Jeffrey Zeldman:
Say it with me: There is nothing wrong with id when it is used appropriately (semantically, structurally, sparingly). There is plenty wrong with the notion that class is always preferable to descendant selectors and semantic, structural ids.
Pretty hard to argue with one of the web godfathers on this one.
I’m currently a bit more developer than designer in my day job so the many virtues of Dribbble don’t apply to me as much. But the many free resources published there – especially for in house UI design, sketching, and brainstorming, really come in handy. That’s what makes PSDDD so useful. A bunch of free resources available for download, separated out by functionality.
Developer Tyson Matanich breaks down how the newly proposed picture element was integrated into Microsoft’s new redesign. Turns out they rolled with a forked version of Scott Jehl’s picturefill JavaScript plugin. Links to it and the original are available on the post.
Ever have a conference call with a coworker living far away? Planning a trip to get a sense of jet lag? That requires time zone math. There’s a million native app solutions (e.g. Apple’s dashboard clocks) but I’ve disappointed with what’s offered on the web, until I stumbled on Every Time Zone. It’s a simple one page design with a slider to quickly calculate the time zone around the world.
Jason gives a nice talk here regarding how and when to say ‘no’ to clients. The content is simplistic but given through the lens of the speaker’s diverse experiences it says a lot.
In the midst of a ‘super summary’ site resurgence (e.g. Evening Edition), I stumbled upon Sidebar – 5 cool, relevant design related links post every day. Normally such a site wouldn’t be especially noteworthy, but look at the curators here: Chris Coyier, Sacha Grief, and many other talented web designers.
For the last three days I’ve been at User Interface 17, a web design conference in Boston (it’s also why posts here have been sparse recently.) Overall I had a really good experience, one of the highlights being Luke Wroblewski’s extended workshop on multi-device design. In addition to Luke being an excellent speaker, he’s also a prolific writer and he wrote up some notes from some o the other talks at the conference.
I’ve linked here to Aaron Gustafson’s talk about progressive enhancement, but there’s more if you check out Luke’s writing section.
One of my favorite and most heavily used apps iA Writer just got a big update with its 1.4 version release today:
Inspired by our deep experience designing for the web, we’ve given Writer for Mac a responsive design, changing the font size based on window width. This maintains the text’s typographic proportions, zooming in and out without reflowing the text. I don’t know why it took us so long to find this obvious solution. However, given that no one else has done it, the simplicity of this solution is perhaps not as obvious as it seems in hindsight.
After playing around with the update for a few minutes I can’t find an immediate need for the three different breakpoints iA Writer offers; 95% of my time I feel like the largest font size/width is optimal. We’ll see how that evolves over time.
The gaming news site Polygon just launched late last night. I’m pretty excited given the team’s editorial strength – Arthur Gies, Christopher Grant, Brian Crecente, Russ Pitts, among others.
Also if you’re at all involved with the web (even if you could care less about video games) the website design and development is very unique (I still have to make up my mind if that’s a good or bad thing.) Fully responsive design, web typography in Gotham and Mercury, minimal navigation and much more.
This is awesome idea: take the already sound idea of throwing a bunch of icons and symbols into a single web-friendly font set and then make them easy to use by invoking the symbols with common terms (e.g. an HTML list item with the word ‘home’ gets replaced by a home icon.) Perhaps most importantly, every set on the site looks great. At $30 to $60 each, it’s a pretty affordable option as well.