Results for web design

Rod McFarland has created a few original WordPress themes.

The themes use some nifty AJAX coding allowing you to navigate through the whole site using a command line interface (CLI). You simply use commands like cd, ls and cat to browse, list and view posts.

Rod McFarland CLI 2.0 WordPress theme

The server is struggling a bit at the moment but check his cool themes out here.

Link via MakeZine.

Smashing Magazine asked 35 designers, 5 questions each.

• 1 aspect of design you give the highest priority to
• 1 most useful CSS-technique you use very often
• 1 font you use in your projects very often
• 1 design-related book you highly recommend to read
• 1 design magazine you read on a daily/weekly basis (online or offline)

Result: 175 professional suggestions, tips and ideas from some of the best web-developers all around the world.

In the end we’ve received more answers than we expected. The results – over 80 CSS-based tips, design ideas, suggestions, fonts, design-related books and online-magazines – are listed below. It’s interesting to know, how designers work their magic. It’s interesting to know what you can actually learn from them.

Check the article here.

Microsoft has released two new Virtual PC images featuring Windows XP SP 2. One includes Internet Explorer 7, the other Internet Explorer 6.

Screenshot of Microsoft Virtual PC 2007

The images should come in handy for anyone running Windows Vista who wants to see how their web page look in Internet Explorer under Windows XP. Of course, you could also run the disc image inside of Virtual PC if you want to try installing new software without risking any damage to your host operating system.

Both disc images will expire on August 17th, 2007. The images are pre-activated so no hassle running them (Windows only). Download the disc images here.

DeGraeve has a nifty tool called the Color Palette Generator.

DeGraeve Color Palette Generator – example of a palette generated from an image

You simply feed the generator an image and it will create a suiting color palette.

Enter the URL of an image to get a color palette that matches the image. This is useful for coming up with a website color palette that matches a key image a client wants to work with.

FeaturePics did some testing, so check this editorial for cool examples.

ColorJack is an online Color Scheme Generator. The author of ColorJack created it as a way to learn color theory & Javascript simultaneously. The result is a refreshing set of color tools.

ColorJack Sphere provides an easy way to create color palettes.

ColorJack Sphere

You simply select the type of color scheme you’re looking to create (i.e. Six-Tone, Complementary or Triadic) and move the little dots in the color wheel to get the color palette of your liking. You can select a level of color blindness and set the color spectrum (websafe, websmart). You can even export the palettes to Illustrator or Photoshop.

If you’re looking for more control over the palettes, check out ColorJack Studio (screenshot).

A minuratuarized version of Sphere, ColorJack Sphere Widget is available for all major operating systems.

ColorJack Sphere Widget

There’s also a little DHTML color picker available for download so you can use it in your own website/application.

Visit ColorJack to check out all of these tools.

I generally get bored with website designs quite fast, but I have to admit the current blue/red rekkerd.org design already lost it’s appeal after a few weeks.

I think the colors scream too much, so I’m trying to tone things down a bit.

screenshot of rekkerd.org redesign (click for larger image)

This design has more grey tone colors and the logo is much less adventurous (boring?). It also halves the amount of Google Adsense ads in the top of the page (which might cost me some revenue, but I don’t really like the current wide Adsense format, and it’s not like the ads generate much anyway).

So what do you think, is the new design better: yes, no or fish?