Let me elaborate on what this means. In the last year and a half ARCPligg has grown well beyond our expectations and it is getting difficult for the developers to manage the business side of ARCPligg on a daily basis without slowing down development. Which consists mainly of advertising, support, and community management. We’ve seen many online businesses develop products to support ARCPligg recently. Selling everything from custom templates and modules, to support and installation. This should be a clear example of the popularity of ARCPligg. We believe by allowing more seasoned professionals take over the day to day management of ARCPligg, it will allow ARCPligg to flourish into realm’s that we never thought possible.

So what does this mean to you, the “ARCPligg”? Right now, not much, as we’ve just open the channels up for negotiation. Any transfer of ARCPligg ownership could take months. We believe this will bring a vast improvements the the ARCPligg community and allow the developers to continue working on the project uninterrupted.

As of right now nothing has changed. Keep up your ARCPligg and we will update you with any information we get.

Beautiful composition, excellent scenery, amazing play of colors.

2. The Ball is Coming!
Analogue shot with Seagull 6×6 (Chinese clone of Rolleiflex), made in 1983. “The gulfball is suspended on a fishing line in front of the camera. It was a stormy day. So I had to shoot 5 or 6 films for getting one image with the ball in the center position AND a light reflection on the golf club.”

3. Sky
The sky is reflected in a drop of water. Beautiful scenery.

4. Returning to the same ocean
Beautiful sand textures, beautiful composition and somehow a very sad story hidden behind the image.

5. Tree
A colorful tree from a different perspective.

6. Gizmo
How adorable is that?

7. Glittery Ball
“The reflection in this water droplet, it looks like the glitter is stuck to the water, but NO, it is reflections from the glitter on the feather.”

8. Yaw? Weeeee
You probably shouldn’t try this in your local trains. Such pictures are unforgettable.

9. Leap of Faith
What does being one step away from falling into the abyss feel like?

10. Astronaut Self-shot Over Earth
Could this be the best self-shot ever? It’s truly out of this world.

11. Autumn in red
Pure beauty. No words are necessary.

12. FlickrMeeting – Genova – G3
Blue baloon, a small detail, gives the picture an incredible power.

13. Sea in the sea
Incredible scenery. Apparently, the shot was made on the boat in the middle of the sea.

14. If I was an old building…
“If I was an old building I would want to be by the ocean. Till’ the end of times”. Photographed at the old fishing piers of the Texas Bolivar Peninsula.

15. Bee the Cat
“It’s hard to get the right exposure, with them being white, and with the fact they don’t stay still unless they’re sleeping.”

16. Passing the Golden Gate Bridge

17. Glow
Smoke from a leaf pile.

18. Swimming pool
Taking a look at the swimming pool. From a quite different perspective.

19. Reflect
A reflection from the louvre’s pyramid.

20. Time To Go Home…
“Tthe way the birds are lined up makes the composition extraordinary fantastic.”

21. Seagull on a sign
This seagull seems to have its own personal understanding of human’s rules.

22. Marshmellow girl
A beautiful composition.

23. Refashioned Dahlia
Photo taken at Duncan Garden in Spokane, WA.

24. Bird and Meat

25. Water drop
A photo taken at the exact right time. Available as a desktop wallpaper in various resolutions.

26. Mt. Fuji

27. Two ways at looking at a fish

28. Blessed fog
A shot of Grande Madre di Dio in Torino, Italy.

29. Family of bugs

30. Pigeon Point Lighthouse
“Once per year at the Pigeon Point Lighthouse they shut down the weak insipid modern (presumably electric) light and switch over the the 5 kerosene lamps and fresnel lens of the original, as it was 135 years ago.”

31. Fire Shot
Location: Changa Beach, Coquimbo.

32. A conversation
Fox, bird and snow. This picture is titled “Good afternoon, my name is chikiricuatro”.

33. Shanghai – Acrobatic
Picture taken during an acrobatic show in a Shanghainese theatre.

34. Northern lights as seen from space

35. Red October Rise
Sunrise over Bogie Lake, Michigan.

36. Crystal clarity

37. Skier’s Paradise
“Climbing partner at 17,000′ on Denali carrying his skis down to around 16,200′ where he will be able to ski down the rest of the way to base camp at 7200′.”

38. Bird and Water

39. Photograph Taken at the Exact Right Time

40. All alone.
This shot is taken on a Norway’s cliff Prekestolen (also known as Preacher’s Pulpit).

41. Looking out of the window

42. Above the clouds
The shot taken during the flight from Vienna to Frankfurt, approaching Frankfurt.

43. The Waves

44. The Waves. One more time.

45. Cockfight
Taken by Jan Sochor.

46. Polar lights
Öxarárfoss in Iceland – Aurora Borealis taken by Arnar Valdimarsson.

47. Concentration

48. Cat and deer

49. Here floats a bubble in the air…

50. A girl portrait

Sources and Resources

You’ll find many more excellent photos, illustrations and pictures on the following sites:

• Pixdaus.com
  A social community dedicated to sharing photos. Pixdaus is a place where anyone can post his pictures, photos and others rate it. If it’s cool it gets to the main page and more people can enjoy it.
• Ffffound.com
  Image bookmarking. An invitation-based service.

Related posts

You may also want to take a look at the following posts:

• (Really) Stunning Desktop Wallpapers covers desktop wallpapers related to typography, art, technology, photography and abstract themes,
• 35 Fantastic HDR Pictures presents 35 extremely beautiful and perfectly executed HDR-pictures.

Do they visit the content you want them to visit? Are they looking in the right places of your web page? Are you able to keep your user’s attention, or do they just leave quickly?

It’s not just about the content either. If your design loads slowly – or if moving from one section to another takes a long time – it affects the user’s experience.

These things can be the make-or-break factors between a user clicking on a link to find more information, or the back button to find it elsewhere.

Some things to consider:

• Are important information being seen by the user?
• Are the navigation and action items intuitive?
• Is the user being directed to sections in a logical manner?
• Does the web page load quickly enough to not turn away the user?

If you’re interested in analyzing and optimizing your page layout – here’s some extremely useful tools that you can use to help.

1. ClickHeat

ClickHeat is an open source visual tool for showing “hot” and “cold” zones of a web page. It allows you to see which spots users click on most, and which spots are being ignored.

It’s very easy to implement on your website, you only have to include an external JavaScript file.

Download: Clickheat on SourceForge.net.

2. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg offers a myriad of analytical tools to help you visualize what visitors are doing.

Features include: Confetti - allowing you to see what people are clicking on based on certain factors such as their operating system and where they came from, Overlay – providing you with tons of data about particular links, and Report sharing – enabling you to share the data with team members and clients.

The free version only allows 4 pages to be tracked – so use your top landing pages to get the most data.

3. YSlow for Firebug

A key tenet of a strong design is that, not only should information be presented in a logical and elegant fashion, but that it must also be served quickly, with very little delay.

YSlow for Firebug is a free tool for Mozilla Firefox that gives you information about your front-end design to see if it performs well. It gives you a letter grade (A through F) and outlines your web page’s trouble spots.

It’s based on the Yahoo! Developer Network’s “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site” initially written by Steve Souders, who was once the Chief of Performance at Yahoo! and is now working over at Google on web performance and open source initiatives.

Downloads: Firebug extension for Firefox (required) and YSlow.

4. clickdensity

clickdensity is a full suite of usability analysis tools that will help you assess your web page design.

You can use heat maps showing where users click on the most, hover maps – which shows people scrolling over links but not clicking on them, and A/B Tests which allows you to change certain page elements to see which style is more effective.

The free subscription give you 5,000 clicks and only one page and one site to monitor.

5. ClickTale

ClickTale offers a lot of user data pertaining to how visitors use your website.

There are plenty of things you can look at such as average time it takes for a user to click on a link, a user’s hesitation on clicking a link, hover to click ratio, and much more. It also provides detailed reports and charts on your users’ monitor sizes to better optimize your web page design to cater for the typical visitor.

6. Clicky

Perhaps the most interesting feature that Clicky has is its real-time tracking and monitoring feature, called Spy (check out the demo here).

Besides Spy, there’s a host of other analytics data you can look at such as user Actions – which records click data from your users and Visitors – providing you user data.

7. Google Analytics

One of the best free services that Google offers is Google Analytics and probably the most well-known analytics tool. It’s incredibly easy to install and offers plenty of user and content data to help you learn more about your web pages’ performance.

It has a feature called Site Overlay, which gives you a visual representation of the popular places your users like to click on. It also offers data on bounce rates and your top exit pages (to see what pages make users leave).

So there they are, some of the best tools in the market to help you troubleshoot and optimize your page layout. In the end, it’s a combination of great content, as well as how you present this content — that will lead to an effective design.

Alexa

• Alexa-Ranking
  Alexa page-rank-and-rating-results
• Alexa Web Rank Checker
  Check your site’s current Alexa Web Rank, Incoming Links, Reach Rank & Average Reviews

Backlink

• Anchor Text Backlink Checker
  This tool is to check your backlinks and the anchor text used in those backlinks.
• Backlink Analyzer
  Research and analyze websites for link quality. Checks for Indexed Pages, Links to Website, EDU & .GOV Links, Domain Age & Expiration, Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rank, DMOZ Listing
• Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer
  This tools help you determine the backlinks of your website and link text used by your backlinks to Link to your website
• Backlink Builder
  Building Quality backlinks is one of the most important factors in Search Engine Optimization…

Domain Popularity, Domain Stats Tools…

• Domain Age Tool
  This tools displays the approximate age of a website on the Internet and allows you to view how the website looked when it first started
• Domain Dossier
  Investigate domains and IP addresses
• Domain Popularity
  This tool shows you all backlinks for the given domain, including up to 10 subpages per backlinking domain, host IP and Google PageRank
• Domain Stats Tool
  This tool helps you get all kind of statistics of your competitor’s domains. The statistics include Alexa Taffic Rank, Age of the domains, Yahoo WebRank, Dmoz listings, count of backlinks and number of pages indexed in Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Msn etc.
• HTTP / HTTPS Header Check
  This tools allow you to inspect the HTTP headers that the web server returns when requesting a URL. Works with HTTP and HTTPS URLs
• View HTTP Headers
  This little tool lets you view the HTTP headers for a HTTP request
• View HTTP Path
  This little tool lets you view the path/redirects a request takes to get fulfilled

Google Page Rank Checker, Adwords Keyword Tools,Google Banned Tools…

• Advanced Google searches
  Use this tool to search google in many special ways. A useful resource for search engine optimization (especially keyword research) among other things
• Check Google Pagerank
  Now you can check the Google PageRank of any web page without installing the Google toolbar
• Check PageRank by Google data center
  With this tool you can check the PageRank from different data centers
• Free Google Adsense Keywords & YPN Keywords Search Tool
  With the ability to search a growing database of tens of thousands of high-dollar Adsense keywords, Iotaweb allows publishers to find the keywords and key phrases that will allow them to focus their content to monetize their site most effectively.
• Google Adwords Keyword Tool
  Keyword tool from Google that provides Specific and Similar keywords.
• Google Banned Tool
  This tool uses two methods to check to see if a URL you enter is in the Google database. Its a great way to check to see if you have been banned by Google for various reasons….
• Google Keyword Ranking Tool
  Search with list of keywords from differnet Google search sites
• Google Page Rank Checker
  Instantly check the PageRank of any website or web page
• Google Page Rank Checker
  A simple tool that checks and your PageRank so you can display it on your website
• Google Sets
  Automatically create sets of items from a few examples.
• Google Synonyms
  Type in a keyword to get Google’s synonyms using the “~keyword -keyword” method.
• PageRank Authenticity Check
  This tool shows you the PageRank of a given domain. Also the PageRank will be checked of authenticity
• Page Rank Tool
  Our PageRank Tool will query and return the Google PageRank values for submitted URL from various Google datacenters…
• Poodle Predictor
  See your site like Google does. Simulate search engines and predict your Google listings
• Visual PageRank
  The Visual PageRank – Tool shows all links and there corresponding PageRanks

Keyword Analysis Tool, Keyword Density, Keyword Suggestion Tools…

• McDar Keyword Analysis Tool
  Enter URL and keyword, it will display Pagerank and Back links pages for the Top 10 websites.
• Keyword Density
  This tool shows you how often appears which word in content of given domain
• Keyword Density
  The keyword density tool is useful for helping webmasters and SEOs achieve their optimum keyword density for a set of key terms.
• Keyword Density Checker
  Keyword Density is the percentage of occurrence of your keywords to the text in the rest of your webpage. This tool will crawl the specified URL, extract text as a search engine would, remove common stop words and Analyze the density of the keywords.
• Keyword Difficulty Tool
  The keyword difficulty tool is used to analyze the competitive landscape of a particular search term or phrase, this tool issues a percentage score and provides a detailed analysis of the top ranking sites at Google and Yahoo…
• Keyword research service
  Type a keyword or phrase and get the top 10 Keyword Discovery listings
• KwMap.net
  A Keyword Map For the Whole Internet
• Keyword Suggestion Tool
  This keyword suggestion tool will help you with the choosing of the right keywords for your website. You can see which keyword combinations are more popular and also get ideas for more keyword combinations..
• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
  Free Overture and Google Keyword suggestion tool
• Website Keyword Suggestions
  This tools tries to determine the theme of your website and provides keyword suggestions along with keyword traffic estimates.
• Ontology Finder
  Related Keywords Lookup Tool
• Overture Keyword Tool
  This tool, based on the excellent Overture and Wordtracker keyword search tools, gives similar data, including search figures from the previous month. It also adds statistics for average searches per hour, day, week, projected figures for the next 12 months and then also a figure to see how searches may look in 3 years from now.

Link Popularity Check, Site Link Analyzer, Link Value…

• Deep Link Ratio Tool
  This tool was created to analyze how the deep link ratio of a site affects its rank in search engines. We can use this tool to compare the DLRs for the best ranking sites for a search phrase.
• Link Popularity Check
  Link popularity check is one of the best ways to quantifiably and independently measure your website’s online awareness and overall visibility…
• Link Popularity Checker
  The Link Popularity Checker tells you how many websites are linking to yours…
• LINK VALIDATION SPIDER
  Free Online Broken Link Checker
• Link Price Calculator
  This tools will help you determine the approximate amount you should be paying (or charging) per month for a text link (ad) from each and every page of the specified website
• Link Value
  This tool calculates the link value per month of a given website.
• Reciprocal Link Check
  This tool helps you ensure that your link partners are linking back to your website. It also determines the anchor text used by your link partners to link to your website.
• Site Link Analyzer
  This tool will analyze a given web page and return a table of data containing columns of outbound links and their associated anchor text…
• The Link Reputation Measurement Tool
  Reveals backlinks pointing to your target url along with the following: Link Survey – Link Reputation Score – Text used in links pointing to you – Alexa traffic analysis for the site corresponding to each backlink
• Outbound Links
  This tool shows every outgoing link from the given domain. Separated in external and internal links

Meta Tag Generators

• Meta Tag Generator
  Our Meta Tag Generator will read the page you specify, remove common words from it, and pick the most used words on the page. It will then generate a Meta Keywords tag using the words it has found…
• Meta Tag Generator
  Use this tool to generate a search engine friendly Head Tag for your web site
• Title & Meta Tags Generator
  his code generator will build the title and meta tags for your site to help improve your website’s search engine ranking using our Meta Tag Generator

Miscellaneous Tools

• 156 Seo Tools
  One of the most comprehensive lists with useful, essential SEO tools.
• Directory Submission Manager
  Use this free tool to track your submissions to various web directories….
• Copyscape
  Search for copies of your page on the Web
• Crazy Egg
  Get a clear picture of where your visitors are clicking and enhance your site’s results
• Site Analysis including Link Popularity
  This tool generates a complete site analysis e.g. amount of backlinks, indexed sites, Google PageRank and also if your domain is listed in DMOZ and Yahoo directory
• Sitemap Generator
  Create your Google Sitemap Online
• Browser Screen Resolution Checker
  The browser screen resolution checker shows what your web page looks like with the viewer’s monitor set to different screen resolutions
• Similar Page Checker
  Search Engines are known to penalize websites that contain Duplicate / Similar content. Your content could be similar to other websites on the Internet, or pages from within your own website could be similar to each other. This tool allows you to determine the percentage of similarity between two pages
• Speedtester
  This tool shows the duration of a given website. This value can be used for showing how long a website take to load and if it is better to optimize the website or change a (slow) ISP.
• mod_rewrite RewriteRule Generator
  Our mod_rewrite RewriteRule generator will take a dynamic url given to it, and generate the correct syntax to place in a .htaccess file to allow the url to be rewritten in a spiderable format
• URL Rewrite (mod_rewrite)
  With this tool you can generate dynamic urls to search engine friendly urls..
• URL Rewriting Tool
  Create Search Engine Friendly URLs
• User Agent Cloaking Detector
  This tool simulates the Googlebot (based on User-Agent) to detect cloaked content
• What is Hosted on that IP
  This little tool lets you view the virtual hosts on a particular IP

Search Engine Position Checker, Spider Simulator, Ranking Report, SERP Tracker

• Dogpile
  Search Comparison Tool
• Google vs Yahoo Graph
  This tool looks at the results from Yahoo and Google, finds the similarities and then gives you a graphical display of what results are in both search engines
• Search Engine Position Checker
  The Search Engine Position Checker tool will automatically query the search engines you specify and check if your URL appears in the first 50 results for your chosen keywords….
• Search Engine Simulator
  This service allows web authors to see what their pages will look like (sort of) to a search engine. This service ignores the META tags that some search engines honor.
• Search Engine Spider Simulator
  With this tool you see all informations a search engine spider receive from a website.
• Marketleap Search Engine Verification Tool
  Our verification tool checks to see if your site is in the top three pages of a search engine result for a specific keyword
• Number of pages indexed
  This tool will generate a report showing how many pages of your website has been indexed by the search engines so far. It supports all major search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alltheweb, Hotbot and AltaVista.
• Search Engine Ranking Report
  Input key phrase list get Google rankings
• Serps Position
  Use this tool to find out, on which position your domain is ranked for the given keyword and compare the first 100 results by Google, search.MSN and Yahoo.
• SERP Tracker
  The SERP Tracker reports on search engine results and charts performance over time

SEO Analyzer, Scanner

• Free SEO Tools
  SEOToolSet
• Cool SEO Tool!
  This internet marketing tool checks the top 10 sites that rank in Google. After that, it checks to see how those 10 sites rank in Yahoo and in MSN….
• SEO Analyzer
  The SEO Analyzer is a FREE tool that uses a sophisticated algorithm that detects how optimized your web design is for search engines
• SEO Scanner
  An all-in-one advanced SEO analysis, tracking, and reporting tool

Robots.txt Tools

• Robots Txt Generator
  Use this tool to generate a simple robots file for your website…
• Robots.txt syntax checker
  This robots.txt syntax checker checks the contents of a site’s robots.txt…

Simple, yet brilliant ideas:

The first time you pick your bottle of pop or a package of milk, you might not even notice anything different, with all the intensity and typical clutter of Japanese package design. But take a closer look – and the charmingly designed UPC masterpieces will amuse you, make you smile, and might even cause you to go hunting for other products, to start your collection.

Trust Japanese to “glorify” every single mundane detail, to cheerfully enhance consumer experience – by adding something extra, a little thing, so easy to miss. But now, with these creative bar codes, the package design in Japan has truly become perfect.

Other barcode art pops up from time to time: This is “Flowers” by Dave Herbert – via

Russian Barcode Posters

Art Lebedev design studio has been issuing wildly creative posters (featuring barcode symbolics) for years. View the whole creative gallery of them here and download some for your desktops. Some examples:

As you can see, there is truly an abundance of ideas… It seems that barcode symbols are ingrained in the very fabric of our reality. Philip K. Dick, for once, would’ve certainly spotted a conspiracy in all this. As for us, we’ll just keep shopping and innocently buying everything that scans.

Barcodes permeate modern design

Just try to have an exhibition of modern furniture without a few examples popping up, like this one:

“The Bar Code Chandelier”, by Mobilet design studio:

More glowing barcode light fixtures by Hampstead Lighting:

Check out a LEGO barcode scanner, described on this page. It includes an actual miniature laser, so handle it with care:

How about a bar code building? – via

Portraits, made entirely from UPC codes and barcodes? Sure, check out the gallery of Scott Blake. He’s got Monroe, Elvis and, of course, Jesus – which is a commentary on the consumerism and kitsch of our times.

“MAD” magazine ran a few imaginative barcode covers back in 1979 (more here) -

Want to know the time? Click on his Barcode Clock:

And as it is a custom nowadays to finish with a cute or LOL-lified cat pictures, no matter what the subject of an article, here are the “Barcode Kitties!” – Hello Kitty spin-off for those in need of a truly geeky cuteness:

Sources via Katize, izreloaded, BarcodeNerds

We’ve been working feverishly around the clock on this new tool which will allow you to age and de-age people, places and things from any browser with Flash 9 enabled.

Here’s a video of Dodo in action:

Dodo is incredibly simple to use: Just upload an input picture, choose between different settings that might affect the aging process (i.e. amounts of alcohol and tobacco consumed), set a year and hit generate. Obviously results will vary, but under strenuous laboratory analysis we have found a margin of error of only +-11% (unprecedented performance for time machines in general, let alone web-apps).

Dodo automatically detects the subject matter (noting the difference between people places and things) and chooses how to age it, using the Astley-Zonday time displacement theorem with accurate results.

Dodo can also be used on scenery. For example, Dodo changed this scene from an ordinary spring landscape to winter, using Dodo’s built-in database of geographically accurate weather history.

Additionally, Dodo is not limited to animate objects, and scenes; It works equally well on inanimate objects, predicting what they might look like at specified dates in the past (and future).

We see market opportunity for Dodo across several mediums, not just graphic design. We imagine it will be useful in everything from tracking down long missing children, to determining if a girlfriend will end up looking like her mother, to deceiving potential dates in the personals section of Craigslist.

To access Dodo, sign up for an Aviary account at http://a.viary.com. If you already have an account, please log out and back in to see it appear in your tool

Whether you are just starting out or a seasoned veteran these tools, tutorials, lists and other resources are great sites for any web designer. Organized into helpful categories (design inspiration, CSS resources, web design guides, color tools, free fonts and more) this collection not only has useful resources but also categorized links to other lists with 100s more. If you’re not a designer but still need to create sites you still might be best off spending a few bucks on a web page creation tool with a simple GUI than hiring a designer but can still use the first section below and these great wallpapers to get design inspiration!

General Web Design Inspiration and Useful Design Examples

CSS Beauty is not only an active database for well-designed CSS sites but it is also a way to connect designers with potential clients and a source for web design and general aesthetic inspiration.

Web Design Inspiration is a collection of screenshots showing excellent web designs. It is well worth browsing simply for graphic and web design inspiration.

Web Creme is a very simple site and easy to follow on RSS: screenshots are posted, often more than once per day, of truly impressive web designs.

Unmatched Style is a source for businesses and designers who seek inspiration from particularly attractive, interesting and progressive web designs.

Design Firms is one of many sites on which you can find designers directly but your best bet might be a simple Google search or simply contacting the author of a design found through one of the above-listed design inspiration sites.

25 Beautiful Minimalist Web Designs shows the awesome power of simplicity when it comes to web design – more isn’t necessarily better.

24 Great Niche Galleries has screenshots with descriptions and links to various galleries that you might want to see for more web design inspiration.

10 Great Web [Re]Designs of 2007 features mostly popular and mainstream sites you may already be familiar with but also provides some useful analysis.

Best of CSS 2007 is another great screenshot-packed eye-candy collection of cool web designs from last year – worth bookmarking for future inspiration.

CSS Web Design Examples, Tutorials and Other Resources

CSS Zen Garden allows you to see the full visual potential of CSS designs. You can pick a style sheet and load it onto the page to view the remarkable differences. The goal of the site is to engender new ideas about and discussions around the possibilities inherent in CSS-based design. While underlying code remains the same throughout the visual differences are readily apparent when you switch between views.

CSS2 Specifications is the place to start with CSS (or go back to when you are stuck). Yes, it isn’t trivial, but it is helpful and (despite the ironic lack of good design on the site itself) is something that everyone should have bookmarked if they are still learning CSS.

The CSS Panic Guide is a resource list which, as you might have guessed, is designed for those moments of utter despair and deparation where you are simply stuck. It is fairly well organized and contains links you’ll likely know as well as ones you won’t. This web design link list features everything from validation and text size to accessibility and media types.

The CSS Shark answers some frequently asked questions, explains some of the basics of CSS offers you a tutorial about Positioning with CSS (CSS-P, web design without tables). There is also a page with interesting links to other on- and off-site resources.

CSS Vault is a highly respected (PageRank resource for sharing beautiful CSS designs and layouts that involves (moderated) community communication regarding designs. If you want to get into active CSS discussions this is one place to do that. The content is frequently updated and the user feedback is generally positive. Overall, this is a great place to browse for interesting and well-done CSS web designs and even find designers.

101 more CSS Tips, Tutorials and Examples is what it sounds like: another great resource list if the aforementioned ones don’t fully handle your needs. Unfortunately, the resources aren’t fully described though some descriptive terms are used as part of the link text.

Web Design Guides and Readings on Contemporary Design and Style

Web Design from Scratch is a great resource for a web designer or aspiring designer of websites either just getting started or already experienced. It is designed to show explicit criteria for success and failure as well as step-by-step guides and instructions for improving your designs. Whether you are completely new to web design, working on new design project or simply revisiting and revising an old web design this is well worth checking out and bookmarking for future reference.

Current Style in Web Design Guide takes you through a series of successful and contemporary designs and then parses the various elements that go contribute to the success of these creative designs. From the particular designs, the author of this useful web design guide extracts general principles which can be applied to other designs. For those of us who have difficulty making the jump from principles and examples to actual design practices this is a must-read guide.

Web 2.0 How-To Design Style Guide: This design guide discusses the generally known but rarely articulated styles associated with designing for what is known as “Web 2.0″ by some and cursed as a passing fad by others. Whether or not you buy into the concept of Web 2.0 or consider it overused and outdated this will take you through the parts and pieces of such designs in a way worth at least browsing through if not bookmarking. On a related note, here are 99 Resources for Good Web 2.0 Design.

Color Tools, Ideas, History and Palette Creation Resources

COLOURlovers is probably the web’s top resource for all things color from color inspiration to palette examples, color history and inspiring uses of color. The tricks learned here can be applied to web design as well as other kinds of design work and are designed for both the color-savvy as well as the virtually color-blind designer.

ColorBlender lets you select a preferred color and then creates a palette based on that input. Blends can be saved for future use and tweaked as needed.

4096 Color Wheel is a pretty straightforward and user-friendly tool for creating color palettes and shifting color schemes.

ColorSchemer Studio suggests palette ideas based on initial and changeable inputs and is both fun to play with as well as useful for professionals.

Photo Color Matcher lets you create a color palette from an existing image of your choice. This can be helpful to people who don’t have a natural eye for color and for clients who may wish to have a designer create a color scheme from a photograph or other image.

Web 2.0 Color Palette is organized to help you develop color schemes based on certain criteria that will fit into a so-called Web 2.0-type scheme.

The Meaning of Colors explains the origins of associations we have with colors including cross-cultural analysis of the meanings of colors across ethnic and geographic groups.

Elegant, Obscure, Abstract and Other Free Fonts

Creamundo is a great place to start searching for free fonts organized in useful ways and easy to view custom samples of prior to downloading. These fonts range from simple and refined to complex and unusual with everything in between.

ShowFont has a likewise extensive collection of free fonts of different kinds

Urban Fonts aren’t all necessarily urban in any traditional sense but many of them are quite interesting and out-of-the-ordinary. Some are based on classic fonts while others are quite creative and original, much like those found at Abstract Fonts or at Better Fonts.

SimplyTheBest has a helpful series of categories that are easy to navigate and understand which, despite their somewhat limited selection, makes them worth seeing.

Mike’s Sketch Pad includes a lot of great fonts but some of them can only be used for non-commercial purposes so be sure to check out the creator details.

Modern Life is an elegantly-designed site run by a skilled designer who recognizes the power of good fonts and shows you some recently successful examples.

TypeTester won’t work for every font but is extremely useful for those it has and to give you a general idea of what different fonts will look like in different situations.

1001 Free Fonts is yet another source for free fonts if the above resources weren’t enough.

Other Great Web Design and General Design Resources

The Landing Page Composer is one great way to go if you aren’t much of a designer and don’t intend to be. It is a program that allows users to create a range of landing page designs from basic templates using a remarkably simply graphic user interface.

Open Source Web Design is a trading post of sorts for web designers to share free web design templates with one another for the common good of web design and designers.

Blue Vertigo is a hodge-podge collection of free resources for web designers including stock photography sites and free fronts, brushes and clip art.

Browser Shots is a great pre-final test site for web designers. The site allows you to see what your design will look like in various browsers.

Top 50 Logo Design Tutorials is a useful collection of logo design guides, accompanied by screenshot images, that range in content from simply elegant to striking and complex.

51 Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials Many designers fail to see the importance of text and text effects as a critical component of quality web designs. These text effects are an essential part of any web designer’s toolbox.

9 Essential Principles for Good Web Design is another good place to start and get your bearings if you’re a relatively new designer or want a refresher course.

Imagine the world in 2050 with almost 80% of the planet’s population living in urban centers and our fruit, vegetables and even animals are grown in … skyscrapers? One man’s vision has sparked a series of designs leading closer and closer to what will be the first real-life vertical urban farm in Las Vegas, Nevada of all places. Here are five of these remarkable architectural designs for sustainable (and stylish) urban farm towers that may revolutionize agriculture as we know it. In the long run such structures may not only provide food for hundreds of thousands of people per building but they will also relieve much of the burden on other flat landscapes where fewer and fewer usable growing spaces exist.

One of the first designs of its kind, the compelling vertical farm project above was undertaken by Chris Jacobs in cooperation with the grandfather of skyscraper farm concepts: Dr. Dickson Despommier of Columbia University. His ideal: all-in-one eco-towers would be actually produce more energy, water (via condensation/purification) and food than their occupants would consume. His mission: to gather architects, engineers, economists and urban planners to develop a sustainable and high-tech wonder of ecological engineering.

Architect Pierre Sartoux of Atelier SOA has gone a step further and put some serious design talent behind his proposal for a vertical farming skyscraper. A light-shading skin wraps around the structure and opens to admit sunlight at particular locations for various functional (and aesthetic) purposes. The building’s air, heating and cooling systems are wind-driven and circulate oxygen and carbon dioxide between growing and living spaces. The simple but reinforced structure is designed to handle additional dead loads from the weight of growing floors and also serve to make the entire building more durable (and thus sustainable).

Given that most urban cores are already densely built, one designer has proposed an auxiliary series of structures to be attached to existing structures in downtown areas. These modular constructions would provide garden and recreation spaces for residents as well as light and air filters for the adjacent buildings. In some cases, these retrofits could even provide structural stability to aged buildings and prevent the need to tear them down. Architecturally, these modular units stand out and add another layer to the visual hierarchy of the cities around them.

The Pacific Northwest regional architecture firm Mithun developed a compelling vertical farm building design to incorporate various green building strategies in a mixed-use residential and commercial complexdesigned for downtown Seattle. The concept? Simply put, the structure is designed as a kind of built organism – completely self-sufficient and adaptive to its surroundings. The design includes water and energy self-sufficiency from rainwater and gray water collection and reuse, solar cells, vegetable and grain growing spaces and even a chicken farm – all built on a small-footprint downtown urban lot.

Architect Gordon Graff may succeed in the more green and progressive city of Toronto with his plans for a sky farm with 48 floors and millions of square feet of floor space (and even more growing space). This building, if constructed, will be able to feed tens of thousands of people per year. Best of all, particularly in Canada, the success of the building’s crops isn’t contingent upon climactic conditions. As an architectural and urban design gesture this structure both fits into the city skyline and differentiates itself with simple layers of green.

Depending on your point of view Las Vegas might be the first or it could be the last place you’d imagine the 30-story world’s first vertical farm. Of course, the food isn’t going to feed the famished masses. It will instead grace the dinner plates of Vegas tourists at local casinos and hotels. Still, as a prototype it has a lot of potential to generate further buzz and interest that could in turn lead to future projects. If the model proves both profitable and sustainable (always the best combination) it will likely (and hopefully) be the first of many.