We all need some inspiration sometimes, even those of us that want to become a source of inspiration. So today I wanted to throw together a quick list of some of my favorite design blogs. Anyone who is into design probably already knows most of these, but you never know!
Smashing Magazine
This is probably the best known design blog there is (although I think they call it a ‘online magazine’). They are known best for their use of lists in almost every article. Articles have names like: “100 ways to improve your designs,” “63+ Unbelieve jQuery techniques,” “72 Professional Fonts.” You get the idea… and for some reason names like these make you want to read more. I know everytime I see these lists I get a little excited.
Check out Smashing Magazine for your daily web fix.
CSS Tricks
This is a relativly new source for me, but I think its been around for awhile. Run by a portly man named Chris Coyier – this blog offers much more than information of CSS. I recently (finally) learned how to use sifr (font replacement) by following one of Chris’ great screencasts. He seems to update things fairly frequently, once every couple days. Actually today I just learned something incredibly useful from Chris – how to avoid IE’s image distorition when using HTML to scale down images. Apparently, all you need to do is insert this code into your stylesheet:
img { -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; }Thanks Chris – this is the kind of stuff you find regularly on his blog. Check it out and your stylesheets will thank you.
A List Apart
Yes yes yes – I almost forgot this corner stone. What would the web be without a list apart? Probably a horrible mess of tables and spacer gifs. This magazine is released in articles – once every second Tuesday. I find the articles are sometimes more academic than practical, but to be honest, that’s often what I find the most rewarding. It also doesn’t hurt when you’re trying to talk to clients and want to wow them with some overarching design philosophy.
Take a moment and check it out – once every second Tuesday.
Nettuts
In life I generally try to save the best for last, and this blog is no exception. Of all design blogs out there Nettuts is by far my favorite. They have an amazing layout and only the highest quality of articles get published. They draw people from all over the web design community and have really put together some great tutorials. I find they deal a lot with wordpress, jQuery, and PHP – some of my favorite web technologies. They pay handsomely for articles, so if you have some high quality material you can try and get them to publish your stuff.
Nettuts, where Jesus would go if he were into web design. (technicially called nettuts+, but whatever, I liked them better before they rebranded.)
A Final Word
I’m going to be relaunching my own web design/portfolio site at elementfortytwo.com – I’ll probably put up a post once it’s done and explain some of the techniques I’ve used to build everything.
Thanks for reading,
Emerson R. Lackey
