Site Reviews - Week 6

http://urbandirty.com/
Urban Dirty provides textured background photos covered under a Creative Commons license for design projects. These images are free to use, the artist just asks the user to credit the web page somewhere in the work. Some of the images are fascinating, carrying an artistic raw edge.

Best Textures
A group on Flickr, this collection currently has 1,402 images that serve as textured backgrounds for use by web designers. Ranging from nature shots to wall art, these images bring a wide variety of scale, perspective and mood to a project. I found a couple of shots of parchment I want to play around with.

Torley Textures
These texture collections provide seamless tiling, are available for any use and are in lossless PNG format. Also hosted on Flickr, the artist generously made them useful to all. Some of my favorites in this group were ones that looked like paint on a canvas, brushstrokes and all.

Deviant Art Textures
This site offers an overwhelming amount of resources for artists, and the texture section is no exception. I downloaded a few to play with, including a grunge page of text, a couple of photoshopped colors with light specks or patterns.

Grunge Textures
The graphics on this site are organized efficiently, easily accessible from the idex page. Another Creative Commons user, they ask that you link back. Interesting pictures, but nothing that looks useful for my design.

Grunge Style
This article published by smashing magazine online explains more about grunge and Web 2.0 design. I liked the explanations and examples they provided. It will help me as I work toward designing my own site. I want to see how I can integrate some of the elements they mentioned.

Vandelay Design
Tuturials, sweet tutorials! This site was IMMEDIATELY bookmarked because I am getting ready to start experimenting with Photoshop, and there are 40 video tutorials. I will so be back!

2007 Web Design Trends (and Cliches)
The top 6 web design trends of 2007 and some fabulous examples!

Web 2.0 Tutorials Round Up
Another fabulous tutorial site... on the back burner for emergencies.

Screen Resolutions and Aspect Ratios
Fascinating information about screen resolution average data across the globe. It's limited, of course, since the sample size is determined by visitors to one website, but a good idea for new web designers as to how big to design their pages.

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Wow- this is a lot to digest and compile into useful knowledge. I am excited to start using some of the information and getting to final selections for my pages!