graphic design, freelancing, illustration, advertising, web design

If any of you are like me and just starting to try and get your head around CSS there are a lot of online resources out there. A new resource I have just become aware of is Sitepoint’s CSS reference for web designers which goes through all the basics and not so basics of CSS. Sitepoint has some fantastic information on its site, a great forum and excellent books to purchase so I am sure the CSS reference will be of great quality too. You can find the CSS reference at www.reference.sitepoint.com/css

I was recently reading Vivien’s blog over at inspiration bit where she was reviewing a cool firefox add-on which allows you to manipulate images in firefox. The Firefox add-on application is called Picnik Tools and is available for Mac and PC. I downloaded it for my Mac to try it out and it is like a mini cut down version of photoshop right in your browser, ideal for people who don’t require a full blown image editor. Once you have downloaded Picnik you can access it via tools in Firefox and then import a photo to edit. Editing options include: crop, resize, exposure, colours, sharpen, red eye. I would imagine it would be pretty slow work trying to edit high resolution images but idea of images for the web. You can also edit images directly from various photo sharing sites including Flickr.

Take a look at Vivien’s blog post which has a more in depth review for more information.

I don’t know about you, but the classic thing I do when looking for typographic inspiration is to flick through a few magazines, design books or the web. Try taking a look at the typographic group on Flickr I really like what has been done. There are entries as you would expect showing pages of brochures and literature, but there are also more REAL WORLD examples you perhaps wouldn’t normally use as inspiration - street signs, posters partially pealed off walls etc.

Keeping a digital camera and snapping anything which could be useful for design inspiration is something I really ought to do - how about you?