css-galleries

Friday Focus 12/17/10: Curious Creatures

December 17, 2010 By Sophia Lucero

This week on Friday Focus: interesting monsters that are featured as mascots of these designs.

Designs of the Week

Love the big header that changes for every page; the illustrations are not cliche and the wrestling concept is well thought out.

Looks like cute little monsters are her specialty, but I have to wonder why there’s no big brand beside the pink blob. Feels like that’s the only thing missing on this page.

The implementation of the scribbly look all over is just excellent. There’s also a bit of subtle line direction in the background. The strength of the design also lies in its conciseness.

Pretty polished website, but I feel like the creatures were just left in one place and then forgotten.

Mind-blowing on imagery alone, but look closer and see how every interface is custom. From the tongue menu to the slot machine donation counter to the handwritten body font. Truly immersive.

Nice and clean, but I feel like the links on the side could be placed right after the welcome blurb, which has an awful lot of whitespace below it.

Very interesting arrangement and controls for the portfolio section. There are arrows in almost each section to encourage you to keep scrolling down. Again, the creatures seem completely forgotten after the first screenful.

Social Media Weekly

Conferences – On Speaking
“The people that get up to speak in front of an audience are no different than the people sitting in the audience. The only difference is that they’ve said yes.”

Design – The Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page
“Ten key landing page features that draw in users”

Design – Where to Find Fonts that Allow @font-face Embedding
” Just because the font vendor gave you the font for free doesn’t mean you can redistribute it. Same thing with the fonts that came with your computer. Again, you have to check the license to be sure.”

HTML – HTML Lint
“HTML Lint is a tool that makes sure your code looks good. While XHTML was very strict with syntax HTML 5 is more lenient like previous versions of HTML, which means keeping consistent code styles will become more difficult. Validating is not good enough anymore.”

CSS – CSS Without HTML
“I’d call this a bonafide CSS trick!”

JavaScript – Front-end developer essentials – 5 tips for efficient jQuery
“Over the last few months I’d like to think my skills in jQuery have got a lot better, I’ve been using it everyday and for more than just showing and hiding areas of a page. Along the way I’ve read about a few ways in which you can make your code a bit more efficient.”

Friday Focus #3

October 21, 2006 By Devlounge

A day late and a buck short, mostly because we spent yesterday tweaking out the extras page and working on some other site related issues. Sorry for the minor delay.

Sites of the Week

Sites that caught my eye in css galleries over the past week, now with brief overviews of why I like them. Clicking the screenshots will take you to the entire sites.

Without a new web based application crossing our radar again this week, we decided Launchfeed can serve as both a featured design for the past week, and an application. Launchfeed is a site designed for announcing new site or product launches in various forms – beta, alpha, final, etc. The design is simple and clean, and clicking on launch titles brings you to a screenshot and review / comment area.

While most of the site is not in English, you do get a calming feeling by the use of a three column layout and pastel colors. Not to mention some of the content is pretty hot.

Semtex Mag is a online independent music magazine that news, reviews, and interviews. I liked the design because of it’s simple layout and clear purpose. Reminds me of what my original intentions were for soundchronicle before I sold it off last summer.

Digg Weekly

My personal favorites of the weeks most dugg articles in both design and programming.

Design – Build a Simple Liquid Layout
Article that goes into detail about creating the html and css required for a pure liquid, cross browser layout “done right”.

Programming – My Rails Toolbox
An article outlining some of the best in Ruby tools, such as servers, deployment, plugins, libraries, and more.

Weekly Opinion

This weeks weekly opinion has been stirred up by a conversation followup to one of my designs posted at Mintpages. When designing, do you try to perfect mocks to the absolute exact as they will appear following completion, or do you do most of the tweaking later on in the process, after the client has approved the mock?

Everyone is different, but I myself spend way less time on mockups then I used to. Before, mockups had to be perfect, because that was the site, simply cut up and turned into table-filled html. With the use of css, you can accomplish many tweaks later on in the process. Because of this, I myself tend to spend less time concerned over little discrepancies which can be fixed at a later time in development. Still, there are many who get their mocks to absolute perfection. Which one are you? Please share.

Css Gallery Sillyness

August 11, 2006 By Devlounge

I’m thinking about opening my own css gallery in the coming weeks – this one will be brand new, with some features you won’t see anywhere else: thumbnails, voting, and commenting – oh my! I even plan on showcasing the same sites that every other css gallery is showing, maybe even at the same time!

A word to the wise, css galleries are over.

The (Lack of) Need for Galleries

Each day, new CSS Galleries pop up all over the net. They get submitted to digg, score a fair to high amount of diggs, and instantly have more feedreaders than Devlounge. How is this possible? CSS Galleries appeal to many because it’s free site promotion. To the webmaster, it’s an opportunity to get thousands upon thousands of site owners to submit their sites, and stack up traffic in a very short period of time, without much effort.

But with such a surge in the creation of css galleries, is there a need for any more? Certainly, people think so, because they continue to pop up all over the place, with promises of being so much different than all the others.

Centralizing Submissions

The need for CSS Galleries also was derailed with the launch of none other than Css-galleries.com, a site using rss to showcase sites featured at 20 popular galleries. 20 galleries all on one site! Why subscribe to any other one again? (I can only imagine the feedreaders on CG, since I see individual css gallery sites with hundreds.) CG was a killer idea, and an absolute must alternative to visiting every single site to check if your site was showcased or not.

CSS Galleries

Standing Out in an Overcrowded Field

Still convinced that you can start a css gallery than will blow people away? It is extremely hard, but consider a few of these keys if you believe your gallery will lead you to greatness.

Be original! When 20+ other galleries are all showcasing the same design within a few days of each other, that’s nothing but major overkill. Keep your visitors wanting to come back by featuring sites no one else has.
Narrow down your selections to one topic. I came across a css gallery a few weeks back that showcased only horizontal scrolling sites. I thought that was a great idea, because it wouldn’t lead to the same old repetitive showcased designs found on every other site. Create your own random niche, and find sites that fit into it. Uniqueness matters people.
More Features – Commenting and voting is boring, because every gallery offers it now, and still, not many people take advantage of it. Come up with something new, like daily head to head battles between the days showcased sites, where the highest voted site wins S.O.T.D or something like that.
Update frequently … or, infrequently. Having fresh content is important, but at the same time, sometimes leaving a while before adding new submissions keeps people coming back. Look at Stylegala. Even with a new owner, the frequency of accepted submissions remains very low, but yet, I doubt the traffic has dropped much. Of course, SG has other features to get people returning, but it’s main purpose – being a design gallery – has really taken the backseat.

My Favorites

Some of my favorite galleries are Tom.ma, which is a “screenblog”, which serves its purpose. Simple, effective, and to the point. No extra goodness, just thumbnails and larger image screenshots.

Others include cssremix, and of course, cssgalleries to put them all together.

CSS Remix