I generally don’t have any free time to sit down and play with new design and development trends, so one of my favorite ways of making myself stay current is to deconstruct others work and mod it for random purposes. I have some favorite places where I go and grab source code, host it locally, and then have fun.

So I thought I’d share a few of the places I like to grab the source from in order to learn new things and stay current with design changes (anyone else waiting for the FlatUI design trend to slow down?), new jQuery plugins, etc.

Codrops

The first place I always go when I get time to play around with code that isn’t mine is Codrops, especially anything added by Mary Lou. You can find anything from CSS3 form styling to animated menus a la the Google Nexus site. She just recently added a tutorial for an animated border menu that I’m looking forward to breaking the hell out of, as a matter of fact.

Tutorialzine

Tutorialzine is another great one, and covers new implementations of different jQuery plugins and examples of use. I’ve also seen articles on making simple registration for your site to footer menu options.

RedTeamDesign

RedTeamDesign also offers some great examples of modern design and development. Currently they have an article up about position:sticky about how FF nightly build is including support for it and a tutorial for a crazy drop down menu tutorial.

This should give you some option for a fast way to keep up on current implementation of new web standards and design options and help you get better at web design.