4th November, 2007
My Top 5 Designing Resources
Sunday, 1:09 pm in Geeking
Okay, so here’s my make-up post from yesterday – I totall did intend to post it yesterday, incidentally, but didn’t get around to— anyway. So, in the vein of the Top 5 Firefox Extensions post the other day I bring you: My Top 5 Designing Resources.
In no particular order:
- Japanese Traditional Colours
You really have to admire any culture that has aesthetics organised enough to be able to produce an official cultural colour palette. And if there’s one thing the Japanese do really, really well it’s aesthetics. This site is invaluable for picking a colour scheme for your site which, let’s face it, is a fucking thankless task and far too easy to get horribly wrong. - Font Frequency Guide
Apparently at some point someone went out and did a survey of the fonts people had installed on their computers. It ws then aggregated into this list, sorted by font-family and OS, and I’m not sure exactly how old the data is (scratch that; it’s from early October), but nevertheless it’s a useful guide. Not to mention a handy reminder that – no matter how cool it looks – you really shouldn’t try rending your headings in Zapfino. - Ultimate Web 2.0 Layer Styles
Having trouble replicating all those hyper-trendy ‘Web 2.0’ gradients? Not sure how other people manage to do them? Well, the trick is they don’t; they’re all using the PhotoShop presets off this site as well. - The Ajax Stripe Generator
Ditto with those stripes everyone uses nowadays. I hope you didn’t think they were rendering them all by hand… - Kaliber10000's Pixel Pattern Collection
You just haven’t really made it until you’ve got yourself a trendy tiling baroque pixel background, you know. People don’t draw those themselves either, incidentally; most of them you can dig up here.
So there you go; the secret to trendy layouts in five easy steps…
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Comments
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Oooh neat new layout btw! I envy your ability to draw! *can’t draw*
Wow, Japan’s official colour pallet is freaking awesome. So is that patterns collection, and I thought everyone got their patterns from squidfingers.com
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Heh; well, most of the squidfingers patterns are up at k10k, but there are a lot of others, too.
The only PITA thing about it is that you can’t really search or anything; you just kinda have to keep flipping through until you find something suitable.
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I thought the font list seemed too dated, but I really appreciate the layer styles and the Japanese traditional colors. I can’t wait to make use of this stuff in a future layout.
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I actually went back and re-scanned over the page and it seems to claim that its list is from early October this year, so that’s pretty good; I think it’s just the site that looks horribly outdated, not the data themselves.
I was also interested to note that apparently the most common sans-serif font installed on *NIX machines is a Century Gothic variant!