Back in July, Jacob from Mutiny.in contacted me, asking if I would be interested in redesigning Mutiny.in. Being a fan of the site, and in a generous mood, I decided to take on the project. The initial plan was to do a complete overhaul, including re-branding the site, and launching it on August 15th, coinciding with India’s 60th Independence day. But, due to the time constraint, decision was made to keep the old identity, and move on with a new site design.

The point man for the project at Mutiny was Woke, Mutiny’s editorial head, and his creative input was a tremendous help in shaping the final design. I tried to follow Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain’s process for tracking the stages of design; and you can have a look at it here: Mutiny.in Project

As for the final site, it seems a little off from the final mark up provided, but their technical team is working on resolving some of the issues. Overall, they got the site up on August 15th, Jacob and team are happy with the new design, and favorable but some mixed reactions from their readers.

After releasing the India 60 wallpaper, which was created for India’s 60th Independence day, I started putting together a web page based on the wallpaper. The intention here was to make it easier to get to the original photographs used in the wallpaper, and this effort resulted in a page matching the wallpaper, with each image linking to the original photograph.

But, while I was creating the wallpaper page, I started to wonder what a web site based on the design of the wallpaper would be like. So, I started putting together a new site, and to keep things simple I decided to make it a site with links related to Indian news, videos, images, and podcasts. This effort culminated in India60.com.

Now, I am probably breaking quiet a few norms with this design, and some of you w ho stick to the preachings of the design gods, might cringe at it. One of the obvious ones being horizontal scroll. There is a little used mouse feature which is perfect for this site and to get around the horizontal scroll issue. If you keep the scroll wheel pressed as you move the mouse around in the browser window, you can move the page in any direction, kind of like the hand tool in Photoshop.

India 60 is still an experiment in progress, and in a future post I will try and share some of the technical aspects of the site. Check it out, and do share your thoughts.

After coming across Greg Storey’s collection of iPhone wallpapers; initially I started going through some of my photographs to put together an iPhone wallpaper collection. But then I got distracted with other projects, and forgot about the iPhone wallpapers, until I came across Adam Polselli’s wallpapers.

This time around I decided to take the Blog Index framework, an old dark theme for Counterjumper, and put the two together to create a new iPhone Wallpapers page on Counterjumper to showcase my iPhone wallpapers, as well as wallpapers by others.

If you would like your iPhone wallpapers to be included on this site, either add it to the iPhone Wallpapers Group on flickr or send me a link to your Wallpapers.

College Scholarships.org has a new web design contest for US college students and the winner will receive a $5000 web design scholarship, provided by The Daniel Kovach Scholarship Foundation. Those interested will have to come up with a WordPress Theme for College Scholarships.org’s new website New Scholarships.org. So the winner not only gets the $5000, but their new design will be used on New Scholarships.org.

Requirements

• U.S. citizen (Can’t people be more open when doing a web contest!!)
• Currently attending full-time in post-secondary education; and
• If you win, you must be willing to allow us to list your name, picture, and website on this page.

When it comes to CSS, there are a lot of standard things that a developer has to do before laying out the site, like: typography, resets, grid, printing, and so on. Blueprint is a new open CSS framework, developed by Olav Bjørkøy, providing a base to build sites on. Here are some of the key features of Blueprint:

• A perfected reset
• Base typography
• A customizable grid
• Print stylesheet

Blueprint is an unknown, untested and unused framework from an unknown guy launched from a highly irregular blog. This should make it quite clear that the craving for a proper designers framework almost couldn’t be greater.
-Olav Bjørkøy