February 19, 2014 — After Marcotte defined the technique, responsive design frameworks began to emerge that incorporated these principles. Many of these frameworks are open-source, free to download and quickly customizable, and in this article, Jen Kramer will focus on the most popular ones: Bootstrap and Foundation. A responsive design framework might be a helpful tool in your arsenal, for quick prototyping, testing or even production code — one that expands your range of products and makes clients happy. Read more…

February 18, 2014 — A type design brief is like a charter path: It asks you questions, and the answers will guide you to where you want to be. The walk won’t be much shorter, but the chances of getting lost will be lower. In this article, Nadine Chahine shares six questions that will shape the typeface through its first moments of creation and serve as guiding principles through the various stages of the design. Read more…

February 17, 2014 — Joshua Mauldin started with style guides with the desire to make it simple to maintain and grow a design. One of the first questions, understandably, was why use Fireworks for a style guide? For him, it was mostly because of symbols and styles. Sure, you could use similar things in Photoshop, but he found Fireworks’ implementation to be smarter. In this article, you will find out why you would want to set up a style guide using Fireworks, and you’ll also get a little starter template that Joshua likes to use. Read more…

February 14, 2014 — Fortunately, learning is not limited to only a small minority of people anymore; it is not even limited to visiting a school or a university. The Internet makes it possible for us to distribute knowledge at a small price, and is full of web design resources to expand everyone’s knowledge on an enormous variety of topics. Read more…

February 13, 2014 — In this series of articles, Gabriele Romanato will cover in depth a practical implementation of session storage by creating a complete e-commerce shopping cart with the sessionStorage object and jQuery. Remember that, in these articles, you won’t find a new technique to replace existing server-side techniques, but rather just a proof of concept of session storage. Read more…

February 12, 2014 — In this article, Mark McDonnell will go over the techniques required to build a command line tool using Node.js and PhantomJS (this is just one example of the sort of command line tools you can develop with Node.js’ many features). Always consider automating the process with a CLI tool the next time you find yourself performing a repetitive task. Read more…

February 11, 2014 — This is the third installment in a series covering four ways to develop a mobile application. In previous articles, we examined how to build a native iOS and native Android tip calculator. In this article, Peter Traeg will create a multi-platform solution using PhoneGap. As with the previous articles in this series, all of the code for our application may be obtained from a GitHub repository. Read more…

February 10, 2014 — There are so many options for running an online course, and all of them seem slightly confusing or time-intensive to set up! Using the method outlined below, Paul Jarvis created a self-paced email course that had over 1,000 registrations in the first 24 hours, and almost 2,500 in the first week. There are other ways to do this using MailChimp, such as triggering the completion of a course with a URL, but this is how he did it. Read more…

February 7, 2014 — As graphic designers, you’ll often have to work with off-the-shelf material created by others. Also, you’ll often have to follow the branding already developed by someone else, and that’s ok because it’s part of the job. But the part of a project that almost every graphic designer likes and is proud of the most is something that you can do from scratch. That’s why Anna Shuvalova loves illustration projects so much. Read more…

February 6, 2014 — Transformations are a powerful technique for separating content and presentation in Web applications. Yet, they transformations have failed to gain popularity through XSLT. For this reason, Web developers are liable to think that transformations “don’t apply to me,” even though they work with HTML. Thankfully, new transformation frameworks are on the horizon, that hold the promise of a revival. In this article, Ishan Anand will reintroduce transformations and explore their applications to mobile and responsive design. Read more…