The Valentine’s period is right around the corner and if you aren’t bent on getting gifts like flowers, chocolates, cookies or aromatic candles for your better half this year, consider making this year’s gift, as in, by hand.

Don’t roll your eyes – if you aren’t a fan of mainstream gifts you can get at any shopping mall (or even online), handmade gifts are the way to go. One of the easiest gift to make by hand is the greeting card. And we’re making it easier for you with today’s post.

Some of the following beautiful Valentine’s Day greeting cards are available as free printables, you just need to pour in a little customization to make the design and the card yours to give. From cutout hearts to arrows and date coupons, grab some fresh ideas for your greeting card this year.

Recommended Reading: 20 Smashing Examples Of Customized Printed Wedding Invitations

Valentine’s Day Card by Allison Freund

Love Quote Penguins by Heather Campbell

Mini Valentine Cards: Free Printable by Jamie Bartlett

DIY Hearts a Flutter by nitestamper

Love Bug Valentines by Dandee

d.i.y. printable valentines by Armommy

Valentine’s Day Card by Valerie Salmon

PRINTABLE VALENTINE'S DAY LOVE COUPONS by The Elli Blog

Valentine’s Day Card by Daniel Maldonado

Peanut Butter + Jelly by Brittany Aprati

DIY ‘JE T’AIME’ MINI CARD SETS by Amy Moss

Valentine Greeting Card by Kingsley Harris

Call Me – xoxo by YA

Stitched Heart Bookmarks by 30 Days

Valentine’s Day Card by Amy Kunkie

Wednesday Card: Pocket Full of Hearts by Darlene DeVries

Be Crafty – Valentines Workshop by Amanda Rydell

Happy Hearts by Danielle Flanders

Valentine’s Day Card by Jessica Witty

Printable Arrow Valentines by Pauline Grayson

Editor’s note: This is a contributed post by Saijo George, who works as a Marketing Analyst for GraphicRiver, a digital marketplace for everything you need for your next creative project – from business card templates to PowerPoint templates. Feel free to reach out to him via Twitter or Google+.

A business card is the quintessential business networking tool and will help your prospective clients find their way back to you long after you have sparked up a conversation with them at a local meet-up.

Traditionally business cards tend to be boring, bland, and used as more of a pre-requisite than a chance to impress – but not these creative and innovative business card designs. If you want to build up contacts and stand out of the crowd, you need business cards that can impress like these 20 examples can.

You might also like these other business card design collections and guides:

• 100+ Creative Examples, Useful Tutorials And Templates
• Designing Business Card That Rocks!
• Business Card Design: 7 Essentials To Consider
• Minimalistic Business Card Designs

Recommended Reading: 15 Business Card Designs That Will Leave An Impression

TAM Cargo. Formerly known as TAM Express, TAM Cargo is a cargo airline based in Brazil that operates within Latin America and between Brazil and the United States. Their business card can be changed into a nice little cargo box. The idea behind the design comes from Y&R.

Tok&Stok. Tok&Stok deals in the manufacturing of self-assembly furniture. Their creative business card can be transformed into a little self-assembly chair. What a way to catch the client’s attention. It’s designed by DDB.

Casabella Furniture. A rather simple foldable business card for a furniture business. Designed by Amanda Casabella.

Travel Tag Business Card Template. A visiting card template that looks like a travel tag that you can use for your travel agency business or as a personal visiting card for a travel blogger.

Denia Salu Tennis Academy. This tennis court business card that works really well for a tennis academy business is the product of a collaboration with Publicis. It comes in both grass and clay courts!!

Ritornell. An Austrian experimental music duo worked with Katharina Hölzl to come up with this work of art that also acts as their visiting card. Their contact information was cut onto a long musicbox paper stripe that also contains nine micro compositions consisting of circles and triangles.

Bon Vivant. Bon Vivant is a cheese store in Brazil. They hired the folks from JWT to create this grate business card. It doubles as a cheese grater – perfect for a specialized cheese store.

Flow Yoga. Flow Yoga has got a business card that is rolled up like a yoga mat. A simple but effective way to communicate what your brand is all about.

Levin Tahmaz Master Trainer. Levin Tahmaz Master Trainer is all about weight loss and getting you in shape, so the peel-off sticker on the card changing a fat man into one with a more athletic build represents the business well. The design was conceived by Bart.

Poul Nielsen. Poul Nielsen is a personal trainer and he will start training you the moment you get his business card. His contact details are printed on a rubber business card and you will have to stretch it to see the details, thus starting the workout process.

Bombay Bakery. Bombay Bakery has got business cards that look like biscuits. What’s more, they are edible too!

1010tires. 1010tires is a high performance and affordable wheels and tires store based in Canada. Their business card doubles as a tire gauge and allows customers to check their tire treads.

Andrew Murray Roofing. A business card for a roofing company that looks like a roof when semi-folded.

Schwimmer Pool Service. Schwimmer Pool Service prints their business cards on a special pH paper, which clients use to test the pH balance levels in their pools. The idea behind this design comes from doug & serge.

Credit Counselling Society. Credit Counselling Society is a Canadian non-profit service that helps people solve debt problems and manage money better. They have a business card that looks like a credit card cut in half. The design was created by the folks at Rethink.

Tur & Partners. Tur & Partners, a landscape architecture firm worked with Jung von Matt to come up with this miniature garden business card. The card comes with seeds that will germinate after a couple of days, in the presence of sunlight and water.

Franco Caligiuri. Franco Caligiuri is a financial & security investment representative that will help you buy stock when it’s low and sell your stock just before they go down. This double-sided business card conveys that message very well indeed. The design was created by Rethink.

Broke Bike Alley. This spanner business card can help you adjust the bolts and spokes on your bike and it also has a bottle opener. This design was created by Rethink.

Ralph 3D Business Card. If you are a 3D designer, what better way to promote yourself than handing out business cards that also act as disposable 3D glasses? Brilliant way to show off your design skills and contact details.

Natalie Roberts. This minimalist business card shows how a simple email address can be used to make a business card that can highlight your website, Twitter handle, and email ID.

These designs are sure to give one an edge over the more traditional business cards. I am sure there are many more awesome business card designs out there that you folks might have come across, so feel free to share them with the rest of us in the comments below!

The greatest thing about the iPhone is that you can buy or download tons of apps that allow you to do just about anything you can imagine with your phone. That includes great music apps. In this post, I'd like to share with you 10 music apps for music lovers that can easily turn your iPhone into a music powerhouse!

I've covered apps that let you listen to an unlimited number of songs, learn lyrics, listen to live radio and even create music with everyday noises. If you know of more great music apps, let us know in the comments section.

Recommended Reading: 10 Premium Music Players For Android – Best Of

1. Audiogalaxy Mobile

Listen to music from your own home collection, not only from your laptop but also your iPhone, iPod and other handheld devices with this app. It just needs a cloud-based access Internet connection and you won’t need to sync your devices, just your music library with your account and off you go to music dreamland.

Platform: iOS | Android

2. Pandora Radio

The Pandora Radio app compiles customized playlists based on the music you like; it’s essentially a free personalized radio. The bad news is you have just 40 hours of free music per month. But with only $0.99, you can get an "unlimited" upgrade, create stations from a particular artist or song, email the station to a friend, bookmark favorite songs and buy tracks on iTunes.

Platform: iOS | Android

3. Slacker

Slacker iPhone app gives you access to unlimited music on your phone. It has an elegant interface that can be customized and is extremely easy to use. You can listen to the music from the huge stream and choose from millions of artists in its library. Also, you can listen to over 100 radio stations in good sound quality.

Platform: iOS | Android

4. Shazam

Ever heard a song on the radio but can’t wrap your finger around what the song’s name or who the singer is? Shazam can help you solve your "What was this song?" issue for good. Just hold your iPhone near the device that is playing and the app will "listen in" and identify the song title, artist and album for you!

Platform: iOS | Android

5. TuneWiki

TuneWiki is both a radio player and a lyrics decoder. It has a huge number of music streams to choose from and you can get the lyrics and the songs via its radio or from your iTunes music library. It also lets you search for a song via the lyrics (or even from just the parts you could catch).

Platform: iOS | Android

6. Adaptunes

Listen to music while on the go? If you walk, run and drive with your music on, volume is probably one of the hardest but most necessary thing to adjust for a good listening experience. Adaptunes adjusts the volume for you based on the speed you are moving. It keeps your hands free and gives you different sound adaption modes to choose from. You can also create a playlist with Adaptunes for on-the-spot sound adjustments.

Platform: iOS

7. Songkick Concerts

Songkick Concerts app is a good local concerts finder. It can track the upcoming concerts of artists in your iTunes library or Spotify playlists as well as artists you like on Facebook, Pandora, or any other service you add to your Last.fm account. The app then creates a detailed calendar of every available concert and you can export it to Google Calendar or Outlook. It can also be shared on your Facebook stream.

Platform: iOS | Android

8. Sir Sampleton

Remember the toy keyboards you used to play with in the 80′s? This is an app that mimic that gameplay on top of a few other features. Sir Sampleton allows you to record and change sounds, mix beats and save your recordings for replays. You can create music with your voice, surrounding noise and other noise sources you fancy turning into a tune.

Platform: iOS

9. Earworms

Remember those catchy songs that get stuck in your head and plays over and over again? Well, if you ever need to inflict that on someone (as a prank or for revenge), send a catchy song to them with Earworms. There are 20 songs included with video clips attached; just pick one and email it to the victim. Songs can be downloaded in various languages.

Platform: iOS | Android

10. Top 100s by Year

Top 100s by Year app provides a wide database of 100 most popular songs from each year starting from 1947 till today. You can search songs by year, see the full year listing and listen to the song you chose. It lets you buy any song on iTunes or watch its video on YouTube. Top 100s by Year is a great app for those who are feeling nostalgic for songs that were great hits of yesteryears.

Platform: iOS

It’s been a while since our last discussion on LESS CSS. Today, LESS CSS has reached version 1.5, and it has been evolving with new features that makes it more powerful as a CSS Pre-processor.

There have been a bunch of new additions in it, and in this post we are going to walk you through 3 of my new favorite features, Referencing External File, Extend, Merging Property, which can help us write better CSS. Let’s take a look.

Recommended Reading: LESS CSS – Beginner’s Guide

File Import

First of all, let’s take a look at how LESS CSS handles external files with the @import rule.

Some people may split their stylesheet into multiple files, rather than putting it in one pot. Then they import them with the @import to another stylesheet, so that the Mixins (as well as the Variables) from those files can be reused in that other file.

 @import "external.less"; 

The problem is that LESS will compile all the Mixins from these external files, so that we would ended up with multiple style rules that define the same thing.

Take a look at the following example: We have two LESS files called style.less and external.less. We import the external.less into style.less. Then, we have .square mixin in external.less to define the style for square boxes. Within the style.less, we use the mixin like so.

 @import "external"; .box { .square; } 

This will produce the following result in CSS. The style-rules from .square mixin is generated as well – which is no good.

 .square { width: 100px; height: 100px; margin: 0 auto; background-color: red; } .box { width: 100px; height: 100px; margin: 0 auto; background-color: red; } 

In version 1.5, LESS introduced (reference), which can be used to instruct LESS to use the import file only for reference, and not to output the content.

Put the (reference) instruction this way:

 @import (reference) "external"; 

Compile the LESS stylesheet, and now the .square is not output.

 .box { width: 100px; height: 100px; margin: 0 auto; background-color: red; } 

Extend

Extend method is pure awesomeness. Technically, it groups selectors that share the same style-rules, which result in cleaner and more organised CSS. When we build a website, at some poins, we could end up having some selectors with closely similar style-rules, like below:

 .box { width: 100px; height: 100px; margin: 0 auto; border: 1px solid black; background-color: transparent; } .box2 { width: 100px; height: 100px; margin: 0 auto; border: 1px solid black; background-color: red; } 

It is redundant, and does not follow best practices, which suggest putting the same styles together. Sass, in this case, is known with its @extend directive to do this job, in LESS we can do a similar thing with &:extend(), introduced in version 1.4.

Given the above example we can do:

 @import (reference) "external"; .box { &:extend(.square); background-color: transparent; } .box2 { &:extend(.square); background-color: red; } 

When compiled to regular CSS, the above code will produce:

 .square, .box, .box2 { width: 100px; height: 100px; margin: 0 auto; border: 1px solid black; } .box { background-color: transparent; } .box2 { background-color: red; } 

Merging Property

Another cool new feature is Merging Property. This feature applies to the CSS property that accept multiple values, like transform, transition, and box-shadow. And as the name implies, it will merge values that belong to the same property. Let’s check out this example below.

As you probably already know, CSS3 Box Shadow property accepts multiple shadow values. By using this Merging Property, you can build shadow effect easily and make them more manageable.

Here we create two mixins .inner-shadow and .outer-shadow – I guess the names are self-explanatory.

 .inner-shadow { box-shadow+: inset 10px 10px 5px #ccc; } .outer-shadow { box-shadow+: inset 10px 10px 5px #ccc; } 

Notice that we add a + sign at the end of the property’s name. This + sign is required for this feature to work. Then, we can use these mixins, as follow:

 .box { .inner-shadow; .outer-shadow; } .box2 { .inner-shadow; } .box3 { .outer-shadow; } 

This code will give us the following result.

 .box { box-shadow: inset 10px 10px 5px #ccc, 10px 10px 5px #ccc; } .box2 { box-shadow: inset 10px 10px 5px #ccc; } .box3 { box-shadow: 10px 10px 5px #ccc; } 

Final Thought

These 3 new features – Referencing External File, Extend, Merging Property – motivated me to use LESS more. With them we can write better, and more manageable CSS. I’m looking forward to more cool new capabilities that LESS will offer in upcoming versions.