Recently I was working on the design of the page for my new product — Time Tracker for Mac — which is to be deployed soon, by the way. I’m by no means a professional web designer, but like to fiddle with colors, layout and font faces. At least no one can fire me when I do it to my own sites.
Scanning through my web-design blogs for an inspiration, I stumbled upon a couple of interesting places. Both are dedicated to typography, but where the typography is good, everything else thrives. So get your notebooks and start taking notes.
80 Beautiful Typefaces For Professional Design
It seems I spent my entire life wandering around that page. The amount of information is simply overwhelming. If you ever make it to the comments section, leave a quick note there. The author will be pleased to know. Yes, I’m sure. Scanning through the comments, I noticed that many disagree with the selection and claim not enough scripts, sans, whatever. People, if this list to contain every font family everyone found useful during their important designer carrier that would bump the counter to 1,363,203 beautiful fonts and you probably won’t expect it to be for professional design either. So calm down and let it go.
20 Websites with Beautiful Typography
A great collection of great looking sites with short comments. Lots of inspiration, so you may want to use your tea spoon here not to grab too much at a time. I found it immensely useful… and the site too.
P.S. Hey Pito, did you like that Puppia business card layout (20 websites with beautiful typography #17)? We did… very much. 
I’m sure Amazon can afford a better web-designer. I have not a single doubt. This little thing below is the part of the Associates registration screen. It’s poorly centered, but the rest of the page is perfectly gray.
Now after several tireless attempts to find a password that it will accept, I’m about to give up. It gives NOT A CLUE why the password I’m entering can’t be used. It just keeps saying…
Another piece of stone age art. It must be my lucky day!
There’s something you should see, or better yet, experience. This morning I came across a fascinating photography project The Light And Land by Bruce Percy that touched me, and touched me deeply.
My first acquaitance with his creative work was on the pages of his podcast which is essentially a smooth slideshow accompanied and narrated by Bruce himself. It was something that I haven’t seen for ages – thoughtful, well-planned, incredibly simple and up to the chase at the same time, that comes to you as a breeze, entertains and makes you tear off your daily routine. It makes you put your life into a different dimension and re-examinate the surrounding carefully, on your own pace.
For impatient, I’m giving the direct podcast link, but still… make sure to check the portfolio section. It’s whole new world that grabs your attention entirely. You will never see it with the same eyes again.
Promise.
I never told you guys, but my sweetheart has finally opened her first very own web-store – Caterok Bags. She is into practical and durable bags design and production, and now everyone can see and purchase them on the Net.
Here’s the front page:
Here’s the product page:
New items are added all the time. Kate spends days behind the drawing board designing simple, yet sparky things. Any feedback is greatly appreciated. If you feel that someone else can be interested, just let them know. Who knows, it could be right what they are looking for. Several times when people were looking for presents, they were excited to discover these cool looking pieces.
If nothing else, enjoy browsing through the collection!
The subject says it all. It’s fine to buy domains from them, but if you want to host your site or app, don’t do it. Everything that is more complex than a “Hello, world!” plain text page will be a trouble sooner or later. Even simple Wordpress with custom permalinks is almost impossible to configure. And if you are lucky, they will Upgrade your account to break it.
To make it worse, the moment it happens, you won’t be able to fix it because a simple change to disable their ugly File Not Found page is reported to take from 30 minutes to 24 hours, but really takes more than 3 days (it is still in progress, so I can’t give you the correct time). Maybe it’s because they are using Microsoft IIS? Probably.
Now check this cute “Page Not Found” message. What a style, don’t you find?
To reiterate, DON’T DO IT. Save your time and nerve cells.
Just noticed the release of the next Wordpress version — 2.6. Check out their release summary video to get an idea of what has improved and how. Good stuff.
I can’t help solving puzzles. Every now and then I buy a new box and we solve it together with Kate all days and night long until it’s finally done. I guess, now our family budget is saved.
Discovery channel has a number of interesting games, but this one is really a gem.
See more interesting games:
Also try:
If you are into SEO, you know how important keywords research phase is. I’m a very newbie in this area and always pay attention to what pro’s suggest. For a couple of weeks, I’ve been using Overture Keywords Inventory and Google External Keyword Tool for my research attempts. They are great tools and they are completely free.
As they say, there was a poll “Best Keywords Research Tools” recently and you can see the results below:
- Keyword Discovery (18%)
- Wordtracker (18%)
- WordZe (15%)
- Google Keyword Tool (14%)
- SEO Digger (12%)
- Overture Keyword Selector (6%)
- SEO Boook Keyword Tool (3%)
- KeywordSpy (3%)
- SpyFu (3%)
- Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool (3%)
- NicheBOT (2%)
- Hitwise Search Intelligence (2%)
- Google Suggest Scraper (1%)
- comScore qSearch (0%)
- AdGooRoo SEM Insight (0%)
I don’t know what you think looking at the results, but to me it seems there’s a little bit of a conservative smell in the figures. I tried, I honestly tried to use Keyword Discovery several times both two years and a week ago. Guess what? They didn’t bother to update their interface. It still quite inconvenient, performs badly and employs approaches older than the world itself. I don’t know what they think, but it’s quite clear they get good money to let themselves not to bother with such minuscule and unimportant things as flexibility, ease of use and overall look.
Anyway, it’s their choice and their business. I just got the confirmation for myself that one shouldn’t follow the crowd blindly. For me, the WordZe was a discovery and it looks as a very good commercial product worth a try. I’ll give it a closer look later. For now…
Enjoy your Friday!
Update: Bill Hunt of Wordstream.com has just contacted me with the news that they’ve started an interesting new keywords research tool that has a huge database and is FREE for all. Check it out and see if it works for you.
For a long time it was a huge pain in the neck to follow the blogs and threads I was ever commenting on. Most of the time I had to make a heart-bleeding decision whether it is going to be a fire-and-forget kind of comment or will I bookmark it somehow for the later returns. I realize everyone has similar problems, otherwise they wouldn’t ask us to add some kind of comments tracking to BlogBridge, so that I’m not alone in these sufferings.
It seems someone got to the point of being desperate, and finally decided to aid the community with an excellent comment threads tracker — cocomment.com. I discovered it by sheer accident noticing in my recent trackbacks section of the Wordpress administrative dashboard a reference from some new site. Quick check of the inbound link led to this amazing discovery. (BTW, it was you Markus, who “showed” me the way with your “IELTS: Done.” tracking.)
So how it is going to help? I believe they support some major blogging systems (Wordpress, Flickr, Blogger.com as I managed to notice from their guide) and use their comment tracking feeds and functions to get the list of recent updates. Then they process collected data and do notifications, organization and nice Web 2.0-ish display of threads in the inbox style. Nothing really complex, but they are the first (to my best knowledge) to turn it from a dream to a real thing. My kudos to you guys!
I personally, will give them a spin. It seems to be a good idea to finally organize my commenting world. It’s not too big, but still… One side-effect I noticed is that whatever conversation you take part in becomes visible to anyone in the world. I believe there’s something I can do to stay private as it’s definitely not in my plans to share a big chunk my personal life with “a community”. Let private stay private, I would say.
Anyway, good piece of news!
Update: I found privacy settings where they let (but not recommend) me hide my conversations from the world.
The Ruby on Rails addict, industrial photographer and amateur electronic music composer. In the mean time I build great web applications, contribute to OSS and help AVAAZ to save Great Barrier Reef.
