“Visually, we wanted to make something that didn’t ape current design tropes - the boring, over-used and essentially art-less ‘web 2.0 look’ of bright palletes, gradient fills and rounded corners - but had a more classical view, as befitting something a little more grown up. Richard Spencer Powell said the magazine design draws from modernism, of course (especially North and Mittel European heritage) but also looks further back into the early 20thC, and beyond the simple serifs and vogue for ornamentation, but look at the engravings, section headers, cartographic styles etc.”

“Grid-based layouts have become really popular among web designers over the last year… However, I ran into a problem when coding grid-based layouts. How can I be sure my grid is maintained from the original mockup to the final coded version? When I coded my first grid-based layout, I found myself regularly taking screenshots of the site and comparing them with my original grid in Photoshop. There had to be an easier way.

Enter GridFox. GridFox is a Firefox extension that overlays a grid on any website. If you can open it in Firefox, you can put a grid on top of it. It’s easy to customize, allowing you to create the exact grid you designed your layout around.”

“Most designers would have heard of the term ‘CSS Frameworks’, for those who don’t know or aren’t sure, here is a brief description from: Wikipedia:

A CSS framework is a library that is meant to allow for easier, more standards-compliant styling of a webpage using the Cascading Style Sheets language. Just like programming and scripting language libraries, CSS frameworks package a number of ready-made options for designing and outlaying a webpage.

Sounds great doesn’t it, something that is going to make designing and developing a website that little bit easier. It will take away the repeating of the same old boring stuff and if you write your framework correctly you will be guaranteed your code will meet W3C recommendations. That will leave you plenty of time to design your site, the fun side of the job!”

Like ffffound (for the rest of us): “We Heart It is a social bookmarking tool for images and videos. We see many great images on blogs and websites around, and now you can put everything you saw and liked on the same page to look again whenever you want.” (Thanks Chris Glass!)

“xScope ($27) is a great utility for Mac-based web and UX (user experience) designers. It provides a number of floating tools for measuring, aligning, and inspecting on-screen graphics.” (Thanks swissmiss!)

“As good design further penetrates the Web, once highly-regarded conventions fall into disfavor and are replaced by more effective ones. Yet some flawed conventions persist. In fact, they persist on some pretty high-profile websites; to their detriment.”

“A little over a year ago, I wrote on the short-sightedness of the visual style which had been named after the technology it had been associated with - Web 2.0. As predicted, the masses have begun to tire of the current trend. Additionally, designers are beginning to write about their dissatisfaction towards the Web 2.0 visual trend and are proposing alternatives to it. As the visual style attributed Web 2.0 wains, we are inevitably going to see the rise of another all but arbitrary visual style take its place which will be adopted by the design masses without a second thought.

A recent article suggests by using elements which are the exact opposite of the stereotypical Web 2.0 style, we will ensure that our designs remain fresh. While I appreciate the author’s intent, it is the equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

“Sim Daltonism is a color blindness simulator for Mac OS X. It filters in real-time the area around the mouse pointer and displays the result — as seen by a color blind person — in a floating palette.

Since there are many types of color blindness, Sim Daltonism allow you to choose the one you want to see.”

“The above image tracks the front page of latimes.com from 2002 through 2006, illustrating how quickly online presence can evolve. Note how the page structure and hierarchy have changed as images (yellow) and advertising (orange) have gradually become integrated with editorial content (blue). However, the manner in which information and links are collaged across a page (or interconnected through a database) is emblematic of a deeper organizational problem with the way that newspapers have dealt with digital content.”

“Web minimalism has come back as a trend in the summer of 2007. Rainfall Daffinson adores the concept of minimalism, zen culture and the essence of things. We chose 24 moments of minimalism web interface design in the last decade, selected several quotes to easily define the minimalism and represent some of the best new minimalism websites.”

From Khoi Vinh and Liz Danzico: “A Brief Message features design opinions expressed in short form. Somewhere between critiques and manifestos, between wordy and skimpy, Brief Messages are viewpoints on design in the real world. They’re pithy, provocative and short — 200 words or less.”

Congrats to the fine folks at Smashing — it seems like it’s been much longer than a year since the magazine launched, considering all the comprehensive roundups they’ve published. Anyway, your humble xBlog editor is happy to be participating in the anniversary festivities so be sure to check out Smashing every day this week.

Turn on the music, break out the champaign, get out the balloons and whistles, but — more importantly — keep track on what will be happening this week on Smashing Magazine.

World’s leading designers, developers and graphic designers will be celebrating with us. We’ll also have some giveaways for each and every one of you.

Be prepared. This week we’re going to smash you big time. Really.

UPDATES:
7 Sep: Smashing Freefont and Wordpress Theme (free downloads for all)
7 Sep: 170+ Expert Ideas From World’s Leading Developers (part two of the piece I contributed to)
6 Sep: 1st Anniversary Giveaway (48 free software packages, licenses, accounts and credit giveaways)
5 Sep: 50 Designers x 6 Questions (part one of the piece I contributed to)
4 Sep: 40+ Books For Professional Design & Development (free book giveaway)
3 Sep: Get Out The Balloons: Smashing’s 1st Anniversary (celebration announcement)

“This tool will help you generate more flexible versions of Blueprint’s grid.css and compressed.css and grid.png files. Whether you prefer 8, 10 or 16 columns in your design, this generator now enables you that flexibility with Blueprint.”

“design|snips was born out of my realization that most sites I add to my ‘Design’ folder are bookmarked because of a few elements that are really well designed. Whether it’s the headline style, callout boxes or other modules, I usually am inspired by a few key parts of each site. design|snips will collect and categorize these elements and hopefully help you when it comes time to start on a new interface.”

“Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.”