John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged design · everything

favikon.com

favikon

Favikon is a platform that uses AI to help brands and agencies find, vet, and manage influencer marketing campaigns by indexing 10 million creator profiles across nine social networks and updating them daily. Beyond discovery, it automates outreach, campaign management, tracking, and reporting through a single interface, while also offering "Favy," an AI assistant that can be embedded into existing tools like Claude or ChatGPT to answer questions about creators and run workflows. The platform serves influencer marketing teams, PR professionals, and newsrooms, with customers reporting significant time savings and improved campaign performance.

Permalink social mediadesignaibusiness

TASTE

TasteBook

Independent scoop shop owners are elevating ice cream beyond a simple dessert by incorporating regional and international ingredients—from local dairy to exotic spices and cultural staples—to create flavors that reflect and celebrate their communities' heritage and identity. These artisanal producers use ice cream as a medium to tell stories about place, tradition, and culinary pride rather than just churning out standardized products.

Permalink foodcookingdesignculture

www.powstock.com

Smashing Magazine

80 Beautiful Typefaces For Professional Design

This curated list of over 80 typefaces is divided into classic, widely-applicable fonts (like Helvetica, Futura, and Gill Sans) and lesser-known alternatives suitable for creating distinctive corporate identities with a contemporary feel. The selection draws from recommendations by designers and typographers worldwide, with most examples sourced from major foundries like Veer.com and Fontshop.com to help designers navigate the overwhelming number of font options when starting a project.

Permalink designfont

iA

Information Architects Japan » iA Notebook » The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard

This essay argues that web designers routinely use font sizes that are too small, justified by outdated reasoning about screen space and user control—but that readable type actually requires sizes comparable to printed books, generous white space, appropriate line height, clear contrast, and text that isn't trapped in images. The author contends that constraints like these force better design decisions by requiring designers to choose what content truly matters rather than cramming pages with information, and that the resulting layouts will feel less stressful and more professional than busy, cramped alternatives.

Permalink design

www.createarevolution.com

www.stripegenerator.com

Stripe Generator - diagonal stripes background tiles

I can't write a summary of this piece because it isn't an article or piece of reportage — it's a web application interface for a stripe pattern generator tool. There's no argument being made or information being reported, just instructions on how to use the tool to create and download striped textures for CSS or Photoshop. If you meant to save an actual article or essay, please share that instead.

Permalink designtoolscss3

Smashing Magazine

42 Design/Tech Magazines To Read | Smashing Magazine

This article showcases a curated selection of innovative and futuristic gadget designs—most still in concept phase as of 2008—that prioritize aesthetic innovation alongside functionality, arguing that when competing products offer similar core capabilities, superior design and user experience become the decisive factors. Examples range from gesture-controlled remote controls and customizable OLED keyboards to holographic laptops and a laser virtual keyboard, each demonstrating how thoughtful design solutions can fundamentally enhance how users interact with devices. The piece emphasizes that design excellence extends beyond visual appeal to encompass the overall user experience, from interface usability to attention to detail in features like charge-status indicators.

Permalink technologydesigngadgets

webtypography.net

Moz

SEOmoz | 15 CSS Properties You Probably Never Use (but perhaps should)

This post catalogs 15 underused CSS Level 2 properties with examples and explanations of their purposes, ranging from visual effects like `clip` and `text-shadow` to print-specific controls like `page-break-before` and typography refinements like `font-stretch`. The author notes that browser support varies across these properties and recommends testing before implementation, while flagging certain uses (like generating content with CSS) as conceptually problematic despite being technically possible.

Permalink designtutorialcss3

Smashing Magazine

Free Design Templates

When selecting a WordPress theme, prioritize developer reputation and code quality—which affect security, speed, and SEO—over the price distinction between free and premium options. The piece walks through seven key evaluation criteria: comparing free versus paid themes, testing page load speed with tools like Pingdom, assessing design and user experience through demo browsing, verifying mobile responsiveness, checking SEO optimization claims, examining customization dashboards, and reviewing customer feedback on community sites like ThemeForest to gauge security and reliability. Rather than becoming paralyzed by endless options, knowing your specific needs narrows the choice significantly, just as knowing your wine preference makes selecting from hundreds of bottles manageable.

Permalink designtutorialwordpress

www.ratemyeverything.net

Smashing Magazine

53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without | Smashing Magazine

A curated list of 53 essential CSS techniques and articles covering modern web design practices, ranging from foundational concepts like CSS selectors and layouts to advanced topics such as CSS3 animations, flexbox, grid systems, and responsive design. The collection emphasizes how CSS enables separation of design from content, making websites easier to maintain and update while advocating for accessible, usable, and well-structured code over outdated table-based layouts.

Permalink designtipstutorialcss3

binnyva.blogspot.com

Bin-Blog: Creating Web 2.0 Graphics In Gimp

This is a tutorial series teaching GIMP users how to create Web 2.0 style design elements—buttons, badges, reflections, and shadows—that were previously only documented in Photoshop-focused tutorials. Each installment covers a specific technique commonly seen in early 2000s web design, from basic buttons to logo reflections with wet-surface effects. The series demonstrates that GIMP is a capable alternative to Photoshop for achieving the same visual results on both Linux and Windows systems.

Permalink designdevelopmenttutorial