Designing a social site

Open Source Icons

　One of the great things about designing and developing in the age of the open social web is the open source community. While traditionally the realm of the developer, recently, designers are coming on board and releasing their work under open licenses like the GPL or one of the Creative Commons licenses.

　When designing a site or web application, one of the most time-consuming parts is the creation of artwork. In the same way that there are numerous resources for interface architecture in the way of templates and color scheme generators, there are also a number of graphic resources to help you when it comes to decking out your application. One great collection we found when building iKnow! was a family of icons called the Silk icon set.

　This set consists of over 1000 different icons for every type of icon you could think of for your web application. You can download the set here http://famfamfam.com/. They also offer a nice set of flags for when you want to localize your application. These icons are released under a Creative Commons 2.5 license and in the words of the author "This means you may use it for any purpose, and make any changes you like. All I ask is that you include a link back to this page in your credits (although a giant link on every page of your website really isn't needed, contact me to discuss specifics). " Now that's a pretty good deal. You might want to leave a donation as well to make yourself feel better for getting so much for nothing!

Open Flash Chart

　In the same way we took a look around the web for some nice graphing solutions to show study progress for our users. We already had quite a nice set that we were using that were built in Flex, but as you may or may not know, Flex SWF files tend to have a large footprint (300k) and light and easy is what we were looking to offer our users. Integrating the charts was fairly painless. If you work in PHP there are some scripts available to help you plug in your data fairly easily.

　A quick search revealed a great open source Flash graphing solution that is lightweight, visually customizable, and functionally extensible. You can find them here: Open Flash Chart http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart/. These are open source and, as above, always give attribution and feel free to make a donation if you feel that it's worth it. You can also contribute by submitting code or creating libraries.

　Well that's it for this week. Next week is the final week where we will be looking at what we have learned in developing a web application on the internet, focusing on presentation layer technologies like Ajax and effects libraries like Scriptaculous. Hope to see you then. As always, when checking out the English sites, make sure to use the iKnow! bookmarklet to help you along. If you need it, that is :)