Miscellany for the day
- In memory of his birthday, you too can be Jackson Pollock. (Thanks Jon Brown!).
- iPlotz: a web app for creating wireframes (Thanks Jay Colle!)
- Dave Shea at Mezzoblue has posted a nice article on sprite optimization.
- Tired of drawing with your hands? Have a go at drawing with your voice.
- Finally, “You’re all a bunch of users!” and other computer wallpaper ideas and t-shirts over at HappyWebbies designed by our upcoming guests.
Animated GIF for the day
This morning while browsing an article on content visualization techniques, I came across this animated GIF and was immediately transported back to my days at LearnSomething.com. I think it may have been Jay who first sent this my way back in 2000. At any rate, it’s a fair description of my mood at the moment.
Sitemap Style
I realize the hyper-pragmatic might snub the nose at “visual fluff” appearing within a sitemap page. Perhaps the informational scrooge within is just plain irritated with any character perceived as waste… demanding to see only the organizational facts and not a byte more. For the rest of us, I give you my new all-time-favorite site map from Erskine Design.
Understanding Web Design
Author and Happy Cog founder Jeffrey Zeldman answers the question: what does a web designer need most? Skills and knowledge of software, of course, but empathy—the ability to think about and empathize with your user—is by far the most important. Go HERE to see this excellent presentation.
Adobe Flash Catalyst formerly Thermo
Yet another tool to bridge the gap between designer and application builder. This product has come a long ways since they called it Thermo about a year ago.
Link to Adobe Labs and Demo Video
WordPress Developers ToolBox
I hope someone finds this helpful.
Web designers and developers are getting an increasing number of requests from clients for custom theme development, and a growing number of designers are also building their own themes to distribute for free or to sell as premium themes.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/09/15/wordpress-developers-toolbox/
Blueprint CSS
Here’s something I discovered recently. Blueprint CSS is a framework that provide you with a base set of style sheets. It has lots of nifty features like”resetting” the browsers’ defaults, assisting with gridded layouts, and establishing a base typography.
This has rapidly become part of my standard toolkit.
jQuery plug-in for the day
Have some psuedo 3-D fun with jParallax.
WebKit Transitions
I hope Google’s Chrome browser gets more market penetration in the Windows world than Safari so more people can see and appreciate the features of the WebKit browser engine. Here is a nice use of WebKit transitions viewable in Chrome and Safari created by Stu Nicholls.
