Post any tools, resources, forums you use for design (web, print, etc)

Recommend good books etc...

I'll start:

http://colorschemedesigner.com/ - good for creating color palettes/swatches/themes.
http://kuler.adobe.com/ - same thing as above but a bit more advanced

http://patterntap.com/ - collection of UI inspiration or design elements. User submitted community.

http://cssprotograph.com/ - tool for creating css/xhtml wireframe prototypes.

http://960.gs/ - css framework...although i just use their photoshop template.

http://www.virtuosimedia.com/tutorials/ultimate-ie6-cheatsheet-how-to-fix-25-internet-explorer-6-bugs - IE cheat sheet



a good design book that id recommend that outlines a good design process from start to finish. "Sexy Web Design" - by Eliot Jay Stocks http://www.sitepoint.com/books/sexy1/


stackoverflow.com - programming question/answer message board.
doctype.com - CSS/HTML question/answer message board.

10/8/2009 5:53:07 PM

add to my topics

10/8/2009 5:57:09 PM

http://www.visualjquery.com
http://www.php.net
http://www.smashingmagazine.com
http://www.delicious.com/ usually has a lot of neat web-related things show up
http://www.flickr.com with CC settings checked for stock photography

i've had that book sitting on my work desk for months now, if i could only get time to read it

10/8/2009 7:02:34 PM

http://www.designerstoolbox.com/
http://www.thegridsystem.org/
http://www.designeducation.ca/
http://www.designboom.com/eng/
http://www.inhabitat.com/
http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/
http://www.alvit.de/handbook/
http://www.colorschemedesigner.com/
http://www.typetester.org/
http://www.browsershots.org/

10/8/2009 7:21:41 PM

http://creattica.com/
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/
http://www.makebetterwebsites.com/

Smashing is great, I've got their book on pre-order.

^ Colorscheme designer is in the first post, try not to duplicate any or this is gonna get nuts

[Edited on October 8, 2009 at 7:29 PM. Reason : ]

10/8/2009 7:27:31 PM

add to my topics.

smashing is amazing, i too have the book on pre-order.

10/8/2009 8:05:15 PM

Lots of good resources in here

How about design galleries we use to steal other people's work for inspiration

http://minimalexhibit.com and its siblings are fairly new, frequently updated and full of good sites -- they're created and curated by the people at Vandelay Design

[Edited on October 8, 2009 at 8:25 PM. Reason : ]

10/8/2009 8:24:29 PM

i just started following http://twitter.com/smashingmag about 2 weeks ago. i had never heard of them before, but yeah they are quality stuff

10/8/2009 8:46:19 PM

http://getfirebug.com/ - don't know how I ever debugged pages without it. Just wish I could find something as good for IE.

http://www.httpwatch.com/ - almost forgot about this one. Its so insanely useful it makes my head spin. Lets you see everything passed between the server and the browser. No more echos to try and figure out why that fucking POST variable isn't coming back right.


VV yah, thats what I've used in the past. Definitely not as good IMO.

[Edited on October 8, 2009 at 9:01 PM. Reason : .]

10/8/2009 8:52:25 PM

lol there is so much stuff it couldn't possibly be listed in one thread - so much stuff in so many different categories...

10/8/2009 8:54:48 PM

^^ you know IE has a developer toolbar or something that has some firebug-eque functionality. not nearly as good, but it helps

10/8/2009 8:57:05 PM

http://my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage - IEtester. LEts you test IE6+ in one tabbed window.

also for IE. http://www.fiddlertool.com/

[Edited on October 8, 2009 at 8:59 PM. Reason : .]

10/8/2009 8:58:59 PM

some more jquery tools

http://visitmix.com/lab/glimmer
http://www.paulstovell.com/jquerypad (less than a day old...might be buggy lol)

[Edited on October 8, 2009 at 9:02 PM. Reason : .]

10/8/2009 9:01:48 PM

Quote :

"http://www.httpwatch.com/ - almost forgot about this one. Its so insanely useful it makes my head spin. Lets you see everything passed between the server and the browser. No more echos to try and figure out why that fucking POST variable isn't coming back right."

check out http live headers for firefox

10/9/2009 1:19:31 AM

what's it do different than the Net panel in firebug?

10/9/2009 8:46:31 AM

you can "replay" http requests, which can be useful

[Edited on October 9, 2009 at 9:07 AM. Reason : i keep forgetting firebug shows headers. i've been using httpliveheaders for a long time. ]

10/9/2009 9:07:04 AM

add to my topics

[Edited on October 9, 2009 at 10:09 AM. Reason : 111]

10/9/2009 10:09:01 AM

i usually go back and optimized my images with RIOT - it shows a preview of the image while you slide the optimizer and shows the file size.

http://luci.criosweb.ro/riot/

Really helps with flash ads to if i have a picture embedded.

10/9/2009 4:14:13 PM

For small web developers: http://www.microsoft.com/web/websitespark/

$100 for 3 years, payable at the end.

You get 3 copies of VS Pro, Expression Studio, Expression Web, Windows Web Server R2, SQL Server 2008 Web Edition.

Plus, access to online training, inclusion in the spark marketplaces, inclusion in partner solution profiler, and the web app gallery. Pretty good stuff if you work in the .NET community.

10/12/2009 10:03:17 PM

web developer toolbar for firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

10/13/2009 8:00:22 AM

http://footerfetish.com/ - more UI inspiration but footer oriented.

10/13/2009 2:07:09 PM

http://designm.ag/resources/logo-design/ - logo resources, haven't looked through all of them yet
http://www.cleancss.com/ - cleans and minimizes css
http://davidwalsh.name/ - good jquery/mootools blog, the man knows his stuff
http://pattern8.com/ - good repeating bg patterns site

10/13/2009 4:22:26 PM

Color Scheme Designer (already mentioned) is cool, but I also like:

http://colorcombos.com/

10/13/2009 4:55:21 PM

if someone with HTML-posting capabilities wants to post these, here's my bookmarks.html from the past few weeks. if i outputted the whole thing, it'd be way too long and nobody would want it.

http://digitalfocus.org/bookmarks.html

10/13/2009 6:08:35 PM

http://twitter.com

+ http://mashable.com/2009/05/04/twitter-designers/

10/13/2009 6:48:16 PM

http://webdesignledger.com/

11/24/2009 11:42:12 AM

http://pixelnovel.com/timeline - Photoshop plugin to integrate SVN into photoshop and your PSD's. You get to see a timeline for each PSD that is under version control and can easily and quickly navigate through your repository history. Very cool plugin if you work with a lot of photoshop files and want to keep them under SVN control.

http://pixelnovel.com/comparepsd - allows you to compare multiple PSD files side by side quickly and easily so you can see differences between them. It will highlight the differences in your layers etc. Its really handy if you have a file you've saved multiple times with different names then forget what the differences are... (flattened vs. not flattened layers etc). Saves you the time of having to open up both and scan through the layers to see what the differences were.

12/8/2009 2:58:01 PM

Hilarious...I'm sure any of you freelancers have definitely run into this before.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

12/9/2009 5:47:16 PM

Any of you Mac web developers...what IDE do you use? I currently use Coda and have been for a couple years but I was just looking at Espresso and CSSEdit...granted they don't support anything other than html,php,css,js but CSSEdit looks to be pretty cool.

12/14/2009 10:41:45 AM

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/the-problem-with-passwords/

Interesting article on password input fields.

2/22/2010 4:11:06 PM

http://www.adobe.com/ap/products/flash/

I kid, I kid.

2/22/2010 4:41:27 PM

i like
http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/
http://www.uxmag.com
http://www.line25.com

this is sort of off topic, but I had a hard to finding anything with the search. Are any of you designers (or know designers) looking for freelance work? Trying to find someone semi-local but its a PITA

2/22/2010 7:32:48 PM

PM Sent.

2/22/2010 8:09:51 PM

Quote :

"Any of you Mac web developers...what IDE do you use? I currently use Coda and have been for a couple years but I was just looking at Espresso and CSSEdit...granted they don't support anything other than html,php,css,js but CSSEdit looks to be pretty cool."

for general text editing, i use SubEthaEdit
CSSEdit is insanely useful for webdev
for anything that takes more than one php script, i use NetBeans (if only because of the SVN integration)

2/22/2010 11:34:48 PM

Quote :

"Any of you Mac web developers...what IDE do you use? I currently use Coda and have been for a couple years but I was just looking at Espresso and CSSEdit...granted they don't support anything other than html,php,css,js but CSSEdit looks to be pretty cool. "

Smultron - current favorite, mostly because it's lightweight and fast, and free
Espresso - does have support now for a decent number of languages if you install Sugars
CSSEdit - pretty sweet with the preview stuff

2/23/2010 12:26:42 AM

yeah, smultron is what i'd use if i had to pay for my own software

2/23/2010 12:31:21 AM

A friend of mine let me have his Espresso key that he got from the last Mac Heist since he wasn't using it and so far I'm liking it. I don't like that there is no SVN support so thats really my only complaint so far.

The other thing I don't like about Espresso but i think its because I'm used to a certain way (coda) is that option+left/right arrow key doesn't have the same effect that it does in Coda. In coda it will skip to the next word or breaking character.

I did buy CSSEdit today and I'm loving it! The preview stuff is really cool.

[Edited on February 23, 2010 at 12:35 AM. Reason : .]

2/23/2010 12:34:39 AM

I've used Coda quite a bit but just D/L demo of Espresso and think its pretty nice. Is the preview stuff the same as CSSEdit?

2/23/2010 2:21:40 PM

Anyone have any experience with ThemeForest or any of its siblings?

[Edited on February 23, 2010 at 2:50 PM. Reason : selling, not buying]

[Edited on February 23, 2010 at 2:51 PM. Reason : http://themeforest.net if you're lazy]

2/23/2010 2:50:33 PM

Designing for the Web available online for free. A good read.

http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/book/


Also, jQuery: Novice to Ninja is available as digital PDF through sitepoint now.

http://www.sitepoint.com/books/jquery1/

[Edited on March 17, 2010 at 12:35 PM. Reason : .]

3/17/2010 12:34:36 PM

WDD has a giveaway for that jQuery title: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/03/win-5-copies-of-jquery-novice-to-ninja/

3/17/2010 2:32:20 PM

http://jsbeautifier.org/

helps reformat minified javascript. helpful if you're debugging another site's javascript to see how they did something

[Edited on March 17, 2010 at 10:37 PM. Reason : .]

3/17/2010 10:36:26 PM

^^ I picked up a copy. Its a pretty good read so far.

3/17/2010 11:00:49 PM

A lot of these are known I'm sure, but good list none-the-less:
http://mashable.com/2010/03/23/social-media-design-tools/

http://www.colourlovers.com/
http://www.iconfinder.net/
http://www.proposable.com/
http://dezignus.com/
http://www.society6.com/
http://99designs.com/

3/24/2010 2:51:03 PM

if you are serious about this field, you should pretty much be against everything that 99designs stands for...

3/25/2010 2:50:15 AM

oooooooh, dont get me started on 99designs.

3/25/2010 9:05:13 AM

http://resources.savedelete.com/65-best-freelance-jobs-websites-for-designers-developers-and-writers.html

4/7/2010 2:20:44 PM

IE8 and the hashchange event own hard.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288209(VS.85).aspx

Pretty much the best part of the HTML5 spec as it currently stands.

[Edited on April 7, 2010 at 2:50 PM. Reason : .]

4/7/2010 2:49:58 PM

Quote :

"In Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) applications, client requests that do not trigger traditional page navigation should update the hash property. This lets the Back button function more predictably."

ownage

4/7/2010 2:56:42 PM

Quote :

"In Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) applications, client requests that do not trigger traditional page navigation should update the hash property. This lets the Back button function more predictably."

ownage

4/7/2010 2:56:42 PM