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Recently Written
- Create tiling backgrounds with bgpatterns
- Create Flash animations
- The best blog coaching program at a discount
- Free fonts at UrbanFonts
- Start blogging the right way
- Colour palettes by topic
- Web templates
- Free web template - Squick Design
- Design Inspiration of the week - nemstudio
- New premium wordpress theme: One Theme
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Link partners
Download some butterflies
Snap2objects - a design tips and freebies blog has made available 93 butterfly photos and vector artwork to download and use in your web design projects.
The pack consist on transparent .png isolated objects, silhouettes, bw and color vector traced vector files - in .eps and .svg of each theme and also a .txt with the attributions.
The art work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Need a web site designed for free?
Mitch Bryson is asking for submissions from companies or individuals who would like a small web site designed (for free). There is only one spot available and the condition is that the design process will be blogged about from start to finish by the designer. This is a good opportunity to get started with that site you have been thinking about so head over to his site and enter.
Free small banners
I created these while experimenting with some text effects. Feel free to download and use on your own site. I’m not sure how useful the current words are on these but if I get enough requests for other words or sizes etc I’ll make them.
Web Design Styles History
I’ve been seeing many articles pop up on the internet trying to define the web 2.0 style design, or current design trends (see here, here, here and there are lots more no doubt). This made me think about past web design trends, which these days seem rather outdated but were popular in their time. (This article is based around my own experience)
Around 13 years ago is when I first discovered the internet. My browser being text based I guess there wasn’t a whole lot to see, this is what things looked like in Lynx.
Navigation was with the arrow keys and space bar. Internet access was free at this time too through a local university.
By 1996 things were a bit more image intensive and along came the era of the animated gif, horizontal divider lines, frames and so much more. Under construction gifs were in high demand especially if they were animated. An average web site might have looked something along the lines of:
Other characteristics of this era were the single column LOOOOOOONG web page (content divided by the horizontal line - animated of course) There was usually a tiling background behind the text. There are still a few examples of this kind of design around today.
By 1998 the bright graphics were flashing a little less and pages had started to become a little more ordered especially for those who discovered the use of tables in formatting their pages. While the use of tables is frowned upon these days, back then it was kind of a step up from the flashing, animated “everything in one column” approach of earlier.
To me this year marks the beginning of the “metal buttons and interfaces” era. I looked up to graphic designers like Andy Evans from andyart.com (site bought by someone else since) who made the coolest (and animated!) navigation interfaces around.
Slicing graphics into many parts and putting them together with tables began with a vengeance around this time. Interfaces were almost always animated with a javascript mouseover script. Common themes tended to be metallic and futuristic, the more wires the better.
Some example “interfaces” can still be found on sites like eyeball-design.com although they have brought theirs up to date and it looks rather good.
Topaz designs one of the better designers of the era but unfortunately her site hasn’t been updated in years.
Other popular styles of the time were the “left side background pattern“, the “click here to enter my site” splash page and the precursor of the web template called “web sets” (which you can still find plenty of be searching for the term.)
Around 2002 web sites started to take on a more corporate kind of look. Possibly due to templatemonster’s popularity many template providers started appearing, offering this type of magazine-like look consisting of a large picture as the header and the information organized into smaller columns underneath.
This style is still fairly popular today however the trend seems to be towards less images used in the design and more focus on the content. Artwork also seems to replace photos often.
No doubt there’s plenty of change yet to come as more young people have a chance to study and profit from design, new software is invented and new talent enters the field each year.
Free metallic CSS menu
The above is a screenshot of this free CSS menu which you can download here.
It’s made up of some pretty simple CSS and html and 2 images.
I’ve tested it in Firefox and IE 6, if you come across problems in other browsers let me know.
It’s main limitation in that you must keep the wording of each menu button to around 17 characters otherwise it doesn’t look right.
Feel free to use in any way you like, some credit is always appreciated but not necessary.
What kind of templates would you like to see here?
At the moment I offer free html templates on this site but I know that these days people are moving towards content management systems and blogs so I was wondering: what kind of templates would you like to see on this site?
1) Continue with plain html templates?
2) Create free wordpress themes?
3) Create custom unique wordpress themes?
4) Other cms templates?
Let me know in the comments area or send me an email with your comments.
3 column template “Clouds”
This is a 3 column template with navigation on the right and the main content area on the left. CSS, no tables, valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
You can preview by clicking on the image or download here.
Site update
If you have visited this site before you may have noticed that many things have been changed. I have started using Wordpress to organize my site and so many URLs have been changed and also the site looks a little empty in places (such as the comments area). This will hopefully change in the weeks to come and anything not working will be fixed. If you have any ideas for improvement, you have requests or have found something not working on the site please leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll see what I can do.
Don’t forget that you can now subscribe to this site in your RSS feed reader and be notified of site updates the moment they happen. Click here to add this site to your reader.
Free backgrounds: rocks, bricks, stone textures
To save an image to your computer click on it with the right mouse buttons and click on “save as” or similar.
Free backgrounds: silk
To save an image click on it with your right mouse buttons and choose save as.
