SotW: Open Designs
April 15th, 2008 by Matt
The first site of the week, what an honor! I’ll start of simple, not getting too far over my head, by bestowing this honor on Open Designs.org. The purpose of the site:
The Open Design Community (TODC) is a group of Open Source Website Designers providing hundreds of XHTML and CSS based free web design templates available for download.
The main page goes on to say that “The main goal of TODC is helping to make the internet a prettier place.” When the dust settles, TODC accomplishes much more than that.
The site started a little over a year ago, but the community has been around much much longer. A core group of users date back over five years to a very different, but similarly oriented site. After much growth (and several domain switches), the site is now run completely by the community. The site itself is run by a hybrid mix of WordPress and Vanilla. The admins moderate the designs coming in and the moderators keep the forum in check. A little more on both of those aspects…
The Designs
The designs that are submitted to Open Designs are created by a range of experience in designers, from first timers to professionals who are making a living off of their work.
Likewise, the quality of the templates fluctuates between good to extremely professional.
Some of the most notorious designers include Andreas Viklund, Pat Heard (who also created the design for Open Designs), James Koster and Christopher. While most designers aren’t up to par with the work that these design gurus are submitting, there is a standard for the quality of work which is upheld through both the approval of the design (all of the designs must contain valid XHTML mark-up and not use tables except for tabular data) and…
The Forum
The forum is probably the best thing a first time designer could come across. It is a wealth of information for a designer at any level, but for a first time the advice offered by experienced users can be invaluable. I myself started learning how to manipulate styles by downloading a design and editing it with help from those in the forum.
The comments on the threads are quality and some are truly intellectual (making up for the threads about…well…cookies?). If I had to give the forum a rating, it would be 5/5. Has anyone happened to notice I’m a moderator there yet?
In Conclusion
Whether you’re looking for a new template for your site, help on developing your design or a way to give back to the community, Open Designs is the site for you. The level of quality is directly related to the commitment put in by its users, who are a community to be reckoned with. Overall, a great site and a real resource for the Open Source Community.
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One Response to “SotW: Open Designs”
And now it is faster than ever.
April 19th, 2008 at 11:14 amLeave a Reply