Webdesigninformer.com

Mezzoblue Go to the source

Last week I put together an animated infographic that required some flexibility. Alpha transparency was essential, but the number of images I needed to pull it off meant that my typical way of creating PNGs wasn’t going to work. Let’s be honest; Photoshop is absolutely terrible at saving transparent PNGs for web use. Your choices are between an 8-bit with 1-bit transparency (better than a GIF in terms of file size, but no better in terms of transparency options) or a huge 32-bit PNG with alpha transparency. There’s no middle ground. … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

Let the games begin! Rich Thornett and I have been building Dribbble for what seems like years (oh wait, it has been that long). About a week ago, we quietly rolled back the curtain so the public could finally see what’s been happening in private beta. I’m pretty damned excited about this. Firstly, what is Dribbble? From the FAQ : Dribbble is show and tell for designers, developers and other creatives. … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

Last October, I wrote about my frustrations with Fireworks CS4 , and the search for decent competitors to Adobe Software. Photoshop has many alternatives, and Illustrator has a handful, but nothing else seemed to cater for the mix of vector and bitmap editing that is Fireworks. I recently tried both Photoshop and Illustrator again for icon creation, and Illustrator in particular irritated the hell out of me with it’s pixel preview artefacts ( still not fixed from CS3). Before I get a sackful of comments from diehard Photoshop fans, please believe me when I say that Photoshop is not the right tool. That post did point to 3 possibilities however: Acorn , Drawit and Opacity … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

Leave it to PPK to come out with a bold statement like, " CSS vendor prefixes considered harmful ". Moreso, It’s time to abolish all vendor prefixes. They’ve become solutions for which there is no problem, and they are actively harming web standards. The problem is that they are necessary. Look at Safari’s implementation of border-radius compared to the rest. I still can’t remember if it’s border-radius-topleft or border-top-left-radius . … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

ReadyShipper: Bulk Shipping for Mac/PC : Today has been filled with shipping madness, as the first round of Colosseo letterpress posters are on their way to customers. While a little buggy and a bit of an eyesore, ReadyShipper has saved my hide today. Integration with PayPal, UPS, and Stamps.com has made it fairly easy to process dozens and dozens of orders at a time. … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

The worrying news came today that the House of Lords have passed the draconian Digital Economy Bill . The bill is being hurried through without democratic process, and that’s just not how we should be doing things in this country. It’s clear that the bill is to appease the befuddled music industry, who are still living in a world before the home cassette recorder was invented. If you’re worried by the speed and heavy handedness of this process, please consider getting behind the campaign on 38 degrees . … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

A few weeks ago, we moved the studio (affectionately dubbed the BitCave) across the street to newer, slightly larger digs. It’s more comfortable, the windows open, we have our own temperature controls–you know, real lavish stuff. Yesterday, we relaunched the SimpleBits Shop , bringing the fulfillment back in house. Our slightly larger space is able to accomodate the stock, and now each order will be lovingly hand-packed by resident Commerce Director, Meagan Fisher . … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

Logo Design Love is a book written by David Airey that covers the whys and hows of brand identity development. The book is broken down into three parts: The importance of brand identity, the process of design and keep the fires burning which looks at how to find motivation and inspiration. It’s a light 200 pages with readable type and plenty of examples. David Airey aims this book at the aspiring designer by not only covering the design process but also covering the process of project scope and client management in the context of logo design. Logo Design Love hits the mark when it speaks from experience, which it does for most of the book… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

Logo Design Love is a book written by David Airey that covers the whys and hows of brand identity development. The book is broken down into three parts: The importance of brand identity, the process of design and keep the fires burning which looks at how to find motivation and inspiration. It’s a light 200 pages with readable type and plenty of examples. David Airey aims this book at the aspiring designer by not only covering the design process but also covering the process of project scope and client management in the context of logo design. Logo Design Love hits the mark when it speaks from experience, which it does for most of the book. There’s plenty of real world examples with plenty of input from designers other than just Airey himself… Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

A few nights ago I attended a UX-Bri session where one of the speakers floated the idea of doing free usability testing in order to win projects. I asked about the moral implications of this and was surprised by the response. While the audience largely disagreed with the idea of speculative design work, it seemed that speculative UX work was somehow more acceptable. The speaker later cc’d me into an email question from one of the audience members querying my negative reaction to speculative pitching so here was my response… “Dear XXXX, There has been a debate over the subject of speculative work running within the design community for some time now, so I thought it was worth raising the issue. One side of the argument states that helping a client solve their problems for free, before being awarded a contact is bad practice… Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

One of the problems of working in the knowledge economy is the constant need to keep abreast of current trends and thinking. This would be fine if you worked in a mature industry or one with a limited number of books, papers and conferences appearing each year. However in the knowledge economy of the web, more information is being published every day than could be consumed in a year. What’s more, that pace is increasing. The problem is exacerbated by a number of things… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Of the many things we do well as creative professionals, we often forget to think for ourselves, relying on thought leaders to determine what works for us and what doesn’t. Paramount in this failure to think for one’s self is the fact that these thought leaders often struggle to encourage others to explore new thinking without belittling their methods–or worse, ostracizing them–in the process. Whether or not the title of thought leader can be applied to myself, I’m just as guilty as anyone else. In ” 20 tips for better conference speaking “, I offer this short-sighted observation: There is absolutely no reason in the world you should use anything other than Keynote. … Read the rest here

Clagnut Go to the source

Earlier this month, Clearleft went on a company outing to the Design Museum in London. There we spent some quality time perusing the work of the influential former Braun industrial designer, Dieter Rams . Accompanying the exhibition were these design tenets penned by the man himself. Good design… Is innovative The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Last Thursday night we stopped in Albuquerque, New Mexico on our cross-country move to Florida . What was supposed to be an overnight stop has turned into a lengthy stay and a permanent change in our family’s lifestyle. One of our sons fell ill with the flu* soon after leaving Utah on Wednesday. By Thursday the flu had escalated and we found ourselves in the hospital by nightfall. On Friday the diagnosis was clear: Type 1 diabetes . … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

Well, it only took nearly a hundred issues since working on the A List Apart redesign for me to get around to writing an article. I’ve had a blast working behind the scenes working with authors on fleshing out the visuals for their articles, but after repeated kindly nudges from the rest of the ALA staffers, I wrote one of my own: On Web Typography . This has been a year packed with talk of type on the web. We’ve been making great strides in bringing real fonts to the web, a good progression that will help us rely less on replacement techniques. There are many great articles that boil down the technical hurdles involved in doing so, but I wanted to tackle what happens to our designs once we have lots of typefaces to choose from… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

A few months ago, the folks at Mobify were kind enough to create a mobile version of my site using their service. Mobify is a web-based service that allows you to create a custom mobile version of your site. Since my redesign, I got an opportunity to play with the service first-hand and felt that it might be good to share my experience. What does Mobify offer? Why would anybody use a service like Mobify? … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

I just signed and returned the paperwork. As of November 16, I’ll be an employee of Yahoo!. This might seem like a bit of a surprise for those aware that I started at Squarespace just seven months ago. Unfortunately, six months into it, the requirements of employment changed and I was no longer able to stay on. … Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

You probably experience this on a regular basis: a client sends you an illustration or a logo they’d like to use in a project, but it’s a low-res bitmap or a flat image file with a background texture. Or both, if you’re really lucky. Sure, you can try and ask for a vector version, but more often than not what they originally sent was the best copy they had on hand. I seem to have made something of a hobby out of trying to coax useful results out of this type of file. Over the years I’ve stumbled across far better ways of doing it than manually clipping the background with the the magic wand or various selection tools. For the next time you’re handed a less-than-ideal source image, here are a few of my tricks for isolating the part of the file I want to work with in Photoshop. … Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

Last we left off , I’d just started going down the road of playing with @font-face , sans IE. This is the follow-up where we bring Internet Explorer back into the equation and look at the hoops we need to jump through to bring it in line. A quick refresher: following a different path than every other browser out there, IE requires a custom-created, rights-managed font file called EOT (Embedded OpenType). The syntax to safely serve up an EOT to IE was shown in that previously-mentioned post . What we’re covering here is, how in the world do you create an EOT file in the first place? Well, there’s WEFT, Microsoft’s one and only tool for creating EOT files… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

A really quick screencast today. I twittered about how frustrating it was to have to take 5 clicks to subscribe to a feed into Google Reader within Firefox. I finally decided to take a few moments to fix the issue and get it down to one click (well, technically two, but who’s counting). Of course, this is by no means the only way to do it. Plenty of people on Twitter recommended plugins and bookmarks that could simplify the process. If you got ‘em, link ‘em up in the comments. … Read the rest here