drweb.de has a nice collection of 35 free fonts that you can download for your graphic projects.

Seems that web design and development trends for 2006 is the hot topic in blog land. Both Cameron Moll and Andy Budd have posts about the web development trends in the new year.

There are also several articles and posts on fonts and typography surfacing lately. SitePoint offers The Anatomy of Web Fonts which is a good article on typefaces for the web; the only drawback is the lack of discussion of scalable fonts.

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web is a companion site for the book Elements of Typographic… Both the book and site are devoted to typographic style on the web.

Mark Boulton blogged Semantic Typography: Bridging the XHTML gap - links and patterns between typographic theory and Web Standards.

The Beauty of Simplicity describes why making things simple is the new competitive advantage.

Very exciting news today; our main office has authorized an adjustment of our classroom hours. The new classes will be 12:15-4:15 p.m. and 4:15-6:15 p.m, both classes will meet Monday-Friday. I think the new hours will give more people an opportunity to attend our program; these new time slots should work better for people who are working, in dedicated job search, or who have family commitments. Please help me to spread the word about our new program times; if you belong to a job search or community group, this post contains all of the information about our classes.

Vitaly Friedman presents 20 Best License-Free Official Fonts, an excellent round-up of 20 of the best license-free fonts.

About.com offers Top 10 Places to Find Free Images For Your Blogs

Future-proof your CSS with Conditional Comments from Bruce Lawson explains how to use conditional comments rather than CSS hacks to correctly display your pages in all browsers.

The Jackol’s Den has an htaccess cheat sheet that you may want to print and add to your resources. You can learn more about other ways the .htaccess file is used in the article Server Move. The .htaccess file can be used to prevent hotlinking as discussed in class yesterday.

Speaking of cheat sheets, Code by Matt, has cheat sheets for Photoshop, Illustrator, CSS, PHP, Dreamweaver, htacess, and more.

Great article at 43 folders on Writing sensible email messages. 43 folders is a personal productivity blog by Merlin Mann with a lot of excellent tips!

Typesetter - oh I love this new typeface comparison tool! You can select three typefaces, sizes, colors, etc., and they will display on the screen so that you can select the best font for your web pages. Be sure to bookmark this valuable resource!

Essential List and Resources on Firefox Extensions from Lifehacker. These extensions would fall into the category of personal productivity rather than web developer. I use many of these extensions and they’re great!

The Opera web browser is now free. That’s $$$ free and ad free!

Microsoft is now offering the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar (beta) - Here is info on the toolbar from the Microsoft site:

Overview
The IE Developer Toolbar provides several features for deeply exploring and understanding Web pages.

1. Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a web page.
2. Locate and select specific elements on a web page through a variety of techniques.
3. Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
4. View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
5. Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
6. Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
7. Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
8. Immediately resize the browser window to 800×600 or a custom size.
9. Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
10. Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
11. Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align objects on your pages.

We will install and check this new toolbar out in class this afternoon.

Please don’t forget to vote in the Macromedia vs. Adobe poll that’s running in the forum.

Time has compiled its 50 coolest web site list for 2005. Take a look at these top 50 sites layout, design and content.

StopDesign has a new article on Zoom Layouts for accessibility.

CSS design for the future: workaround vs hacks - a discussion of hacks vs. workarounds in CSS.

Communicating error messages accessibly. This article addresses the need to write clean application errors (form validation for example).

Atomic Fonts has over 25,000 free fonts for download.

I know some of you are trying to restyle your WordPress blogs. Here is a WordPress 1.5 Theme CheatSheet.

How about another color scheme generator.

I love these Meyers-Briggs typology tests. So what are you?

This morning on the KRON news I saw two shopping search engines that you may find useful:

Cairo helps you to find the best deal in town. Enter your zip code and the item that you’re looking to buy and Cairo will search for sales in your area for that item. It will even display a thumbnail of the newspaper ad that the item was found in. If it can’t locate the exact item, it will display similar items.

Become is search engine to help you make informed purchasing decisions. It searches buying guides, articles, forums, reviews, specs and information from across the web to help you buy the right product. This looks great for finding reviews on the digital camera or other electronic product you may be searching for.

Speaking of search engines, you can find out the latest offerings from Google at the Google Blog. If searching still has you frustrated, try my Google Search Tutorial.

CSS still have you stumped? Take a look at the Complete CSS Tutorial. - Link removed due to “dated” material.

Here is a little Div Mania for you all. Everyone who is working on the CSS unit or has completed it would benefit from reading this article.

Check out the top 100 fonts being downloaded at Dafont, another free font site.

Andy Budd’s article 10 Bad Project Warning Signs is worth reading if you’re considering freelancing.

How about creating some chrome text with Fireworks today.

Since most of you will be in a postition to have to provide feedback or receive critiques regarding web site designs and usability, I thought that you might find this article by Scott Berkun on How to give and receive criticism helpful.

WhatTheFont? allows you to submit images of fonts that you are trying to identify to a font forum where “font gurus” may be able to help to identify the font.

I have heard a lot of positive things about the Job Connections’ meetings in Danville on Saturdays. You can learn more about this networking group at their web site.

I mentioned a few of programs today during our workshop.

1. Gimp is a free image editor
2. Irfanview is a free image viewer that can be used to convert and optimize images
3. The Adobe Studio Exchange has all kinds of free Photoshop actions, filters, brushes, and other goodies.
4. Photofiltre is also a free image editor

I personally use BreezeBrowser to view images from my digital camera and to convert RAW images. I’ve used this program for years it’s fast and easy to use.

Have I mentioned NoNags lately? There are all kinds of great freeware applications listed at this site including graphic editors and viewers.

Simple Bits has made a Call for Typography Resources. There are a lot of resources listed in the comments.

On Friday we will use my basic photo editing in Photoshop as an outline for our workshop. You may want to print the tutorial and download and save the images associated with the tutorial before Friday.

I also have some basic scanning directions for HP and Epson scanners for today’s lecture. Special Note: In order to use the scanner in our classroom, you must ask me to login to the scanning workstation.

There is a new article on Progressive Layouts at Pro.HTML.IT. It’s hard to keep track of fixed, fluid, liquid, jello, elastic, progressive, and the other assorted CSS layouts!

YourTotalSite has a great article entitled Simple Design Tips for Non-Designers. I think there are a lot of informative articles on the site, worth adding to your RSS feeds in Sage.

Ok, now this is cool, Colr.org allows you to type in words to pick colors. Great for determining what colors you should use depending upon the mood or emotion you want to project on your site. You can also select random colors from any image that you load. This site is in progress, but it’s really neat!

Do you want to see what your web site looks like in all different browsers? Visit browsershots.org and submit your URL. This is an awesome service!

I’m sneaking this in - Part 5 of the five simple steps to better typography series is now available.

Star Wars anyone?

Stu Nichols demonstrates a CSS method of achiving min-width in Internet Explorer. This is very useful technique when you want a column to resize depending on the visitor’s browser, but you want to maintain a minimum column width. Most browsers support the CSS min-width property, but IE does not. In order to maintain a minimum width on a column in IE JavaScript must be used. We used the min-width IE JavaScript hack for the Site-in-an-Hour exercise, but we discovered that the JavaScript actually locks up IE when the browsers is resized. Neither of the methods Mr. Nichols demonstrates use JavaScript.

And All That Malarkey has gone through a complete redesign. Fortunately for us the designer, Andy Clarke, shares his design process with the rest of us.

Mezzoblue has a good article on Columns & Grids

How to be creative - Worth a read.

Still looking for more free fonts? How about 1001 of them.

Have you visited the library lately? The public library has lots of great books on graphic design, CSS, XHTML, PHP, and other course related topics.