Over at iliveonyourvisits.com they have put together a neat little quiz to test your typographical skills. The Arial vs Helvetica test. Can you tell which font is which? It’s actually alot harder than I thought.

I have tried it twice now, I did take about a week in between tests so that the answers weren’t commited to memory. The first time I took the test i scored a 5 out of 10, and then second time i scored a 6 out of 10. It is truely almost impossible to tell the difference. I’m interested to know if anyone has the ability to get 10 our of 10 on this one.

Give it a try:

Arial vs Helvetica

THE Right Brain vs Left Brain test … do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it.

LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses logic
detail oriented
facts rule
words and language
present and past
math and science
can comprehend
knowing
acknowledges
order/pattern perception
knows object name
reality based
forms strategies
practical
safe

RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses feeling
“big picture” oriented
imagination rules
symbols and images
present and future
philosophy & religion
can “get it” (i.e. meaning)
believes
appreciates
spatial perception
knows object function
fantasy based
presents possibilities
impetuous
risk taking

Over at W3 Schools, they have setup a small CSS Quiz to test your skills. It’s all pretty basic stuff.

I got 19 out of 20 which resulted in a 95%, but I claim shenanigans! One of the questions was worded to be a little tricky and if you don’t pay attention and read carefully, you might just have the same outcome. I could take it again, but I know I would get a 100% since I know what I read wrong.

So go over to the site here:

W3 Schools Quiz

And test your skills!

Feel free to post your results here..

*Update

So it seems more and more people are trying to cheat this test by searching for the answers on Google. I mean, are you serious? Why bother cheating on a test like this? You aren’t being graded by a teacher. This is just a test to see how much you know. If you are failing the test, it’s obvious that you need to learn a little more. The test is just about the easiest test on CSS I have seen. Just today alone I received about 5 new hits from Google with the search term of CSS Quiz Answers.

I hope you people out there are just trying to learn, and not cheat.

On a side note, I will be putting together my own CSS Quiz in the very near future. And it will get harder as the test goes on, to really test your skills.

As a designer I often find myself using many of the same colors over and over. That’s not to say they aren’t a wide range of colors, but they are used more often than other colors. The amount of colors available to us designers is just about limit-less, so why do many of us find ourselves in the same position of repeatedly using the same colors?

The answer is we become comfortable with what works for us. And when I find myself once again using comfortable colors, I go to my extensive vault of links to help myself out of a rut.

So please enjoy my collection of links to websites with colors, color palettes and patterns. As always this list will be continually updated.

Last Updated 1-11-08

Kuler

Brought to you be Adobe, this online color tool is basically a social color palette website. Quickly create harmonious color themes online. Explore, create and share color themes.

Colour Lovers

COLOURlovers^TM is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color – whether for ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification – a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.

Color Hunters

Create and find color palettes made from images

Color Palette Generator

Pretty much self explanatory

Web 2.0 Color Palette

Organised into 3 distinct colour groups – neutrals, muted tones and bold colours, you may recognize a few of the shades from some of your favourite Web2.0 sites.

Squidfingers

This is just a site with tons of free patterns to download. I wouldn’t say these are Web 2.0 style patterns, but they are pretty good, and you just might be able to find some uses for them.

GenoPal

This link points to the free online application, but there is a more full and robust version that can be purchased and installed on your computer. GenoPal always proposes colors that are eye-pleasing. GenoPal colors are based on how your eye explores color – they are naturally harmonious.

Mayang

A site with mostly textures. Not the best textures in the world, but they are free and you just might find some use for them somewhere.

By now mostly everyone has used a photo host of one type or another. There are numerous websites to go to for your image hosting needs, however, none of them are anywhere close to as cool as RapidBin is. RapidBin combines the best of an image hosting site with the best a screenshot application can hope to offer.

Rapidbin can handle all the normal images you would expect an image host to handle. But that’s not where the real beauty of RapidBin comes in. RapidBin has a Win32 application (which means you can run it on your computer without installing it) which makes taking screenshots and uploading it a snap.

You can either take a snapshot of your entire screen, or use the “Shoot By Selection” option (which was my idea I gave to the creator coincidentally ) to select an area of your screen that you would like to screenshot. After taking the screenshot, the image is instantaneously uploaded onto the RapidBin server and the URL to the image is automatically copied to your clipboard for you paste away!

So save yourself hours of screen-shooting and editing and download the RapidBin application today!

Everyone loves icons right? Right! So I have put together a list of some of my favorite and some of the best icon sites I have managed to find on the internet, along with a few examples each of the site has to offer..

If you have any other great links to add to the list, just go ahead and leave a comment with the link.

This page will be updated regularly
Last Updated 1-14-08

H-T-D

This site is one of my newest discoveries and has some of the best looking, highest quality icons I have seen. I don’t even know what to call the website because half of it is in another language of some sort, but I will take full advantage of all it has to offer, and I suggest you do to.

FREE ICONS WEB

Free Icons Web has quite an impressive selection of truly high quality icons. Most of the icons are not full sets, but mini sets with particular themes in mind. The icons I show above are just small samples of very different sets available for free.

Sweetie

Some small and clean icons to use for your various web development projects.

DESKTOP LAND

A very random selection of high quality and not as high quality icons. It’s not an all in one icon website, but you just may find the perfect icon you have been looking for.

WEB 2.0 BADGES

A Web 2.0 badge generator. Select from many different badges, add your text, and download. Simple as that.

DESIGNER FOLIO

A selection of a few good looking Web 2.0 badges available for download.

The web, such a bountiful source of free information. The really is no limit to the amount of information you can stumble upon and consume, and completely free no less!

After years and years of being a web designer, I have gathered quite a collection of links to websites that offer me unlimited amounts of css tips, tricks, and free downloads. I have decided to share my list with the rest of you. I hope you enjoy them, as much as I do.

This page will be updated regularly

Last Updated 1/25/08

Dynamic Drive

An amazing archive of numerous free css based scripts, menus, layouts and much much more. Some of my personal favorites are the ones that are inside the Dynamic category.

Layout Gala

Free CSS layouts to download

LightWindow

Of all the LightBox scripts, I think this is so far my favorite. It supports video, flash, external websites, forms, inline content (divs) and of course images. And it also looks amazing as well. Definitely a highly recommended script.

ShadowBox

I really like this lightbox script. It might be in contest for my favorite lightbox script with the LightWindow one above. Best thing about this one though, is that its html will validate, which lets face it is increasingly important these day.

Lightview

This is yet another script that can be used to overlay image on top of the current pag. It is very similar to Lightbox, Thickbox, and Greybox.

Before I get to the bad stuff, I will talk about the good parts about the script. The interface is quite nice looking, with white rounded corners and borders. The animation effect is also quite smooth and nice to look at.

However, I have tested this script on both IE6, and FF2 and I must say that it works better on IE6. On Firefox the animation is a little bit jittery, and gives a very strange effect outside of the borders. It almost looks like a magnifying glass is being put over the outside edge for a quick second, but after the animation is over, it looks great!. I suspect this is a bug that will be worked out in the near future. So defintely don’t hesitate to try this script out for yourself!

Facebox

Facebox is a jQuery-based, Facebook-style lightbox which can display images, divs, or entire remote pages.It’s simple to use and easy on the eyes. Download the tarball, view the examples, then start enjoying the curves.

Lightbox

Lightbox is a very simple script that can be used to overlay an image on top of the current page to keep users from being linked to other pages. It is an exceptionally clean way to show off your pictures, designs, and more.

Thick Box

Another version of the Lightbox script. This version adds support for more than just images, you can include iFrames, div’s and many other text based pieces of content.

Greybox

Yet another version of the Lightbox script. This one is probably one of the most well rounded versions I have seen. You can display external pages in the pop ups, and the gallery setup is just plain beautiful.

MultiBox

This is one of the best incarnations of the Lightbox scripts I have seen so far. I am very impressed with this one, and suggest trying it out. Lightbox that supports images, flash, video, mp3s, html.

HighSlide

Highslide JS is an open source JavaScript software, offering a Web 2.0 approach to popup windows. It streamlines the use of thumbnail images and HTML popups on web pages.

DHTML Goodies

DHTML Goodies has a high quality assortment of CSS / DHTML / AJAX scripts all available to download for free.

CSS Gradients

Think you need images to have gradients in your designs? So did I, at least I used to until a friend of mine told me about this website.

As a web designer I encounter all sorts of road blocks that although small, really start to add up to wasted time that I’m not getting paid enough for. The Web Developer plug for Firefox built by Chris Pederick has completely dissolved all those road blocks to make my life a whole lot easier.

Read on to get a generalized summary, review, and small tutorial on this quite amazing incredibly powerful tool. Read the rest of this entry »

From the first day I discovered Mozilla Firefox I was greatfull to the internet gods. I jumped on board and never looked back at the scourge of the internet, Internet Explorer. As far as I’m concerned they don’t even deserve a link back from my site.
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Being a web and graphic designer, it was only a matter of time until I also started hosting my own clients websites. With this came a whole new set of problems and learning experiences that I would have to cope with to get to the promise land.

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