Faraway, So Close

I'm very far from being an expert (somewhere a step above newbie is where I'd place myself), but thought I'd list off a couple of the resources that I use for learning about designing in the tangled interweb:

• 
  A good book that helped me wrap my head around CSS (cascading style sheets) is Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook. It's a very easy read and Dan's own site (www.simplebits.com) is another great resource to have in your RSS reader for tips. His new book (Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS) is on my wishlist at Amazon and I've been planning to pick it up when my next 'big' web project comes along.
• 
  Pretty much any book by Eric Meyer would be good reading. I picked one at random.
• For design ideas/inspirations I often head to one of these places: CSS Zen Garden (and the guy's site who runs it mezzoblue, the Movabletype Style Contest or Wordpress themes depending on what/if blog software being used.
• CSS Beauty, A List Apart, Godbit, Learning Movabletype

I'll add more as I think of them. What are some sites/books you use to help in your design escapades?

Posted by iChris at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Brilliant commentary on design from Ze - click here to watch.

And on that note, we're outta here to head 4 hrs north to Pierceland along with 8 grade 8ers to do a fun camp/VBS for the week. I loves me some sleeping in a tent!

Posted by iChris at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'll try this one out for awhile. I've been experimenting with Wordpress on a super secret blog in a secret location - see if you can find it and leave me a comment if you do. (Hint: Something to do with the name of this blog.)

This design is from the recent Movabletype style contest and was designed by Bryan Buchs.

There's something funky with some of the li elements in some of my pages, but it's most likely something I did by not following css/html standards as usual.

Posted by iChris at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I finally got around to updating my site to the new Movabletype v3.2 templates. We'll see how long this design lasts. :)

Posted by iChris at 9:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I keep trying other colors, but I still find black text on white to be the easiest to read - so I went back to it (for now).

Whaddya think?

Posted by iChris at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I want one of these.

Swiped from.

Posted by iChris at 3:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A walk thru from pencil sketch to setting up a character for animation in Flash.

Posted by iChris at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How to fake the lomo effect.

When you don't have an actual lomo camera you can make do with Photoshop.

Posted by iChris at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

Pretty neat way to implement tabs on your own website. It would have some interesting application for certain site designs, that's for sure.

Posted by iChris at 7:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ultimate Link Library - and not one of those crappy full of pop-ups type link libraries either.

Posted by iChris at 3:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

300 free TrueType fonts for your designing pleasure.

Posted by iChris at 7:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cool collection of common symbol signs - available for free!

Posted by iChris at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

People are always wondering what i see when I tell them I'm a bit color blind. My reds and greens tend to mesh together as well as purple/blue. I don't know what it is, I've never really had it diagnosed.

But this site allows you to see what other people don't see. It's basically a color palette chooser for web designers and gives you an idea of what various degrees of color blindness will do to a color you choose for a design.

Posted by iChris at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Get your favorite band font here... if your favorite band is a late 80's early 90's metal band that is.

Posted by iChris at 2:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (6)

I got bored of my old design and since I'm lazy I just went and used a template that someone else built. If I get around to it I'll change the colors and graphics a bit to suit me, but I'm not making any promises.

Let me know if there's any broken links or things that look wierd. Off for lunch with Mark.

Posted by iChris at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (5)

The top ten things that they never told me in design school.

Link via www.k10k.net

Posted by iChris at 4:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (3)

Mezzoblue's CSS Crib Sheet offers a bunch of quick tips to follow when designing using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Don't know what CSS is? This will get you started. It's a great way to design a site so that you can decide on style in one file and pull that "style" across to multiple files/sites - such as what I've done on the various music, blog, video pages on mennoboy.com.

Update: More good links care of scriptygoddess.com:

Posted by iChris at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (8)