Designrlink and Topofthenet

Part of being a desinger/developer is filling open gaps in the market. The sites I’m building wont. Well not exactly. There are dozens of CSS Gallleries, and honestly I’m quite sick of them. The problem is, what else are you supposed to do with a domain called Topofthe.net? A toplist? I think not.

The other one is also user-generated, but its about collecting links to decent design/development articles. The thing I like about these sites is that they have the same design. I’m a sucker for uniformity. Am I hinting may be the start of a long list of sites , maybe turning into a network? I dont know.

I’ve been working on these sites sporadically over the summer. But things are taking a turn for the better, I’m working faster than usual, and I hope to have at least one online before the weekend is over.

Why? First and foremost, I’m doing this to fill out my portfolio (which is coming soon, honest!!). Secondly its gonna make me think, something I havent had to do since mid-May. And thirdly I’ve domains to use and I’ve been putting it off for much too long.

For more info about either follow their Twitter Accounts @topofthenet and @designrlink

Stay tuned.

Best Designs Of The Week 1

Every week I’m gonna post 10 or so amazing design finds. Contrary to what you may think, this is for both you and me. This way I can archive the sites I like and look back on them when I have a creative block. But mostly it’s to show some really cool designs to the people who read this blog. So enjoy!

Made By On

Edenbee

R U 4 Children

Base 6 Design

Insic Designs

Havoc Inspired

Echo Brand Design

Jan Pivonka

Atebits

JukeBook

If you want to be included in next weeks collection, please leave a comment or use the contact form.

And remember, please subscribe to my RSS feed

100 Amazing Design Blogs To Subscribe To

It is important as a designer, to build a good collection of resources for constant inspiration. That’s why I subscribe to over 100 feeds all in different areas of design, to gain see a wide spectrum of knowledge. My RSS reader of choice used to be Google Reader, but more recently I’ve been using the Firefox addon Feedly , which extends Google Reader’s capabilities and adds Twitter and FriendFeed integration.

Here I will list over a 100 blogs for you to subscribe to, but also I will give a link to download all the URLs so they can be easily imported into Google Reader.

New Blog Theme – Its Ninja-tastic

Yes this is my bluesy design for Miralize.com and I quite like it. Yes there are some kinks to be worked out, but this is my new design. I need to add a few things (like styling to the comments), but they shouldn’t take that long, and I wanted to get this design out as fast as possible.

I really like the ninja illustration I did for this site.I think it adds something different to the site. The whole site is designed to be fast-loading, with only two images, and a heck of a lot of CSS, I got it to look like this. Pretty impressive, huh? Haha I’m proud, but im not that arrogant.

Hope you enjoy it,

Sean

Media Virgins Style Redesign

I love the new style of Media Virgins, the home of first year at Tipperay Institute, for several reasons. Its design is simple yet not boring. People often say dark grey is the new black, but the dark grey I think adds elegance and professionalism to this new design.

Probably my favourite piece of this design is the sidebar with alternating shades of grey, that make it eay to stand out. This was also one of the most tasking pieces as I had to fiddle around with Wordpress for a bit to get it to work properly. The footer also is a nice piece. I was never that much of a fan of content in footers but once I finished it I was surprised at how well it fit in with the sites flow.

This one is quite a different project than ones I usually work on. I administer this blog, and so I had the creative room to do what I wanted and I am pretty pleased. I had the chance to brand this design over several social networks to add conformity and continuity to the site. I had done several other designs beforehand (4 to be prescice), yet I was never happy with how they had turned out. Im pretty sure that this one will last for a bit and I hope people enjoy it. There is still several kinks to work out so if anyone see’s any, please comment below.

[Media Virgins]