Notebook Entries on {category_name}

June 9, 2009

Ten Great Free Fonts for @fontface Embedding •

Ten free fonts that support @font-face embedding in CSS3 (via Simplebits).

June 8, 2009

Ajaxload •

Simple ‘loading’ icon generator that helps you create a custom indicator for whatever site you’re creating.

June 3, 2009

The Xerox Star UI •

The Ministry of Type takes a squinty-eyed look at the pixel-perfect attention to detail in the Xerox Star UI.

June 2, 2009

8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography In Your Designs •

Rock-solid primer on Web typography from AisleOne.

April 13, 2009

All 120 Crayon Names, Color Codes and Fun Facts •

For the five-year-old designer inside all of us, ColourLovers nails down the Crayola color palette for onscreen design. Now you can design your links in Burnt Sienna, Carnation Pink, Cornflower or traditional Blue.

March 19, 2009

Exploring Cufón •

Cameron Moll reviews the differences between the popular font embedding technique sIFR and relative newcomer Cufón, with a great set of examples.

Cufón’s lack of text selection and a :hover attribute give me pause, but I completely sympathize with Moll’s desire to never have to open Flash again.

jQuery Sparklines •

Splunk’s Gareth Watts releases a sparkline generator plugin for jQuery that I can’t wait to try.

February 11, 2009

Give Up and Use Tables •

A reminder against semantic navel gazing:

We’ve scientifically determined the maximum amount of time that you should need to make a layout work in CSS: it’s 47 minutes.

I’m looking forward to the 10 minutes to get a doughnut part.

January 27, 2009

List of 10+ Usability-Conscious Link Styles Done in CSS •

Web designers too often overlook semantic, usability and aesthetic possibilities when designing the simple text link. This comprehensive list covers the options from simple CSS styling to more advanced enhancements available in the new CSS 3 specification, with examples.

January 16, 2009

A More Useful 404 •

A List Apart gets back to basics with great advice for designing 404 pages from Dean Frickey:

Often, developers provide custom 404 pages to make the experience a little less frustrating. However, for a custom 404 page to be truly useful, it should not only provide relevant information to the user, but should also provide immediate feedback to the developer so that, when possible, the problem can be fixed.

Required reading.

Corporate Risk Watch •

Corporate Risk Watch has garnered a lot of buzz from the online design community for an innovative design. While the writing could use more substance, I have to admit that the clever use of blue underline and the unabashedly bold rollover menus are fantastic.

Elegant Web Typography •

A thorough, well-balanced and dead-on overview of Web typography presented by Jeff Croft (via Subtraction). This is required reading for anyone who designs online.

December 15, 2008

Gridr Buildrrr •

I can personally attest to the pain of manipulating prototype layouts in Adobe Illustrator while trying to find a grid that balances the needs of a new site design. For those like me who don’t like to drag shaded boxes around, or just don’t like crunching the numbers, Tom Genoni presents a workable solution, complete with standard ad sizes, in Gridr Buildrrr.

December 10, 2008

50 Most Beautiful Icons from 2008 •

Great set of icons gathered by Noupe.com. I’m partial to these hand-drawn icons.

December 2, 2008

The Grid System •

Billed as “the ultimate resource in grid systems,” The Grid System offers articles, tutorials and other resources for designers needing help getting their ducks in a row.

24 Ways: 2008 •

The best advent calendar for Web designers is back with it’s 2008 edition of tips, tricks and insightful articles. Celebrate the holidays and start percolating new design ideas for the new year.

November 21, 2008

Mark Boulton’s Practical Guide to Designing for the Web •

If you put words on Web pages, this book goes on your wish list, period. Shipping in PDF in February 2009.

October 22, 2008

Multicolr Search Lab •

Idée’s Multicolr Search Lab (via Kottke) looks like another must-have tool for the designers arsenal. Pick up to ten colors, and you’ll get back a gallery of the most interesting Flickr photos that match.

Here’s a sample gallery that matches this site’s pallette. Addictive.

Javascript Will Save Us All •

Eric Meyer wakes up thinking about how rapidly improving JavaScript performance in browsers could allow designers to append hacks that improve CSS standards support in non-compliant browsers at runtime using JavaScript.

So instead of coding a box-model hack for Internet Explorer every time you style an element, a JavaScript library would inject the CSS work-around as the page loads. While this is probably too time consuming in today’s browsers, it’s becoming more realizable as Firefox and Webkit compete to improve their JavaScript interpreters by orders of magnitude.

Think about it: most of the browser development work these days seems to be going into JavaScript performance. Those engines are being overhauled and souped up and tuned and re-tuned to the point that performance is improving by orders of magnitude…So why not write JS to implement multiple background-image support in all browsers?

Just like that, you’ve used the browser’s JS to extend its CSS support. This approach advances standards support in browsers from the ground up, instead of waiting for the browser teams to do it for us.

This would be game-changing for standards-based designers. I hope it happens.

October 21, 2008

About Us Information On Websites •

Jakob Nielsen summarizes and cites best examples of the common elements of about us content on corporate websites: tagline, summary, fact sheet, detailed information.

October 10, 2008

IDEO Redesigns •

The farther you dig, the better it gets, and the whole thing runs on ExpressionEngine. IDEO’s website redesigned by Solspace.

October 8, 2008

Cabel Sasser on Wedding Design •

Pixel-perfect wedding invitations self-designed by Panic’s Cabel Sasser, beautifully letter-pressed and complete with matching website for RSVP’s.

October 3, 2008

2008 Web Design Trends •

A catalog of Web design trends gleaned from WebDesigner Wall’s Best Web Gallery. Top picks for 2008: vintage/retro, handwritten notes and paper clips, grunge, ink splatter, watercolor, collage and more.

September 15, 2008

Everymoment Now •

A fascinating website-as-info-graphic design currently focused on news coverage of the 2008 presidential election.

September 11, 2008

What Your Global Neighbors are Buying •

Geo-tree map illustrating worldwide consumer spending habits, from the New York Times interactive team.

Umbrella Today? •

Billed as “the simplest weather report ever,” this site is made for today’s deluge.

August 21, 2008

Wanderlust •

GOOD magazine unfolds an interactive map of “history’s greatest journeys from Magellan to Kerouac.”

August 12, 2008

Pattern Tap •

Great collection of searchable Web design patterns.

August 8, 2008

Smart Car, Smart Design •

Simple site design, engaging interactive features and a solid case for Smart Car ownership. I watched all the way through; too bad they’re sold only in the UK.

August 4, 2008

NYT: A Collection of Olympic Torches •

Another well-designed interactive feature from the New York Times covering the history of the Olympic torch.

July 29, 2008

The Survey for People who Make Websites 2008 •

A List Apart is has sounded the call for participation in the 2008 census of The Survey for People Who Make Websites.

What started as a quest to quantify the working conditions of the online design industry resulted in the first complete glimpse into what it means to be a working Web professional. This year’s survey looks to ferret out answers to some of the leftover questions and grow the body of knowledge about the profession for people who make Web sites.

So if you’ve ever scrutinized the alignment of one stubborn pixel or nit-picked the semantics of a page’s HTML source, take five minutes and help define what it means to be a Web designer.

July 8, 2008

On Content and Design •

Zeldman nails the relationship between content and design, in 14 words.

June 30, 2008

BBC Web Identity Guidelines •

Interesting collection of corporate Web identity guidelines to correspond with the redesign of the BBC Web site.

May 29, 2008

ExpressionEngine Screencasts from The Pragmatic Bookshelf •

New ExpressionEngine screencast videos from The Pragmatic Programmers, and affordable at $5 an episode (DRM-free). Likely a valuable resource for designers new to ExpressionEngine.