Page 2 of 4 in "design" in Weblog

Struggling to find sources of inspiration? How about browsing the American Library of Congress Memory Project? I came across it while reading an article on Typographica and went for a wander round. Need a reference for old typography? How about Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera?!

Roger Hudson goes back to fundamentals for his Web Essentials 04 talk on web navigation. Everyone needs to be reminded of this stuff.

I’ve been noticing a certain degree of homogeny across the websites I visit of late. It’s probably always been there and combined with my relatively limited selection of subject I shouldn’t be surprised. That said though, I would love to be awed, or at least charmed, a bit more often. I see a LOT of websites every day - it’s my job - and it’s very very rarely that something really jumps out, either for design, technical trickery or personality. Novelty just doesn’t lend itself to every subject and with my lack of patience novelty without some thought for the user guaruntees that I won’t stick around. By the sounds of things Carol has been feeling frustrated with Netdiver submissions… Enough to write an editorial about it.

I went down to Santa’s Ghetto at the weekend to check out some pieces of work by the likes of Liam Howlett, Banksy, Shok1 and Insect. It’s another great exhibition - in a more fitting venue than last year - featuring crumbling cement, low lighting, camo nets and bare brickwork, but with significantly less space. If you’re anywhere near Tottenham Court road you have to go take a look.

There was a photo of a Banksy piece there I hadn’t seen before - of birds in the act of destroying a CCTV camera! Brilliant, thought I, before promptly fogetting about it. By chance I was reminded today by Dick’s Daily photo, which was accompanied a link to The Birds on Banksy’s site. Great project!

Not much to say about this one except that minigraff is great! Street art with a cute twist…

The Thinking with Type website has a wealth of information on typography, with plenty of nice examples surrounded by some highly entertaining writing. Thanks to 456 Berea Street for this one.

I have quite randomly stumbled across a great-looking list of resources for the whole web development process. I think I’m all design-processed out but the ‘design’, ‘user research’ and ia sections look very handy indeed.

I hadn’t realised how prolific Craig Kroeger was on the fonts front! He appears to have designed dozens of pixel fonts while I wasn’t looking. It’s amazing how much variation you can squeeze out of 10 pixels! I used to be a regular at miniml back when it had that lovely Flash interface but I’ve lapsed of late…

I haven’t had a chance to read through too much of this yet but the BTexact Safe Colours site appears to contain a wealth of information on the use of colour on the web and it’s relationship to accessibility.

Richard Rutter over at Clagnut has spotted a fantastic little bit of javascript on the Couloir site. I’d seen the site before but I’d just assumed that it was another Flash photo switcher… Turns out that it’s a pure HTML/JS thing! It’s done so well that it didn’t even occur to me to see how it worked.

The ‘loading’ message is in a div masking out the photo underneath. That’s nothing new, but it’s very well done. The clever bit is the dynamic opacity fading done onload, giving that proper macromedia look without the plug-in. Slick. Very slick.