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Eric Meyer Go to the source

In the course of expanding my documentation of color values, I failed to find a table that listed all 147 SVG-and-CSS3-defined keywords along with the equivalent RGB decimal, RGB percent, HSL, hexadecimal, and (when valid) short-hex values. There were some tables that listed some but not all of those value types, and one that listed all the value types (plus CMYK) along with a few hundred other keywords, but none that listed all of the CSS keywords and value types. And none that I saw used precise values for the RGB percent and HSL types, preferring instead to round off at the expense of some subtle differences in color. So I created my own table, which you can now find in the CSS area of meyerweb . Most of it is dynamically generated, taking a list of keywords and RGB decimal equivalents and then calculating the rest of the values from there. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Earlier today Erik Spiekermann made mention of FF Chartwell , and, at least conceptually, it’s pretty fantastic. Similar to the way icon fonts replace keyboard characters with icons, FF Chartwell uses alphanumeric characters to generate beautiful charts on the fly. To my knowledge, however, this works only in software programs and can’t be embedded in web pages. Update: It can be embedded . It’s possible to embed it, but the current EULA doesn’t allow it. Demo by Yaron Schoen who says , “Besides the FOUT which was really hard (impossible?) to remove, it was glorious.” The family includes “weights” for creating bar, line, radar, pie, rose, and ring charts… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Don’t Expect Applause : Seth Godin: If your work is filled with the hope and longing for applause, it’s no longer your work—the dependence on approval has corrupted it, turned it into a process where you are striving for ever more approval. Who decides if your work is good? When you are at your best, you do. If the work doesn’t deliver on its purpose, if the pot you made leaks or the hammer your forged breaks, then you should learn to make a better one. … 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

Cameron Moll Go to the source

“Creativity is a Verb” : Milton Glaser, as quoted in Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine : There’s no such thing as a creative type. As if creative people can just show up and make stuff up. As if it were that easy. I think people need to be reminded that creativity is a verb , and very time-consuming verb. It’s about taking an idea in your head, and transforming that idea into something real. And that’s always going to be a long and difficult process… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

I was making a change to a page that needed to pull from a remote API and make changes to various parts of the page. Sounds like the time to pull out jQuery and Ajax, doesn’t it? Instead, I just used old fashioned JavaScript. Actually, I used new fashioned JavaScript. Browsers haven’t stood still in the advent of libraries and frameworks. As a result, we can take advantage of those features when we need to bake in a little extra… Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

A little while back, I was reading some text when I realized the hyphens didn’t look quite right. A little too wide, I thought. Not em-dash wide, but still…wide. Wide-ish? But when I copied some of the text into a BBEdit window, they looked just like the hyphens I typed into the document. … 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

Snook Go to the source

My mind is on CSS quite a bit these days. At Shopify , I’m jumping into projects that already well under way. As a result, it’s been a great way to look at what I wrote in SMACSS and see how applicable it is to yet another project. (As if Yahoo! wasn’t already enough of a testing ground.) With Yahoo!, I (and a team of people) were writing the CSS from scratch and creating our mental map of the project as we went along. Jumping into the middle of a project as I am at Shopify, I have to try and figure out why things are done the way they are. Here’s an example of something that I ran into in the CSS: #loading-header .loading { background: url(spinner.gif) no-repeat 0 0; } [...separated by a few pages of code...] #content { [...separated by more code...] #loading-header { display:none; } .row { display:block; } &.loading { #loading-header { display:block; } .row { display:none; } } } The loading class has a spinner… Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

The latest issue of A List Apart is one of my favorites in recent memory, and has three articles you can’t miss. In “ An Important Time for Design ”, Cameron Koczon challenges designers to be all that they can be: The web is going to increasingly shape our world and consequently our daily lives. We can either sit on the sidelines and submissively assist those who are doing the shaping or we can take a more active role in creating the future we want. This year, thanks to a spike in demand, designers have a chance to actively nudge the world in any direction they like. It’s a huge opportunity with a tiny window. Let’s not let it pass by. … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

2011 was the year that cycling replaced the “search for the right media centre” as the main blog topic at The Hickensian. I’ve been pretty much starting from scratch in terms of knowledge, and gleaning information from all sorts of sources. Here are just some of things I’ve learnt this year: There are Rules . 87 of them in fact. … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

These upcoming Kafka covers by Peter Mendelsund are really lovely. These beautiful stark shapes and colors make them unexpected, but also totally on the mark. Also, they make use of FF Mister K , a typeface based on Kafka’s handwriting. That’s one of the few appropriate uses for a handwriting font, and it really works here. via Jacket Mechanical … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

From my presentation at StarTech , here are my slides. Fake it ’til you make it shows some code and examples on how to make a web app look more like a native mobile application. This can provide a way to build quick prototypes or to build using familiar technologies. … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

Another great gallery from Christian Annyas: Speedometers are those kind of items you look at thousands of times during your live, without ever really noticing. You notice the speed, not the meter. And if you do notice the meter chances are you don’t realize someone actually designed it. The company probably even did some research beforehand. Research regarding the readability of typefaces, the right size of the numbers and the space between them. … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

Just in case you were under the impression that type design or typography are easy, I suggest you try out Kern Type and Shape Type , two fun game from Mark MacKay for Method of Action . Each game tasks you with correcting default and malformed spacing, and then ranks you against the correct solution. It’s instructive and humbling! Hug your designer today. … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

We just launched something over at Typekit that we’ve been working on for some time: a brand new interface for browsing our type library . This release had lots of moving parts, including devising a new classification system that worked with our offerings, and retagging every last one of our fonts. We had built up some crufty tags in the last couple of years, so I’m happy to say that things are nice and tidy now (and vastly simplified). But my favorite part of all is the new visual interface for browsing fonts. Type can be difficult for newcomers to understand, there are lots of strange terms that don’t always sound like what they mean… 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

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

The previous Instapaper icon on the left, and the updated icon on the right. Instapaper 4.0 is out! Instapaper is one of the best iOS app around. It lets you save articles from the web for offline reading, and strips out everything but the article text and images. It’s especially great for a subway commute. … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

Stephen Doyle, that super smart guy that everyone loves, created some lovely tape illustration/lettering/installations for a New York Times Magazine story this weekend. Lots of people do these type illusions, but few do it this well. Check out the tape on the skeleton’s ribs! I want to be Stephen Doyle when I grow up. Also, don’t miss the behind the scenes video. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

There’s a lot of nonsense being written about conferences at the moment; so as a regular speaker, organiser and attendee of both free and paid for events, I thought I’d redress the balance. First off there is a big difference between community driven events and professional conferences. I started a free monthly event called SkillSwap way back in the early naughties and know a stack of people who run similar events now. These FREE events tend to rely on local speakers (who typically don’t charge), community organisers (who work for free), venue donations (usually from companies or community groups) and the occasional spot of sponsorship to pay for beer and pizza. These FREE events have grown from small local happenings into large community events like HackDay , BarCamp and Design Jam … Read the rest here