One could easily argue that nothing affects a design more than typography. And good typography starts with choosing an appropriate typeface. But can having too much choice be a bad thing? In this article, Jeremiah Shoaf reviews a collection of beautiful websites and analyzes the impact that their designers’ typeface choices have had on the overall designs. She’ll critique both the good and the bad. Of course, type is subjective, so take any critiques with a grain of salt. Let’s dig in!
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In this industry, there’s so much to learn, that falling behind is easy. So, you tell yourselves you’ll come back to it later. But later never shows up. What if you did just one small thing a day to expand your knowledge and skill set, every day, for 30 days straight? This challenge of stacking knowledge daily will enable you not only to learn 30 things, but to learn 30 things that will increase in complexity and fit together as a whole new branch of working knowledge for you.
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While many Web professionals work hard to make work-related relationships as strong as possible, they often neglect their non-professional relationships. Web professionals, and IT workers in general, often struggle to maintain a healthy work-life balance, and their relationships often suffer because of that struggle. In this article, Jeremy Girard will offer some of the ways that he has found helpful in his own life and career to foster healthy non-professional relationships and personal well-being.
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The quality of available free fonts has increased dramatically. Fee fonts don’t have a good reputation, and often they are knock-offs of thoroughly crafted, already established typefaces. So is it time for professional designers to take a second look? Thanks to the open-source community, there are now free fonts available that even typography snobs would be happy to use. The following fonts all have multiple weights with matching italics. They are suitable for headlines as well as body copy, and they render well on screen and at small sizes.
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Transformations are a powerful technique for separating content and presentation in Web applications. Yet, they transformations have failed to gain popularity through XSLT. For this reason, Web developers are liable to think that transformations “don’t apply to me,” even though they work with HTML. Thankfully, new transformation frameworks are on the horizon, that hold the promise of a revival. In this article, Ishan Anand will reintroduce transformations and explore their applications to mobile and responsive design.
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After a decade of JavaScript library work, the progressive-enhancement revolution, the advent of polyfills, and the effort to birth the “Web Components” and “Shadow DOM” specifications have taught us surprising lessons: In every period, being able to use features in both high- and low-level forms has always been desirable. HTML is great, until it isn’t. And JavaScript-only has predictable drawbacks. Thinking that there is a “right way” to build new Web features is seductive. Turns out, it’s not that simple.
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Developing an application in HTML5 is a way to leverage code across multiple platforms, rather than having to write the application from scratch for each platform. As such, much of the user interface would be done in HTML. It’s important to understand the benefits each potential development strategy affords. As an app developer you have the ultimate decision on what strategy best suits the needs of your application. Test early, and test often, across a variety of devices. Keep your technology choices open and flexible to reap the rewards of a hybrid experience.
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Progressive enhancement has become a bit of a hot topic recently, most recently with Tom Dale [conclusively showing it to be a futile act, but only by misrepresenting what progressive enhancement is and what its benefits are.
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Jesse Friedman has spent nearly a decade trying to create scalable, predictably insightful, inspirational environments. he has led creative teams in these environments, and is currently doing it as the Director of Web Interface and Development at Astonish. What follows is what Jesse has found to help his team harness inspiration effectively.
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While srcset as implemented by WebKit doesn’t address to all the responsive images use cases, it does represent a major step toward a long overdue solution—hopefully the first of many. And as Chair of the W3C’s Responsive Images Community Group, Mat Marquis has been dreading this moment for some time now. Pertaining to “responsive images”: it’s complicated, and it can be hard keeping up with the signal in all the noise. Here’s what you need to know.
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