Linux for Designers

Using a grid for your design is one way to keep it smooth and clear. The Smashing Magazine wrote interesting articles about what grid design is and how to use it.
Meanwhile the standard resolution for web pages is 1024x768px and Nathan Smith developed the perfect 960 Grid System. On his website he shows all the beautiness of it and made templates for various programms available. The 960 Grid System is now available for Inkscape too.

Blanket 14 is out., They described themeself as "a free PDF online magazine that is aimed at uncovering art, design and photography from the talented people who create it". Again interesting stuff at all.

A new year start and the web is filled up with forecsts about web and design trends in 2009. Here is a short overview:
* T3N Web Trends 2009
* Smashing Magazin: Web Design Trends For 2009
* Open Source Technology: 2008-2009 Web Trends - WEB 3.0
* Baekdal: Web Trends 2009
* Independent.ie: Tech Trends 2009
* Just Creative Design: Logo Design Trends 2009

Looking for a cool nice fonts? Try that:

• Open Font Library
  
• Fonts @ the Smashing Magazin
  
• Dafont
  
• I love Typography
  
• Typophile
  

Once i posted a link about two good wallpaper selections of the Smashing Magazine. Today Sebastian, member of the DEV3 team, droped me a link to Desktopography. Desktopography offers a really quite amazing collections of wallpapers - check it out!

For those that loving funny sketches and art: Beautiful Examples of Moleskine Art. Another goody of the Smashing Magazine.

After creating a new splash for TORCS (using Blender and Gimp) i finished now a new Tango styled icon for TORCS. I enjoyed it again working with Inkscape:
How i did it:
* Set up the document (Shift+Ctrl+D) to 48x48px size
* Setup in the same dialogue the grid with 1px space
* Diplay the grid (View > Grid)
* Optional let the paths snap to the grid
* Now create/ design your icon but make sure everything used full pixel sizes/ positions
* Export the images as PNG (File > Bitmap export)

TORCS is available for Windows too and so i have to create a multiformat icon in the Windows ICO format too. Gimp make it possible to save images as the required format. The bad thing is that Gimp can't create multiformat icons (like Sibcodes plugin for Photoshop). Gimp didn't add resources it always replaces the full icon I created a bug report for Gimp 2.6.0.
Stupid me, GIMP can do!
Creating a multi-format Windows ICO with Gimp:
* Open the biggest icon PNG (in my case 48x48)
* drag all smaller resolutions into it
* If you like to create various color depths duplicate the layers often as needed (i duplicated them one time because i'd like to export 24bpp and 32bpp icons)
* Now save the layered image as an *.ico
* At save dialogue assign the color depth to any layer
* Save it, you will get an Ico file with various sizes and color depth

If you do illustrations with Inkscape or Gimp and looking for inspirations you should check out Cool Showcase

Smashing Magazine: Pop Art Is Alive: Classics and Modern Artworks
Design Reviver: 15 Amazing 3D Flash Websites
Design Reviver: 400+ High Quality Patterns
.net: The best Flash sites ever
inspiredology: Keep It Simple Stupid; 48 Super Simple, Clean Websites

The Smashing Magazine wrotes two interesting articles about Web Form Design Patterns:
Sign-Up Forms Part 1
Sign-Up Forms Part 2

There is an older article about creative web forms design too.