Webdesigninformer.com

Andy Budd Go to the source

Yes, it’s that time of year again. Time to set your alarms or calendar notifications as tickets for dConstruct go on sale this Monday at 11am. As always we’ve scoured the world to bring you an amazing line-up of speakers. People who educated, entertained and inspired us over the last couple of years. We’ve got insightful speakers like Adam Greenfield , author of “Everyware”, talking about ubiquity and location, or Russell Davies from Wired Magazine talking about the rise in post digital culture. We’ve got entertaining and educational sessions like Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel ’s excellent talk about interaction paradigms in science fiction movies. … Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

Currently one of the biggest stumbling blocks to embedded type on the web is of a legal nature rather than any genuine technological barrier. Most of the major browsers have now implemented the @font-face property, and between sIFR and Cufón there are also alternatives for providing non-standard typefaces to browsers that haven’t caught up yet. So the technology that allows us to embed custom fonts is more or less here, but the licensing debate rages on. Richard Rutter and Simon Klein have written a great pair of posts summarizing the concerns some foundries have with embedding, while countless other opinions have come out in favour of both addressing and ignoring these concerns. But this is really for the foundries and the browsers to figure out. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Lionel Schriver’s piece in the Standpoint called Dashed Bad Form is a witty affair, comparing and contrasting the semicolon and the em dash . Alas, the self-describing nature of the article is completely lost in the online version—though presumably not in the print edition—having suffered the all-too-common fate of emdashculation; every instance of an em dash in the article has been converted into a plain ol’ hyphen. Oh, the irony! …proper irony too—not that confused Alanis Morissette kind . It’s probably a CMS issue. But, hey, it’s as good an opportunity as any to point to the classic article on A List Apart , The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters) . … 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

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. (I personally have not opened Flash on my computer in literally 4 years, and I hope to keep that run alive.) Cufón, on the other hand, can be set up and run on your site in about 5 minutes. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

This post isn’t about what you think. This isn’t about some handy little CSS technique you can implement right now. Not yet, anyway. This is about an idea that I’ve been working on. An idea that — I hope — will one day help you and me build better web sites. I’ve come up with my own layout specification . … 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.) 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

(This is part of the Feedback on ‘WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008′ series.) Out of all the selector feedback , selector blocks was the part that really caught my attention. I also see the usefulness of a parent selector , but that one has come up many times before, and it’s always died at the doorstep of implementors, who point out that it’s far too difficult to implement without serious performance penalties and even risk of browser lockup. See, for example, the comment left by David Hyatt on Shaun Inman’s post on the idea. Similarly, I think constants (or macros or whatever they’re called) are a great idea and would be very helpful, especially if you’re coding up a Jason Special. Both are loaded with use cases, so I don’t feel like I can add a lot; besides, constants are already in the WG charter, so there’s once more hope in the land. So anyway, selector blocks… 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

Adactio Go to the source

Registration opened a couple of days ago for the latest Clearleft event. UX London will be taking place from June 15th to 17th . This will be a very different event to dConstruct . For a start, the format is based around workshops (although there will also be a day of presentations). … 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

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