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75 Helpful Web Design Resources

Hii Every body, Do you know we are all very very very good web designers? But the only thing we are missing is proper guidance and resources. 🙂

What resources have you found helpful? I’m always looking to add to my resources so please share your favorites in the comments below.

Design Inspiration
If you’re anything like me creativity doesn’t come easily. The truth is we could all use some design inspiration from time to time. Thankfully there’s plenty of resources for us to find inspiration in. Here’s a list of sites that haveuseful for me when I need to get the creative juices flowing.

DesignerSide – Web Design Inspiration, photoshop tutorials, logo design and more.
CSS Vault
Favourite Website Awards

CSS Reboot
CSS Zen Garden – The beauty of CSS design. The Zen Garden shows what’s possible with a CSS based design. This site is responsible for turning me on to CSS based designs. Very inspirational.
HOW Magazine
Web Standards Awards
35 Sexiest Designed Websites You’ve Forgotten About
Web Pages That Suck – Good examples of what not to do.
Screenspire – This my favorite site for design inspiration. Not only do they have thousands of inspirational designs, you can view the screenshot of each site which makes it very easy to browse through the huge collection.

Design Shack
CSS Beauty
CSS Import
W3C Compliant Sites
Liquid Designs
Web Creme
Stylegala – Stylegala is an online resource and inspiration guide for web agencies, designers and developers who take interest in websites that combine the powers of design, web standards and CSS.

Web Standards

I can’t express the importance of using web standards enough, hopefully the following articles and resources can.

10 Reasons to Learn and Use Web Standards – If you’re a web developer or designer new to the concept of web standards and are undecided on whether you should spend the time to learn all about them or not, here are some of the most important reasons for doing so. For web professionals who are already using web standards, this list may come in handy when you need good arguments.
Developing With Web Standards – This document explains how and why using web standards will let you build websites in a way that saves time and money for the developer and provides a better experience for the visitor. Also discussed are other methods, guidelines and best practices that will help produce high-quality websites that are accessible to as many as possible.
10 Reason for Web Standards – 10 more reasons to develop with web standards.
Roadmap to Standards
Web Standards Primer – What Every Web Site Owner Should Know About Standards.

Don’t Meet Your Heroes – Web standards compliation site.
The Web Standards Project – The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards that ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
Web Standards Workshop
The Guild of Accessible Web Designers – GAWDS is a world-wide association of organisations and accessible web designers and developers – designed to both promote and protect standards – not technical standards – but accessible design standards.

Validators
Now that you’re all caught up on standards make sure you always validate your code to make sure it’s compliant. These tools from W3C will also help you find any errors so you know what needs to be fixed.

HTML & XHTML Validator
CSS Validator

Typography
Typography articles. Compare typefaces and downloand fonts.

The Anatomy of Web Fonts – Very good article on understand typography and the role it plays in web design.
Typetester – “The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. Its’ primary role is to make web designer’s life easier.” It’s certainly made my life a lot easier. Compare up to three different typefaces, sizes, spacing, and more all on one screen.

Typography for Headlines – Nice collection of typography headlines. Great for inspiration.
25 Best License-Free Quality Fonts – Great collection, thank Vitaly Friedman.
DaFont – More fonts than you can shake a stick at.

Photoshop Tutorials

Pixel2life.com
Photoshop Tutorials Blog

Tutorial Select
deviantART
Good-Tutorials
Fadedpixel
Planet Photoshop
Free Photoshop – Thousands of Photoshop downloads.
BrushFind.com – Thousands of Photoshop brushes.

Stock Photography

Stock Exchange – Huge collection of high quality, free stock photography. Some images require photographers permission but most photos don’t.
Morguefile – Another highly recommended free stock photography resource site.
Veer – Visual elements in ways that work.
iStockphoto – Royalty free images. Prices are very reasonable.

Fotosearch Stock Photos
Features millions of images and royalty free photos from more than 150 publishers.

Blogs & Other Resources
Some of my favorite blogs. Make sure you subscribe to these.

StopDesign
Digital Web Magazine – Digital Web Magazine is an online magazine intended for professional web designers, web developers and information architects. Digital Web Magazine is a non-profit publication created by a world-wide network of volunteers dedicated to producing quality educational and informative material free-of-charge, to foster the development of the web for the benefit of all.

Particletree – Weblog about CSS, XHTML, and JavaScript.
A List Apart – A List Apart Magazine explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on techniques and benefits of designing with web standards. Tons of great articles, a must for any serious web designer.
Authentic Boredom – Cameron Moll’s Blog. Cameron is an awesome freelance web designer with a great writing style.
456 Berea Street – Roger Johansson’s Blog. One of my favorites.
Molly.com – Molly E. Holzschlag’s Blog. You will learn a lot from Molly.

Box of Chocolates – Derek Featherstone’s Blog.
Stylegala – Stylegala is an online resource and inspiration guide for web agencies, designers and developers who take interest in websites that combine the powers of design, web standards and CSS.
Jonathan Snook
Mezzoblue – a semi–daily expository and exploratory on all things web, design, and typographic.

Forums & Help

Search for tutorials, articles, or get help in forums.

W3Schools Online Web Tutorials
HTML Help
HTML Dog
SitePoint – Lots of great articles and the forums are very helpful.
Character Reference
CSS Templates

Color Tools

Search for colors, color schemes, and color inspiration.

Colourlovers – I’ve found some great color inspiration and color schemes from Colourlovers. Currently more than 39,000 colors and 16,000 palettes.
Colour Contrast Check – From Jonathan Snook, the Colour Contrast Check Tool allows to specify a foreground and a background colour and determine if they provide enough of a contrast “when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen”. The tool will indicate that the colours pass the test if both the colour difference and the brightness difference exceed their threshold. It will indicate that it sort of passes if only one of the two values exceed their threshold. And finally, it’ll fail to pass if neither value exceeds its threshold.
The Color Wizard – This is my favorite color tool on the web. I wrote about The Color Wizard a couple weeks ago. The Colour Wizard lets you type in the value of your colour and get an automatic return of that colour’s complementary colour, split complementary colours, analogous colours, chromatic variations, shade and tint variantion and saturation variation.

ColorCombos.com – Color Combos allows you to test color combinations, see how the different combinations work together on screen, and gives color combination ideas. You can also pull colors from other websites by simply entering in the URI.
ColourMod

Firefox Extensions
Firefox extensions make life a lot simpler.

Web Developer – So many features & tools I don’t even know where to begin.
ColorZilla – Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.

IE Tab – Open Internet Explorer in a Firefox tab. Very wasy way to check compatibility.
Measureit – Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.
View Rendered Source Chart – Easy way to visually navigate source code.
HTML Validator – Validate your HTML inside Firefox.
Screen Grab – Save an entire webpage as an image.

Other

Background Image Maker – Makes some basic backgrounds for your site, much easier than using photoshop.
FamFamFam Icons – Free Icons. Awesome.
IconBuffet – One of the best sites for royalty free icons and digital artwork. These icons are awesome!
Browsershots – browsershots gives you screenshots of your projects in all major browsers so you can make sure your design looks the same across the board.

Remember you can use cheap indian web hosting as a great web design and hosting service provider in eastern india.

So what am I missing? What are some of your favorites?

web design

Same as per Cameron Olthuis also.

Always your feedback and comments encourage mw to do search n find some great useful stuff like this. 🙂

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