This year, you can also buy the 24 articles that will be published over the next month in printed form. The 24 Ways Annual will be published by Five Simple Steps and costs £8 ($12.48 USD) to preorder (the book will ship in the New Year). All proceeds will go to UNICEF; 24 ways is looking for a sponsor to pay for the printing costs so that all revenue generated will be donated.

24 ways is produced by the team at edgeofmyseat, the company behind Perch, a lightweight CMS I’ve written about previously. They deserve a great deal of credit for their hard work in putting together this fantastic free resource year after year.

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BrandBucket offers some creative ideas for new domain and company names. It’s basically a domain name exchange system that connects the sellers with buyers. You can find deals from under $500 to well over $5,000, depending on the quality of the name and the domain name owner. There’s also a registry of graphic designers that you can hire to create a new logo for you.

Logoease provides a tool that will let you create your own logo for free. Is also offers a low-cost solution via some preferred designers.

Creately allows you to collaborate online to design a diagram and workflow of just about anything you can think of for your business. The free account allows up to three collaborators and unlimited public diagrams. The only catch is that you can’t save private diagrams with the free plan.

iPlotz makes designing your web site or application very easy by allowing group collaboration online with its visual wireframe designing studio. The free account allows one project with unlimited users with up to five pages.

Produle is a way for you to create cool Flash widgets and applications without any Flash development experience and very little expense. Implementing a simple drag n’ drop interface with many pre-made templates, you can come up with some slick elements for your web site or campaign such as a timer countdown to a special launch or event. You can create up to three Flash widgets for free.

Here’s a sample countdown widget I created within minutes for the grand opening of my brother’s new showroom for his home cinema business. Notice how the TV screen changes the images.

Viviti provides an easy platform to build some good looking web sites and blogs quickly. The basic plan offers a free web site with up to ten pages.

These are just some of the available resources out there that can help you with designing or redesigning your web site or just about anything else for your organization. All of them offer some form of free plan to get your feet wet and other plans at economical prices.

Know some other useful design tools? Please share them in the comments.

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SlickPlan doesn’t really differentiate between creating a web site plan or a flowchart, which can be a little confusing at first. But once you realize that it uses the same tool for both, you can quickly start adding items to a chart. The tool is fairly simple: You click the “Add a New Page” to add a bubble (whether it represents a page on a web site or an item on your chart) and select the page or item under which it will be located.” You also have a side bar listing each element and allowing you to move, edit or delete individual pieces. There aren’t a lot of fancy bells and whistles — but you won’t miss them. Instead, SlickPlan does one thing particularly well, allowing you to create a chart in no time flat. Even better, any project you put together with SlickPlan is clean and attractive enough to send out to clients comfortably.

Once you’ve got a chart or site map put together, SlickPlan offers you a few different options on what you can do with it. Most importantly, you can save it and work on it later. You can also save multiple versions of a project. By opening up individual projects, you can access an HTML embed code that allows you to add your chart to other sites, export your project as a PDF and send a link to anyone you need to look at your chart. You can save an unlimited number of projects to your SlickPlan account at this point.

There are a few places where SlickPlan could use a little bit of polish. The application itself is easy enough to use, but the way certain buttons are labeled can make it seem like you can only create site plans, rather than use it for flowcharts and other options — uses that are specifically mentioned on the application’s web site. The application was developed by Atomic Interactive, a web development studio. SlickPlan was not created for a client, however; instead, it’s more of an internal tool meant to eliminate the frustration of trying to build site maps in Illustrator or InDesign. The resulting application makes knocking out a fast chart easy.

You may find that SlickPlan is not quite so useful if you want to add notes about individual elements or need to make more elaborate charts. In such scenarios, you may want to consider a more robust tool. Otherwise, it’s a useful tool at the right price. SlickPlan’s developers intend to keep it free, as well, relying on ads and donations to cover the site’s costs.

What tools do you use to create flowcharts?

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The web-based application has been developed with simplicity in mind. Any task that could be made automatic or streamlined has been. Even sizing text has been automated — if you resize an object, any text associated with it will be adjusted to match. You can add as many pages to a mockup as you like, with as many elements as you need. Mockingbird offers a wide array of user interface elements based on the elements that are commonly used in building web sites. From embedded videos to different types of text, you can easily drop in anything you’d expect to see on a web site. It’s the little things that make Mockingbird a solid tool: you can snap elements to a grid, so that your mockup looks clean without requiring you to spend extra time getting it that way.

Unfortunately, there are no templates that you can base your designs on, but overall, Mockingbird has been designed with speeding up the process of creating a web site in mind. It’s easy to share a mockup with clients or other stakeholders in the design process. Mockingbird will provide you with a link that you can send out, or alternatively you can use an embed code to place it on a web site.

Being able to embed your mockups is a nice alternative to trying to share a mockup with a whole list of people via a email — instead, it’s just a matter of following a link over to whatever system you use to communicate with coworkers or clients as a matter of course. There’s also no need to install anything in order to view Mockingbird’s mockups — even Flash is unnecessary. The application is based on Cappuccino, a web app framework that doesn’t use plugins. It may not be the best choice for projects that require some privacy, however, as it looks like anyone with the link can check out your mockup.

Mockingbird is in beta and is currently free to use — you can actually demo the application without even registering. However, to save a mockup, you’ll need to provide an email address and a password in order to create an account. If you just need a tool to pull together a quick mockup, it’s ideal — you don’t even need to know much about web design, making it useful for a non-designer communicating ideas to a designer, and the ability to embed your wireframes is a nice touch that isn’t available in some of the other wireframing web apps like Balsamiq and FlairBuilder. However, if you’re doing a lot of web design work, you may need a more robust solution. If, for instance, your workflow requires you to be able to download your mockup to use in other apps, Mockingbird does not currently provide that option.

Which wireframing tools do you use?

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Landing Work

While your first visit to Haystack may leave you with the impression that the site is only meant to help out clients, it’s already proved useful for many designers. Some web designers report landing projects within hours of posting a listing on Haystack. The general idea is that the site can better match prospective clients to your services who are browsing online — you might not be highly ranked enough to be found through search engines, but your skills can make you stand out among other web designers on Haystack. 37Signals takes care of promoting the site via advertising, blogging and marketing to its user base.

Any web designer can post a listing on Haystack for free. That includes anyone from freelancers to big web design companies. The basic listing includes one portfolio image, the type of budgets you generally work with, the nearest big city to where you work and a contact email for your company. A Pro listing, priced at $99 per month, allows you to post more images, change placement and place for your logo. The Pro listings do seem to show up first in search results. Clients can search for web designers based on budget and location.

Scoping Out the Competition

You’ll find that Haystack has a few uses beyond landing clients. It’s an easy way to get an idea of what your fellow web designers are up to. You can check out prices, portfolios and services offered for a whole list of web designers in one place. You can tell quickly how well your prices fall in with your competition’s, as well as learn about how they’re landing clients — valuable business information no matter how you look at it.

There are some design reasons to look at what other designers are up to, as well. Need a little inspiration? Browse through some of those designs that have been posted on Haystack. You might see a technique or style that sparks a new idea for a project you’re working on.

Haystack’s Background

The minds behind Haystack are already well-known for creating tools. The site is a new offering from 37signals, the same company that created Basecamp, Backpack and other well-known tools. Haystack is a logical extension of these tools — 37signals’ original application, Basecamp, grew out of a tool that the team designed for their own use. With the 37Signals team’s roots in web design, it’s easy to understand how they would come to create Haystack.

That background has definitely contributed to the site’s overall usefulness. While it takes a slightly more subtle approach to inviting web designers to join than it does to inviting prospective clients to shop, Haystack is built to be an effective tool for the web designers posting listings.

Have you listed your company on Haystack? Has it generated any leads for you?

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For some tasks, you absolutely need network access, but for others, a rich and varied stock of offline-accessible information and research resources should provide plenty of fodder for getting things done. Your iPhone or iPod touch can be a great supplemental resource for exactly this kind of thing. Here’s how to turn your device into an offline road warrior.

Instapaper or Read It Later

These apps are great because when you do have connectivity (if you get a signal briefly, for example), you can quickly save articles for reading in extended blackout zones of little or no coverage. Both these apps allow you to capture and store web content as offline pages. What’s more, integration with both of these apps is often baked into other iPhone gems, like Tweetie, the popular Twitter client that recently got a brand new version with lots of extra bells and whistles.

Instapaper comes in two flavors: a Free version, and a Pro version for $4.99. The more expensive app allows for Folders, article recommendations, background updates, and more, and really is worth it if you’re an avid Instapaper user. Read It Later also comes in Free and Pro flavors, with the Pro costing only $2.99. It features full-screen reading, sharing, and the ability to send articles to other iPhone apps.

Dictionary.com or WordBook

Despite having impeccable spelling skills (quiet, Simon), even I can see the value in a dictionary app. For instance, I often have an overwhelming urge to look up the origins of words. Not necessarily of tremendous professional value, but still. And of course, I’m kidding about the spelling thing. I often need to double-check words, especially ones for which I seem to have a mental block like “aesthetics.”

Both Dictionary.com (Free) and WordBook ($1.99) offer offline access to more than 200,000 definitions. My personal preference of the two is WordBook because of the UI, but both provide a thesaurus, word of the day, audio pronunciation guides, and more.

Encyclopedia

Wikipedia is a great on-the-spot reference for background and contextual information on new and unfamiliar terms and concepts. Which is fine when you have an active network connection, but doesn’t help much when you’re on a train in a 3G dead zone and you’re looking to provide a quick overview of the USB 3.0 standard for a client report.

Enter Encyclopedia ($8.99, iTunes link), an iPhone/iPod touch app that stores a complete full-text offline version of Wikipedia on your device. All internal links function, and you can navigate your history and backtrack when you need to. Beware, references are excluded in the interest of usability, and it will take up a full 2GB of your device’s storage space, but it’s much simpler and more convenient than the alternative.

myPANTONE

Web designers, and people who just take an interest in the finished look of their documents and web work, will truly appreciate the usefulness of the recently released myPANTONE app. The app gives you access to Pantone’s color libraries, and allows you create color schemes on the go. You can even use colors from photos taken with your device to find matching Pantone hues. Even if you’re not a professional print designer, this app can still be very helpful in coming up with pleasing color combinations for documents, personal websites and more.

It’s a little on the pricey side at $9.99, but it does let you do really cool things like GPS tagging, and voice/text annotation of palettes you create. If color is important to the work that you do in any way, there might be no better way to spend otherwise unproductive time out of network range.

The Pocket Reference Re-imagined

Imagine how crazy the idea of having an encyclopedia in your pocket would’ve seemed 20 years ago? Plenty crazy, I’d say. Thanks to the versatile platform Apple developed for its mobile devices, you can now have multiple encyclopedias on hand in a package slimmer than most people’s wallets. And it doesn’t end where I’ve stopped here. There are plenty of very specialized reference apps available via the iTunes App Store, for little or no money.

What reference apps do you carry with you?

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Could becoming a web designer be a good career move for you?

Web Design Career

Web design is not the same as web development. Web designers focus on visuals, typography, colors, layouts and other important design considerations. Their technical expertise usually consists of mainly HTML, XHTML and CSS along with one or two programming languages like JavaScript and PHP for adding interactive features. Web developers concentrate on web site function and programming, rather than design and the interface.

Once upon a time, web designers could do it all. All they needed to build an entire site was to know was some HTML and possibly a little JavaScript. In the last few years, though, the web site-building process has become more complicated and has evolved to include more technologies and techniques, including  CSS, AJAX, Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, information architecture, search engine optimization (SEO), usability and user experience. This long list makes it impossible for anyone to know it all and do it well. Designers like Jon Phillips from Spyre Studios know this and hire freelancers with specific skills to help out with their projects.

Matt Brown of thingsthatarebrown does design consulting and full-scale site development and deployment. However, as a small design shop he finds that the best use of his time and resources is focusing on design projects. “In a given day I tend to manage 2-5 projects (of various sizes) concurrently, and I’ll usually do a little work for each one during the course of the day,” he says. ”This keeps me fresh and not too ‘over-focused’ on any one client project.”

How to Qualify

Do you know how to do HTML and CSS, but have no portfolio to speak of beyond your own web site? Do what Reese Spykerman of Design by Reese did. She asked, “Hey, who wants a free design for their personal blog?” Offer to design a web site for friends and family. Few designers majored in anything related to design in college. Most learn through reading and studying various online resources, and also by examining the code for web sites they like. A few take design classes at a local school or online. Jon Phillips makes time to learn new tricks and experiment with web design techniques.

This field is still very young, which is why those doing web design today typically don’t have degrees or certification in the field. However, new and wannabe designers have more opportunities than ever to get a formal design education as colleges and universities are increasingly adding design programs, such as the School of Visual Arts, which offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in graphic design, illustration, photography and more. Matt Brown recommends interning with design agencies to learn how to work with clients and gain experience in working with the latest tools and technology.

Web Design Tools

Photoshop, of course, is in most web designers’ toolbox, along with Fireworks and Illustrator. They love Firefox’s Web Developer Toolbar Extension for editing and testing the site and its CSS. Designers often use a text editor like Textpad, TextMate or TextWrangler for hand-coding because WYSIWYG editors, like Dreamweaver, add a mess of unneeded code that weighs down the page. Besides design tools, many designers rely on business apps like FreshBooks for invoicing, Harvest for time tracking and Basecamp for project management.

Geography doesn’t tie down web designers. Reese Spykerman, who’s located in Malaysia but has most of her clients in the U.S., communicates with clients through email, telephone and conference calls.

Find Clients

Word-of-mouth marketing takes the lead in helping designers find gigs. Jon Phillips reported that over 40 percent of his clients found him through Twitter, but they also find him through his blog and referrals.

Are you considering a career in design?

Image from T. Al Nakib.

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In this post, I’ll cover an excellent book about Blender, available for free online. Blender is a robust 3D graphics and animation application that can help you create eye-popping graphics for web sites, blogs and documents.

If you’re unfamiliar with Blender, take a look at the gallery posted here for the quality of graphics you can produce with this free application (available in Windows, Mac and Linux flavors). It’s actually been used to produce respected full-length 3D movies but is also more than capable of helping you give a web site, a blog or documents a distinctive, eye-catching look with still 3D graphics. The screenshot above was created by a member of the Blender community, and it’s a drawing, not a photo.

Learning to use Blender is a lot of fun and adds a useful tool to your graphics repertoire. “Blender Basics, Second Edition” is an exhaustive, free online book, downloadable as a 120-page PDF here. It takes you through 2D and 3D graphics creation, how to add lighting effects, and much more. The animation aspects of the book won’t necessarily be of interest to all web workers, but still might be fun to try out.

On OStatic, we also recently covered Linuxtopia, a site that houses a huge number of tutorials. Don’t let the name fool you if you’re not a Linux user. The site includes very complete guides on many free, non-Linux applications and platforms.

For example, you can find thorough guides on virtualization (useful for running dual operating systems), beginning Java programming, the GIMP (a powerful open-source graphics application), web development tools, and much more. Look down the left rail of Linuxtopia for the many free online guides that are available.

Share your Blender tips and tricks in the comments.

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Yesterday saw the launch of $2000 Website, an intriguing design shop in the Bay Area that describes itself as a “self-service” design agency, offering to design, code and publish a custom website within a two-week period.

Users begin by completing a short online questionnaire to help tease out their requirements. The dialog is largely focused on the strategy and goals of the client, rather than technical requirements: questions range from site’s goals, to the company’s “personality”, required calls-to-action, and some simple audience demographics, along with your aesthetic influences.

I’ve seen similar services in the past – including PSD2HTML, XHTMLized and PSD2WordPress – but these have focused on the technical production of an existing creative treatment.

The service is aiming at small businesses with limited budgets, but it’s not hard to envisage it as a labor-saving utility for web workers who need to quickly punch out a microsite for a new product, store, event, community campaign, or even a client of their own.

The company promises to prepare initial design treatments within five days and complete production within another five days. It limits the output to a five-page site, with the option to upsell additional creative services, such as creation of a brand, for another $500.

The creative quality of the modest client portfolio actually looks pretty good given the short time available to the producers, though it’s unclear what the division of work was between the company and the client. There’s nothing here that couldn’t be created with a working knowledge of WordPress, CSS and XHTML, but many web workers aren’t fluent in all those areas, nor have the time to undertake small projects economically.

So, perhaps the notion of web site micro-factories may prove to be a useful toolkit for web workers – what do you all think?

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My Web Portfolio is a Facebook application that’s designed to help web designers at least strut their stuff on the popular social network. Just as the name implies, it allows you to build and share a portfolio of your web sites and share them with other Facebook users.

Once you add the My Web Portfolio application to your FB account, you can access the dashboard, where you can see a random featured website, and the most popular, largest, and most recently added designs from users. Currently, My Web Portfolio has 40 users, which is a farily large number considering it’s only recently been launched.

Right away, you probably noticed a significant drawback of the application, namely that it is a Facebook application. That means that, in order to take full advantage of the service, users have to add the application to their own profile. You can still show off by adding the My Websites tab to your profile, though.

For me, the main advantage of the app doesn’t actually reside with its usefulness as a promotional tool. Instead, I like it for its ability to inspire and provide a space where ideas can be shared. As a web designer community with a focus on actual products, it has a lot of potential. Whatever your motivation, it’s free easy to set up, so there’s not much arguing against adding it to your existing toolset.

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