HYPERlinks: January 4, 2012
Happy New Year to you! We are excited about getting back to work in 2012 (not to say that we didn’t all enjoy 2 3-day weekends in a row…) and one of the most fun things we get to do each week is share some of our favorite industry links with you.
This week Jenni and Jason share links to websites and blog posts that might inspire some reflection on the past year – both on your own design work and the work of others. If you are feeling like Santa left your wallet nice and full, check out the premuim WordPress tools and icons sets recommended by Tim and Rachel.
Jason Amor / Facebook Designer & Developer
The Great Discontent
Inspiring interviews of artists, designers, musicians, and other creative types — all presented on a beautiful responsively-designed website.
Simple Desktops
De-clutter your workspace by applying a simple, distraction-free desktop background.
FontShop: Best Typefaces of 2011
http://www.fontshop.com/blog/newsletters/dec2011c/
Take a look back at the best typefaces of 2011.
Rachel Tietjen / WordPress Programmer
2 Essential Premium WordPress tools
Use that Holiday money from Grandpa Bob to buy yourself one of the best WordPress frameworks out there. Throw in a much-needed security precausion – reliable backups of your site.
www.studiopress.com/themes/genesis
Genesis is a great premium wordpress framework (see my blog post) that allows for quick, seo optimized and highly functional theme development.
http://pluginbuddy.com/purchase/backupbuddy/
Backup buddy is the complete solution to your WordPress backup process. This premium plugin allows for regular scheduled backups of your entire site to your own server or a cloud service as well as offering tools for restoring and migrating your WP site.
Tim Ware / SEO, Web Design & Development
Website Backgrounds – Examples & Best Practices
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/31/backgrounds-in-web-design-examples-and-best-practices-2/
This Smashing Magazine article is an excellent overview of the use of backgrounds in Web designs, with examples and best practices.
Quality Icons for Print & Web – Overview by Think Vitamin
http://thinkvitamin.com/design/tips-for-finding-the-perfect-icon-set/
When you’re designing a website, there’s often the need for icons. There are many icon sets out there that are free and some that can be up to around $300. The more you pay, the more you get. And, of course, the more you pay, the less likely that a gazillion other sites on the Web will have the same icons!
The more expensive icon sets have more icons and they’re in vector format which allows you to scale them to any size, making them perfect for Web or print.
This Think Vitamin article is an excellent overview, with links to sets ranging from free to $279.
Jenni Schwartz / Designer
We’ve Come A Long Way, Baby
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/what-i-learned-about-the-web-in-2011/
Some of the industry’s most insightful people sharing what they learned about the web in 2011.
Hold On While I Google That For You
Being in the web industry comes with some unforeseen responsibilities. If you’re anything like me, your friends come to you with questions that they can easily Google themselves. I like to use “Let Me Google That For You” to kindly (or not) help them get a clue.
What Was I Thinking?
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
Need a reminder of how much you’ve grown as a web designer/developer? Wayback Machine is a digital time capsule that enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time. Go ahead and check out what your website looked like in the beginning of the millennium. You are sure to have a giggle.
Please, share your favorite links of the New Year with us!
