Hand Drawn, New Favorite

Ok, I found a new favorite! It Looks Good is a great site. Here’s what I like about it:

1. Hand drawn elements. This is always something I enjoy. I always like the way hand drawn elements look. I think they create an automatic ‘uniqueness’ for any site.

2. Unique Navigation Style. While it took me a couple of moments to find out how to navigate their site, I still like it. When I opened their site, I enjoyed the falling smiley faces. I knew something was up with the ‘dead faces’, but it took me a moment to realize that they were the navigation points.

3. It’s completely unconventional. Again, sites like this automatically rise to the top in my opinion.

There are some great elements of this site that are worthy of remembering. This one is a definite keeper!

Ruby on Rails

I’m just wondering if any of our readers use this system for web development. If you do, please let us know what your experience with this product has been.

Here’s what their own website says about their system:

“Ruby on Rails is an open source framework that’s optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration.

Rails is a full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern. From the Ajax in the view, to the request and response in the controller, to the domain model wrapping the database, Rails gives you a pure-Ruby development environment. To go live, all you need to add is a database and a web server.”

Some of the sites produced using their system that I found are great looking and function well. I’m just wondering what other folks out there think about the system. If you have any experience using it, just let us know! Thanks!

12 Excellent Textures…FREE

All Things Designed has twelve excellent, seamless textures available for FREE. As I’ve said before, FREE is fits into my budget very nicely. The only caveat attached to these textures is a request that you pass the link on to other people who may find them useful too.

Again, as Web Design Ideas finds sites like this one, we want to share them with you. We consider our site as a kind of ‘toolbox’ for Web Designers. Lots of ideas, lots of links to good resources and information. We hope you enjoy it!

Another Great Resource for Fonts

DaFont.com has some really good fonts available. Registration is free on their site too. Most of the fonts are free, some are restricted to personal use and other fonts as for a donation to the author of the font. The fonts are broken down into 9 major categories that contain about 60 sub-categories. So, when you’re hunting for a font that works well on a particular project, I’d suggest checking out DaFont.com’s site. While looking through their site briefly, I found quite a few that I liked and would use.

Excellent, FREE Video Tutorials

Need to refine your CSS skills? Are you looking for some cool tips and tricks for CS3, Acrobat, Illustrator or MS Office? If you are, then go check out the free video tutorials at Ten Ton Books! Geoff has put together some great, informative tutorials on all of the subjects listed above. Currently there are 8 free videos. I watched the first in a three part series on ‘Creatin’ CSS Layouts in Dreamweaver’ and it was great. I’d highly recommend them to anyone interested in refining their abilities in Dreamweaver.

Go check ‘em all out!

For the lab exam preparation like ccie or for Cisco Certified Design Associate, ccda you need to get skills in solving papers. Exam like Certified Information Systems Security Professional or CISSP and Microsoft Certified Solution Developer or mcsd also require some quick brainstorming techniques as well.