64 Ultimate Design Inspiration Resources

October 5, 2007

Over the past years website design has become more and more beautiful. You can find thousands of inspirations online – Logos, Icons, Websites, Colorschemes…

I have carried together the best and largest sites. So sit back, relax and let yourself inspire!

Logos

LogopondLogoPond – Identity Inspiration

faveupfaveup – Design Inspiration Gallery

logosauceLogoSauce – Logo design, inspiration and information

Icons

iconbuffetIconBuffet – Free Icons, Stock Icons, Custom Icon Design

iconbaseIconBase – Connect ideas

iconfactoryIconfactory – World leader in icon design

Website Style Showcases

thebestdesignstheBestDesigns – The Best Flash and CSS Web Design

theFAWFWA – Favourite Website Awards – Web awards at the cutting edge

unmatchedstyleUnmatchedstyle – CSS Web Design Inspiration and CSS Gallery

most inspiredMostInspired – designs from all the popular css and design galleries

Web cremeWebcreme – Web design inspiration

screenalicioScreenalicio.us – Get inspired!

css basedCSSbased – Designers love nature

css natureCSSnature – well designed css and xhtml nature based website designs

Zen GardenCssZenGarden – The Beauty in CSS Design

css impressCSSimpress – the most updated css gallery

css galerieCSSGalerie – just a galerie

css flashCssFlash – Your daily inspiration dose

cssclipCSSclip – Web Design Inspiration and Gallery

css maniaCSSmania – the most updated css showcase all over the globe

cssbeautycssBeauty – CSS Design, News, Jobs, Community, Web Standards

css vaultcssvault – The Web’s CSS Site

css leakCssLeak – CSS Gallery, Showcase of beautifull webdesign

css galleryCSSElite – CSS Gallery and Website Development Resources

csswebsitecsswebsite – Website Design

css driveCSSdrive – Categorized CSS gallery and examples

css hazardCSS Hazard

CSS RemixCSS Remix – A fresh blend of the best css web design

best web galleryBestWebGallery – CSS & Flash Design Inspiration

stylecrunchstylecrunch – css and standards websites gallery

Apps maniaApps Mania – Web Applications Showcase

stylebooststyleboost – showcasing outstanding websites since 2001

PortfoliobasePortfolioBase – Showcasing the best portfolios from all around the world

csstuxcsstux – The best dressed sites on the web

Splenchsplench – Designs for Creative Minds

Colors

kuler.adobekuler – Explore, create and share color themes

COLOURloversCOLOURlovers – Color Trends + Palettes

Forums

deviantARTDeviantArt – where ART meets application!

MojizuMojizu – A Contemporary Character Design Community

Blogs

smashing magazineSmashingMagazine – useful and innovative information for web-designers and web-developers

thecoolhunterthecolorhunter – today’s most happening movements, styles and trends

moco locoMOCO LOCO – Modern contemporary design & architecture

netdivernetdiver – digital culture magazine + new media design portal

startdrawingstartdrawing – the asia drawing portal

Design in EuropeDesign in Europe – Design News from Europe

LCSV4LCSV4 – the illustrator news portal

ventilateVentilate – A portal for artistic ideas, thoughts and works

piclipicli – Constantly changing gallery of photos created and moderated by a large community of creative users

Other

elements of designElements of Design – A Web Design Showcase

DesignfloodDesignFlood – Waist Deep in Pixels

ThreadlessThreadless – Designer Clothing Submissions

graffitiGraffiti – The Writing on the Wall

mailmeartMAilmeART – the ongoing mail art project for artists, illustrators and general doodlers

Design melt downDesign Melt Down – Design Elements, Trends & Problems in Web Design

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BlogRush – The Easy Way to Get More Readers?

October 3, 2007

What is the aim of every blogger? As much traffic as possible, of course! Normally it means a lot of work and sometimes money. But than comes BlogRush and says it has the ultimate weapon to send you thousands of visitors for (quite) nothing.

To start, go to BlogRush.com, register for a free account and add your blog. You can select a category which will later help BlogRush finding the right content for your site. After you have installed the widget, let the magic begin..

Blogrush

How does it work

Now you can see the BlugRush widget on your site (or look in the menu on the right of this blog) showing 5 posts of blogs with related content. If you click on one of these links, a new window will open and refers you to the article. But how should this supports you drive more traffic to your own blog? That’s easy. Always when the BlogRush widget is shown on your site, one of your posts will, in return, appear in the widget of another (topic related) blog. This means that if you have 100 pageviews a day, your posts will appear on 100 other blogs.

Furthermore BlogRush offers detailed statistics and filters. The filters can be set to permanently block a certain URL or posts (on the basis of blocked words), from being displayed in your widget. Since a few days you can also choose between different widget-’flavors’, to fit your sites design.

Good or Bad

I want to make clear that we didn’t get paid or something else to write about BlogRush. It’s just a new tool bloggers should know. But what about the real effect of the widget?

Many bloggers deny using BlogRush but other welcome it.. I will try it and in a few weeks we will see whether it has brought us a crowd of visitors or not.

If you want to know what others say, you could read Despite Recent Criticism, Blogrush Means Business, BlogRush is a Blog Bust or My BlogRush Stats – Can John Reese Make This Work?.

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Stay Organized – Become Productive

October 2, 2007

Time – time management means productivity, means money! In a world of multitasking you have to reduce stress and improve your self-organization. You can use pen and post-its or you try one of these web-based equivalents…

Online Mindmaps

1. Mindmeister is an Ajax driven web application specialized on collaborative mind mapping. Also it allows you to instantly start a Skype conference with your friends/partners.

mindmeister

2. Mindomo, a very heavyset mindmapping tool, enables you to structure your maps in every detail. It’s one of a few which supports image-integration.

mindomo

3. Bubbl.us uses Ajax and Flash for creating beautiful and simple mindmaps. You can share them with your friends or print your work.

bubbl.us

To-do Lists

1. Rememberthemilk is a powerful to-do list tool that allows you to locate tasks, share, publish and get reminded of them via IM, SMS or email.

Rememberthemilk

2. Blablalist is a simple to-do list. It’s fast, and offers all the basic features. It tenders an easy-to-use interface, but loses points because of a nerving pop-up window, launched when setting up a new list.

BlaBlalist

3. Roughunderbelly is a Ruby on Rails running to-do list, which allows you to set yourself a deadline for your tasks and classify them.

Roughunderbelly

4. Ta-da Lists, also built with Rails, offers a wonderfully simple and clean to–do manager. Ta-da Lists uses a lot of whitespace and big fonts to make the lists more appealing and open.

Tadalist

5. Voo2do provides detailed task management for individuals.

Voo2Do

6. Toodledo allows you to group your tasks, assigned to due dates and priority.

Toodledo

7. With Taskthis you can create to-dos with notes and publish them via RSS. If needed you can share your lists with your friends.

TaskThis

Web Calendars

  1. Yahoo Calendar – “Access dates and meetings from anywhere, anytime”
  2. Google Calendar – “Simplify. Organize. (And relax.)”
  3. Hipcal – “it’s about time”
  4. Kiko – “dead simple calendar”
  5. 30boxes – “it’s so easy my mom can do it”
  6. MSN Calendar One of the big three together with Yahoo! and Google.

{ 3 comments }

A Comprehensive Guide to Free Fonts

September 26, 2007

Font

It’s always difficult to find the right typeface for a logo or even a website. Here are some resources of free fonts but remember if your are using special fonts on your site less visitors will be able to see the site with the actual font and most see the site in a standard font. I recommend you to use rare fonts just for your logo but if you really want to use such a special font for your site be sure to declare alternative font styles in your stylesheet.

Free font resources:

  • Dafont.com offers user created free fonts. 7500 typefaces have already been submitted to Dafont.
  • Grsites.com has a big collection of about 6800 fonts, including a logo and button maker.
  • 1001freefonts.com gives you 1001 fonts for nothing.
  • There are 11202 nicely categorized fonts on Abstractfonts.com. It’s one of the biggest free anthologies out there.
  • Fontriver.com includes a collection of nice fonts for PC and MAC. Also Fontriver provides some useful tools for fonts, e.g. a font manager.
  • Highfonts.com offers a well-designed free font site with more than 3000 fonts and another 25000 to pay.
  • Fontmaniac.com has nearly 12000 fonts.
  • Fontasy.de includes a huge collection of free fonts as well as some links to font tools but attention not all of them are for free.
  • Fontviallage.com presents you a nice collection with about 6000 fonts.
  • You can get ready-made collections of free fonts on allfreetemplates.org (containing up to 7952 Fonts!!). But in order to get the fonts you have to register once on their site.

Do You want to create your own font?

  • Macromendia Fontographer 4.1 is on of the best fontcreating tools but the newest version isn’t available for free. I linked to version 4.1 which is latest one available for free downloading.
  • DTL FontMaste can be downloaded for free in a light version. It’s a good alternative to Macromedia Fontographer.

Helpful Web-Applications

  • typetester.maratz.com is a website with a realtime font-preview app that lets you easily see how a certain typeface affects you.
  • Searchfreefonts.com is a search engine, indexing more than 13000 free fonts.

If you know other good and free font resources or gadgets you can post them in the comments.

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Do You Want To Make Money Online?

September 24, 2007

money

Every day thousands of people are surfing through the web – make them click the money into your pocket! Maybe you run a website or blog about something really interesting and want to make money with your page – Start now and earn hundreds of dollars!

Beginner Guides

To start from scratch, read at least one of these beginner guides to site marketing. After you have done that think about it and start to improve your website. Probably you already know a lot of these tips but they are only the first step on your way to richness!

Traffic building for Newbies

People always believe in Traffic being the ultimate weapon for making money online and they are right, partially! No-one will make the big thing without massive visitors. But how do normal people, who neither have huge amounts of marketing capital nor influential contacts, can get high loads of visitors? Read a few of these tutorials/guides and you will understand how to make it rolling.

Search Engine Optimization

Another important part in your way of becoming a rich man, is SEO. A lot of traffic to websites is also coming through search engines such as Google or Yahoo. The higher the rank, the more clicks you will receive. But to go beyond the basics and not just read but understand it makes you the winner!

Place Ads – Earn Money

Now, after you have learned how to get a good PageRank and drive a lot of traffic, you probably want to know with what you will earn the money. The typical answer would be something like AdSense (and yes it’s great) but there are several other profitable advertising networks. Not forgetting the ‘pay per blog’ systems and direct affiliate solutions.

At last you could subscribe to a few feeds of the sites, mentioned above. One I really like is the feed from Dosh Dosh; a really good blog with many posts to current marketing topics.

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