In a recent thread on the Independents Hall list-srv, David Speers asked us all to list our favorite daily blogs. This spawned a fascinating set of child threads that lead me to sites I have never been to before. As I finished up my list I figured it would be good to augment the items and write a post of my most used and abused web resources for design.

The following is a list of those resources that I cannot do with out. Hope you find it useful.

Inspiration:

DFCKR - a daily stop in my routine. This site is one of my ultimate inspiration resources. DFKR is a web publication created by design aficionado Alex Giron, who is the creative director of the DC based agency called nclude. The site itself is an aggregate of design news and info from all over the web. In addition to its extremely encompassing topics on design, it is a showcase for illustration and creative ads which would be hard to come across all by your lonesome.

PhireBrush - online design rag and showcase. Phirebrush is similar to DeviantArt in some ways, like being able to submit writings as well as artistic subjects. Submissions are driven by users mostly comprised of illustrative art, photography, music, desktop wallpapers and writings of various styles. These submissions are compiled into monthly “Issues”, with “Best Of” annuals showcasing the best submissions of the year.

LogoPond - LogoPond is a community based site driven by logo submissions contributed by its users. If you love to design logos and are looking for a great place to get some direction this is a hot spot. LogoPond also acts as a showcase for your logos where you can receive and deliver feedback on other’s submissions.

CSS Remix - this is more geared for web designers, most notable those designing with CSS/XHTML based layouts.

Resources

Adobe Studio Exchange - Ahh, the Adobe Studio Exchange. If you do not know about this resource and you are a regular Adobe CS user, shame on you! The Studio Exchange is a place to trade, upload, and download all kinds of Adobe related materials, like brushes, custom shapes, styles and patterns for Photoshop and Illustrator; templates and scripts for InDesign, as well as other plug-ins and add-ons for almost every Adobe product.

BitBox - A fantastic Photoshop/Illustrator blog, heavy on the Illustrator. Tons of free resources and techniques for all you pixel pushing addicts; including brushes, and details into Photoshop and Illustrator’s more underused, sometimes intimidating tools. Articles are informative for even the most novice of CS users.

Wikimedia Commons - Hands down one of the most underused resource for designers and artists. The Wikimedia Commons site is a vast library of various media formats. You can search the site by medium, copyright status, topics and categories. Since the site is operated by the boys over at Wikipedia, (one of many daily stops in my day!) it operates the same way. Think of it as an encyclopedia of Media, you can find such interesting stuff on here to use in your designs, blog entries, news stories, etc. There is so much just in the “public domain” Copyright Statuses, that you tend to get lost in the site for an hour or more. Kudos to the collaborative information movement, this is one of the fruits of that labor, and a must have for any creative.

Open ClipArt - This is the OpenSource communities answer to clipart. The site is not the most efficient in its display of the information, it uses a tag system which is nice but the tag cloud is a little hard to navigate. There are also limited thumbnails, once you drill down to them; and that really makes the site a bit unfriendly for the user. I am sure there are chaps out there working to improve the usability of the site, however you can find some interesting public domain and creative commons clip art on here.

OpenDesigns – I love designing a whole site from scratch, but tweaking a template can really save you on work and time. Most of the templates on the site are fantastic starting points.

Pixel 2 Life – has to be one of the most comprehensive tutorial sites on the web. You can find tutorials dealing with almost every major graphics program, and tutorials for web development as well. All of the tutorials are aggregated from other sites, but Pixel2Life acts as the front end. It incorporates an easy to use navigation system, organized by category, then software package. This should definitely be one of your bookmarks if you want to constantly brush up on your graphic skills.

Fonts

DaFont - My first stop when I am looking for great free fonts. The items on the site are categorized by type styles, or listed alphabetically. There are a ton of fonts on here for every range of graphic design, specifically the bitmap and pixel fonts.

Wanted Fonts - another good font site with easy to use navigation, however it follows in line with many free font sites, in its love of using pop-ups. Even if you have pop-ups blocked it is a bit annoying, still a lot of great fonts.

Many more, I am sure.
I realize that this list can be augmented, and would welcome anybody to leave a comment about resources they believe are just as beneficial. I hope that this list is helpful to my fellow designers, and I look forward to all of your input.