Hiring: Lead Front-End Developer at Stussy : Throwback time: I wore Stussy clothing frequently as a Bay Area teen. They’ve made a strong comeback the last few years, and now they’re seeking someone who “loses sleep looking at gorgeous websites” and “spams your friends regularly with some ‘awesome’ use of jQuery.” … Read the rest here
Webfont Services Chart : A nice round-up of the current options for webfont hosts. I’d like to see Part 3: Type vendors that don’t host your fonts but sell fonts approved for webfont embedding, e.g. MyFonts . /via swissmiss … Read the rest here
Determining a unit of measurement to size our text can be a topic of heated debate, even in this day and age. Unfortunately, there are still various pros and cons that make the various techniques less desirable. It’s just a matter of which less-desirable is most desirable. There are two main techniques that are extolled: Size with px Size with em Let’s review these two approaches before I reveal the magical third. Sizing with px In the early days of the web, we used pixels to size our text. … Read the rest here
Hiring: Lead Web Designer at Apartment Therapy : I have to admit I’m feeling a little special right about now seeing these guys post a listing on Authentic Jobs. I’ve been quietly following Apartment Therapy for several months, along with its sister site Unpluggd . What’s really exciting for me is that, while the content they post is fantastic, I’ve always felt the formatting and layout could use a little fine-tuning. Looks like that’ll be part of the job: The first job will be to join in our redesign process with our art director, Thomas Porostocky, and work through a complete redesign for launch in September. After that, you will be working on everything: site pages, email templates, cross browser compliance, media kits, and ad driven event campaigns… Read the rest here
Over the weekend, Aaron Gustafson and I created a tool for anyone who wants to resolve a series of CSS transforms into a matrix() value representing the same end state. Behold: The Matrix Resolutions . (You knew that was coming, right?) It should work fine in various browsers, though due to the gratuitous use of keyframe animations on the html element’s multiple background images it looks best in WebKit browsers. The way it works is you input a series of transform functions, such as translateX(22px) rotate(33deg) scale(1.13) . The end-state and its matrix() equivalent should update whenever you hit the space bar or the return key, or else explicitly elect to take the red pill. … Read the rest here
Hand-drawn Web Icon Set : A set of 247 icons (32px and 128px sizes) with a hand-drawn feel. Free for commercial and personal use. Created by the Poland-based designers at 177 Designs . … Read the rest here
Discovered in the road around the corner from my house, labelled ‘website’ on the top and sides. No, I wasn’t brave enough to look inside. I was a little scared to tell the truth, it was like someone was trying to bait me. Tagged: found … Read the rest here
I just shipped off the last of my drafts for CSS Pocket Reference, 4th Edition to my editor. In the process of writing the entries, I set up an ad-hoc test suite and made determinations about what to document and what to cut. That’s what you do with a book, particularly a book that’s meant to fit into a pocket. My general guide was to cut anything that isn’t supported in any rendering engine, though in a few cases I decided to cut properties that were supported by a lone browser but had no apparent prospects of being supported by anyone else, ever. For fun, and also to give fans of this or that property a chance to petition for re-inclusion, here are the properties and modules I cut… Read the rest here
Chris Noessel & Nathan Shedroff from UX Week . Toby Barnes from Interesting North . Matt Webb from The Do Lectures . … Read the rest here
I’ve handed over several PSDs to the crew at WooThemes , a leading source for customizable WordPress themes. I’m quite pleased with how my WordPress template, which I’ve called Brief, turned out. It’s now up to their exceptional front-end team to turn my designs into markup and make adjustments as necessary. Besides embracing a minimalist approach for this project, I had another goal in mind for my template. I expressed the following in early conversations with WooThemes: I’d like this design to appeal to more than just the web designer crowd, i.e… Read the rest here
Griddle.it : Like Placehold.it but for grid backgrounds. Add any dimensions after the griddle.it URL to get a background guide image in your site’s design, such as: griddle.it/[total width]-[number of columns]-[gutter size] /via Tiffany Wardle … Read the rest here
One method that I’ve been using quite a bit for positioning elements is setting them absolute and using left, right, top and bottom values to lock inner elements relative to an outer container. I like using this technique because padding will not cause any positioning issues like using width can—especially when widths need to be percentage-based. textarea { position: absolute; left: 5px; top: 5px; right: 5px; bottom: 5px; } I tried positioning a textarea using this technique and everything looked fine in Webkit but the moment I went to check it in other browsers, I was surprised to find it wasn’t respecting the right and bottom values. Yes, the element was absolutely positioned. And yes, the left and top values were working fine. … Read the rest here
Media Queries, a Gallery of Responsive Web Designs : Fantastic. Only complaint: make the screens click over to the site. /via @ khoi … Read the rest here
Hiring: Front-End Developer at Newism : This one’s for all the Aussies in the house. A full-time role in Newism ’s Newcastle city office. They’re seeking a front-end developer with a solid understanding of HTML, CSS, and JS. The ideal candidate, among other things, “signs up to every new web app known to man, just because they have a nice splash page.” … Read the rest here
Here’s an interesting little test case for transitions . Obviously you’ll need to visit it in a browser that supports CSS transitions, and additionally also CSS 2D transforms. (I’m not aware of a browser that supports the latter without supporting the former, but your rendering may vary.) In Webkit and Gecko, hovering the first div causes the span to animate a 270 degree rotation over one second, but when you unhover the div the span immediately snaps back to its starting position. In Opera 11, the span is instantly transformed when you hover and instantly restored to its starting position when you unhover. … Read the rest here
The architect Frank Lloyd Wright famously told a customer to move their table when they complained that water was leaking from the ceiling when they ate dinner. This is almost certainly apocryphal but hints at the ego of the experience designer. Well tell our users and customers what experience they are going to have (sometimes based on research) but they have to live with the results. In an agency centric world which I come from, designers are used like Cruise missiles. The target is acquired and we fire and forget. Rarely if ever do we get the opportunity to cycle back to see if the target turned out to be a hospital rather than a barracks. … Read the rest here
Canon Filmmakers Live with Philip Bloom : I’ll be in Miami the next couple days enjoying a full-day workshop with Philip Bloom, basically the co-godfather of DSLR video ( Vincent Laforet is the other), and basically an animal when it comes to producing some pretty fantastic stuff with a DSLR. It’ll be a nice change of pace to sit while someone else presents and talk shop about video rather than web. Other U.S. workshops are still available in Dallas, Austin, Albuquerque, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Tickets are just $150 for the day. … Read the rest here
I’ve been coming to SXSW for 7 years and I’ve seen it change from a small and intimate event to the tech sector’s equivalent of Glastonbury. Back then bloggers were king and CSS2.1 was the hot technology of the day. Today the conference has gone from 2,500 people to an astonishing 25,000. Blogging is considered old hat, and the new tech superstars are the start-up founders, the professional publishers and the best selling authors. … Read the rest here
Yesterday, Web Standards Sherpa launched. A WaSP outreach project initiated by Aaron Gustafson and Easy! Designs and sponsored by Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, W3C and several other companies. I had the pleasure of handling the initial design and art direction for the site and working with the fantastic team that put this project together. It’s exciting to see it alive and kicking. Web Standards Sherpa will… “…provide web professionals the opportunity to receive feedback, glean advice and learn best practices from experts in the field to help them improve the quality of their own work.” Check out the first pool of articles from sherpas Jared Spool, Aaron Gustafson and Erin Kissane or read more from the Web Standards Project… Read the rest here
Knight Sans : An affordable webfont that I could see myself using in an upcoming project. … Read the rest here