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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I’m working on a covert project that may or may not be related to my next letterpress poster . This time-lapse video shows me attempting to recreate one of the glyphs featured in Libro di M. Giovambattista Palatino , which, again, may or may not be used in a poster involving letterpress. I captured the process using iShowU (Mac), sped it up 3000%, and edited it using Final Cut Express. … Read the rest here
I’ve spent a couple days worth now trying to figure out the best and most complete approach to font embedding using @font-face . It really is a dark art that must be mastered. It is by no means a straightforward process. Font Formats Generally speaking, these days, a font on our system is going to be one of two formats: TrueType (with a .ttf file extension) or OpenType (with a .otf file extension). While it would be nice to be able to just throw a font like this on the web and link it up, we’re hit with two major limitations… Read the rest here
I have a confession to make: I don’t like paying full price for Apple hardware. So I buy it refurbished . Almost all of it. In fact, in the past few years I’ve purchased a 20″ iMac, 13″ black MacBook, Mac Mini, Airport, and now a 13″ MacBook Pro 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (aluminum unibody) — all refurbished. The obvious advantage to buying refurbished over paying full retail is exactly that — you typically save anywhere from 10% to 30%, and all products are covered by a one-year warranty. I’ve hardly needed the warranty… Read the rest here
dConstruct week is in full swing. The conference itself is tomorrow. Remy and Brian are doing their workshops today. Myself, Rich and Nat did our HTML5 and CSS3 Wizardry workshop yesterday. I was handling the HTML5 side of things and had quite a bit of fun with it. … Read the rest here
I can never pinpoint the exact moment at which I
I know, this feels like a Facebook meme or something like that. But in the absence of having time to post something more substantial, this will have to do. I go in for knee surgery tomorrow, hence a large part of the reason things have been relatively silent around here. This is due to a severe injury playing soccer (football) and several weeks of physical therapy since, consuming a lot of my spare time. This will be surgery #5 for me, the continuation of a history of knee problems since I was 16. The most ridiculous injury so far… Read the rest here
HTML5 is a strange character with what appears to be a split personality. Hardly surprising then that something so divided would appear to be so divisive. First of all, there
HTML5 is a strange character with what appears to be a split personality. Hardly surprising then that something so divided would appear to be so divisive. First of all, there
Somebody contacts you out of the blue, possibly through a friend or from an advert you posted on a dating site, interested in meeting up for a drink and possibly more. They like what they’ve seen so far, but before telling you about themselves, they want a little more information. It’s noting big and perfectly normal. They just want a copy of your passport, your last quarter bank statement and the phone numbers of your past couple of dates. Oh, and could you sign this contract agreeing with my standard date conditions assuming I chose to go out with you… Read the rest here
Somebody contacts you out of the blue, possibly through a friend or from an advert you posted on a dating site, interested in meeting up for a drink and possibly more. They like what they’ve seen so far, but before telling you about themselves, they want a little more information. It’s noting big and perfectly normal. They just want a copy of your passport, your last quarter bank statement and the phone numbers of your past couple of dates. Oh, and could you sign this contract agreeing with my standard date conditions assuming I chose to go out with you. … Read the rest here
I thought I had Adobe’s colour profiles all worked out. I really did. I’m sure they’re great for photographers and print designers and so on. The problem is, on the web, we deal with browsers and image formats that don’t support colour profiles. With a few exceptions, we can’t use them even if we want to. … 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
