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The Best Design Resources you can Clear in One Sitting

Posted by Phil Renaud on February 26th, 2006.

Phil Renaud is a Canadian blog design and web design enthusiast, with a particular admiration for web standards and CSS innovation. Ruby on Rails, xhtml/css, ajax, and a whole lotta love.

http://philrenaud.com

Phil Renaud has posted 21 articles.

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Already posted this over at my site, but thought it could benefit from some exposure here at fadtastic. The basic idea is that all of the major design-tutorial resources around (a great one that comes to mind is The Web Developer’s Handbook) are geared toward prolonged viewing, where one comes back time after time to try and find solutions to specific problems. What I tried to address is a different kind of need: Having an hour to kill on a saturday afternoon and wanting to get a good knowledge base so that these problems can be solved, in the long run, without having to constantly check back to resource-warehouses. Hopefully you enjoy, and feel free to comment any essential ones that I’ve missed (I’m sure there are quite a few)
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 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.)

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed the list - what are some of your essentials?

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7 Responses to The Best Design Resources you can Clear in One Sitting

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Great resources, thank you so much. And a very nice blog, too!

Alexander Kinnunen
February 26th, 2006
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very good collection, bookmarked!

Birgit
February 26th, 2006
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Amazing collection of links. Really, thank you for putting this together. Keep up the great work.

Brad
February 27th, 2006
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A great list of resources and an excellent contribution to the fadtastic community. Many thanks again, Phil.

Andrew Faulkner
February 27th, 2006
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i’ve been wondering about the title of this article since it first appeared. how exactly do you “clear a resource”? i’m not being funny here, i really would like to know.

btw - keep up the good work! i love to follow the trends. my clients love to have that cutting-edge look. i, on the other hand, love to avoid the trends. either way, this is a valuable resource.

JP
March 1st, 2006
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how exactly do you “clear a resource”

It means you can grasp the idea/get the code/understand a point without taking an hour to solve the problem.

Andrew Faulkner
March 2nd, 2006
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[…] Briefly glancing through fadtastic (apologies, but I’m swamped), I came across discussions to book for later. For instance, The Best Design Resources you can Clear in One Sitting is Phil Renaud’s collection of resources which I’ve added to my personal bookmarks. And with a client request for a site design similar to the worn look, I’ve made a note of Marc’s discussion dealing with Worn Out , Grunge, Vintage. I’m not totally convinced the worn out look is old hat, more like it’s become a style along with all the other styles around. If it’s appropriate (as in my client’s site) then it fits the bill. Getting the clean look married to the worn out look will be a challenge, but one I’m looking forward to tackling. So is this a site for bloglines? Certainly, and I’m slightly redfaced it hasn’t been added before this time. […]

Designers who Blog: Design, Illustration, Photography, Web, Advertising, Branding …
March 5th, 2006
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