Category: Design Tips

What Color, here demonstrated with the beautiful Lemon Bee color theme, is a very simple Web utility. You punch in the URL (whatcolor.heroku.com), add a slash, and then put in the HEX codes of whatever colors you'd like to see. The tool accepts short notation, such as "cdc," or extended notation, such as "ccddcc." You can also just append the word "random" to the URL, and get a colorful ...

I have recently been experimenting with CSS3 box properties for my own personal site. I was thrilled with how easy it was to create a box with rounded corners, some shading and a border – it was really trivial. That was even before I found CSS3 Playground. Had I found this neat little tool before, I would not have had to hand-code a single line of text. Like so many other showcases and ...

Let me start this off with a disclaimer: If you feel any sort of aversion towards hipsters, you should probably move on; I don't think you can enjoy Forrst. However, if Tumblr feels like a second home, and you spend your days endlessly gazing at ffffound and sharing snarky comments over at the Shirt.woot forums, you are probably going to love Forrst. The site has a simple, clear-cut mandate: it's ...

John's Background Switcher is one of my favorite Windows applications; it's a fantastic free wallpaper switcher with excellent multiple monitor support. That's a must, since I enjoy having a different wallpaper on each of my monitors. The application can rotate wallpapers from a number of sources, such as Flickr accounts, the local hard drive, Google Images, ... and as of version 4.2, the ...

Do you ever have to design or have input into software user interfaces? If not, you might want to skip this post, but if so, Balsamiq Mockups might be of interest to you. The concept of the program is quite simple: create a bare-bones version of the user interface in question. So bare bones, in fact, that it almost looks like it was sketched. The hand-drawn style might seem a little funny at ...

Icons are to me like clothes are to my wife - meant to be changed. I love sprucing up my desktop with customized icons and a funky background, only to change it all up a week later. If you're like me, then you're going to enjoy this list of 50 of the most beautiful icon sets created in 2008 at NOUPE. The icon sets listed are intended for everything from customizing your Mac or Windows desktop, to ...

If you're tackling some graphic design project or maybe even your wall decor, getting color hints from ready made color templates from professional designers can be useful. Below are 10 of the better sites to help you out on your design challenge. ColorCombos - nice color palettes to choose from. If there's a particular website whose colors you want to snag, check out their "Grab Website ...

Outlawdesignblog did a great job compiling an interesting collection of free downloadable grunge fonts to help you get that nice, dirty, raw edge you might be craving on your graphics. Of course, whether or not grunge fonts convey edgy anymore is debatable since they are all over this year's back to school fashions which school kids are wearing with the appropriate bad ass attitude. I don't ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2007/11/21/ten-tips-for-web-design-magic/';Now that we've harangued you to upgrade your Web site, take advantage of business blogs, read your Web stats/, incorporate search engine tips and use Web 2.0 themes, it's time to choose a Web design firm to make all of the above happen for your small business. Google "web design" and spend the rest of your ...

Virtual Hosting has an excellent article up detailing 23 actionable web design lessons that we can learn from eye-tracking studies. Most of the items are common sense: people scan web pages rather than read them, people look at the top left corner of the page first, people ignore banner ads, people ignore fancy formating that looks like ads, etc. But why do people interact with pages in this ...

In the world of web developers there are two standard ways of laying out a web page. The classical way is to use tables and structure your web page like you would an Excel Spreadsheet or a Word document. The second is to use Cascading Style Sheets that let you create elements on the page and position them according to your needs. For a large variety of reasons CSS based layouts are the way to ...

Whilst there's plenty of tools around for helping with CSS styling, if you want a neat little browser bookmarklet that displays all the properties associated with the selected element and "box model for any element on any web page", then XRAY from WestCiv might be just the thing. XRAY shows you the sizes and other attributes of element you select, fades the rest of the page out and hovers a ...

It's your worst digital nightmare, apart from perhaps a full system recovery, the losing of digital photos. We've all been bitten by a memory card or computer itself ruining a set of pictures at some stage, however well-renowned Flickr and Zooomr-based photographer Thomas Hawk points to a handy tool that might just save your bacon: PhotoRescue 3.0 from DataRescue Software. Hawk also provides a set ...

Free fonts are everywhere online, but in most cases you get what you pay for. While many people are happy using hacked together fonts, discerning viewers notice the little things that set a well-made font apart from the wannabes. Freelance web designer Vitaly Friedman has put together a listing of his choice of the best 25 free fonts available online, and it's very hard to argue with his choices. ...

If you're a fan of the Adult Swim network, you've certainly seen Tom Goes to The Mayor and probably wondered, "How do they do that?" The show's oddball humor is punctuated by innovative and simple sparse-frame animation, dominated by characters who look stimpled and photocopied onto the set. If you've longed to be on Tom Goes to the Mayor but aren't as cool as David Cross, Sarah Silverman, ...