Archive for the ‘Websites’ Category

If your job includes design, sometimes your biggest time waster can be waiting for feedback from a client, or from your friends. You spend a whole day to get every detail right, you send out your work, and then you have to wait 1-2 days for any reaction, and in many cases this could be “give me a day or two more to go over it”. By using Concept Feedback you could cut to the chase by showing off your work to the design community, putting your heads together to improve your design.

The site has a rating system, so you can see what people thing in numbers, but generally the more comments an item has, the better it is. Each commenter also votes on design, purpose, originality and engagement, so you can easily see where to improve. Users can also rate comments, so it is very clear what the most important bit of information is. The great thing about the site is that there isn’t really any inappropriate behavior. Weather this is because it is well moderated, or designers are just so cool, I don’t know, but generally comments really are helpful and encouraging.

If you are just starting out, this website is a great tool to use to further your skills. People will generally try to be constructive about their criticism. I recently saw a truly bad illustration, it looked like it was done in MS Paint, in a bad way, and while people did say it’s bad, they weren’t rude, and left tips on what to do.

Do you do a lot of shopping online? I bet you’ve been in a situation where free shipping is just $2 away, but you can find any item you like for that amount. In my case this inevitably results in higher spending because I just put in something else I like, which is generally in the $20 range. This is not the best practice, especially if you’re tight on money, or a spending machine like me.

A really cool tool (and idea) to help you plug in your shopping cart holes on Amazon is the Amazon Filler Item Finder. If you’re just a bit short on the $25 minimum, just visit this site, enter how much you need, and you will see a list of products which cost around that amount. You can enter any value, it works with decimal places as well, and you can also check and un-check categories if you know what type of product you’d like.

What I really liked about the site is the idea, the simplicity, and the speed. Just enter a number, click go, and you’re done. Pick something from the list, add it to your cart, and that’s it. The other great thing is speed. You can filter by price in Amazon, so you could really do this there, but Amazon Filler Finder is extremely fast, and I mean extremely. Click go, and out pops the list in the blink of an eye. I just moved, and I’m stuck with a really bad connection for a week or so more, but this still works in a flash.

What might be cool to add is a social feature to the site, where you could see what other people bought for $1 – $3. There might be some great novelty items, things you really want, but just didn’t come to mind, or you might just get some inspiration from what others are buying.

If you’re the supportive kind of person, I urge you to use Amazon Filler Finder because they are helping to support Haiti, The American Red Cross, and other organizations. For you it doesn’t really make a difference if you shop on Amazon or through Amazon Filler Finder, but it does help them if you do go through them, so why not?

I’ve written about how I love wallpaper before, but never have I found so many things I like on one site. Vladstudio contains designs by one person only I think, and the wallpapers, the site itself and the quality is absolutely stunning. This is not just an example of great desktop backgrounds, but also of how to create a wonderful website.

You can download lower quality (still great for most people) for free, and you’ll need to register to get to the multiple screen backgrounds, or widescreen backgrounds. Considering that the site costs $10 for 3 months, or $30 for your life, this is not a huge expense. Some people may not be too happy about the price, but there are two things you might want to consider.

First of all, if you register, you can download the designs without the signature, so you can have a distraction free experience. Also, these truly are works of art, and giving a little something to the creator is definitely worth it in this case.

Incidentally, Vladstudio has a cool iphone app which creates puzzles from the images on the site. It costs $2 for all the puzzles, and upcoming ones, so again, very worth it. We usually go head to head with my girlfriend, its pretty entertaining.

Sometimes we all need that extra bit of software. “I want to take some notes in an ordered way, with tags”, “I want to rip all my music to a CD with a push of a button”. I found a site, Giveaway of the Day, which offers such software daily.

Every day you can download commercial software. On that day you can register for free, it’s as if you bought it. I appreciate that many on the site are for very specific tasks and you can probably find free alternatives, but here’s the chance t get your hands on non-freeware software for free. Every now and again you can find a real gem!

The only problem I found is that since the registration is time-limited to that day, if you reinstall windows you may not be able to use your software again, since you can’t re-register it.