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Friday Focus: One Year in Review

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52 Weeks ago, the first edition of Friday Focus was born. On October 6th, 2006, the first ever edition of Friday focus was born. The very first edition featured three sites: brdcast, hydrastudio, and authenticjobs. Since then, Friday Focus has come along way. Featuring just about 156 “Sites of the Week”, 100 featured Digg posts, and a lot of other random fun, it has been an exciting process to see Friday Focus evolve.

While we did not always get the kind of reader response we would have really liked to get each and every Friday, I’m sure they are plenty of you who quietly and possibly secretly made Friday Focus one of your favorite things over the past 52 weeks. I am happy to say that we lived up to the very first comment on the first edition of Friday Focus, which stated “Hope you keep posting something like this every week. I just can’t keep track of digg. There’s just too much news and I miss loads of good articles. Looking forward to next week to see what I’ve missed 🙂” I’m proud that each and every week I was able to provide at least a few people with a decent overview of some fresh sites and even fresher content for them to check out before the weekend got started. So, without any more further delays, here is edition 52.

The Year in Review: Some favorite weeks you may have missed

Here is a highlight of some of the Focuses’ from the past year. I’m pulling one for every 10 weeks, so six all together. Go back and enjoy!

Week 2 – Friday Focus #2
I highlighted Apples to Oranges, C-Ville, and 5thirtyone, which at the time, happened to be pink for October.

Week 13 – Friday Focus #13
I highlighted Svenigson, Trig, and OPUS Underground. (This seems like I just did this recently)

Week 25 – Friday Focus #25
A Tennessee tourist site, Scrapblog, and a personal portfolio all wound up on the sites of the week during the 25th week of the focus.

Week 37 – Friday Focus #37
A bunch more cool sites in the 37th week of the focus, which went live on July 20th.

Week 46 – Friday Focus #46
Now these are fresh in the head. Just a few weeks back, t-shirts, a church, and even another project named Mint.

Week 50 – Friday Focus #50
The Big 5-0, making the list for obvious milestone reasons.

Sites of the Week

Feel the honor to be named a site of the week on the one year Friday Focus Anniversary. Unfortunately, only two this week because there wasn’t a whole lot of fresh site designs that I spotted in css gallery sites around the web. But, I guess that makes these two sites even more special.

Kicking things off is Team Green. Pretty cool site, very outdoorish (even though that is not a word).

Team Green

Wood never dies, and neither does good work. Happilycreate is an example of that. A wooded background portfolio mixed with a nice collection of work.

Happilycreate

Iconsushi

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Just a quick side note for everyone on this wonderful weekend. You may remember Iconsushi, a site I briefly talked about in Friday Focus two weeks ago. It’s my friend Prash’s (who helped create Devlounge with me) newest creation. It is now officially open for business, with two icon sets available for purchase. He’s hooking up Devlounge readers with a 40% discount by using the code DEVL07X when you order. Check them out!

Friday Focus #51

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We are now just one week out from the first anniversary of Friday Focus. It’s kind of weird to be sitting here thinking how quickly a year has really gone by…but I’ll get into all this reflection stuff next week. Enjoy the upcoming weekend everyone. Next weekend is November.

Sites of the Week

DreamsDrive is the personal portfolio of Roy Ng. Small and compact is the best way to describe this baby. It could definitely qualify as one of the smallest portfolios as ever seen. What do you think?

DreamsDrive

Second this week is FutureFabric. Cool name, even cooler work. FutureFabric is the portfolio of Guy Moorhouse, who also works at Airside.

Future Fabric

Wrapping up this week is the portfolio of Marius Roosendaal. This site makes the list because of its two themed designs. Based on what time of day it is, it will either show a day (light colored) or night (dark colored) version of the site. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Marius Roosendall

Hot Spot: Jobberbase

Check out this cool piece of script I came across this week. Jobberbase is an open source Job board application that will give you the ability to run your own job board. I know there are already plenty of paid job boards out there, so why would I be encouraging you to start your own? Well, Jobberbase seems like a great solution for anyone who may be looking to add a job board to their own site specifically for their visitors and a specific category. If anyone has used or starts using this, let me know how it is.

Jobberbase

Digg Weekly

Design – 99 Useful Resources for Graphic Designers
From the Digg description: I have used every one of these resources as a graphic designer and website developer and have hand picked all of these resources based on their usefulness and overall quality.

Programming – Protecting Your PHP/MySQL Applications from SQL Injection
From the Digg description: SQL injection is a serious concern for webmasters, as an experienced attacker can use this hacking technique to gain access to sensitive data and/or potentially cripple your database. Are you safe?

21 Album Art Covers for Inspiration

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Design comes in many forms. Take album artwork, for example. Not only is it the packaging trying to sell the product, but many times, it is also being used to represent the style of the artist’s music on that album. Sometimes, album art can be so bad that people won’t purchase an actual physical copy of the album just because the packaging is horrible. Other times, people will already have every song on their computers, but yet they feel the need to go out and purchase a physical copy of the album and add it to their collection because it looks so good. I asked some members of Absolutepunk to list some of their favorite album artwork, and I’m now here to show off some true works of art to you.

21 Album Art Covers

The List

Below is a list of 21 (yes, odd number I know, but whatever) really cool album covers. Most were determined by the Absolutepunk members who participated in my thread (much thanks to them!), and some of the others were selected by myself. The list could have been a lot bigger (of course) but each of these covers has their own style, so I think it’s enough – at least for now.

Menomena – Friend & Foe
Album Art 1

Say Anything – In Defense of the Genre
Album Art 2

Jimmy Eat World – Futures
Album Art 3

Punk Goes Acoustic 2
Album Art 4

Mae – The Everglow
Album Art 5

Underoath – Define the Great Line
Album Art 6

Brand New – Deja Entendu
Album Art 7

Mae – Destination: Beautiful
Album Art 8 new

The Beatles – St. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club
Album Art 9

Dashboard Confessional – The Shade of Poison Trees
Album Art 10

O.A.R. – In Between Now and Then
Album Art 11

Sugarcult – Lights Out
Album Art 12

Finch – Say Hello to Sunshine
Album Art 13

Switchfoot – Nothing is Sound
Album Art 14

mewithoutYou – Brother, Sister
Album Art 15

Armor for Sleep – What To Do When You Are Dead
Album Art 16

Circa Survive – On Letting Go
Album Art 17

The Early November – The Room’s Too Cold
Album Art 18

Our Lady Peace – Spiritual Machines
Album Art 19

Sum 41 – Chuck
Album Art 20

Yellowcard – Paper Walls
Album Art 21

I Want More!

While putting together this quick list, I stumbled upon a really cool site dedicated to album artwork and nothing else. Check out Sleevage if you are looking for more album art inspiration. Or, if you are looking to see what covers absolutely suck, you may want to check out the Museum of bad album covers.

More Cover Art Information

There is also a great article on AOL Music about the supposed “fading out” of album artwork because of the increased amounts of music that is downloaded. The article, titled “Picture Worth a Thousand Songs?“, shows that designers are still fairing just fine, with physical copies of the album still playing a major role in the music, and sometimes even the success of the album.

Friday Focus #50

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Time to celebrate the big 5-0! I guess that’s why today’s focus is rather late compared to the last few weeks (we were out celebrating all night). But anyways, here we go with edition fifty.

Sites of the Week

Kicking things off this wonderful 50th edition of the focus is Sikker, the Portfolio of Nicolás Calabrese. It is nice to see a portfolio displayed in a different way, and the dimming / highlighting of work really works well here on this simple, dark portfolio.

Sikker

Next up is IconSushi. IconSushi is new icon marketplace started by my buddy Prash (co-conspirator of Devlounge and owner of Mintpages), which he has been working on over the past few months. I had a chance a while back to check out the first icons from the first set, and they are looking very nice. The site is now up, but the service has not yet fully launched, but it will soon. Nothing like a little pre-launch hype.

Iconsushi

And wrapping things up this week is Newsweek. The site was recently redesigned and features a very nice clean feeling to it. A bold reader header gives way to the simplistic, organized fashion of the rest of the layout – but it is nice.

Newsweek

Digg Weekly

Design – Flash-Based Galleries for Your Images
More list madness from our buddies at Smashing Magazine (I have another list in store sometime this weekend that they have yet to do). A large list of flash-based galleries you can use for your portfolios or simply to show off your images.

Programming – Preventing Spam without captcha
From Digg Description: “I hate CAPTCHAs because it discourages lots of users(specially in impulsive mood) if they make a single mistake on first try. Here is how I tackle SPAM attacks on the comment form of my blog without using a CAPTCHA. You can use this technique for any kind of form on your website.”

Still on the market..

The hunt for a suitable new owner continues. It has a been a rough couple of weeks, with myself struggling to find the time to do anything but school work. I’m sure you are all tired of hearing that, and believe me, I’m tired of saying it. But, as the owner of the site, I feel it is important to have a personal connection with you [the readers], and I’d rather share news like this with you then keep you in the dark. Today I made a post on Mashable about the site situation. So if you see this, please don’t get all too worried.

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