And the second link is a slightly charming story about how a tricky problem can be handled elegantly and with respect.

1) Resources, resources, resources:
Nows the time to crack on with those resources you allways need. Generic (and common specific) backgrounds, icons, stock photos. All of these increase your toolbox, and whilst you might not need them, when you do, you’ll thank the gods you did the work and saved yourself some hassle and some money. As an ancillary benefit you can upload them to various stock sites and make some money off of them.

2) Improve your understanding:
There’s no denying that manuals can be pretty dry reading, but now might be the time to refresh yourself with those big old documents. Read through the CSS spec or whatever language is your thing. Remember these can be downloaded a lot easier than lots of tutorials, and if you’re already fairly competant it’s likely the specifications will be more useful. Don’t just stay confined to languages though, explore the help files of the applications you use (Dreamweaver, Illustrator etc).

3) Identify your weaknesses:
Often we’re too busy hurtling through whatever project we’re working on to stop and think about how we could branch out. It’s only when a client requests something that’s outwith our remit that we hit a stumbling block, and sometimes lose a client. So maybe now’s the time to work out where you want to expand your knowledge and set goals in that direction, even if you can’t actually work in it. Think about things that would naturally extend your skill set. A good way to do this is to look at job listings for positions you don’t think you’re ready for and see what they want. If you’ve got two out of three languages  down, make an effort for that third and you’ll be pulling in the big bucks in no time.

4) House keeping:
Besides going through and commenting your work, now might be the right time to look at components that you find yourself using over and over. In a perfect OO (object oriented) world we’d all restructure things reguarly, but with deadlines looming sometimes we just hack it together. Go back through your code and see if there are any cool elements that you could seperate out.

5) Seek inspiration:
If you’re on the design end of things, use the time to get inspired in other ways. Visit museums, take photos, sketch, paint, or watch weird movies. But don’t just do these things. Take NOTES! Actively reflect on them and why they make you feel a certain way. How the colours interact. All the good stuff.

Hope this helps, and remember you don’t have to work all the time, but there’s no time when you can’t work.

Last year, for my Master’s program we were tasked with designing a Website. It was more complex than that, I can’t remember the actual spec., but we were supposed to provide a unique website that we could market. My idea was Edcast. It was actually something I’d been thinking about for a few months before, and for several months I laboured with three peers to get the site up and running. Sadly when we graduated, our access to the Coldfusion server was cut, and the site went down. Well I’m in the process of porting Edcast over to PHP, so stay tuned for it’s relaunch sometime in April!

An easy read full of technical know how, Thinking with type covers the dense sprawling topic of typography to an exacting depth. This book ticks all the boxes, covering the history of typography, font creation, technical elements of lettering, editing and layout, as well as including tips for creating better work. Well laid out, the book is easy to read with short, distinct chapters, accompanied by appropriate and interesting imagery. The book’s size (8.4 x 6.8) means it travels well.

If I have one criticism it would be that the book could be improved by including more rules for improving your work. Things like which fonts work well together, how to change margins to achieve an affect, or some good ratios for internal padding vs external margins would have given some practical application to the excellent theory. But these fine points are perhaps not what the book is about. Rather it sits amongst its peers as an excellent introduction and launching point to the world of typography. I finished the book, feeling satisfied, but still keen to explore more. Now at least I know what I want to know more about.

Noteable quotes:

“A handbook designed for the hands”.

“Users of web sites have different expectations than users of print. They expect to feel “productive” not contemplative. The expect to be in search mode, not processing mode. Users also expect to be disappointed, distracted and delayed by false leads.” (p74)

“You can express the meaning of a word or an idea through the spacing, sizing, and placement of letters on the page. Designers often think this way when crating logotypes…. The round O’s in Futura make it a fun typeface for this project.” (p104)

We’ve all seen them. Whether it’s ten, twenty or a thousand, every week even the most critical web design blogs post their choice picks of good looking websites. But with so many of them floating around, what’s the best way to make use of them?

Ignore them.
It’s a serious option. Many of the lists don’t include anything other than links to the page. Well, there are sites out there that archive all those good looking sites already, and they have a bigger collection, often have peer reviews and are constantly updated. Most Inspired even aggregates all of those sites into one. Using such services enables you to search by keywords, and means you can keep your bookmarks nice and tidy.

Bookmark the lists.
There’s often a lot of good stuff in the lists, and some places really go out of their way to find new stuff. Web Designer Wall has good examples of how sites can put together a nice themed list, such as this one on Vintage sites. My problem with this is that you can often get the same results by just searching the aforementioned collection galleries. That’s why I like it when the themes are specific, because those are not so easy to track down good examples of. By bookmarking the lists, in a separate ‘Lists of Good Looking Sites’ folder, you can always go back and scroll through to find examples or inspiration, because whilst something might not seem too inspirational or important at the time, five months down the line when you’re working on that Vintage Hat redesign you might just need it.

Bookmark the Sites.
No matter how you deal with the Lists you’re still going to have to deal with the individual sites that you come across and find inspirational. So why not just bookmark all the sites individually and put them together? Well that’d get messy, and you’d end up not knowing which sites were which. Not to mention that you’d have to go through the process of bookmarking all the sites on the list by hand. Ugh. And on top of that, when you come to look at the sites, you’re going to have to open each one to get an idea of what it looks like; checking out the list is much faster as you’re viewing thumbnail images of the pages. All in all, it’s probably not a great idea to start bookmarking the pages unless it’s something super inspirational that you want to bask in regularly.

Screen Grabs of the Sites.
This isn’t as crazy an idea as it sounds. By saving the thumbnails from the lists, or screengrabbing the page itself, you can view lots of pages simultaneously off line through your favorite image browser. There’s quite a bit of overhead involved, but the payoff is big. Rather than having to worry about active pages or waiting to load up sites, you can view thirty or so sites at the same time, and find the ones that you want. You can use keywords on some image browsers to make the process more percise. I’d suggest IrfanView or ACDsee, although IrfanView did cause a bug with Dreamweaver the last time I used it, which is very unlike Irfan.

Conclusion
Whatever you do, the next time you’re in a rut take a few minutes to browse some of the really great websites out there. Go back and check out an old favourite and see why you like them. But remember the aim is to get inspired not to rip off your peers!