I came across this article yesterday about hot female designers and was inspired by the amazing work being produced by these women at the moment. Where I work there are mostly female designers, so this comes as no surprise to me, but I guess that’s because I feel we have good organisation skills for managing our projects as well as designing and building sites that impress our clients. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy working with guys as well and think a balance of both allows us to pool our strengths, but they tend to get more excited about the coding and back-end side of the projects more than I do. I like to work out tricky solutions or try out new code when I get the chance, but at the end of the day for me it’s really about the designs that I can produce.

Of the article that I read, my favourite portfolios belonged to:

• Honey Design – not only is her work amazing but I love how she uses nice big images to show screenshots of her work.
• Twiggle Graphics – clean fresh website which reflects her beautiful website designs. Her logo is also really cute.

I’ve been hearing about this website for a few months now, but finally been able to login and create an account today to find out more about what makes it so exciting.

Aviary is a suite of powerful creative applications that you can use right in your web browser. It’s also a community of friendly artists to share and collaborate with. The current tools available are:

• Phoenix – an image editor that has layers, masks, effects, undo history, and all that other good stuff.
• Toucan – a color swatches and palettes tool will help you find colors you didn’t even know exist.
• Peacock – it does so many wonderful and amazing things, that they decided to call it their visual laboratory.

What intigued me most was how the website came to life and why they decided to offer such fabulous tools online and for free! I had a little poke around their website and found some interesting background info:

• What is Aviary’s mission?
  Make the world’s creation accessible.
• Why did you choose the name Aviary?
  Our motto was “Creation on the fly” and the bird metaphor seemed the best choice out of all the options available to us. We didn’t want to name our software after bugs (for obvious reasons).
• Why did you start Aviary?
  We have our roots in the grassroots hobbyists community. We are artists ourselves and know that there are so many other potential creators out there like us… all they need are accessible tools.

I haven’t had a chance to play around with the software for more than a few minutes so far, but it looks like a fantastic resource and there are also some great tutorials on the site to help get you started with ideas on how to use the full capabilites of the tools. Let me know if you have had a chance to play around with Aviary and share your creations!

I recently discovered a wonderful website called Etsy – a place to buy and sell all things handmade. Not only is the site itself lovely in design, but the collection of handmade craft is amazing. Eveything I have come across seems to be of very high quality, with great prices and many locally made. There are some great tools on the site for searching for items, such as “Shop Local” where you can enter your country, state or city to hone in on artisans nearby. There is also a fantastic community section which has a very village-y feel to it and the Alchemy section where members can post up requests for custom items that they would like made.

I’ve spent hours browsing through the site, adding things to my “imaginary wishlist” and bookmarking them on Del.icio.us when I remember, but here are a few of my favourites at the moment (click on image to go to item). Post your comments below to let me know what other gems you find on Etsy’s site!

Purple and Blue Flower Bag

Turtle Earrings

Sleepwalk print

I heart cupcakes

Mini Notebook Cover

Watermelon painting