CategoryTechniques

July 3, 2012 — As interface designers, we’re often required to demonstrate the look and feel (and interactions) of the interfaces we design. We often begin with a series of flat images, and while these may be pixel perfect and show some amazing detail, they lack the context of the user experience. Read more…

June 26, 2012 — There are different ways to make your website faster: specialized plugins to cache entire rendered HTML pages, plugins to cache all SQL queries and data objects, plugins to minimize JavaScript and CSS files and even some server-side solutions. Read more…

June 21, 2012 — Since our last round-up of useful CSS techniques, we’ve seen a lot of truly remarkable CSS geekery out there. Read more…

May 7, 2012 — While certainly not as well known as Photoshop, Adobe Fireworks is a great tool for creating user interfaces, website designs and mock-ups, wireframes, icons and much more. Read more…

April 19, 2012 — If you run an online magazine, most of your readers will never go through your archive, even if you design a neat archive page. It’s not you; it’s just that going through archives is not very popular these days. So, how do you actually make readers dig in without forcing them? How do you invite them to (re)read in a way that’s not boring? Read more…

April 11, 2012 — I’m pretty confident that I won’t surprise anyone here by saying that CSS sprites have been around for quite a while now, rearing their somewhat controversial heads in the Web development sphere as early as 2003. Read more…

March 22, 2012 — This is a different take on Responsive Web design. This article discusses how we can better embrace what the Web is about by ignoring the big elephant in the room; that is, how we can rely on media queries and breakpoints without any concern for devices. Read more…

March 13, 2012 — Designing and developing emails can be challenging, especially if you start doing it after years of designing and developing websites. Read more…

March 9, 2012 — The creative process is not a linear one. As artists and designers, we often set off in one direction only to decide that the proper solution lies somewhere else completely. Unfortunately, many of the creative software packages we use (Photoshop in particular) can be pretty unforgiving when in comes to making changes late in the game. Read more…

February 3, 2012 — Custom post types add a level of flexibility to WordPress that makes this open-source Web development platform more useful on many levels. Whenever I have been faced with a Web-based task, especially one that involves organizing information, the first thing I do is examine WordPress to determine if it can handle the job. It usually can. Read more…