“Web design is not merely building. It’s not just designing. It’s not only the rest of the myriad disciplines and titles we all align ourselves with, but the culmination of all these things.” - Jason Santa Maria, A Real Web Design Application … Read the rest here
A Real Web Design Application : This is a very thorough overview by Jason Santa Maria of the current tools available to web designers, their shortcomings, and the friction and waste created by transferring work from tool to browser. Jason’s argument toward the end of his article will certainly continue a debate that’s already raging: A web designer jumping into the browser before tackling the creative and messaging problems is akin to an architect hammering pieces of wood together and then measuring afterwards. The imaginative process is cut short by the tools at hand; and it’s that imagination—or spark—at the beginning of a design that lays the path for everything that follows. Without it, you’re at best able to make a website that looks like a website—rather than a design that tells a story in the form of a website. To read only the above quote on its own would be to take Jason’s remarks out of context. The paragraphs that follow demonstrate he favors designing in the browser if the tools to do so can be improved. … Read the rest here
HTML5 Live with John Allsopp : Just purchased my subscription. Though I’m familiar with a lot of this, I still have plenty to learn. I suspect it’ll be a good interactive complement to Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers . … Read the rest here
UI Design Palettes for Illustrator : If you prototype in Illustrator, consider downloading this framework. Includes GUI elements, interface icons, and buttons styles, all of which can be dropped into your artwork and customized as needed. /via Zeldman … Read the rest here
FontFonter: Try WebFontFonts on Any Website : Bear with me as I continue to catch up on old news. This is probably the coolest thing I missed last week. We’ve been in the process of selectively switching fonts on Authentic Jobs over to Kievit Pro for a little while now. You can see what an all-FF Kievit Pro version would look like and why I’m so fond of of the font family. (We’ve been using FF Kievit Pro for some time, but only as image text on buttons and nav elements.) … Read the rest here
This beautiful Apple Airport Basestation was my 30th birthday present from my wife, quite possibly one of the best presents I’ve ever had. The gift of wireless. In those days it was 1mb broadband, but it was still exciting being able to work from anywhere in the house. These days it’s been overtaken by N wireless devices, but it’s such a design classic that it has to be on display. It’s new home is the windowsill next to my desk at Webble Mill. … Read the rest here
An interview with Think Vitamin : While I was in London for the Future of Web Design conference this past May, I had the pleasure of chatting with Keir Whitaker from Carsonified about Dribbble . You can also find the audio over at Huffduffer if you happen to huff the duff stuff. … Read the rest here
FontFonter : This is a wonderful tool. Enter a URL and replace its fonts with any of FontFonts web fonts. Hmm, this site looks rather nice with FF Dagny and FF Meta Serif replacing Helvetica and Georgia. … Read the rest here
8 Faces : I just purchased a debut copy of Elliot Jay Stocks ’ new print magazine that asks: “If you could only use eight typefaces for the rest of your life, which would you choose? 8 Faces is a new magazine for devotees of typography that asks this question — and many more — to eight leading designers from the fields of web design, print design, illustration, and of course type design itself.” Hurry though, only 1000 copies available. … Read the rest here
Stanford University: iPhone Application Development (iTunes) : If you’re interested in teaching yourself how to develop for iPhone, this might be the ideal resource. Includes videos and presentation slides, all free of charge. And the “professors” are Apple employees Alan Cannistraro and Josh Shaffer. Don’t know Objective-C? Start following Dan Walker’s series of articles, the first titled “ Learn Objective-C: Day 1 ”. … Read the rest here
How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made : Just yesterday I contemplated authoring something on what I think is the most fascinating advertising campaign in recent memory. I’m glad I didn’t. It wouldn’t have come anywhere close to the insight offered by ReadWriteWeb in this article. I do wish, however, that the article would have mentioned more about the equipment and software being used for the ingenious, real-time shooting. Video DSLR? Final Cut… Read the rest here
Future of Web Design - New York : More about this later, but for now a brief announcement: I’ll be joining a marvelous crew of speakers at this year’s Future of Web Design in New York, several of whom I’ve known virtually for years but have yet to meet in person. Register now for early bird tickets and save $300. … Read the rest here
Just before noon (Eastern U.S. time) today, An Event Apart Minneapolis sold its last available seat. That’s three events so far in 2010 and three sell-outs. If you were hoping to join us in Minneapolis but hadn’t registered yet, we’re sorry we won’t see you there! You can contact our Event Manager to get put on the waiting list, or you can join us for one of the remaining two shows of the year: Washington DC and San Diego . There are strong reasons to prefer either one. In Washington DC , we’ll have our second-ever A Day Apart , a full day of in-depth learning with Jeremy Keith and Ethan Marcotte taking on the topics of HTML5 and CSS3, respectively… Read the rest here
A hard copy of Jeremy Keith ’s HTML5 For Web Designers arrived in the mail today. It’s wonderful to finally see how well-designed it is as a physical object. Most importantly, it’s the clear explanation of a confusing subject that’s made this little book a must-read. … Read the rest here
Is CSS the New Photoshop? : John Nack, Photoshop’s principal product manager: As people can do more and more in code, it makes sense to ask whether even to use Photoshop in designing Web content. I think Adobe should be freaking out a bit, but in a constructive way…. As for Photoshop, we could either teach the app to speak HTML natively (via live HTML layers ), or we could translate Photoshop-native artwork into HTML (e.g. ‘copy this button/text as HTML/CSS’). It’s not yet clear to me, however, how such code would smoothly integrate into one’s projects… Read the rest here
Inc. Magazine: How to Design and Build a Mobile Website : In which myself and several others offer advice to those diving into mobile. … Read the rest here
“Google is Bringing Android Software Development to the Masses.” : It’s called Google App Inventor for Android , and how’s this for user testing: User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors. The chances of anything extraordinary coming of this? About the same as me writing a course for nursing students. Or about the same as useful, elegant websites created by FrontPage . … Read the rest here
Fracture Custom Glass Printing : This is a unique idea: Print your photos on a sheet of glass, ready for mounting. I found out about Fracture’s service through their listing on Authentic Jobs for Web Developer / Visionary / User Interface Guru / Design Master . Pricing is affordable, from $8 for a 5”x7” print up to $25 for 11”x14”. And they’re located just a few hours away in Gainesville, Florida to boot. … Read the rest here
WebINK Font Embedding by Extensis : Another entry into the font embedding market, this one by Extensis. Fonts foundries currently include Mark Simonson Studio, Porchez Typofonderie, TypeTogether, URW, and exljbris. One nice feature seems to be the ability to control kerning within your font settings rather than just through the letter-spacing CSS property. I’m not certain, however, that kerning should be set off-site rather than within the CSS. (Though admittedly, the current CSS/browser support for kerning is lacking considerably.) … Read the rest here
If you upgraded Thunderbird and discovered that the fonts used to display messages suddenly changed, and worse still, you were unable to get all messages to obey your font display settings, then this post is most likely for you. Here’s what happened to me: I upgraded to Thunderbird 3.1, and suddenly all my messages were in a font I didn’t recognize or appreciate. I insist on seeing only the plain text version (technically, the text/plain part) of all my e-mail; and what’s more, that it be displayed in a monospace font. Courier 13, in my case. So I made sure “View > Message Body As” was still set to “Plain Text”, which it was… Read the rest here