We are all designing and building responsive websites now. For many of us this means both exciting new challenges and significant increases to our workload. Testing at many variable widths is more and more difficult to do and is likely the culprit of much of our increase in development time. We are all designing and
With all of the great frameworks popping up it can be difficult to choose the “right” one. Besides doing some really great things, probably the two most popular frameworks Twitter Bootstrap and Zurb Foundation, can be a little overreaching at times when it comes to theming them. You may find that you have to overwrite
It used to be that websites and their interactions were much different than those from native software applications. Well this is not so much the case anymore. Mary Lou, a freelance web designer and developer from tympanus.net, wrote an interesting article discussing a few different morphing buttons concepts that showcase some amazing possibilities for web
Paul Irish created and maintains a site devoted to Ampersands. The site is a collection of open source web fonts that only contain the ampersand character. He created it based off an article from 2008 regarding the usage of ampersands and the fact that certain variants of the character in some fonts are more interesting
For those of you who have taken advantage of web fonts you’ve likely noticed various levels of quality. Sometimes, in some browsers, they look great. Other times, in other browsers, they look thin grainy. And if you’re like me you probably just cringed a little and dealt with it. Well, fortunately we now have help
We pick up lots of pieces of knowledge over time when working with CSS and then if we don’t use them often we can forget how to use them and then have to spend time either looking it up again or looking for where we used them in other projects. Well, Adam Schwartz, a Principal
If you’re ready to build out your next site using flexbox you are probably going to want to use a grid. Well, you’re in luck because Kristofer Joseph has created Flexbox Grid with many of the features that you’re used to with other div based grids and more. Flexbox Grid Features It’s responsive It’s fluid
Subtlepatterns.com is a great free resource for high quality repeating backgrounds for use in your designs. It was created and is actively maintained by Atle Mo. With subtlepatterns.com you can simply browse all of the backgrounds and when you find one that you like you can download the image. He even provides a 2x version
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.
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. It’s pretty simple, just install the chrome extension,
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. jQuery Notebook jQuery Notebook is a small JavaScript plugin that mimics the editor functionality seen in other platforms like
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
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. The beauty of using a cubic-bezier() timing function is that it allows you to to create an acceleration curve so
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 from Bells Design. He has captured and continues to capture amazing, high quality photos and he is providing them for us to use
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. It is a very non-traditional user experience that takes the parallax scrolling
Navigation can be a hard thing to master. Handling it intuitively and in a usable fashion is even more challenging with the wide variety of devices and screen resolutions available. Most sites tend to just shove all of their menu items under some three bar icon and expand the menu when clicked. Seems to work
Anyone who’s ever had to create HTML emails knows that it sucks. You have to write old, crappy, code and inline style everything. You have to use tables because more modern float layouts just don’t work consistently across the bagillion email clients that are out there. Overall, I would say that they are probably my
CSS Preprocessors like LESS, SASS, and Stylus are all the rage now-a-days and rightfully so. They all do some great stuff allowing us to write CSS in a more programmatic way where we repeat ourselves less and operate at a higher efficiency level. With all the good that they provide for us they do add
There are many pros and cons to using icon fonts and SVGs for icons in your designs. I had been under the impression that icon fonts were the more effective of the two but have had some reservations. For one, what happens if you need a multi-color icon? Remember, they are simply fonts so they
For those of you that have read my post “SVGs are Cool & You Should Start Using Them, If You’re Not Already” you know that I am a fan of SVGs. In fact, now that I know a little more about them I feel that they are very under used in modern web development. They