danliveshere.com

I’m always on the lookout for new and innovative designs for sites. I think that is one of the many things that always intrigues me about the web. When people combine art with functionality. I’ve seen plenty of sites that make you just go, ummm what? “What does this do?” “Why am I here?” or “How do I get this to do something… oh look something shiny!” I do really enjoy when I find a site that really shines in functionality and design. (This is why I dig the guys at Substance so much. They do a great job saddling the two concepts, design vs function).

I found about a cool site through a ’round about way. @richjoslin posted a link to a design blog in a FriendFeed room “Web Design, The Good The Bad, The Ugly”. The design blog is called Cult Foo. They have a compliation of a bunch of different sites to check out. If you have 1/2 hour to kill, check it out (the tag cloud, literally, on the top with the fixed position and use of .png transparency is a nice touch). One of the site on there is what inspired me to write this post – Digiguru.

Digiguru is the blog/portfolio site for Craig Jaimeson in South Africa, a flash and front end designer. The site that he created is a full flash one with a clean calendar interface. It has several nice touches including Full Screen, permalinks using SWFAdress and smooth transitions. The site functions well, and allows him to create…

I try to keep the number of RSS Feeds that I subscribe to a minimum. I have read about people like Robert Scoble that read some insane number of RSS Feeds a day, I just don’t have time. I find that if don’t read the RSS feed in over a month, I dump it. I look it almost like subscribing to someone’s email list. If I haven’t read their email in awhile, I should really unsubscribe… unless it is IMPOSSIBLE to unsubscribe (I’m looking in your direction eHarmony… subscribed for purely research purposes, I swear). A blog I have recently subscribed to their RSS feed and have been extremely happy with is the blog bokardo.com. Written by Joshua Porter/a>, author of Designing For the Social Web, the blog details examples of good and bad design throughout sites that are in the Social Web space (ie Web 2.0 sites). Below is an example of his review of the homepage of Freshbook’s homepage.

I still need to pick up his book which was recommended to me by David at Substance.

This is a space that I continue to look at for inspiration. A lot of the social networks and social sites that have been built out have been built with development in mind, but the experience or UI is secondary. How will people use the cutting edge functionality that your company has invested in if your design and UI was the last thing that you looked at, and didn’t invest really any money or time in… that is a bridge that a lot of people like to cross after…