Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet… most designers probably have these few words embedded in their heads from seeing them over and over. This is dummy text, otherwise known as Lorem Ipsum. I’m not going to give you a history lesson, but it is helpful to know that it is in Latin — because most people just think that it’s gibberish. When you do a Google Search on ‘Lorem Ipsum’, the first hit is Lipsum.Com. Now, don’t get me wrong, Lipsum is a great resource for getting chunks of the text and learning more, but there are other websites out there that can do an even better job as well. So, here they are — alternatives to Lipsum.Com.

1. LoremIpsum.Net

LoremIpsum.Net is a small and simple static site that provides you with a decent sized passage without having to use a generator. The site also provides an all caps version of the text, as well as translations, and an explanation of what this famous passage means.

What Sets it Apart: Very Simple. No Generator Needed.

2. Lorem-Ipsum.Info

The main site of lorem-ipsum.info contains general info as well as translations. They also have a generator that looks pretty nice. It lets you choose Lorem Ipsum in a different language and the amount of words/paragraphs that you want to generate.

What Sets it Apart: Generates text in different languages.

3. Malevole Text Generator

This is a text generator that makes real paragraphs, not lorem ipsum! I don’t know what it does make, but it is readable English and provides pretty balanced text (graphically). You have the option to create 1 to 5 paragraphs.

What Sets it Apart: Creates dummy text that is in English.

4. Lorem Ipsum Generator

This Lorem Ipsum Generator creates HTML markup, as well as giving you dummy Text. Because of this it will help you perfect your web typography with added b, i and p tags.

What Sets it Apart: Adds various different tags

5. jHTML-Ipsum

This is a jQuery plugin that will create HTML elements using Lorem Ipsum. It dynamically creates the text, so you don’t have to end up removing all of the Lorem Ipsum later. Helps figure out how you will style your web type and CSS.

What Sets it Apart: ‘Make your own’ solution

6. WP Dummy Content

This is a WordPress plugin that generates dummy posts when developing and testing your WordPress theme! It also makes fake titles, and multiple length paragraphs. In one click you have an entire set of dummy content.

What Sets it Apart: You can remove all of the dummy data in one click.

7. Lorem Ipsum Generator – Chrome Extension

This is a Lorem Ipsum Generator for Chrome! It’s quite simple and minimalist in design. You can choose the amount of words and paragraphs you want to generate.

What Sets it Apart: Convenient and easy to use.

8. Greeking Machine

This ‘Greeking Machine’ generates dummy text in many different forms. Like the others, you can choose how much text you want to generate. There are also many languages or forms to choose from, so you aren’t just stuck with boring ‘Lorem Ipsum’.

What Sets it Apart: Cool Languages like, “The Matrix, and Hillbilly”

9. Lorem Ipsum 2.0

This generator is pretty cool! It’s ‘Community generated greeking’, which means that it takes text from community powered sites and presents it to you as dummy text for you to use. It gives you pretty random results, but at least it isn’t Lorem Ipsum!

What Sets it Apart: Fun to use and play around with.

10. Blind Text Generator

This Blind Text Generator creates dummy text in many different forms! You can choose Lorem Ipsum, Panagrams, The alphabet or other English passages. It’s quite easy to use and gives you a bunch of options!

What Sets it Apart: Great if you’re tried of using Lorem Ipsum for your dummy text.

11. Lorem Ipsum Generator

This is yet another Lorem Ipsum Generator. It gives you the option to get the text as a plain text file or HTML file, and to pick how long you want your passage.

What Sets it Apart: Many different options.

12. Sample WordPress Content

This is a .xml file which you can import into your WordPress blog! It creates dummy posts, comments, categories, tags, and pages as well as adds common styling elements such as blockquotes and lists.

What Sets it Apart: Saves lots of time!

13. HTML-Ipsum

HTML-Ipsum provides code snippets rather than just plain text. Of course it features Lorem Ipsum, but it really is a great resource when designing webpages. They even have a kitchen sink, which is the body of a webpage template with necessary code structure and dummy text!

What Sets it Apart: Very useful. One click copy to clipboard.

14. Lorem Ipsum Generator

This Lorem Ipsum Generator lets you pick out how many characters, words and sentences you want. It explains lorem ipsum and shows you translated passages.

What Sets it Apart: Lets you start with something other than ‘Lorem ipsum dolor…’

15. Dynamic Dummy Image Generator

The Dynamic Dummy Image Generator is basically what the title says – a dummy image maker! It’s quite useful when creating web layouts, even for creating dummy advertisements and such. This LifeHacker post explains it all quite well!

What Sets it Apart: One of a kind and very useful!

16. Lorem Ipsum Paragraph

This is a code snippet at CSS-Tricks. It’s a paragraph of Lorem Ipsum text. Simple. Just copy the paragraph and you’re on your way! No fuss included.

What Sets it Apart: Not a Generator!

17. Lorem Ipsum Post Generator

This is a Lorem Ipsum plugin for WordPress! This plugin can be a lifesaver when designing wordpress themes. It creates dummy posts and comments that help test your styling elements.

What Sets it Apart: Conveniently accessible!

18. The Dummy Content File

This is another .xml file that you can import into WordPress! It creates a lot of useful things like posts, pages, tags, categories and non-admin comments!

Something we hear over an over in the design world is that less is more. Even though using that statement has become a bit cliche, it is true – especially when it comes to logo design. Sometimes designers can get carried away with trying to incorporate too many complicated elements into a logo. It’s better to keep things simple and make use of clever negative space and typography. These types of marks are usually far more effective and memorable. To inspire you, here are 20 Examples of Simplistic but Effective Logo Design.

As a designer, anything that you can do to make more efficient use of your time will ultimately increase your productivity. When you’re starting a new design you probably do many of the same tasks over and over again to build the foundation of the site. I’d like to point out a number of resources that others have created to streamline the process and give you a starting point that can save you some time.

CSS frameworks are of course popular for this purpose, and there are a number of different frameworks available. However, outside of the typical framework choices there are some other great resources including skeleton templates that will simply give you a starting point for your design that you can style in any way you like.

Additionally, for WordPress designers/developers there are a few different blank themes that you can download. These themes will include the standard WordPress files and the coding to have a functional site (which can save you a few hours) but they’ll leave the styling up to you.

UPDATE: We recently launched a gallery site to showcase the best blog designs for your inspiration – Blog Design Heroes.

Blank HTML/CSS Templates

Dyanamic Drive

Dynamic Drive provides a large number of CSS layouts, including two column, three column, fixed width, liquid layouts, and CSS frames.

Code Sucks

Code Sucks offers over 90 free CSS layouts. There are over 50 fixed width layouts and over 40 faux column layouts.

Layout Gala

Layout Gala has 40 CSS layouts to choose from. You can download them individually or as a pack.

CSS Creator

CSS Creator is a little bit different from the others. Rather than providing blank templates, you will enter the details that you want and it will create the code for the layout.

Blank WordPress Themes

Whiteboard

Whiteboard is a free WordPress theme framework. It contains all the necessary tags and files, plus a little bit extra. Unfortunately there is no demo available on the site. I’ve downloaded it and it really does give you a blank theme with just the basics (see image below).

Starkers

Elliot Jay Stocks has created the Starkers theme with no formatting whatsoever, just the basic WordPress coding. Again, there is no demo available on the site, but you can refer the image below to see it in action.

Naked

Unlike Starkers, Naked does contain some very basic formatting. You may prefer it one way or another, so try them out and see what works best for you.

Sandbox

“The Sandbox is a powerful tool available for WordPress theme designers and developers. The Sandbox can be easily designed just with CSS, so beginners will feel comfortable not bothering with PHP.” You can see a live demo of Sandbox at plaintext.org.

Starter Theme

WPCandy has released the Starter Theme. It is not an out-of-the-box usable theme. From the words of the creator, “This isn’t a framework, and it’s not intended to work as a theme right out of the box. Rather, it’s a basic template that I can paste right into without worrying about typing out the loop and standard header.php information every time I create a theme.”

CSS Frameworks

YAML

Yet Another Multi-Column Layout (YAML) “is an (X)HTML/CSS framework for creating modern and flexible floated layouts. The structure is extremely versatile in its programming and absolutely accessible for end users.”

YUI Grids CSS

YUI Grids CSS from Yahoo! “offers four preset page widths, six preset templates, and the ability to stack and nest subdivided regions of two, three, or four columns. The 4kb file provides over 1000 page layout combinations.”

Blueprint

Google’s Blueprint “is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.”

There are two components of judging the quality of a logo:

1. A subjective one that depends on the style, mentality or the culture of the judger. This can’t be predicted…all is very vague; each person has his own preferences. It could happen (the laws of Murphy are respected) that a very bad logo which doesn’t match the rules of design to be greatly appreciated by a client… it accomplished his/her/their demands and of course, like it; what impresses them is the logo and not if it respects the rules of design or not. The subjectivity wins over the principles of design in the most cases.
2. An objective one means that it is based on the rules of design .The problem regarding the rules and the number of it is still open…here are the ones which are the most important.

1. A Quality Logo Should Be Easy Rendered On All Possible Media

All the rules should be logical or have a commonsense. In most of the cases the clients are initially asking for a logo to put on a website… some of them believe that it is less expensive; in these conditions the restrictions are almost zero, or the creativity of the designer; few moments after finishing the logo he remarked that it will be perfect for him to have the logo on a business card and that could be a disaster. A logo only for a website could have some shadows, highlights or gradients and these are hard/impossible to look well or barely the same in print.

It is possible that the client wants the logo printed/painted on a T-shirt in an aggressive campaign of promoting and here other particularities arise. In these circumstances it is a mark of professionalism to realize a logo that has the same features on multiple media.

2. Try To Avoid Shadows, Highlights Or Gradients

This piece of advice has a connection with the previous one and the reason is clear to not recommend using these even if the overall design seems to suffer.

3. A Logo Should Look Well In Black & White Format

An important feature of a quality logo is the capacity of it to look well in black and white. This is so important because in this format the concept is highlighted and not the design. In the judging of a logo the primordial fact is the concept… colors, fonts can suffer some small modifications along the time. Problem of this: the trends in color??? These are changing every year and maybe the client wants a fresh look: he can change the nuances keeping the project. It is easy to notice and to understand a logo being fine in black and white has no problems in changing the colors.

4. Few Colors And Few Fonts

The great majority of high quality or well-known logos are using no more than three colors and one-two fonts, which are known by most of all users.

This recommendation is the one which makes the connection between composition and the concept of the logo. A logo should say everything about the owner: who the owner is, his field of activity, the quality of services and so on; all these should be conveyed in few shapes and two-three words. You may ask yourself… why that?

We all know that a human being can’t retain everything that he saw along the time of his life; in these conditions a complicated logo with a lot of colors, multiple fonts which are hard to distinguish and many shapes surely won’t be memorized by someone even if the services or goods provided are very good. Also keep in mind that a normal person has no interest in memorizing logos.

5. KISS- Keep It Simple Stupid

This is the most important. Maybe you could ignore the all previous rules, but ignoring is synonym with poor quality. Look at the great showcase of logos on the web and you will see that this rule is respected by all. Here are some places to visit and see great works:

6. Make It Recognizable

Obviously, no one except maybe the logo designers want to study logos. When you create a new logo, always keep in mind this statement; we live too fast and have too many opportunities to easily bring back some graphics in our memory. I recommend you to do something that can’t be learned, there works only of our talent and creativity but this is sure to be important: try to make it recognizable as much as you can…. but how can you do that? Simply, here the difference between a very good designer and an inexperienced one is made. There is no piece of advice, and I am afraid I could do nothing for you and once again, here works only talent, creativity and experience.

I am really excited to hear your principles of judging a logo or how to bust you skills in creating masterpieces.

This set by IconDrawer, consists of 278 free flag icons representing countries and unions from all over the world. They are all in .png format and sized at: 16×16px, 24×24px, 32×32px and 48×48px.
License: Linkware License. (You can purchase a royalty-free license for $60)
Flags Icons by IconDrawer →

Country Flag Icons for iPhone Maps

The Country Flag Icons for the iPhone come in .png, .ico and .icns formats. Available sizes include: 256×256px, 128×128px, 64×64px, 48×48px, 32×32px and 16×16px. There are 230 country icons in the set.
License: Free for non-commercial use.
Country Flag Icons for iPhone Maps →

Ultimate Free Web Designer’s Icon Set + Flag Icons

This icon set, from Smashing Magazine, is a huge collection of icons that focus on web design: web application icons, user interface icons, e-commerce icons,blog icons, smiley icons, button icons, keyboard icons and, of course, national flags icons. There are a total of 94 flag icons in the set.
License: You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes.
Ultimate Free Web Designer’s Icon Set + Flag Icons →

famfamfam Flag Icons

There 247 icons in the “Flags” icon set from famfamfam, in .gif and .png formats and all representing most countries in the world as small pixel icons.
License: They are available to use freely for any purpose with no requirement for attribution.
famfamfam Flag Icons →

Free Country Flag Icons

There are 37 country flag icons in this set, they are rendered at 256×256px, 128×128px, 64×64px, 48×48px, 32×32px and 16×16px and come in .png, .ico and ,icns formats.
License: All of the icons contained in this set are free for non-commercial use. For commercial use or for extending the existing set please contact CustomIconDesign.com.
Free Country Flag Icons →

172 Final Flag Icons

There are 172 icons in this set, they render at 256×256px, 128×128px, 64×64px, 48×48px, 32×32px, 24×24px and 16×16 pixels and are .png, .ico and .icns formats.
License: Free for non-commercial use.
172 Final Flag Icons →

Flags of the World Icons

Flags of the World is a collection of 18pxx12px icons in .gif format.
License: Creative Commons licence: Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales. This means you are free to use them for both personal and commercial work, as long as you do not sell them.
Flags of the World Icons →

Phoca World Flag Icon

Phoca World Flag Icon set includes 252 icons in .gif and .png formats. They are sized at 16x12px and 22x14px.
License: You are free to use them for both personal and commercial work, as long as you do not sell them.
Phoca World Flag Icon →

Flags of all Countries – National Flag Icons

The National Flag Icons are a collection of 250 individual icons, in .png format and sized at 48x48px, 32x32px and 16x16px.
Flags of all Countries – National Flag Icons →

Flag Favicons

These basic (and slightly old-fashioned) world flag icons were created many years ago when the standard color and size formats recommended were 16 colors and 16X16 respectively. They come in .ico format and are sized at 16x16px.
License: These are free to download, use and modify in any way you like.
Flag Favicons →

Flag Icons Search Engine

flag.redpixart.com is a flag icon search engine that has high quaility icons of more than 190 countries. Each icon has serval file formats, such as PNG, GIF and JPG, and you can browse and download them for either Windows, Macintosh or Linux Systems.
License: All icons are free to use for non-commercial purposes, but part of copyright belongs to the original designer. If you want to use icons for any commercial purpose, you have to give credit to the individual artist.
Flag Icons Search Engine →

50 iPhone Styled Flag Buttons

License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
50 iPhone Styled Flag Buttons →

Flag Button Devkit from Bartelme Design

This is a Photoshop and Illustrator development kit for creating flag buttons. After downloading the kit, to create a new button, just duplicate a layer group and paste the new flag into the respective layer. It’s as simple as that.
Flag Button Devkit from Bartelme Design →

Flag Creator PSD

Mozilla’s new Firefox Home app for Apple mobiles is now available for download. You can get Firefox Home for the iPhone and iPod Touch in iTunes. It’s a free download.

As we mentioned when we first told you about it, the Firefox Home app is not Firefox on your iPhone. It’s a companion to Firefox.

It securely syncs your bookmarks, browsing history, user preferences and open tabs from the last time you used Firefox, and it brings them down to your iPhone or iPod Touch so you can access that stuff on your mobile. It works in tandem with Firefox Sync, Mozilla’s hosted, cloud-based service that keeps all of your installations of Firefox synced up with one another.

Browsing my Firefox bookmarks on the iPhone

It’s especially welcome now, as most of us use multiple screens every day — one or two computers, and at least one smartphone with a web browser. Firefox Sync tied our work machine and our home machine together by syncing all of our browser data in the cloud, and Firefox Home completes the circuit for iOS users, making all the hard-to-remember stuff — your myriad “starred” favorites and bookmarked URLs — available in your pocket.

Needless to say, this app is only going to be useful to you if you’re a Firefox user with an iPhone or iPod Touch. Android users have had Mozilla’s mobile version of Firefox available on their phones since April.

You also need to have Firefox Sync set up to use it. If you don’t have an account, you can sign up when you install the app on your phone. You will also need the Sync add-on for Firefox (newer versions of Firefox will ship with Sync pre-installed). As Charlie Sorrel notes in his Gadget Lab post, this is a bit more work than syncing your desktop Safari data to your iPhone, which just involves checking a box in iTunes (and you can keep Safari and Firefox in sync — and by extension, the iPhone — using Xmarks, but only on the Mac). Opera’s mobile browsers have easy syncing as well. But unlike those choices, this isn’t a new browser or a half-way-there solution, it’s a direct line to the same browser data that’s on your desktops and laptops.

Once the app is set up, you can search your history, access your Firefox bookmarks and see the tabs you most recently had open when you walked away from your computer. All of this info is accessible from within Firefox Home’s search bar, which is sort of a miniature version of the “Awesome Bar” in Firefox. It will search both page titles and URL strings, and it will auto-suggest results as you type.

Searches use the Awesome Bar approach

Just like using the Awesome Bar in Firefox, everything shows up in a single list as you type, and a little icon shows up next to each item to tell you what sort of result it is — a bookmark, a piece of history, an open tab.

Click on an item and the page opens inside an in-app browser. It’s your standard iOS WebKit browser in a pretty blue wrapper, and it performs about the same as the built-in browser inside other popular apps like Twitter.

So Firefox Home is not Firefox on your iPhone, which is something we’re not ever likely to see. Mozilla’s brass has made it clear that Apple’s app policies are too restrictive for Firefox, and the company doesn’t want to dumb the browser down for the iPhone. For people who use Firefox as their primary browser everywhere else, this app is the next best thing.

You can read Mozilla’s announcement for more links, troubleshooting tips, and feedback channels.

See Also:

• Firefox Home App Syncs Firefox Faves to Your iPhone
• Early Version of Firefox Lands on Android Phones
• First Look: Firefox 4 Preview Delivers Speed, Revamped Interface

As we do business every day, we always wonder how to get more of it. More money, more clients, more dollars per hour while still being “competitive.” Sometimes it’s hard to make any of those things happen singly, especially all at the same time. A great way to increase your overall revenue (e.g. money in your pocket) is to work your current projects for extra work. It has all the benefits of repeat business with none of the extra work of getting back into contact. Work these top five tips for how to close the upsell and make some extra moolah.

1. If you don’t ask for it, you’ll never get it

Ask and ye shall receive: the first step to getting an up sale is to ask for it. If you don’t ever bring up the subject of doing additional work, expanding a project to truly meet a client’s needs, they definitely won’t bring it up unless they are trying to squeeze it out of you for what they’ve already.

There is a caveat — you have to sneak it in. Remember little things your client says about a wish, a dream or a goal for their online marketing, and then use them as ammo. If you are truly listening to what they are saying, they’ll spill their guts about things they wish they had. If you can, mention it right there. “You know, we can add that into your project for just 2 additional hours of labor, it ends up being discounted because you’re already doing business.” If your client really wants it and the price is right, they’ll pick up on it and probably approve the extra labor.

2. Don’t force it — you have to make them want it

If your client isn’t necessarily receptive to asking about additional labor, make them want the addition. Prove how it extends the capabilities of their project deliverable by making their life less complicated, or easier for them to make more money from their website. Convince them of that, and bingo, the up sale is complete and closed.

3. Always provide a “Good,” “Better,” and “Best” when giving quotes, or re-examining work

When creating quotes, or doing anything where you have an option to provide “more service,” provide a Good, Better and Best option. The good option should always be exactly what the client asked for, the better option should provide additional functionality and be approximately 25% higher in both labor and expense, and the best option should be a full-blown option giving your client things they never even realized they wanted, and can be 50% or more in price. The goal with your bigger options is to keep them in line with your client’s goals, and make them sound luxurious and valuable. “I know you said the following is exactly what you wanted, but I wanted to make sure you had some options that could make your life simpler, reduce upkeep costs and give you a better, more functional website for your customers to interact with.”

4. Develop the relationship and make them open to suggestions and upgrades, even midway through the project

As you can see, the key to working the up sale is to already be working with the client. You can’t up sell somebody who isn’t currently doing business with you. Once you close the initial sale and begin the consultation to make their website, pepper options in and see how many your client will bite. Always providing options will also make repeat business easier to get.

5. Never leave your client vague about what the future options are

Your client is happy, you’re almost done with the project, now what? You should always take the opportunity to let your client know about add-ons you can for their website, new options they can take and new technologies they can implement. Ask probing questions to find out what your customer’s future goals are, and see what they consider their next step to be in their overall marketing strategy. See how you can involve yourself, and up sell yourself into the next phase of their marketing plan.

Take your web content global

Content is the most important part of any website. The old saying ‘content is king’ still rings true. There are three main factors you need to consider with regards to your content:

It must be relevant and useful to your target audience. By ensuring that your content is well-written and relevant, you will not only be maintaining quality, but you will also ensure that it can be more effectively translated into other languages.

You need to make sure it is as universally understandable as possible. With 79% of web users not speaking English as their native language, at some point you are going to have to get your content translated if you want your websites to be truly accessible across different cultures. The best way of achieving this is to use a professional translator, but if your budget is tight, you may also consider an online machine translation tool, like Google Translate.

It should be appropriate across many cultures. This applies especially to visual content – you should be aware that some images may be perfectly acceptable in western cultures, but could be offensive in other parts of the world. For example, pictures of scantily-clad models may cause offence in some countries. Even a simple image of someone relaxing with their feet up, which is perfectly OK in most parts of the world, may cause offence in Thailand, where it is unacceptable to show the soles of the feet.

Keywords in a Foreign Language

Even if you decide to use an online translation service to translate the bulk of your website’s content, you should not rely on this method of translation for your keywords. Nor should you use direct dictionary translations. Your keywords are too important to entrust them to these methods of translation – they are just not accurate enough.

To ensure your search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are successful in other languages, you need to work with a professional translator to develop a good list of foreign-language keywords. This will save you a great deal of time and money in the long run, because you can be sure that you are targeting the keywords that people are using to search for your product in any market – there’s no point in building a great website if no one can find it.

CSS spans language barriers

Make sure to use CSS as your design tool when building your website, because by doing so, you are keeping the content separate from the design. This makes it far easier to develop versions of your website in different languages – it’s a simple matter of substituting the different translated text into your pre-existing CSS templates. You should also use Unicode UTF-8 character encoding because it is compatible with the widest range of language scripts.

Planning the layout for a global design

You can improve the cross-cultural accessibility of your website by carefully considering its design and layout. One of the main issues here is the fact that not all languages are read from left-to-right. This can impact on the usability of side navigation and sidebar content. For example, a left-hand navigation structure may not be very convenient for someone who reads from right-to-left.

The same principle applies to the theory that the eye is naturally drawn to the top-left area of a web page. For an Arabic reader, it may be the top-right. You can avoid usability issues with your navigation structure by employing a horizontal top navigation, which will be more universally usable.

Choosing colours for a cross-cultural audience

Colour is a very important part of web design, as it can affect the way your websites are perceived by different cultures. Most designers are aware of colour theory, which tells us that different colours can have different psychological effects on the people viewing them, and that the psychological impact of colour is strongly influenced by cultural factors. Put simply, colours mean different things to different people depending on their cultural viewpoint.

For example, in Islamic countries green usually has an important religious significance, whereas in Western cultures it may be more suggestive of environmental issues. In Korea, a name written in red indicates that the person is dead. You should examine your use of colour carefully to ensure you don’t make any cultural faux pas.

Put simply, cross-cultural web design is about being aware of the possible pitfalls highlighted here, and ensuring your websites are accessible to as many cultures as possible, a sensible move to take considering the increased internationalisation of the internet.