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.

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.

Today i uploaded a new version of my easyGIMPkit (at the moment german version only). This version brings typical templates for webpages and some more shortcuts like "Alt++" or "Al+-" to change the layer transparency.
» Read more...

When i start developing a new website design for our customers at first i make a little tour to see what's going on at the lazy web. To getting some cool input i visit:
* Smashing Magazine
* CSS Mania
* Surfstation
* K10K
* Designpicks

...and of course using Google to see how others are presented at the web acting in the same business as th customer.
What are your inspirational sources? Tell me

After Firefox has a lot of extensions for web development like ySlow, Web Developer, Firebug and the Internet Explorer has IEpro, Developer Toolbar and the Web Accessibility Toolbar now Opera brings Dragonfly to the front. An addon for web developers using the Opera browser. Since a while a Opera Web Developer toolbar made by the community members is available too, of course Dragonfly will add more features.

I wrote an article for the T3N issue 12 about GIMP and complex webdesign. Here you can find the easyGIMPkit. Basiclly that are configuration files (window behavior, space optimized theme and shortcuts simliar to Photoshop) and some additional scripts (layer effects, duplicating or Moving selections, paste as layer etc.).

Download the easyGIMPkit (german version) and copy all files into

/home/aeggy/.gimp-2.4

Windows user have to copy it to

C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\#YourProfileName\.gimp-2.4

To turn GIMP into a good graphic editor for web development you may install these plugins:
* Save for Web (Windows - Ubuntu Linux)
* UFRaw (Ubuntu Linux package "gimp-ufraw)
* Deskew (Windows and Ubuntu Linux)
* GREYCstoration (Windows and Ubuntu Linux)
* Liquid Rescale (Windows and Ubuntu Linux)

If you like to use GIMP for creating textures for 3D or realtime 3D content check out the article "Pimp the GIMP for 3D". If you can read/ understand german take a look at the german ubuntuusers board, icecold posted there a nice workflow using UFRaw, Gimp and Greycstoration. Visit my post about batch processing too.