A couple of years ago I read an article that predicted we would soon see a surge in niche social networks crop up across the internet, targeted at specific groups whether they be for cat lovers, home brewers, or in our case designers. The thinking behind it was that one massive social network, Facebook, couldn’t suffice the needs of each and every individual out there. Facebook is great for staying in touch with friends and family, but it is far too broad reaching to cater to everyone.
Fast forward to present day and there’s a nearly overwhelming number of social outlets for designers to promote themselves on and network with others. In this article I’ve listed six of the most prominent social networks for designers available today.
The Invites
Five of the six networks listed here are invite only, so along with covering the sites I’ve also got a few invites to give away:
- Five invites to LoveDsgn
- Three invites to Forrst
- Three invites to Design:Related
To enter yourself in the drawings for the invites just leave a comment below with a link to your portfolio and which sites you’d like to get an invite to. I’ll announce the winners in a week
The Sites
Dribbble
Some hosts have custom error page options in their admin panel software, but if you want to bypass that and easily make your custom error messages work (as long as you’re running Apache) it’s pretty simple. Especially if your a blogger, and you’re familiar with .htaccess files, this is a very simple process and it works great. Let’s get started.
WebClip Icons are strictly for iPhone & iPod Touch users, but since they are quite the popular little devices, website owners might want to think about adding a WebClip icon soon. A WebClip icon is the icon that the iPhone/iPod Touch uses if a user adds your site to their (now customizable) homescreen/s. I would expect that most people who would bookmark BittBox on the iPhone would just read the RSS feed, but as a site owner, I don’t want to leave anything to chance. I want my icon to look the way I want it to look, and not rely on the iPhone to do it for me. Think of it as a really big favicon.
We all need inspiration every once in a while, and I have a few favorite sites I’d like to share with all of you. Some of these may be obvious, some may not, but I’m including the obvious ones because I realize a lot of people who read BittBox may be new to design. If you fall into that category, bookmark these sites (a couple of which are in my sidebar). We all get stuck sometimes, and when that happens, I like to stop everything, sit back and surf for inspiration. Or just to try and take in some new ideas.
Let me start of by saying that there are many different ways to do this. I’ve recently gotten a lot of emails and feedback regarding how to take the free vectors I provide, and actually use them in a web page design. There is no possible way I can entirely cover that subject with a single tutorial, so I’m going to show you a simple example to expose some key steps that might make this process a little more clear to you. It’s important to note that this tutorial requires basic knowledge of a vector graphics editor (Illustrator in my case), Photoshop, HTML, and CSS.
There are a number of reasons why vector graphics may be pushed aside in favor of photoshop when it comes to web design. One of those reasons is exactly why I wrote this tutorial. It takes a few extra steps to get an image from vector format to a webpage design, but vector graphics hold much more value in the long run. For instance, you can customize a set vector buttons for a specific website design, take all of those customized vector graphics into Photoshop, and you have your raster buttons to save for the web. However, since you started off in vector format, you can dig those buttons up a year from now and change anything you want about them, without losing a single pixel-worth of quality.
Who needs 4 round corners when you can have 1 or 2 that fade into oblivion?
There are a few reasons why this is not only kinda cool, but also a good idea for optimizing your site or blog:
1. It just looks cool.
2. It effectively separates content and keeps load times down because the background only loads once and doesn’t repeat.
3. It gives you freedom in your layout. Having a border that fades into your background enables you to leave the height and/or width of the column up to the content. For example, if you have a fading corner on the each section of the sidebar in your blog, you can add as many links as you want into that section and your CSS only loads one background image.
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