You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July, 2007.
Not being a big fan of Flash sites (generally speaking), I found this amusing:
Act now and it will only cost your business $399 to annoy the f**k out of your website’s visitors! Or if you already have a slick Flash intro for your site, why not drop another $199 and make shit spin around your logo! Hot!
From version two of designer Jason Santa Maria’s site.
Working on some websites this afternoon, it occurred to me that a good rule of thumb when faced with perfectionism is, don’t try for perfection, because it isn’t possible. Perfection means different things to different people, and you’ll never be able to reach every person’s idea of perfection. Being ‘just good enough’ not only saves you from undue pressure, it gives you room for maneuver, too.
As a favour for a friend (hello Eira!): here are the webdesign tools I use at the moment, and the websites I go to for inspirations/reference/reading when I’m bored…
Tools
- TextMate
- Ridiculously useful text editing tool: sort of inspired by DHH of Rails fame, and so very useful for Rails work. And for those of you who don’t enjoy chasing after the latest fads, it’s also brilliant for general html and css editing.The features I find especially useful are automatic syntax coloring, folding of code blocks, and ‘project-wide’ find and replace. You can also add your own custom shortcuts for standard blocks of text, so (for instance) li+tab becomes opening and closing LI tags, with the cursor handily placed in between them, ready for typing. This feature can seems like a small deal, until you start using it regularly, when it just saves loads of time.I could rave about TextMate all day, and would probably be using it for all my web design work if it wasn’t for…
- Coda
- I’ve not been using Coda for long, but the jist of it is that it lets you do all of your web design work in one app. So, html coding, css editing (in text or visual mode), terminal work, file uploads, are all handled by the one app. There’s also built in reference via a ‘books’ option which lets your browse various reference works on html, css, and javascript. Coda drags this information down off the web, so this feature only works when you have an internet connection.Most importantly – although this might vary depending on what you actually want to do with the app – Coda lets you preview your work in a browser window inside the app. This means no switching between text editor and browser to preview changes to a website your working on. It’s a really nice idea: I’ve come across bugs in Coda’s rendering of my work (it sometimes doesn’t update pages as it should), but I’m thinking these will be ironed out as the app is improved.
- xScope
- I occasionally use this for checking out colours on websites and the like. It’s a free trial which last for something like 30 hours of use, so since I don’t use it much it’s lasted me since last year. Which is nice.
Sites
- A List Apart
- All sorts of web design tips.
- Signal vs Noise
- User interface design, and how-to-be-insanely-productive.
- Bearskinrug
- A recent discovery, this last one: nice layout (I think so anyway) and great illustration.
I shall update this list as and when I feel like it!
