Productivity seems to have become the term-du-jour, especially during the recent economic crunch we’ve been experiencing globally. It’s no surprise companies have been trying to cut down workforce numbers and making those who didn’t loose their jobs up their productivity level during the same work hour period. This is also important for freelance graphic and web designers who run a one-person show and are responsible for pretty much everything, from designing to billing to customer service. We’ve compiled our favorite sites to make your life a little easier and your day a little bit more productive. Enjoy!

Colour Lovers and Adobe Kuler
www.colourlovers.com
http://kuler.adobe.com

Both Colour Lovers and Adobe Kuler are great sites that follow color trends for all types of creative endeavours. Colour Lovers offers palettes and patterns in downloadable files (Expression Design, WPF, XAML, ASE, PS, AI, GIMP, HTML, and ZIP). In Adobe Kuler you can play around with color values until you get the exact value you’re looking for. Web design has never been more colorful!

Colour Lovers

Adobe Kuler

 
Blind Text Generator
http://www.blindtextgenerator.com/

This handy page allows you to generate blocks of dummy text for web design layout visualization purposes. The menu on the left hand side of the page lets you choose the language for the dummy text, the number of words, characters, paragraphs, and font styles (including family, weight, letter spacing, height, decorations, alignment). The best part is that you can see the changes in real time inside the middle container.

Designers Tool Box
http://www.designerstoolbox.com

Designers Toolbox has a pretty impressive collection of very useful print and online tools. Print designers will get simple and straight forward answers to all of those nit-picky questions about envelope sizes, typical folders, DVD/CD covers and labels, and other print formats (postcards, binding styles, proofing marks, business card sizes, etc). Web designers have great resources available – web browser elements, web safe areas, banner sizes, iPhone GUI Elements, HTML characters (glyphs, accents, punctuation, numbers, money, math and much more).

SXC – Free Stock Photography
http://www.sxc.hu/

Owned by Getty Images and running on iStock backend technology, SXC is the ultimate free stock photography around. Great to have as a source of inspiration, or when you’re looking for that perfect image to complement your web design layout or just decorate your desktop.

Dafont
http://www.dafont.com

A constantly growing and high-quality collection of fonts and glyphs for all your graphic and web design needs. Conveniently divided in categories for your searching ease and with a special custom preview option so you can see what your text will actually look like in various font types.

Mail Chimp - Free Email Marketing
http://www.mailchimp.com

Email marketing can be a really useful tool, especially if you work on your own. Mail Chimp has taken out all the hassle (and monthly payments) of email campaigns. Although there are plans which start at $30, the best thing is the “Forever FREE” plan which allows up to 500 email subscribers and a limit of 3,000 emails a month. Not bad!

Browser Shots - Check Browser Compatibility
http://browsershots.org/

Web designers will probably go back to this page again and again. It makes screenshots of your site in every browser. The process is simple. You submit your site URL, it gets queued, several distributed computers make the screenshots, and they get uploaded to the site. You can even select which browsers and versions you want to see.

Type Tester- Compare Fonts Online
http://www.typetester.org/

This nifty type tool lets you cross-reference three different font types at once, with the same text. All you have to do is paste your text inside the text area, select font type and parameters for each option and you’re ready to go!

Icon Finder
http://www.iconfinder.net/

Icon Finder holds around 135,000 icons and 369 icon sets. There’s a special bar on the top, which allows you to select the background color, pixel size and license filter (for commercial and non-commercial use). Formats available are PNG and ICO, as well as various standard icon sizes.

Clean CSS
http://www.cleancss.com/

CleanCSS is another good resource for web designers. It formats and optimizes CSS so file sizes become smaller and the code is cleaner.

Top 10 BLACK Sites in Web Design

Black is the color attained by surfaces when no light is reflected from them. It’s associated with death, evil, elegance, the occult, darkness and mysteriousness. Bands such as Metallica have used the stark power of black to grace album covers like “The Black Album”. If designers choose black wisely as the main color for a layout, the results can be absolutely astonishing.

Web design has used black and gray variations alike as palette for many types of sites. From cars, to high-end fashion, designer’s self-promotion portfolios, and many luxury items and goods.

The decision to use black as a background is one that has to be carefully made, considering that heavy-text based sites might be tiring and annoying for visitors to read.

Below is a compilation of ten excellent examples of the color black on the web, as done by several web design companies and independent designers. They have a smart, purposeful, and well-designed combination of black, text, and web design elements. Dark on!

1. Pierre Calvez

http://pierrickcalvez.com/

Art director Pierre Calvez showcases his extense and impressive work on a dark charcoal background. The delicate and impeccable placement of menu text plays very well with the images for each piece he wants us to see.

2. Zaum & Brown

http://www.zaum.co.uk/

Zaum & Brown are quite a breath of fresh air! They offer amazing cost effective design solutions to artists and charities (from all types of cultural backgrounds) that aren’t that big on cash flow. A good combination of blacks, grays and white sorts out and cleanly distributes all the info in the site.

3. Cuarto Piso

http://www.cuartopiso.com

Cuarto Piso is a design partnership headed by two Colombian designers, Alejandro Posada and Carlos J. Roldán. Their divine taste and absolute sense of style instantly pours from every pixel, in every page, web design, and every portfolio piece.

4. Cabedge

http://www.cabedge.com/

Cabedge doesn’t just build websites, they build communication tools. This is quite evident in the methodic, organized and concise way they have laid out their portfolio and case studies against a black textured backdrop. It’s nice to be able to read the proportionately sized font too. The insanely adorable carrot on the top left hand side is the perfect finishing touch.

5. Mediaflex

http://www.mediaflex.com.au/

Mediaflex solutions works in the motion picture production business. A no frills and they-mean-business image is clear cut with a simple white sans serif font menu on top of a partially gradated black and white photograph.

6. Thomas Prior

http://www.thomasprior.co.uk/

Thomas Prior, a Brighton-based web designer, playfully shows off his mad set of web design skills in his online portfolio. A highly textured and compiled site, with random bits of old tickets, a black jacquard textured fabric (reminiscent of an old sofa in an old rock club), and a pleasant combination of grays and dark blues makes this seemingly drab color selection quite grand!

7. Black Estate

http://www.blackestate.co.nz/

Black Estate Vineyard shows off their wine selection in this elegant and sexy website. The concept is evidently tied in well with the company’s name, packaging, and design, letting the wine inside the bottles speak for itself.

8. Drew Dellinger

http://www.drewdellinger.org/

Drew Dellinger, a poet, teacher, writer and speaker who travels the globe to inspire minds and hearts. The correct mix of red, black and grays are well suited to helping him spread his message, with great design of course, throughout the web.

9. Dan Tobolic

http://www.tobolic.com/

Dan Tobolic cuts straight to the chase and shows us his design goods by placing comfortable-sized (not everyone has 20/20 vision) portfolio images, full of color, on a dark background. This Chicago art director cleverly signs his name/logo all the way at the bottom of website design.

10. Tic Toc Family

http://www.tictocfamily.com/

Digital agency, The Tic Toc Family, prides itself on telling everyone that as a work team, they share the same ideals, characteristics and sense of fun. This becomes even more coherent with the manner they have presented their fruits of labor with their web design. Fun to read sections are simply separated by blue and white fonts, all resting on a dark almost-black background, neatly adorned with a piggy-like sketched character.

Top 10 WHITE Websites

White is the reflection of all light rays from a surface. It’s associated with purity, cleanliness, and spirituality. The English language has also used the word as a term meaning decent, honorable, and dependable. How white of us to clear that up, huh?

Surprisingly enough, for people hiring a web design company to create a website, this might not be the first color of choice, and at times might even seen like a turn off due to its simplicity. But as many of us involved in the industry, we know how powerful an impact we can make by often going with things that are precisely just that, simple.

Choosing a color scheme during the design process is one of the most important factors to give way to the message, mood, concept, and impact that a website should transmit. A white canvas among artists, writers, graphic designers, and web designers can be a scary thing!

Figuring out how and where to start building upon, and deciding what elements are going to make the foundations of a new blank website layout, should be considered carefully.

Remember, this is the place where you will be placing all relevant content such as text, images, and videos inside your website. Here are some pristine examples we’ve pulled off from the web, showcasing web design, at its most crisp and #FFF state.

1. COMA

http://www.coma.sg/

COMA, which stands for Communication Analysts, are Singapore based agency who help clients communicate more effectively with their clients. Nice work on their choice of sans serif font backdropped to white.

2. Subtraction

http://subtraction.com

Designer Khoi Vinh was born in Viet Nam and was raised in Maryland. Subtraction started off showcasing his non-commercial work and currently features extensive blog archive. Straight to the chase, this no-nonsense layout warms our hearts with a front page photo of Khoi’s dog, Mr. President.

3. Design is Kinky

http://www.designiskinky.net/

Art and design goodness straight from Australia. Design is Kinky got it just right with a seamless white backdrop, and colorful content sitting on top of crisp gray boxes. The squirrel logo is just as cool.

4. I love typography

http://ilovetypography.com/

An immense collection of drool-worthy articles about everything and anything typography imaginable. Of course, the website lives up to its name and successfully carries out what it preaches in the first place – all on white too!

5. Empty

http://www.emptymag.com/

Empty publishes all sorts of creative bits from people around the globe. Elegantly executed, its website displays just the precise amount of info its meant to.

6. Urban Outfitters

http://urbanoutfitters.com

Urban Outfitters balances the mighty world of male, female, and apartment fashion in great taste. Subtle touches of design elements are found in perfect contrast to its white setting.

7. Cate Blanchett

www.cateblanchett.net/

A fresh and well-organized fan site for actress Cate Blanchett is the work of Dutch web engineer Denise Broekman.

8. SPC Design Library

http://spcdesignlibrary.org/

The SPC Design Library is an online library that showcases sustainable innovative packing and solutions. No resources are wasted, both online and offline.

9. Buckenmeyer & Co.

http://www.miguelbuckenmeyer.com/

Madrid-based communication design firm Buckenmeyer & Co.’s website design and use of white cuts to the chase faster than you can say “Ole!”.

10. Matt Bango

http://www.mattbango.com/

Matt Bango’s personal site and web development portfolio tastefully shows us his many talents with this impeccable use of white on the web.

Web design is a complicated process and demands precision and care, masterful expertise and latest technology. Web design development  Miami with its unique templates and features creates websites that prove to be a critical marketing tool and extends the values and goals of the web site to the users. Marvelous layout and easy navigation definitely generates qualified leads and tremendous conversions.

The eye soothing visuals, sizzling graphics, professional logos and best navigation blended in a site by web design Miami empowers the E-entrepreneur to edge out competitive sites.

web design should also be in accordance to the budget constraints of startups and small businesses and therefore is able to prove cost effective.

Websites created by adept web designers looks cleaner and effortless at a simple go. Web2.0 features enhance the qualitative feelings of a web design. With Web2.0, the next generation technology, efficient web designers are able to highlight the most important parts and sections of a website with fluorescent color blocks as per your needs. It simply drives the visitor to the targeted portion of the web page. A free flowing Web design makes navigation absolutely clear from the point of the view of the visitor.

web design Company, Turbo Nacho with its years of expertise, the most upgraded technology and the most innovative design, develops web sites that facilitate positioning of an online business as a professional and reputable one for the targeted audience and users. We offer par-excellence services with immaculate web design.

Get a clearly defined web design from web design company, Turbonacho and shape the path of your business as per your wishes.