position: absolute - Design resources and inspiration.

Webdesigners Toolkit offers a selection of very useful Photoshop templates for your next website projects: editable browser templates of all major browsers, form elements, buttons and dummy copytext. There are also some book recommendations available. All browser templates include “safe area” and grid overlays to facilitate optimizing for specific screen resolutions. I use it all the time and recommend having a look.

Here’s one for our German readers. Sorry to the rest of our readers, I hope the site will have an english language version soon. I will quote right off their “about” page:

Als Designer erreicht man früher oder später den Punkt, an dem man seine Entwürfe einem Publikum präsentieren muss: seinem Vorgesetzten, einem Kunden, in einer Pitchsituation. Dabei ist es entscheidend, die Grundlagen des entstandenen Designs genauso wie seine Details herleiten zu können, erklären und verargumentieren zu können.

Diese Seite soll dazu als Inspirationsgrundlage dienen, indem sie designrelevante Zitate, Versatzstücke und Satzbausteine zeigt, die sich als Grundlage für eigene Präsentationen eignen könnten.

Check it out.

I always thought that due to their excellent scalability, vectors were the way to go in icon design. Josh Williams from Firewheel Design explains why that isn’t necessarily so. Quick read, good insight.

Here’s a hilarious ad for Firefox. It’s quite silly but it gets down to the point. :) For more, have a look at Firefox Flicks, a new project challenging Firefox fans to create 30-second clips to help spread the word.

stepinsidedesign.com has an article up on this year’s design trends. “It’s true that many trends are continuing along past vectors, but they’re being deployed a lot more creatively—and more beautifully—this year. In fact, in the dozen or so years I’ve reviewed competitions (as a judge or behind the scenes), this is the loveliest body of winning work I’ve ever seen. I believe that in itself is a trend.”
It sounds like we’re in for an exciting year.

Apparently, this one has been around for a few years. I just discovered it recently and thought I’d share for those who haven’t seen it either. Accompanying his first children’s book, Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich created the promotional website Bembo’s Zoo, featuring unexpected transformations of letters into animals. The trick is, only letters in the animal’s name were used. Delighting for children and typography lovers alike.

“what is the difference between analogue and digital, physical and virtual? what connects and bridges these apparently different worlds?”
dialog05 sets out to find the answers, and delivers fantastic results with universal connections. Good stuff, have a look.