Webdesigninformer.com

Andy Budd Go to the source

User research is an extremely powerful tool (or set of tools) for understanding customer needs and behaviours. As digital projects grow in size and complexity, the risk of building the wrong thing becomes an increasing danger. So it makes sense to spend a portion of your budget to ensure that you’ve done the due diligence and are investing wisely. Marketing teams have known this for years, so few company’s would dream of launching a product or service without first understanding the market and ensuring product-market fit. However for some reason this hasn’t filtered into the world of digital products… Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

A couple of weeks back I wrote about customizing your markup , but I got an important bit wrong and while I’ve corrected the post, I wanted to clear up the error in detail. I said that you wrap portions of your document (or the whole thing) in an element element and use the customized element inside. This is incorrect , and actually a very bad idea. In fact, you define your customized elements using an element element and then use the customized elements later in the document. Something like this: <element extends="h1" name="x-superh1"> </element> <h1 is="superh1">UltraMegaPower!!!</h1> <h1>Regular Old Power</h1> The line break inside the element element isn’t required—I just threw it in for clarity. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

I have this very odd problem that seems to be some combination of PDF, Acrobat, Outlook, Thunderbird, and maybe even IMAP and GMail. I know, right? The problem is that certain PDFs sent to me by a single individual won’t open at first. I’ll get one as an email attachment. I drag the attachment to a folder in my (Snow Leopard) Finder and double-click it to open. … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

Stamen has released some beautiful alternative takes on map tiles . They’re all free to use wherever you display OpenStreetMap data. All three are great, but the watercolor one is particularly pleasing to the eye, feeling a bit reminiscent of an old pirate treasure map. Maybe we just need to throw some all-caps italic Caslon on top of it. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

I was making a change to a page that needed to pull from a remote API and make changes to various parts of the page. Sounds like the time to pull out jQuery and Ajax, doesn’t it? Instead, I just used old fashioned JavaScript. Actually, I used new fashioned JavaScript. Browsers haven’t stood still in the advent of libraries and frameworks. As a result, we can take advantage of those features when we need to bake in a little extra… 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

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 the Apple TV doesn’t let you connect a drive directly with your content (it requires a ‘middle man’ of iTunes) getting your content to show up can be a little trying at times. Some of the reasons why it goes wrong are: The Mac serving the content isn’t on The Mac serving the content has dropped off the wifi network (happening a lot in Lion) The Mac serving the content doesn’t have iTunes open The Mac serving the content has iTunes open, but Home Sharing isn’t turned on (or using the same login as the one specified on Apple TV) The drive where all the content is stored has become unmounted, so iTunes can’t access it You’ve remounted the drive, but there’s a bug where if iTunes has tried to play content stored on the network drive, it corrupts the file path data, replacing it with some other obscure file (in my case, it seems to be a photo folder bizarrely) In short, there’s too much to go wrong, and Apple TV is on the naughty step until these steps can be bypassed without hacks. Rant over. Tagged: appletv , mediacentre … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

In episode 2 of Off Book , typeface designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones outline the importance of selecting the right font to convey a particular feeling. Graphic designer Paula Scher talks about building identity in messaging, while Eddie Opara uses texture to create reaction. Infographic designers Julia Vakser and Deroy Peraza map complicated data sets into digestible imagery, mixing color, graphics and type. There is a moment towards the end where Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones have a John and John from They Might Be Giants thing going. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

10K Apart, Responsive Edition : Same as last year’s contest (10k of data total per app submitted), but with an additional rule this year: must be responsive. Site design by the responsive savants at Paravel . … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

As somebody who has publically stated that they “don’t care about user experience” and is fed up of “defining the dammed thing” I find myself being drawn into discussions about the term far more often than I’d like. Some designers think that user experience is just a made up name and that we’re all user experience designers really. Others think that User Experience is a term used by consultants to trick clients out of money and would prefer it we all just stuck to the title of web designer. Some feel that user experience is simply common sense design while others see it as a land grab to own the fun bit of the design process. This is all complete nonsense of course, which is why I keep getting drawn into an argument I don’t really want to have and one that isn’t especially beneficial to the industry. It’s obviously nonsense to argue that the field of UX design doesn’t exist as there are hundreds of books and conferences devoted to the practice, tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people with UX in their job title and an unfathomable number of blog posts about the subject… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Most Common iPhone Passcodes : Hint: 1234. This isn’t actual iPhone passcode data, but instead passcode data from an app called Big Brother Camera Security whose “passcode setup screen and lock screen are nearly identical to those of the actual iPhone passcode lock.” (From what I can tell, Big Brother is an app not unlike Hidden of This Guy Has My MacBook fame, but for iPhone.) There’s some irony here to behold. Users of the Big Brother app track those who use their phone without permission. And how did Daniel Amitay compile the Big Brother passcodes being used? By quietly, albeit anonymously, tracking users of the Big Brother app. Apptly named… Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

There’s an interesting debate happening in the world of mobile design at the moment. In one camp we have the “nativists” who believe that the best mobile experiences are tailored to a particular device. These are the people focused on creating platform specific mobile apps and mobile websites. Then we have the “universalists” who believe in the “one web”, a place where all content and services can be delivered to multiple devices through the same URL. This division is causing me a bit of a quandary. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Hiring: Senior Software Developer at charity: water : Regular readers of this site are familiar with my partiality to charity: water . They’re seeking someone with experience developing with an MVC framework (CakePHP is a plus), database design and implementation (RDBMS or NoSQL) and working in test-driven development. Experience with PHP and Java is necessary, as well as HTML/CSS and JavaScript. It’s a tall order for an organization accustomed to crushing tall orders, i.e. helping nearly a billion people get access to clean drinking water. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

At Clearleft we’re an incredibly business focussed agency. So we work closely with our stakeholders to understand their business needs, and then turn these into Key Performance Indicators to track. In the vast majority of cases, our clients KPI s increase after working with us. However on the rare occasion that things go in the other direction, we take it as a matter of professional pride to rectify the matter. Thankfully we’ve only seen this happen on 4 occasions in our 6 year history. … Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

I’ve decided to slap a Creative Commons license on the entire darn Chalkwork Family and make them completely free for personal use, starting right now. I’ve been considering doing this for quite a while. These icons represent a lot of hard work for me between 2006 and 2009, so you can imagine I’ve thought through the implications of making them available for free download without a pay barrier: will people use them commercially and not pay? Will they abuse the license terms? … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

AisleOne’s Antonio Carusone: A Backup System : I would imagine this is as thorough and redundant as a backup system gets. 6 copies of vital data, 3 copies of unimportant data — spread across Backblaze , Dropbox, iDisk, and a few local drives. There’s a nifty diagram , even. I’m also in the process of assembling a backup system. I went with Crashplan instead of Backblaze because of the option to have a seeded backup drive (scroll down) shipped to your home for the initial backup. Additionally, I purchased a refurbished Airport Extreme to which I’ll attach a Western Elements 2 TB drive . … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

In 1884 Thomas Marks opened his first market stall in Leeds. Over the next few years he opened 20 other stalls around the UK. In 1894, Thomas Spencer invested in the business and retail chain Marks & Spencer was born. From it’s humble beginnings M&S —as it was colloquially called—became one of the UK’ s biggest success stories and was the first retailer to make a pre-tax profit of over £1 billion. Companies like WH Smith, Woolworth’s and AMSTRAD all started the same way, so it would seem that in order to make it big, you should start small. Can the same thing be said of the Web… Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

I recently decided to create a CSS Editors Leaderboard , which is my attempt to rank the various editors of CSS modules based on the current process status of their modules, how current the modules are, and so on. It’s kind of a turn of the wheel for me, given that I started out my CSS career with browser support leaderboards. Now you can see who’s amassed the most spec points, and who’s made the most effective use of their time and energy. Who knows? Maybe some editors will try to game the system by pushing their specs along the process track. That’d be just awful . … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Daring Fireball: The Verizon iPhone 4 : The Gruber, comprehensive as always, sharing his take on the new Verizon iPhone. He’s had one for a week already: The numbers don’t lie. AT&T’s data network is faster — when you have a strong connection on both phones. The catch is with that ‘when you have a strong connection’ clause. Verizon’s network has wider, more consistent coverage, and noticeably superior voice quality…. There’s one difference [between the AT&T iPhone and Verizon iPhone], the network, and their network looks better. … Read the rest here