On power and responsibility →
Other speakers from the Fronteers web conference were solid, but Robert Jan Verkade’s talk on work and the general future of the front end web industry was my favorite. Great work on some really unique slides as well.
Author Archive
Putting flexbox into practice →
Nice talk at the Fronteers web developer conference all about the flexbox module by developer Zoe Gillenwater. Some of the talk got a bit too deep into coding syntax that was a bit difficult to follow in a single slide based presentation. But stick around to the end where Zoe talks about the practical benefits of using flexbox today. It’s the first time I’ve been encouraged to dip my toe into flexbox with production level work.
Critic’s perspective: A. O. Scott →
Nice video feature where longtime critic A.O. Scott discusses his experiences reviewing and watching film. Always been a fan of his writing.
Bookmarklet to colorize text between 45 and 75 characters →
Keeping to a reasonable line width adds significantly to a web page’s readability. But it’s easy when building a site to forget about this and hand counting characters on a screen is a drag. That’s why Chris Coyier’s simple bookmarklet here works great. Run it on any site and determine immediately how your lines are shaping up.
Nintendo is doing just fine and doesn’t need to make games for mobile, thank you very much →
Kris Naudus, writing for gdgt:
Granted, if Nintendo started making games for mobile it’d still be making games, which isn’t a huge momentous change. But it does mean giving up on their commitment to hardware. And that leads us to the other reason it doesn’t make the switch:
Control.
Why Japanese web design is so different →
From Randomwire, one reason why native Japanese sites often feel so cluttered, at least to more of a traditionally U.S. centric eye:
Logographic-based languages can contain a lot of meaning in just few characters. While these characters can look cluttered and confusing to the western eye, they actually allow Japanese speakers to become comfortable with processing a lot of information in short period of time / space (the same goes for Chinese).
Ridley Scott’s trojan horse career →
Scott Fennessey and Chris Ryan, writing for Grantland:
As a fine-arts student who got his start in the vulgar world of commercial directing and slick TV shows, he has always subverted expectations…Looking for the quintessential interstellar extraterrestrial adventure? Instead, take the most grotesque body-horror movie ever made. Scott’s movies are delivery systems for ideas, but they’re also Trojan horses — hulking, beautiful objects, meant to distract audiences while those ideas creep in, one soldier at a time, to take over your mind. It’s been an effective, unlikely strategy for the British-born filmmaker.
Responsive images – end of year report →
We’ve making progress on the responsive image front in modern browsers, but alas, we’re at an impasse. As noted by Opera rep Bruce Lawson:
The outcome of the meeting was that
isn’t a viable option. Browser makers don’t like the fact that it’s a new element that does the same as (or what
should do if we were speccing it today), and that it depends on multiple nested children…
…The Paris meetup’s most immediate outcome was agreement that srcset + DPR-switching is the right initial step forward (i.e., the 2x, 3x, etc. syntax).
Bottom line, the consensus is moving toward srcset over a new picture element but no modern browsers are yet shipping with it.
Where to start →
Designer Trent Walton is a responsive web design veteran; he’s part of the three man web agency Paravel who’s done many cutting edge responsive projects. That’s exactly why reading this post, highlighting some smart steps to get a team on board with RWD, is so awesome.
(Bonus points for the FF Meta Serif usage, one of my favorite web fonts.)
‘The Shining’ behind the scenes →
Some really great behind the scenes photos from Stanley Kubrick’s classic, courtesy The Overlook Hotel. Images discovered via David Chen.