Design Grid

The sophisticated image of minimalism has always been a popular style of design.

In webdesign a minimalist site is stripped naked of eye candy and fancy colours or effects, leaving the underlying structure exposed. The key to a beautiful minimalist site is a solid and structured layout, as well as focus on stylish and well designed typography.

These 50 examples showcase some of the best minimal site designs out there on the web.

Read full article over at Line25

There has been an increasing and sincere interest in typography on the web over the last few years. Most websites rely on text to convey their messages, so it’s not a surprise that text is treated with utmost care. In this article, we’ll look at some useful techniques and clever effects that use the power of style sheets and some features of the upcoming CSS Text Level 3 specification, which should give Web designers finer control over text.

Read the full article over at Smashing Magazine

“Mathematics is beautiful.”

This may sound absurd to people who wince at numbers and equations. But some of the most beautiful things in nature and our universe exhibit mathematical properties, from the smallest seashell to the biggest whirlpool galaxies. In fact, one of the greatest ancient philosophers, Aristotle, said: “The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.”

Because of its beautiful nature, mathematics has been a part of art and architectural design for ages. But it has not been exploited much for website design. This is probably because many of us regard mathematics as being antithetical to creativity. On the contrary, mathematics can be atool to produce creative designs. That said, you don’t have to rely on math for every design. The point is that you should regard it as your friend, not a foe. For illustrative purposes, we created a couple of web designs that present mathematical principles discussed in this article. We are also giving away a couple of PSDs that you can use right away in your next design.

Layouts featured in this post were created specifically for the purpose of this article. During the design process we made sure that all of the designs shown in this article are essentially mathematical in nature; that is, they exhibit order, symmetry and limitation.

Read the full article over at Smashing Magazine

I am a huge fan of the work of Dieter Rams, there will with no doubt be more posts soon outlining some of his specific works.

As head of design at Braun, the German consumer electronics manufacturer, Rams emerged as one of the most influential industrial designers of the late 20th century by defining an elegant, legible, yet rigorous visual language for its products.

Rams developed the 10 Design Principle of Good Design:

Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design makes a product understandable.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is long-lasting.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
Good design is environmentally friendly.
Good design is as little design as possible.

Copyright Dieter Rams, amended March 2003 and October 2009

I love beautiful things.

There’s very little in the world that takes my breath away quite like an object that was lovingly crafted, built with care and passion, and presented with the sort of pride that befits a marvelously well-made item.

That which is beautiful is increasingly difficult to come by in a world where a premium is placed on speed, and things are made to be disposable. We often sacrifice real craftsmanship at the altar of expediency. While we are still capable of recognizing the value of something that has been expertly constructed, we often choose the cheap and easy option instead.

Read full article at Design Informer

In this post I’ve selected some of the coolest industrial designs from Behance. I was looking for some inspiration in this field and decided to browse through Behance, and before I knew it I had hundreds of tabs opened.
Some designs I selected because of the visual aesthetics like the Fan Clock, but the majority due to the eco-friendly aspects. I hope you like it and if you have any links to great product designs let us know, let’s enrich this article with your comments.

Read the full article by Abduzeedo

It’s competition time!

We all love Moleskines right? Design Grid is giving you the opportunity to win your very own luscious red Moleskine notebook.

To enter this competition:

1. Follow @design_grid on twitter.

2. Post a tweet:

Win a red Moleskine over at @design_grid! http://tinyurl.com/dgmoleskine

That’s it!

OR

For you non-tweeters, pop a comment on here explaining why you should receive one of these beautiful Italian designed Moleskines and you will be entered into the draw. Please use a valid email address so that you can be contacted if you win!

Good luck! The winners will be announced on the site/via email (if applicable), and on twitter via @design_grid.

Decorate your desktop with images from the pages of National Geographic magazine.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/wallpaper/download

Swing over to Lifehacker to check out the simple command line scripts to download all of National Geographic’s 2008 and 2009 wallpapers.