When I'm designing a new website for a client, half the time they have their perfect idea in mind and the other half want me to come up with something new and fresh and completely unique. It's always a crapshoot. And while I usually get the structure easily, the colors have been known to cause aggravation.

And that's when I turn to the Color Combo Library, plop the client in front of the computer screen and ask them what they like. They can choose to look through the library, narrow it down to a specific color (which then shows them all the complementary colors) or plug in the URL of a website they love to identify the color scheme. It works every time.

Smashing Magazine is a great resource for designers of all types, but the post I bookmarked was in May of 2007 titled, "70 Expert Ideas for Better CSS Coding". Some of the information is a no-brainer (but I'm big on following CSS standards and organizing… I won't let anyone else work in my CSS unless they do it the way I do): organize, use borders to identify how the setup is working, pay attention to closing all tags, etc. But some of it still surprises me, like working with EMs.

It's definitely a link I'm glad to have in my repertoire, especially when I run into a wonky problem I can't seem to solve.

I have probably 20 links for different ways of displaying photo galleries on websites… Flash, javascript, plain CSS, etc., and one of my recent favorites is Cabel's Fancy Zoom. Using Javascript and CSS he's created a beautifully styled photo gallery that's incredibly easy to execute.

I'm not a big fan of Flash—bad SEO, doesn't work on old browsers, etc.—so a Flash-looking javascript gallery is exactly what I'd bookmark.

I love my RSS reader. I have hundreds of blogs and news sites I regularly follow, so having an excellent RSS reader is crucial. Currently I use NetNewsWire, but I've been thinking of switching to Acrylic's Times. They have a completely new way of showing you RSS. Instead of an email-type box, it's similar to a browser window, and when you click a link, the top pages forward and you see the story behind it.

Right now I'm using it on their 15 day free trial (it's $30 after that), and so far, I love it.

In general, a list apart rocks. Once I started doing web design full time, a list apart became an invaluable resource.

In 2004 they ran an article about creating onion-skinned drop shadows using CSS, and it was such a great idea, I made a bookmark. But a list apart has a ton of excellent, well-written articles, so I have the homepage bookmarked as well.