Web Creative

Bermuda 9 Beaches

leelowe — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:06:06 +0000

Bermuda 9 Beaches, originally uploaded by beforethecoffee.

This is a gorgeous shot. I lived in Bermuda for four years, and while I am glad not to be constantly stuck on ‘the rock’, I do miss it at times.

When Tweets Collide

leelowe — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:51:59 +0000

Micah at Learn to Duck enthuses about how much he loves Twitter and why. Some good links, so worth a read.

Re-Tweet: 73 Posts from the last week

leelowe — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:47:32 +0000

SEOzeitgeist ask for their followers favorite Tweets from the past week this is what they got.

Save the Developers!

leelowe — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:09:36 +0000

Check out www.savethedevelopers.org . A good cause and all in good fun.

Down for everyone or just me?

leelowe — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:42:28 +0000

Down for everyone or just me? I love cool little ideas like this site that lets you check if a site is down. Now we need one to answer questions like ‘is everyone staring at me, or is it just me’.

Twitter ‘Jumps the shark’

leelowe — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:54:05 +0000

ProBlogger Launches PayPerTweet . Before you get all ‘WTF!’, this is not for real. An early April Fool perhaps? It had me going for a few seconds! Scary thing is that someone is going to think this is a good idea and try and do it.

Far from Grotesk

leelowe — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:38:07 +0000

Matthew Wahl says his ‘Don’t Believe the Type’ poster was inspired by old music, an obsession with pioneering sans serif typeface Akzidenz Grotesk and the need to try out a local print shop.

Simple, well crafted and visually very effective — just how I like my designs.

SEO is dead. Long live ‘findability’.

leelowe — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 09:12:40 +0000

A List Apart publish a great article from web designer Aarron Walter — author of Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond (New Riders, 2008) — addressing the issue of, what he terms, ‘findability’ and it’s importance in the web design and development project cycle. Walter rightly asserts that, as web professionals, connecting with our audience is the most important aspect of our work. He believes ‘findability’ is an integral part of making that connection but thinks most of us come at ‘findability’ from the wrong angle — seeing it simply as what he calls “search engine duping” SEO. I like his take on this and feel that if we start calling it ‘findability’, not SEO, we might just take it more seriously for ALL projects.

For my part, my team and I have mostly been doing ‘findability’ but calling it SEO - cue Monday morning memo title ‘SEO is now being called findability upon pain of death!’

Yummy jQuery Goodness

leelowe — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:32:36 +0000

More than 45 freshly baked jquery plugins compiled into a handy list by Noupe.com. I really liked…

wSlide allows you to paginate and animate the content of list items.

Hover Sub Tag Cloud — a handy tag cloud de–bloat tool that shows sub–tags in a tool–tip style bubble.

Gradient by Aaron Brandon — this jQuery plugin enables you to add a background gradient to any element without the use of images.

jWYSIWYG seems like it could be an excellent tool for using on text input fields in a content management system. I like it because it offers only basic options such as bold and italics, along with the ability to add images and links (as well as H1 through H3) — this contains end–users’ content formating abilities and means much less chance of your site design being ruined by 20 pixel tall hot pink text using Comic Sans!

My personal favorite is jquery Nice Form — anything that assists in making form elements far prettier to look at makes me very happy.

If I use any of these in upcoming projects I will post about it.

Typographic Inspiration 101

leelowe — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:11:13 +0000

When web designers talk about seeking out inspiration from offline sources, this is exactly what we mean. I am slightly lightheaded with ideas and excitment having looked at only a handful of the hundreds of gorgeous examples of typographic design layouts in this Flickr pool. Josef Muller-Brockmann makes many an appearance, and any typophile will have seen plenty of these examples many times before (but it doesn’t make them anyless brillaint or inspiring).

A few examples of what you’ll find in the ‘International Typographic Style’ pool at Flickr.