Webdesigninformer.com

Snook Go to the source

Over five years ago, I put together a really simple tool that let you specify a foreground colour and a background colour. The tool would spit out whether it met the W3C guidelines for acceptable levels of contrast as part of AERT . A year later, I added convenient sliders for adjusting the red, green and blue (RGB) values. I decided to take a moment to update the tool with a couple new features. WCAG 2.0 The first of these is having the tool be able to calculate the contrast ratio as defined within WCAG 2.0 . The guidelines appear to be less strict than what was defined previously… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

Over five years ago, I put together a really simple tool that let you specify a foreground colour and a background colour. The tool would spit out whether it met the W3C guidelines for acceptable levels of contrast as part of AERT . A year later, I added convenient sliders for adjusting the red, green and blue (RGB) values. I decided to take a moment to update the tool with a couple new features. WCAG 2.0 The first of these is having the tool be able to calculate the contrast ratio as defined within WCAG 2.0 … Read the rest here

Design Melt Down Go to the source

The personal site can closely resemble a portfolio site, and often the line between them is rather fuzzy. All the same this collection of samples represents sites that serve to show more of a full view of a person as oppose to simply a huge display of work. Obviously this approach has benefits on a personal level (mom and dad can see photos of the baby, etc), but it also has some other potential benefits…. Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

In building this iteration of the blog, I decided to follow that trendiest of trends and embed my latest Twitter status on my sidebar. Despite having been on Twitter for awhile and having my site linked from my Twitter account, I didn’t really have anything pushing people from my site back to Twitter. Problem solved: add status to sidebar. But what’s the best way to keep it up to date? … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

(This is part of the Feedback on ‘WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008′ series.) Not surprisingly, there was a lot of community feedback asking for better layout mechanisms . Actually, people were asking for any decent layout mechanism at all, which CSS has historically lacked. Floats mostly work, but they’re a hack and can be annoyingly fragile even when you ignore old-browser bugs. Positioning works in limited cases, but does not handle web-oriented layout at all well. Why do we use floats for layout, anyway? clear . … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

View from on stage as I’m preparing to speak at An Event Apart New Orleans 2008. I’ll be straight up with you: I don’t profess to be an expert speaker. I’ve had my share of presentations that have been total flops, along with some very successful ones. But if anything, I’ve done quite a bit of speaking over the past four years (see the summary on my LinkedIn public profile ), and therefore I’ve learned a few things about speaking along the way. Below are 20 things I’ve learned. Though this list is geared towards one-hour sessions rather than panels and workshops, some of the same principles apply… 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

Andy Budd Go to the source

I remember reading a story once about an octogenarian discussing her most prized possessions with a researcher. She shows the researcher an iron that’s been going for over 40 years and explains how she had to scrimp and save to buy the product and how it ended up out living even her husband. Quizzed on why she spent so much money on the iron she said “I’m too poor to buy cheap!” Too poor to buy cheap. That simple phase really resonated with me and has stuck with me ever since. Cheap is quick. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Routinely I’m afforded the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to redesigning vs. realigning . However, not since July 2004 have I done so in a forum so public as this. Here goes… … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

As soon as I mentioned I’d ordered one of these, I’ve had a lot of interested people quiz me about it, so it seems a review is in order! Apologies for the use of press photos here, as the ones I’d taken (and the video) were rubbish – I’ll hopefully post decent ones in the next few days. Quick recap: The WD TV is a device for playing your non- DRM media (Movies, Music and Photos) through your TV (via HDMI or Composite) with audio out via toslink if you prefer. There is no internal HD, you simple plug in up to 2 USB drives, making it easily expandable. It intrigued me for 2 reasons: cost and size. … Read the rest here

Clagnut Go to the source

The CSS 1 font-weight property is used to display text with a Bold or Regular weight. This is achieved using font-weight:bold and font-weight:normal . So much so CSS 101. But there’s more to the lives of many typefaces than just bold and regular. There’s Ultralight, Extralight, Light, Thin, Medium, Book, Semibold, Demibold, Extra-bold, Heavy, Black, Extra-black, Ultra-black, and more besides. Since its inception in 1996, CSS has provided a way of displaying these other weights through use a numerical scale with the font-weight property. … Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

It’s a new year, so it’s time for a slight change of direction. You may have noticed your feed reader of choice just barfed up a few dozen posts from these here parts. I’m hoping that little bit of necessary unpleasantness will be one time only. I’ve come to realize that my content-creating has become a lot more distributed, which means the long-form post format of this site has been seeing less and less love in recent years. Much has been written about Twitter killing the urge to write longer blog posts, and I won’t dispute that as a cause. I liked Andy Budd’s take on why his site has been suffering, I can relate to a lot of those reasons… Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

This isn’t necessarily a list of movies that came out in 2008. Just ones I’ve enjoyed watching. King of Kong In Search of a Midnight Kiss Dark Night Two Days in Paris Sharkwater No Country for Old Men In Bruges The Orphanage Cloverfield Tell No One Any must see movies I’ve missed off that you’d recommend? … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

I’ve talked a lot about OS X apps recently, and I’m slightly nervous of doing it again so soon. Let me make it clear though, that I only blog about those that interest me, and for no other reason! I’ve mentioned before about creative spongery , and how I collect images, screenshots and type samples from the internets and shove them into iPhoto. I loved the idea of being able to use one app to do multiple jobs. After 3 years of doing this, I became bothered by having my photographs and family snaps in particular, mixed up with ‘work stuff’. iPhoto is an excellent app for storing though, so I decided to create a new iPhoto library and switch between the two. … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

I’ve talked a lot about OS X apps recently, and I’m slightly nervous of doing it again so soon. Let me make it clear though, that I only blog about those that interest me, and for no other reason! I’ve mentioned before about creative spongery , and how I collect images, screenshots and type samples from the internets and shove them into iPhoto. I loved the idea of being able to use one app to do multiple jobs. After 3 years of doing this, I became bothered by having my photographs and family snaps in particular, mixed up with ‘work stuff’. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve been on this lovely MacBook Pro. It’s a fabulous little laptop. And probably one of the tasks I’ve spent the most time doing is sending and receiving email. Keep in mind, this is from the point of view of a die-hard Windows user of many years. I’ve been using Microsoft Outlook and had really gotten to like the most recent version in Office 2007. My default view in Outlook 2007 gave me all of my information at a glance: my inbox, a list of favourite folders that I used to track current projects, a quick view of upcoming appointments, and my to-do list which included flagged emails (which could be further categorized by colour)… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve been on this lovely MacBook Pro. It’s a fabulous little laptop. And probably one of the tasks I’ve spent the most time doing is sending and receiving email. Keep in mind, this is from the point of view of a die-hard Windows user of many years. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I’ve been with the same ISP for years: Eclipse Internet . I never had any cause to complain until recently. I’ve been finding that certain types of requests simply weren’t completing; file uploads, some forms, Ajax requests… I started googling for any similar reports. I found quite a few forum posts, all of them expressing the same sentiment; that Eclipse used to be good but that since getting bought out by Kingston, service had really gone downhill. Most alarmingly of all, I read reports of traffic shaping . … Read the rest here