Five Awesome Design-Related Bookmarks
User experience is one of the hottest hot buttons in the web design and inbound marketing industries. Designers love it, developers hate it, the actual audience… well, it’s hit-and-miss. Sometimes the designers nail it, and other times they create something that looks like the Frankenstein monster…
I’m no great designer. I wouldn’t even classify myself as a designer. But I love examples of great design, and these handful of bookmarks (that range from examples to inspiration to useful tools) are some of my favorite places to hang out and (hopefully) osmose some design talent.
#1 Dribbble
If you like design, you’ll love this website. I seriously lose hours just browsing the fantastic work these designers are cranking out. If you’re a designer yourself, this is a great place to showcase your work and build a peer-reviewed portfolio.
#2 Pearsonified’s Golden Ratio Typography Calculator
I can’t really describe how this site works, but it’s incredible. It basically tells you the perfect font size, spacing, line height and so on, based on your content container’s width, font size, or both. Mmm… gorgeous.
#3 Design-Seeds
If you’ve been on Pinterest for more than a couple of minutes, you’ve seen one of these design swatches pinned somewhere. I enjoy this site, mostly because it’s a great way to get an at-a-glance look at a potential color scheme. Actually, I used it to vet color schemes for my logo redesign.
Browse around this site and get inspired. You might find your next favorite color scheme.
#4 CSS Button Generator
This site is great for beginners to CSS. You can put in a few specifications for a custom CSS button and hit generate to get the code. It’s easy to mess around with the sliders and see the changes to the button in real time. Quick, easy way to pick up some basic CSS styling methods.
#5 Webpages That Suck
This is like the Darwin Awards of bad design. Websites so awful you can’t help but facepalm.
Get it? Darwin Awards? Hah!
Ok, so I go here more to laugh (and weep bitterly) than anything, but I’ll occasionally pick up a few bits of useful info when the main man Vincent Flanders points out some atrocious design elements that I originally thought were kind of cool (like the Xerox website… at first I thought it was neat…). Go there, learn, and don’t screw up bad enough to show up on this site.