Web Design Tutorials and Inspiration
October 11, 2010 4:42 PM   Subscribe

Web Design Ledger is a publication written by web designers for web designers. The primary purpose of the site is to act as a platform for sharing web design related knowledge and resources. Topics range from design inspiration to tips and tutorials and everything in between. posted by netbros (15 comments total) 49 users marked this as a favorite
 
When you really think about it, the whole web design industry originally spawned out of the desire to make the results from the dir command prettier to look at.
posted by crunchland at 5:12 PM on October 11, 2010


Please take no offense as I'm sure some of these resources are genuinely helpful to the community at large, but they've taken the 8, 9 & 10 reasons to read this post to a whole new level and it's been my experience that the quality of the content suffers immensely after the third or fourth item listed therein, as seen on many other design-appropriate sites.

Stay fresh, but just don't get too crazy with the lists, please.
posted by jsavimbi at 5:19 PM on October 11, 2010 [2 favorites]


Sigh. List sites — even ones with really pictures — aren’t resources; they are distractions.
posted by KS at 5:21 PM on October 11, 2010 [3 favorites]


*with really pretty pictures
posted by KS at 5:22 PM on October 11, 2010


This is different from WebMonkey how, exactly?
posted by vhsiv at 5:26 PM on October 11, 2010


A lot of these sites are spammy.... WDL's been in my RSS reader for a while, but I have mixed feelings about sites that only create arbitrarily-numbered lists of tutorials on other sites.

But since we're linking, here are the relevant webdesign blogs I have in my RSS Reader:

Six Revisions
Abduzeedo
SpoonGraphics
FudgeGraphics
The Design Cubicle
Thinkdesign
iDsgn


Honestly, WDL is probably one of the better ones of the bunch, although I stopped paying attention to this quadrant of the internet quite some time ago.

Currently looking for a good blog to make my JQuery skills seem inadequate. Open to suggestions!
posted by schmod at 5:27 PM on October 11, 2010 [7 favorites]


I would like this better if there were only one featured item per post. Otherwise it's overwhelming. And it starts to look like the cover of a Cosmo knockoff.
posted by expialidocious at 5:29 PM on October 11, 2010


Okay, no.

Sorry. This site, and mashable, and whatever other SEO jank sites out there are just embarrassing for our industry.

Take, for example, "Must Know Usability Tips for Web Designers". Nevermind that the page reads like something out of a sixth grade art studies book ("It just so happens that recently the web has undergone a paradigm shift and we’re entering a powerful new information era." -- really? You're leading with this pablum?) -- the "must know tips" are utter crap. The tips are, in order: wireframe, mobile, "structure your typography carefully" (wtf does that even mean?), big headings, and... testing. Whoo-ee, now that's some great advice right there!

In other words, no actual mention of HCI, no mention of Fitts' Law, in fact nothing about things which actually matter to real users -- page rendering speed, readibility, whitespace (something they apparently know nothing about at WDL), and the list goes on.

The entire site seems like it's geared towards the 22-year-old college kid who wrote a wordpress theme for his MIS class and now thinks that he could do this professionally. It's nothing more than stupid SEO-build headlines ("Top X Nouns in order to Verb Nouns!") with no real structure; there's no way to browse these crapass Wordpress blogs other than the pager, and the designs are structured around the advertising they're trying to sell, which thank f'n god I run Adblock otherwise the site would have a display time of something on the order of minutes.

Do you want a _real_ wealth of resources for web design? The Stanford HCI Group, A List Apart, and Tufte will actually teach you things, rather than just giving you list of sites to cop the latest drop-shadow-gradient-fad from.
posted by m242 at 5:40 PM on October 11, 2010 [21 favorites]



I can't tell if everyone's being satirical and ironic... or not.
posted by Bathtub Bobsled at 5:54 PM on October 11, 2010


What he said.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:39 PM on October 11, 2010


Currently looking for a good blog to make my JQuery skills seem inadequate.

I'm still in the process of culling through a list of like a gazillion blogs on the subject somebody I don't even remember who it was posted somewhere once -- accurate sourcing FTW! -- but here are a few that seem to keep bubbling up to the top:

1 2 3
posted by ook at 7:41 PM on October 11, 2010 [4 favorites]


Sites like these are like those damn McRib sandwiches. They take something that at one point was a valuable resource, chop it up, sprinkle in SEO-MSG, and press it into "(n) things that will verb!" shaped nuggets and put a pretty picture on the box. These kinds of sites aren't for designers, they're for making money.

Sorry to be bitchy about it netbros. I don't intend it as a personal attack, just not my cup of tea. As it goes, this site seems better than others playing the content-farm ad revenue game.

I'll toss a few of my faves into the bunch:posted by fontophilic at 8:54 AM on October 12, 2010


tee hee hee
posted by ook at 1:14 PM on October 12, 2010 [1 favorite]


I came her to make ook's joke. Damn.
posted by cjorgensen at 9:45 AM on October 13, 2010


Here. I came here!

Ok, I'm in a hole. Damn it! I want my edit window.
posted by cjorgensen at 9:46 AM on October 13, 2010


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