Good friend Justin Talbott just launched a new site QuestionSuggestions.com. Small voyages into the collective psyche of humans who ask google questions. Hilarious suggestions made by google’s search engine! One thing that’s super cool is the keyboard controls Justin included. Simply hitting the J or K key moves you through each post, a feature I wish more sites used. Check it out!

In an effort to bridge the cultural and religious misunderstandings within Australia, artist/surfer Phillip George has designed 30 surfboards with beautiful Islamic motifs. These boards were inspired by Phillip’s trips to the Middle East and the 2005 Cranulla Race Riots that targeted Lebanese Australians. The surfboards are currently on display at the Casula Powerhouse in Western Sydney. For more info check out the BBC article.

One of my favorite sites for finding inspirational web designs is Website Design Awards. WDA recently replaced their outdated full Flash site with a cleaner, more organized XHTML/CSS layout. The new design is great because its simple and puts all of the focus on featured sites. Another great choice was to separate CSS and Flash designs into two categories. Go take a look!

Any serious designer uses the Lorem Ipsum dummy text on a regular basis. While recently building a website that required me to make frequent text submissions, I came across this super handy Lorem Ipsum Widget for Macs. Now, instead of going to the Lorem Ipsum website to copy and paste, I simply go to my Dashboard and use the copy to clipboard button right on the widget. Go get it. It’s a major time saver!

Wanna build a website! Here’s a list of software that I find absolutely essential to building a great site.

TextMate – If you wanna design a great site then you need to get down to the nitty gritty, and that means hand coding everything. After trying a slew of freeware and non-freeware editors I’ve finally landed on TextMate. It’s incredibly lightweight, formats code nicely, and makes managing several projects a breeze. Unfortunately TextMate is only for Macs so if you’re on a PC your out of luck :( Head over to Smashing Magazine and read their article on 25 Useful WYSIWYG Editors Reviewed. You may find a good alternative.

Photoshop – Although incredibly expensive, Photoshop is a must have if you want the fancy graphics to go along with your badass code. There are definitely other freeware options out there but Photoshop has a great set of tools specific for web design and optimizing graphics.

Firefox – Firefox is a web designers best friend. Not only does it display HTML and CSS correctly, there are a wide range of plugins that make the process of debugging a hell of a lot easier, number one on my list being Firebug. By allowing you to edit styles and HTML right within the browser, it allows you to quickly make tweaks to reach the desired effect. It really is WYSIWYG. In addition to Firebug, FireFTP is an amazing FTP client perfect for quickly uploading files as you work. If your using version control and need to edit directly through FTP you may want to try something like Cyberduck along with TextMate. Lou Zell has a great article on how to set that up.

* If you’re on a Mac testing your site on Internet Explorer can be a bit of a pain. Services like Browsershots can be useful, but painfully slow. If you want to immediately check cross browser compatibility I would recommend running a virtual desktop with VMware or Parallels. These are particularly useful because you can have Windows running in a separate window allowing you to quickly check all the nightmares IE has in store for you.

What’s in your toolbox? Hit up the comment section!

This is promising news for web designers out there. It’s always frustrating when you build a site and find yourself spending a significant amount of time getting it to display right in IE. I think my biggest pet peeve with IE is its lack of png support. Designing would be a lot less annoying if you didn’t have to worry about AlphaImageLoaders and conditional styles.

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