The Best Design Resources you can Clear in One Sitting

A few people have emailed me asking where they can find this or that font, or image collection or tutorial, or ajax methodology, or ruby on rails intro, etc. This is a collection of all my favourite Design Resources links, and while I'm not trying to replace such powerhouse resource portals such as The Web Developer's Handbook, hopefully you'll agree with me that most of these are the cream of the crop. As a rule of thumb, these were selected here, keeping in mind that someone could go through them all in a short period of time; something that some of the bigger resource sites don't do much to accomplish. I don't expect there to be unanimous agreement with what's posted here, I'm just saying that these are all the very most useful things that I've found in designing for the web and beyond.

Font Resources
- The Elements of Typographic Style - applied to the web. Great resource.
- Jon Hicks' del.icio.us Foundries bookmarks
- Vitaly Freeman's 20 best license-free fonts
- Font Leech: New Font blog
- Mike Davidson's sIFR and sIFR 2.

Articles/Opinion
- Survey: 80% of Consumers hate Flash Intros
- Your Elevator Pitch has helped me sell myself and my work.
- Forbes magazine's Best of the Web
- Fadtastic: a journal on Web Trends.
- Writing a Good Accessibility Statement
- A Guide to Starting your own Business
- Slim helps create more efficient web applications. Lots of great resources within.
- Design Meltdown. Pssst: Mixtaping is featured under "blue".
- 24 Ways to Impress your Friends. This one is so useful, I could put it in any of several categories.

Ruby/Rails
- Ruby on Rails wiki's Start at the Beginning
- Ruby on Rails dot org
- Ruby Off the Rails
- Real Lessons for Rails Deployment
- Rails Upload Progress shows a progress bar during uploads using Rails. Pretty nifty.
- Ruby Facets
- Ruby on Rails Cheat Sheet
- Rails best practices, tips, and tricks

Ajax/New school javascript
- Ajaxed's Keyword Suggest
- Moo.fx is so nice. and tiny.
- Rico: javascript for rich internet apps.
- Alex Bosworth's 10 places you must use ajax
- Edit in Place with javascript and CSS
- Mastering AJAX part one, and Part Two, by IBM.
- Ajax Matters's list of sites using ajax
- Lightbox, which I've found entirely too useful in a few projects now. Also make sure to check out Customizing Lightbox
- 30-second AJAX tutorial
- AJAX tutorial with Prototype
- javascript live search is something I've been meaning to implement for awhile now

Flash techniques and lessons
- ten weeks with Flash MX
- bananalbum makes standalone flash galleries that are very, very appealing.

Inspiration
- Designologue, by our dear mr. Shaun Inman
- StyleGala
- Design is Kinky
- CSS Import
- CSS Liquid Designs

Image Resources
- Stencilry
- Stencil Revolution
- The Rasterbator. Used for several images hanging up around my house.
- Stock Xchng. The best community based around free stock images I've ever seen.
- Magurno - Photoshop Brushes
- Design Packs' Image Catalogue
- Simple CSS Image Switcher. In the same vein, but slightly different use, than my beloved resource at CollyLogic's Rollover Image Generator. I use colly's model every, every time. Invaluable.

CSS techniques
- CSS Play has a whole bunch of resoures. This site alone is why this section is so small.
- Footer-Stick. This has been an extremely valuable resource to me. Demo.
- Clearbits: CSS-based colouring on small icons

Misc Design Resources
- Customize.org: customize everything.
- Vanilla, the best web 2.0 forum around
- Free File Host List, and another in the same vein
- Sonspring's fixing Firefox's dotted-line-links.
- Wufoo makes forms awesome.
- Safari Testing, for those without macs, who want to know how macs render. (Answer: not so well. Just kidding! Don't kill me.)

Thanks for the comments: Sean, Fil, Al B Sure, Anthony King.

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