My iGoogle
Many of you use iGoogle or Google Reader to RSS feed your favorite news and tutorials so I figured that I would give a break down on the latest and greatest in industry resources. I basically break them into four columns: Personal, Web Applications, Inspiration, and Tutorials. I guess I could make tabs out of them but that’s another click, and well, I am lazy.
Personal
Well every self-respecting person has a Gmail account so I of course have my Gmail Inbox first on the list. I like to keep it minimized to keep unwanted people from looking at my mail (I’m paranoid like that) but basically it’s just the standard 5 recent messages in my inbox! Next down would be my buddy Eugene’s Geneome RSS feed from his very interesting Blender blog. Last on that column is the every popular BlenderNation RSS feed which helps me stay up to date on recent Blender happenings.
Web Applications
This column is basically for everything I need to know about or have in the world of web applications. I love web applications and developing them so these give me inspiration and ideas. Plus, they are great resources for finding things to use in my applications or projects. First on the list is WebAppers which has a daily featured web application or feature for web applications. Often you get your hands on free (we love free right?) fonts, graphics, logos, or other scripts that can really enhance your web apps. Next up is FeedMyApp which is similar to WebAppers but not as great. It’s more of an inspirational site of the latest web apps or industry news about them. I’m not really into news that much - more like latest and greatest cool stuff - so this one is usually minimized. The last one on this list is LogoTemplater - it pretty much sucks as a site but well I like to have logo templates to use when ever I can so I keep it on my RSS reader to know when they come out. It’s packaged as an EPS which isn’t supported by GIMP, which makes me mad, but I have other tools to get around that and so I can still use them, if for anything, inspiration. It updates about once a month so after a while you got yourself a pretty nice collection of stock logos!
Inspiration
This column contains mainly web site inspiration. The latest and greatest websites are featured on these RSS feeds and so it’s nice to see what other people are doing. They are often good search tools for finding design patterns too! I’m not going to take time to analyze each but they are all worth checking out: WebCreme, Design Shack, FaveUp, Web Design Gallery, CSS Design Yorkshire, and CSS Hive. The other two things that are on this list is LogoPond logo inspirations and ColourLovers color palette inspirations. Both of these are better for someone looking for logo ideas or branding concepts. Inspiration is important for the non-creative artist!
Tutorials
Ah, the tutorials! My favorite group - I love to learn and so tutorials are often the best way to get that idea for how to do something better. Not all of these are great but for the most part they all show concepts that are helpful. The main thing to remember for those who use OpenSource tools is that you will rarely find a tutorial showing you how to use your tools - get used to it! Look beyond the tools and try to learn the concepts taught - then think how to use your tools to do the same thing. My favorite is definitely PSD Tuts (surprising right?). Most of the tuts are for Photoshop which is something I rarely use but the site itself it so professional and the tutorials are all uniform and very informative. The concepts are great and the final designs are always great looking! Recently they went more commercial which made it hard to get your hands on the PSDs without paying and then they created a membership program so I expect this kind of site to get more and more “free friendly”, but until it completely goes membership only, it’s worth checking out. Then there is Abduzeedo, Luxa, and Pixel2Life - all of these are great but nothing like PSD Tuts. You can always find good resources online for different tutorials but for the latest and greatest you usually only have a handful and these are mine.
That’s It
That’s the run down on my iGoogle home page. It works for me and maybe you’ll find some of these sites useful. I often add and delete different feeds throughout the week as I find they work and don’t. These have stood the test of time but you never know what might be getting the boot next. If you have your own favorites be sure to share them!
