Web Design Gone Grunge

Grunge Style In Modern Web Design

Most design trends come unexpectedly, evolve over time, become pointless and finally disappear from the design landscape. This holds particularly for web design, which is — just as every other creative field — prone for over-hyping and over-usage of trends. Being used excessively (sometimes properly, but mostly without any reasonable purpose), trends lose their ability to communicate information, express something unique or innovative and consequently lose their visual appeal.

Web 2.0 style is an excellent example for this evolution in design. In the last months of 2007 we’ve observed a clear example of design abuse, as glossy buttons, colorful reflections, 3D-effects, rounded corners and xx-large font sizes could be found almost everywhere (and we’ve presented some examples a year ago). However, currently we’ve been observing a new step in this evolution. Web 2.0 elements start to disappear; they become more subtle, more user-centric, more content-oriented and less loud. Is it a sign for coming changes?

What is the Grunge style?

As Web 2.0 style passes way, it’s time for something new. Few weeks ago we’ve written about the hand-drawing style in modern web-design. And as Web 2.0 style is all about glossy and shiny look, another option would be something rather crude, radical and provoking. Such as the grunge style — dirty look with irregular, nasty, sometimes even ugly and crooked visual elements. Will it establish itself as a trend? Probably not. However, it may be used once some creative and unconventional design approach is needed.

Below we’ve collected everything you would ever need for a perfect design in a grunge style — design examples, free fonts, icons, textures, brushes and even few tutorials.

Examples of Grunge Style

Grunge doesn’t necessarily stand for dirty. Grunge designs may have subtle dirty elements, providing the content with the dominant position it deserves. Let’s take a look at some examples how it might look like. All screenshots are linked and lead to the sites from which they have been taken.

Web 2.0 meets Grunge.

Notice the clear, rigid structure of the site blocks, supported by the grunge style.

Visually appealing design with grunge elements.

Not that visually appealing, however unique and unusual. Wood in use.

Grunge can be used not only in personal web-sites, but also in galleries and blogs.

Grungy Free Fonts

5 Excellent Free Grunge Fonts
A selection of free “grunge” or “eroded” typefaces.

Bleeding Cowboys Font
Free for personal use. PC / Mac OS X.

Grungy Icons

Stretched, torn and dirty: grunge icons at its best. They don’t necessarily fit to all designs, however it’s nice to have them ready to hand once you might need them.

RSS Grunge Icons
A set with Feed-Icons in blue, red and green. Sizes: 128 x 128, 64 x 64 and 32 x 32 px. In .png-format. One of the icons has an ornament embedded into it — you can see it in the right hand side of the screenshot.

Grungy Olive Icons
This set by designed by Dryicons fits not only to grungy cloth and weapons. 28 icons in the .png-format. 16 x 16, 24 x 24, 32 x 32, 48 x 48 and 128 x 128 px. Released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. You can do with them almost everything you might ever need to.

Grungy Asphalt Icons
Another set, in a different color.

Litho System
A bright and well-worn system replacement icon set. This collection contains 99 individual icons with large resources for Vista & Leopard.

Grungy Textures

The Best Textures Flickr Group offers excellent textures, among them also pretty colorful grunge textures. More than 900 images offered in a variety of sizes.

Torley Textures presents 11 sets with quite impressive images in the size 512×512 — available in the .png-format.

DeviantArt: Textures is probably one of the largest sources for textures. For instance you can find excellent textures by searching for rust, grunge or wood. The choice is enormous, so you better take a portion of patience with you: advertisements are annoying, but the search is worth it.

Example: Flaky Old Gold

W-Enter Textures
Three excellent collections of grungy textures. Preview (links on that page don’t work, use this link to download the textures)

Textures Download
A number of textures: walls, dirty, wood, graffiti, metal, plastic, stone, sand and cloth. Feel free to use these (mostly dirty) textures for any project, personal or professional. Click any thumbnail and use your mouse to “save image as…”

Garden Grunge Macro Photos
This is what the photographer Neil Creek explored in his garden under the macro-objective.

Urbandirty collects the dirty of cities. Virtually, of course, in form of textures. No, this is not beautiful, but real. The collection includes 291 photos in three sizes. Released under the Creative Commons License.

Free Grunge textures from TextureKing
A growing collection of grungy textures, available for free download. 319 textures.

10 Grunge, Rusty and Dirty Tileable Textures
This is a collection of ten 1000×1000 pixels seamless textures. These textures were created using Filter Forge plugin. And they are free.

Grunge Textures
Craig Jewells texture set contains 211 photos on Flickr. Different themes: rock, wood, rust, floors and more.

24 Free High-Res Textures
By Bittbox. There is also a set of Photoshop brushes made from these grungy textures. There are 12 brushes in the set, and they are all 2500px. Available for CS3, CS1, and in PNG formats.

Grunge Textures
Huge choice, (mostly) high quality. For instance in categories Asphalt, Brick, Concrete, Drains, Vents, & Grates, Graffiti & Vandalism, Metal, Mud, Clay & Earth, Old Machinery, Paper & Cardboard, Peeling Paint, Rusted Metal, Spills & Splatter, Stone, Trash & Garbage and Wood Textures. Hotlist displays the most popular textures.

Grungy Paper Textures

Scanned Scrapbook Papers Set 1 with 14 themes, Set 2 with 12 themes.

Set 2

Lovelamp presents 7 textures which look like wallpapers (real wallpapers, not desktop wallpapers).

PapierScans offers more paper scans; 12 images in high resolution.

4 Free High-Resolution Grungy Paper Textures
The full-size images are in the 2005×3000px resolution.

Grungy Brushes, Corners etc.

Jenn B’s Typographic Grunge Brushes
A random collection of grungy, decayed typographic brushes.

Grunge Brushes
Photoshop set.

50 Free Vector Grunge Corners
Formats: AI, EPS, SVG, PNG, Ill8. Source grunge is also included to let you play around with.

RisingSun Brushes
This set contains brushes of the size 1280×1024px.

Grunge Brushes
Photoshop set.

Dumpster Brushes
8 Photoshop brushes created from photos of old dumpsters. All brushes are over 800px.

Vector Ink & Paint Splatters
Vector images that would make a niece background touch or even a nice finishing touch to top off a grungy piece of art.

XiconTexturesX
15 icon with two large scratchy / grungy textures in .pat (Photoshop Patterns Format).

Grungy Tutorials

Grunge Photoshop Tutorials
An overview of grungy Adobe Photoshop tutorials.

Grungy Cover Design Tutorial
Learn how to create a nice grungy cover design with grungy textures.

(source)

Recycle Your Spam!

Are you sick of spam? (and no, not the lunch meat!)  Now is your chance to do something USEFUL with this most USELESS of communication! Simply email a piece of spam to this website and then watch as the latest “special offer” from a  Viagra dealer turns in to a beautiful work of art!  You can then, if you choose, make the resulting masterpiece you wallpaper. Beautiful and smooth flash environment, this site will at least give you something to do with spam, and spare time!

Cuil - The World’s Biggest Search Engine

Welcome to Cuil—the world’s biggest search engine. The Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too.

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Anna Patterson’s last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system.

She believes her latest invention is even more valuable - only this time it’s not for sale.

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

Now, it’s boasting time.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When they find a page with your keywords, they stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then they offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. They believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so they don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest they are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.

100+ Free E-Book Sites

July 16, 2008

EBOOK Central

100 Addictive Book sites

More than 100 (web 2.0) addictive book related sites where you can spend any minute of the rest of your life! Linking more than 1.000.000 free books and stories.

World Public Library (+500.000 books)

1 world public library
2 classic literature (10.000+)
3 technical e-books (5.000+)
4 sacred religious texts
5 gigantic much more

Father Gutenberg (+25.000 books)

6 gutenberg project
7 gutenberg top 100 download
8 gutenberg recent
9 gutenberg audio books
10 gutenberg2msreader

Internet Archive (+450.000 books)

11 internet archive texts
12 recent additions
13 american libs (200.000+)
14 canadian libs (125.000+)
15 universal library (30.000+)

When done reading above continue here (all free)

16 arxiv (+480.000)
17 IPL (20.000+)
18 Penns. books (16.000+)
19 alex catalogue (14.000+)
20 bartleby
21 bibliomania (2.000+)
22 free novels online
23 universal digital library
24 cornell library
25 wikibooks
26 scribd
27 many books
28 2020ok
29 Planet ebook
30 memoware
31 pagebypage
32 globusz
33 digital classics
34 online books 4 free
35 freeonlinebooks
36 great books & classics
37 free online novels
38 neverbound books
39 readeasily
40 eserver
41 alive and free
42 MS reader books
43 readprint

Fan Fiction / SF / Fantasy

44 elfwood
45 bean free library
46 fanfiction.net
47 fictionpress
48 fictionalley
49 subreality

Free short stories / Amateur

50 storiesville
51 bitbooks
52 short-stories
53 amateur-writing
54 tiny stories
55 channel49
56 flux stories
57 fables
58 topwritecorner
59 wovenwords
60 gushema
61 classic shorts
62 classic reader
63 american literature
64 indianchild
65 abc short stories
66 the short story
67 IPL short stories

Book Search

68 book.google
69 pdf search engine
70 addall
71 used books search

Innovative

72 read at work
73 which book
74 shortshortshort
75 abacci
76 ficlets

Banned / Obscure

77 wikipedia list
78 banned magazine
79 banned books
80 fahrenheit 451
81 forbidden library
82 banned books online

Make your own books

83 blurb
84 Lulu 100

85 The secret secret
86 5 renewable energy books
87 7 unique fitness books
88 5 bucks a day
89 our ultimate reality
90 easy bookbinding

BookShop Bestsellers

91 ereader bestsellers
92 amazon 100
93 lulu 100
94 reader2 Popular
95 powells bestsellers
96 abebooks
97 bn bestsellers

Magz, Reviews and Interviews

98 Reader Robot
99 cnn reviews
100 small spiral notebook
101 bookrags

Rankings, we love ‘em!

102 EW 1000
103 100 must read books
104 778 all time
105 wikipedia list of books
106 100 greatest novels
107 mindfuck books

Collect and Read Together

108 bookmooch
109 librarything
110 shelfari
111 bibliophil
112 chainreading
113 goodreads
114 bookglutton
115 freeonlinebooks.org

Feel free to add any that have been overlooked!

source

Drugs That Will Improve Memory, Concentration and Learning

Illustration by David Simonds

FOR thousands of years, people have sought substances that they hoped would boost their mental powers and their stamina. Leaves, roots and fruit have been chewed, brewed and smoked in a quest to expand the mind. That search continues today, with the difference only that the shamans work in pharmaceutical laboratories rather than forests. If asked why, the shamans reply that they are looking for drugs to treat the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, attention-deficit disorder, strokes, and the dementias associated with Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia—and that is the truth. But by creating compounds that benefit the sick, they are offering a mental boost to the healthy, too.

Such drugs are known as cognition enhancers. They work on the neural processes that underlie such mental activities as attention, perception, learning, memory, language, planning and decision-making, usually by altering the balance of the chemical neurotransmitters involved in these processes. This week a report* from the Academy of Medical Sciences, a British learned society, says that a large number of such brain-affecting drugs are likely to emerge over the next few decades. Sir Gabriel Horn, a researcher at Cambridge University who chaired the group that produced the report, reckons that scientists are working on more than 600 drugs for neurological disorders.

History suggests that most of these will fall by the regulatory wayside, but given their numbers, a fair few are likely to be approved. And although none of the companies working on cognition-enhancing drugs designed to treat illness intends to license them for wider use, that is what is likely to happen—at least going by the growing “off-label” use of existing drugs such as Ritalin (methylphenidate) and Provigil (modafinil) by people who want to pep themselves up.

Provigil and Ritalin really do enhance cognition in healthy people. Provigil, for example, adds the ability to remember an extra digit or so to an individual’s working memory (most people can hold seven random digits in their memory, but have difficulty with eight). It also improves people’s performance in tests of their ability to plan. Because of such positive effects on normal people, says the report, there is growing use of these drugs to stave off fatigue, help shift-workers, boost exam performance and aid recovery from the effects of long-distance flights.

Earlier this year, Nature, one of the world’s leading scientific journals, carried out an informal survey of its (mostly scientific) readers. One in five of the 1,400 people who responded said they had taken Ritalin, Provigil or beta blockers (drugs that can have an anti-anxiety effect) for non-medical reasons. They used them to stimulate focus, concentration or memory. Of that one in five, 62% had taken Ritalin and 44% Provigil. Most users had somehow obtained their drugs on prescription or else bought them over the internet.

Given results like this, and the number of drugs of this kind that look likely to emerge, many people, including the authors of the report, believe that the use of cognition-enhancing drugs is going to grow a lot.

There are a number of approaches to cognition enhancement. One of them, according to Trevor Robbins, a colleague of Sir Gabriel’s at Cambridge and another member of the working group, is to activate the brain’s “off” and “on” switches. Crudely put, the brain’s neural networks can be thought of as electrical circuits. Neurotransmitters throw the switches.

Thanks for the memory

One such neurotransmitter is glutamate. This throws switches to the “on” position in memory-forming circuits. Members of a newly discovered class of compounds, ampakines, boost the activity of glutamate and thus make it easier to form memories.

Cortex Pharmaceuticals, based in Irvine, California, is one firm that is developing ampakine drugs. One of its compounds, code-named CX717 to disguise its exact identity, is undergoing testing for Alzheimer’s disease in elderly patients. Early trials have already shown that the drug can make people more alert. Unlike caffeine, amphetamines and other stimulants, CX717 causes no increase in blood pressure or heart rate. Nor does it offer any “high”, so is unlikely to be addictive.

Paradoxically, another glutamate-booster, D-cycloserine, is being tested not to enhance memory, but to abolish it. The paradox is resolved because unlearning (or “extinction”, in neurological parlance) is a process similar in its details to learning.

By binding to certain glutamate receptors, D-cycloserine selectively enhances extinction, suppressing the effects of conditioned associations such as anxiety, addiction and phobias. According to Dr Robbins, experiments have shown that if a rat is given a cue that it previously associated with fear at the same time as it receives D-cycloserine, the bad memory can be eliminated. Not only may this help remove unpleasant memories, such as those involved in post-traumatic stress disorder, but it may also help to return the brains of addicts to their pre-addicted states. It may, for example, be able to remove the triggers that cause smoking.

Another approach to cognitive enhancement, says Dr Robbins, is through a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. Cholinergic neurons—the name for those that respond to this molecule—are involved in concentration, focus and high-order thought processes, as well as memory. It is the cholinergic system that degenerates in Alzheimer’s disease.

Interest has thus focused on drugs that inhibit the breakdown of acetylcholine, and also on nicotine, which works by mimicking its effect. Dr Robbins says that cholinergic drugs may offer minor cognitive benefits for things like alertness, and similar drugs could be “potentially useful in normal humans”.

Mind-expansion may soon, therefore, become big business. Even though the drugs have been developed to treat disease, it will be hard to prevent their use by the healthy. Nor, if they are without bad side-effects, is there much reason to. And if that is so, there may be a very positive side-effect on the profits of their makers.

* “Brain science, addiction and drugs”. The Academy of Medical Sciences, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH

Source