Kyle Wiebers

My first adventure into creating icons for a personal project has come and gone and left me with some things I want to share with you.  I’ve created round icons for Delicious, Ember, RSS, DesignBump, Skype, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Digg, Twitter and Facebook.  I’m hoping to use these to create a virtual business card I can include in my new design for this website.  Please feel free to take the set, modify the included Illustrator file and use them however you want.

They are licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License.  If you are looking to find me on any of these appliations, my pages are below.  Give me some feedback and enjoy!

• Delicious – wiebers
• Ember – wiebersk
• Skype – wiebersk
• StumbleUpon – wiebersk
• LinkedIn – Kyle Wiebers
• Digg – wiebersk
• Twitter – wiebersk
• Facebook – wiebersk
• DesignBump – wiebersk, this one is not shown but is the same as the stock DesignBump logo.

Simplecons

Download the set – Simplecons v1.0

Welcome to my first weekly blend. This is going to be a consistent weekly post every sunday night reviewing the blog posts/web musings that have peeked my interest throughout the week.

The Blend

This week was interesting between the release of Google Wave and lots of different web design blogs with quality posts.  I’d categorize this blend as 2 parts inspiration, 1 part theory, 1 part tutorial, and 2 parts fun.  I’ll go into the detail of this concoction below.

Inspiration

Absolut Vodka consistently has well designed ads with a consistent message.  Over at amog they have a great post that showcases different Absolut ads over time. http://bit.ly/sf3G8

Here's an example of one of the Absolut ads

WebDesignDev is a great blog that I just started to subscribe to with lots of inspirational posts.  This past week they had a great post which listed 26 Excellant Dark Website Designs.  If you are interested in different types of designs and how color influences design, this post is a must read.  http://bit.ly/3lm0ZR

Here's an example of one of the dark websites

Theory

Inspect Element is another blog I recently subscribed to that has some excellant content.  Inspect Element mostly focuses on theory and design principles of the web.  They recently started part 4 of a 4 part series – The Principles of Good Web Design: Content.  Throughout this series, Inspect Element has applied different design concepts to the web in an easy to digest way.  This is a must read for people who are just getting into web design (like me).  http://bit.ly/3ljlW5

Inspect Element

Tutorial

TutorialZine recently published a tutorial on how to make a slick content slider using jQuery. This is a great intro for developers looking to get into jQuery and the possibilities of this amazing framework.  .  http://bit.ly/2wA5vP

Making a Slick Content Slider With jQuery

Fun

There were plenty of fun things out on the web this week.  A lot of talk was over Google Wave which went into closed beta.  I unfortunately did not receive a invite so I’m unable to give a first hand review, but I have the next best thing – Lifehacker.  Lifehacker did a detailed overview of Google Wave which is worth a read if you are interested in the next generation of collaborative web  apps.  http://bit.ly/Nozco

Lifehacker - Google Wave

The final part of fun was an entertaining workflow diagram of whether or not you can be a web designer from Six Revisions.

Can You Be a Web Designer?

Thus concludes the Weekly Blend for this past week.  Let me know what you think in the comments or what you want to see for next week.

Who doesn’t have a Twitter account these days?  If are one of the few who doesn’t, you at least know what it is (and you should sign up today).  Twitter, once described by a wise man as 140 characters of id and now it’s changing the game.

Twitter Changes Everything

Twitter is changing the perceptions of what everyday web users perceive to be pertinent content.  Soon, the days of the long descriptive sentence effectiveness will be gone entirely.  Marketeers and copywriters alike, tune your communication methods because within a year, if it’s not under 140 – it won’t be effective.  Web readers will become habituated to shorter hooks as Twitter becomes their preferred method for receiving content.

Five Principles of Rockstar Content

Please note – none of these principles are new, but they are becoming ever more important.  If anything, take away these five simple principles and you will be on your way to getting prepared.

1. Tweetable Titles - Keeping titles short will be a sure fire way to get them sent all over social media outlets.  Think 40-60 characters.
2. Cut Fluff - One piece of advice I learned from Stephen King’s On Writing was adjectives and adverbs are not your friend.  Cut them out at all costs.  Your visitors will respect you for serving them more direct content and be more likely to link to you.  Web users can smell fluff a mile away when there’s no body language to hide behind and they don’t like it.
3. Think Architecturally – The days of lots of content taking up the entire screen is over.  The newspaper model worked for print, but users don’t want to stare at lots of words on a screen.  Use header tags to create an outline of your content for your users.  Users will thank you for not having a big blog of content for them to digest.
4. Think Graphically – If an image can communicate a thousand words, use it.  Using images to communicate trends, summaries, and other high level information is great for the linkability of your content as well as summarizing it for your users.
5. No More Content Pagination - Not only is this bad from an SEO standpoint, it’s annoying to users.  If you have that much content, do multiple posts, stories, vlogs, or any other way to communicate information faster. – don’t put the burden on the user to get your content.  Serve it to them in a simple easy to digest manner.

Summary

Principles of Rockstar Design

Don’t take this as the Gospel, if your current method works, use it.  If you have a lot of detailed content – be sure to explain it.  Just consider the five principles above  as time goes on and your readership will thank you.