friday links!

TGIF...I'm pugsitting my mom's dog this weekend, starting last night, so that is um...interesting. :) Fun, I love him, but he's a handful! Tomorrow we're going hiking to the Walls of Jericho, so that should be fun. I'm a little nervous about keeping up with all the boys (7+ miles round trip!) but Nathan says I'll be okay..who knows. Speaking of Nathan, he's not feeling good today and I'm starting to feel a little bit of cold symptoms..hopefully we won't get anything nasty. *Crossing our fingers* for that.

Anyway - on with the links! I have lots of design-ish links mixed in today that may or may not be of interest to anyone..but hopefully you'll find at least something you like. :)

Designers Toolbox
Lots and lots of tools for designing and printing..like templates for all different envelopes, cd's, folders, mailers; special character codes; a lorem ipsum greeking generator; and a store with all kinds of forms and maps and whatnot. It's got a lot more than it looks like at first glance.

Creative Latitude
"...a worldwide community that unites various creative disciplines for collective promotion, education and ethical business practice." Lots of articles, news and editorial, and resources for those working in the creative fields.

Freelance Switch
It's an online community with a blog, a job board, and lots of resources for...ta daaaa...people making the switch to freelancing.

NO!SPEC
A campaign by and for designers against doing free spec work for potential clients. It's super interesting and also a pretty controversial topic..read it and see for yourself.

cardboardesign
Uh...I love this. It's anything and everything you might need for your house, except made out of cardboard. It's like playing with boxes for grownups!! (Lots of kid stuff, too, that looks totally fun...like forts and houses. Who doesn't want to play with this stuff?!)

Passive Aggressive Notes
Absolutely hilarious, and a little painful because you know we've all been on the receiving end of these at one point or another. Especially if you ever went to college and lived with several girls at one time.

The 50 Most Popular Web Design Blog Posts, Resources & Cheat Sheets of 2007
The title says it all..lots of good stuff!

green is the new blue
Yet another cute, crafty blog by a former art teacher/mom. Loves it..

Bookmark Bliss
"Weekly Business Bookmarks for Internet Entrepreneurs." It looks like this blog is pretty outdated, but it's still got a lot of useful resources in the archives.

Nifty Corners
Now I know how to make rounded corners on my divs with CSS! Everyone jump for joy on that one.

Feed Digest
This is a really awesome tool that you can use to publish your RSS feeds on a separate website. For example, if I had a website, I could take the RSS feed from this blog, run the address of my feed through the Feed Digest generator, and it would give me the code I need to put in a website and publish my most recent blog updates on a different page -- even though my blog is hosted on Blogger. That may be confusing, but..it's really very cool. I'm trying to grasp this whole "blog feed" thing and what I can do with it on websites I build.

creative bits
Fabulous geekery blog aimed at Apple users, but still interesting for PC users like myself. :)

AiBURN
Ai = Adobe Illustrator. This guy's website has tons of tutorials for cool effects and different ways of drawing in Illustrator.

"Onion eggs" for Easter on Craftster.org
I think I want to try this for my eggs this year! A few pages into this thread, she shows how she blew the eggs to make them hollow and made them into hanging ornaments. Beautiful!

Natural dye for Easter eggs and Dyeing eggs naturally on Martha Stewart
I just think this is cool. I think I'll try this too. Natural dyes make the most beautiful colors..especially when Martha Stewart does it for you.