Archive for the ‘Useful tools’ Category

Today I found a great and simple application called Bounce. It’s “a fun and easy way to share ideas on a website” (in their own words). Developed by Zurb, a popular web design agency that has all of our admiration, the application allows you to make a screen-shot of a site, make notes and share them with friends or customers. Simple idea, right?

I like tools like this: practical and easy to use, user friendly. This is how it works:

1. Write the URL of a website

2. They provide a screenshot in just a few moments

3. Then you can give it a name and a title, add notes (no restrictions, you can add ass many as you like)

4. Save your screenshot and notes

5. Then share them with your friends using a URL provided by Bounce or post it on Facebook or Twitter. Your friends can give you feedback.

It’s perfect for web designers that want opinions about their work  or for website owners with the same intentions. What do you think about the app?

check here to see some notes I made about BannerSnack

Need a little color inspiration for your design projects? Or perhaps to get ideas on how to paint the room. There are a lot of websites that can help you create an awesome color palette, but from what we’ve seen, we recommend these 5 websites.

1. Colourlovers was made to inspire web designers, people fascinated by home decoration or fashion, wedding invitation designers and event decorators. In other words color enthusiasts. Filled with thousands of color pallets and patterns, the site is an endless resource of inspiration.

You can browse through the great variety of color suggestions, create new ones and discuss the latest trends with a vibrant community of people. You can also create a nice background for your Twitter page in just a few minutes, check out the application here.

One word description: rich

2. Kuler is the spot you have to go if you need color combinations. Developed by Adobe, Kuler is an application for generating color schemes for any project you can imagine. There are thousands of themes already created by members and you can browse through them using the tags that members associated with their palette.

If you want to create a new theme, you can start from a color or from an image. It’s the kind of tool that you can play with for hours.

One word description: inspiring

3. Color Combos was build to help web developers quickly select and test website color combinations. They offer tools to see how different color palettes would look on the screen and a library where users share their combinations for some inspiration.

If you have some favorite websites that look nice, just grab the url and let ColorCombos suggest some colors from those sites. Or you can just browse different categories like aqua, lemon, green, peach and others to find a color scheme.

One word description: convenient

4. Toucan is a little more sophisticated tool, compared to the others in this list. Developed by Aviary, it was made to encourage you to create and play with color pallets. You can increase up to 20 or go down to only 3 colors in your scheme and you can customize it in many many ways. The possibilities are endless.

Aviary released several more online tools, among which an image editor and an effects editor, so the palette created with Toucan can be imported and used in these tools. I think that’s a great plus for Toucan users.

One word description: customizable

5. Colorhunter is a very simple tool that lets you create colorful schemes from your images. All you have to do is browse a photo from your computer or insert a URL.

One word description: easy

If you are looking for icons to put on your website or blog try IconFinder. It’s just too easy to use and I think a very handy solution.

There are tons of icons out there, but where to find the right one? The application answers your question and makes the searching process easier. Good points for them?

• it’s intuitive,
• most of the icons are free also for commercial use,
• you can download right from the search results,
• nice mascot.

So next time you are looking for an icon try this website. What do you think?

I’d like to tell you about a great website that I found last week. It is a community of well opinionated people that want to help. Concept Feedback was made  to give helpful suggestions to web designers, developers and marketers, for their projects before going online.

This is how it works:

1. Upload and share the project you’ve been working on

2. Then, you’ll receive feedback from the professionals in the community

3. Improve your concept and give back to the community by helping others

One word description: helpful

Do you know other great feedback websites?

Hi again lovely people! How was this week for you? We have two reasons to be very happy: first, that spring is here and second because we launched a new product >> PodSnack. So happy that we could sing a song … well play it on a playlist.

Enough with us, let me share with you some interesting links that I think you will like.

Joshua Johnson writes about 10 ways to make your customers love you. I’m sure you know a lot of things from his list but they are so important that sometimes we need to review them. His article was a good way to start the week. Loved it.

Are you a designer? Or an aspiring one? You should check this awesome list of design related ebooks. Valuable content.

Also for you, talented guys, we have another list: Social media design tools, an article that was posted on Mashable. See how the autors came up with the blog post  “We’ve talked to the experts about what they use for inspiration, collaboration, and getting down to the business of design in a social media world.”

Have you seen this video that got a lot of designers enthusiastic about a new feature in Photoshop?  People tweeted about the video, wrote tons of comments and post it on a lot of blogs. It is a promise that something magic will happen soon in the most popular image editor, something that a lot of photoshopers expect because it will make their work much much easier.

Here is a brilliant piece of information if you want to know how to spread the word about what you do or sell Social Media Cheat Sheet.  It gives the answer to a very important question (also for us) “How do I know which social media sites to use?” Don’t you think this is a gold mine? It puts order in my mind. Thank you Drew!

A little inspiration for this weekend? I thought so … 66 mind blowing photo manipulation art.

To end this blog post I’ll just add a little eye candy: photos that celebrate the beauty of India. Color, mystery, contrast …

Hope you will have a beautiful and full of energy weekend, just like the first days of springs.

*** image credits Alliesnaps

I just found an interesting web application, Flavors.me that lets you create a homepage to gather your online profiles. It brings together your blog, photos, videos, music and social network accounts (like Twitter, Facebook and others) all in one place.

It’s like a good looking business card that works online.

They have an intuitive interface, you don’t need more than 15 minutes to open an account and create a nice homepage with your links in it. Flavors.me is free for the basic user and $20 per year for the professionals that need their own domain, statistics and the option to have a contact form. I think it was made with web designers and photographers in mind, usually creative people, because they focus on the visual aspect and simplicity.

You have to check their directory to see what others made using this tool. It speaks for itself.

One word description: fresh

Online photo editing has its advantages: you don’t need to download any software, most of them are free (or have a free version), easy to use and intuitive.

There are a lot of tools out there that you can use to enhance your images. But I’d like to recommend you the best three of them: Pixlr, Picnik and Aviary. I’m sure you’ll find one that’s perfect for what you need.

Pixlr

I found it on Twitter; it’s recommended by many people. Pixlr’s interface is very similar to Adobe Photoshop’s, offering you a nice collection of filters, custom effects, contrast & brightness adjustments, hue & saturation etc. For advanced projects, you can even work with layers!

Pixlr, due to its complexity, is both a photo editor and a graphic design tool. So it’s a great solution if you want to design a banner or to draw something.

One word description: easy

Picnik

I played a lot with Picnik; it’s very easy to use, fast and fun. You can open your photos from several places: your computer, Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook, MySpace and others. Besides the basic options like resize, crop, adjust colors and contrast, you can add effects, frames, text, stickers in just a few seconds.

You can even make a nice collage or a scrapbook from your images. And in the end you can share your photos on different social networks.

I also like the fact that Picnik optimizes your images, reducing their file size. This is useful when you share your photos online and want your website, blog or album to load fast.

Flickr integrated Picnik in its platform and that is a great recommendation for this tool.

One word description: fun.

Aviary

Aviary offers multiple tools for web designers and graphic artists, including an image editor, color editor, vector editor, effects editor and even a screen capture tool. Aviary’s interface looks like Adobe Photoshop’s and has a lot of effects and filters, but I found it a bit more difficult to use than the previous two image editors. However if you are a beginner, their collection of  tutorials might help you. One feature that sets Aviary apart is the ability to start a project from a design made by other users.

I think that Aviary is best suited for people who already have some experience in image manipulation.

One word description: professional

Did you try any of these photo editors? Or do you use another one?