Lets rewind back the time to 2006, exactly five years ago when I just graduated in college and started my career as Web Designer. That time, I was fresh, ready for challenges but inexperience. Back in my school, the course didn’t teach much but just the basics of the Web Design skills, and I’m the only designer in the company that I joined after graduation.
With no senior that I can refer to for Web Design skills, and the school taught me the old style web development skill like building a website using Table and lacking CSS skills, I decided to look for learning materials online. Soon, I found out some really useful websites and great designers that influenced me during my early career as Web Designer. Without their help, perhaps today I still cannot build a Table-less website! Read on to find out the websites and designers that influence me when started out as Web Designer.
Delicious Bookmark
During 2006, with Google search result, I having hard time finding the inspiring articles and useful resources. Until one day I stumbled upon Delicious, s social bookmark service. With Delicious, I discovered many useful links and blogs that related to Web Design which I can read and learn. Besides that I also start to save the bookmarks there so that I can access to them everywhere. How convenient!
Vitaly Friedman – Smashing Magazine
Obviously I discovered Smashing Magazine with Delicious. The article 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without is a huge hit and with this article, I found out that CSS is so cool and opened my eye on the possibilities with CSS.
Soon, I found that Smashing Magazine was founded by Vitaly Friedman, and I had been reading his blog, that introduces resources to high quality fonts and referring to his Developer’s Handbook at daily basis.
Roger Johansson – 456 Berea Street
456BereaStreet, founded by Roger Johansson is a great blog with loads of articles regarding CSS and Web Design standards. I learnt a lot from him on CSS, SEO, web usability and more technical site of development. I think for people who wants to learn more about web development should read his blog.
Jay Hilgert – Bittbox
When talking about Bittbox, you will think of high quality design resources and useful tutorials. Bittbox has been a great website if you want to learn more about tricks and tips on Photoshop and Illustrator, as well as high quality design freebies. I used many of his brushes and textures in my designs. They are just brilliant.
Veerle Pieters
During the early days, I visit Veerle Pieters‘s blog regularly, looking for useful tutorials that produce beautiful results. And her V2 blog design has been a great inspiration to me. I’m fascinated with the color scheme, and modern approach of the design.
Khoi Vinh
Khoi Vinh has been influencing me with beautiful web design with grid and typography. I still remember his presentation about his design approach of Yahoo! with grid and typography.
Joshua Davis
Joshua Davis is a Flash guru and he showed us what the power of Flash and the beauty of generative artwork. His book “Flash To The Core” website, is a awesome resource to learn about Flash.
Web Design From Scratch
In year 2006, I encounter the idea of Web 2.0 with Web Design From Scratch. The website teaches a lot of what is Web 2.0 and give me the general idea of it.
2Advanced Studio
I’m a fan of cool websites and I just have my eye wide opened when I saw the V5 design of 2Advanced Studio. It is so highly detailed and the animation is just cool. This website tells me that how awesome a website design can be and continues to influence me until today.
The Skin Factory
The Skin Factory has been my long term inspiration for sleek and cool User Interface design. I learnt from them that pixel perfect designs are really beautiful! I just love their shiny details on the interfaces.
Firebug
Well, Firebug is not a website but an extension of Firefox to help Web Designers to quickly identify design bugs and inspect elements. I totally fall in love with Firebug, because I’m able to inspect the elements of nicely designed websites to see how the designers style the website. To be honest I really learnt a lot of CSS tricks by using Firebug.
End word
This is it, the websites and designers that influence me during my beginning stage of web design career. I learnt a lot from them. Hope you enjoy this post! What’s your influencer when you started off as a designer?
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