position: absolute - Design resources and inspiration.

Hi everyone! I’m just going to throw a question at you and hope this can turn into a good discussion that everyone will benefit from. Of course, this isn’t entirely altruistic: I myself am looking for some suggestions that will help with designing a complex CMS.

How do you go about wireframing a design beforehand?

Which apps do you use? What methods do you apply? Pencil on paper? Prototyping in Fireworks/Illustrator? Old-school table-cell copy&pasting in Dreamweaver? Or do you prefer to do a quick sketch and then jump right into Photoshop? Do you create complex work flow charts and study use-cases? Share your best practices!

Any good links you may have on the topic are appreciated as well.

Just stumbled across this nifty free (and open source!) tool: The Pencil Project. Pencil lets you sketch out your applications quickly and export them as PNG images. It offers, among other things, the standard operating systems widgets (currently WinXP and GTK, collection expandable) and is built upon XUL and SVG. Pencil runs as a lightweight 400k Firefox 3 extension, but can also be run as a stand-alone application.

Graphic design has some amazing history to look back on. Eric Carl has scanned in a mid-70’s edition of the book World of Logotypes and put it in a Flickr photoset. Lots of beautiful logos, I really love the geometric precision in play, and all examples work perfectly with no color at all. These are really strong. Seeing this, I think we’re in kind of a sad state with all the companies running after the shiny web2.0 trend. But not all hope is lost, aclevercookie has a good collection of current logo redesigns, some of which are definitely good (and some bad). So, what do you think?

I just love this so much. It reminds me of this as well. (via)

Croatian creative agency Bruketa & Zinić have designed an annual report for food company Podravka that has to be baked in an oven before it can be read. dezeen.com has info on the smart piece of work, along with more pictures.

…is that, when not thought out perfectly, they are open to interpretation. In the case of safety signs, the outcome can be disastrous. safenow.org demonstrates this wonderfully in a hilarious parody of our fear-mongering friends at US Homeland Security. Remember: If you are sprayed with an unknown substance, stand and think about it instead of seeing a doctor.

Without content, there’s no form. And without form, there’s no content. A work of art is realized, when form and content are indistinguishable.

Very classy Paul Rand tribute video. Bonobo fans (like myself) might recognize the beginning music (Marra Bossa by Jazz Juice, which he remixed on an album).

We get better design when we understand our medium. Yet even at this late cultural hour, many people don’t understand web design. Among them can be found some of our most distinguished business and cultural leaders, including a few who possess a profound grasp of design—except as it relates to the web.

Jeffrey Zeldman writes a very insightful A List Apart article on the role of web design in the grand scheme of life, and the challenges and tasks we face. Oh, and write down this quote, because it will be around for a while:

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

(Thanks, Stylespion)

As part of his master’s degree, Thomas Eichinger is conducting an interesting little design quiz. You are presented with 20 designs created some time during the last century. Your task is to correctly guess from which decade each piece is. You only have 20 seconds per piece, so it’s fairly fast-paced.

I’m afraid I only got 7 right, but I did realize I want to study the 20s… the style is lovely! Take the test and post your results here if you like.

“In April 2007, A List Apart and An Event Apart conducted a survey of people who make websites. Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey’s 37 questions, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide.” Get the survey results here.