I’ve had this Tweet bookmarked for months now from Brian Lovin who does a classic and well-deserved wrist-slapping of flashy design at the cost of communication. It’s all-too-easy to focus on exotic micro-interactions that will get likes on social media, but fail to communicate what a product does or tell a compelling story. Criticism of […]
My goal with this bookmarkable guide is to provide a list of (frankly: incredible) new additions to CSS lately. There is no hardline criteria for this list other than that these things are all fairly new and my sense is that many people aren’t aware of these things. Or even if they are, they don’t […]
I feel like I’ve always been in the minority on this: I don’t think you should use target=”_blank” on links. Unless you have a very good reason, that is, like there is currently-playing media that would stop, or a user has unsaved work you don’t want to interrupt. But I find that most people disagree, […]
Jermey Keith visited a school doing this exact project, and I thought it was a great idea for learning: There’s a specific module his students are partaking in that’s right up my alley. They’re given a PDF inheritance-tax form and told to convert it for the web. You could make doing this job really well […]
Matej Latin has rejected the vast majority of portfolios he’s seen in his career for one reason, a “linear design process”: By “linear design process” I mean cookie-cutter case studies that always read the same. The designer learned about a problem, conducted user interviews, created user personas, proceeded to sketches, then mockups and wireframes, made […]
CSS has a feature called scroll snapping. A lot of the demos and examples, rightfully so, focus around things that benefit highly from it. For instance, an image slider, carousel, or grid of things that just beg to be aligned after scrolling. But you don’t have to be in such a strict and rigid situation […]
The job title “Design Engineer” has been having a moment. I commented on Jim Nielsen’s takes recently. To me it makes a logical sense. The engineer aspect means they know the tech (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), and the design aspect means they are building and refining the look and experience. You don’t have to be both. […]
Stefan Judis covered this recently, and like Stefan, I first heard of the safe keyword in CSS from Rachel Andrews at an AEA conference years ago. It’s used in addition to other alignment keywords in layout like this for example: The extra value safe here is essentially saying “don’t let the alignment force a situation […]
You could design something on the web then take a screenshot of it. That is, in a basic sense, converting DOM to PNG. But a screenshot is rather manual and finicky. If you had to do this over and over, or you needed a very exact size (like a social media card), you can actually […]
An awful lot of JavaScript developers I know speak of Eloquent JavaScript as a very formative book for them in their path toward becoming the developer they are today. It’s certainly on my bookshelf. Eloquent JavaScript is now in it’s 4th edition, and available free online. Pretty sweet complementary learning resource right there, goes nicely […]
