Might I start by saying that nothing in art/design is original. Some famous artist said something along those lines long before me and I think Keith Richards said the same thing about music. However, taking inspiration from art/design is a lot different than outright pilfering someone’s design. If you call yourself a web designer and can’t even muster the ability to design your own damn site, what’s that say about you? Not much in my book. I’m a big fan of integrity and the woman below has none. She did something worse than rip off someone’s design; she ripped off a friends design and now my wrinkled collar is getting a bit warm.

My good friend Lorissa came across this site because the idiot who stole the design, Joanne Lousie Gailitis, left the original Google Analytics code in her “redesign.” Not a smart cookie. What’s even worse is her tag line she puts in the footer of the site; “Please don’t steal. That’s naughty.” For the paranoid among us, this makes me think she was setting it up to say that Lorissa stole the design from her but like I said, that’s for the paranoid among us and those of us, mainly me, who have doubts about the integrity of most of the people walking this basketball we call earth.

I would love to start a blog meme entitled ‘Joanne Lousie Gailitis is a thief.’ Wouldn’t that be fun? Instead I decided to write this post and encourage people to contact the thief with the subject line of ‘Please don’t steal. That’s naughty,’ and let her know what we think of her acts. I’ll even make it easy for you by giving you her email address une_cute_tomato@hotmail.com with the subject line in place; all you have to do is click the link and tell her what you think.

Designing websites for a living, you not only have to know how to design, code the mark-up, keep up on the latest technologies and languages but you also have to keep an eye on things such as browser share and screen resolutions. I was just over at Market Share by Net Applications to check up on screen resolutions. It would seem that designing for 800×600 can now be a thing of the past. According to their numbers, 1024×768 is the dominating resolution these days.

So what does all of this mean? Well for starters it means I need to do a bit more redesign for my site and blog. It also means it’s time to adjust the width of standard designs in the future. I for one will start out with a blank canvas set at 960px for fixed-width designs. Unless, of course, the design dictates that something narrower is called for. Plus as Cameron Moll states, it’s a great width for working with grids because it’s so easily divisible.

I’m a big fan of tools to help me with my work, especially if they’re web-based. I have great love for the Firefox ‘Web Developer’s‘ extension but I just came across a tool today that I’m quite excited about; It’s called Design and it’s a Javascript bookmarklet that helps with measurement and alignment in web design.

Design is a suite of web-design and development assistive tools which can be utilised on any web-page. Encompassing utilities for grid layout, measurement and alignment, Design is a uniquely powerful JavaScript bookmarklet.

Below are some screenshots of the bookmarklet in action.

Grid: Overlays a highly configurable layout grid over a web-page. Grid can be set to match any set of dimensions, allowing easy development of CSS layouts in the web-browser.

Ruler: Displays rulers on a page, with all the expected features of the rulers found in a desktop design application, including guides which snap to block display elements and origin location control.

Unit: Allows measurements to be made between any two points on a web-page, giving basic information about each of the points clicked on, and drawing a line on the page for the measurement.

Crosshair: Draws a crosshair cursor on the page to assist in layout alignment. Cursor information is also presented in a tooltip.

Download it today!

Yes, I’m obviously infatuated with Wordpress right now. What can I say I’m definitely smitten. Anyway, there’s an interesting discussion that took place last month over at ZDNet entitled “WordPress vs. an army of clunky content management systems.” Basically the author ponders why so many companies roll out custom CMS software when Wordpress and other open source options are available and, in my and the author’s opinion, probably better written than in-house CMS’s.

At ZDNet we use WordPress for blogs, but in previous positions I’ve almost always had some custom built creation that usually stinks. Sure, these CMS systems may have started out as standard, but sooner or later they turn into this Frankenstein creation. And lookout below if the guy that cooked up the code ever leaves. If there’s an open source option that has rich features why would you spend time building the same thing?

Of course I have an opinion on why so many in-house developers are against using open source software. I think part of the reason is that the developers may not be too familiar with PHP. Most of these folks are Microsoft certified so most of the stuff is going to be written in ASP… to date you don’t see a lot of open source ASP software out there on the net. I actually had one Microsoft certified developer tell me PHP would be dead within a year—that was 2-3 years ago now and he was fired before the year was up anyway.

I think it also comes from a fear of losing one’s worth in the marketplace. If a company has all these highly-paid Microsoft certified developers on staff and suddenly you bring in open source, why do you need them? I think open source software is a perfect compliment for small to medium sized businesses and particularly non-profits. Instead of spending large chunks of money for people to reinvent the wheel, they could go with available solutions that wouldn’t cost them a dime.

But of course, not everyone is web or business savvy and may not know there are options available to them in the first place. Which is why as web designer’s we must go forth and plant the open source seed. Now I’m sounding like Johnny ‘Web Designer’ Appleseed.