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Cameron Moll Go to the source

Of Mice and Markets : Zeldman: In the short run it’s going to be hell, just as the browser wars and their lack of support for common standards were hell. But it is the short run…. When I see fragmentation, I remind myself that it is unsustainable by its very nature, and that standards always emerge, whether through community action, market struggle, or some combination of the two. This is a frustrating time to be a web designer, but it’s also the most exciting time in ten years. We are on the edge of something very new. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

A little while back, Andy wrote : Even if you happen to be a genius in the waiting, there are no svengalis to pluck you from obscurity and put you on the pedestal you know you deserve. … So if you want to contribute to articles, write books and speak at conferences, you’re the only person in the way. You can contribute to A List Apart . You can write for Smashing Magazine . You can also put a resource written in HTML at your own URL that is retrievable via HTTP …write a blog post, in other words. If you prefer dead trees, you no longer need a publishing house. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

It is once again that time of year where I reflect on the year that has passed and contemplate the year the come. Professionally On a professional level, this has been a fantastic year but still not without its ups and downs. This year capped my second and final year with Yahoo!. Yahoo! has been a great experience for me and exposed me to an environment that I hadn’t worked in before. I was able to work with large teams on a large scale across multiple products. To know that I had a big part to play in the success of those projects is very rewarding. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

As the year draws to a close, I find myself casting an eye back on the past twelve months. There are two events that stand out for me: Mobilewood —the get-together in the woods of Tennessee that led to the Future Friendly movement and Hackfarm —the Clearleft outing to Herefordshire that resulted in Map Tales . I learned a lot at both events. I think there’s enormous benefit in getting together with your peers for days of intense geekery—it’s quite the learning experience. Looking ahead to next year, there’s one more such event on the horizon. Aaron started up Retreats 4 Geeks last year and kicked it off with an outstanding week in the woods with Eric . … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

Here’s a great find from the dusty depths of YouTube – a British Transport promotional film from 1955. Not only does this feature Tweed (plus fours much in attendance), cycling, a fantastic soundtrack, railways and country pubs, it’s also filmed around the area I grew up in Warwickshire. So if you need an antidote to haggard looking men or hipsters doing trackstands on their fixies*, this is it! Part One Part Two Via the Tweed Cycling Club *I do love Rapha and fixie videos too, its just that, well, this is the complete opposite . Tagged: britain , cycling , films , retro … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Dear Apple Claus, I’ve been a very good boy this year so I hope you don’t me asking for a little present. What I’d really like for Christmas is for you to fix that strange orientation scaling bug in Mobile Safari. Just in case you’ve forgotten about it, my friend Scott —who has been a very, very good boy this year (what with that whole Boston Globe thing)—put together a test page quite a while back to demonstrate the problem. Basically, if I set meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0″ then it means a pixel should be equal to a pixel: in portrait view, the width should be 320 pixels; in landscape view the width should be 480 pixels. But in Mobile Safari, if I move from portrait to landscape, the width jumps to a value larger than 480 pixels, which means the hapless user must double tap to bring the scale down to 1:1. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

I first came across the term Minimum Viable Product when I dropped into a talk by Eric Reis at the Web 2.0 Expo in New Year a few year’s back. As a company that has always worked on variable scope projects, defining a MVP seemed like a great way of managing client expectations. Rather than clients worrying whether your team would deliver something useful, you’d work together to define the smallest thing you could release and it still be a success. You would then guarantee that the client would meet their core business needs, and everything else you manage to deliver in that time was a bonus. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I flew out to San Francisco last week for An Event Apart . This was the final event (apart) of the year so it was something of a bittersweet affair. This year the line-up for AEA was—with some minor modifications—consistent from city to city: Seattle Boston Atlanta Minneapolis Washington DC San Francisco It was like a travelling roadshow, a carnival of web geekery. Next year’s AEA line-up will be very different from city to city, showcasing lots of new speakers, so last week’s San Francisco gig felt like the last concert of a tour before the band breaks up. Well, we went out with a bang. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

I hesitate putting this information out there as I’m not sure what its relevance is. I merely note it as interesting, especially in light of gender inequality in our field. In number crunching the people who have purchased a SMACSS e-book or site membership, I’ve noticed that the numbers are heavily skewed in one direction: 94.5% of the purchases are by men. That means only 5.5% of purchases were by women. I wonder if there is anything in the way that I’ve presented the information that has turned women off from buying the book. Since I market the book under my personal ‘brand’, especially via Twitter, I wonder if my particular following is also heavily skewed towards men (I suspect it is). … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

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

SimpleBits Go to the source

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

Hicksdesign Go to the source

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

Cameron Moll Go to the source

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

Hicksdesign Go to the source

Tagged: discovery , science … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

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

Hicksdesign Go to the source

…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

Adactio Go to the source

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

Cameron Moll Go to the source

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