10.17.12 |
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A common scenario for me is having a bunch of Safari tabs open and then closing them rapidly before I shut down. Safari saves your previous browser state, but often there’s a lot of good tab nuggets that I’ve closed individually but get lost in the shuffle.
Alternatively I open a lot of tabs from my RSS reader, but because I’m looking to save memory or focus in on work, I want a quick way to save my tab state and get rid of them.
Chrome has had this slickly built in for a while, but no dice on Safari. Enter this simple plugin from Pinboard. You’ve got to be a user, but with one click you can quickly save your tab state and reopen later. Works great.
10.05.12 |
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From Font Bureau:
The digital version of Helvetica that everyone knows and uses today is quite different from the typeface’s pre-digital design from 1957. Originally released as Neue Haas Grotesk, many of the features that made it a Modernist favorite have been lost in translation over the years from one typesetting technology to the next.
Type designer Christian Schwartz has newly restored the original Neue Haas Grotesk in digital form – bringing back features like optical size variations, properly corrected obliques, alternate glyphs, refined spacing, and more.
Really interesting work here. Be sure to check out the features page to see the subtle (yet significant) differences between Neue and the default Helvetica.
10.04.12 |
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Lots of great advice here on running fast design iterations. Many fairly well proven pieces of advice here as well, like the weaknesses of group brainstorming and how tighter constraints and deadlines can lead to innovative ideas.
10.03.12 |
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Really enjoyable read here on how Microsoft’s web design jumped into such a modern, approachable design. Pay special attention to author Nishant’s “four tenets” web design presentation at the beginning; I like his emphasis on responsive design.
10.01.12 |
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I agreed with the design and development philosophy laid out by Dave Rupert in the latest issue of A List Apart:
Those of us involved in CSS and Web Standards groups are well acquainted with the concept of progressive enhancement. It’s important we stick to our collective guns on this. Pixels, whether in terms of device real estate or device density, should be treated as an enhancement or feature that some browsers have and others do not. Build a strong baseline of support, then optimize as necessary. In fact, learning how to properly construct a progressively enhanced website can save you (and your clients) lots of time down the line.
His core methodology for handling responsive images is simple: Rely on CSS first, SVG and icon fonts secondarily with the picturefill as a final solution.
09.27.12 |
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A great email from 1993 made the front page of Hacker News recently; Marc Andreessen proposes a new tag to be added to HTML…img. Cool to see how the effects of such a simple email helped set the foundation of the web we know today.
09.25.12 |
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I really enjoyed this extended design post by Mark Boulton. What’s awesome is the specificity here: detailed recommendations for characters per line to maximize readability, how to avoid hanging punctuation and much more.
09.19.12 |
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Matt Asay writing for The Register on Zuckerberg’s recent Disrupt comments where he dumped on HTML5:
There’s a lot of blame to throw around, and HTML5 is only one target. Instead of pointing his finger at HTML5, Zuckerberg might be better served by looking inside his company to see how it was deployed. Facebook’s approach to HTML5 has been hobbled by politics and a lack of expertise, both in HTML5 and in mobile. Zuckerberg is correct that today’s HTML5 tools aren’t perfect, but in this case the problem may lie more with the craftsman than with the tools.
Bingo.
09.18.12 |
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Upstatement is a small web firm that assisted with the massive Boston Globe switch to a fully responsive design. In this blog post they go through some of their choices made: workflow, tools, break point decisions and more.
Biggest surprise for me came with their primary design program: InDesign. Not Photoshop or Illustrator? Strange at first, but their reasoning appears pretty sound.
09.18.12 |
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Not super crazy about developer Troy Hunt’s title (“uncultured” comes off as a bit crass), but he brings up some excellent points about working in web development for an international audience. Does your site support automatic currency conversion? How about something as simple as proper dd/mm instead of mm/dd for users outside the U.S.?