Matt has redesigned his personal site. It’s brown and pick, so you know I love it. Matt’s stuff is always full of great texture, good typography, and awesome little details. Check it out. Visit site »
Really nice design work on The Las Vegas Sun’s new weather page. And of course, I’d be remiss to not point out that it’s Ellington and Django-powered. ;) Visit site »
The difference between “typeface” and “font” is one of those things where you know it doesn’t really matter when people use them interchangeably, but when you know the difference, it still grates on your nerves to hear them used incorrectly. By the way, if I haven’t said it before: Jon Tan’s site has some of the best web typography around. Check it out. Visit site »
From Jeremy Keith’s live blog of Jeffrey Zeldman’s talk at An Event Apart San Francisco:
It’s hard being a web designer. The unmotivated need not apply. You have to constantly educate yourself. There are plenty of tutorials out there on using web design tools like Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, and so on. But teaching Excel is not the same as teaching business. Knowing how to use Photoshop and Illustrator doesn’t make you a web designer.
Yes. Yes. YES! Visit site »
An absolutely gorgeous design by Bryan here. Great typography, great simplicity in the colors. I love it all. Also, how about that product name? Addicitionary, for a social dictionary? Perfect. I read it three different ways: “A dictionary,” “Add dictionary,” and “Addicition-ary” (which I assume is the way it’s pronounced). Clever.
Also, see Bryan’s retrospective on the design. Visit site »
My good buddy JB drops a new personal site on us. As you’d expect, it’s full of great typography and illustrative flourishes. Awesome job, Jina. Happy birthday, and I’ll see you in Sydney! Visit site »
Wow. It’s absolutely astonishing — and frankly, appalling — that the Wall Street Journal, a respected business publication, would pushing such a steaming load of shit as this article. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen something so incredibly stupid in a serious publication in my entire life. Wow. This really sums up everything that sucks about our industry. Visit site »
By Cameron Adams. Freaking brilliant. Hilarious. And so true. Visit site »
Probably nothing you don’t already know here, but they’re good reminders, nonetheless. Visit site »
Looks interesting at a glance. I haven’t checked out the code, so I’m not sure. If you’re needing non-web fonts in sucky browsers, it may be worth looking into. Visit site »
Alex smashes all the silly arguments CSS spec editor Bert Bos tried to use against the concept of CSS “variables” (really constants). I’m sorry, but anyone who thinks CSS variables are a bad idea just isn’t living in the real world of web development these days. Go Alex! Visit site »
Michael Heilemann says that pagination widgets should always point left for older stuff. I’m not sure I agree — but I totally se his point. It’s a tricky thing to solve with things like blogs, as they’re naturally in reverse chronological order. I know I’m not consistent about it; I tend to just do what feels right at the time.
To illustrate the problem, consider two scenarios: a blog has “next” and “previous” page links. I would say “next” should pointing to the right, so left is newer stuff. Now, a daily archive page shows all the content posted on one day, and has links to “next day” and “previous day”. I would say “next day” should be on the right, meaning left is older stuff. Clearly, this results in inconsistent interfaces (in one scenario, older stuff is to the right, and in the other, older stuff is to the left). What do you think? Should this be consistent? Visit site »
Helen at designinterviews.com talked with fellow Blue Flavorite D. Keith Robinson about mobile web design and development. Good stuff. Visit site »
A terrific post by Stan on the role of graphic design on the web. What do you think? Is web design graphic design? Get to Jason’s site and join the discussion. Visit site »
A few weeks ago, Nathan Borror and I were at Free State Brewery in Lawrencem talking about how it would be cool if a template could extend itself — that is to say, extend the same template at another path in the TEMPLATE_DIRS settings. Overhearing us, Jeff Tripplett, Eric Holscher, and James Bennett had a few ideas, but no definitive solutions. Today, I found out that conversation ultimately sparked Daniel Lindsley to write a template tag that adds the functionality. Then, Django co-creator Simon Willison came along to detail yet another solution which can be achieved without additional code. It’s a bit “devious,” as Simon calls it, but it’s certainly clever and doesn’t feel particularly inelegant to me. I’m still looking forward to Daniel’s tag, but it’s great to know you can do this without it. Visit site »
Bert is, of course, referring to symbolic constants, which many people seem to want to call “variables,” even though they’re really not. Anyway, he contends that the idea of constants in CSS is flawed, in large part because added complexity makes CSS more difficult to learn. I think this is kind of absurd. CSS is easy to learn. Really easy, in fact (I’ve said for years that the only hard part of HTML and CSS is browser bugs. Take browser bugs out of the equation, and CSS is child’s play). If symbolic constants are really so complicated that non-programers can’t grasp them (which they’re not), then they simply don’t have to use them.
But even more importantly than that: why is keeping CSS easy to learn so damned important? The only people that need to know CSS are web developers. This notion of keeping it simple so “regular people” can read and understand it is silly. Doctors, lawyers, and pharmacists don’t keep their specs and documentation simple so regular people can understand it, because regular people don’t need to understand it. Why does the W3 seem to place such an emphasis on making CSS palatable to everyone? Visit site »
In which I outline a Django template setup which allows you to literally design a site by creating only one file.
Kenny suggests that “developing with web standards is now a standard,” and that we all need to stop focusing on getting people to write standards-compliant code and start focusing on getting the browser makers to give us the new shiny and the W3C to finish some of it’s long-proposed specs. I agree completely. Visit site »
Helen Walker’s designinterviews.com has been redesigned. If you like reading what smart web designers the world over have to say, check it out. Visit site »
