November 5, 2013 — In this article, CJ Gammon talks about the CSS Regions specification, which provides new options for web designing. We are largely constrained by the layout features available to us. Content placed inside a container will often extend the container vertically. If a design requires elements to remain a certain height, then our options are limited. In these cases, we can only add a scroll bar or hide the overflow. Let’s solve this problem! Read more…

November 4, 2013 — In this article, we are honoured to present to you Nice Things a set of 128 original, beautiful icons that Chris Behr came up with while playing around with the Shape tools in Illustrator. He casually divided a square into a grid and then randomly colored it. Then he combined the grid with a couple of icons that he had been doodling.  Let’s see the results! Read more…

November 1, 2013 — As designers, we usually turn to different sources of inspiration, and we’ve discovered the best one: desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than usual. We’re very thankful to all the designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for November 2013. Read more…

October 31, 2013 — As Web designers, developing websites that work well on mobile devices is an important aspect of the work we do. And selling a responsive design is no different than selling anything else. It all starts with solving problems. For this project, we highlighted the benefits of a responsive approach beyond the familiar benefit of support for mobile devices that we normally mention to prospective clients. Here are some of the key points we made in discussing the value of a responsive approach for a website without an obvious need for mobile support. Read more…

October 29, 2013 — Today, Mike Cunsolo will show us how to use Grunt in a project to speed up and change the way you develop websites, looking briefly at what Grunt can do, before jumping into how to set up and use its various plugins. Then he will explain how to build a simple input validator, using Sass as a preprocessor, how to use grunt-cssc and CssMin to combine and minify our CSS, how to build our compressed assets on the fly, and much more! Read more…

October 28, 2013 — In this article, we will discuss several recent such experiments, with special focus on new forms of storytelling, as well as new business models for publishers — a fascinating recent trend called “subcompact publishing” will be our main reference. Read more…

October 25, 2013 — In this article, Zeno Rocha presents a series of workflows in Alfred that will boost your productivity! A collection of great tricks to automate your work. Hopefully, some will speed up your workflow. Maybe they will even inspire you to share some of your hidden secrets of productivity. Read more…

October 24, 2013 — Much of that page weight could be reduced if images were conditionally optimized based on device width, pixel density and modern image formats. These reductions would result in faster loading times, but the debate isn’t about whether to optimize images for different devices, but about how to go about doing so. In this article, Shawn Jansepar will take a look at Mobify.js, which lets us generate small images for small devices from a single high-resolution image. Read more…

October 23, 2013 — Some websites outperform others, whether in their content, usability, design, features, and so on. Details of interaction design and animation make a fundamental difference on modern websites. We’ll share some lessons drawn from various models and analyze why these simple patterns work so well. Read more…

October 21, 2013 — When it comes to CSS, Thierry Koblentz is convinced that the only way to improve how to author style sheets is by moving away from the sacred principle of “separation of concerns”. CSS authors thrive on styling documents entirely through style sheets, an approach that has been sanctified by the CSS Zen Garden project (what most developers consider to be the standard for how to author style sheets). Read more…