BlogmyQuery – BMQ

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As designers we are always on the hunt for good pictures. Noupe certainly needs fitting imagery now and then and even more often. That's where photo-services, stock image providers and the like come into play. There are big marketplaces, offering you high-grade imagery at more or less affordable rates. Then we find repositories with free usage policies but varying licenses, which at times are not easily comprehensible. I have certainly been in trouble with this kind of mine-seeking. Pixabay, a fresh repository with a quickly growing selection of excellent imagery, is different, dead-simple. All the pictures are free, no license conditions apply. Pixabay delivers pure public domain photos.

UICloud is a fresh project. Launched in July 2012 it already provides over 25,000 UI Elements in over 1,000 UI sets. All the resources can be used free of charge, individual licenses apply. Jack Cai, a Southampton (UK) based Chinese freelance icon and GUI designer, did a great job. The platform is intuitive, even fun to use. The design is modern and elegant, the content is neatly arranged. Enough reason to look deeper into it.

We know you like tiled websites. Our article featuring Sergey Pimenov's Metro UI CSS drew loads of attention. So we thought you might also be interested in what the Italian frontend-developer Marcello Palmitessa created. By the name of BootMetro he just introduced a whole framework for building tiled websites in the Metro-style of the forthcoming Windows 8. Palmitessa took Twitter's Bootstrap and changed its looks to mimic Redmond's next-generation operating system. And yes, he not only got inspired by Pimenov's Metro UI CSS.

Before you detail the design of your next website project you need to determine where should be what. You will have to place your navigation, images, texts, forms, whatever will be part of your site. Especially essential parts such as the navigational concept have to be planned very thoroughly. The information architecture decides if your project will be usable or not. Also important in your early concept is that nothing should be forgotten. The established way to deal with all of these challenges is creating one or more mockups of the project. Mockups are small models, sometimes even prototypes, sometimes only scribbles of the website under construction. They do not determine the design aka looks of a site but they define its structure and the navigational concepts. The brand-new web-app Moqups has been created to help you do just that, build early mockups of your next big web-thing.

Kiandra IT is one of the bigger companies in the field of software development and the likes in Australia. In 2012 they were declared Microsoft Partner Of The Year. Pushing ahead their own software development efforts Kiandra created a theme for jQuery UI which they used internally for almost a year. Then they decided to open source it under the name of Delta. Kiandra did and put it under the liberal MIT/GPL-license, so everybody can use Delta free of charge for any purpose, be it for private, educational or commercial use.