When I was young and learning to program, I was fascinated by the possibility of creating things that could live inside my monitor. I had the same feeling when I started to play with procedural content generation, which is to find the rules behind a phenomenon, encode them in an algorithm, and use that algorithm to create something virtual, but realistic — a plausible simulation.
Typically, you can give a seed or some initial parameters to a procedural content generation algorithm, and get some result. You could generate the landscape of a city, the shape of a tree or an entire world.
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Data visualization is on the rise. Publishers around the world — individual bloggers and major online publications alike — are realizing that charts, maps and combinations of the two can convey a message far more effectively than plain numbers can.
From simple charts to fancy infographics to complex timeline animations, data visualizations are popping up all over the Internet. However, as in any other area, once everyone gets on the train, distinguishing yourself from the pack becomes hard.
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The list of charting libraries for the web is already quite long, and you might ask yourself why we would need to make it any longer. Whenever you need to develop an application’s dashboard, embed some usage statistics or simply visualize some data, you will find yourself looking for a charting library that fits your needs.
Chartist was developed for a very particular need: to create simple responsive charts. While other charting libraries do a great job of visualizing data, something is always missing to satisfy this simple yet demanding need.
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The web is growing up. We are building applications that work entirely in the browser. They are responsive; they have tons of features and work under many devices. We enjoy providing high-quality code that is well structured and tested.
But what matters in the end is the impact for clients. Are they getting more products sold or are there more visitors for their campaign sites? The final results usually show if our project is successful. And we rely on statistics as a measuring tool. We all use instruments like Google Analytics. It is a powerful way to collect data. In this article, we will see a CSS-only approach for tracking UI interactions using Google Analytics.
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Responsive web design has become the dominant method of developing and designing websites. It makes it easier to think “mobile first” and to create a website that is viewable on mobile devices. In the early days of responsive web design, creating breakpoints in CSS for particular screen sizes was common, like 320 pixels for iPhone and 768 pixels for iPad, and then we tested and monitored those devices.
As responsive design has evolved, we now more often start with the content and then set breakpoints when the content “breaks.” This means that you might end up with quite a few content-centric breakpoints and no particular devices or form factors on which to test your website.
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Too often when working in information design, you’ll hear the request, “Can you make the data look cool?” “Cool” is a rather ambiguous term, and means different things to different people.
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Last Friday, we published an article on the Do’s And Don’ts Of Infographic Design written by Amy Balliett which raised quite a discussion within the design community. Some readers agreed, some readers found examples contradictory, and some readers felt that there were some problems with the article which should be addressed in a further article.
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Since the dawn of the Internet, the demand for good design has continued to skyrocket. From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and beyond, designers have remained on their toes as they define the trends and expectations of our online universe.
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There are pros and cons to the wide range of resources available to us, but this tutorial will not explore them all. Instead, we’ll create our graph using a progressively enhanced sprinkling of CSS3 and jQuery.
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A certain category of design gaffes can be boiled down to violations of audience expectations. Websites that don’t work in Internet Explorer are a heck of a nasty surprise for users who, bless their souls, want the same Internet experience as everyone else. Websites that prevent copying, whether through careless text-as-image conversions or those wretched copyright pop-ups from the turn of the century, cripple a feature that works nearly everywhere else on the Internet. Avoiding this category of blunders is crucial to good design, which is why I am upset that one particular pitfall has been overlooked with extreme frequency.
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