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Archive for the 'Website Design' Category

The top 500 fonts on the Web

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I have kind of a secret fetish for good free fonts, so Fonts 500, a site that has collected the top 500 popular fonts used on the Web, is definitely on my good list.

You can preview each font using your own custom text; each font can be downloaded as a zip file quickly and easily. There are five pages of really good fonts here, I don’t think I saw any that I didn’t like (which presents a problem in itself, I must say). — Wendy Boswell

Fonts 500 [via etc]

From Lifehacker

Create your own Web 2.0 logos

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Want to create a logo using that hard-to-define but easy-to-recognize Web 2.0 style? Tech blog Hongkiat.com shows you how.

You’ll need Photoshop and a downloadable "style" file provided by the author. This file includes the necessary elements to recreate six popular logos (including LinkedIn and Skype), though the idea here is not to copy, but rather to learn the basic techniques and "start your own creativity from there."

Although the tutorial suffers from a bit of fractured English, it does show you how to recreate that distinct Web 2.0 style (annoying as it may be). Hmmm…wonder what the Lifehacker logo would look like after being "Web 2.0-ized." — Rick Broida

From Lifehacker

Free fonts at UrbanFonts

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If you’re looking for a few new fonts to spice up your presentation or document, head over to UrbanFonts, a site with pay-for and freebie fonts.

I’m no designer but lots of these look fun and interesting. The free offerings especially might contain something that should be in your collection. Urban Fonts free typefaces are available as a download for Mac and Windows. — Gina Trapani

From Lifehacker

Simile

SIMILE is a joint project conducted by the MIT Libraries and MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. SIMILE seeks to enhance inter-operability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services. A key challenge is that the collections which must inter-operate are often distributed across individual, community, and institutional stores. We seek to be able to provide end-user services by drawing upon the assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, and metadata held in such stores.

SIMILE will leverage and extend DSpace, enhancing its support for arbitrary schemata and metadata, primarily though the application of RDF and semantic web techniques. The project also aims to implement a digital asset dissemination architecture based upon web standards. The dissemination architecture will provide a mechanism to add useful “views” to a particular digital artifact (i.e. asset, schema, or metadata instance), and bind those views to consuming services.

To guide the SIMILE effort we will focus on well-defined, real-world use cases in the libraries domain. Since parallel work is underway to deploy DSpace at a number of leading research libraries, we hope that such an approach will lead to a powerful deployment channel through which the utility and readiness of semantic web tools and techniques can be compellingly demonstrated in a visible and global community.

The SIMILE Project and its members are fully committed to the open source principles of software distribution and open development and for this reason, it releases the created intellectual property (both software and reports) under a BSD-style license. The SIMILE Project team members gladly welcome community efforts and would particularly like to recognize SIMILE’s contributors.

Check out some of the cool projects (including Exhibit and Timeline)

http://simile.mit.edu/

Timeline

Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information. Below is a live example that you can play with. Pan the timeline by dragging it horizontally.

Timeline website

Exhibit

Exhibit is a lightweight structured data publishing framework that lets you create web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and rich visualizations by writing only HTML and optionally some CSS and Javascript code.

It’s like Google Maps and Timeline, but for structured data normally published through database-backed web sites. Exhibit essentially removes the need for a database or a server side web application. Its Javascript-based engine makes it easy for everyone who has a little bit of knowledge of HTML and small data sets to share them with the world and let people easily interact with them.

Exhibit website

Create your own icon at the Tiny Icon Factory

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Make your own wee little icon with the Tiny Icon Factory, a site where you can also browse through tens of thousands other tiny little icons.

You can use tiny icons in a variety of ways; on a website, blog, etc. And there’s SO many here at the Tiny Icon Factory that it’s hard to walk away just choosing a few.— Wendy Boswell

Making Compact Forms More Accessible

Space constraints can put the squeeze on accessibility and usability. Mike Brittain shares his method for making itty-bitty forms more accessible and easier to use.

From A List Apart

How to design a logo of letters

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Design magazine Before & After shows you how to turn letters into a logo using a variety of techniques.

These include creating a mid-letter crossbar, removing part of a letter’s stroke, interlocking letters and more. The examples are all colorfully illustrated within the tutorial, which also includes the fonts and colors in case you want to crib them for your own design. This professional-quality guide is actually an 18-page PDF that’s free to download. — Rick Broida

From Lifehacker

Son of Suckerfish Dropdowns

A flexible and attractive CSS-based dropdown menu that supports multiple levels:

The original Suckerfish Dropdowns article published in A List Apart proved to be a popular way of implementing lightweight, accessible CSS-based dropdown menus that accommodated Internet Explorer by mimicking the :hover pseudo-class.

Well now they’re back and they’re more accessible, even lighter in weight (just 12 lines of JavaScript), have greater compatibility (they now work in Opera and Safari without a hack in sight) and can have multiple-levels.

More: Son of Suckerfish Dropdown

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