About the author: This guest article was written by Emma Best from Laptopical - a guide to the latest laptop reviews and laptop related news. You can also follow her on Twitter.

I've been using my MacBook Pro since a while now and I must say: I really love it. The most common app(s) that designers use has to be Adobe Photoshop (Or the full suite). The app(s) are great, but there is a downside: The price tag. Photoshop CS4 costs $699, CS4 extended is $999 and the full Creative Suite starts at an stunning $1799. For many people this is just a little bit too much to "play around with".

Luckily, there are also many free applications out there that can do the same kind of job that Photoshop could do for you. This article rounds up the best 15 free Mac Programs for Graphic Designers. Some of these applications can even do stuff that can't be achieved using Photoshop, or are much more simple to use.

Keep your wallet in your pocket, since all these programs will cost you nothing.

Time for a short tip: What are the (user)names / identity names that should try to grab as soon as possible? You want to identify yourself all over the net when you have a blog / website, so you should be the only one that's able to use that specified name. But what are the places where you should try to capture a name? Here's a list of a couple of names that you should register at this moment (if you didn't do it already). If you wait, the name could be grabbed by someone else already!

Before you read the rest of the article, make sure you already know what you already have in your inventory of names. If you have all points stated below checked, you're doing fine. If not, you should really try to grab those names before someone else does. I try to identify myself with Marcofolio.net, although it doesn't work all the time. You want to brand your name, so that once someone enters your name on a search engine, you'll be the only one that will be found. Here are a couple of tips.

About the author: Mazibo mainly aims at offering useful and affordable services to small and medium scale companies helping them run and maintain a successful web presence with the least of efforts.

After a good amount of planning as mention in the previous article, you can start building your website. Building a website involves the following steps.

• Designing your web pages
• HTMLizing your designed web pages
• Adding content
• Embedding web tools
• Obtaining a suitable domain name
• Hosting your website

About the author: IconGalore is a wonderful resource to provide small and medium sized companies with an effective medium to buy professional xp icons at low prices for their commercial as well as non commercial needs. We aim at providing our customers with complete icon solutions right from supplying quality ready made icons to custom made icons, by genuinely keeping the prices as low as possible.

The previous articles provide a glimpse at the making of a website. If you do not care to do such tedious task you still have the option of creating your own website with free web template offered through out the internet. Web templates are nothing but readymade website that could be easily modified to your purposes. This way of creating a web site is much easier than designing it from the scratch. Steps in creating a website with the free web templates are as follows:

• Locating a suitable theme template
• Customizing free web templates
• Abide by the terms
• Hosting your website

This article has been written for the Design Group Writing Project for Charity, an initiative set up by Jacob Cass.

There are a lot of design related blogs out there. Some better than other, some are just getting off the ground and others are leaving. The quality between the blogs can differ a lot, but they all have one thing in common: Love for (web)design.

This article will show the The roadmap from the Kingdom of design blogs, listing the greatest / biggest players in this game. These bloggers have the biggest influence on the design community, bringing you innovative articles every time a new one is released. They're always really creative and inspirational most of the time and bring you the highest quality of articles: These are the characteristics of some true royals.

Don't forget the social communities that are dedicated to design too. Digg (Design), DesignBump, DesignFloat and the StumbleUpon Design Buzz.

Take a walk down the red carpet and prepare to greet some royal blood based on their followers (RSS) count.