Pixlr

This is probably the most advanced and most popular image editing application on the internet. The best part about it is, it’s a 100% free and for simple designs, you can save your money on Adobe Photoshop.

Kuler

This one is a personal favorite: An online application for generating a color theme that looks good together. Whether you are creating a website template or an application UI, Kuler allows you to efficiently experiment with different color variations as well as browse thousands of pre-existing color themes from the Kuler community.

Qvectors

Qvectors is a website that provides free high quality vector graphics for your projects. They even allow you to make money by uploading and selling your own vector designs as a registered user.

Qtextures

Like Qvectors, Qtextures is a fairly new site but it delivers high quality textures and patterns from various designers. Its catalog is updated on a weekly basis.

Qicons

Another great community resource for finding fresh and royalty-free icons for your designs

Gomockingbird

This is an online tool that makes it much easier to create, link together, preview and even share mock-ups of your website or application to your colleagues.

Gliffy

Gliffy is a online diagram software, you can easily create professional-quality flowcharts, diagrams, floor plans, technical drawings, and more – straight from within your browser!

Favicon

This online tool can easily create a favicon for your site – a small 16×16 image that shows in your browser’s address bar and bookmark menu when your site is called up. Definitely, this is the quickest and easiest way to make one.

Shape/Form by Lukas Peet

Canadian designer Lukas Peet has created a set of cutlery comprising a silver fork and spoon and a ceramic knife

Ribbon Cutlery by Makoto Yamaguchi

The pieces are meant to relfect ribbon as it is held between the fingers. We don’t know how easy it would be to eat with these, but we could look at them all day long.

Exhausted Cutlery by Kathryn Hinton

Her pieces include lettering on the prongs of forks that correspond with words imprinted in bowls and the Exhausted range (below), where cutlery follows the shape of objects it appears to collapse onto.

Gone Fishin’ Cutlery by Yamazaki

Each piece in this stainless steel collection is whimsically fish-shaped, right down to tail, fins, and eyes, and the pointed tips of the spoon bowls even create little mouths.

Appetize Table Cutlery by Nedda El-Asmar

Inspired by the oval shape of Japanese tea plant leaf, Belgian designer Nedda El-Asmar came up with this beautiful table cutlery design.

Dexter Cutlery

Each piece of cutlery is hand crafted into its own unique character.

Wrenchware

Wrenchware is 18/10 polished “drop forged” stainless steel, and comes in its own individual blow-molded heavy duty ABS plastic box. |Measures 4.5″ wide by 8.75″ long by 1.25″ high.

Flat Cutlery by Josef Hoffman

Josef Hoffman (1870 – 1956), five pieces from the ‘Flat Model’ flatware service

Bite Silverware by Mark A. Reigelman II

Mark A. Reigelman II has designed this Bite silverware in an effort to help raise awareness of worldwide epidemics such as starvation and obesity.

Natural Cutlery by Clara Del Portillo and Alejandro Selma

Beautiful cutlery set merges traditional silver cutlery with the elegance of wood.

Canonical has revealed the style of the new default theme that will be used in Ubuntu 10.04, the next major version of the popular Linux distribution. In a significant departure from tradition, Ubuntu is shedding its signature brown color scheme and is adopting a new look with a palette that includes orange and an aubergine shade of purple.

Ubuntu’s distinctive brown look dates back to the very first version of the distribution, which was released in 2004. Although the style has evolved considerably since then and new colors like orange gradually gained a foothold in the desktop palette, brown has been the dominant color of Ubuntu’s default themes for the past five years.

Canonical began discussing the possibility of a major visual refresh in 2007 during the development of Ubuntu 8.04, the last major long-term support release. At the time, Canonical’s art team was thinking about adopting a darker look with a black and orange color scheme, but the theme concept was abandoned and never implemented. Although the idea of a major visual refresh was resurrected and discussed again during the development process of several subsequent Ubuntu versions, it hasn’t happened until now.

The theme change is part of a broader effort to redefine Ubuntu’s visual identity, a move that could help make the open source desktop platform seem more professional and attractive to a mainstream audience. According to design documentation in the Ubuntu wiki, the new style was developed last year by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth and a team of designers. They chose “light” as the thematic concept behind the new brand identity. The new Ubuntu logo, which was also unveiled today, has a thinner font and a smaller icon.

“We’re drawn to Light because it denotes both warmth and clarity, and intrigued by the idea that ‘light’ is a good value in software. Good software is ‘light’ in the sense that it uses your resources efficiently, runs quickly, and can easily be reshaped as needed,” the design documentation says. “Visually, light is beautiful, light is ethereal, light brings clarity and comfort.”

The new logo and colors will be rolled out to the Ubuntu website. The logo will also be featured in the new boot splash screen for Ubuntu 10.04. The updated GNOME theme will include an aubergine desktop and gray widget styling. The orange “Humanity” icon theme will apparently be retained during this cycle. Two variants of the GNOME theme are displayed on the Wiki page, one with black menus and panels and another with light menus and panels. It’s unclear at this time which one will be the new default. These designs are still at a relatively early stage and will undergo further refinement prior to the official release.

Making Linux beautiful

When Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth gave his memorable keynote at OSCON in 2008, he articulated a vision of building a Linux desktop with industry-leading design and unbeatable usability. He promised that Canonical would invest in a broad effort to make Linux beautiful.

“I think the great task ahead of us over the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop from something that is stable and robust and not so pretty, to something which is art. Not emulate, but blow right past Apple in the user experience we deliver to our end users,” he said at OSCON in 2008.

A few months after that speech, Canonical launched the Ayatana project, a broad initiative to improve the usability of Ubuntu and upstream open source software projects including the GNOME desktop. Canonical assembled a team of professional usability and design experts to take on the task. Ayatana has delivered tangible results, including an enhanced desktop notification system and a multitude of minor improvements to usability and consistency throughout the desktop.

Although Ubuntu has made great strides in the area of usability, it has still lagged behind other distros like openSUSE in the quality of its theming and visual style. The new theme is a nice improvement that will move Ubuntu forward and make the desktop more visually appealing.

- Ryan Paul, Ars Technica

Via Ars Technica

First off, I would like to make a clear distinction between illustrations and mascots because people often get confused with the two and the terms are used quite interchangeably. Although they both have similar functions for evoking emotion and making the design more lively, they are very different things. Mascots can be animals, people, abstract creatures or even robots! On the other hand, illustrations can be any of these things but are not limited to them – in other words, illustrations are just there to enhance the design and to liven up to mood. What makes a mascot different from other illustrations is that it defines the brand and serves as some sort of corporate identity and in websites, they appear on all or most of the pages. Take a look at Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves) – their mascot, Jeeves has been used to guide users and help them with their search queries. It wasn’t until March of this year, that Ask.com has resumed the use of Jeeves since their re-branding in 2007.

Contrastingly, if you look at volll.com, you can see the site uses a lot of comic-like illustrative elements but they are not necessarily used for branding purposes.

The following is a list of websites I have compiled that creatively uses illustrations and mascots to enhance their design and build their brand.

MailChimp

The MailChimp mascot not only effectively represents its company and product, but also depicts the company’s efficiency and competence. The great visual appeal of the mascot makes customers want to use the product and trust the brand. This is easily one of my favorite mascots on the web.

Freelanceswitch

In one form or another, this mascot appears on every single page of this website. Having different variations of the mascot (for example the same character doing a different action or holding a different prop) throughout the site makes it more interactive and fun for the audience.

Joyent

Joyent.com uses characters in a cartoon style although they were not intended to be used as mascots as different characters appear on each page. These illustrations are merely used to embellish the site design.

branded07

Rob Palmer’s represents himself with a cartoon puffin bird as a mascot in his web portfolio. The bird appears throughout the site in different variations – sometimes holding up signs and sometimes burrowed in the sidebar.

Cork’d

Another example of a simple, yet effective mascot. This one depicts a person holding a wine bottle. It is positioned beside the site features to encourage new users to sign up to the site.

volll

I want to conclude with this particular site because not only is it beautifully illustrated, the site layout is so creative and ingenious.

Putting characters and mascots in your designs can effectively change its look and feel. There are no definite rules for implementing mascots/characters in a web design, but keep in mind that you should always design to fit the purpose. If it is a company mascot, it should convey confident expressions and shouldn’t have negative expressions as it must represent the company in a positive way.