Outlaw Design Blog

16 Web Designer/Developer Resources

Posted on 07. May, 2008 by Danny Outlaw in Resources, Web Design

Here’s my list of the most useful resources on the web right now. I hope you find something here that makes your life as a web guru a little easier whether you’re just starting out or a veteran of the web. If you’re so inclined feel free to add to my list in the comments section below.

Templates

Dreamtemplate - I know most designers wouldn’t think twice about using website templates for their design work, but Deam Template may be an exception to the rule. Not only do they offer a number of free and paid website templates, they also offer Powerpoint Templates, Joomla Skins, InDesign Layouts, and Icon sets. All of these resources can be useful for expediting projects or learning the basics of design.

Open Source Web Design - A small, but growing collection for decently coded layouts. These can make for a starting point in coding your sites or themes.

Open Web Design - A variety of website templates that include tableless design, fluid layouts, and more.

Learn

Lynda.com is a pretty cool site that offers memberships to their website to view video classes as well as ways to purchase their DVD’s and books. Their Flash and Actionscript books are excellent for beginners.

Go to and Learn has an awesome list of video tuts. My favorite is the Advanced After Effects and Flash video.

CSS Tricks has a lot of easy to understand articles and tuts. I particularly liked the javascript slider article.

Tutorial 9 - An awesome group who is cranking out amazing photoshop tutorials, some of the most helpful I’ve seen on the www so far. They just started a new section for absolute photoshop beginners that are perfect for anybody looking to start at the beginning.

All Web Designer Resources - Ok, although I find their site a little overwhelming with how much crap they have packed into every page, I can’t deny that they have a lot of useful information, links, articles, and tuts.

UMN - Being a UMN alumni I love to recommend this U of MN, Duluth site. They have an incredible amount of link resources here. They seem to be missing a design link category, but I’ll let that fly since the rest seems to cover anything I could possibly want to look into.

Abduzeedo - A series of decent articles and fun tuts. My favorite is the Retro light effects!

Photoshop Star - Tutorial sites are littered across the web, this is one of the better photoshop tutorial sites out there. Nice collection of high quality photoshop tutorials that are well explained.

Design

Design Meltdown - This site has a lot of great features. The one I like the most is the references of sites based by color usage, design techniques or type of site! I go here whenever I’m experiencing designer’s block.

A List Apart - Seems everybody knows A List Apart by now, but one of my favorite articles on there is Prettier Accessible Forms. Anybody and everybody should know how to properly style up a form. Whether or not you use it is up to you obviously, but you should know it none-the-less.

Trevor Davis offers his 6 most important css techniques that everyone needs to know. I happen to agree with him on most of these!

AIGA, the professional association for design. They offer some good articles and my fav is the design archive in the inspiration section. This site is definitely worth an hour or two of drooling over some sweet designs.

Computer Arts - Although I find their site layout a little draining from the lack of white space, they have great content that keeps me coming back. In particular they have a cool gallery of design work and some pretty cool tuts.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions, I wish you well on your search for the best content out there and let me know if you find anything amazing! J

Tags: Resources, Web Design