The Icon Handbook is now available to buy . Here’s what it looks like: This is a book that I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. Whenever I’ve looked for a book on this subject, the only available publications are reference guides that simply reproduce as many symbols as possible. Where books have gone into theory, they were published decades before desktop computers, and therefore miss the most relevant and active context of icon use. … Read the rest here
Yesterday, a copy of my latest book arrived in the mail, the Third Edition of Bulletproof Web Design . The first edition came out back in 2005, and I’ve been revising it every few years. This latest edit was a bit larger than the 2nd because so much has changed. HTML5, CSS3, Responsive Web Design—all of these things dovetail nicely into the core bulletproof concepts from the original book. If you have the 2nd edition, the new version is likely not a necessary upgrade (New Riders probably loves me for saying that). Meaning, the guidelines for building flexible websites are still there, but a lot of the code and some of the examples have been brought up to speed. … Read the rest here
The Icon Handbook is ready and will available to buy tomorrow (Tuesday December 20th), from Five Simple Steps 3pm GMT ! You can purchase the digital edition or pre-order the paperback which will ship around 30th Jan 2012. A proper blog post will come tomorrow, in the meantime, I need a good sit down and a cup of tea… Tagged: iconhandbook , icons … Read the rest here
Lighting Techniques for Video Interviews : This is an excellent tutorial that answered a lot of questions for me regarding how to light an interview properly, as that’s something I’m still experimenting with . … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
The fine folks at Made by Hand made a cheery promo video for those lovely designy temporary tattoo people at Tattly . I love it when smart people get together and make great things. And you can’t help but smile while watching this. I make a cameo appearance about seven seconds into the video. … Read the rest here
Tagged: discovery , science … Read the rest here
Todays 24ways article is Displaying Icons with Fonts and Data- Attributes , taken partly from Chapter 6 of the upcoming Icon Handbook , but rewritten to fit to the 24ways format. Instead of using the traditional route of PNG s, web fonts offer a scalable and resolution independent solution. Combined with HTML5 data attributes, you can create one CSS rule to style them all in one go. This article covers both the advantages and disadvantages of the technique. Thanks must go to Drew Wilson who helped me understand how to use data attributes. He created Pictos the excellent icon font used in the article, and his experience in making Pictos was a valuable source of research… Read the rest here
…as we have a date! The Icon Handbook will be available to pre-order on December 20th ! More details will be released shortly, but the Five Simple Steps page has an introduction and table of contents to give you a flavour. Tagged: iconhandbook , icons … Read the rest here
It’s been just a week since Clearleft unveiled the Map Tales project that we built at Hackfarm and there have already been some great stories told with the site. Paul documented his 2009 road trip to South by Southwest . Alessio put together a photographic guide to his adopted home, showing the secrets of Barcelona . Andy told two tales of two different trips: wine-tasting in California’s Dry Creek Valley and hanging with the hipsters in East London . Fellow Brightonian Tom Prior has recreated the story of the famous Stirling Moss victory at the 1955 Mille Miglia , the legendary open-road endurance race in Northern Italy. I love the simplicity of Oliver and Peter Walk to School that Peter Ruk has embedded on his site —beautifully simple psychogeography . … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
Does our definition of what a book is need to change? Barbara deWilde has been seeking to answer just that as part of her project “What the Book” in my SVA IxD class that also doubles as an installation at the AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers exhibition going up later this week at the AIGA headquarters in NYC. This on the heels of the near cancellation of the competition last year which drew the ire of many designers. Part of the project is a short survey online that asks you to agree or disagree with such statements as “I would never give an ebook as a gift” and “Decorating with books is perverse”. Those same questions are asked at the exhibit too as an installation that allows viewers to physically shelve books as votes (as seen in the photo above). … Read the rest here
Hero : This is a really fantastic, well-shot piece. And the resulting portrait definitely wasn’t what I was anticipating. Update: The process of creating art with small dots is called stippling . Had no idea. (Thanks @signalnoise .) /via @jontangerine … Read the rest here
The Never Forgotten House is a beautifully-written piece with a central premise that is utterly, utterly flawed. Once again the truism that “the internet never forgets” is presented as though it needed no verification. Someday soon, the internet will fulfill its promise as a time machine. It will provide images for every space and moment so we can fact check our memories. Flickr and Facebook albums will only accumulate. … Read the rest here
Have you every been in the situation where the client keeps requesting tweaks to the design or changes in functionality? As you sit moving boxes around the page, the budget is slowly draining away and you’re no longer sure whether the project can be completed on target? In these situations what do you do? Some designers will push back on the client, claiming that these changes were never in the agreed brief and that they had only budgeted for 2 or 3 rounds of design. … Read the rest here
On the eighteenth day of last year’s 24 ways, Paul Hammond wrote a great article called Speed Up Your Site with Delayed Content . He outlined a technique for loading some content — like profile avatars — after the initial page load. This gives you a nice performance boost. There’s another situation where this kind of delayed loading could be really handy: mobile-first responsive design. Responsive design combines three techniques: a fluid grid flexible images media queries At first, responsive design was applied to existing desktop-centric websites to allow the layout to adapt to smaller screen sizes… Read the rest here
I had a good productive Responsive Enhancement workshop in Düsseldorf and Marc was an excellent host. But alas, I couldn’t stick around for the rest of the Beyond Tellerrand conference which was, by all accounts , excellent. I made my way back to the UK post-haste and started playing rail parkour to get across the country to Herefordshire. There lies The Colloquy —the rural but very comfy location for Clearleft ’s week of hacking in the countryside. Casing out the joint We called it Hackfarm. The idea was pretty straightforward. … Read the rest here
There is nothing worse than pulling up to an unknown cafe while out on a ride to find they offer poor coffee and stale cake Patisserie Cyclisme , is THE source of cycling café reviews and they have a rather spiffingly hypnotic new logo! Comment on this … Read the rest here
Letterpress Tuesday : A brief hiatus from hiatus-ing to announce Letterpress Tuesday , a one-day holiday sale exclusively for letterpress goods made by yours truly and a few other vendors. As for my stuff, this is final promotional sale of 2011, so if you’d hoping to receive or gift one of my posters at a discount this Christmas, today is the day to pick one up. Happy holidays, all. … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
Wow, Little Printer from BERG is such a stellar little example of making something simple and fun. Little Printer lives in your front room and scours the Web on your behalf, assembling the content you care about into designed deliveries a couple of times a day. You configure Little Printer from your phone, and there’s some great content to choose from — it’s what Little Printer delivers that makes it really special. We have an incredible group of launch partners, and in the run-up to shipping we’re working with them all on custom publications. It makes mini personal newspapers! Count me in. Just watch the video and tell me you couldn’t see using one of these things… Read the rest here
Meet Jack the Lumberjack. He’s the new mascot for Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS . When working on the e-book, I wanted to have something that could provide an identity for the book and for the project. The idea of it being a lumberjack quickly came to mind. I liked the idea of a lumberjack for a number of reasons. For those that aren’t aware, I live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada… Read the rest here