Webdesigninformer.com

Shared notebooks are one of the many selling points of Evernote. Being able to automatically share content easily (no manual upload), with additional benefit of an RSS feed is genius – it almost becomes a blogging platform. As well notebooks shared with individuals (such as moodboards for clients) I have two public notebooks: Design Scrapbook – where I keep any inspiration, be they images, PDF s or type samples. When clippings have come from webpages. the original URL is saved too. … Read the rest here

My Evernote Workflow

Shared notebooks are one of the many selling points of Evernote. Being able to automatically share content easily (no manual upload), with additional benefit of an RSS feed is genius – it almost becomes a blogging platform. As well notebooks shared with individuals (such as moodboards for clients) I have two public notebooks: Design Scrapbook – where I keep any inspiration, be they images, PDF s or type samples. When clippings have come from webpages. the original URL is saved too. Cheese Diaries ) – where I take snaps of cheese labels to remember what I ate… Read the rest here

Onward

It’s so easy to wallow in self-pity when things don’t go right. As much as 2009 sucked on all levels, it wasn’t all bad. As much as I want to sulk, the fact remains that I live a charmed life. Through some karmic luck of the draw, I’ve got a lot to be thankful for. Personal Projects This past year was a year of simplication and basically had me letting go of all my personal projects—at least for the time being. … Read the rest here

Onward

It’s so easy to wallow in self-pity when things don’t go right. As much as 2009 sucked on all levels, it wasn’t all bad. As much as I want to sulk, the fact remains that I live a charmed life. Through some karmic luck of the draw, I’ve got a lot to be thankful for. Personal Projects This past year was a year of simplication and basically had me letting go of all my personal projects—at least for the time being. I shut down SidebarAds, I never worked on Snitter, and I never finished Haylia, FontSmack or any number of other personal projects that I wanted to work on… Read the rest here

Shaping the City

If you’ve got 4 minutes spare, treat yourself to this video of printmaker Paul Catherall explaining how he produced the beautiful linocut prints that were commissioned by Transport for London under the title “A new view of London”. An exhibition of his work is on display at the.gallery@oxo in London South bank’s until May 18, and the posters are available in the London Transport Museum Shop . Comment on this … Read the rest here

Rejoining the ranks of the self-employed

Yesterday at noon I turned in my employee badge, laptop, and other employer-owned property. Goodbyes and K.I.T.’s were exchanged. A Snickers was indulged, just because. And with that, I concluded a chapter from the last three years of my life. Today I begin full-time employment as founder, principal, whatever of Cameron Moll LLC. This is a decision that has been quietly (and carefully) considered since November 2008… Read the rest here

Discovery

Discovery are a new project by members of Vampire Weekend and Ra Ra Riot. Vampire Weekend was my favourite album of 2008 – like a breath of fresh air to my collection – and this looks set to be a contender for 2009. Go see the Discovery site created by David Emery and his team of boffins. … Read the rest here

Coding like it’s 1999

Recently I made the switch back to HTML 4 for DOCTYPE s and px for font-size (sound like 1999 again?), and I’ve tweeted about it occasionally. I’m documenting the switch more thoroughly here. HTML 4.01 Strict I’ve chosen to go with HTML 4.01 Strict as the DOCTYPE in my projects moving forward, favoring it above XHTML 1.0 Strict and HTML 5. I’ll briefly explain my reasoning. XHTML 1.0 Strict – This is what many of us in the industry, including myself, have been using for the past few years… Read the rest here

Authentic Jobs: Advice for Staying Gainfully Employed

The redesign for Authentic Jobs , which is coming along swimmingly thanks to your feedback, will include a blog to allow myself and others to post articles on the topic of employment, freelancing, and the like. The following is one such article. I’ve been bookmarking the links below over the past few months in anticipation of the new blog. However, because the redesign is taking longer than I had hoped, I’ve decided to post the article now given the timeliness of the subject. The last 6 months or so have been rocky for just about everyone and every business, and with layoffs and budget cutbacks, job search is certainly no exception. Many more applicants, but far fewer job openings… Read the rest here

Handling an Explicit-Width Bug in Internet Explorer

In creating the combo-bar charts for the survey report , I stumbled into an Explorer bug that I didn’t remember ever seeing before, and Google didn’t turn up anything that seemed to be related. This could easily mean that I’m the only person who ever did something this insane and thus found the bug. It could just as easily mean that my Google-fu has failed. Either way, I’ll write it up here so it can enter the collective memory. … Read the rest here

Findings of the A List Apart Survey 2008

At last—at long, long last!— the results of the A List Apart Survey 2008 are available , along with the anonymized raw data we collected. There are a great many reasons why it took so long to get this out the door. A big part is that it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort, which means it happens in our “free time” (and there the word “free” has a couple of meanings). I say it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort because the detailed analysis is actually done by a pair of professional statisticians, who are paid for their time and expertise. They did a great job once more, and did it in a reasonable time frame. … Read the rest here

Colour Contrast Check Tool Updated

Over five years ago, I put together a really simple tool that let you specify a foreground colour and a background colour. The tool would spit out whether it met the W3C guidelines for acceptable levels of contrast as part of AERT . A year later, I added convenient sliders for adjusting the red, green and blue (RGB) values. I decided to take a moment to update the tool with a couple new features. WCAG 2.0 The first of these is having the tool be able to calculate the contrast ratio as defined within WCAG 2.0 . The guidelines appear to be less strict than what was defined previously… Read the rest here

Colour Contrast Check Tool Updated

Over five years ago, I put together a really simple tool that let you specify a foreground colour and a background colour. The tool would spit out whether it met the W3C guidelines for acceptable levels of contrast as part of AERT . A year later, I added convenient sliders for adjusting the red, green and blue (RGB) values. I decided to take a moment to update the tool with a couple new features. WCAG 2.0 The first of these is having the tool be able to calculate the contrast ratio as defined within WCAG 2.0 … Read the rest here

Exploring Cufón, a sIFR alternative for font embedding

Thanks to a tweet from Jason Santa Maria a few weeks ago (and his help since), I was pointed to Cufón , which “aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use.” I’ll refer to these tests again in a minute, but feel free to jump ahead to these Cufón test pages that I’ve put together. sIFR , as many of you are aware, is a means of replacing “short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems” using a combination of Flash and JavaScript. Shaun Inman , Mark Wubben , Mike Davidson , and several others put in many long hours developing and refining IFR and sIFR, and we all owe them our gratitude for moving forward in a big way the state of typography on the web. These efforts continue today, as evidenced by this Web Typography mini-site from a SXSW 2009 panel. For many of us, however, the Flash part of these technologies makes it difficult to set up and use… Read the rest here

Selectively Disabling Downloaded-File Warnings in Leopard

One of the things that I’ve found mind-bendingly annoying about Leopard (besides its complete refusal to allow classic window management) is the “this file was downloaded from the internet, are you sure you want to open it?” dialog box. Yes, damn it: I just downloaded the file with the express intent of opening it. Stop bothering me. Keep it up and I might mistake you for PC . What’s even worse is that the dialog requires mouse input to get past. It would be just within the limits of acceptability if the dialog buttons responded to keyboard input; if I could hit command-O or something to invoke “Open”, then I’d probably keep the safeguard in place, because I could just charge past it with a quick twitch of the fingers. … Read the rest here

The 5 P’s of Twitter’s runaway success

Hi there, respected Twitterer. Follow me at @ cameronmoll . Twitter , the social ______ application for which no one can accurately describe its purpose (except this video ), became a runaway success last year. The San Francisco-based startup added 70% of its subscriber base in 2008 and is steadily growing in 2009, with an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 new accounts opened every day ( source ). Actually, I think we enjoy claiming we can’t describe what Twitter is, yet a closer inspection of it yields not only a better understanding of it but also why it’s become so prevalent in the media lately. And when that kind of inspection occurs, it’s not surprising to the inspector why Twitter is where it’s at today. … Read the rest here

Recent job listings (and job search data)

I was reviewing analytics data for Authentic Jobs this morning, and some figures emerged that are remarkable, but also somewhat unsurprising: For the same monthly period one year ago, visits to the site have increased by 45.9% and average time on the site has increased by 22.9% . For the same annual period one year ago (technically two years ago), visits to the site have increased by 76.0% and average time on the site has decreased by 5.1% . I say somewhat unsurprising because given the current economic climate, one can assume traffic to online job boards has increased in the last 6-12 months. Indeed, a recent report from comScore confirms this assumption: Job search ranked as the fastest growing U.S. online category in 2008 . Had comScore’s study included other countries, the same trend would likely have emerged. … Read the rest here

CSS3 Feedback: Graphical Thoughts

(This is part of the Feedback on ‘WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008′ series.) My few thoughts on the “ Graphical Effects ” part of the feedback document. A lot of what was mentioned by the community is already in the pipeline, so there’s not a lot to say about those except “hurry ‘em up, willya?”. Gradients — like rounded corners, no surprise these came up. (All we need is to define wet-floor-reflect and we’ll complete the Web 2.0 design tricks hat trick.) I’d like to see them myself, and I don’t think defining them is quite as hard as the commentary implies: Imagine, for example, applying a gradient to the text of a <span> broken across two lines. Do you apply the gradient to each part individually… Read the rest here

CSS3 Feedback: Animated Shapes