Web Developers Handbook is Awesome

With so much garbage out there, it is refreshing to find a site that is useful and genuinely relevant. Often it is something really simple that helps the most. I came across the Web Developers Handbook recently and was happy to find utility in a well organized list of bookmarks. Nothing fancy, just plain text links to gems of wisdom.

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Free Web Icon Sets

There’s just no way around it. If you are going to build graphical interfaces, you’re going to need some icons. Any seasoned designer can attest to how tedious working with tiny thumbnail images can be, having spent countless hours pixel scrubbing 16 by 16 sized spaces.

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50 Beautiful and User-Friendly Navigations @ Smash

Smash magazine is one of those sites that continually comes up when I enter very open ended design related searches. Much of their content is a collection or list of useful sources of inspiration. So beyond their ability to relate and index well on the web, they are also providing a great service to the universe.

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Design Meltdown, Useful Tips and Tricks

Whether you are looking for color schemes, specific design trends such as radial layouts or just inspiration in general, you’ll find countless examples here.

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Using flash animations in Flex swfLoader

Came across this useful tutorial on YouTube. For those of you out there that have a background in Flash from the AS2 days and miss the timeline in Flex, this video should give you some useful tricks.

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Optimizing Google Analytics and Mint

The major winner here was Mint. For $30, you get the right to use mint on one domain and I couldn’t pass up the nerdy desire to play with something tidy, simple and above all useful.

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Javascript and the future of browsing the web.

With so many options, there really isn’t that much need for the boring flat web of the past when so many engaging tool sets and libraries are free of charge to anyone who cares to use them. If you’re making flat boring sites, then you aren’t trying hard enough.

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Search Engine Optimization and Flash

Let’s face it, flash presents interaction designers with options they simply don’t get anywhere else. Flash as a design tool is the primary plugin for achieving truly dynamic and engaging multimedia content. It is vitally important, however, that all content and resources that are produced for the web can be indexed by search engine crawlers or no one will see your new creation and product.

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Measuring the User Experience

Experience is a great mentor in usability testing if not an expensive one. Measuring the User Experience by Tom Tullis and Bill Albert is a much faster route for guidance for issues relating to metrics and analysis. The book is neatly organized and presents usability professional with a clear understanding of how to produce a testing regiment that is impactful and accurate.

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Designing for Developers - A Checklist

In a fast-paced development cycle, it is the little details that often make the difference between a product on time and budget or a pissed off Product Manager or client. As a designer of digital content there are many facets to this mastery of execution. No single topic will make you successful 100% of the time, but there are some simple things you can do to lubricate the wheels of deployment.

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