The PHP community is big. A lot of best practices have been learned over the years. The bigger the codebase, the harder it is to keep track of all the working parts and their relationship to one another. And you can add to that the limitations imposed by working in an antiquated version of PHP, 5.2. It’s good to always look beyond the walled garden of WordPress to look for answers. With autoloading and a plugin container we are one step closer to better code. In this article Nico Amarilla will explore an alternative way of developing WordPress plugins, using the lessons learned from the greater PHP community, the world outside WordPress.
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Have usability conventions and the web’s universality steered us away from proper art direction? Have we forgotten about art direction altogether? Marko Dugonjić believes so. As designers, we can achieve much more with type, and with just a little more thought and creativity, we can finally start to take full advantage of the type systems available. Let’s look at ways we can push typographic design on the web further, beyond the status quo of today.
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There is a gap between pure CSS layout and custom design elements created in software such as Photoshop or Illustrator. Sophisticated SVG filters give us more independence from third-party design tools and bridge this gap by enabling us to create visual styles directly in the browser.Wouldn’t it be great if we could style letters the same way we usually style text with CSS? In this article Dirk Weber will show you how SVG filters help you to create playful, decorative web typography.
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In this article, Colleen Roller will show us that defaults are powerful because they provide a way for users to passively decide, thereby easing the difficulty and effort associated with decision-making. Also, that providing a default option is not always appropriate. Sometimes, it’s better for users to make an explicit choice — especially when they are more likely to follow through with a decision and be more committed to taking action on it. It’s imperative to understand that the design matters. UX design professionals have a responsibility to understand how design itself influences — and sometimes even drives — user perception and behavior and, therefore, decision outcomes. The decisions we make as designers matter.
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Jeremy Girard loves being a web designer and he’s incredibly thankful that he decided to join this industry many years ago. Still, there have been a number of times during his career when his passion has waned. This scenario is called burnout. Do you find passion for your work an important part of your career? If so, what have you found to be helpful in keeping that passion for your job intact? In this article, Jeremy shares his moments of burnout in his career and what you can do to avoid them.
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Depending on the website’s architecture, you could store the metadata in a category, a tag, a custom taxonomy or a custom field. In this article Carlo Daniele will show you how to let your website’s subscribers decide when they want notifications, and linked to a particular location. Today you are going to add several functionalities to WordPress’ core, and the CMS allows you to declare our own custom functions in the main file of a plugin.
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How does your website look on the Windows Phone platform? Approximately 3% of your mobile users will be using a Windows Phone, so you may need to make sure that your site renders properly. If you’re a developer without a Windows Phone device, you might have to get a little creative to ensure that your websites are being rendered properly. In this article Daniel Herken will point out a few different tools and techniques which can help test websites for Windows Phone even if you don’t have the real device handy or if you are not developing on Windows.
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Are you designing at “Retina” resolution in Photoshop? In this article, Murdoch Carpenter will walk you through the problems he faced in creating Retina mockups to be displayed on a tablet device. He will then explain a way to work that is easier and gives you better performance. This is about Murdoch’s experience with Photoshop, but it could be applied to Illustrator and other software. Throughout this article, he will use the @2x and @3x notation. These represent the Retina buckets for iOS. A great example is the app’s icons.
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Tools are an extension of our hands, and as such, they should be versatile, quick and intuitive. A lot has changed between the print era of offset presses and the digital era of cross-platform screens. Developers have attempted to adapt our tools, but Sketch is perhaps the most successful app in this regard. In this article, Patrick Keenan will not only show you a new tool, but also start you on your way to a new design system. Remember, no matter how good it looks, the greater focus is not on the pixels, but on the user. If your sight is true, all else will follow.
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When it comes to providing pleasure or delight in our websites and apps, animations contribute a lot. But always remember that they must be functional first. In this article, Amit Daliot shows us video examples that show functional animation. The following rules map well to every animation Amit encountered so far. They helped him to assess animations that he saw in interfaces, and they are a strong set of guiding principles in deciding how to add animations to a wireframe design.
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