Placekitten : A simple service for using pictures of kittens as placeholders in your designs or code. See also the jQuery plugin on GitHub , which lets you dynamically change any or all images to kittens. Update: How about a bookmarklet to turn all images on any site into kittens? (thx @ paulroon ) … Read the rest here
Shawn Blanc Membership Drive and Giveaway : Shawn Blanc is making the leap into full-time blogging. I steal links from his link blog regularly, but Shawn does the long-read, entertaining article stuff too (see his software/hardware reviews ). Support Shawn by signing up for just $3/month and you’ll be entered to a number of nice prizes: Fusion Ads Burst , prints by Jorge Quinteros , signed copies of books, a copy of my Colosseo poster, and more. … Read the rest here
Let’s get straight to it! I’m busy writing a book called “The Icon Handbook” to be published by Five Simple Steps , hopefully at the latter end of this year. It will be ‘application-agnostic’, looking at the process of creating icons for web as well as software. It will be a manual, reference guide and coffee table book in one. For the last 5 years I’ve been wanting to write this book – I keep looking around for other books of its type on the market, but never find any. … Read the rest here
DODOcase’s BOOKback for iPhone 4 : It would have been nice to have one of these on the back of my phone last week . Now it’ll be a nice cosmetic cover-up. Ordered. … Read the rest here
Let’s Swap is place where artists and designers can swap art for free. I’m lucky enough to have my Colosseo print featured as this week’s swap. Here’s how it works: You submit something you’ve created — a poster, an illustration, a book — and if I like it, I’ll swap for one of my prints. Four 8” x 10” cropped prints and two 16” x 24” full-size prints are available for swapping. … Read the rest here
I wrote an article about creating an animated, image-free button with CSS3 and Typekit type and it’s been published today over at the Typekit Blog . Thanks to Mandy Brown for coordinating and editing it. In a way, the article is an extension to a lot of the stuff I talk about in CSS3 For Web Designers : using the experience layer as a place to fully embrace the pieces of CSS3 that have decent support today amongst modern browsers. Buttons are a perfect place to experiment that way—and embedded type makes them all the better, while remaining flexible. … Read the rest here
Throwing Water : I own a copy of Shinichi Maruyama’s sold-out book, Kusho , and it’s glorious. This is the same idea but in motion. I could watch 30 minutes of this, not just 30 seconds. The images are captured with a Phase One P45 camera and a Broncolor Strobe. More details about the artist and his work can be found in this interview with The Morning News . … Read the rest here
Sketchnotes : Many of us probably know people who take notes at conferences by sketching. Eva-Lotta Lamm is one of these individuals, and she put her sketches from two years’ worth of conferences in a book, printed on demand by Lulu. Brilliant. Just ordered a copy. /via Quipsologies … Read the rest here
Book Review: “Living with Complexity” by Donald Norman : Review by Robert Blinn, who observes the following: Norman explains that all of our desire for ‘simplicity’ is a false hope because life is complex. Complexity, however, does not need to be confusing. Those designers who can manage to produce devices (and systems) that corral the complexity of the world into intuitively grouped and well-designed systems will garner success in our digital world. I love this. It’s the same point I try to make when speaking about visual hierarchy and managing complexity , rather than eliminating it… Read the rest here
Frank Chimero, “The Shape of Design” : The latest runaway success on Kickstarter. Currently at $42,000 and rising, and that after just 21 hours since the initial announcement . The intro video, albeit a little long, is quite creative. Frank’s book is sure to be worth backing. … Read the rest here
My Globe Daily 1 bike has finally arrived! It took over 3 weeks after ordering it online from Evans Cycles , but it was worth the wait for the fact that it was all setup, bar attaching the pedals and straightening the handlebars. They even provide a free multitool. Normally, I wouldn’t have bought a bike that I hadn’t a chance to try first, but all the research I did led me to the Globe Daily as the bike I wanted: a modern hybrid bike with retro styling. My heart was set and I love its looks even more in the flesh… It has a front basket/rack (does rack sounds more manly?) with integrated d-lock holder. I’m still in two minds about whether to keep this on or not. … Read the rest here
Frank Chimero on the 13” MacBook Air : Frank gave up his 27” iMac in favor of the 13” Air and no external display. Here’s his reasoning: A person only flails around in regards to their rig when they don’t have a clear idea of what constitutes their work. Suitability and fit is paramount, and one is never going to find what they’re looking for if they don’t know what they need. So, I looked at my work, I watched how I used my computer for a day, and found out all I do is draw vector shapes, surf the web, listen to music, and bash words out in plain text. That’s hardly the type of activity that requires computational brute force, though I understand there are some of you out there that require just that. Not me though. … Read the rest here
Commissioned by the BBC and designed by Stuart Manning, these Sixties style posters for recent Doctor Who episodes are just spot on: The jaunty Matt Smith silhouette in the O of lodger particularly floats my boat. Comment on this … Read the rest here
“… people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It’s its own thing.” … Read the rest here
“… people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It’s its own thing.” … Read the rest here
You may have noticed that there’s a second edition of DOM Scripting out. I can’t take any credit for it; I had very little to do with it. But I’m happy to report that the additions meet with my approval. I’ve written about it on the DOM Scripting blog if you want all the details on what’s new. In short, all the updates are good ones for a book that’s now five years old. … Read the rest here
You may have noticed that there’s a second edition of DOM Scripting out. I can’t take any credit for it; I had very little to do with it. But I’m happy to report that the additions meet with my approval. I’ve written about it on the DOM Scripting blog if you want all the details on what’s new. In short, all the updates are good ones for a book that’s now five years old. … Read the rest here
I acquired an 11
Let’s face it, testing multiple browsers on multiple systems isn’t very practical. But it’s still a fact of life for the web developer. What I’m about to show you is how I manage testing in multiple browser versions. About three years ago, I used to do all of my development on a Windows laptop. I had an old Mac G3 tower, an Ubuntu server, and a Windows 2000 server… Read the rest here