This Week’s Tabs [Expanded Holiday Edition]

It never fails that my post­ing fre­quen­cy drops around Christmas and New Years. I seem to fall into a win­ter hiber­na­tion or maybe it’s a food coma. Whatever it is, I’m shak­ing it off and unload­ing all the cool links I’ve been sav­ing up.

Chris Allen has an awe­some­ly sim­ple port­fo­lio site full of nice work.

I loved land­ing on Benjy Stanton’s site because you get a bit of his per­son­al­i­ty right off the bat.

Ivo Mynttinen has a gor­geous hero image and well-designed site over­all. I also love the trans­paren­cy he took with his business.

Build your own over­head desk image with this free­bie of Designer Desk Essentials from Graphic Burger.

I love the details in this free­bie of food themed icons.

And speak­ing of food, “C” is for cook­ie. “L” is for letter-pressed.

Speaking of free­bies, Freebbble lets you search Dribbble resources by license so you can find free for com­mer­cial use design items.

These off-canvas menu effects would add a nice touch to your user experience.

Do you won­der how some­body else solved that tricky design prob­lem you’ve been hav­ing with a dia­log box, login form, or other ele­ment. Well, Codepen put togeth­er a library of design pat­terns for you to draw inspiration.

There’s also this list of user inter­face ideas to check out.

Kenneth Cachia put togeth­er this SVG-based seam­less pat­tern maker in your browser.

Quickly and eas­i­ly build an ani­mat­ed CSS gra­di­ent with this tool by Ian Forrest.

The Lost Type crew share a few of their favorite draw­ing tools.

New tech meets old tech in Richard Ardagh’s idea of a 3D-printed let­ter­press font.

Speaking of new tech, Gyroscope har­ness­es your social media activ­i­ty and health data to build a web­site about your life.

Motive — Digging the design of this WordPress theme by ThemeZilla

I also like this free theme from Automattic — Goran

More WordPress — eas­i­ly add employee/team pro­files with this Staffer plu­g­in.

I’m always check­ing out the CMS, website-building land­scape so this list was super help­ful in find­ing new contenders.

I’m get­ting one of these t‑shirts for my birth­day because my wife loves me.

Mmmm… Typography poster… So nice…

Aerial Wallpapers — inter­est­ing satel­lite imagery opti­mized for use as iPhone 6 Plus wallpapers

I’ve always want­ed to get into using Gantt charts to get orga­nized. Maybe I’ll give this free tool from Twproject a shot.

Great sug­ges­tions about what could be slow­ing down your team and how to fix them. Don’t Blame the Designer.

Need some sug­ges­tions for how to struc­ture and write your code? Check out Mark Otto’s Code Guide for HTML and CSS.

Is that new client or job worth tak­ing? Here are three ques­tions to help you con­sid­er the true value of every design job.

And here’s anoth­er six ques­tions to ask dur­ing inter­views to find out about a com­pa­ny’s cul­ture and environment.

Another post from the busi­ness side — Pay People for Commitment. He def­i­nite­ly has a point about the chang­ing dynam­ics of work/life balance.

An extreme­ly long read, but def­i­nite­ly worth it if you are think­ing of strik­ing out on your own. How I Wrote and Sold My First Ebook

And we’ll end this mon­stros­i­ty of a list with a video — Guardians of the Galaxy: 8 Bit Cinema