February 2012
1 post
3 tags
January 2012
1 post
December 2011
3 posts
1 tag
“At the very least, Hitchens’s antireligious writings carried a whiff of...”
– Ross Douthat
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Fonts In Use: BostonGlobe.com →
Stephen Coles:
Despite the emphasis on maintaining the newspaper’s identity, BostonGlobe.com is not merely a skeuomorphic replication of the printed paper. Font sizes, column widths, and navigation are informed by best practices in digital media, and specifically “responsive” design, resizing and repositioning text and images for optimal viewing at any window size. Not every window width...
November 2011
7 posts
1 tag
Please let this not be the future of reading on... →
Rian van der Merwe:
As advertising clickthrough rates continue to drop, the ads become more desperate and invasive, and readers are starting to notice and do something about it. I’m doing the majority of my reading in RSS and Instapaper where I can read in peace without being pummeled by distractions.
The chorus decrying the exodus of readers to quiet alternative reading experiences is...
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Responsive Advertising →
Mark Boulton:
Recently at Mark Boulton Design, we’ve been working on a redesign of the global visual language for a large sports network. Like many web sites delivering news and editorial content, they rely on advertising for their revenue — either through multiple ad slots on the page, or from video pre-rolls.
Early on in the project, we discussed Responsive Web Design at length. From an...
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Meaningful Transitions →
Johannes Tonollo:
Meaningful Transitions have the purpose to communicate the process of the interaction and the structure of the user interface. They focus on specific events, or explaining the user’s interaction by animation. All transitions are clustered in 6 categories in order to differentiate the certain field of use. The aim is to present a scaleable collection of existing...
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“Clutter is what happens when we fill a page with things the user doesn’t care...”
– Jared Spool
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25 Secrets of the Browser Developer Tools →
Andi Smith:
Historically developers have used Firefox’s Firebug add-on to develop and debug their websites, but more recently each browser has developed its own set of tools and each comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. Nowadays it seems hard to imagine ever building a website without one of these handy tools, which are normally accessible by either pressing “F12″ in Windows or...
“There are a lot of people I dislike in the world. I mean, a lot. I don’t...”
– John Gruber
The Webfont Revolution Is Over,... →
Stephen Coles rains on the webfonts parade:
Building the fonts is the part of this story that so few anticipated or dared to face. It’s the hard part. So hard, in fact, that some font manufacturers skipped the process altogether, simply releasing their print-optimized fonts as “webfonts” without the significant changes required to make them read well on screen. To me, this is akin to shipping...
October 2011
11 posts
1 tag
Proof by Mask →
Frédéric Filloux:
Web design is in bad shape. In the applications boom, news-related websites end up as collateral damage. For graphic designers, the graphics tools and the computer languages used to design apps for tablets and smartphones have unleashed a great deal of creativity. The transformation took longer than expected, but great designs begin to appear in iPad applications (in previous...
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Where Are All the Ed-Ex Designers? →
Khoi Vinh:
I would guess that there are less than a few dozen people in the world who can create superb software for editorial products, who can combine the holistic, systems-level thinking of UX with the incisive storytelling instincts of editorial design. I’m not even talking about a designer who can ‘do both,’ who can create a great digital publication one day and then create a great print...
What Should I Look For In a UI Typeface? →
Ian Hex:
I’ve touched briefly before on some typefaces that I consider to be particularly good for on-screen reading. But now I wish to delve further into this realm of typography and consider: What makes a typeface good for screens and UI design in particular?
Thanks, Ian, for a great deep-dive into a tricky topic that is too often ignored when selecting typefaces for screen reading.
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Pew Study: People Undervalue Their Local Newspaper →
Freakonomics:
While 69 percent of Americans claim that losing their local newspaper would have no impact, their reading habits show that people rely on print and online papers for 11 out of 16 major news topics.
And who wants to bet that radio and TV are relying on newspapers to steer coverage of the remaining five?
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Foundation →
The guys at ZURB have built another nice responsive-grid framework to add to the rapidly growing list:
Foundation is a rock-solid, responsive framework for rapidly prototyping and iterating into production code. It includes a 12-column, future-friendly grid and tons of great tools and elements that’ll get you up and running in no time. Clone the repo to get the marketing site, docs, and...
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“Allowing artist-illustrators to control the design of statistical graphics is...”
– Edward Tufte, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”
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Steve Jobs: Visionary, Inventor, and Very... →
This great article from Photo District News on Jobs’ difficulty as a photo subject also includes a gem towards the end — the story behind the portrait selected for Apple’s homepage tribute:
Albert Watson, who photographed Jobs just once for a portfolio of people in power that Fortune commissioned him to shoot in 2008, had a different experience from other photographers. “The...
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Before Hitler, Who Was the Stand-In for Pure Evil? →
A fascinating look at the evolution of one of our favorite rhetorical devices from Slate:
ESPN dropped singer Hank Williams Jr. from its Monday Night Football telecast after he publicly compared President Obama to Adolf Hitler on Monday. Today, the Führer is universally recognized as the embodiment of evil and the most convenient example of a truly terrible human being. Before World War II,...
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“The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the...”
– Bill Gates
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O network, where art thou?
Last week’s launch of a redesigned and reengineered Delicious brought many surprises, not least frustrating among which was the disappearance of any interface to browse links from your network of friends on the service. Thankfully, Delicious’ engineering blog indicates that functionality is in the queue to be addressed:
Networks: We have all network data, and are working on...
September 2011
9 posts
2 tags
Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS →
Jonathan Snook:
SMACSS (pronounced “smacks”) is more style guide than rigid framework. There’s no library within here for you to download or install. SMACSS is a way to examine your design process and as a way to fit those rigid frameworks into a flexible thought process. It’s an attempt to document a consistent approach to site development when using CSS.
Jonathan...
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WatchMy old friend Katie Herzig has a new album out today, and it sounds amazing. Highly recommended.
iTunes · Amazon · Rdio · Spotify
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FitVids.js →
From the project’s GitHub docs:
FitVids automates the Intrinsic Ratio Method by Thierry Koblentz to achieve fluid width videos in your responsive web design.
Scaling video dimensions is one of those heartburn-inducing pain-points in implementing a responsive design to a media-rich site, and this seems like a great start to a robust solution.
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New site a peek into Globe’s technological... →
Hiawatha Bray, for the Boston Globe:
Building BostonGlobe.com meant thinking about how to publish for people who often do not use traditional desktop computers. Globe developers knew that readers will be just as likely to view the site on smartphones, tablet computers, and even televisions. That meant figuring out formats to fit a host of gadgets varying in screen size, computing power, and...
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WatchTumblr celebrated their 10 billionth post with dashboard confetti. Congrats!
“When reality itself moves past irony to absurdity, irony starts seeming like a...”
– Michael Hirschorn
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Bless the toolmakers →
Robin Sloan:
So I wish more people were making tools for a specific creative purpose rather than for general consumer adoption. I wish more people were making tools that very intentionally do not scale—tools with users by the dozen. Tools you experience not through a web signup form, but through pathbreaking creative work.
Building tools for our small (but growing) stable of bloggers has...
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“We tend to forget that there’s music going on in the future and in the...”
– Justin Vernon, a.k.a. Bon Iver
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August 2011
16 posts
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Sublime Text 2 Tips and Tricks →
Jeffrey Way:
I consider Sublime Text 2 to be the spiritual successor to TextMate – particularly when the likelihood of TextMate 2 coming to fruition becomes bleaker and bleaker. When Duke Nukem Forever is released before TextMate 2, you know you’re in trouble! But that’s okay, because Sublime Text 2 is one of the fastest and most incredible editors to come out in a long time! I’ll show you my...
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Joao Silva: ‘This Is What I Do. This Is All That I... →
From an adapted version of Silva’s speech at the Bronx Documentary Center Aug. 2, posted on the Times’ Lens blog:
I heard the mechanic click. I knew: this is not good. And I found myself lying face-down on the ground, engulfed in a cloud of dust, with the very clear knowledge that this has just happened and this is not good. I could see my legs were gone, and everybody around me...
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Macho Programming →
Stijn Debrouwere:
I have to admit, even for a zen-like chap such as me, it’s still quite the mental effort to repress knee-jerk reactions about the tools and programming languages other people use. Perl is for dinosaurs, Ruby for hipsters, Haskell is useless outside of academia, C is for masochists, C# for corporate drones. Computer programmers have probably been waging these kinds of petty...
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Map of Today's East Coast Earthquake Available on... →
The indecently smart folks at Development Seed put together a beautiful map of today’s seismic event along with a quick write-up of the process:
This afternoon at 1:51 pm our office started shaking, pretty strongly. And then we all ran outside. Turns out a 5.9 earthquake hit Northern, VA, with its epicenter just northwest of Richmond, and we definitely felt it here in Washington,...
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Tumblr Engineering: Building a Faster Lightbox →
Don’t miss this great write-up of the new photoset functionality Tumblr recently rolled out:
Tumblr’s new Photoset feature was hinged on being able to quickly display high-res images in an interactive lightbox slideshow. You can check out an example with my dog. After solidifying the design, we spent a couple days doing everything we could to improve the real and perceived responsiveness....
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“By overemphasizing a truth, you can create a lie.”
– Deroy Peraza, Hyperakt
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Twitter Bootstrap →
Fresh out of the oven from Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton, Twitter Bootstrap could significantly cut the lead time required when spinning up your next web app. The form elements and notifications are particularly gorgeous.
From Mark’s post on Twitter’s dev blog:
In the earlier days of Twitter, engineers used almost any library they were familiar with to meet front-end requirements....
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Skin Your Chrome Inspector →
It’s Christmas in August for all you Chrome-loving web devs:
Ever want to change the look of your Google Chrome Web Inspector? I personally love being able to customize the “theme” or “brush” of my favorite IDE and my Web Inspector is no different. If you’ve ever done some snooping around Google Chrome’s Web Inspector you may have noticed that it’s made of straight HTML + CSS +...
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“We’re not ignorant because we’ve consumed too little information...”
– Clay Johnson
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“We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.”
– François de La Rochefoucald (via seanjohnson)
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Flat, simple icons for interface design →
Meagan Fisher posted a great roundup of flat icons today, including the awesome Glyphish and Icon Sweets packages that I’ve used in multiple projects over the last few years. Highly recommended!
I can’t overstate the value of a good flat, sharp, detailed icon. You can style it any way you please, use it in a variety of projects, and communicate difficult interface concepts in a 16 pixel...
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News Redux
Web designer Andy Rutledge tackled a section front from NYTimes.com for his series of “redux” redesign exercises. The Internet had some thoughts about this.
[View the story “News Redux” on Storify]
July 2011
10 posts
2 tags
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“If you’re good, and you know you’re good, and you know you’re better than those...”
– John Mayer