Quick Tip – 12: Rounding Corners in Illustrator
Ever needed to quickly and precisely round corners on vector shapes and typography already added to your designs in illustrator? Well, it's pretty easy to do nowadays.
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Oh Wow That’s Neat – 12: SVG Optimiser
If you've ever created an SVG image in Adobe Illustrator you've seen some pretty crazy code. Just like all other code we write, it should be simple, clean, and lean. Also, like any other image type we want to make sure that it is optimized and has the highest quality with the smallest file size.
AngularJS Overview for Web Designers
AngularJS is a newer JavaScript framework geared towards the creation and maintenance of single page web applications. It is considered to be a “toolset for building the framework most suited to your application development” meaning that, for the most part, you can choose the elements that you want to use and swap out those that you don’t want with other libraries/frameworks of your choice. It is built and maintained by Google and is open source with an MIT license.
Quick Tip – 11: Text Wrapping in Illustrator
Often when creating a web design mock-up you'll have the need to wrap text around objects. Illustrator makes this very quick and easy to do.
Oh Wow That’s Neat – 11: Whatfont Bookmarklet
Do you ever use browser developer tools just to figure out what fonts and font styles are being applied on your site and perhaps others? Well, there's an easier way thanks to Chengyin Liu an engineer at Backplane. He has created the Whatfont Bookmarklet extension for Chrome.
User Experience Design With Illustrator
Every time I go to design a new site I jump directly into PhotoShop because, well, it's the tool I've used since the very first site I designed as a professional. I know it very well and can move quickly and efficiently.
Quick Tip – 10: Using Global Swatches in Illustrator
Ever wish that you could create high fidelity design mock-ups with the ability to make global color changes? Well, with Illustrator you can do exactly that.
Oh Wow That’s Neat – 10: jQuery Notebook
Getting tired of those ugly old school WYSIWYG editors that have every setting under the sun? I know I am. Well, there are some other great solutions out there and jQuery Notebook is one of them.
Getting Modular With Web Components
Modular is the new black when speaking in terms of the web. From the back-end perspective, developers have been building modular, object-oriented code for a long time now. Well, as web technologies and our development processes continue to improve, more and more of these back-end, programmatic philosophies are finding their way into front-end development.
Quick Tip – 09: Placing PhotoShop Documents Within Other PhotoShop Documents
You can now place PhotoShop documents within other PhotoShop documents. This is awesome when you are in the process of mocking up large scale applications consisting of common components like site headers, footers, navigation, etc. It also helps to keep these design elements consistent when developing with a team of designers.
Oh Wow That’s Neat – 09: Conditioner.js
Media queries are great and they have become the standard for responsive web design. They provide us the ability take control of our designs and dramatically change the way they look across a wide array of view port dimensions and devices. They are not without issues however. They are are only concerned with the width of the view port and not the width of containing elements.
Pseudo-Classes vs. Pseudo-Elements
For the longest time the only pseudo selectors that we could use were :link, :hover, :visited and :active and they could only be applied to a tags. As long as we were intending to support ie6 that was all we could do. As we've adopted philosophies like progressive enhancement, graceful degradation, or dropped support for ie6, 7, and 8 we have seen the landscape of CSS selectors change dramatically.
Quick Tip - 08: Highlight Search Results With the HTML5 Mark Tag
The HTML5 mark tag was created in order to highlight text within a document that is relative to another context. This is perfect for highlighting the search term in a list of results.
Oh Wow That’s Neat – 08: Cubic-Bezier.com
I don't really come across much about the use of CSS3 cubic-bezier() functions for easing in animations. It is a timing function that can be used in place of the easing keyword for CSS animations.
Modern Web Typography: Kerning
Kerning is a very important aspect when it comes to setting type. Unfortunately, until more recent times, it has been left out when it comes to the web.
Quick Tip - 07: Autofocus Fields With HTML5 Form Attributes
Have you ever wanted to automatically place the cursor in a field when the page is rendered? I know I have.
Oh Wow That's Neat - 07: Gratisography.com Free HQ Images
Looking for high quality pictures to use in your personal or commercial projects? Don't want to pay tons of cash for overused stock photos? Well, you're in luck thanks to [Ryan McGuire](http://www.laughandpee.com/) from [Bells Design](http://www.bellsdesign.com/).
How to Use CSS Filter Effects
Quick Tip - 06: Use the Four-Value Syntax to Properly Position Background Images
After writing my post Use CSS Calc to Properly Position Background Images I had some folks point out that you can now use the new Four-Value syntax for the background-position property to achieve the same effect. I was absolutely blown away when I saw that this was finally possible. I'm mean, this just makes sense and it's something that I've wanted for years.
Oh Wow That's Neat - 06: www.fontwalk.de
www.fontwalk.de is a site that was created as a marketing tool for www.fontshop.com. I'm not so interested in their fonts, although it looks like they have a nice selection. I am more interested in the great design ideas behind the Font Walk site.