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Friday Focus #38

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Issue number 38, right in time for dinner or your late afternoon Friday parties. Sit back and enjoy as I rundown the week that was.

Sites of the Week

Kicking off week 38 is CSSRemix. We have featured them in the past (one of the very first edition of Friday Focus I think), but today a new design went live, and since I generally get a lot of the designs featured in Friday Focus from there, I figured it’d be nice to showcase their new design as well. The new design addresses a lot of performance issues, and it is a nice way to recover from a recent hack that took over the site earlier in the week.

CSSRemix

Next up is By Designers for Designers, commonly known as BD4D. BD4D recently underwent a brand new face lift, and for a dark colored site (many of you probably know how much I don’t really like many dark layouts), it is a very clean and refreshing design. It is pretty slick, so go give it a look (hopefully they’ll feature us now ;)).

BD4D

Rounding out this weeks favorite three is Moodboard. SXC might be my favorite free stock photography site, but Moodboard might just become my new favorite of the paid variety. I am loving this design – I think the whole layout and look is just excellent. (Some totally kick ass photos there too!)

Moodboard

Digg Weekly

Design: Color Inspiration of a Different Kind
Color inspiration from an unlikely source! Colour Lovers has put together a few different palettes based off the colors of beer! That’s inspiration for many of us!

Programming: CSS Redundancy Checker
A nice little web app that will clean up your css files, including removing code that you might have planned on using but then never got around to using. Helps optimize your css file size.

Things are Changing

I’ve migrated our forums over to SMF. This may or may not change, I’m still deciding. Either way, it will be a few days until the forums start to look like the site again. I appreciate your patience. Regardless, feel free to register and post – it’s the beauty of being able to use forum converters if I do indeed make another switch or not.

Friday Focus #36

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Week 36, without any more delay. Have a good weekend everyone, but first, here’s the weekly wrap up we around here like to call Friday Focus.

Sites of the Week

Starting off this week is WallCandyArt. An excellent canvas art gallery and shop which combines grays and whites with flash splashed here and there for some cool looking effects and rollovers.

WallCandyArt

Next is Harvest. You may remember we reviewed Harvest a long time ago. Yesterday I visited the site for the first time since I wrote that review, and I really loved the new design. It’s simple, clean, and super effective in my opinion.

Harvest Snapshot

That’s it for this week, as many of the css galleries were a little dry. Can’t blame people, for the most part it’s been to hot for me to really want to spend any extra time in front of the computer than I need to, so designing might not be top priority on people’s minds.

Digg Weekly

Design – Quiet Structure
An excellent article from Designview on using a “quiet structure”, with the use of a consistent grid. Give this a read.

Programming – Replicating the iPhone, the webkit way
How to use one background image to create dynamic, scaling buttons for the iPhone in Safari.

Announcement

Tomorrow and / or Sunday I’ll be switching the forums over to SMF. The few members we currently have have all requested it, as minibb is a bit too weak. It may take me a few days, possibly into next week depending on how lazy – I mean busy – I am to style it to match the site.

Friday Focus #35

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Week 35, a little later than usually because I just got home. But without further delay, here is this weeks Friday Focus. Enjoy the upcoming weekend everyone.

Sites of the Week

My personal favorites from various css galleries over the past week.

Leading off this week is Mark Boulton Design. Simplicity wins in the case of this portfolio. I really dig the look of project and client pages – providing a summary of the project and what the client had to say. It is nothing mind blowing, but it gets the job done in an extremely clean manner.

Mark Boulton Design

Next up is down2night, a place to search for nightlife events and hot locations. The site uses lots of blues and rounded corners, but it is one of the better looking “night life activity finders” I have seen. They even have a pretty cool heatmap of party and event locations.

Down2Night

And rounding out this weeks three is Biola. An absolutely great looking site that will appeal perfectly to its intended audience. More college sites should take a route like this.

Biola

Digg Weekly

Picked from the most dugg articles over the past seven days.

Design – Art of the Business Card
A large gallery of design business cards to use as inspiration. There are over 400 of them.

Programming – Ultimate HTML hex code list
A large list of color hex codes from Colourlovers. Pretty useful if you want to quickly grab hex codes for a variety of colors.

Keep in mind…

A few days ago the Devlounge community went live. You don’t have to spend every living moment there, but feel free to occasionally stop by and participate in some threads, ask for help, or suggest new topic ideas. Also, if you haven’t noticed we now have multiple feed subscribing options. While of course we’d like to see you subscribe to the full feed containing all the Devlounge goodness, additional ones are up there which could be helpful in certain situations (putting a Devlounge feed on your site for example, because no one cares about our site news). Just give these things a look over if you get the chance.

Friday Focus #12

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First Friday Focus of the new year, and what a bad start, already a day behind! Unfortunately I wasn’t home much yesterday, so I didn’t get a chance to type up this weeks FF until today. Definitely on my list of new years resolutions I have to make – Make sure Friday Focus occurs on Fridays!

Anyways, enough talk, and let’s take a look at what was good this first week of 2007.

Sites of the Week

The first site up this week is Snagt. Snagt is a portfolio of artwork and photographs, and I love how well the site does in displaying it. A playful site that really goes well with the many sketches on the site.

Snagt

Next up is the excellent and extensive portfolio of Shane Mielke. Works include various designs and sites for car companies, Motorola, the FWA, and many more.

Shane Seminole Mielke

Finally this week we have the Norwegian Cruise Lines site, sporting ocean blues and illustration that really shows off a fun and vibrant atmosphere. And of course, most of you probably know I’m a sucker for ocean like designs :).

NCL

Digg Weekly

Design: 15 Tips to Choosing Good Type Text
You frequently find yourself asking “what font should I use for this?” This article outlines 15 tips to consider when choosing fonts to work with.

Programming: CSS Cheat Sheet
A little css cheat sheet to keep handy for those who may be just digging into css for the very first time.

Help Us Out

Avid Devlounge reader? We dropped a new digg post the other day, only to find Digg down for maintenance shortly after. So we found ourselves with only 1 digg! Help us expand our audience by giving us the special feeling of the “digg effect”. Get to it!

And In other News…

Techcrunch launched a forum yesterday, and needless to say it’s already extremely popular. It will become a good breeding ground to find out about new web applications. I’m sure I’ll be watching to give a few good ones write ups. If you’re interested you can find me there as “snafubmx”.

Enjoy the weekend!

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