I was reading the other day this interesting article on the Smashing Magazine website by Jad Limcaco. The article was a challenge for designers to design something every day for 365 days. I thought that I would take up this challenge and try as much as possible to design something every day on the theme of Robotics. I’m hoping that this will be a great chance to improve my design skills and learn a lot along the way. I plan to only spend about 20 minutes a day on this, so there will be no master pieces, but hopefully some interesting works.

You can follow other designers who are taking up this challenge by following (searching)  #daily365.

So without further a do, check out the Design Something Every Day (DSED) 2010 Gallery.

As a designer/developer I’m always wanting to do things in the least amount of time possible and also feed my creative side. Below is my current list of FireFox Extensions that I have installed that enable me to do that.

Foxmarks

First up is Foxmarks. I don’t think that I could live without this one. I use a number of different machines and this extension keeps the hundreds of bookmarks I have up-to-date and synchronised. On a machine that is not your own but still want to see you bookmarks no problem just point any browser to https://my.foxmarks.com/ and login, you with then have all your bookmarks. The latest version now supports the synchronisation of passwords also, which is great.

Web Developer

Web Developer extension by Chris Pederick, has saved me hours in webdesign and development. It adds this great toolbar which gives you access to tools that can help with a number of different problems, such as; HTML & CSS diagnosis, submission for page vailidations, source views, rulers, etc, etc.

Firebug

Another great tool to help web designers and developers. Firebug has a great DOM explorer interface and helps to debug CSS, HTML and Javascript.

X-Ray

During the design process of a website I am always previewing the site and often when there is a problem I need to see the HTML kinda in-line. This little extension called X-Ray helps me in that process by displaying the HTML tags around the content.

Colorzilla

I’ve used this one quite a bit. Basically you get an colour picker in the bottom right corner of the broswer that you can use to pick any colour from a webpage. You then have a number of different options of what format to copy that colour (RGG or #code). Colorzilla’s webpage.

Google Toolbar

Google offer a great number of different services and solutions. The Google Toolbar helps me daily in the internet searches etc.

Tab Mix Plus

Hundreds of tabs open in the browser, wish you had more control over Tabs? Then Tab Mix Plus could be the answer to your wishes.

Smart Bookmarks Bar

Recommended for anyone who has a lot of bookmarks in their Bookmarks Toolbar Folder. Basically Smart Bookmarks Bar reduces the bookmarks down to a single icon for the site, and on mouse roll over expands the icon to revel the bookmark name. This just speeds up getting to you favourit pages and keeps your toolbar as small as possible.

StumbleUpon

I have ‘wasted’ many a creatative hours stumbling. The StumbleUpon toolbar gives you access to the Stumbleupon community service. Basic idea – setup a profile, pick some categorise that interest you and then click on the StumbleUpon button in the toolbar. This will open a random page based on the catorgories you picked and what other people have submitted to those catorgories. Like a page give it the thumbs up. You can follow different people so why not follow me on Stumble?