The Design Disconnect

This a must-read for any and all designers, I think. The author, Ross, talks about his struggles with design, client revisions, and the like. If you’re a designer, you will relate.

Creating a Body Border

A (older but updated to reflect new methods) tutorial on how to create a border that goes around the inside of your browser window. Web design trickery!

Biofuel Caffeinated Popcorn

Designers & developers can be known to burn the midnight oil. Instead of brewing up a pot of coffee to keep you awake to hit that deadline, why not try caffeinated popcorn? Weird. I think I’ll stick to the coffee.

Better Image Management with WordPress

WordPress is our CMS of choice; that’s been beaten into the ground by this point. However, it’s not perfect and there are always ways to improve it – and this article touches on exactly that, focusing on handling images within the CMS.

Ostrich Sans

Odd name, pretty cool typeface. 5 different fonts are in this family, and they’re good for display use (exclusively, I’d say).

See you next week!

Lost Type Co-Op

This “type co-op” (aka foundry) commissions typefaces from a variety of designers. You pay what you want – the Radiohead model, if you will – and that money goes to the type designer. Some cool display faces in here.

Freebie Pixels

Freebie Pixels offers resources for designers to download and use; however, those designers who submit resources that get accepted earn “Pixel Points”, which can be used to buy other resources from their Pixel Store. Interesting concept.

Simple Desktops

If you’re a fan of minimalism, you’ll like the wallpapers that Simple Desktops have to offer. But be sure to come back here on the first of every month for our monthly desktop calendar wallpapers!

BundleHunt 4

While I might be feeling a little overwhelmed with the explosion of “deals” around these ‘ere Innernet parts, BundleHunt 4 offers some great stuff- 13 Mac Apps & resources for designers, to be specific, at a combined 93% discount.

Rebinder

Rebinder is a company that offers truly sustainable office products. I dig the look of what they’ve got going, and you get to feel good about doing your part too! Their goods could have potential for branding collateral for a lower-budget, eco-focused client too.

See you next week!

24 Ways: 2010

Let’s just let the website authors explain: “24 ways is the advent calendar for web geeks. Each day throughout December we publish a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring you all a little Christmas cheer.” Sounds like fun to me!

50 Beautiful Examples of Snowboard Designs

‘Tis the season! To get out on the slopes and shred, that is. If you’re lucky enough to be working on a snowboard design, or if you just want to see some great work, check out this post for inspiration.

Tips to Create Awesome 48×48 Icons

WeGraphics has a great tutorial on creating a 48×48 pixel Wacom tablet icon. Not only do they go step-by-step, but they explain a bit of the thought process behind the decisions. Good read.

Gains Clients & Avoid Stress with a Solid Design Brief

We’ve talked about design briefs before; this article takes it a bit further. Have a read, freelancers!

Lens Bracelets

If you are a photographer nerd, or if you have a photographer nerd friend, this would be a great stocking stuffer. A bracelet – a la the Livestrong style – but designed to look like part of a camera lens. Brilliant!

See you next week!

Bamboo Bottle

Plastic bottles are terrible for the environment and you, if you reuse them. So kick the habit by picking up this Bamboo Bottle.

Dirpy

A website with a very simple premise: it takes in Youtube videos and spits out MP3s. So, for all of you who want the mp3 version of my engagement stickman country music video for Andy (moderately NSFW because of a swear… man I’m so romantic), now you have your chance. (via swiss-miss)

Envato Birthday Bundle

$400 worth of high-quality design files for $20? Count me in. WordPress themes, vectors, PSD templates, CSS-only designs, and so forth. Only available for a few more days, so get on it if you want it.

10 Essential Free eBooks for Web Designers

I don’t know when I’m going to find the time to read 10 ebooks on design, but I’ll find the time to at least skim a couple. Check this list out if web design is your thing.

Nikon S1100 PJ

Point and shoots don’t really excite me, but this guy – which comes in different colors, thankfully – lets you connect to your computer and project images up to 47″. Pretty solid for $350.

That’s it that’s all! See you next week.

Every Friday, we’ll post a new Found Friday article, linking to a variety of design-related articles, items & more that we’ve discovered during the week that we think are awesome. We’re active in the online design community, and there is a ton of new content released every week; our hope is to help spread some of that content to people who might also think it’s great. I hope you, our readers, will find this post both more fun & useful than the weekly wallpapers post.

So let’s get rolling. The inaugural Found Friday post features the following: an ultra minimal start page, a redesigning of Valentine’s Day, a huge & awesome icon pack, a really little content management system, the BBC site redesign process, and 35 new free fonts for designers.

FAV4.ORG

How to use Fav4.org: choose your 4 favorite websites from their list. Set the page as your browser’s home page. Enjoy the ease of minimalist design. (via swiss-miss)

REDESIGNING VALENTINE’S DAY

The gents over at Brand New (a great blog on identity design) were tasked to redesign Valentine’s Day. Read about their process, and see the awesome result, here.

Hit the jump for the rest of the article!

NIXUS ICON PACK

Tutorial 9 has released a free icon pack with 60 very useful, very well-designed icons for you. Enjoy!

PERCH

In their own words: “a really little content management system”. It’s not CushyCMS; it’s not WordPress; it’s in between, and it looks awesome. Buy Perch on a per-website license for a very reasonable price, install on your server, brand it yourself, and let the love from your clients roll in.

BBC SITE REDESIGN

The BBC redesigned their site, and this article details how in-depth the process was. A great article to reference when a client can’t understand why a “simple website” costs $XXXX (not that we all go to this extent).

35 NEW FREE FONTS

InstantShift posted a nice list this week of 35 new free fonts, for those looking to spice up their font collection.

Hopefully you found these links as useful & interesting as I did – if so, perhaps share the love below. Tune back in Monday for a new post!