Web Design Ledger - 10 Amazing Designers

Here are some of the big dogs in the web design world. And yes I have to put a picture of Moll here since he's my idol right now.

10 Amazing Designers that Influence the Community

Chúc Mừng Năm Mới! Happy Lunar New Year!

Happy New Year
To all our friends and family
Near and Far
We wish you the best for 2009
May you find happiness, success and good fortune
In the Year of the Ox!

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Chúng cháu xin chúc các bác, cô chú, anh chị em
Một năm mới tràn đầy hạnh phúc và thành công.
Mong rằng năm Kỷ Sửu sẽ mang lại nhiều may mắn.


Hội Tết is this weekend so prepare for pictures!

Greepit Post - Long Exposure Pictures

Greepit is a design blog I've been frequenting lately. It mostly posts about web design but once in awhile drops some inpsiring photos. Thought I'd share this one.

I Heart Google Chrome

One of the things I love most about Chrome is that the dialogs and alerts are, well, almost funny. Like this:

My favorite is the secret agents part. I ran into a new one today:

I still love Firefox, though, for more reasons than I can name. I'm just glad to have two tools now for traversing and dissecting the web.

Cameron Moll (pronounced Mull or Mall but not Mole)

I first ran into Cameron's work several months ago when I was reading a snap2objects article on how to destroy the web 2.0 look. Little did I know who I had found! That was when I first started dabbling in actual solid web design instead of just screwing around with my blog, and since then I've seen his name pop up over and over. Today I hit the jackpot - an interview with Cameron on UIE.com. I haven't listened to it yet, but after break I plan to spend the next 29 minutes and 52 seconds listening to Spool pick Moll's brain while I calculate stats from the Nov election for work. Wonderful.

Oh, and he did a letterpress of the temple. He's so awesome.

Earlier today I found found his wife's blog, as well. Suzanne has a delightful sense of humor and made my day with her post about her boys. 4 boys. Phew.

Needless to say, I think I've found a new role model.

UPDATE 01/22/09: Lookie what I found today: Chatting with Cameron Moll on Nettuts.com

Nine Lion Design

This homepage has got to be one of the most beautiful I've ever seen. I still get chills looking at it.

Carrot Creative - jQuery at Work

The folks over at Carrot Creative have put jQuery to good use. Great use, actually. Smooth animation, no-refresh content changes, good sense of humor (they give you directions to their office by foot, car, train or dinosaur. How funny is that? lol) all combined to yield a rather pleasant experience.

Lately, I've seen so many sites like theirs, utilizing dom manipulation to create full-fledged applications instead of merely a website, all without moving from the homepage. The first I saw was a year or so ago (can't remember the link - doh!) by a Scandinavian company where you were a little plane flying all over the site. It had cool background sound effects like you were in a terminal, to complete the ambiance. Now this concept is being applied in very creative ways to more and more sites each day (favs: nofrks, youlove.us). I wonder if it will become so widespread that in 5 years from now we'll look at it like we look at the blink tag now haha. We'll see I guess.

I'm getting an itch to redesign again... argh, gotta kick it. Back to school. Clean your house. Serve your members. But don't redesign. Maybe next year.

But then all this cool stuff will be old. :(

The Best CSS Design of 2008

Wanna see some of the best CSS designs of 2008? This site has a terrific collection of websites that use rock-solid CSS markup to break the Web 2.0 look. I love these sites - someday I will design like these people.

The Best CSS Design of 2008