A Hilarious Design Classic
For your first day, I present for your reading pleasure a wonderful classic comic by the incomparable Matthew Inman (aka The Oatmeal).
Read OnFor Your Second Day, Some Humor
A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, chances are it's not that good.
And Now, to Waste Your Time
This site has some great illustrations, some funny random stuff, and overall is just a champion time-waster, for those of you tired of Buzzfeed hell.
Visit Books of AdamAnd Now - A History of Web Design
Web design has been around for a while now, and it has a storied history. Webs.com and AmeriCommerce have put together a fun infographic to walk you down memory lane.
View the InfographicA Stellar Podcast
If you're not familiar with Chris Coyier, shame on you. The dude is one of the founders of Codepen, for crying out loud. Anywho, he has a podcast called the Shoptalk Show that is audio gold.
Listen NowAn Up and Coming Designer
Dan Eden is a prodigious young brit working for Dropbox who has already contributed a large amount to the web design world. He's got a blog that's admittedly not updated often - but what's there is worth your time.
Visit DanEden.meSwift for the Masses
For those of you familiar with Swift, Apple's new programming language, it's been an exciting few weeks. Apple, as promised open-sourced Swift, and in response, IBM introduced a cool Swift toy.
Visit the Swift SandboxBeautiful Progressive Loading Images
So it seems that we're all after a great solution for smoothly and progressively loaded, large images. There hasn't been a perfect solution presented yet, but this one at CSS Tricks comes close!
Visit CSS TricksA Wonderful Web Comic
Jerry King is great - and he does an awesome web comic for WebDesignerDepot every week.
Visit WebDesignerDepotCSS Animation Nirvana
While perusing another advent calendar (24ways) I stumbled across an in-progress website that is pretty epic. The guys at Rally Interactive are seriously impressive.
Visit Their Beta SiteFreelancers, Rejoice
One of the most integral pieces of a freelance business is your billing. I've been using Hiveage since it was called Curdbee, and love it. It's not as ubiquitous as it should be, but you should definitely check it out.
Visit HiveageA Designer's CMS
While there are a slew of full-featured, easy-to-use CMS options out there, my personal preference is a lesser known one called MODX. If you take the time to get into it, you can do almost anything you want with relative ease.
Visit MODX.comA MODX Helping Hand
To aid in my CMS suggestion from yesterday, one of the best MODX resources is MODX.today. You should give it a look!
Visit MODX.todayBegin at the Beginning: Part 1
Jon Duckett has a fantastic series of books on the basic technology involved in front-end web design. Here's the first.
Buy Javascript & Jquery: Interactive Front-EndWeb Development
Begin at the Beginning: Part 2
Jon Duckett has a fantastic series of books on the basic technology involved in front-end web design. Here's the second.
Buy HTML and CSS: Design and Build WebsitesLooking To Break Into UI Design?
UI-Patterns.com is a fantastic resource for learning and practicing UI design. You should really check it out, even if you don't consider yourself a dyed-in-the-wool UI designer.
Visit UI-Designs.comGet to Learning!
If you're just beginning in web design, I've shared a few resources already that should help you build up your fundamentals—but no resource is more effective than Treehouse. They do a fantastic job at making complex concepts easy to understand, and their wealth of material covers much more than just web design.
Visit Team TreehouseAnd Now For Something Completely Random
Most of the things I'm sharing on here are related to web design, but haven't you always wondered what happened to Kevin Mccallister of Home Alone fame? Well, now we know—and it ain't good.
Watch on YouTubeTonight, on 60 Minutes...
You should check out the 60 Minutes segment with Charlie Rose tonight. He's peeking inside of Jony Ive's secret design studio.
Read the Tweet