I think fan art is super cool. I think it is especially cool when artists transform their favorite characters in their own style. It is so interesting to see the variations that different artists come up with. Some of the more popular characters like The Little Mermaid and Super Mario, could easily have their own post where no two pictures looked alike. It is quite amazing when you think about it really.

Which one is your favorite?

It has been a while since I did one of these sort of posts and I think its long over due. Being that I am in a real simple design state of mind lately, I thought I would do a showcase of websites that feature very organized and clean designs. While many designs that fall into this category tend to be “minimal” themes, that’s not always the case. Some of the examples below are proof of that.

What do you think of these designs and this style? Which one is your favorite?

1. MashKULTURE

2. Snook

3. Simple Type – Free Template

4. Astheria

5. Teenage Engineering

6. Corporate Risk Watch

7. Five Simple Steps

8. Typojungle

9. CFO Registry

10. Minimalsites

11. Life of my Story

12. Information Architects

13. 3 Rings

14. HUGE

15. Frank Chimero

16. Kyle Steed

17. If You Could

18. Hellonoam

19. Somme

20. Internet Gentleman

21. Iconwerk

22. Reform Revolution

23. Book Cover Archive

24. Distrop

25. Deskography

26. Pro Theme Design

27. Iokon Media

28. A Way Back

29. Design Intellection

30. Capitol Circle

31. Christos B

32. Art Expo New York

33. One by Four

34. Brian Hoff

35. Purple Raincloud

36. GOOD

37. Poccuo

38. SiteInspire

39. Nosotoros

40. Hex

41. Sans Lux

42. AdLucent

43. Marten de Jongh

44. Anebstar

45. Mission Bicycle

46. The Post Family

47. Fusion Ads

48. Ostmodern

49. Clicwerk

50. 508 Switch

Not to long ago I did a post that featured 50 Genius Advertisements Featuring Animals. I thought a nice follow up to that post would be a showcase of logos that featured creative uses of animals in their logo. Below is a list of about 30 really creative ones. There are plenty of other animal based logos out there, but many sport the same style and ideas. I thought just about all of these were extremely creative and different.

If you are looking for more logo inspiration, I suggest checking out: The Design Inspiration

Some people use Photoshop to create art, others use a pen and paper, Scott Wade on the other hand uses dirty windshields.

Scott and his wife live down a long and dusty road the results in constantly having a rear windshield that is covered with dust and dirt. Scott being the strange and bizarre artist that he is, decided this dusty surface was perfect for recreating masterpieces of art along side with his own creations. It was only a matter of time before the press got a hold of Scotts work. His unique artistic surface and style has landed him a number jobs playing and painting on dirty windshields!

Check out his website

There are plenty of posts out there that showcase creative ads, hell, I have posted a few myself. But, most of these posts just showcase a wide variety of creative ads. I wanted to narrow that down a little bit and only showcase creative ads that featured animals. There were tons of cute and creative animal based ads out there, but I selected 53 of my favorite to share with you!

A while back, Smashing Magazine did an awesome round up of 2009 Web Design Trends. The post was a great round up of trends for 2009 and websites that showcased these trends. I would like to take that post a step further and add a list of tutorials to show you how to recreate these popular trends.

Letterpress

“One of the most unexpected trends we’ve observed over the last months was the emergence of letterpress (actually pressed letters) in Web design. Probably the most important reason for this trend is the simple fact that this technique has been rarely used until now. Letterpress is used in various styles and on various websites and for various topics; in particular, it is often used in product designs and on websites for online services.”

Photoshop Tutorial: The Letterpress Effect

Easily achieve the trendy LetterPress effect with Photoshop

Ps Letterpress emboss text effect

Create Your Own Letterpress, Inset, Debossed Text

Photoshop CS3+ Letterpress Tutorial

Create a Sleek Pressed Letter Design

Rich User Interfaces

“Happily, user interfaces in modern websites and Web applications are becoming more beautiful and more usable. Over the last year, the user experience for these applications has dramatically improved, resulting in rich and responsive user interface that have tremendous similarities with classic desktop applications. AJAX and Flash are widely used to offer users the dynamic interaction that they have come to expect from advanced, sophisticated, professional solutions.”

jQuery Plugin: Tokenizing Autocomplete Text Entry

Ajax Tooltip with JQuery

A fancy Apple.com-style search suggestion

Interactive Map with jQuery

jQuery checkbox and Radio button

PNG transparency

“PNG transparency, although unsupported by Internet Explorer 6, seems to have gained popularity on the scene over the last year. Apparently, designers are trying to better integrate background images into the actual content and are aiming for a style that is often seen in printed media, magazines for instance.”

Transparent Glass Lettering in Photoshop

Add Transparent Type To An Image

Transparent Desktop

How to make a Diamond in photoshop.

How to Use Depth of Field to Create Portraits with Blown-Out Backgrounds

HUGE Typography

“We presented some outstanding examples of BIG typography in previous posts. In 2009, big typography should remain popular. In particular, design agencies, portfolios, product websites and online services will use big typography to communicate the most important messages of their websites.”

Create a Trendy Typographic Poster Design

How to Create High Quality Metal 3D Text in Photoshop

Logo Design Project Step by Step Walkthrough

Creating a Typographic Wallpaper

Typography Wallpaper in Photoshop

Font Replacement

“As designers pay more attention to typography, they also pay more attention to the fonts that are used for the copy in the body of websites. Although classics such as Helvetica, Arial, Georgia and Verdana undoubtedly dominate, we observed a slight trend towards font replacement (for instance, with sIFR).”

How To Use Any Font You Wish With FLIR

Fixing Fancy Font Frustrations

Embedding Fonts

Use a custom font on your website

Use Any Font on Your WordPress Blog with AnyFont WordPress Plugin

Modal Boxes (Lightboxes)

“Modal boxes (dialog windows) are, essentially, the second generation of pop-ups. They serve as a user-friendly alternative to classic JavaScript windows and support users by focusing their attention on the most important area of the website.”

Lightbox Tutorial

Lightbox Gone Wild

Building a Lightbox with jQuery

Create a Photo Admin Site Using PHP and jQuery

Media Blocks

“Users just lean back and enjoy the show; they get everything explained to them step by step, without having to click, search for descriptions or learn the navigation. The movies are usually pretty short and get directly to the point; they are mostly formal but can be entertaining, too.”

Adding Movies to Your Web Page

Playing Videos on a Web Site

Embedding Windows Media and QuickTime Video on a Web Page

Putting Video on Your Web Site: The Basics

How to put video on your web site

The Magazine Look

“An interesting development in the design of blogs is the adaptation of various techniques usually found in traditional (print) media. The arrangement of posts on the page, the use of typography, illustrations and even text alignment often resemble traditional techniques from print. Grid-based designs are gaining popularity as well but are used mostly in portfolios, product pages and big blogs; they almost never appear on corporate websites or in online shops.”

Magazine-style layouts

Creating A Professional Magazine Web Layout

Prototype a Magazine-Style Home Page Template with the Blueprint CSS Framework

Build a Newspaper Theme With WP_Query and the 960 CSS Framework

Grid-Based Design: Six Creative Column Techniques

Carousels (Slideshows)

“Carousels are essentially slideshow navigations, in which the content rotates vertically or horizontally (hence the name “carousel”). To rotate the navigation, users need to click on one of two toggle elements (usually a left/right or up/down arrow). Depending on the toggle element selected, the content is rotated in the desired direction.”

How to Use noobSlide

Installing a Accessible News Slider

Getting Started with SmoothGallery

Installing jCarousel

Creating a Carousel Slideshow

I constantly find my self studying good user interfaces to find out what makes them work so well. I think understanding good user interface design can help you create website designs that are more user friendly. The more user friendly a website is, the more profitable it can be. Therefor, why would you not study good user interface design? Here is a showcase of some good user interface designs I came across while doing some research for a recent project of mine.

1. Ballpark

2. Want Stream

3. Mozilla Songbird

4. Amidst

5. Concierge Live

6. Fluid Tumblr Theme

7. Seen It Yet

8. Episodic

9. Send Space

10. Answer Me

11. Swatchblot

12. Code Base

13. Blinksale

14. WuFoo

15. Groove Shark

16. Go Plan

17. Basecamp

18. Help Suite

19. Human Race

20. Crazy Egg

Maybe it is because I am new to Macs, but I had no idea of the extreme customizing options that they had to offer. With just a few tools and additional apps there are all sorts of cool things you can do to create a more custom look and feel to your Mac Desktop and operating system. Today I started browsing the web for some inspiration on how to customize my own Mac desktop. Below are some of the really cool customized desktops that I found. If any of them seem a bit sub par, be sure to click the link to examine all the little details.

The other day I got one of those lame forward emails that people like your mom or 10 year old sister send you. You know the ones that have lame jokes, heart felt stories, or pictures of cute animals? Well, I got one of those but t turned out to be pretty cool. It was just four or five pictures of create semi advertisements. I thought it was so cool I decoded to google some more and found a decent amount of really cool looking ones. Check them out!

Like any other web/app/iPhone junkie, I like to check out all the new and popular apps as they come out. One thing I like about all these app sites is that most of them have a really cool design. The only catch to their cool design is that it looks like every other app website on the internet. Its funny, when browsing my favorite CSS gallery, I can automaticlly tell an app site right away just by the way it looks.

I guess thats good, right?

Anyways, here are some of my favorite app website designs.

Tic a Tac Poker

Future Tap

Little Sanpper

Fat Burger

The Invoice Machine

Tap Tapas

Empty Factory

Culture Code

The Resumator

Firetask

Tao Effect

Sifter

PB Wiki

Versions

Mac Rabbit

Two December

Storytlr

Zen Desk

Unblab

June Cloud