Just stumbled across a great blog post called Colour Inspiration from the Masters of Painting at the COLOURlovers blog. It’s about getting color palette inspiration from old painting masters…Van Gogh, Dalí, Warhol, Monet, da Vinci…that crew. I love that palette inspired by René Magritte’s Les Amants. Beautiful colors…rather creepy story. I knew there was a reason why I loved art history. You can check out the post here.

And be sure to check out the rest of the COLOURlovers web site once you get there. If you’re ever stumped for some kind of color choice for your web site, your next piece, or even for decorating your studio, you’ll find the inspiration at COLOURlovers. There you can search through color palettes, read up on color trends and news…and even talk with other color fiends on the discussion boards. Take a look at: http://www.colourlovers.com/

Whew! I can’t believe it’s already May! I’ve neglected this blog disgracefully while getting the new season of my podcast Crafting Voices up to speed. But I promise to get back to blogging here regularly and I’ll start with another resource I’ve found for picking colors for your web sites. The Daily Slurp compiles a daily list of well designed web sites for design ideas. Now The Daily Slurp has created a new tool that will allow you search through their database of over 10,000 sites by color. Looking for ideas for sites that are predominately orange? Choose your main color, and if you like, you can also choose a secondary color and you get a whole list of examples that use these color combinations. Check out their new Color Search tool here.

Holy crap! StumbleUpon sure is addictive. I’ve heard about this web site for quite a while, but I’ve finally got around to getting an account a couple days ago and I’ve been so unproductive ever since If you’re not familiar with StumbleUpon it’s a web site/browser tool that lets you push a button to find web sites that might interest you. So if you would like to find web sites on fly fishing, woodworking, and photography, push the little Stumble button on your web browser and it takes you to sites that deal with those topics.

Fly fishing is not my thing tho’, so I’ve been “stumbling upon” sites that have to do with jewelry, art, web design, and graphic design, and I’ve hit on a bunch of really useful web and graphic design sites, a few of which I’ll mention here:

The first site, BittBox is actually a blog that has very cool tutorials for Photoshop and Illustrator, so if you have some basic experience with either of these two programs and you want to stretch your skill a bit, you may want to try some of these tutorials. But not only does Bittbox have tutorials, but there are a number of free goodies like graphics and fonts that are available for you to download to use. Amazingly this blog is only about 3 months old, but there’s some good stuff there.

If you haven’t a clue about how the whole process of designing and launching a web site works, you should visit the Beginner’s section of the site Web Design from Scratch and get a quick overview. The site is maintained by web designer Ben Hunt who is in the midst of writing a book “50 Redesigns from Scratch”. Even if you aren’t a rank beginner when it comes to building your place on the web, there are some useful articles on HTML, the design process, copywriting, and other topics.

This next site is more of an online magazine of sorts. Smashing Magazine is focuses on rounding up some of the latest web trends and techniques. While this site is targeted towards web designers and developers, it’s great for finding resources and inspiration. I’m especially fond of their design showcases like the 50 Most Beautiful Web Designs in 2006, 49 Simple Web Designs, and 50 Remarkable Favicons (you know…those little graphics you see on the address bar of your browser). If you are a newbie at Dreamweaver, you should check out yesterday’s roundup, Adobe Dreamweaver Tutorials

If you’re just learning how to use Photoshop to design your web site, there are hundreds…even thousands of web sites and resources that will help you learn. But for today, I’m just going to focus on three of them!
The web site Photoshop Lab, has a number of tutorials for special effects, tips on useful Photoshop shortcuts, news, reviews, and links to other Photoshop resources. If you’re a beginner, you can go to the Beginner’s section and get up to speed on using the basic tools in Photoshop and basic shortcuts. And you can keep up to date on all the news and tutorials by subscribing to the Photoshop Lab blog.

Phong is actually I web site that I used when I was first learning how to use Photoshop and to my surprise I found that it’s still around. Phong focuses on using Photoshop to create specific special effects and the tutorials are categorized as basic, intermediate, and advanced. If you’ve always wanted to learn how to stitch photos together to create a panoramic image, how to use drop shadows, how to design metallic wires, or how to make your text look like metal or glass…Phong is your web site. While some of the effects are probably too far out for your web site (the web site itself is pretty far out), just going through the tutorials is a great way to practice and sharpen up your Photoshop skills.

This last web site is not specifically a Photoshop web site, but it’s very useful one if you don’t have much experience in graphic design. Chuck Green’s Ideabook focuses on graphic design and how to use it for effective marketing. Ideabook focuses on print design, but it also has some useful advice for web design as well. As many of the design principles in print also apply in web design, there’s some very useful advice for you if you need to design your web site. So you can learn how to pick a commercial printer for printing your business card as well as how to integrate you web site design with your brochure. And if you need a logo for your web site, check out the tutorial Step by step logo to see what the process is behind designing a logo…fascinating stuff.

Do you have a favorite design or Photoshop resource? Leave a comment and share!

If you’re a Mac OSX user, you’re probably familiar with the Dashboard Widgets feature…those nifty little programs that let you look up airplane flights, movie times, traffic reports, gas prices, and pretty much anything else you would want to have quick access to with a couple mouse clicks. A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Kuler, which is an online color palette tool by Adobe Systems. If your a Mac OSX user, you can now download Kuler’s Dashboard Widget that will let you see the Most Popular color scheme and even download the hex values for each particular theme. If you’re not a Mac OSX user, you can subscribe to Kuler’s RSS feed and get updates on the most popular color themes that way.