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Hicksdesign Go to the source

Since publishing a section from The Icon Handbook as part of 24 Ways last December ( Displaying Icons with Fonts and Data- Attributes ) I’ve been involved in a few discussions regarding its cons, some of which have since gained workarounds, and it felt a good time to do a follow up post. First of all, its worth mentioning the context of the article – it’s from Chapter 6, where all the various possible methods for deploying icons on the web are laid out. This includes creating icons with CSS , which isn’t something I’d recommend, but just may be a solution for someone out there and work well in a particular context. In the same vein, using fonts to display icons is just one of the options. Lets go over the 2 cons that keep coming up: Unicode Mapping Jon Tan states (rightly) that where matching unicode characters exist , the key should be mapped to that (such as the heart symbol for Favourites) and others that don’t to Private Use Areas where they have no associated meaning or content. This isn’t a problem with the technique as much as the current implementation of the fonts… Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

First off let me apologise for the laboured metaphor I’m about to inflict on you, but I thought it could be entertaining to try and describe the web design industry using a medium I’m sure you’re all familiar with—Dungeons & Dragons. However I should point out that I’m no D&D expert, having played it last when I was 13. So please don’t leave comments to the line of “you got that all wrong as those character classes were changed in AD&D 2nd Edition, Unearthed Arcana.” or I’ll pull out my +2 broadsword and go Berserker on your ass. In the world of Dungeons & Dragons, characters could have a variety of professions such as Fighter, Thief or Magic-User. These professions were loosely related to a characters natural abilities. So if you were intelligent you’d be well suited to becoming a magic-user, whereas if you were dexterous, becoming a thief was a good option. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

I was really disappointed to see a recent post from somebody I admire and respect defend the validity of the new UX Developer job title that has been cropping up of late. As well as being misleading, the title, UX Developer has implications that are damaging to the field of User Experience and will hasten the current devaluation of the term. Despite what many newcomers to the industry may think, User Experience Design is a well-defined specialism as distinct from visual or interface design. The practice of user experience design is a specific field of study with its own books, conferences, membership organisations and college courses. User experience designers therefore have a distinct set of skills and practices that form the core of their profession. That being said, user experience designers don’t own these practices any more than developers own the ability to code up wireframes. … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

One of the best annual wrap-ups returns after a hiatus in 2009-10, Our Favorite Typefaces , from Typographica. Welcome back! The idea is simple: I invite a group of writers, educators, type makers and type users to look back at 2011 and pick the release that excited them most. … This is not a juried contest. The result isn’t necessarily the “best fonts of the year”, or even those most used or ballyhooed. But these 50 selections do capture a pretty accurate snapshot of where type design is now, and where it’s headed. And the results are spot on… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Gridiron League : Wes Kull: This is not an exercise in nostalgia but an interpretation of the league’s founding principles through the symbols that we, as football fans, identify with most. Many NFL franchises — Patriots, Broncos, Rams, Lions — have updated their uniforms and logos to a swooshed-out, dropped-shadowed, and more commercial-ready image, ignoring a good deal of their team’s heritage and the original rough-and-tumble character that the league stood for. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

My mind is on CSS quite a bit these days. At Shopify , I’m jumping into projects that already well under way. As a result, it’s been a great way to look at what I wrote in SMACSS and see how applicable it is to yet another project. (As if Yahoo! wasn’t already enough of a testing ground.) With Yahoo!, I (and a team of people) were writing the CSS from scratch and creating our mental map of the project as we went along. Jumping into the middle of a project as I am at Shopify, I have to try and figure out why things are done the way they are. Here’s an example of something that I ran into in the CSS: #loading-header .loading { background: url(spinner.gif) no-repeat 0 0; } [...separated by a few pages of code...] #content { [...separated by more code...] #loading-header { display:none; } .row { display:block; } &.loading { #loading-header { display:block; } .row { display:none; } } } The loading class has a spinner… Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

Tagged: photos … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

After the blackout on Wednesday, it seems that the political tides are shifting against SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act—as of this writing, there are now more members of Congress in opposition to the bills than in favor. That’s good news. I wil reiterate something I said on Twitter, though: the members of tech community, particularly those who are intimately familiar with the basic protocols of the Internet, need to keep working on ways to counteract SOPA/PIPA. What form that would take, I’m not sure. Maybe a truly distributed DNS system, one that can’t be selectively filtered by any one government or other entity. I’m not an expert in the area, so I don’t actually know if that’s feasible… Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

The latest issue of A List Apart is one of my favorites in recent memory, and has three articles you can’t miss. In “ An Important Time for Design ”, Cameron Koczon challenges designers to be all that they can be: The web is going to increasingly shape our world and consequently our daily lives. We can either sit on the sidelines and submissively assist those who are doing the shaping or we can take a more active role in creating the future we want. This year, thanks to a spike in demand, designers have a chance to actively nudge the world in any direction they like. It’s a huge opportunity with a tiny window. Let’s not let it pass by. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

Though I certainly do not support SOPA or the PROTECT IP Act (the complete, rather contrived acronym of PIPA), I will not be blacking out meyerweb. This is largely because the vast majority of my readers already know about these bills, and very likely oppose them; as for anyone who visits but does not know about these bills, I feel I’ll do better to speak out than to black out. (Which is not a criticism of those who do black out. We all fight in our own ways.) Instead, I will reproduce here the letter I attempted to send via contact form to my state Senator this morning, and which I will print out and send by regular postal service later today. Senator Brown: I grew up in Lexington, Ohio. I moved to Cleveland in pursuit of a career, and found success. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I use my walk to and from work every day as an opportunity to catch up on my Huffduffer podcast . Today I started listening to a talk I’ve really been looking forward to. It’s a Long Now seminar called Universal Access To All Knowledge by one of my heroes: Brewster Kahle , founder of The Internet Archive . Brewster Kahle: Universal Access to All Knowledge — The Long Now on Huffduffer As expected, it’s an excellent talk. I caught the start of it on my walk in to work this morning and I picked up where I left off on my walk home this evening… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Aral recently released the videos from last September’s Update conference . You can watch the video of my talk if you like or, if video isn’t your bag, I’ve published a transcription of the talk . It’s called One Web, Many Devices and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. It’s a short talk—just under 17 minutes—but I think I made my point well, without any um-ing and ah-ing. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

Using CSS transitions can be quite fun. But what’s not fun is when you want to transition something that needs to use display:none or visibility:hidden (or really, any non-transitionable property). For example, let’s say you have a dialog. When the user clicks on the close button, you want the dialog to fade out — a simple transition from opacity:1 to opacity:0 . The problem is that the element is still there, even though you can’t see it… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

By far the most common use of media queries is to execute CSS based on viewport width (using min-width or max-width ). Lately there’s been more talk about using media queries based on height as well. Paul talked about using min-height media queries to adjust content appearing above the fold . Owen Gregory wrote his superb 24 Ways article on using viewport proportions and device-aspect-ratio for media queries. Trent has documented his use of horizontal and vertical media queries to bump up the font size for wide and tall viewports . One of the areas where I’ve found height-based media queries to be quite handy is in combination with another CSS3 module: multiple columns . … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

While I was in San Francisco for the last Event Apart of the year in December, Luke pulled me aside while he was preparing for his A Day Apart workshop on mobile web design. As befits the man who literally wrote the book on web forms and also wrote the the book on mobile-first design , Luke was planning to spend plenty of time covering input on mobile devices and he wanted my opinion on one of the patterns he was going to mention. Let’s say you’ve got your typical checkout form asking for credit card details. The user is going to need to specify the expiry date of their credit card, something that historically would have been done with select elements, like so: January February March April May June July August September October November December 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 With the introduction of the new input types in HTML5 , we can now just use input type=”month” . That’s particularly nice on mobile devices that support input type=”month” like Mobile Safari since iOS5. But the behaviour on non-supporting browsers would be to display just like input type=”text” …not ideal for inputting a date… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Here’s a nifty piece of in-browser behaviour… Fire up Chrome and in the address field type “huffduffer.com” followed by a space and BOOM! …the address field transforms into a site-specific search field: “Search Huffduffer.” That’s thanks to this XML file that’s been on Huffduffer since day one. It’s the most straightforward example of the OpenSearch format. It’s the same format that powers Firefox’s search providers. If you visit Huffduffer with Firefox and click in the browser’s search field, you’ll see the option to “Add Huffduffer” to the list of search engines. I can’t imagine many people will actually do that but still, no harm in providing the option. Another option that’s been added to Huffduffer recently (thanks to Andy ’s hacking) is the ability to access the API through YQL … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Local lads British Sea Power have started up a residency, playing the first Friday of every month down at The Haunt. Myself and Jessica went along to the inaugural event, which was great fun. The only downside was that it clashed with a one-off screening at The Duke of York’s of The Thing , the 1982 classic that conspicuous by its absence from the recent John Carpenter all-nighter . Now I’m sure you’ve probably seen the Thingu parody that’s been doing the rounds. Personally, I’m still laughing about The Thing: The Musical . … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

‘The Bacon and Cheese Machine’ is a collaboration between Illustrative genius McBess and P-G Bikes for Dudes Factory I’m a sucker for art projects like this, and really fancy having a go myself! This video shows the intricate painting process unfold: … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

2011 was the year that cycling replaced the “search for the right media centre” as the main blog topic at The Hickensian. I’ve been pretty much starting from scratch in terms of knowledge, and gleaning information from all sorts of sources. Here are just some of things I’ve learnt this year: There are Rules . 87 of them in fact. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

A few years back, Craig took some lovely pictures of four generations of sushi chefs : The story goes something like: Jiro trained Shiro who ran off to Seattle, started one of the first sushi joints in the city, and trained Taiichi, who now runs his own sushi shop. Jiro also trained his son, who works at Sukiyabashi Jiro and (one assumes) plans to take over the business once his octogenarian father retires (which, according to Jiro, is when he dies). I love the additional photos that Craig took of each chef making their nigiri-te (the hand motion they use when forming nigiri). The undisputed Jedi master of these sushi chefs is Jiro Ono. He’s the subject of the forthcoming documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi . Tagged with sushi documentary photography food japan … Read the rest here