A wonderfully crafted and beautifully designed system to help any and all designers when it comes to Grid Designs/Layouts. Thanks for the awesome resource Nathan!!

This is one thing I have been struggling with for several years. Do I spice up my personal blog and use it as my freelance site as well? Or leave it just like it is and have random posts that have nothing to really do with what I do on the side. I’ve tried more than a thousand times to come up with a great ‘name’ or identity for a site that can showcase a portfolio, tell others what I do, and bring in customers that way…but they all sit there wasting away and never come to fruition.

So, my point in this post, is that after the long struggle, and after reading a very insightful post from Jonathon Snook: Maintaining your Personal Brand Online, I have come to the decision that I will keep this site as is, but add all those other elements that I need to create work.

In the coming months I am going to redesign this site so look out if you run into broken links or missing images. The blog will still be here, just will not be the main focus of the main home page. I’ll try to post as I go, so that all of you can follow the progress!

Thanks Snook! for the inspiration to actually do something with my life site!

Some people can master it. Some people know only enough to get a simple style set on an HTML element. Then there are some people that just don’t have the time, so they look to something that can help speed up the development process…just like most other programming languages. This brings up the notion of a Framework where the developer can just plug into an already built Style Sheet and make his/her changes as needed.

I’ve been compiling lists in my Firefox bookmarks for years, so now it’s time to place some of the most common (and not so common) in a list on here so that the many others can reference to.

1. Blueprint
2. YUI Grids CSS
3. YAML
4. Tripoli
5. Elements
6. WYMstyle
7. Schema
8. His CSS Framework
9. Cw/S Framework

This is a slim list so far as many people are not ready to release an official Framework classification for their CSS. I don’t, but I do use the same setup across most of my projects.

If you see one that is not on this list, please let me know and I’ll keep an updated and continuous list of these much like I have done with my preferred free software post. I’d love to hear what you all have to say about these as well.

I am more and more enjoying this Inspiration (even though I am not updating this as much as I want to) theme for some of my posts. I seen many others like it…but this isn’t just for the heck of it. A lot of people always say, don’t take someone’s design, instead use other designs for NEW inspiration. And the more I archive, the more I can look back and take the best of a select few to create a new design.

Anyway, next up is Park View Baptist Church. There are many visually appealing things about this site. The colors are wonderful and the layout itself is great. The flow of information on the pages were designed very well too. But there are a few things I would like to point out about this site that I do not like.

First, the main navigation on the right side of the page could have been a different font, IMHO. Second is how the navigation is set up relative to the page/colors/etc. I almost don’t even know what’s links and what’s not because the mouseover or hover is so subtle that I can’t tell if it’s changing. The same goes for the links in the header, the icons to change…ever so slightly…to alert to the user that you can click. Those are my main issues with this site. Everything else is GREAT!

Park View Baptist Church

And I also want to give a nice round of applause to Ken Woodworth for doing such great work, and this being his second site in my very short list of Design Inspirations. His site alone needs to be in this list at some point…go check it out…nicely done Ken!

Most of you know that I fully support the open source world, while I hack away as a ‘jack of all trades’ developing currently in .NET (C# and ASP.NET). I also don’t mind NOT having to pay for things like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. I have both because I love to support and there are soooo many tutorials out there that even an amature can pretty much achieve a goal. I do most of my graphics in AI or PS.

But, I also love to use Inkscape and GIMP. These are the two open source rivals to the Adobe line. And let me tell you this…if you don’t mind the minor learning curve, you can do anything and everything you can do in these two free graphic software that you can do with Adobe’s AI and PS. Now, I should also let most of you know that Inkscape is Vector based and GIMP is Raster. To most that doesn’t mean much so I won’t go into technical details.

Anyway, the main reason for this post is to let those of you know that the GIMP just released a new and improved version: 2.4

I’ll load it up here in a few days and give it a spin. Maybe I’ll write a review this time!