Hey where are you roaming? Are you insane about Foursquare check-ins? If yes then you would like to know that 4sq is rapidly working of enhancing the user experiences. Few months ago they introduced the friends suggestions features(in online interface) then they introduced the sharing option in Foursquare app, recently they updated few more features for Android apps. Here are the screen shots:

Old UI

New UI with change in Tips, Photos and Mayor positions

Nearby and Worldwide Friends

Since last few months Youtube is experimenting so many changes in the UI of the user dashboard. Here are few changes that we have observed in last few months:

Youtube Header Scroll – Favorited, Watched Later and Playlists

Youtube Account Drop-down Menus

Recent Change in Dropdown Options: My Channel/Channel

Many times designers face a very common problem in maintaining the crisp look and feel throughout the website, and if designer is a newbie and when he/she surf across the web and found slick magazine themes website and wondered a first question raised in his mind about how to achieve this? Our research says if not all but many of them are build on CSS Framework.

Why you should go for it?

Apart from that it helps you to cut down on your development time.It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.
Suppose you are going to make a website and start writing HTML and CSS code for it and if you need to take care of typography which is very essential part of your project, maintaining margin and padding throughout the website, and one of the most critical part cross browser compatibility.

Advantages of using it:

What I really feels which improves our work a lot:

1. Uniformity and consistency in HTML element placement, thereby reducing CSS coding errors.
2. A CSS reset that eliminates the discrepancies across browsers.
3. A solid grid that can support the most complex of layouts.
4. Typography based on expert principles that predate the web.
5. Visual design cohesion between page elements.
6. Mostly eliminates the need to use nested HTML tables.
7. Reduced effort for producing slicker web page layouts, compared to coding the necessary CSS from scratch.
8. Tools, editors, and templates for every step in your workflow.
9. Cross Browser support, which is just a pain for every designer (though it brings best out of you).
10. They comes with documentation which helps you in getting started with it.

Though there are some disadvantages such as:

1.Redundant Code: CSS files contains lot of extra code which you never need, only if you are over concerned about each and every extra bit of your page, otherwise it doesn’t effect your site performance.
2.Lack of Freedom: Though every framework has it’s own structure, it leaves you to do things around that but this is some thing which brings best out of you.
3.Fixing someone’s else bug: Another painful thing, you have to fix someone’s else bug, as you can easily fix those bug if whole code is written by you from scratch.

YAML

“As you can see there are plenty of valid arguments either way. It really comes down to your personal workflow and preference. Let us know what you think of CSS frameworks and which ones you use.”
Personally I suggest Blueprint Framework as it is easy to deploy and helps you in learning basic CSS errors.

Bubble icons are widely used by the designers and developers for pointing any features of the web applications / sites.If you are a tweetdeck user (twitter client) then remember the its icon(a black bird in bubble like this).

How to make the icons like this

All of the above icons are generated via photoshop.The common things in all the icons are the background only.Follow this simple step to generate your own icon

1.Create any background image like this via photoshop.

a. Draw a rectangle

b. Draw an arrow below rectangle

This will create an image like below

2.Draw the shapes and text on the above background via photoshop.You can choose any texts or any shapes and just use in the above background.An example of the source psd file in red share is below.

Source PSD file

Commenting icons psd source (215) Yellow Comment Bubble Icons (23)

(courtesy via mysitemyway )

It’s incredible, a lot of online color tools are often better than local free software I’ve seen. Depending on what you need to do you can be quite sure to find what you need online. Each time I needed I searched and tried some of the online tools and I noticed that it’s only when I’m really using them that I find out how useful they are.

If you’re tackling some graphic design project or maybe even your wall decor, getting color hints from ready made color templates from professional designers can be useful. Below are 10 of the better sites to help you out on your design challenge.

These are the ones I found myself using the most:

• ColorSynth Axis: This is amazing, it’s the most advanced color shemer I’ve seen. It’s worth going though the tutorial.
• Slayer Office’s color palette blender: This is the one I use most, it’s simple but amply enough for common use.
• ColorMatch Redux: Because it can export to .ACT, .AI and text. I use all 3 of them.

COLOURlovers this is pretty close to color mecca. This post should actually be filed as a Timewaster because you can spend hours checking out the various palettes and patterns and rolling your own. The site is full of features such as create your own palette from a URL you’re inspired by, join groups devoted to colors (srsly), shore up on the latest color trends, contribute your own content and vote on others.

ColorCombos – nice color palettes to choose from. If there’s a particular website whose colors you want to snag, check out their “Grab Website Colors” engine. You just input the URL of the site you’re reviewing and ColorCombos extracts the palette for you.

ColorExplorer – another site that’s feature rich and full of color goodies. Color import from images, palette export to most programs, convert any number of colors into a matching palette, 1 click palette filters and adjustments, plus no requirement for site registration.

ColorJack – very nice color site featuring several apps such as Color Sphere which allows you to choose the right color scheme supporting 18 formulas and 9 color blindness simulations. There’s also Color Galaxy, an online color visualizer with colors from 27 libraries including everyone’s favorite forever and ever, Crayola.

Kuler - not surprisingly, Adobe has a fetching web app to help you generate color schemes and if you have Adobe’s Creative Suite 4, Kuler is built in. Kuler has great tools such as color extractor from an image, theme creation from 1 to several colors, as well as a community you can join and give and receive comments on yours and other’s creations.

Color Scheme Generator - your basic color tool, nothing fancy. Nice online tool to generate color schemes and palettes to create good-looking and well balanced and harmonic web pages.

Color Hunter - allows you to create and find color palettes from photographs.