I don’t really have the time to do freelance work anymore, but I did manage to whip this one up over the weekend for my friend Kim and her new business venture, Little Darlings, Inc.. I took on the project mostly because I wanted more experience setting up an e-commerce site using Network Solutions’ Pro E-Commerce platform. Kim’s a good friend, so I made an exception to my self-imposed “No. More. Freelance. Ever.” rule. Apologies to Joan Crawford.

While I was at it, I gave her site a little face lift and re-coded the entire thing with standards-based XHTML and CSS. A complete separation of presentation from structure – design from data. Here’s the “Before” shot. This project was a soup-to-nuts website redesign and e-commerce implementation completed in just 28 hours. Not too shabby.

I was just chatting with my friend Danni from ella j designs about design inspiration; where we look for it, and where we find it. We both agreed that playing with colors is certainly a great way to start! I just joined this community of like-minded color geeks called (appropriately enough) Colour Lovers. Below is a color palette that I designed called Windsor Cottage. It was inspired by ‘country chic’ interior design styles. If you join the community at colourlovers.com (for free) you can download the PhotoShop and Illustrator palettes right to your desktop and then load them straight into your application.

Update: An hour after I wrote this post, Skyblue2u, created this beautiful pattern based on my Windsor Cottage palette. Wow!