Awesome-Selfhosted

April 22, 2021 at 4:59 pm

This is a post-it note for myself to a long list of free, self-hosted soft­ware solu­tions. Decentralization, inde­pen­dent inter­net, and all that jazz. If you’re look­ing for alter­na­tives to siloed, sub­scrip­tion model, software-as-a-service (SaaS) — give it a look.

colorpalettes.earth

April 12, 2021 at 10:20 am

Simple, straight­for­ward, noth­ing more, and noth­ing less. Color inspi­ra­tion from nature pho­tos. Most of the palettes might be too mono­chro­mat­ic for applied use, but they are a great start­ing point for ideas. Plus, tak­ing a scroll can be pret­ty relax­ing as the imagery and pre­sen­ta­tion is calming.

Misty evergreen forest, color palette inspiration, color circles, frosty dark greens, misty blues

Haikei

March 12, 2021 at 2:00 pm

I can remem­ber see­ing this blob­mak­er and wave gen­er­a­tor mak­ing the rounds on design boards months ago. (Or was it longer than that thanks to being on pan­dem­ic time?) They’ve been super charged togeth­er — along with a dozen more options for cre­at­ing back­grounds — in a new web app. There’s some good options like a low-poly grid and quite a few wave scenes. Go roll the dice and cre­ate some­thing fun for a few minutes.

Poly grid triangle background, static png sample of an svg graphic
Blob step scene background, static png sample of an svg graphic
Layered waves background, static png sample of an svg graphic

Busy, busy, busy.

December 8, 2014 at 8:41 pm

You might have noticed the post­ing fre­quen­cy here at SpareType has dropped off a bit the last few weeks. Client work has picked up and hope­ful­ly I’ll be able to share some of that soon as items get com­plet­ed. In the mean­time, here’s a huge list of awe­some things from around the Internet that have been col­lect­ing dust in my brows­er tabs. Enjoy!

The State of Web Type — Do you need to know which OpenType fea­tures are sup­port­ed in which browsers? Then here is the Can I Use for typo­graph­ic features.

Do you know how many rules, selec­tors, and dec­la­ra­tions are in your CSS? Maybe you’re curi­ous how many col­ors or font fam­i­lies are hid­den in your style sheets? Plug in your URL or raw code to CSSStats and get the breakdown.

The folks at Tower are cel­e­brat­ing OS X Yosemite with An Illustrated History of Mac OS X. The illus­tra­tions are mar­velous. I think the Lion in the space­ship is my favorite, though Snow Leopard is close too.

Turn sta­t­ic mock­ups into trans­par­ent, float­ing guides with GluePrint.

Just want to code and not worry about web servers, data­bas­es, engines, or deploy­ment? Cactus is a free, sta­t­ic site gen­er­a­tor that com­piles Markdown, SASS, and Coffeescript out of the box. It also auto­mat­i­cal­ly refresh­es your brows­er when you save changes and can deploy to Amazon S3 to make your web­site public.

Flakes is a clean, open source design frame­work for build­ing inter­nal busi­ness appli­ca­tions — think sales lead man­age­ment and inven­to­ry track­ing screens. Just look at this form for enter­ing info.

Flakes Framework Screenshot of Form Entry Screen, Admin UI, CSS framework

How to Make a Performance Budget? What should you be mea­sur­ing, how should you mea­sure it, and what should your goal be in deliv­er­ing the best web­site performance.

DeviantArt has a new brand. I love the write­up about the process, but I’m not entire­ly sold on the logo yet.

Awesome home­page and all-around awe­some web­site by the folks at Underbelly. Really nice touch­es with the URL names.

Underbelly.is - Screenshot of creative agency homepage, blue washed desktop, full screen background

Tis the sea­son for cute, wintery-themed hol­i­day icons. Here’s an awe­some free set on Dribbble.

Speaking of the hol­i­days, here’s a Christmas present I would have liked as a child. Typeblocks — maple wood alpha­bet blocks.

Typeblocks - maple wood alphabet blocks, font blocks, laser cut

Finally, let’s wrap the post up with a lit­tle self-promotion. Society6 — which I have some art­work avail­able on — has some great hol­i­day dis­counts going on this week. Be sure to check out my store and pick out any last minute gifts you still need to get.

Coolors.co — Color Palette Generator

October 27, 2014 at 3:39 pm

I always like fun, single-task tools that make inspi­ra­tion easy. How about color palettes just by click­ing the space­bar? Coolors.co let’s you do just that. Like a color and want to lock it in? Click on it, then keep hit­ting space­bar to build a palette around that color. You can also paste in your own hexa­dec­i­mal val­ues if you already have a color you want to start with. Palettes are easy to share because the URL has all the val­ues in it. Just copy and paste. Here’s one I cre­at­ed earlier.

Coolors.co Color Palette, color theory, complementary, hex colors

Oh, and it’s respon­sive too. Definitely give it a try on your mobile device.

OSX Yosemite Icons

October 21, 2014 at 12:25 pm

I’m still on the fence about updat­ing my late 2008 Macbook Pro to Yosemite. I might wait for the 10.10.1 release for any of the bugs not caught in the beta to shake out. I’m also a lit­tle wary about the type­face changes. But I am excit­ed about the design and the inspi­ra­tion that leads design­ers to cre­ate new things.

For those of you who have already taken the plunge, you might notice some apps still wait­ing for an update to fresh­en up their design or intro­duce a clean­er icon to fit the new Yosemite style. Luckily you can cleanup your dock your­self with cus­tom icons for OSX appli­ca­tions. Here’s a run­down of the best so far.

Yosemite Dock Icons By Jeremy Goldberg

Yosemite Dock Icons By Jeremy Goldberg - Replacement icons for Mac OSX applications

 

Muir: Yosemite Icons Volume 1 & Volume 2

Muir: Yosemite Icons by Sebastiaan de With

 

Adobe CC Icon Set by Benjamin Schmitt

Free Adobe CC Icons for Mac OSX Yosemite by Benjamin Schmitt, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Muse, InDesign, Bridge, After Effects

 

Dots by dradis75

Dots by dradis75 - Mac OSX Replacement Icons, Yosemite, Round Flat Minimalist Icons

 

Microsoft Office Icons for Yosemite by Jason Zigrino

Microsoft Office Replacement Icons for Mac OSX Yosemite by Jason Zigrino (ziggy19) - Word, Excel, Lync, Publisher, Powerpoint icons

 

Evernote Field Book by Jason Zigrino

Evernote Icon for Mac OSX Yosemite by Jason Zigrino, replacement icon, field book, notebook

 

What do you think? Are you dig­ging the new OS or have you start­ed a list of things Apple needs to fix? Should I make the leap to Yosemite — or a bet­ter idea, just get a new Mac. Maybe one of those shiny 5K iMacs? Yummm… *drool* *slob­ber*

This Week’s Tabs

September 12, 2014 at 8:10 am

Dan Rhatigan on type…Type on Dan Rhatigan from Grey London.

Interesting user inter­face idea — Monocle (via Smashing Newsletter)

Glitch effect — Chris Coyier breaks down Lucas Bebber’s neat CSS only technique

This is a shirt. Funny, very meta idea.

Why Starbucks Spells Your Name Wrong (via swiss­miss)

Tools Outline Icon Set by Oxygenna

Beautiful inspi­ra­tion for color gra­di­ents — uigradients.com

iPhone 6 Screen Sizes Infographic — This is the best break­down in terms of res­o­lu­tion for Apple’s new toys released this week.

This Week’s Tabs

September 5, 2014 at 8:00 am

Jeffrey Zeldman: 20 years of Web Design and Community from lynda.com on Vimeo.

Map Glyphs — hun­dreds of scal­able vec­tor map icons

Build a quick flexbox lay­out just by divid­ing a box.

I would­n’t mind hav­ing one of these tables when I get a new house.

Or maybe I’ll just string up a treehouse.

Codio — my IDE of choice — just launched edu­ca­tion fea­tures for teach­ers to run cod­ing classes.

And speak­ing of teach­ing, Tal Leming teach­es you how to cook OpenType fonts.