Firebug Great For Web Design

Hey

There is one tool that I use the most for web design and that is Firebug. It is a simple firefox plugin that lets you dive into the CSS and HTML of a web page to see how it is built and works. It is great for understanding CSS and working out my stuff isn't working as it should be.

What firebug offers is a simple interface pane that appears on the bottom of the screen. You have on the left the html of the webpage, this is used in flippy triangle format so you can collapse great panes of html if you don't need it. On the right you have the CSS this is live, so you can change the CSS and see what happens.

It is a great tool to see how pages work, you can also fiddle about with pages to see why they aren't working as they should be. As well as this they also include script messages, as well as DOM and Net errors. A try developers tool. I recommend it to any designer new or old.

PicLens - An Amazing Firefox Plugin

Hey

I was really impressed when I cam across this plugin for Firefox. I was blown away with what it can do, as well as this amazing design on it. Its called Piclens and it is a plugin for most browsers that offers many cool features to show off images while searching the internet.

In a nutshell it is very similar to the image you see of the AppleTV, this has since changed but you get the general jist of what it is. You can browse through the hundreds of images within a Google search, or from some of the other popular images sites such as flickr. You can see by the image below the amount of images you can see, each is a real image that can take you to the respective website.



You get lots of swooshy effects as you zoom back and forth. You do need broadband other wise your computer will lag behind a bit with the rendering.


You can zoom in by double clicking on an image, this a flickr image (which I think is really cool) you get the full res. It is very Mac like and seems to work really well. Clicking on the the arrow in the top left will take you to the respective image if you want to view it in its context.


It is well worth checking out, have a play and tell me what you think. It will make searching through hundreds of Google images a lot easier. Go to PicLens for more information and links to download.

Amazing Blogger Design

Hey

I like blogger, it is simple, easy to use and very easy to implement designs. Anyway, I was really impressed by this blogger design. Its simple clean and has a couple of cool little features which make it stand out. Anyway if you head over to jackbook, you can check out the details about the "iWork" theme. I like it and I thought I would share.

Cool Place To Get Labels

Hey There

While searching the web as usually during a small period of free time I have, I came across a really neat website. Since this website is all about design I thought I would share something that could hopefully help your design skills and products. The website I am talking about is Frontier Label. This website has two great things that made me write a post about it. One the cool product, which are labels and two the website.

If you don't know the process you create your own artwork, upload it and then send it off to be turned into a label. I must say the prices are expensive, around $250. But these are about 2x3 inches minimum sizes. So you do get what you pay for, for your $250 you do get around 250-300 labels, so the price does work out. But you don't have to stick with your basic 2x3 inches. You can make a label that can be any size, this will of course be really cool to stick on places. You could make a funky design to advertise your services or just make people laugh. You could make the next viral image on the internet with your label on it. Better yet you could get your own bumper sticker for $658 for 1000 and do something like I Park Like An Idiot.com. The possibilities of labels are endless.

Another cool part of this site is the layout design. I usually like two things when I want to buy from a site. The products (duh!) and the site. I don't know why but this site just feels cool and well made. It has a lot of cool things such as online quoting which you can mess about with an really see how cheap (or how expensive) you can make it and I really like the colour scheme, it just seems to work well.

Anyway I just thought I would share it with you. These do seem like quality printers, which use quality stock. I don't think they will let you down. You could go for a cheaper place, but then you may not get the best quality and a quick next day delivery if you chose to opt for it.

Cool Website Feature - Lightbox - And Implemented

Hey

I always like cool little features that are present on websites. It makes them uniques or very cool when they are implemented correctly. One of theses such things is a bit of CSS and javascript that is used to create a "lightbox". You may have seen it on your internet travels. lightbox is a bit of code that opens an image on the page in its own little div elements. As well as this the background is blacked out to a certain level. I think it is really cool, so I decided to share it with you. An example of the lightbox is shown in the image below.


If you want to try it out you can go to the lightbox webpage and download the all the code. There is an earlier version that can be used but it doesn't look as cool. I have also added the code on this website and if you click on the image below you should be able to see the test in all its glory. It takes a couple of seconds for the image to load. If you do get impatient just click the loading icon and it should close the image overlay.


I am not going to be able to make every image lightbox compatible as I would have to go through every single page and image and change some of the code. But I will do it on most of the images I post from now on.

Just as a final note I would like to say kudos to GeckoandFly and some page.