Inspect Element

Web Design & Development Blog

Links of the Week 14

September 11th, 2009 — 1 Comment

Make your site stand out, streamline your creative process, important things any website needs to succeed, spezify and iTunes 9′s design changes.

Links of Interest

3 ways to make your site stand out from the crowd

Great post by Paul Boag encouraging web designers to create websites that stand out from the competition.

5 Steps to Streamline your Creative Process

Five simple steps to get the most out of your creative process.

The Important Things Any Website Needs To Succeed

Consider these points the absolute necessary aspects of an web design and development.

Spezify

Spezify is a visual based search engine. Great way to find inspiration and is really cool despite being built in Flash. This was great find by, Mike, a colleague of mine where I work.

iTunes 9 – Interface Changes

iTunes seems to be the testbed app for Apple to introduce new design elements into OS X and iTunes 9 is no exception.

Design of the Week

Freelance Folder

Nice use of icons and description in navigation as well as tabs in sub navigation make the new design of Freelance Folder easy to use.

Inspiration for the Weekend

ffffffive

ffffffive is a great source for creative inspiration. One of those sites that you can spend hours on.

This Week on Inspect Element

Recent Web Designs that Don’t Follow Recent Trends

Wallpapers of the Week 14: The Sky

How to Design Buttons to Help Improve Usability

Links of the Week 13

September 4th, 2009 — No Comments

Vreate a valid non-Javascript Lightbox, go beyond your working comfort zone, top designers’ own favourite work, SVG support in all browsers and a code snippets gallery.

Links of Interest

How to Create a Valid Non-Javascript Lightbox

Go Beyond Your Working Comfort Zone

Be proud, your favourite pieces of work!

Google’s SVGWeb Brings SVG Support to All Browsers

Css-Tricks’ Code Snippets Gallery

Design of the Week

Max Voltar

Inspiration for the Weekend

blitblit

Links of the Week 12

August 28th, 2009 — No Comments

Typedia, get creative beyond your education, A/B testing results, IKEA’s bizarre font swap, Photoshop disasters, design of the week and inspiration for the weekend.

Links of Interest

Typedia

Recently launched, community driven site with almost everything you ever wanted to know about typography including individual typefaces.

Don’t Stick With What You’ve Been Taught; You’re a Creative So Get Creative.

A great article encouraging designers to be more creative beyond what they’ve been taught.

Which Test Won

Great little site that takes A/B tests and shows which one was the best. Very handy to get an idea of what works best before you do your own testing.

IKEA says goodbye to Futura

Ikea has inexplicably changed their main font from Futura to Verdana. See just how bad it looks.

Awful Photoshop Disasters

A collection of funny Photoshop mishaps.

Design of the Week

Make Photoshop Faster

Dan Rubin has designed a beautiful site informing people of two simple steps to make Photoshop work. Superb use of colour, webkit transition effects and CSS3 properties.

Inspiration for the Weekend

Think of Ember as the flickr for designers. Make sure to check out the categories section to narrow down the type of inspiration you are looking for.

Links of the Week 11

August 21st, 2009 — No Comments

The font-as-service, interview with the founders of Envato, blog effectively, alignment in design comic and advanced CSS selecting.

Links of Interest

The Font-as-Service

Elliot Jay Stocks, writing for I Love Typography, discusses the new wave of font services that aim to bring paid-for-fonts to the web.

Interview with Founders of Envato Collis and Cyan

A great insight into the minds that created the success of the Envato network. Must watch.

How to Blog Effectively

Great tips for bloggers or would-be bloggers to improve their work.

The Brads – Alignment in Design

A little lesson in alignment in the form of a web comic. A very fun and easy to digest method of learning.

Taming Advanced CSS Selectors

Smashing Magazine takes an extensive look at advanced CSS selectors.

Design of the Week

ngmoco’s plus

Plus is a social network for iPhone and iPod touch games. Now that ngmoco have released an SDK to third party developers they’ve also given their site an overhaul and it looks great.

Inspiration for the Weekend

The Design Inspiration

Found this site recently and it serves up a good mix of inspiration from various aspects of design.

Links of the Week 9

August 7th, 2009 — 1 Comment

The Espresso illustration, using Twitter for inspiration, what if websites we’re people, HTML5 goodness, colour tips and a great web comic.

The process behind the Espresso illustration

Veerle Pieters guides us through the ideas and thinking for her beautiful design for one of the best text editors on the Mac.

Essential Guide to Using Twitter for Inspiration

This one does exactly what it says on the tin and it’s always fascinating to see how other people work so check it out.

What if Websites Were People…

A fun post matching websites to people they most resemble. Very creative.

HTML5 Canvas Experiment

A look at the potential of HTML5 can do. Don’t forget that no flash is being used here at all, just Javascript and HTML5. View in latest version of Safari, Firefox or Chrome.

Five Really Simple Colour Tips

Colour can be a harsh beast to get to grips with but Mike Kus over at Carsonified gives five tips to get you started.

Brad Colbow

I’m a big fan of online comics and the only one missing was a web design comic. Brad Colbow’s comic about web design fills in the missing gap superbly.