Devlounge

Design, Develop, and Grow

Friday Focus #32

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It’s incredibly hot where I am as we enter into the last weekend of May, a three day weekend for many of us. As May draws to an end we get closer to the new Devlounge design and a surge of new content. I want to personally thank Ronald, as his WordPress plugin series (which I promise will be getting it’s own “table of contents” page this weekend) has restored Devlounge visitors to what they were a few weeks back before we began the decline. If you’ve been following the series (which he has left a note about at the end of this week’s focus), please leave your comments in the series finale on how helpful the series was to you. We have had a lot of trackbacks, but little comment feedback on the series itself. It’s always nice to know our readers appreciate the effort of hard working writers.

Let’s kick this weeks focus off. Enjoy the weekend everyone.

Sites of the Week

Up first this week is StayDecent, the personal portfolio of Adrian Unger. For this one, I love how the display of work is put together. There is also Ajax used here and there, and lots and lots of big, bold fonts.

Stay Decent

Next up is another portfolio, this one for Jason Julien. The portfolio is neat and clean, and there’s is a very nice collection of work that goes along with it. Worth a look.

Jason Julien

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Favorites from the past 7 days

Design: 60 Elegant and Visually Appealing Designs
From the list-creating-masters of Smashing Magazine comes an entirely new list, this time with 60 “visually appealing and elegant designs”.

Programming: The top 10 dead (or dying) Computer Skills
While not directly related to design, most of us understand computers a bit more than our average friends, so I thought it might be interesting to know what is and isn’t needed anymore.

Up and Coming

Software – 10 Open Source Apps You Can’t Live Without
A nice collection of open source apps including the usual suspects Firefox and Open Office.

Design – 20 Killer Resources Every Good Web Designer Should See : May
Within the post are twenty resources from icons, to CSS, to Web 2.0 layer styles.

Design Dilemma

What would be your approach for finding a color scheme if you are color challenged?

WordPress Plugin Spotlight

The Devlounge Plugin Series is drawing to a close with the last post scheduled to be published Sunday. It has been quite a journey and a few people have e-mailed in saying that the series has been helpful. If you have yet to check out the series and are a WordPress user, please start with the introduction.

Friday Focus #31

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Here we are with only a few more weeks left in May, and we get closer and closer to the brand spanking new Devlounge design and a ton of new features. Friday Focuses will play a much bigger impact in the next version of Devlounge (slated for early – mid June), so you can continue to expect even bigger things in the weeks to come for FF. Let’s get started, and enjoy the weekend everyone!

Sites of the Week

Starting off this week is 18Seconds from Yahoo. The purpose – to get people to buy new environmentally friendly CFL light bulbs and help the world wide global warming issue while doing it. Check and see how helpful your state has been in conserving electricity and helping the environment.

18Seconds

Next up is The Big Noob. After being dormant for a very very long time, our buddy Ryan Sims and crew have relaunched their blog called The Big Noob. Now that they are back, I’m sure you can expect a lot of (great) fresh stuff.

The Big Noob

And rounding out this week is Design By Grid, another niche design gallery from Every5Weeks creator, along with design help from Climax Designs.

Design by Grid

Digg Weekly

The best of the last 7 days in design and programming

Design – Rediscovering the button element
Button styling constantly goes forgotten in the standards-driven world we live in today. Don’t let your poor buttons take on their own styles based on browsers and operating systems – style them today.

Programming – 14 Rules for fast Web Pages
A lead-in page for a very long Powerpoint presentation featuring 14 rules for optimizing your web pages. Powerpoint was created by Steve Souders of Yahoo’s “Exceptional Performance Team”.

Two Hundred Thousand

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Earlier today we successfully passed the 200,000 unique visitor mark. Just a quick thank you to all our readers and contributors for helping make this possible. In other news, progress is quickly being made on the next Devlounge. I’m about 80% done with the new homepage, and once the homepage is completed, other pages should be completed fairly quickly. As an additional note, DL is now running out WordPress 2.2 – which once again completed with a flawless upgrade process. Until next time, have a great day!

Note: I’ve emailed a few people regarding possible illustration contributions for the next DL design. If you have an extensive illustration portfolio and would consider contributing, please feel free to drop me a line.

Friday Focus #30

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Number thirty! Enjoy the weekend everyone.

Sites of the Week

Starting this week off is Unfortunate. This site makes the list because I really like the idea, and I think it’s pretty fun. The site itself isn’t bad either, but I think it’s the originality of the project that gets more vote a bit more.

Unfortunate

Next up is a site for Syntax clothing. If you’ve followed Friday Focus for weeks and weeks on end, you know what I’m a sucker for online store fronts, and Syntax is no different. With a site designed to look likes its inside of a bag, Syntax really looks great.

Syntax Clothing

And rounding out this weeks picks is a personal portfolio, with some really cool work. Owlscout is a dark brown design, but I really like a lot of the graphics and illustration found in the portfolio. Give it a look if you get the chance.

Owlscout

Digg Weekly

Favorites from the past 7 days

Design – How to make sexy buttons using css
This tutorial was simple and the results were pretty nice. If you want clean looking buttons, considering trying this css technique.

Programming – Top 5 Javascript Frameworks
The top five javascript frameworks (according to this author), with a brief summary of each ones features.

Up and Coming

Design – How do you write a graphic design brief?
A design brief ensures that you know exactly what you want to achieve from your project and allows a point of reference for designers to focus on.

Programming – The JavaScript Programming Language
Want to learn JavaScript? Here’s five videos to help you out.

Design Dilemma

How do you convince a micro-managing style-challenged client that having a plethora of fonts on business cards, posters, or websites is not only third grade, but that it looks absolutely dreadful?

Have your own dilemma? Send Ronald yours and we’ll feature it in the next focus (with a credit to your site).

WordPress Plugin Spotlight

I didn’t find any plugins this week to spotlight, but there is some cool WordPress news. From Avinash I learned that WordPress 2.2 RC1 has been released. I’ve had the opportunity to tinker with it (to test plugin compatibility) and haven’t found any problems so far. The changes are mostly under the hood. One of the features I really like is a plugin sandbox that makes sure a plugin has no errors before loading it or activating it.

WordPress Plugin Series

I have started a plugin series that is sure to benefit all WordPress users who are interested in getting started with plugin design. Here are the posts so far:

  1. How to Write a WordPress Plugin – Introduction
  2. Seven Reasons to Write a WordPress Plugin
  3. How to Get Ideas for WordPress Plugins
  4. Structure of a WordPress Plugin

Updates from HQ

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After a pretty long absence, I’m back and ready to go with putting together the next edition of Devlounge. I listened to all the positive and negative feedback about this design, previous ones, and what was going to be the next design. I’m taking everyones ideas and suggestions and mixing them all together to restore Devlounge to the site it once was. I promise you, this is going to be one hell of an exciting summer for us and our long time readers are going to enjoy all the changes that are going to occur. We promise content is going to get better and much more frequent, and the site will be a piece of cake to navigate through, while of course keeping that “artistic touch” that has made people love us. Stay tuned, June is looking like a good one.

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