15 web design resources that will save you time and improve your designs!

I have been doing quite a lot of creative work recently in the domain of web design (get it, “domain”, har har!) , and I’d be happy to share some of the great web sites and applications that have helped me make better and cleaner design and code jobs. I have divided the sites into six categories, so take your pick and dig in!

If you have any suggestions of your own, I’d be happy to hear them, leave a comment and be heard!

Cliparts and photos

 

Sxc.hu – Royalty free photography
Sxc.hu, or stock.xchng, is the little brother of  iStockphoto. They offer royalty-free photography for non-commercial use, and an option to contact the authors for use in commercial application using a very relaxed license. My experience with the people there has been great as a whole, highly recommended and great array of photographs, but also clip art.

 

clker.com – public domain clip art
Clker.com offers public-domain clip art uploaded by users. Great site for any smaller images that you might need, such as bullets and icons.

Compatibility

Common font list
When designing a page, you need to make sure you use a font that is visible to and looks visually similar for every viewer, and degrade gracefully in the cases where the font is not present on the viewers computer. This useful webpage displays common font families that work over a wide array of browsers and operating systems.

Inspiration

BrowserShots
BrowserShots has lost its glory days as the go-to site for making sure your web pages look equal across all browsers due to its increasingly long rendering waiting time and restrictions, and with IETester mentioned below, you can verify that your page runs properly on all major browsers.

But BrowserShots has introduced a fantastic gallery of web designs, and this is a place where you can find great inspiration.

ColorSchemer gallery and ColourLovers palette gallery
Finding the correct colors for your site can be a surprisingly difficult challenge, but when browsing these galleries, this becomes a fun experience. The idea is that you pick a scheme, which contains roughly 3-8 colors, and then try to base your design around these. If you try it, you’ll find a surprisingly clean and beautiful site looking back at you when you are finished. Using schemes with multiple variation of the same color (like this one) has worked the best for me.

Web Design From Scratch
A great resource for articles about the philosophy behind, and practical application to modern web design.

Applications/Add-ons

Sizer
Sizer is a small application which allows you to easily resize your browser (or really, any) window to see your web pages (hopefully) degrade in a graceful manner. Simple and easy, yet invaluable.

Firebug (Firefox add-on)
Firebug is a great web developer tool built as a Firefox add-on. I have barely scraped the surface of this great tool, but it has been very helpful so far.

 

IETester
Your web design and CSS looks great in the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera and IE? You’re not done yet! Unfortunately, a large portion of people still use Internet Explorer 7 and 6 (*shudders*) and this tool will help you make sure your design stays true to its form. (although it probably won’t until you spend an hour trying to figure out why IE6/7 doesn’t handle inline block  properly, which brings us to…)

Fixes and hacks for common problems
 

Google
This might seem like an odd choice at first, but if you’ve ever had a problem, googling will almost always lead to an answer. The great thing about the internet is that chances are great that somewhere, someone has had your exact problem and either asked about it in a forum or given a solution in a blog post, which will usually lead you closer to an answer.

 

IE PNG Fix
It is fairly common knowledge that Internet Explorer 6 and below does not handle the alpha channel (transparency) for PNG images properly and displays the whole transparent area as a gray box. Resorting to GIF is possible for single-colored background, but for patterned backgrounds your only choice is PNG and this fix (Which is mostly done in CSS) will take care of that.

A quick note: I have noticed that the JavaScript used for tiling images in “IE PNG Fix”, which is called “iepngfix_tilebg.js” seems to break the dropdown functionality of Superfish, which I mentioned earlier. I have been looking at the problem, but haven’t been able to identify the culprit, although I suspect it is related to the way the JS places the image. Unless you absolutely need tiling support, it’s best not to use the JS code, so beware!

CSS Sticky Footer
Making a footer that always stays at the bottom of the page, moves with JavaScript and  works over all major browsers is a surprisingly difficult task, but CSS Sticky Footer takes care of it. It requires you to import a fairly large CSS file, but it shouldn’t break your layout too much, aside from a margin that needs fixing here and there.

Coding
 

CodeIgniter PHP Framework
CodeIgniter is a great framework for easily making web applications in PHP. The features I have enjoyed so far is the fantastic database handling using Active Record, the interesting Model-View-Controller approach (which was new to me) and the great performance I get from my applications. If you want to know what the hype is about, check out this video tutorial entitled “Create a blog in 20 minutes”!

Suckerfish JavaScript/CSS menu system
Another thing that seems like there should be a myriad of online, but is surprisingly difficult to find is a menu that works over all browsers, is completely free, simple to use and can be used in commercial applications. Look no further, Suckerfish is what you have been waiting for! And it degrades nicely to CSS-only under environments without JS too!

Tinfoil Tom Series – Episode 1: Securing your web browser

“What’cha lookin’ at?!”
(Thanks to Sarah for this beautiful depiction of paranoia!)

Hi and welcome to the “Tinfoil Tom” series that I intend on running on this very blog. This series of post will be dedicated to end-user computer security – for the slightly paranoid. So it seemed appropriate to start with what you’re doing at this very moment – that is, surfing the web! (Whatever else you were doing is but your own business, in the spirit of tinfoil hats, paranoia and all.)

This guide is first and foremost directed at power-users, but it is written in a way so that (hopefully) anyone can follow it without problems.

The web browser
Try asking someone about their web browser preference and you’ll notice that many people would rather bite your head off than consider an alternative one. That being said, according to me – the power-user browser is Firefox. Opera is not far behind and may very well excel in some categories, but with the grand focus on security, the enormous community and the perpetually growing add-on library that all Firefox users can enjoy, it’s simply unbeatable, and so it will be a prerequisite for this tutorial.

With its out-of-the-box configuration Firefox is one of the most secure browsers, but we won’t stop there! To make your experience even safer – read on for some useful add-ons.

Added security
Here are some great add-ons that will help in tightening your browsers security.

Adblock Plus

Before and after shot. Unfortunately, some of that heavily
appealing “bling-bling” disappears together with the ads.

Whilst not technically a security add-on, Adblock plus make practically all ads on pages disappear, and in such way makes you less targetable to third-party exploits such as XSS attacks, not to mention those bastard animated smileys. *shivers*

Using Ad blocking software has come under heavy fire lately, with many ad-financed sites expressing heavy criticism towards the users, some sites have even started to reject users with ad-blocking software. Luckily, the number of these sites so far is very small, and let us hope it doesn’t spread. One could probably spend a whole series of posts just discussing the moral aspects of ad blocking (Which according to me has heavy parallels to downloading or TiVo‘ing TV shows, effectively skipping the commercials.) but I’ll leave it for another day.

Get Adblock for Firefox here.

NoScript

Evil script is evil.

Before you install this add-on, you should be aware of the fact that breaks almost all modern websites because it interferes (or rather completely shuts off) JavaScript support unless you specifically enable it on a per-site basis. But it also stops a lot of third-party homepages from running scripts and makes a lot of other security improvements under the hood. Although I don’t recommend this add-on for normal users, power users who often visit the same set of homepages may benefit greatly in terms of increased security – this add-on will truly make your browser an impenetrable fortress.

Get NoScript for Firefox here.

TorButton

Just watching that onion makes my eyes tear up… with laughter!

TorButton is actually a quick proxy gateway to Tor, an online darknet-like anonymization effort, but because the Tor software acts as a standard HTTP proxy, we can use any proxy server in its place, and because the TorButton add-on features many security tweaks, some similar to NoScript, even running it through a transparent server on your own computers adds security, and as far as I have noticed, TorButton breaks much fewer websites and barely requires any user attention. The only problem might be the cumbersome task of properly setting up a proxy server, but for Windows I can recommend CCProxy which I use myself. (Demo version with some non-timebased restrictions, although works fine for our intentions.)

Get TorButton for Firefox here.

Coming up!
In the next episode of the Tinfoil Tom series we will be discussing laptop security, secure file deletion through wiping and file recovery.

In other news…

Randomly speaking of video game soundtracks – the classical Unreal Tournament Score is really such a pearl. Fantastic and surprisingly mellow soundscapes with a hint of almost organic roughness. I’m pretty certain it isn’t being sold anymore (I think it was only included in the special editions to begin with.) but I found a mirror, let’s hope it stays up!

A trip to London

Greetings everyone! As promised, here are my notes on the journey to London! Most of these were scribbled down on the plane home.

The culture
Under this section I’ll mention some of the sights and attractions visited and give my personal take on them. After writing all of them I notice a generally negative tone, but it isn’t really my intention. I liked most of what I saw… Maybe I just like to complain. (My friends will probably agree on that one. xD)

– The Phantom of The Opera

I didn’t really know what to expect as I walked into the theatre for this performance. I’ve seen my fair share of musicals, and sometimes I’ve been really blown away. I remember seeing a Swedish rendition of “The Producers” and really liking it. Sadly, I wasn’t as amazed about The Phantom Of The Opera. The music was sort of repetitive, we were treated to half a dozen renditions of the signature track and another half dozen of “Angel Of Music” with other songs in the intermissions between the two giants. The lyrics were sometimes pretty laughable (Not a compliment!) and any “funny lines” seemed more likely to be a mistake than an actual attempt at comedy by Mr. Webber. I can’t complain about the story though. It was interesting, beautiful and captivating. All and all, I was satisfied with the show.

– The Salvador Dali Exhibition

A famous portrait of the master.

I’ve seen a few paintings by this Spanish prodigy, but it was great to see some of his lesser famous works. Over 500 of his works are available for viewing, everything from giant paintings to quick sketches. All and all, a fantastic man, who had an extremely wacky imagination. (Compliment!)

– The Science Museum

The two great arts… or something.

Now this is my cup of tea. A great museum (which incredibly enough was free with the exclusion of a couple special exhibitions) and an IMAX theatre under the same roof. The 3D technology used wasn’t the red-blue-based Anaglyph type, but rather some sort of polarization-based technology (although still using glasses) which was better, but still not perfect. The high-point was definitely the Computer Science exhibition, which showed a lot of old-age computer memorabilia. (Although I’d love to have an ERNIE-I in the closet connected to a server for use as a dice over 3G!)

Who says you can’t find practical uses for old computer today?

– The Kensington Palace

That’s got to be a pain to wear! But talk about child-bearing hips.

A look at the clothing of the royal family throughout the ages. Not really my kind of thing, although with the extreme care, talent and creativiy that goes in to creating these fantastic garments is really something to admire.

– Madame Tussauds

Overheard in the waiting queue:
“- Who’s that?
– Oh, that’s Angelina Jolie and MacGyver.”

I was excited to visit Madame Tussauds because of the extreme care and talent that goes into making one of these dolls. After seeing a few, the rest of the museum wasn’t as spectacular, although the Chamber Of Horrors cheered me up a bit!

PS. The dolls were harder than I had imagined. DS.

Observations

Look at me, daddy!

I really must say that England as a country was quite fantastic. I noticed an incredible mix of nationalities and races. It really is a multi-cultural country. Women and men were dressed handsomely and seemed to be generally very patriotic of their country and the royal family. The drug culture seemed a bit more relaxed than in Sweden, with smoke shops selling “Smoke blends” and bongs in all colors, but it’s actually pretty much as restricted as in Sweden – and so the tolerability amongst the population must be higher. Onto something a bit different, the Brits really love their CCTV – it felt like you couldn’t walk much more than a a few dozen feets between the signs warning you that you are constantly being monitored. A quick look at Wikipedia shows that there is an estimated 4,200.000 cameras in use throughout the kingdom. Cameras were everywhere – I wouldn’t be surprised if I was registered on several hundred of them throughout my four-day visit.

Oh yes, and here’s a British Big Mac.

Verdict: Nice, reminds me of the Swedish version.

In pictures
Go ahead and look through the gallery below!

In other news…

His awesomeness is so thick, you can almost
cut through it with a butter knife.

These past few weeks I’ve been indulging myself in the post-apocalyptic 2003 CBS show Jericho. Portraying a small town at the heart of the United States in the aftermath of a series of nuclear explosions. The show was initially cancelled after its first season but resurrected after a petition for a seven-episode second minis-season, after which it was… yeah, you guessed it – cancelled again. A real shame according to me. To be completely fair, the show is very corny – sometimes it feels like you could guess large parts of the dialogue, but despite its flaws, it somehow managed to go beyond them and the show really works. In fact, it works really well, although it might just be my love for dystopian futures at play. Definitely a recommended watch!