Links of Interest

Favorite Design-Related Sites of 21 Designers

Steven Snell of Vandelay Design launched a brand new site called Designm.ag which is “articles and resources for designers”. I participated in a group interview post where a bunch of designers list some of their favorites sites.

Pattern Tap

Pattern Tap is a very cool new way to browse design inspiration. Instead of just browsing full designs, you browse by particular parts of websites. For example, you can browse just different breadcrumb navigations or contact forms or 404 pages. I think this is quite smart. It’s quite often we set about browsing other sites looking for inspiration on very particular aspects of the site, so now we have a single browseable site that fits that need.

3G Availability as JSON

I’ve used JSON in several tutorials lately. It’s nice when sites serve up data in this format as it allows people to easily use that data to present it in interesting ways and create mashups. I think there should be a whole site someday which finds and publishes locations to interesting JSON feeds. Apple provides their iPhone 3G availablility in JSON. UPDATE: They pulled it. Boooooo.

Design Decisions of the Top 50 Blogs

Smashing Magazine takes a look at the top 50 blogs and what kind of design decisions they made. Fixed width, Just under 1000px wide, dark on light, sans-serif… Yep, sounds about right.

Silverback is now officially released

$50 Mac software that allows you to record someone using a website. Records their screen, their clicks, their face, the sound. You control things via the apple remote control. Not to mention a nice interface for storing all your usability test videos and adding notes. Silverback is free for 30 days.