WTF, HTML and CSS? →
The next time I teach any introductory course on HTML/CSS I need to pass this list of “commonly frustrating HTML and CSS quandaries” by designer (and creator of Bootstrap) Mark Otto along to the class.
I haven’t revisited Alien for quite a while. But Ridley Scott’s classic has aged extremely well, and it’s influence on modern sci-fi and horror tropes is undeniable; smart analysis is always welcome. This video essay by Steven Benedict is exactly that; it hits on some major themes while not overstaying itself welcome.
The next time I teach any introductory course on HTML/CSS I need to pass this list of “commonly frustrating HTML and CSS quandaries” by designer (and creator of Bootstrap) Mark Otto along to the class.
A four minute super cut of scenes from Michael Mann movies? Count me in.
The 1910 design team posted some advice for optimal web typography on their blog. Some of it I’ve seen before, but rarely in such a concise yet helpful format. Here’s one of those “why didn’t I think of this myself” moments, regarding picking an optimal body text size:
If in doubt, just grab a camera and take a picture of the text from the desired viewing distance and compare this to a picture of a page from a regular textbook taken from 30 to 40 cm away. Alternatively hold the book somewhere between yourself and the screen while keeping one of your eyes closed. If the digital text is smaller than the printed one you’ll want to go bigger.
Smart tutorial by Louis Lazaris over at Sitepoint on WebPageTest. Like so many other developers, I find myself on WebPageTest all the time for web page performance optimization. But I only understood the page basics; Lazaris mostly focuses on the Filmstrip View, an aspect of WebPageTest I’ve rarely looked at but clearly should have a long time ago.
The penultimate season of Mad Men starts in a few weeks, so it’s a great time to look back at some of the show’s definitive episodes. “The Wheel” is undoubtedly one of them. As A.V. Club writer Todd VanDerWerff writes, that pitch to Kodak is still incredible:
Somewhere in the middle of that pitch, though, he [Don] realizes the place he longs to go is the place he’s already talking about, even if he won’t allow himself to feel that for more than a millisecond. He’s trapped by time, as we all are, forced to live our lives in sequence, as the same, flawed people who never really realize the truth of who they really are at heart, which is wounded and beaten and fleeting. But also, possibly, kind and good and capable of something outside of themselves.
Jeremy Keith:
If your client or boss expects that a website will look and behave the same in every browser on every device, then where did they get those expectations from? And rather than spending your time trying to meet those impossible expectations, I think your time would be better spent explaining why those expectations don’t match the reality of the web.
It’s like Mike Monteiro says about clients: if they just don’t get something about your design, that’s not their fault; it’s yours. Explaining your design work is part of your design work. It’s the same with web development.
Exactly. And I love how Keith concludes his post at the end: the web isn’t just another platform where if you have the right device, you get all of the content, otherwise you get zero. It’s instead a continuum; different browsers can have different experiences.
Nice walk through a series of bite sized tutorials, by designer Kevin Hon Chi Hang. I still find myself mostly wedded to Photoshop comps for my development workflow, but I’d like to learn more about Sketch for side projects; this looks like a good place to start.
It’s a year old, but Jason Grigsby’s post on recommended guidelines still (remarkably) holds up very well with regard to best practices and responsive imagery. The most important takeaway:
The one thing we can be certain about is that we’re going to need to replace what we implement now when standards catch up with responsive images.
So whatever you build, make sure it is flexible and can be changed easily when the ultimate solution for responsive images becomes apparent.
When I’m working at my Mac it’s easy to reference my iCloud tabs from my iOS devices when I’m in Safari. But elsewhere it’s a no go. This little extension by Kevin Marchand for the Alfred keyboard launcher makes the tabs much more accessible: I type ‘tabs’ into Alfred and immediately can open a tab with an extra key press. Very useful.