Unless you are designing just for the joy of it – or you are one of the fabled ‘unicorns’ who can do EVERYTHING – at some point you will encounter (and probably lock horns with) someone tasked with taking your pretty little pictures and turning them into a real world product. Like cats and dogs, these relationships are historically known for being… strained.
Top 6 frustrations developers have with designers | Web design | Creative Bloq
This is an important aspect of job growth and training that I don’t think is done enough. Hearing about developers getting PSDs that are 300dpi and filled with unnamed, ungrouped layers – shameful.
When working in teams made up of designers and front-end developers, there can be a lot of frustration and confusion when it comes to handing assets over from one team member to another. These might be design mockups or icons or high fidelity imagery for banners and the like. Regardless of the content of these handovers, there can always be improvements to this process.
Depending on the project, developers will often require certain materials in order to make development as smooth as possible. So, I’d like to review a couple of steps that designers might take in order to alleviate these pressure points.
Read up on some best practices @ The Asset Handover | CSS-Tricks
Placeholder Images for every case. Webdesign or Print. Just put a custom url in your html and you receive a proper placeholder picture
Be sure to check out the Placeholder Generator for plenty of fun options for your next group of FPO images!
The Flexbox Layout (Flexible Box) module (currently a W3C Last Call Working Draft) aims at providing a more efficient way to lay out, align and distribute space among items in a container, even when their size is unknown and/or dynamic (thus the word “flex”).
The main idea behind the flex layout is to give the container the ability to alter its items’ width/height (and order) to best fill the available space (mostly to accommodate to all kind of display devices and screen sizes). A flex container expands items to fill available free space, or shrinks them to prevent overflow.
Most importantly, the flexbox layout is direction-agnostic as opposed to the regular layouts (block which is vertically-based and inline which is horizontally-based). While those work well for pages, they lack flexibility (no pun intended) to support large or complex applications (especially when it comes to orientation changing, resizing, stretching, shrinking, etc.).
Note: Flexbox layout is most appropriate to the components of an application, and small-scale layouts, while the Grid layout is intended for larger scale layouts.
One type of CSS in particular makes me cringe every time I see it; poor selector intent. Poor selector intent means carpet bombed selectors whose key selector has way too broad a reach; a selector like .header ul{} as opposed to one like .main-nav{}; .widget h2{} instead of .widget-title; article > p:first-child{} as opposed to .intro{}. Selectors whose intent isn’t specific enough.It’s worth noting that selector intent is something I completely made up at some point today; if you think there’s a better name then please let me know!
This is more of an in-depth examination of what is know in CSS as specificity – which is a fancy way of say “how certain styles get applied to certain stuff” in the DOM.
Read more @ Shoot to kill; CSS selector intent – CSS Wizardry
We can all agree that using png sprites for icons is not the most modern (or best) way to present icons on the web. Png is a rasterized format which means that if you try to make the image (or icon) larger, the quality will become worse. When browsers started properly supporting @font-face and svg some people chose to use icon fonts to serve their icons, others chose svg sprites to do this. These methods share the big benefit of scalability. This matters because our websites get viewed on many devices and you want your icons to be crisp on every device, not just the ones you optimized for by hand. This post is intended to give an overview of these two methods and to explore the benefits and drawbacks of each method. At the end of this post you will hopefully have an understanding of both svg icons and iconfonts and you’ll be able to choose one of these icon delivery methods for your own projects.
TL;DR: The comparison is very close, both have their big upsides and no real big downsides. I’d say iconfonts win because they’re a bit easier to use. Svg icons are a easier to position and manipulate. The code for this blogpost is on Github.
Your new site is not behaving how you’d expect – but how do you know if the bug is hidden in your code, or if it’s a browser issue? Creative Bloq asked the experts.
Check out How do you identify a browser bug?
With the web being used on so many different devices now it’s very important that you can change your design to fit on different screen sizes. The best way of changing your display depending on screen size is to use media queries to find out the size viewport of the screen and allowing you to change the design depending on what screen size is on.
read the whole article at Checking Media Queries With Javascript.
personally, i think this is possibly an excellent way to inject only the needed javascript libraries according to their usefulness. If a particular feature ability isnt used in a certain context, say a Revolution Slider in desktop which isn’t used in tablet or mobile… don’t load that library unless you have to!
To customize bootstrap a bit more, here’s a site that generates the CSS to use different colors for buttons when using bootstrap.
I use modernizr on most of the scratch site builds and this will be used right along with it going forwards…
Conditionizr – Perfect Supplement To Modernizr
First things first – Conditionizr does not intend to replace Modernizr, nor would it be able to. Instead is has been developed as the perfect supplement, so that both solutions work best when used cooperatively. Conditionizr is based on the same classes approach Modernizr is, thus making integration seamless.
Through the use of javascript-based feature detection, Conditionizr is not only able to determine which browsers are in use on the client-side but also which OS they are running on and whether the device driving it is retina-capable or not. According to the found possibilities Conditionizr adds corresponding classes to the HTML elements and cares for necessary CSS and JavaScript to optimally support the findings.
Instead of adding the conditions to the markup, Conditionizr works completely markup-free. All you have to do is call the script right after jQuery and Modernizr (if you want to take advantage of that) and add a configuration part to the head of your document. All supported browsers can be configured to how far the influence of Conditionizr shall go. You can choose to en- or disable the use of specific classes, styles and scripts separately. In the same way you can define whether Conditionizr shall take care of OS and retina detection.
Conditionizr for jQuery – Conditional Loader For Scripts And Styles.
The top 50 books for web designers and developers
The ultimate web designer and developer book list. I have to say I agree a TON with the books on this list. And looks like I have a lot of reading to do…. ugh.
I have to agree with Cameron Moll about reading. To me it’s a chore. It’s something I have to make myself do and I’me a very slow reader but at the end of the day reading books like this only help and I find the subject fasctinating.. still.
“Which CSS preprocessor language should I choose?” is a hot topic lately. I’ve been asked in person several times and an online debate has been popping up every few days it seems. It’s nice that the conversation has largely turned from whether or not preprocessing is a good idea to which one language is best. Let’s do this thing.
Really short answer: SASS
Slightly longer answer: SASS is better on a whole bunch of different fronts, but if you are already happy in LESS, that’s cool, at least you are doing yourself a favor by preprocessing.
Much longer answer: Read SASS vs. LESS | CSS-Tricks.
Top 10 Pro Tips and Tools for Budding Web Developers and Designers.
For all youz “budding” types out there on the Dev and Design side. This can be said for both techy types and creative types.
WordPress 3.2 is the fifteenth major WordPress release in the project’s eight-year history. The focus in this release was to make things faster, lighter and more streamlined.
The cost of employing a programmer in my area is $50 to $100 an hour. A top end machine is only $3,000, so the cost of buying a truly great computer every three years comes to $0.50/hour. ($3000/(150 wks * 40 hours))
So suppose you can save $2000 every three years by buying cheaper computers, and your average developer is making $60. (These are the most charitable numbers that I can offer the bean-counters. If you only save $1000, or $750, it only strengthens my case.) If those cheaper computers only cost you 10 minutes of productivity a day. (Not at all a stretch, I’m sure that my machine costs me more than that.) then over 3 years the 125 lost hours would add up to a loss of $7500. A loss of 1 minute a day ($750) would give a net gain of $1250, which would hardly offset the cost of poor morale.
read more at productivity – Why doesn’t every company buy developers the best hardware? – Programmers – Stack Exchange.
Very interesting testing tool from Springbox. It does allow for quick display checks of ongoing development but does have a few ‘gotchas’ to watch for…
The mobile renderings do not employ any type of scaling so the emulation is not 100%.
From the website:
Preview mobile websites, design mockups, and local HTML on Mac or PC.
- Preview on iPhone 4, Palm Pre, HTC Evo, and Blackberry Storm, with more devices on the way
- Visit any URL or drag and drop local HTML, Flash, or image files
- View the same site on multiple devices
- Export PNGs of device views – perfect for portfolios
- Quick, painless installation and upgrades via Adobe AIR
check out Mobilizer | Springbox.
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