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Snook Go to the source

Zielun asks of managing projects: It often happens in projects that based on one, large system with tons of modules that can be enabled or disabled, and documentation is often not up-to-date or doesn`t exist at all. At least I have such experience. I know that real problem lies elsewhere like in project management but such things often plays main role when you or team decides which coding standard to pick for a project to solve such issues. This project detritus can definitely be frustrating. Big projects that go on for extended periods of time begin looking like sediment layers of a rock formation… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

Harry Brundage , a co-worker of mine at Shopify , does a lot of CoffeeScript development and said he would love to be able to do CoffeeScript right from the console in Chrome’s Web Inspector. I asked Paul Irish , a “dev relations guy” at Google, to point me in the right direction on building just such a thing. The result of today’s pet project is CoffeeConsole , a Chrome extension that adds a new panel inside the Web Inspector. Type in any CoffeeScript and then hit the run button (or hit Command-Enter or Shift-Enter). The code will be compiled into JavaScript and then run in the context of the current window… Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

A little over five years ago, Greg Storey suggested Whitney for the SimpleBits logotype that went along with a previous brand update . I’m thankful he did, because since then it’s become a favorite typeface around these parts, eventually becoming the base for the current ‘SB’ mark. Over the next few years,  Hoefler & Frere-Jones catalog became my standard go-to font choices for presentation slides. I was hooked. Over the weekend I made some subtle design tweaks here, and some not-so-subtle type refreshing. I’m honored to be beta testing H&FJ’s forthcoming webfonts offering. … 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

Andy Budd Go to the source

Over the years I’ve heard plenty of designers moan about their clients. I’ve also witnessed a recent outburst of complaints against authors and speakers on Twitter. However the group that rarely comes under fire in public, but probably should, are the mass of terrible agencies out there. Through my travels I get to speak to lots of designers and developers, and am constantly amazed by how smart, knowledgeable and engaged these folks are. … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

One of the best annual wrap-ups returns after a hiatus in 2009-10, Our Favorite Typefaces , from Typographica. Welcome back! The idea is simple: I invite a group of writers, educators, type makers and type users to look back at 2011 and pick the release that excited them most. … This is not a juried contest. The result isn’t necessarily the “best fonts of the year”, or even those most used or ballyhooed. But these 50 selections do capture a pretty accurate snapshot of where type design is now, and where it’s headed. And the results are spot on… Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

After the blackout on Wednesday, it seems that the political tides are shifting against SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act—as of this writing, there are now more members of Congress in opposition to the bills than in favor. That’s good news. I wil reiterate something I said on Twitter, though: the members of tech community, particularly those who are intimately familiar with the basic protocols of the Internet, need to keep working on ways to counteract SOPA/PIPA. What form that would take, I’m not sure. Maybe a truly distributed DNS system, one that can’t be selectively filtered by any one government or other entity. I’m not an expert in the area, so I don’t actually know if that’s feasible… Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

I generally avoid lists and New Year’s resolutions, but Mike Monteiro issues a rallying cry so poignant we all need to listen: I spent the first 10 years of my career saying things like, “If I could just do this work the way I know it should be done…” and convincing myself that someone else was keeping me from making better choices. I’ll often be reviewing work with another designer and they’ll say, “Well, if I were doing this…” I stare back at them in astonishment until they realise what they’ve said. What is this strange gene that makes designers handicap themselves? Mike sums things up as only he can and it’s a damn fine way to start off a fresh new year. Do yourself a favor and read this one. It’s a wake up call we could all use… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

It is once again that time of year where I reflect on the year that has passed and contemplate the year the come. Professionally On a professional level, this has been a fantastic year but still not without its ups and downs. This year capped my second and final year with Yahoo!. Yahoo! has been a great experience for me and exposed me to an environment that I hadn’t worked in before. I was able to work with large teams on a large scale across multiple products. To know that I had a big part to play in the success of those projects is very rewarding. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

I first came across the term Minimum Viable Product when I dropped into a talk by Eric Reis at the Web 2.0 Expo in New Year a few year’s back. As a company that has always worked on variable scope projects, defining a MVP seemed like a great way of managing client expectations. Rather than clients worrying whether your team would deliver something useful, you’d work together to define the smallest thing you could release and it still be a success. You would then guarantee that the client would meet their core business needs, and everything else you manage to deliver in that time was a bonus. … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

There is nothing worse than pulling up to an unknown cafe while out on a ride to find they offer poor coffee and stale cake Patisserie Cyclisme , is THE source of cycling café reviews and they have a rather spiffingly hypnotic new logo! Comment on this … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

A month ago I made one of the best purchases I’ve made in a long time. I bought a kick scooter . Not one of those aluminum things with rollerblade wheels where the handle is so short you have to hunch over—but a scooter built for adults. Check out this video that shows how the KickPed operates—particularly how it folds up. … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

We’re very excited to release not one, but two, new A Book Apart titles today. We’re finishing up our publishing year with a big splash; first with Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter , and next with Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski . These guys are both personal UX/design heroes of mine and their books really hit home. Here’s an appetizer from the back cover of Aarron’s book: Make your users fall in love with your site via the precepts packed into this brief, charming book by MailChimp user experience design lead Aarron Walter. From classic psychology to case studies, highbrow concepts to common sense, Designing for Emotion demonstrates accessible strategies and memorable methods to help you make a human connection through design… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

With all my work at Yahoo!, I’d been thinking more and more about CSS architecture. I really sat down and took the time to analyze my process. What’s the most flexible but straightforward way to do it? How does this fit in with the team process and how does this work in comparison to how other people are doing it? I started making notes and eventually started writing up my thoughts… Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

Here’s an interesting idea for improving bike lights and night time visibility. Revolights is a Kickstarter Project that places LED s in a ring around the wheel, timed so that it provides a constant beam lower down, lighting up the road around you: From the video, I’m not 100% convinced that they’re quite bright enough yet, but to be honest, I adore the effect. Tron light cycle comparisons aside, I’m just a fan of how they look when moving. I really hope this project gets some attention, funding and development – in a few years this might be the kind of thing that gets built into the wheel itself. Tagged: cycling , inventions … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

Wood Type Revival is the brainchild, and subsequently successful Kickstarter project , of Matt Griffin and Matt Braun from Bearded . Their aim is: …to acquire ten fonts of rare historic wood type representing faces that are not available in the world of digital typography. The faces will be printed on an old Vandercook proof press, scanned, and digitized as opentype fonts. Those fonts will then be for sale as digital downloads on this site. … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

Golden Grid System , a folding grid for responsive design. I’m not big on frameworks, especially when we’re talking about baseline grids, but this one is really well done. And I can get behind this sentiment from its creator: “Take it apart, steal the parts that you like, and adapt them to your own way of working.” Plus it’s a beautiful design to boot. Be sure to resize your browser a lot and play with the little grid reveal button on the top right of the page. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

Just a quick documentation of this interesting bug. This only happens in Internet Explorer 8 (but not 7 or 9), which was interesting. If you have an element with long text but it has white-space:nowrap to prevent text wrapping with a max-width and overflow:hidden to clip the overflowed text, then a floated container (which should collapse to the width of the content) will collapse to the width of the text as if it was not set to be clipped. The use of text-overflow:ellipsis has no effect on this. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about CSS architecture these days. One thing in particular that has crossed my mind is how to handle certain situations. For example, we want to hide content on the page and then reveal it (or vice versa). In JavaScript, this is relatively straightforward: get an element, and apply a class or remove a class to change the state of the element. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

“You Interact with the Content, Not the OS” : Joseph Cohen: They reversed the direction of mouse scrolling! Crazy! But really, they needed to. With Lion, Apple is trying to change the user experience metaphor that has governed OS design since the 80s. It was a symbolic move, but one, to me, that ties together the new interaction paradigm — you interact with the content, not the OS. Lion — at $29 — seems like an incremental upgrade. But I guarantee that it will prove to be one of Apple’s boldest moves in defining how we interact with computers of the future. … Read the rest here