Homeschool Quizzing for Four Grade Levels
TL;DR: It’s challenging. Some of you know we homeschool our four children. Their U.S. grade levels range from 1st to 6th grade. … Read the rest here
Posts Tagged books
Design Is a Job, by Mike Monteiro
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
One moment
I use my walk to and from work every day as an opportunity to catch up on my Huffduffer podcast . Today I started listening to a talk I’ve really been looking forward to. It’s a Long Now seminar called Universal Access To All Knowledge by one of my heroes: Brewster Kahle , founder of The Internet Archive . Brewster Kahle: Universal Access to All Knowledge — The Long Now on Huffduffer As expected, it’s an excellent talk. I caught the start of it on my walk in to work this morning and I picked up where I left off on my walk home this evening… Read the rest here
Reflective
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
Bulletproof Web Design, Third Edition
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
Shelve Your Opinions
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
Of bits and butterfly effects
I’ve never been so vain as to think I’ll have much impact on the world. I never wanted to be president. I never wanted to be a doctor. I’ll almost assuredly never go to war to fight for my freedom and the freedom of others. Way too much responsibility. … Read the rest here
Two New A Book Aparts!
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
We’re very excited to release not one, but two, new A Book Apart titles today. We’re finishing up our publishing year with a big splash; first with Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter , and next with Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski . These guys are both personal UX/design heroes of mine and their books really hit home. Here’s an appetizer from the back cover of Aarron’s book: Make your users fall in love with your site via the precepts packed into this brief, charming book by MailChimp user experience design lead Aarron Walter. From classic psychology to case studies, highbrow concepts to common sense, Designing for Emotion demonstrates accessible strategies and memorable methods to help you make a human connection through design… Read the rest here
Analogue
I like my Kindle. I mean, I hate the DRM and the ludicrous overpriced badly-typeset books but I really like having a browser with a free internet connection just about anywhere in the world. The Kindle is a particularly handy device when travelling. I can load it up with science fiction and popular science books without weighing down my carry-on luggage. … Read the rest here
The X-factorisation of the Web
Over the last few years I’ve noticed a strange and disturbing trend amongst web practitioners. There was a time—not so long ago—when passionate individuals would blog about their work for no other reason than to share their discoveries. The more prolific of these individuals built up an online reputation and became seen as experts. Some of the more articulate ones were asked to write books or present their thoughts at conferences, and received a modicum of success. After years of sharing their knowledge freely, some were able to capitalise on their notoriety by securing jobs at interesting companies or setting up small agencies. A few even managed to make a living off publishing books and speaking at conferences, although how they managed this is anybodies guess… Read the rest here
Conference Nonsense
There’s a lot of nonsense being written about conferences at the moment; so as a regular speaker, organiser and attendee of both free and paid for events, I thought I’d redress the balance. First off there is a big difference between community driven events and professional conferences. I started a free monthly event called SkillSwap way back in the early naughties and know a stack of people who run similar events now. These FREE events tend to rely on local speakers (who typically don’t charge), community organisers (who work for free), venue donations (usually from companies or community groups) and the occasional spot of sponsorship to pay for beer and pizza. These FREE events have grown from small local happenings into large community events like HackDay , BarCamp and Design Jam … Read the rest here
Amazon’s Kindle Cloud Reader
Amazon’s Kindle Cloud Reader : Neato. An in-browser reader. Now I can read my Kindle books on every piece of Apple hardware I own. Update: @ nicjohnson informs me they’ve already got Kindle for Mac in the App Store, while John Gruber explains why a non-native web app is probably a response to Apple’s new rules . … Read the rest here
Responsive Web Design: The Book
Today! Ethan Marcotte ‘s brilliant book for A Book Apart is available for purchase . You need to go buy it. Responsive Web Design is not just an assembly of technologies, but rather a new way of approaching designing for the web. To say this book is important would be an understatement. I had the pleasure of doing the technical review of the book. Doing a technical review of anything Ethan writes is bit like trying to find an out-of-place note on Sgt… Read the rest here
Have Kindle, will travel
I’m on my way from Florida to the Pacific Northwest. I don’t mean I’m about to set out. I mean, right now I’m in a plane flying across North America from Orlando to Seattle. This in-flight WiFi lark is quite wonderful. There are some other technological inventions that make long journeys more bearable. … Read the rest here
The Elements of Content Strategy
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
If you think your site’s content doesn’t matter, then you are sorely mistaken. Granted, the argument for content strategy has always mystified me. Not because I think we can do without content strategy, we can’t, but I’m amazed that we still have to make the argument. Folks care very much about appearances; what their websites look like means the world to them. But why don’t they care just as much about what their sites are saying? … Read the rest here
Matchboox
Matchboox : Books that come packaged inside a matchbox. /via @ insideoutmag … Read the rest here
Book Review: The Elements of Content Strategy
The third book from A Book Apart, The Elements of Content Strategy , is a “brief guide [that] explores content strategy’s roots, and quickly and expertly demonstrates not only how it’s done, but how you can do it well.” That’s an accurate description, although this book, unlike the previous two, does not feel brief. This book focuses on content and is all content. There are few diagrams and no code samples filling up the pages; this books feels lengthier than it is, and I mean that in a good way. The writing within this book is also eloquent and well-written, as I suppose might be expected for a book on content strategy. While much of the content seemed targetted at larger organizations that could afford the cost of a dedicated content strategist, I felt the material would be good to know for freelancers and agencies, alike. When I worked in an agency, I worked with project managers who had many of the skills described within… Read the rest here
Shawn Blanc Membership Drive and Giveaway
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
Announcing The Icon Handbook
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
CSS3 button article at Typekit
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