Red Pill: Shiny New Toy's Blog » design http://shinynewtoy.com/blog Causes dizziness and other side effects Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:38:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Weekly Inspiration: Mobile sites http://shinynewtoy.com/blog/2008/12/07/weekly-inspiration-mobile-sites/ http://shinynewtoy.com/blog/2008/12/07/weekly-inspiration-mobile-sites/#comments Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:58:36 +0000 Holly Hagen http://shinynewtoy.com/blog/?p=203 For the last few weeks, I’ve been helping a friend design a mobile site. It’s a space that I’m not all too familiar with, so I’ve been capturing a lot of decent inspiration. Here is a snapshot of what’s been on my mind.

I know what you are thinking… looks like screenshots of iphone apps. Actually most of these are sites designed for advanced phone browsers with a couple of apps sprinkled in here and there. Plus grabbing screenshots from my iPhone is 10 times easier than taking them from my browser. It’s all those site with smart redirects… those clever developers =)

Anyway here’s the list (from left to right, top to bottom):

Want more? I started a collection over at Flickr of all my mobile inspiration. Feel free to follow along.

]]> http://shinynewtoy.com/blog/2008/12/07/weekly-inspiration-mobile-sites/feed/ 1 Weekly Inspiration: Design Sites http://shinynewtoy.com/blog/2008/11/22/weekly-inspiration-design-sites-2/ http://shinynewtoy.com/blog/2008/11/22/weekly-inspiration-design-sites-2/#comments Sat, 22 Nov 2008 08:41:07 +0000 Holly Hagen http://shinynewtoy.com/blog/?p=180 During my presentation at WordCamp Hawaii last month, I showed a handful of web sites that I look to for design inspiration. I thought most of the examples were so obvious, I actually considered taking those slides out right before the presentation. But to my surprised most of the audience admitted to never seeing them before.

Anyway, this experience started me thinking… what’s obvious to me, may not be for someone else. So with that in mind, I’m starting a weekly series to show off stuff that inspires me. Even though I’m hoping to highlight more than just web sites, in this first series it is a good place to start. So without further ado, here are 5 sites I visited (more than once) this week for design inspiration.


PatternTap – Makes finding inspiration for specific elements a breeze with their collections.


Colorlouvers – A site full of color… browse by trends, palettes, and even by what other sites are already using.


FFFFOUND! – The randomness of what I may find is inspiration enough.


Design*Sponge – When design websites, I don’t always look at other websites. Design*Sponge is great home eye candy.


paper crave – I don’t just do web sites… I’ve been designing holiday cards at work and paper crave shows off a variety of inspirational print pieces.

]]> http://shinynewtoy.com/blog/2008/11/22/weekly-inspiration-design-sites-2/feed/ 0 Twitter Cha-cha-cha-changes! http://shinynewtoy.com/blog/2008/09/19/twitter-cha-cha-cha-changes/ http://shinynewtoy.com/blog/2008/09/19/twitter-cha-cha-cha-changes/#comments Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:00:29 +0000 Holly Hagen http://shinynewtoy.com/blog/?p=133

Twitter got a little face lift yesterday and its not that bad. I love the look of the larger type for your “following”, “followers”, “updates” count and that your latest tweet is place under the update field. They do use a lot of my design pet peeves… but that’s pretty much the extent of my complaints.

Pet peeve #1: Rounded corners… really?!? I’ve abused corners in some of my designs too, but I just don’t really understand the obsession. I know it’s very web 2.0, but the design stands up without them. I took a look in IE and it does… I almost prefer it. Maybe it’s because I’m missing the squareness of a tweet. It was sort of iconic. (Side note: It’s damn cool they are the CSS3 border-radius property for those silly corners)

Pet peeve #2: Finger tabs… or at least that’s what I’ve been calling them since my boy Shalin added them to the redesigned My eBay. In the new Twitter design, the finger tabs (right) replaced the horizontal ones that used to be above the timeline. I didn’t like the horizontal tabs either and really don’t know what the best solution would be, but those finger tabs just irk me. Maybe it’s because they look like fingers or maybe it’s because they want look like side navigation but act like tabs… something is just confusing about the whole look of them.

Pet peeve #3 Georgia Italics… that’s just gross and should never be done.

So other than that… it’s good step forward. Congrats, I know how hard it must be to please our large, vocal community. Want to see what everyone else is saying? Check out some of the reviews.


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