Funky Friday Collection – 10 April 2009

Here’s this week’s selection of great links I’ve come across in the past seven days. I seem to have gone with a CSS focused theme this week when it comes to technique and resources.

Design Inspiration

22 Radiant Red Websites – inspiredology

I’ve always found red to be one of the most difficult hues to use effectively in web design. This selection demonstrates some great sites which use a predominantly red palette to great effect.

Fatbrass – Ossi Gustaffson

This is a typeface project on Behance. Most particularly though I love the thirties style that’s demonstrated in the airship photo in the project portfolio. Has a real punch, and I love how the font works in 3D, smoothly blended with the overall image.

50 Creative Business Cards of 50 Graphic Designers – The Design Cubicle

Often the very first impression that any potential client is going to get of your business, a strong business card is a must. Here’s a selection of business cards that really showcase the talents of the graphic designers who hand them out.

Miscelaneos – Ricardo Peña

Great collection of collage style images incorporating typography, vectors, sketching, imagery and photographs. Very eclectic and yet also pulls together into a comprehensive whole.

Design Technique

don’t use @import – High Performance Website

Many designers use the @import command in their CSS files to combine all their styles. This analysis demonstrates the performance hit that this can cause, and explains why using LINK in your HTML file is a better option.

Organize Your Stylesheet Madness – Neal Grosskopf.com

Another trap that most designers fall into is bloated or confusing CSS files. I know that there’s many times I’ve had to go back through CSS I’ve written and wondered how I managed to end up with such complicated code. Here’s some excellent advice on streamlining CSS files to save size and make them easier and more understandable to work with.

The Art Of CSS Positioning – TutShelf

I’ve talked about the advantages of absolute positioning in CSS before. A solid understanding of all the positioning options in CSS is essential to give you the most flexibility in layout and design, and to avoid as much as possible the errors that can come about with excessive use of the float property. This is the best primer on positioning that I’ve seen.

Design Resources

IE6 CSS Fixer – onderhond.com

This is a clever little tool. Any web designer hates having to go through their code and work out ways to fix the multiple layout difficulties and errors that Internet Explorer 6 causes. This tool automates some of that process, quickly identifying some of the most common issues in the code and giving you a cut and paste version that should solve those issues. It’s in an early beta but well worth checking out.

Freelancing

15 Steps To A More Productive Work Day – Vandelay Design

It can be tough to be productive as a freelancer, particularly if you’re working from home. There’s distractions and the need for self motivation. Vandelay Design lays out some best practices for making sure you’re at your most productive all through the day.

In addition to all the web pages linked to here, I’m choosing one of my favourite Flickr images from the past week available under Creative Commons. This week’s original image is by Flickr user Tomás Rotger.