Webdesigninformer.com

Snook Go to the source

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

Snook Go to the source

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

Cameron Moll Go to the source

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

Eric Meyer Go to the source

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

Cameron Moll Go to the source

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

Cameron Moll Go to the source

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

Eric Meyer Go to the source

(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

Eric Meyer Go to the source

(This is part of the Feedback on ‘WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008′ series.) The portion of the feedback devoted to shapes had two overarching themes, as I saw it. That makes this entry a bit short, but when I tried to combine it with my feedback on “ Graphical Effects “, it quickly got too long. So, a little amuse cerveau , as it were. Animations, transformations, and so on — the WebKit team have of course been having a field day in this area, and what they’ve done will likely make is way to other browsers. Or not. I don’t know. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

(This is part of the Feedback on ‘WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008′ series.) Not surprisingly, there was a lot of community feedback asking for better layout mechanisms . Actually, people were asking for any decent layout mechanism at all, which CSS has historically lacked. Floats mostly work, but they’re a hack and can be annoyingly fragile even when you ignore old-browser bugs. Positioning works in limited cases, but does not handle web-oriented layout at all well. Why do we use floats for layout, anyway? clear . … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

View from on stage as I’m preparing to speak at An Event Apart New Orleans 2008. I’ll be straight up with you: I don’t profess to be an expert speaker. I’ve had my share of presentations that have been total flops, along with some very successful ones. But if anything, I’ve done quite a bit of speaking over the past four years (see the summary on my LinkedIn public profile ), and therefore I’ve learned a few things about speaking along the way. Below are 20 things I’ve learned. Though this list is geared towards one-hour sessions rather than panels and workshops, some of the same principles apply… Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

(This is part of the Feedback on ‘WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008′ series.) In this round, layout . Not all of it, but the bits that struck me as either really useful or really, really way too long overdue. Float containment – yes, we need a property that does just that. As long as we’re tied to floats for layout—and I plan to rant about that soon—there should be a clear, unambiguous, intentionally defined property that tells elements to wrap themselves around floated descendant elements. overflow works in most cases but can fall down in unusual circumstances (I’ve seen scrollbars appear where none were actually needed) and anyway, it wasn’t intended to provide the wrapping effect in the first place… Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

Back before holiday season hit, Elika Etemad—better known as Fantasai —published WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008 . I gave it a read and came away with a number of things I wanted to say. So many things, in fact, that I’ll need to split them up into a series of posts. This here post will serve as introduction and hub, with links to the follow-on entries added as they’re published. All very Bray -ny, no? (Go ahead, groan… Read the rest here

Clagnut Go to the source

The MyFonts January 2009 newsletter reports on their Top 10 Fonts of 2008. The list highlights the year’s most successful fonts in each genre, based on sales numbers. Sitting pretty in that list (based on sales numbers, remember) is a free font family: Museo and Museo Sans , which were the year’s top geometric display fonts. Designer Jos Buivenga offers three out of the five Museo weights for free, along with 2 out of the 10 Museo Sans fonts, but on the strength of the paid weights alone, the Museo family still made it to the top of the list. Jos specifically allows use of the free weights for @font-face linking, but it’s clear this was no deterrent to people forking out hard cash for the full family. … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

As soon as I mentioned I’d ordered one of these, I’ve had a lot of interested people quiz me about it, so it seems a review is in order! Apologies for the use of press photos here, as the ones I’d taken (and the video) were rubbish – I’ll hopefully post decent ones in the next few days. Quick recap: The WD TV is a device for playing your non- DRM media (Movies, Music and Photos) through your TV (via HDMI or Composite) with audio out via toslink if you prefer. There is no internal HD, you simple plug in up to 2 USB drives, making it easily expandable. It intrigued me for 2 reasons: cost and size. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Recently I’ve seen a considerable amount of press on blogs and such regarding HTML 5, “the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web” (W3C). I have virtually no experience (yet) with HTML 5, so as I jump on the bandwagon and begin familiarizing myself with it, I thought I’d share some of the resources I’m reading along the way. So far from what I’m learning, the consensus among several of these articles seems to be this: The world isn’t ready for HTML 5 at large just yet, but we can begin preparing for it by using common, semantic selector names ( header , nav , section , etc.) — or even new attribute names — derived from HTML 5 within our HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.x documents. This is by no means an exhaustive list, just a start. In each of these you’ll find other resources to help you dig deeper. … Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

It’s a new year, so it’s time for a slight change of direction. You may have noticed your feed reader of choice just barfed up a few dozen posts from these here parts. I’m hoping that little bit of necessary unpleasantness will be one time only. I’ve come to realize that my content-creating has become a lot more distributed, which means the long-form post format of this site has been seeing less and less love in recent years. Much has been written about Twitter killing the urge to write longer blog posts, and I won’t dispute that as a cause. I liked Andy Budd’s take on why his site has been suffering, I can relate to a lot of those reasons… Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

There’s a lot of sneering about end of year lists, but I love looking back personally, as well as reading others (like Jeremy and Elliot ) as well. Anyway, I’ve been doing it since 1990, so I don’t see why I should stop now… Music With the exception of Vampire Weekend, 2008 didn’t have a great deal that excited me musically. So much so, I didn’t list any favourites for that year. In contrast, there has been a shipload of albums that have done it for me in 2009 (and in no particular order): Silversun Pickups : Swoon Placebo : Battle for the Sun Phoenix : Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix The Clientele : Bonfires on the Heath Mew : No More Stories Are Told Today… (long pretentious album title, but another great Mew album nonetheless) Yeah Yeah Yeahs : It’s Blitz! Mos Def : The Ecstatic Mastodon : Crack the Skye Pelle Carlberg : The Lilac Time Bat for Lashes : Two Suns Bombay Bicycle Club : I had the blues but I shook them loose Brendan Benson : My Old Familiar Friend The Duckworth Lewis Method : The Duckworth Lewis Method Idlewild : Post Electric Blues Imogen Heap : Ellipse Editors : On this light and on this evening Kasabian : West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum Graham Coxon : Spinning Top School of Seven Bells : Alpinisms iTunes also tells me that the most played tracks this year were Silversun Pickups’ “Panic Switch” and Placebos’ “Bright Lights”. There were also good albums such as Grizzly Bear’s “Veckatimest”, The Flaming Lips “Embryonic” and “Julian Plenti: is Skyscraper” that had some winning tracks, but not enough to hold interest for the whole album. … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

There’s a lot of sneering about end of year lists, but I love looking back personally, as well as reading others (like Jeremy and Elliot ) as well. Anyway, I’ve been doing it since 1990, so I don’t see why I should stop now… Music With the exception of Vampire Weekend, 2008 didn’t have a great deal that excited me musically. So much so, I didn’t list any favourites for that year. In contrast, there has been a shipload of albums that have done it for me in 2009 (and in no particular order): Silversun Pickups : Swoon Placebo : Battle for the Sun Phoenix : Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix The Clientele : Bonfires on the Heath Mew : No More Stories Are Told Today… (long pretentious album title, but another great Mew album nonetheless) Yeah Yeah Yeahs : It’s Blitz! Mos Def : The Ecstatic Mastodon : Crack the Skye Pelle Carlberg : The Lilac Time Bat for Lashes : Two Suns Bombay Bicycle Club : I had the blues but I shook them loose Brendan Benson : My Old Familiar Friend The Duckworth Lewis Method : The Duckworth Lewis Method Idlewild : Post Electric Blues Imogen Heap : Ellipse Editors : On this light and on this evening Kasabian : West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum Graham Coxon : Spinning Top School of Seven Bells : Alpinisms iTunes also tells me that the most played tracks this year were Silversun Pickups’ “Panic Switch” and Placebos’ “Bright Lights”. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

At the start of 2008, my past self wrote down a few resolutions for my future (now present) self: Reduce and/or offset your non-renewable energy output. Give blood. Lose some weight, you fat bastard. Play more bouzouki. Let’s take them one at time… Reduce and/or offset your non-renewable energy output. … Read the rest here