Damn, Friday Focus is truly getting old quickly. Here we are at issue 39, just one week out of turning the big 4-0, and getting even closer to week 52, which will official mark the first full complete year of Friday Focuses. Whether you are new to our weekly run down or you’ve been reading it all along, one things for sure – it’s possibly the best way to kick off your weekend (ok, maybe I’m just a little biased).
Sites Site of the Week
Usually, this would be where we run down my favorite three designs that I ran into during the week or spotted at various CSS Galleries. This week was rather slow, with my two favorite resources to pull from – CSSMania and CSSRemix – not featuring too many updates. So, I decided to give a full open review of just one site, and quite possibly one of my favorite designs I’ve seen in a very, very long time.
If you guessed Web Designer Wall, you are correct.
It is not often I would be pointing out “competition” like this, particularly by dedicating a whole portion of Friday Focus to one site, but when I run into a design like this, I feel it deserves it not matter how much “competition” it may be.
Web Designer Wall is the newest project of N.Design Studio’s Nick La. I’ve always liked the N.Design designs, but when I saw WDW earlier this week, I was simply blown away. Many of you who frequent Friday Focus knows that a good illustration in a header will do you pretty good if you want to make it onto a Friday Focus. But WDW? The whole site is one beautiful illustration.
Why do I love this design? The illustration is extremely amazing, and I think goes perfectly with the paper / note look of the content. I know some people had issues with the illustration saying it was too overpowering and took the focus off of the content, but I think that is entirely untrue. I would love to have a design that looked like that for any type of project. If you haven’t checked out this site yet, you owe it to yourself, even if it just to see the killer background illustration.
Design Float / Digg Weekly
This week marks the first week that we will no longer be using Digg to pull my favorite stories out of the “most dugg” items in design and programming over the past seven days. When I went to take a look and saw two pictures of nothing more than places with long ass names, I decided digg is completely useless. If two images can get the most diggs over the course of seven days out of the entire design category, then I don’t want to be picking from crap people digg just for the hell of it. This section will not come from Design Float, a digg clone for just design related items. Programming posts, for the time being, will still come from Digg.
Design – 33 Artistic Sites
Coincidentally from WDW, this is another list, but unlike many of the others that usually make the normal rounds here and on digg, most of these sites haven’t appeared and everyone and their brothers lists. So, most of these are pretty fresh. Give them a look.
Programming – 496+ Ajax / JS / DHTML demos and downloads
Huge list you have to see to believe.
Forums Reopened, Refreshed, and Ready for Action
As I mentioned a bit earlier in the week, the forums have now reopened running Vanilla (which will remain the script used for the forums from here on out at least). With everything back up and running, we hope to get participation in the forums swirling again. If you head over there now, you can catch some sneak peaks at what may or may not be coming in the next few days / weeks, and of course, you can show off your latest work and it maybe, just maybe may end up here in the weeks to come. Go register now!
