Articles and news about web design found trawling the web.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
130 Websites To Submit Your Design News | blogfreakz.com
130 Websites To Submit Your Design News | blogfreakz.com: "130 Websites To Submit Your Design News"
Top 5 Web Font Design Trends to Follow
Top 5 Web Font Design Trends to Follow: "Top 5 Web Font Design Trends to Follow"
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
Thursday, September 16, 2010
20 questions to avoid website project disasters
http://sixrevisions.com/project-management/20-questions-to-know-for-avoiding-website-project-disasters/
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Friday, September 10, 2010
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Font database
FontPark is a great big database of free fonts—for personal and/or commercial use—that'll work with Windows, Mac and Linux.
http://lifehacker.com/5634062/fontpark-is-a-searchable-sortable-database-of-over-70000-free-fonts
With 70,000 free fonts it can be hard to narrow it down, so FontPark has a bunch of filtering and sorting options so you can browse only the top fonts, for example. You can also search the site if there's something you're looking for in particular. If your typographic gluttony doesn't cap off at 70,000, you can also find great free fonts at DaFont (our take), The League of Movable Type, and Urban Fonts.
http://lifehacker.com/5634062/fontpark-is-a-searchable-sortable-database-of-over-70000-free-fonts
With 70,000 free fonts it can be hard to narrow it down, so FontPark has a bunch of filtering and sorting options so you can browse only the top fonts, for example. You can also search the site if there's something you're looking for in particular. If your typographic gluttony doesn't cap off at 70,000, you can also find great free fonts at DaFont (our take), The League of Movable Type, and Urban Fonts.
Tools and Resources for Grammar, Copywriting, Spelling and More - Noupe Design Blog
Tools and Resources for Grammar, Copywriting, Spelling and More - Noupe Design Blog
So much of the web is based around written content that it’s important for anyone who works online to have a good grasp of language, including grammar and spelling. But it’s not always easy to find reputable sources that can teach us these things if we didn’t learn them in school (or retain them for long after). Below are over thirty great resources for learning more about grammar, vocabulary, copywriting, and more. If you have more resources you’ve found helpful, please share them in the comments
Designing and Producing Creative Business Cards: Techniques and Details - Smashing Magazine
Designing and Producing Creative Business Cards: Techniques and Details - Smashing Magazine
Plenty of creative business card showcases are available out there. Many of these are beautifully done and well thought out, and they serve as inspiration for those who would like their business card to be more than the standard rectangular piece of paper. Yet little explanation accompanies these examples, and figuring out just how to bring your idea to life can be overwhelming, to say the least. This guide is meant to help you decide which technique is right for you, how to correctly prepare the files and what to look for in a printer.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Monday, September 6, 2010
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Microfilmmaker Magazine - Reviews - Website Review: WIX.com, Pg. 1 of 4
Microfilmmaker Magazine - Reviews - Website Review: WIX.com, Pg. 1 of 4
Wix.com is a flash based web site creator. It allows you to create a site based off of templates (which some are really nice and very customizable) or you can start from scratch from a blank slate.
It offers drag and drop features along with a seemingly unlimited amount of clip art, animations and other little additions that can add a spark to your site
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Friday, September 3, 2010
Blogging Pitfalls: Why You Can’t Stop Promoting | BloggingPro
Blogging Pitfalls: Why You Can’t Stop Promoting | BloggingPro
The Pitfall
Whenever we launch a new blog, we are initially very eager to promote it. We tell our friends, our family and anyone else who will listen. We leave comments, we get active in the community and swap links whenever we can. In short, we fight for every visitor and celebrate every comment.
However, as sites grow we become less aggressive about that fight. We don’t promote as actively, ignoring our Twitter, avoiding leaving comments and not working with other webmasters. A lot of it is pure practicality. It takes more time to run a busier blog (more email, more comments, more spam, etc.), thus reducing the time available for promotion, but much of it is that bloggers feel they have move past promotion, as if it were just a phase.
Unfortunately, some bloggers take this to an extreme and rest on their laurels a bit too hard. They stop promoting, they stop producing top-flight content and they effectively cut off the engine that has pulled their blog to where it is. The result is that blogs carry on for a time, then slow down, then stagnate and eventually begin to stop.
For bloggers who have traffic as part of their goal, this can be a very devastating problem to have and a stagnate blog or one losing traffic is at much higher risk of abandonmentthan one that is actively growing.
So how do you prevent this from happening to your site? The answer is quite simple.
Tips for Using Virtual Assistants and Personal Outsourcing
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| By Matthew Carpenter at Six Revisions.com |
Personal outsourcing isn’t quite the hot topic that it was two years ago. With virtual assistant firms available left and right, could-be assistants have become less of a unique work accessory and much more of a sustainable, ubiquitous business addition.
What was once a quirky but useful tool for the digital age has become standard — nowadays it’s rare to find a small design firm without a personal outsourcing strategy.
But while personal outsourcing has become popular, it’s certainly not a process that’s loaded with security and simplicity. Virtual assistants are notorious for packing up at random and leaving employers with projects in a state of limbo.
While thousands turn to personal outsourcing as a way of simplifying their workday, many find it achieves the exact opposite.
Managing your online assistant(s) doesn’t need to be a painful exercise, particularly with the right staffing strategy on your side. Apply these eight tips and you’ll see a noticeable increase in how efficient, effective, and worthwhile your outsourcing endeavors are, no matter how small or large your team is.
1. Never Rely on Just One Service Provider
For most people, one full-time outsourced employee is enough to complete basic tasks and manage extra work. Regardless, it’s important to keep a backup planned, especially if your work is subject to deadlines and urgent "complete by" dates.
Online assistants are known for disappearing at the worst possible times, particularly when they’re contacted through a semi-anonymous contract bidding website. So keep a backup provider ready, whether through a loose email connection or by switching through providers for different tasks and projects.
By splitting your workload across multiple assistants, you’ll end up less exposed to fallout from failed projects and mystery disappearances.
Use Elance or another outsourcing service to build a database of prospective full-time assistants.
2. Increase the Duties of Your Assistants Gradually
Three years ago, 43 Folders carried an excellent article on the psychological barriers surrounding personal outsourcing. Not surprisingly, one of the most common objections to outsourcing basic tasks is the trust factor — people are largely skeptical that a low-cost employee can manage their workload effectively.
The obvious solution to this is rarely taken, largely because people are opposed to outsourcing entirely out of fear. Guide your assistants into the position slowly bygradually increasing the importance of submitted tasks and you’ll end up with a small stable of effective, trustworthy remote employees.
For example, you could start with simple tasks such as booking an appointment, searching for a hotel, or tracking down a piece of software.
Assign the same job to multiple employees and you’ll gain an understanding of who among them are proficient enough for the position — and who aren’t.
With just a week of testing and a small budget, you can put together a team of assistants that are stress-tested and capable of taking on the work you need completed.
3. Sort Your Tasks by Importance
It’s tempting to send your assistants a hundred-item list of tasks to complete, asking them to report back at the end of the month for the next chapter in a project. While this strategy can work well on long-term employees and experienced providers, it’s unlikely to mesh well with new hires.
Mistakes become more apparent without direction, and when communication is cut down, it’s much harder to eliminate errors and refine the type of work you need completed.
Work on a day-by-day basis with new employees, offering new tasks and providing feedback after they’re completed.
By cutting your major projects into smaller action-related groups, you’ll be able to focus on efficiency and eliminate mistakes before they become a liability. Start by requesting a daily progress report from assistants, and expand the reporting period as mistakes are ironed out.
4. Be Specific and Detailed with the Tasks You Assign
Ask an assistant to rent a car in New York and you could end up with a two-seat compact car conveniently located fifty miles away in New Jersey. Of course, that’s no use to you — what you wanted was a family van available for pickup from the airport.
The damage is obviously greater when applied to offline tasks, but online projects can easily go just wrong when essential details are overlooked.
Instead of asking your assistants to complete a task, ask to have a task completed according to a detailed set of instructions. Offer unspecific instructions and you’ll be met with work that’s equally inaccurate.
It may seem like an anti-productivity move at first, but offering more detailed instructions will lead to more accurate and effective output from your assistants and outsourced staff.
5. Separate Emails for Outsourced Tasks
Using your regular email address to manage staff will lead to disaster. With just a few remote assistants, messages will quickly pile up and make it near impossible to read correspondence from other contacts, let alone respond to them.
Collaborating on work requires a surprising amount of back-and-forth communication, giving you a good reason to separate outsourcing-related emails from other email.
We recommend communicating with assistants via email; the vast majority of collaboration suites out there are too bloated and ineffective to work for small, one-off tasks.
Set up a secondary email address or have your current email accountautomatically sort messages from assistants into a new folder or label; not only will this lead to a better ability to focus on important tasks without distraction, but you’ll also be able to automate task recording and build a separate history of communications with your staff.
6. Shop Around and Be Patient
Post an advertisement on any leading assistant website and you’ll be inundated with applications, most of which just aren’t very good. From spelling mistakes to nonsensical sentences, it’s far from uncommon to find that your first attempts at personal outsourcing are met with a questionable set of replies.
Resist the temptation to pack in the towel and stick at it — finding good assistants takes time.
Allow for at least a month when searching for a long-term online assistant, just as you would when hiring offline staff.
Cutting the process short may lead to short-term productivity gains and a quick search, but it’ll inevitably result in long-term losses due to missed opportunities and rash choices.
Spend the first few weeks trialing several different assistants and you’ll end up with a high quality hire — someone who is likely to generate long-term results and reduce your outsourcing stresses.
7. Be Nice and Professional
The employer/virtual assistant relationship is similar to the client/freelancer relationship. Whether you opt for a long-term hire or simply choose to outsource to assistants on a per-project basis, remember that you’re working on the other side of the transaction this time.
In essence, be the type of client that you like working with — your assistants will appreciate it, especially if they work with other people too.
If you plan on working with an assistant for an extended period, go out of your way to keep work efficient for them too. The goal of personal outsourcing is to increase your efficiency, and as unusual as it may sound, the greatest way to increase your efficiency is to ensure that your staff are able to work efficiently too.
Put the hours in and work out a strategy with your assistant(s); it’ll save you time and increase the amount of work they can complete for you.
8. Use Productivity Tools and Resources to Help You
Have you experimented with personal outsourcing? Before you take the plunge and hire your own online assistant, use these resources and productivity tools to ensure you go about it the right way.
The International Virtual Assistants Association has its own code of ethics, information for freelancers, and a directory of qualified virtual assistants – the perfect hiring resource.
Elance and oDesk claim thousands of virtual assistants and task-specific freelancers. Indian outsourcing firm GetFriday has a staff of over 150 personal assistants from $15 hourly.
A.J. Jacob’s piece on personal outsourcing from Esquire offers a humorous look at the possibilities of personal outsourcing.
Productivity expert Tim Ferriss compares fourteen different personal outsourcing companies and virtual assistant providers.
Story
Thursday, September 2, 2010
A collection of mini icon sets
Icons can add a lot of meaning to a website or web app design.
Used appropriately, they can make it faster for your visitors or users to complete the tasks they need to complete. But not every website design has space for normal, full-size icons (often 32×32 to 48×48 or sometimes even larger).
That’s where mini icons can come in handy. With the smallest versions of these icons sometimes coming in as tiny as 8×8 pixels and the largest generally being 16×16 pixels (though sometimes they’re slightly larger than that), they can fit into virtually any design.
And there’s a huge variety out there that can fit with almost any aesthetic style. Here are more than 35 of the best sets of mini icons out there (most featured here are free, though we’ve included a few premium sets, too).
Color theory in web design: Blue theme designs
This article is dedicated to color theory and the use of colors in web design. Whether you are a designer or blogger who needs ideas for a color scheme or a designer in search of some color inspiration. My hope is that this site will give web designers a better understanding of color theory and the importance of colors as it applies to web design. Blue is the color of the sky. Blue is also one of the easiest color to work with, and also give a clean and bright look to your website design. Since Blue is one of the commonly color used in web design I have present to you Well designed blue websites.
read story at Themeflash
read story at Themeflash
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Craftsmanship in Designing Websites
http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/craftsmanship-in-designing-websites/#more-3958
With high pressure from clients and crazy development schedules for web designers, it is easy to forget to spend the proper amount of time crafting a design.
In the interest of speeding things up, it’s tempting to skip over small details. This is an easy pitfall to which to succumb, but in the end, it can hurt your overall career.
This article will share methods and simple tools for building better portfolio pieces, having happier clients, and imbuing your work with more value.
50-amazing-free-icon-sets
http://sixrevisions.com/resources/50-amazing-free-icon-sets/
There are a lot of free icon sets out there for you to use. In this collection, we rounded up a few icon sets from all over the web that you can use in your design projects.
The hundreds of featured icons here are diverse in their styles: glossy, hand-drawn, realistic, textured are among the design themes you’ll find. I hope you find a handful of icon sets that you’ll bookmark, download, and use!
There are a lot of free icon sets out there for you to use. In this collection, we rounded up a few icon sets from all over the web that you can use in your design projects.
The hundreds of featured icons here are diverse in their styles: glossy, hand-drawn, realistic, textured are among the design themes you’ll find. I hope you find a handful of icon sets that you’ll bookmark, download, and use!
iCandies Icon Set: 60 Free Icons For Your User Interfaces and Apps
From the good folks at SmashingMagazine
Today we are glad to release iCandies Icon Set, a set with 60 high quality icons in 64×64px, 48×48px and 32×32px, available in .EPS, .AI and .PNG. The set is designed by the talented folks from IconEden on a sole purpose of giving your projects a sleek and geeky style or provide crisp, attractive icons for your modern and fashionable-looking interfaces. All the icons in this pack — 60 icons in total — are designed in Round Rectangle shape.
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Today we are glad to release iCandies Icon Set, a set with 60 high quality icons in 64×64px, 48×48px and 32×32px, available in .EPS, .AI and .PNG. The set is designed by the talented folks from IconEden on a sole purpose of giving your projects a sleek and geeky style or provide crisp, attractive icons for your modern and fashionable-looking interfaces. All the icons in this pack — 60 icons in total — are designed in Round Rectangle shape.
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25 Websites to Download Free Stock Photo for Your Projects
If you are searching for free stock photo databases, there are quite a few sites on the web that do that, and even at high quality: there are sites that are made by artists or designers for other artists and promote sharing their creations, there are also others which have a double policy, offering both photos for sale and for free, in distinct sections, and there are also sites which offer exposure to new talented photographers who are willing to collaborate.
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