bravewhale

The best CSS gallery websites you should visit daily

mark — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:27:34 +0000

Everyday I sit at my computer and get ready to work, but end up browsing CSS gallery sites. Over years of doing so, I’ve come to visit a small handful of these sites which I think are the best of the best (in my opinion). These particular gallery style sites showcase some of the best looking websites out there, are updated daily (or at least often enough), and they themselves boast a nicely designed site. Here are my favorites, listed in the order which I visit.

Design Bombs

Designbombs.com has some of my absolute favorite inspirational design sites. It is updated almost daily; if not, and displays a fair amount of sites that other galleries have not showcased yet.

CSS Mayo

CSS Mayo is my next favorite gallery which is not only updated daily, but usually with a hefty amount of new sites. It also has a feature allowing you to save sites to your lightbox.

Best Web Gallery

Best Web Gallery is probably the most well known CSS gallery site, and it still manages to maintain its popularity. However I don’t frequent this one as often as I used to, due to a slight lack of updates (not always daily and only 1 or 2 sites at a time). However I can understand the difficulties of having to update a showcase site daily (portfoliosfriend.com) and I don’t hold it against the owner. Still a wonderful gallery site.

CSS Line

CSS Line has quite a large collection of well designed websites, and it utilizes the infinite scroll jquery technique to display its content. However this makes it quite hard to come back later and continue browsing where you last left off. Oh, and I love their logo!

CSS DSGN

CSS DSGN is a newcomer among my gallery site bookmarks, and so far it seems very promising. Updated daily, it displays a good amount of sites not easily found on other galleries. It also has a sizable archive which I still plan to explore.

Unmatched Style

Unmatched Style has been around for quite some time now, and offers a great amount of inspiration, news, screen casts and resources. It is usually good for a new site or two on a regular basis.

There you have my favorite CSS gallery websites. I encourage daily visits to each site, in depth exploration of archives, and in general a complete overload of designer’s inspiration. There are countless gallery sites on the web, many of which display a poor selection of sites, or they themselves just look too awful to even give a chance. Stick with these galleries and you will surely find what you are looking for.

Root Question

mark — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:40:14 +0000

We were needed to create a new front-end design for Rootquestion.org to portray a more professional web 2.0 look. After several design drafts, we came up with a clean and simple style that fit the site’s needs rather well. The goal was to guide users to the search function as the first step in using Root Question, and provide a visual explanation of what the site can be used for. The good folks at Root Question also have plans to move towards mobile usage.

Using web-safe fonts in web design typography

mark — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:26:51 +0000

As a web designer, I toy with typography and try to make the best of standardized, web-safe fonts. Until now I enjoyed the often seen, italic Georgia type style. This usually looks best in 20-28px, or their respective pt and em counterparts. This example is set to 24px. As well it looks nice in Bold Italic.

You’ve seen me around, haven’t you?

However, I recently discovered a wonderful replacement for the above; italic Times New Roman! It is a bit thinner and has sharper curves; looking slick. The example is set at 26px, and at 24px it was smaller than the above Georgia, so you may want to play around with the sizes to find the best fit.

Times New Roman has a purpose now!

Courier New, which has a typewriter look to it, is not seen quite as often as the other two Serif fonts. Perhaps it should be, as it makes for nice headings.

Courier New has a unique typewriter look

Let’s have a look at some Sans Serif fonts ( serifs are the little extensions you see at the end of letter strokes, and the word Sans is French, meaning without ). First off, Verdana has been seen around the web for ages, and I often feel it is over used. A great substitute is Arial, which looks very much the same, except slightly more narrow. Perfect for your general content font style, or headings.

Arial’s Dad can beat up Verdana’s Dad

One secret in my typography arsenal is a font called Trebuchet MS. In particularly, I use this font for menu items. It looks quite nice at around 16px, text-transform set to uppercase, and bold. I prefer to use this font only for main menu links, and maybe some headings, but for the main content font I find it to be too unique.

Trebuchet MS makes very clean menu links

There are several other web-safe fonts you can use in your typography; these are just my favorites. Play around with larger font sizes, bold, italic, and uppercase. You’ll notice that some font families work better for headings, and some work better for your general content. Check out this complete list of web-safe fonts.

Folsom Lake Electric

mark — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:40:40 +0000

We created an online presence with new branding and custom features. FLE wants its customers to easily learn about services, and have the convenience of discovering new products, items and ideas that can be added to a Wish List. This custom features was designed for quick reference and with the ability to email directly to yourself, FLE, or be printed. Every bit of content: text, ads, and images, are all updated easily by the client through a Content Management System.

We have new Brave Whale business cards to show off!

mark — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 01:30:48 +0000

As you can see, our new business cards are themed to our website. We are proud to begin passing them out to potential clients, or those with interest in Brave Whale. This takes us one step closer to our goal of improving the web presence of San Jose businesses. Perhaps if you are in the Bay Area we’ll pass our card along with you.

A step towards better web design in the San Jose bay area

mark — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 05:55:25 +0000

Brave Whale is a creative web design company in the San Jose bay area of California. We love our community and want its businesses to flourish not only in town, but online as well. Often times we browse websites of local businesses only to cringe and squint as we endure very outdated and poor designs. Brave Whale to the rescue!

One of our goals is to help enhance the user experience on many local business’s sites by creating feature rich, attractive designs. We want to utilize modern web trends and technologies on as many San Jose bay area websites as we possibly can. Visitors to those websites; be they small businesses, local brands, or promotional micro sites, deserve to experience an up to date site with an aesthetic design.

We would love to hear from our community in need of a web design overhaul, or a brand new web presence all together. Shoot us an email, and perhaps we will sit down together and discuss how Brave Whale can improve your online experience.

Portfolio’s Friend, a showcase of great artist portfolio sites

mark — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:57:51 +0000

We recently launched the new design and layout for http://portfoliosfriend.com. It’s a wonderful showcase for artists of all kinds, who have their own portfolio website. It covers most genres, including web design, graphic design, illustration, print design, photography, logo work, fine art, and urban style art. Portfolio’s Friend doesn’t actually display the artist’s work, but promotes them by linking to their website. The showcase grows almost daily, and can be subscribed to via rss.

Brave Whale created a new design and homepage layout, including a couple new features such as community added tags and a randomly loaded portfolio for the front page. We tried to create a unique web design for Portfolio’s Friend, to help it compete with the many other “showcase” style websites out there in the creative community. We’d like to help other companies, brands, or just idea websites out there improve their design and become the quintessence of their niche. Let us know if we can help you achieve your goals.

Portfolio’s Friend

mark — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:14:16 +0000

Portfolio’s Friend is a website which showcases online portfolios from artists of all fields. It has been a steadily growing site for a while, and recently needed a brand new design and feature upgrade. We created a new design, and new homepage layout with added support for portfolio submissions, and a new user added tagging system was added to each artist’s page. As well, we are providing SEO support to help keep the site’s growth up.

Xpaid

mark — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:44:48 +0000

This is a design mock-up for start up event opportunities company. Xpaid’s previous design was lacking the flair being portrayed by their community of event extremists. With the type of service Xpaid offers, we set out to design a very bold, clean and impactful homepage. With eye catching contrast and precise placement of important community information, our design suits Xpaid’s needs quite well, and with the type of style they craved.

Recycle Bookstore

mark — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 04:11:23 +0000

A design mock-up for our friendly community bookstore, specializing in used books. A custom design and layout was needed to display the diverse selection of books they have to offer. This design incorporates a blog which each employee can post to, as it helps create a more personable experience and add something unique for the employees.