We Love Brisbane – Website Design

For this Sites of the Week we have selected some great sites such as Touristeye and Jackson & Kent. Also we’re featuring the nice service called Scan, and much, much more! As usual we would love to hear from you, keep sending your suggestions to us and we will be more than happy to feature your site.

You can keep sending me your suggestions via Twitter twitter.com/FabianoMe or twitter.com/abduzeedo, and include #abdz_sites in the message.

DESIGN / CSS

Lemon & Mint – lemon-and-mint.com

Lemon & Mint – Online Concept Store: innovative fashion accessories, beauty and lifestyle products – combining originality and imaginative design with function and understated style…

Corona Radiata – coronaradiata.com

Illustration, animation and design studio based in Mexico City.

APP / WEB APP / SERVICE

Motache – motache.com

The easiest and fastest way for your business to GoMobile.

Chill – chill.com

Watch video from the people you care about.

COMMUNITY / PORTAL / STORE

Talking Donkey – talkingdonkeyshop.com

Talking Donkey offers high quality Christian t-shirts with unique and eye-popping designs. Shop our men and women collections online.

Goodhood – goodhoodstore.com

Started as a self initiated, self funded project to curate some of the finest clothing collections and objects from around the world, it’s initial purpose was to support like minded brands from around the world who shared our ideas of independence, exclusivity and quality.

STUDIO / PORTFOLIO / BLOG

Duct Tape & Glitter – ducttapeandglitter.com

Duct Tape & Glitter | Design & Creative.

Bartelme – bartelme.at

We are a small design agency located in Graz, Austria. We create beautiful, custom user interfaces and icons for iOS and Mac.

THEMES

Sentient – woothemes.com

Sentient is a smart, innovative WooCommerce theme. Products are cleverly aligned using jQuery masonry allowing you to cleanly showcase a great number of products on your shop pages without any wasted space. Sentient has also been fully optimised for use on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.

Whitelight – woothemes.net/

Whitelight was designed by Chris Rowe, with the aims to set a new standard on our business theme line-up. It features a clean and responsive design, customized modular homepage, portfolio functionality that we all love and integrated WooCommerce goodness (child theme) for your e-commerce needs.

The book suggestion of this week is the next one in my list and I will start reading it this weekend. It’s called Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. I have been waiting to read this book for a while. I got it a few weeks ago as a present and now it’s the right time. Below I will list some info about the book.

“Reduce, reuse, recycle” urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. As William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue in their provocative, visionary book, however, this approach perpetuates a one-way, “cradle to grave” manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world, they ask.

In fact, why not take nature itself as our model? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we do not consider its abundance wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective; hence, “waste equals food” is the first principle the book sets forth. Products might be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new-either as “biological nutrients” that safely re-enter the environment or as “technical nutrients” that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles, without being “downcycled” into low-grade uses (as most “recyclables” now are).

Elaborating their principles from experience (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, the authors make an exciting and viable case for change.

TED Talk

Editorial Review from Publishers Weekly

Environmentalists are normally the last people to be called shortsighted, yet that’s essentially what architect McDonough and chemist Braungart contend in this clarion call for a new kind of ecological consciousness. The authors are partners in an industrial design firm that devises environmentally sound buildings, equipment and products. They argue that conventional, expensive eco-efficiency measures things like recycling or emissions reduction are inadequate for protecting the long-term health of the planet. Our industrial products are simply not designed with environmental safety in mind; there’s no way to reclaim the natural resources they use or fully prevent ecosystem damage, and mitigating the damage is at best a stop-gap measure. What the authors propose in this clear, accessible manifesto is a new approach they’ve dubbed “eco-effectiveness”: designing from the ground up for both eco-safety and cost efficiency. They cite examples from their own work, like rooftops covered with soil and plants that serve as natural insulation; nontoxic dyes and fabrics; their current overhaul of Ford’s legendary River Rouge factory; and the book itself, which will be printed on a synthetic “paper” that doesn’t use trees. Because profitability is a requirement of the designs, the thinking goes, they appeal to business owners and obviate the need for regulatory apparatus. These shimmery visions can sound too good to be true, and the book is sometimes frustratingly short on specifics, particularly when it comes to questions of public policy and the political interests that might oppose widespread implementation of these designs. Still, the authors’ original concepts are an inspiring reminder that humans are capable of much more elegant environmental solutions than the ones we’ve settled for in the last half-century.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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