thirtyonethree

I am one who is always looking for inspiration. I am creative but I need a starting point to design. I can’t just start with a blank piece of paper.

Here is a list of a couple of sites that I have been looking at for inspiration. I came across the CSS sites in the last couple of weeks. I want to move toward designing all in CSS so I thought these would be a good place to start.

• CSS Drive - I just found this site today. I like the setup a little better than CSS Vault because they classify by structure and theme.
• Cool Homepages - I found inspiration for one of my designs through this gallery. It has not inspired me much lately. The people who post seem enthralled with Flash.
• CSS Vault - This is the site that I began seeing the “weathered” or “worn” look. I have liked several of the sites that I have seen here.

I have found a couple of other sites that have galleries. Several of them have the same sites as CSS Vault. I have not checked out the other sites as much to put them in my list yet.

I have noticed several blogs on CSS design galleries that are using this “worn” or “weathered” look. I have an idea for a page design using this look. I wrote to one of the blog authors who is a designing and he sent me to this tutorial that helped me to get equipped on how to pull this off. I am excited to try. I also bought some “weathered” filters for Photoshop and I look forward to playing around with those when they arrive.

My friend Shawn told me about a site that gives news and information about all the different Web browsers. There are also links to downloads of current and older versions of each browser. At first look, this site: upsdell.com/BrowserNews/overview.htm looks like it could be a good resource for Web designers and developers.

I am so excited. This morning I registered to go to a User Interface Conference in Boston in October. I have heard two of the speakers before at another conference. I get their weekly email tip that deals with useability and designing for user experience.

I am currently reading books by two of the speakers that will be at the October conference. I am a little bummed that I have to choose between hearing one of them for an all-day seminar. But I think because I registered early I will get the conference proceedings so I won’t miss out. I also am getting an iPod mini by registering early.

The two books I am currently reading are Web ReDesign 2.0 by Kelly Goto and Content Criticalby Gerry McGovern. I think I am going to go to Gerry’s seminar on information architecture.

I am sure you have seen the little icons in the address bar of websites. I have created some in the past for my websites but they did not look very good. I decided to take another crack at it and have created some for GodSquad and campuscrusadeforchrist.com. I found some articles and other resources on creating these “favicons.” I even found a site where you browse to an image file on your computer and the site will generate a favicon. You then download a zip file with it and put the icon in the root folder of your site. Pretty simple.

• Favicon from picts - favicon generator that I mentioned above
• Creating a favicon in Photoshop - Runs through how to download the plugin you will need to save as an “.ico” file. Then the tutorial runs you through the process and gives some tips at creating a good favicon. I have customized my desktop by creating .ico with Photoshop.
• I did a Google search and found several resources out there.

I did find that you have to empty the cache on your browser and clean out temporary files to have the favicon show up. I also learned that in Firefox you have to double click the “paper” icon in front of your link to get it to update the favicon from the default “page” icon.