Funky Friday Collection – 24 April 2009

Another Friday, and here’s another selection of awesome resources I found around the internet in the past week.

Design Inspiration

30 Beautiful White Desktop Wallpaper – IzzatAzizDotCom

I keep a pretty minimal desktop – no icons, a nice image, a clean slate as much as possible. Many desktop wallpapers are way too busy though. Not here, this superb selection of the best white desktop wallpaper designs link functionality with inspirational styling.

Color Scheme Inspiration – Good Morning!

OK, I may be biased here. This is the competition results for developing a color palette on the ‘Good Morning!’ theme, which I won! Regardless of that, it’s also a great selection that demonstrations the vastly differing inspiration people can draw from a simple phrase or image.

Design Technique

How To Make A Planet Terror Style Poster – Outlaw Design Blog

You could probably turn yourself into a Photoshop expert merely by trawling the millions of tutorials on the web these days. So many of them are unclear though, or don’t provide amazing effects. This is a top notch lesson, well laid out and easy to follow, with a superb end product. I’ve already tried it out, it works great.

Web Page Size And Browser Download Performance – BombayCrow

Switching to the opposite of the graphically creative, this gets down to the technical side of web design. Excellent outline of the importance of optimizing your page loading even in this age of cheap broadband, and some simple techniques that help you to achieve fast loading sites.

Freelancing

Why I Love Working With Two – Veerle’s Blog

Freelancing can be a lonely business, and Veerle outlines some of the frustrations she faced when she was working solo, and how working with a partner can lift some of the weight and stress from the working day. A great personal story with useful advice and tangible benefits to any lone freelancer.

Social Media

How Twitter Broadens My Horizons – Tracey Grady

I use Twitter daily, and I really enjoy it. I talked a little last week about #followfriday, and how lists of “good follows” can be overwhelming. There’s a lot of blog posts like that – lists of ‘the best 50 people in design’ to follow or similar. Tracey’s post does it best though – by outlining not only Twitter usernames but *why* they are worth following, and what they bring to the conversation. Makes me far more enthusiastic to seek those recommendations out.

Opinion Pieces

Old Browsers: Do They Still Exist? – SNOOK.CA

Interesting piece this. Internet Explorer 6 isn’t the only obsolete browser out there, though it’s the only one that continues to get extensive (if grudging) support from web designers. There are many others though, and though the user numbers might be small, all those percentages of the user pie start to add up. Here’s some insight and explanation of the issue that will make you think.

The Future Of Open Source CMS – Deziner Folio

There are so many open source content management systems around now, and probably make up the majority of websites these days. Deziner Folio has canvassed 23 top designers and developers on their thoughts on the future of open source CMS, with some fascinating and generally positive results.

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 fast eddie 42.