Useful Resources for Web and Graphic Designers

It’s friday again, summer seems to be passing swiftly. Had a pretty good week, mostly listening to Eddie Izzard’s ‘Death Star Canteen’, its soooo funny (some swearing involved). “Do you know who I am?” lol

Anyways, below is a list of useful websites that can help generate some backgrounds for websites.

1. Background Image Maker
2. Stripmania
3. Ajaxload

This is a blog that has some templates to display your artwork on (i.e. stationary templates, packaging templates), all with a simple Layer Options > Multiply.

Clear images for Identity Design

BlueprintCSS by Google

Google has come up with a prettty handy tool…

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.

Features:

• An easily customizable grid
• Sensible typography
• Relative font-sizes everywhere
• A typographic baseline
• An extendable plugin system
• Perfected CSS reset
• A stylesheet for printing
• Powerful scripts for customizing your layout
• No bloat of any kind

To read more click here

Living, Breathing & Eating Design

A nice list of things us designers tend to do. I find a lot of them to be true. Original List from CG Files, I’ve added a few of my own in here.

1. You’ve almost rear-ended the car in front of you because you were analyzing a font on a billboard.
2. You get pissed when a free Photoshop brush you download is less than 1000px in size.
3. You’d rather study the paisley pattern on your boyfriend/girlfriend’s shirt than listen to what he/she has to say.
4. You can use keyboard shortcuts at light speed, blindfolded, but you can’t type a paragraph of text without staring at the keyboard.
5. You’ve had “Software Nightmares,” when you’ve been working way too much.
6. You consider meals, interruptions.
7. You’ve learned your lesson and stopped using the word “final” in any file name when saving.
8. You clean your keyboard more often than you wash your car.
9. You’ve intentionally given up trying to explain your projects to non-designers.
10. You see CMYK and RGB like Neo sees the Matrix.
11. You’d rather organize your desktop than your sock drawer.
12. When you heard that Adobe was acquiring Macromedia, you had a Design Orgasm.
13. When you look at Album art all you see are grunge Photoshop Brushes. (Then you see the album art a couple minutes later)
14. You’ve Photoshopped out a watermark for a comp or mock-up.
15. Everytime you come across an intricately designed site, you must take it apart and figure out how it’s done using the wed developer tools in Firefox.
16. You’ve actually $paid for a font.
17. You’ve totally slaughtered a great design concept because the client thinks he/she knows best. (everyone thinks they are a designer)
18. The amount of words you’ve written with a sharpie labeling burned discs total more than the amount of words you’ve read in novels.
19. A lot of time is spent browsing CSS websites for inspiration.
20. You’ve had to explain to a client that a layered file wasn’t part of the deal.
21. You’ve kept a ragged concert ticket just so you could scan it.
22. You’ve nicknamed the OSX spinning wheel. (and not affectionately)
23. You bookmark a resource more often than you have a fun night out on the town.
24. You’ve intentionally overbid a project because you can sniff out a bad client from a mile away.
25. You can’t go to a restaurant without secretly critiquing the menu design.
26. You download the weekly free image at istockphoto.
27. You have an amazingly huge font collection, and an amazingly short temper.
28. If you had a penny for every mouse click, you would have been a trillionaire 3 years ago.
29. Lunch break at work is spent working, sketching or thinking up design concepts for your freelance clients.
30. You cannot watch TV without having your laptop in front of you (it just wouldn’t be right!).
31. While away on vacation, your laptop is most missed.