A great collection of templates for print and sketchbooks by Brad Reiken.

Before any tangible designs are made, any experienced designer should know that the first thing you do before any sort of web development project is map out a rough sketch first. Although most sketching is done on blank paper, many developers have now started using sketch templates for their web applications. This is definitely the most productive and organized way to start probably one of the most important phase of the application design process. Below are resources and templates to download or print off for designing your next great project!

Find out more and download you sketching paper

Nick Finck and Raina Van Cleave’s presentation slides from the SXSWi talk are up. Here’s a summary:

User experiences are your everyday experiences—anything from operating a car, to making a pot of coffee, to ordering a pair of shoes online. User experience is the result of your interactions with a product or service, specifically how it’s delivered and its related artifacts according to the design.

In this presentation Nick Finck and Raina Van Cleave will explore the ten characteristics of a great user experience. They will cover all aspects of user experience design such as user research, information architecture, information design, technical writing, interaction design, visual design, brand identity design, accessibly, usability and web analytics. Nick and Raina will also explain how following the ten commandments can boost your web sites, web app, or mobile app’s ease of use, appeal, conversion rates, and more.

Read more on Nick’s site.

Design, develop, and deploy feature-rich Magento online stores with PHP coding.

If you are a PHP developer who wants to understand the architecture of Magento, learn how to extend the system with PHP code, add new features, and integrate Magento with a third-party CMS, this book is for you.

You are expected to be a confident PHP 5 developer. No experience of Magento development is expected, although you should be familiar with the operation of Magento. No experience of the Zend framework is expected.

What you will learn from this book

• Install and upgrade Magento to get ready for development
• Get familiar with the architecture and internal structure of Magento
• Learn about the best modules available and what they can do for you out of the box
• Build a Shipping module for your Magento store to give users options for receiving their items once they have paid for them
• Create a payment method for Magento and the various aspects that go together to complete the payment process
• Speed up your module creation process using the Module Creator script
• Build a basic brand-management module for Magento to manage brands and display their details
• Integrate your favourite CMS into Magento including a walkthrough of integrating WordPress into Magento
• Create, update, delete, and retrieve customer data from within Magento by implementing the customer API
• Integrate Magento data into an existing external web application or script using the Magento Core API
• Import/export files to retrieve and store information from and to external sources using Excel Spreadsheet or CSV data

Find out more

Some interesting examples of beautiful sketches for website prototypes for your daily inspiration, collected by Antonio Lupetti on woorkup.com.

When you start designing a new website it’s very useful to sketch out a first idea of page layout using paper and stencil. This approach help you define easily a working draft of the final version of your website. In general this is a top-down process: you can start sketching first the main sections and then adding more details progressively.

If you are a graphic or web designer you should understand the importance of color combinations. Nice colors and color combinations are much coveted among graphic designers, interior designers and landscapers. You must have used Kuler in Photoshop CS4. ColoRotate is a similar kind of online color palette creator that lets you browse through the color palettes, create new palettes and share them with the online community.

There is a sliders mode as well. This will bring up color sliders for editing the colors. You can choose various modes like RGB, CMYK, LAB, HSV, HLS, NCS while adjusting these sliders. You won’t need to remember the color values and jot them down as you can download the palettes directly in .act format.

You can also browse through the palettes , sort or search for palettes based on tags. There’s also a very information description about colors and how the human eye perceives colors, color models. Checkout Learn Colorotate