Card Observer is a design inspiration gallery that does only one thing but it does it extremely well: Collect the best business cards from around the web and display them in all their glory to help inspire your next great business card design.
The site itself has a very clean look and feel to it, and the photography is definitely top notch. Each card features a full size image, and a word or two about the design from the designers themselves.
If you’re tired of just showing off your name and phone number when handing out your business cards, then take a look through Card Observer and see what strikes your fancy, because I bet you can get an idea or two from just a brief look around at what’s on display.
[Card Observer]
[Via: Vandelay Design]
It’s always nice to get a peak behind the scenes of a new application before it hits the market, because you can see some of the decisions that the designers made to get to the final product, and you can imagine what decisions you yourself would have made in their shoes.
Sebastiaan de With of Cocoia recently worked with Phill Ryu and Andrew Kaz to create Classics, a new book reading app for the iPhone, and Sebastiaan shares the steps involved in creating the app design, creating the logo, and creating the overall look and feel of the app on his blog.
[Cocoia Blog - Designing Classics]
Delicious (the social bookmarking site formerly known as del.icio.us that calls itself “the tastiest bookmarks on the web” and was also the father of the strange domain name), launched its long awaited redesign yesterday to help move the site beyond its late ‘90s style.
Though the underlying functionality is still the same, the new look and feel is designed to make it faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more desirable.
Speed: We’ve moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable. You may not have noticed, but the old backend was getting creaky under the load of five million users.
Search: We’ve completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they’re very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another public user’s bookmarks, or your social network. Now it’s easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.
Design: Finally, we’ve updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we’re hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn.
I’m a big Delicious user (http://delicious.com/cory411), but since I use the Firefox plugin, I rarely if ever visit the site.
However, with looks like this, I just might have to give it a second chance.
[Delicious]
