These days, a portfolio is a must. What we have here is a list of dark portfolio websites that are split up into common groups that most portfolios fall in. The last group will be for those experimental dark layouts, where the designer tries something different.

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Today, as part of MIX 2010, some exciting updates were released on the progress of Internet Explorer 9. The IE team is implementing some incredible features, such as HTML5, CSS3, SVG support, and a new lightning fast JavaScript engine, Chakra! Further, they’re currently scoring a 55 on the Acid3 test – a figure that’s surely to increase substantially before the official release. What about the idea of Microsoft contributing to an open source project, jQuery, with their proposed templating engine? Within moments of these announcements, the Twitter-verse spilled “tears of joy.”

Want to dive in and check out the developer preview? That’s available too, starting today!

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WordPress 3.0 is scheduled to be released within the next 30-60 days. There are some great new features coming, including custom post types, a new default theme, and a menu manager. Read on to find out what to expect in version three!

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Hi everyone, the winners have been selected and contacted. Thank you all for entering this great competition. If you weren’t successful there are still two more days for you to get on the Rockin’ List and get the voucher for the book.

The winners are Khaled, Kay and Achikochi.

Today we’ve got three copies of the new eBook from Rockable and FreelanceSwitch, How to Write Great Copy for the Web, to give away. Entering takes seconds, just leave a comment below and three lucky people will be selected.

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If you’re a book lover, you may have noticed that the vast majority of book-related websites out there leave a bit to be desired when it comes to design and information architecture. In fact, some author and publisher websites make me feel like my eyes might bleed!

But there are some gems out there, and we’ve collected some of the best. If you know of any other fantastic book-related websites, whether they’re for authors, individual books, publishing companies, or blogs, let us know in the comments.

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Over the last three days we’ve been steadily rolling out a new Tuts+ theme across all 8 sites. The new design is a refinement more than a big change, with lots of little improvements in usability and more suited to big screens. Read on to learn more about the redesign and lots of news about Plus!

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This article showcases 30+ stunning web designs that make use of the incredible watercolor effect. The showcase is followed up with a small selection of links sharing a few tutorials and watercolor textures and brushes that you can use in your own designs.

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On February 1st, we announced an enormous scripting competition on CodeCanyon with prizes equaling $6200. You now have just one week left to enter!

For those unfamiliar, Envato recently launched its newest marketplace, focused specifically on selling high-quality scripts and components for PHP, JavaScript, ASP.NET, and Java. As we’ve only recently launched, we’re hoping to build up our repository with a plethora of fantastic scripts and components, across all of the categories.

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Over the weekend and into Monday we unfortunately experienced some pretty severe downtime on all Envato WordPress blogs. The downtime was due to problems in the data centre of our current hosting company which was out of our control.

It seems to all be resolved now, but I just wanted to make a quick apology for the inconvenience and interruptions. We’re going to be re-examining our hosting setup to make sure we avoid this situation in the future and to generally try to pull up the quality of service across the board.

In the meantime there may be some further minor interruptions as we shore up the setup. Thank you for your patience!

So you’re starting to show interest in web design, but are having trouble figuring out where to start? Want to create awesome websites, learn how to code HTML/CSS, and learn about web standards and the user experience? If so, we have a list of hand-picked Envato tutorials that should get you started on your journey!

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