Webdesigninformer.com

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

Hillman Curtis, artist, designer, filmmaker, Brooklynite, bicyclist, friend, and explorer passed away last week at the young age of 51. I put off writing about him because I couldn’t find the words. Everything I would try to write felt so insignificant for such a significant man. Thankfully, as is usually the case, I found my words among friends. The folks over at Happy Cog have collected some thoughts on Hillman and invited a few of us staff alumni to share too. Below is my contribution: I followed Hillman’s work when I was first getting started in design. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

Zielun asks of managing projects: It often happens in projects that based on one, large system with tons of modules that can be enabled or disabled, and documentation is often not up-to-date or doesn`t exist at all. At least I have such experience. I know that real problem lies elsewhere like in project management but such things often plays main role when you or team decides which coding standard to pick for a project to solve such issues. This project detritus can definitely be frustrating. Big projects that go on for extended periods of time begin looking like sediment layers of a rock formation… Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

I’m very excited for our latest release from A Book Apart available today, Mike Monteiro’s Design Is a Job . I’ve been working in design a while now and good handbooks on how to do it right are few and far between. Years ago, I read Norman Potter’s What Is a Designer , a thin yet surprisingly dense book that attempts to quantify this dear profession. There’s truth to be found there, but the language is terse. Perhaps it’s an effort to dissuade all but the most brave; if you get to the end and you still want to be a designer, you may have earned it… Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

A little over five years ago, Greg Storey suggested Whitney for the SimpleBits logotype that went along with a previous brand update . I’m thankful he did, because since then it’s become a favorite typeface around these parts, eventually becoming the base for the current ‘SB’ mark. Over the next few years,  Hoefler & Frere-Jones catalog became my standard go-to font choices for presentation slides. I was hooked. Over the weekend I made some subtle design tweaks here, and some not-so-subtle type refreshing. I’m honored to be beta testing H&FJ’s forthcoming webfonts offering. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

‘Paper’ for iPad : There are so many things right about this app. The lovely watercolor, miniature sketchbook icon. The marketing site. The “take this everywhere life takes you” video above. … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

When I was writing The Icon Handbook, I had my list of first choices for people I wanted to work with. Chris Mills and Owen Gregory for Project Manager and Copy Editor, Gedeon Maheux from the Iconfactory for Technical Editor, and for the foreword… The Noun Project. All of which said yes! I absolutely love what The Noun Project are doing, there isn’t a comparable site for the quality of it’s curated collection of pictograms. So when I was asked to write a guest post for The Noun Project blog, I was chuffed to bits! The post I’ve written, ‘Insights on Symbol Design’ contains portions from The Icon Handbook (and as such It’s another taster for the book), but was still written more or less from scratch, looking at considerations of pictogram design in particular. Comment on this … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

So, yeah. I wrote an e-book . It has been an interesting experience and I thought I’d share a few random thoughts on how things have gone so far. Backwards When I first started down the path of writing the SMACSS e-book, I had intended it to be either an e-book or a printed book. … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

Yesterday, on stage at An Event Apart Atlanta , I announced Pears : an open source WordPress theme for creating your own markup & style pattern library. I wanted to create my own database repository of commonly used patterns and figured the tool might be useful for others as well. Breaking interfaces down into patterns has been immensely helpful in learning and re-evaluating the best possible code to implement them. I’ve just gotten started and will be adding more as I create them. But Pears isn’t about how I code these patterns—it’s a tool for creating your own . The theme is available on GitHub for those that want to chip in and make it even better. … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

I’m getting a lot of ‘Are you still using Fireworks?’ questions recently, and my answer is ‘Not for almost 2 years now…’. I’ve been using Illustrator CS5 solidly ever since, but part of the transition is going from Fireworks Pages/States to Illustrators multiple artboards. Artboards are more flexible, and allow you to have see everything at once, but the built-in options for exporting artboards are limited. I use this wonderful script, which provides all the settings I could desire, from format to filenaming. Top work! Comment on this … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

There are a few apps that I’m particularly enjoying using at the moment, so I thought I’d share in case any of them are news to you: Choosy Choosy does a seemingly simple task, and does it very well. For a start, it provides a central preference pane to choose your default browser, but its main thrust is letting you choose which browser to open a link in. You can do this either manually via a chooser display (right), or automatically depending on order of preference. My favourite feature is ‘behaviour rules’. For example, I get emails from Opera’s internal bug tracking system, and I always want to open these in Opera, no matter what my default browser is at the time. … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

Earlier this week I recorded an interview with Chris Bowler for his Creatiplicity podcast . Chris has a very genial style and the whole affair felt very relaxed and enjoyable! Its not just about The Icon Handbook either, we discussed everything from parenting to cheese. Pop along for a listen! Comment on this … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

YAY !!! What a way to celebrate 10 years of Hicksdesign (to the very day) – my advance copy of The Icon Handbook arrives! I’m actually holding it in my hands! It has pages that turn with words (what I wrote) and pictures on them! It looks and smells flipping’ gorgeous! Excuse me, I think I need a sit down… If you’ve been waiting for the print version to be available before purchasing, now is your time to pick up a copy ! Tagged: hicksdesign , iconhandbook , icons … Read the rest here

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

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

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

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

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

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