Devlounge

Design, Develop, and Grow

Friday Focus #33

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This is a special edition of Friday Focus, as it the very first one (out of 33 weeks, which is pretty incredible) that is being published on the first of the month. This gives us an odd and rather rare chance to explore the month ahead (in what will be a very big and productive one), rather than looking back on the weeks past. And since for us in the State’s, this week was a very short week with Memorial Day on Monday, it makes a bit more sense to hype up some upcoming events.

Digg Weekly

But first, we will start off with our usually top Digg picks.

Design – Hey Ya Typography Animation
For those that remember, we featured another motion text flash video a while back that matched a scene from a movie with moving, animated text. This is a similar experiment, this time matching some background music.

Programming: Google Maps gets upgraded
It hit the Today Show today, and now you can have a look for yourself. Google has updated Google Maps to provide actual street views of some major cities and locations. It’s very cool and fun to play around with.

That mystery illustration

And now to announce who will be designing a whole new set of illustrations for the upcoming redesign. Mr. Fernando Lins, who I have been a long time fan of since first seeing his portfolio, will be putting together some great abstract illustrations for us in the coming weeks. It will definitely help keep the artistic touches fresh around here, something so many have people have said they would hate to see us lose in any type of redesign.

Timetable for Upcoming Updates

These dates are not yet so in stone, but use them to estimate when the new design and content will be arriving. Depending on when the launch is will depend on when other events occur, but if an event is 2 days after the launch, you can expect that to remain constant regardless of the actual launch date.

  • Wednesday, June 20 – Launch of the newest Devlounge design, along with many new features.
  • Thursday, June 21 – Devlounge version 2 will be released as free WordPress theme.
  • Friday, June 22 – Devlounge “Hub” goes live.
  • Sat, June 23 – In the Making – An extensive documentation article on the recreation of Devlounge, how statistics were analyzed in constructing the newest design, and an overview of new site features.
  • Sun, June 24 – Three interviews with some “major” people in the design / development field will go live.

For Designers, Developers, Entrepreneurs, and You

Yes, that will be the slogan for the next release of Devlounge. The main point in the whole slogan being the emphasis on you. Have an idea for a topic you want us to cover this month? Let us know, we’d love to write about it if it would benefit you.

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

Digg Weekly

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 #4

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Sites of The Week:

Sites that caught my attention is css galleries over the past week.

Friday Focus - I.G.T

A cool blue theme and a simple, clean design lead to a great looking store front. All they need is some more tees to fill this new design up with!

Friday Focus - Mozilla Firefox 2 Refresh

The new Mozilla / Get Firefox homepage sporting a very colorful illustration. Should be inspiration enough to upgrade to FF 2 if you haven’t already.

Friday Focus - DDMW

A smooth combination of valid xhtml and css along with flash to display portfolio work. Nicely done for a dark color schemed site.

Digg Weekly:

Design: How Much Should a Design Cost?
An interesting article discussing the ever hard to narrow down subject of “how much do I charge for this” or “how much should I expect to pay”. I’ll be writing my own response post to this in the next few days with my own thoughts on the issue, as they do vary a little bit from this authors. I’ll also be covering decided what to charge for advertising.

Programming: 37Signal’s Gets Real W/ Free Read
This has been out for a while, but just hit the weekly popular radar on Digg this week. You can now read and print the entire 37signals book, Getting Real, a guide to building a successful web application, online. As the creators of many of them, I think they know what they’re talking about.

Application of the Week:

If you have yet to upgrade to Firefox 2, then what are you waiting for? While not being web based, Firefox 2 released a few days back, and we’re thrilled to see it reach this stage. FF 2 has quite a few updates, as well as many backend / behind the scenes things that have been tightened up. Make sure you make it your browser of choice – we highly recommend it!

Considering During Design

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It seems like these days you encounter a new “some name here cheat sheet” on digg almost everyday. They all aim to help you with something, be it coding, designing, using some application – whatever. I figured it was about time Devlounge jumps aboard, but with one of our own – more of a checklist / things to remember type than a cheat sheet, but still worthy of consideration anytime you’re about to design. Let’s start off with this cool little image before we break down just exactly what in the world I’m talking about.

A Checklist of Sorts?

9 Things to Focus On

Yes, we know there’s plenty more than 9 – in fact, I could probably go on for nine hours about the multitudes of things you should be thinking about while designing – not to mention how much money you’ll be making when you finish this for your client… Anyways, let’s get back to the subject here. For this list, I’m focusing on 9 areas including screen res, fonts, white space, new web looks, line spacing, comic sans, how “2.0” you are, pixels vs ems, and finally, xhtml. Next let’s see me go into detail about all of them, and just why they made my first list of things to consider when designing.

Screen Resolution

Virtually all of the design world has moved on to bigger and better things – included larger monitors and more powerful graphics cards. 800 x 600 has all but disappeared to the powerful new numbers your desktop is capable of showing, and the amount of monitors one person might have themselves. But then, there’s me. I fall into that obscure 1% you probably see on your mint logs after I visit your site. Why? Well for one, it’s because the computer I do my designing on is fairly old, which one would consider odd when I have a newer computer just a few rooms away, but also to keep myself from designing too big. (And it also makes it a challenge for me to keep Photoshop up without it crashing, but that’s another story.) I always start off most of my designs at or around 800 pixels by whatever. Even though the percentage of people using 800 x 600 has greatly declined, you never want to rule them out. Having to make long horizontal scrolls if your design is too big for a 800 x 600 screen can really annoy people, but for the most part, designs at 800 by whatever look fine in larger resolutions. If you plan on having a fixed width, make sure your design looks fine in 800 x 600 display.

Fonts

The next thing to consider is fonts. First off, pick a generalized font that everyone has or should have, and be sure to set alternatives. “My new summer dingbats” isn’t going to do very well displaying on other peoples computers if they don’t have the necessary file.

Another thing to consider is font size. We like to start with the basic 12px. (Devlounge also features some use of 11px, but we keep it minimal.) Making your fonts too damn tiny or going to have people squinting so much they’ll be saying the **** with this site, and never coming back. Line spacing is essential, but we’ll get more into that below.

Whitespace

White space (which doesn’t have to be white), is just a term for leaving areas of space between different elements of your site to distinguish certain parts. Using css you can set anything, from the margin between header and paragraph, indent (padding) of paragraph – you name it, and it can be set. Having white space is important because it creates separation, makes things easier on the eyes (even if the site is dark), and breaks apart the design so it’s not too tough to swallow.

Old Vs. New

Another thing you should always be taking into consideration is what year we’re in. Sites like guistuff that used to generate the oh-that’s-so-cool-let-me-generate-my-own-exactly-like-it nav bars and images have been replaced with that new found web goodness called ajax, xhtml, and css, and you can find generators that will build standards compliant nav bars, buttons, and more with a much more up to date look.

Managing Multiple Sites

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Managing multiple websites can be a daunting and challenging process. For many people, even keeping control of one site isn’t the easiest thing to do. This guide is aimed to help you manage and run multiple sites, without giving up on them.

Know Your Goals

Many designers wait until they have just settled down – and then jump right into a new project or site. This is common. It also can create very many problems. Depending on the types of sites you may have open, you could be require to have new content flowing in everyday, and with every additional site your working on, it becomes quite a hassle to keep track of everything.

So the first thing you do is figure out exactly what you want and your visitors expect out of each site.

  • How often does each of your sites need to be updated?
  • Will you be posting original content that takes longer to write, or just making small updates from time to time?
  • If you are managing multiple sites, will you have a few other contributors, or will you be the sole contributor of content and images to your site?

Prioritize

The next step is to prioritize your sites. Most times when you find yourself managing multiple sites, there are some that have a much greater importance over others.

Take a look at Devlounge right now. As we head into the summer months, I’m managing Astereostudio for displaying work and a personal blog, Soundchronicle, a music review site I threw together in three days, and of course Devlounge. Out of all of these, Devlounge holds far more importance, because of it’s much higher popularity and it’s importance to me to provide constant and fresh content for my visitors. Keep in mind a few things when prioritizing your sites:

  • Which one of my sites is currently the most active and most popular? Keep the focus on this one.
  • Before I start a new project, am I sure I can handle the workload? Know in advance whether you may become busy before you are able to get the new site off the ground, because if you become sidetracked, chances are the site is no more.
  • Plan before action – Many times, you’ll come up with a new idea and jump right into it without any preparation. This can almost always lead to failure. Devlounge was in the works since December of 2005, and finally launched in April 2006. By giving yourself time and a chance to manage the creation, content, and launch of your site or project, you increase your chances of successful launching and keeping another site active.

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