Pallian Creative

Came across a bunch of interesting sites the past few days on my quest to find inspiration for the all new TIM. And to keep up with the linkfest tradition we have over at TIM, I present to you the first ever Pallian Weekender Linkfest:

Mygazines.com - Read all your favorite magazines online for free! They seem to have everything - from the latest Obama’s New Yorker to the juicy 230 page WALLPAPER.

My weekend splurge: Bigfoot vs Unicorn T-Shirt.

Cool new site for people who really love movies: Boxwish
The New Starbucks? - Check out this designer’s take on an all new Starbucks after their recent downturn.

Help Lisa out - buy her an iPhone! Seriously! If you’re in Vancouver and happen to get hold of the new 3G iphone… get in touch with her!

And if you’re generous enough to get Lisa her iPhone, splurge some more and buy me one of these :) Read & Discuss

A lot of people ask me how I go about designing a website - especially how I come up with all these designs for TIM. To answer your questions and reveal a little bit about how we do stuff here at Pallian, here’s two little things I do before I begin any project. If you’re a web designer yourself, you will hopefully find this post useful when you set off designing for your own clients.

Scour The Net For Good Inspiration
I’m not going to lie - I’ve spent hours and hours, mostly very late at night, searching for inspiration on design sites and web design galleries. Here’s a small list of sites I frequent the most:

FFFFOUND! - I can spend hours on this site and come up with all kinds of color, type and design ideas. And it’s growing by the day - almost 1250 pages of it! It’s like a free design mag that never wants to end.

Smashing Magazine - Once I’m all rouled up with FFFFOUND, my next stop is usually Smashing Mag. These guys have done a great job finding some of the most useful resources a web developer would ever need and neatly categorizing them. If I wanted layout ideas, font ideas, vector images, CSS hacks, Ajax codes - you name it, they have it. Saves me countless Google hours.

Screen Fluent - A little gem of a site hidden away from the mainstream design galleries - this mostly CSS based gallery has a ton of beautiful sites to give you all the inspiration you would need before you start your own.

CSSImport - Another great little CSS gallery I frequent a lot. They always tend have a very neat set of light, clean and fresh sites featured.

Some other sites I usually do a quick overview of:
Core77 / Design is Kinky / Christopher Lee / Web Designer Wall Read & Discuss