Web Design Pick 'n' Mix 01

This is the first post in what might become a series, just collecting together a few things I found useful, interesting or inspiring recently. Let me know what you think via my twitter - @nervewax.

Design

Icon a day is an awesome project by Marko Stupic, he creates an icon every day, all of which are very cool.

Here’s a pretty cool tip, if you didn’t know about this already: When using the type tool in photoshop, go to Type > Paste Lorem Ipsum. You then get a paragraph of Lorem straight away!

Design Patterns is a collection on codepen, grouped into different elements for use in your next web project. It’s a good starting point and also pretty interesting to browse too.

Triangulator is a neat web app that lets you create polygon patterns from any image, you can then export them as vectors and use them in your designs.

Front end

This article on useful MySql queries for WordPress saved me a lot of hassle the other day. I used this to correct all the direct links in an imported blog feed:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (post_content, 'http://www.oldsiteurl.com', 'http://www.newsiteurl.com');

I’ve been learning how to use a few front end dev tools recently, if you haven’t already you should definitely check out bower. Bower is a package manager for all sorts of front end tools like bootstrap, fontawesome and animate.css (to name a few of the more popular ones). Basically bower will fetch any package and download it to your current projects directory for you, without you even having to open the browser. It’s really useful, and once you’ve got it set up all you have to type is something like this:

$ bower install jquery

Within seconds, you will have the latest version of jQuery, ready to use!

Other

I found this the other day, definitely worth taking a look at all the random stuff it buys…

The Random Darknet Shopper is an automated online shopping bot which we provide with a budget of $100 in Bitcoins per week. Once a week the bot goes on shopping spree in the deep web where it randomly choses and purchases one item and has it mailed to us.

RANDOM DARKNET SHOPPER (2014)