It’s been a blistering start to the year in just about every quarter. Unless you happen to be a Liverpool fan. Anyway, as the UK economy slowly drags itself out of the mire of the past couple of years, we are seeing the rise of a lot more sites that draw on the power of the collective for good effect. Which is especially useful for helping you succeed in your New Year resolutions! I decided not to focus on Wikipedia’s 10 birthday, MySpace’s continuing demise or the products that were revealed at CBIT. So as per usual, we have four categories and one random site.
Enjoy!
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Getinspired
Struggling for design inspiration? Trying to come up with an engaging but slightly differentiated resolution to a sticky problem? Then Pattern Tap is worth a try. It is a resource of design ideas and executions, nicely categorised into quick access categories. Looking for some ideas about how to display lists? Then click the ‘List’ tab and hey presto, 418 different ideas. Struggling with iconography? Then look at the 200 different types of thumbnails. Simple, intuitive and effective.
GetaGravatar
The term ‘gravatar’ is a neologism that stands for a ‘globally recognised avatar’. Apparently. Anyway, the notion behind this is that, given the explosion of social media requiring soundbyte interaction, making sure that everyone can identify the person behind the comment is an important. Being consistent with this representation of who you are is “SUPER important”, so the logic is that you should create a image of yourself that is associated with every comment or insight you post. I think that this is also called branding…
Getajob
This site is a children’s book, designed to answer the question “what are the strangest jobs in the world”, delivered as a flash site. There are a couple of games to keep you entertained – I particularly like the Sewer Cleaner game. Some content can be translated, but much of the content is in Polish. I’ve no idea why I like it, but I do.
Getsupportfromyourcommunity
We have seen an explosion in the number of community-based support sites recently: Feedbackers.biz and StartUpLift offer low cost support for new to market ideas; Veel provides crowdsourced design support and sites like Sparked make it easy for altruistic consumers to support an organization or cause by enlisting both individuals and groups of company employees to contribute their expertise to a non-profit organisation. It’s a nice idea and I’d love to see this sort of approach used in either internal or recruitment comms. We just need to think about the ‘what’ and the ‘how’…
Shiftperspective
Tilt shifting is where real-photos are manipulated to look like model photographs. Tilt-shift maker allows you to make your own. It works better with landscapes.