Tag: inspiration

Coffee tones

One of the things I’m working on during the last year is the ImpreStyle project.  Among other things, that pushed me to learn way more about color theory, balance, and coordination.  One of the websites that I’m using for inspiration on a daily basis is Design Seeds.  That’s where  beautiful photography meets color exploration.  Have a look at these lovely example of coffee tones.

I think I’ll be sharing more of Design Seeds pictures in the future.

Foursquare’s adorable puppy

One thing I like about people who love what they do is that they usually don’t take themselves too seriously.  They can smile and joke about the things they passionately love.  Today I came across an example from Foursquare.  In the Settings screen about the notifications that Foursquare sends to you, there is an option to “Also include an adorable picture of a puppy in my weekly update“.  Here is a screenshot in case this will disappear with time.

On having resources

I found this excellent illustration somewhere in my social networking streams.  Don’t know who is the author, but this is absolute genius.  Until now, I’ve been using a rather outdated example of “brand new Pentium IV computer to play solitaire“.   This one is so much better though.

Maintenance screen from BannersBroker.com

No matter how big or small you are, how much money you’ve invested into your infrastructure, how many levels of redundancy you have, or how many IT gods and gurus you’ve hired to watch over your website – the fact of life is that your website will go down, even if it’s for a brief moment.   And you should be ready for that moment.  Here is a good example that I came across recently – BannersBroker.com maintenance screen.

It looks simple and and straight-forward.  But if you are even remotely familiar with web development and design, you can appreciate how much thinking actually went into this one.  First of all, the mere fact that there is a maintenance screen, means that someone thought plenty about the website.  Secondly, it’s very well composed.   The big yellow helmet and large, bold “Under maintenance” letters both tell you exactly what’s going on.  It’s not a user error.  It’s not a crashed server.  It’s not something to report to the webmaster.  They are working on it.  Thirdly, it tells you exactly when to come back – in 30 minutes.  Fourthly, it still provides you with an emergency contact information – phone number and email.  Fifthly, it gives you something to do for thirty minutes that the site is going to be down – explore the company’s YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter stream.  Sixthly, it reinforces the company brand.  Twice, in full color and full name, and in black-and-white small logo.  Seventhly, it doesn’t have any useless junk.  What else could you wish for?

To me, this is up there with Twitter fail whale and GitHub 404.