Sterling Rose Design Blog

I don’t consider myself a designer – I self-identify as a developer – but since I’m the only coder on most of my projects, I have to fake it sometimes. Over the years, I have bookmarked a lot of sites that I find more useful than others in doing the design work. They include:

* Bazaar Designs – Links to incredibly rich, detailed stock photos and really unusual font choices available for download and use, as well as great tutorials and blog entries on other subjects, like CSS and AJAX.
* COLOURlovers – Suggestions of color palettes to use for site designs, plus downloadable tiling patterns.
* Da Button Factory – Generate custom buttons on the fly for use in your applications.
* Dry Icons – Lots and lots of free-to-use glossy icon sets.
* FamFamFam Icons – These tiny little icons are ubiquitous in web applications. They’re cute and plentiful, and I use them in almost every website.
* Fontspace – My go-to free fonts place.
* For Web Designers – A plethora of information; links to everything from CSS-compliant layout templates to font resources to free downloadable fonts to stock photos you can use. It’s like a giant web-design clearinghouse.
* Lorem ipsum generator You often can’t judge how a site will look without some textual content in it, and “asdf asdf asdf” only gets you so far. This site lets you pick the number of paragraphs, words, bytes, or lists you want and generates “lorem ipsum” text for you.
* Pics4Learning – Stock photos that are free to use if your application is educational.