Adii from www.adii.co.za recently put together a list of some of the best blog designs about. If you’re a web designer this is a great source of inspiration and useful articles.
Thanks to Adii for featuring my site at #32 - it’s an honor being featured amongst the best of the best 
Thought I’d give a quick update as I haven’t said anything in a while.
Very busy these days with Masters course and finishing up a couple of big projects that I started over the summer. Made a few changes to the site to make it a bit more user friendly. I’ve been reading a couple of good usability books:
From this I’m making my sites more ‘user friendly’ and ensuring my designs are easily understood at a glance.
Was at an interesting talk a few weeks back with Sir John Hegarty of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, a highly respected advertising agency in the U.K. Some of their clients include British Airways, Audi, Levis and one of the ads he showed us was this Levis ad below, which I hadn’t seen in years and thought it was pretty cool.
Since the launch of my new website in January 07, there have been a number of contributors to the traffic that the site receives. Incoming links from other websites isn’t just good because it gets you a potential visitor, it also works well with Google’s ranking system as it sees each link to your site as a vote and therefore it can improve your search engine listing.
Thanks to the sites/magazines below for linking/listing my website. A lot of these sites are galleries for well designed websites so if you’re a web designer like myself, or if you just have a generally well designed website, I recommend submitting your site to some of the lists as it doesn’t hurt to have as many incoming links as possible. They’re great for getting inspiration as well.
Once again it’s the end of another University year and fellow graduate designers around the world are now seeking new jobs and new challenges. This is also the case at the University of Ulster for the Interactive Multimedia Design crowd who, including myself, have just completed around the clock work on their major projects and are awaiting their reward with graduation in July.
We recently had a degree show in the Belfast campus, showcasing our work to potential employers across the country, which was very successful and ended up with the gathering of a lot of creative business cards.
Over the 4 years of our degree, we’ve been shaped into talented web designers, graphic designers, 3d modelers and application developers and the end result has been a collection of amazing final year projects. Apart from my own project, Kit Me Out, I have listed 5 of my favorites below that I think are interesting and are well put together.
www.shakehandswithastranger.com
Mark James of FamFamFam.com has designed over 1000 web icons and is offering them at no price whatsoever. The icons are issued under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License so you can use them as you like in your projects.
This is a great time saver when developing web applications or sites and thanks to Mark, by having these at your fingertips you are able to concentrate on the more productive aspects of your development without having to waste your time coming up with creative icons that look good.
I came across this website recently called N.Design. It’s the blog and portfolio of a guy named Nick La. I was taken away by the initial illustration, used as the background of the site, and by diving deeper into Nick’s portfolio you can see more fantastic art work.
Nick’s work has been featured in many issues of Web Designer magazine along with Computer Arts magazine. He offers fantastic tutorials on Illustrator and offers great downloadable resources that I would recommend to any web designers to take a look at. His blogs very interesting too.
Take a look and see for yourself.
