I often need banner ads when I create web page mocks for sales. Doing a web search on yahoo or google sometimes does it, but it’s a painful process of sifting through tons of images because most of them are not banner ads or if they are, they’re from 1990’s.

I came across adverlicio.us today while going through that same search process.

It’s a nice site that archive banner ads and tag them. This makes my life so much easier, so I thought I’d share it with the world.

Wordpress is one of the most popular blog application on the web.

It’s really easy to set up and very flexible. One of the cool things about WP is that its community of users/developers is very active which translates to abundant of plugins and themes.

Here are few websites that have great selections of themes for your WP blog:

• http://www.wordpressgallery.com/
• http://www.wpfreethemes.com/
• http://web2feel.com/
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/02/09/83-beautiful…
• http://wthemes.com/
• http://www.bestwpthemes.com/
• http://www.blogperfume.com/category/wordpress-theme/

Elitebydesign.com has compiled a rather extensive list of resources and tutorials for logo design.

My personal favorite from this list is The Evolution Of Tech Company Logos, no 8 under “resources”.

Fubiz, a french design blog featuring various inspiring ideas, compiled a list of very cool business card designs (view the list).

Seeing these refreshes me because they remind me to think differently; to really understand the objective of the design project.

Another thing that these design remind me is to always try to incorporate the element of surprise. A pleasant surprise makes a design stand out because it makes the activity of seeing the business card more than just absorbing information. It becomes a unique experience.

A t-shirt design based on a painting titled “Miss Sarajevo” that was inspired by U2’s song by that same title.

That song is about the act of defiant in the midst of ugly adversity. Not letting ugly situations/conditions caused by evil-minded people kill the beauty in our soul.

We need to fight to let that beauty shines through darkness.

A portion of the lyric that is displayed on the t-shirt:

Dici che il fiume
Trova la via al mare
E come il fiume
Giungerai a me
Oltre i confini
E le terre assetate
Dici che come il fiume
Come il fiume…
L’amore giungerà
L’amore…
E non so più pregare
E nell’amore non so più sperare
E quell’amore non so più aspettare
–from “Miss Sarajevo” by U2

This t-shirt is customizable (color and material) and available for men also. You can purchase this t-shirt at my online print/poster store.

Here’s another t-shirt design based on a painting that I did.

As always, you can customize the t-shirt by picking different materials and/or colors.

The product shown here is available for $31.45 at my zazzle store

Research from Jakob Nielsen about reading behavior of web user.

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

I knew this all along, from usability, eye tracking and my own behavior, but seeing the number is very eye-opening.

An idea for a method to test out the scannability of the content on your page is to ask a person who’s not familiar with your site to read what he sees on the page out loud as fast as he can within 5 seconds. Most web users only stay for 2-3 seconds, but we need to add the extra 2 seconds to accommodate the time needed to do the reading.

Link to article:http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html

A great looking site with very elegant,yet playful, animated transitions.

The design works very well to frame the great illustration and art work without distracting users. Check out the illustration work of this artist. Very inspiring to say the least.

the only thing that could be done better is the way the full size images are loaded. When I first visited the site, I jumped to an image that I fancy and it took a while to load. I think it was trying to load other images first (there’s a queue of images to load).