The Cultivated Web Blog » Web Sites

The Advent Calendar for Web Designers and Developers

Mitch Cohen — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 17:22:54 +0000

The more time I spend on the web the more gems I stumble upon. But I did not find this gem on StumbleUpon.com. This time I was venturing into a new (for me) service to reach out a little more and enhance my online identity with Gravatar. What Gravatar does is provide you with a globally recognizable avatar. For those who may not know, an avatar is representation of yourself, in this case a small image. When you open an account and upload your avatar, the Gravatar service will show it on blogs, forums, or any other web site that supports them when you do something like comment on a blog post or participate in a forum.

But I digress. Gravatar is not the gem I am talking about, although I believe it will prove to have value. Gravatar.com is the starting point that led me to 24 Ways to Impress Your Friends, a wonderful collection of web design and development articles and tutorials posted each year on the first 24 days of December. The authors are a diverse group of rather pretigious personas in the web design and development world such as Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, and Kevin Yank. As you might expect, the design is a good example of blending functionality, information architecture, and content. Make no mistake, it’s the content (as should be with all web sites) that is the real value here.

I’m interested in what you think about 24 Ways, so leave a comment.

Here’s to the Endurance of the Perishable Press

Mitch Cohen — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 03:04:03 +0000

Sublime, elegant, well written design blog of Jeff Starr. This most informative blog covers a wide range of technologies that pertain to digital design. Jeff reminds me how much I have to learn and I always learn something new. The Perishable Press challenges us all to be better designers. Remember the quote from the potato chip commercial, “I bet you can’t eat one”? Well, I be you can’t just read one Perishable post. They just make you want more and what may start out as a 10 minute visit will often turn into a 30 minute read and an hour of putting your new found knowledge into practice and then going back for more. Head over to Perishable Press and see for yourself.

Do You Need to Smash Your Creativity?

Mitch Cohen — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:58:43 +0000

I started with the intention to write a post about some great tutorials on using Illustrator. When I started looking at those tutorials, I really had to resist the temptation to watch them and try them out myself. But I stayed on track for about 5 minutes until I became so impressed with all the other great content for web designers and web developers at Smashing Magazine. They have so much such for web design and web application development it’s mind boggling. Tutorials, how-to articles, tools of all kinds, design principles, fonts, graphics, icons, wallpapers, and on and on. This site is such a great resource I’ve added it to my list of resources at the right side of this blog. Smash On!