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SimpleBits Go to the source

Ten years ago, two of my biggest fears were: flying and public speaking. I’ve done enough of both (usually combined) over the last several years to where I’m now OK with either. At times even comfortable with it. I’ll probably always get nervous right before a talk — but the anxiety has shifted from, “crap, how am I going to get through this” to, “I want this to be good . I don’t want to let anyone down”. With that confession out of the way, the next year is filling up with some great events, and I thought I’d list them here: Future of Web Design NYC — November 17th, 2009. … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

Well, after 6+ years on an ancient and highly customized install of Movable Type 3.15, and 4+ years on various homegrown CMS solutions, I’ve finally upgraded the guts of this site. I chose WordPress. Sure, there are several other excellent options out there to power the blogs of 2010 and beyond, but the familarity of WP, its plugins, pricetag and other factors all fed into the decision. Plus, I told Matt in the halls of SWSW in 2003 that I’d try his little weblog project. … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

Marshall Alexander creates wonderful one-piece paper toys, available as free PDF downloads for you to make, including the Max figure (right) having a wild rumpus! Growing up in the seventies and eighties, my personal work is heavily inspired by retro design, videogames, movies, bright plastic toys and TV cartoons. Most of this work can be downloaded for free from my site. So get your knives and glue out, download some of the models and start building. Enjoy! Comment on this … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

by Mandy Brown I remember the candy cigarettes most fondly, not because they tasted better, but because they were grown-up. Sticks of white sugar rested neatly in packaging that could have passed for the real thing. I could hold a candy cigarette between my fingers and perch on the curb—my too-long legs in front of me—and the driver in the passing car would open his eyes wide; I was seven going on seventeen. It wasn’t long before candy cigarettes vanished from the aisles, sent off to the same warehouse where the toy-guns-that-looked-too-real went. They were too obvious a sign of our parents’ addictions, too easy a target for their guilt. And yet I’ve barely smoked a day in my life… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

In case you hadn’t noticed the lovely titles on this page, they’re League Gothic . Well, they should be if you happen to be using the latest version of Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer. However, it took much trial and error to figure out exactly how to get there. There are a number of pieces to the puzzle but in the end, I got something to work. The assumption here is that you are on a Mac (as I am) but I believe these tools work the same on PC… Read the rest here

Design Melt Down Go to the source

A new serving of tasty event sites…attend and learn (or just admire the nice designs)… Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

While it’s been a fairly quiet summer around these parts, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve been slacking off. Let’s run down the list. New Chalkwork Icons & Search Back in June while sitting around recovering from some minor surgery, I spent a weekend producing a new free icon set for payments and ecommerce called, naturally, Chalkwork Payments . It highlighted a fairly obvious deficiency in the collection, so immediately after I set to work on a much larger commerce set. Creatively named Chalkwork Commerce of course. Due to the growing size of the overall icon family (2500+ now), I decided a better way to find a specific icon was in order. … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

Our friends at Campaign Monitor are sponsoring two tickets to the Handcrafted CSS workshop in Salem, Massachusetts next month! Write a haiku via Twitter over the next 24 hours, and enter to win one of two free tickets to the event. Ethan has all the details on how to enter . Go go go. … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

Our friends at Campaign Monitor are sponsoring two tickets to the Handcrafted CSS workshop in Salem, Massachusetts next month! Write a haiku via Twitter over the next 24 hours, and enter to win one of two free tickets to the event. Ethan has all the details on how to enter . Go go go. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

In doing research on Italian type, I stumbled across a wonderfully inspiring resource published 460 years ago, possibly on or about the typography work by Giambattista (or Giovambattista or Giovanni Battista) Palatino, the master Italian calligrapher. A Google translation doesn’t provide a lot of clarity as to exactly what the book is about or why it was created, but the source from which I discovered the resource describes the book as follows: This jewel of a book was published in 1550 by Antonio Blado asolano in Rome. It is now available on the web and contains of complete alphabets, from chancery scripts, to blackletter and roman. There are also greek, hebrew, Cyrillic, Syrian, Arabic and other alphabets. Below are a few snippets from the book… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

In doing research on Italian type, I stumbled across a wonderfully inspiring resource published 460 years ago, possibly on or about the typography work by Giambattista (or Giovambattista or Giovanni Battista) Palatino, the master Italian calligrapher. A Google translation doesn’t provide a lot of clarity as to exactly what the book is about or why it was created, but the source from which I discovered the resource describes the book as follows: This jewel of a book was published in 1550 by Antonio Blado asolano in Rome. It is now available on the web and contains of complete alphabets, from chancery scripts, to blackletter and roman. There are also greek, hebrew, Cyrillic, Syrian, Arabic and other alphabets. Below are a few snippets from the book. You can browse the online version containing scanned images of all 128 pages… Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

Now that we’ve announced the book , we can also announce another exciting thing: Handcrafted CSS: A Day of Markup & Style will be a unique, one-day workshop presented by Ethan Marcotte and myself on September 14, 2009 at the Hawthorne Hotel here in Salem, Massachusetts . You’ll get a copy of the book (the Video Edition , including the DVD ), and we’ll present the content live, throughout four takeway-packed sessions, followed by Q&A. Breakfast, lunch and two snack breaks are also provided. And we’ll cap off the day with an after party at an awesome location to be determined. The Hawthorne Hotel is located in downtown Salem, just 16 miles north of Boston. It’s also just a 10-minute walk from the MBTA Commuter Rail station which connects Salem to Boston in about 25 minutes… Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

Last week I had the pleasure of attending @media 2009 in London, where it has to be said, I had the best conference experience I’ve had for a long time. I prefer the more cosy nature of the event – a single track, not too large and overwhelming quantity of people, and simply great talks. I can’t pick one favourite presentation, as I came away feeling really inspired and energised by everything. It was also the last @media curated by Patrick Griffiths, who is moving on to follow other passions (from next year the conference will be in the able hands of the Web Directions Team ). I want to take this opportunity to thank Patrick for encouraging me to talk, and giving the best possible environment to do it in. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

Almost a month ago, I wrote about supporting older browsers — how and whether we should even support them. We draw a line in the sand that says, "You popular browsers, stand over here. Everybody else, just be happy you got content." More specifically, a base style sheet would declare some default font styles but no float or other layout tricks. Just linear content. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

When CSS animations were first introduced in Webkit back in 2007, I expressed my concerns that CSS may not be the best place for it . Sound cool? I don’t think so. Not only does it make CSS more complicated, it makes JavaScript more complicated, too. Having actually taken some time to implement CSS animations in an example , a light bulb clicked. The way I looked at how animations were declared and in what situations you would declare them suddenly changed. … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

The rule of thirds and ratios such as the golden section are fantastic methods for achieving designs that feel cohesive. The problem is these principles don’t really apply to web design. Golden Ratio: When the ratio between two numbers is the same as the ratio of the sum of those numbers and the larger number. Basically, a+b is to a as a is to b . Also referred to as the “divine proportion” from its frequent occurrence in nature. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

The Module Pattern is the use of closures to create, in essence, private functions that are only accessible by other functions created within that closure. Functions can be attached to an object and returned outside of that function call. This establishes a public API and only the functions defined within that public API will have access to those hidden functions. The YUI blog documents this well but here is a simple example of the Module Pattern: var ManageChildren = (function(){ var children = []; return { addChild: function() { /* add to children array */ }, removeChild: function() { /* remove from children array */ } } })(); In this example, the ManageChildren object will have two methods: addChild and removeChild. From outside the wrapper function, you cannot access the children array that is defined within. After having worked with and used this pattern for some time, I now avoid it… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

With all the talk of URL shortening services, I decided to add a quick service into Snook.ca, which is run on CakePHP, to redirect a short URL to a post. Because my static content already has short URLs and all I have are posts, creating a short URL handler for it was very easy. To give you some context, I route my posts through a specific structure: /archives/:category /archives/:category/:articlename In this case, I have a couple routes that route everything to my Posts controller and the bycat or view actions. These action take the named parameters and pulls out the appropriate content. Easy peasy. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

It’s the honeymoon phase of learning a new platform. That part where you really enjoy the features that it offers. It’s fun and exciting. You’ve yet to discover all the weird quirks and limitations. This little screencast is of my little frolic through the fields that is Webkit in Titanium… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

Now that I have a little more free time, I’ve begun the process of bringing Snitter back to life. The crowd of desktop applications has not deterred my resolve to (re)build a Twitter application of my own. I have a vision — a vision that I’ve had since before SXSW of last year — that I still have an opportunity to bring to fruition. However, along the way, I’ve decided to accomplish a little extra along the way: I’m building a framework to allow others to build their own applications quickly and easily. This framework, I have dubbed Streamliner . … Read the rest here