As the end of the year approaches and the holidays near, many of you might already be pondering your new year's resolution for 2012. Before you get back to serious business in the new year, you should lean back, relax, spend some quality time with loved ones, and give a good book or eBook a closer look. After all, you don’t want to fall behind just as the year begins, do you? This is an occasion to catch up on developments in the fields of Web design, Web development and coding.
The last three Smashing Bundle Deals of the year.
For each of the last seven days, we have been offering a different special bundled deal. We hope many of you have found an appealing offer in there, and we hope we were able to inspire some of you to get your colleagues and office friends a resourceful printed book or an eBook for the new year. In this post we'd like to kindly inform you about the books we've prepared for the last three days of our Bundle Countdown to Christmas and we are confident that they will make your visit to the Smashing Shop worthwhile.
Today we are glad to release a yet another freebie: a Twitter GUI PSD for the recently released Twitter UI update, designed by Jon Darke and released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The PSD provides the full mockup with all layers in vectors, allowing you to scale up the design elements without loss of quality. The set includes two versions: one for personal accounts and also the new Twitter Enhanced profile page with 835×90 header image for brands and advertisers.
The set is compatible with Adobe Photoshop CS4+. All assets are redrawn in vector, all layers are labeled and grouped. You can use the freebie for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word. You may modify the file as you wish.
Every day I work with WordPress in one way or another. My Twitter feed is full of WordPress types, and I’m a regular at my local WordPress meetup. I’m a WordPress fan. The developer across the hall from me works with Joomla. His Twitter feed is full of Joomla types, and he uses the CMS every day. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he attends the local Joomla user group. He’s a Joomla fan.
The White House hosts a number of Web developers who use Drupal every day. Their Twitter feeds are probably full of Drupal types, and some may well attend the Washington DC Drupal meetup. They are Drupal fans.
A couple of days ago, we launched a photo contest in which you could submit a photo of how upcoming holidays are celebrated in your city. For those who have participated, thank you for taking the time to shoot the photots and sending them to us.
We've received hundreds of pictures from all over the world and we have to be honest and say that it was really hard to pick only ten winners! All winners have been contacted. Of course, the owner of each photo owns all the copyrights.
Microsoft’s new mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7 (WP7), introduces a fresh approach to content organization and a different UX, based on the Metro design language and principles that will be incorporated into Windows 8. It also targets a different market than its predecessor: instead of being designed mainly for business and technology workers, WP7 is targeted at active people with a busy life, both offline and online, and who use social networks every day, whatever their background.
First, it’s a new interface, so you have space to create and develop some new ideas for it. We are still at the beginning of its growing curve, so it’s an interesting challenge. When I saw a WP7 presentation for the first time, I thought, “I want to design something for this.” Exploring is a great way to learn how to build a new exciting experience for users.
In the Web world, hearing businesses and freelancers alike complain about low-budget projects is not too uncommon. Let’s say that a local coffee shop needs to update its Web presence and contacts you for a redesign. It also requires a blog so that it can announce new coffees, events and so on. However, during the course of the first meeting, the client mentions that they don’t have a budget.
Being the inquisitive businessperson that you are, you say, “Well, we work with budgets of almost any size. What price range were you thinking of?” The owner of the coffee shop reveals that he has only $1500 to spend on the website. Thinking it would be a waste of time, you walk away.
In this article, we’ll explore a scoring system for rating and comparing websites, we’ll visualize those ratings using infographics, and we’ll see what data and structure this method provides for reviewing websites. We are all reviewers. We review many websites every day without even realizing it. In fact, many of us are experts at it. We don’t realize it because the whole process occurs in moments.
That’s how it is. We use websites; we judge websites. Even if we don’t know we’re doing it, we make judgements about trustworthiness, credibility, competency, reliability, design and style within seconds of arriving on a Web page. After looking around, we also get a pretty good feel for the user experience and usability.
A few concerns keep bobbing up now and then for Web developers, one of which relates to how to lay out a given design. Developers have made numerous attempts to do so with existing solutions. Several articles have been written on finding the holy grail of CSS layouts, but to date, not a single solution works without major caveats.
At the W3Conf, I gave a talk on how the CSS Working Group is attempting to solve the concerns of Web developers with multiple proposals. There are six layout proposals that are relevant to us, all of which I described in the talk. Here is a little more about these proposals and how they will help you in developing websites in the future.
Christmas is near and the spirits are rising but why not speed it all up a bit? To make the days prior to Christmas much more exciting, we'll provide you with something to look forward to each day for the next ten days. This year, we'd love to help you out with your Christmas presents. We have some truly smashing Christmas deals lined up for you, and with very affordable, special prices for our dear readers and customers.
We have put together extremely content-rich and valuable bundle deals at prices you have not seen at Smashing Magazine. Seize the opportunity while it lasts and if you are lucky, you might just win one out of the 10 Golden Tickets (read the post to find out more). Where’s the catch you ask? There is none — better yet: you can win a bundle deal of your choice daily with a little touch of whimsy fortune!
I hear a lot of people talking about the importance of sketching when designing or problem solving, yet it seems very few people actually sketch. As a UX professional, I sketch every day. I often take over entire walls in our office and cover them with sketches, mapping out everything from context scenarios to wire frames and presentations.
Although it’s sometimes easier to start prototyping on a computer, it’s not the best way to visually problem solve. When you need to ideate web site layouts, mobile applications or story board work flows and context scenarios, sketching is much more efficient. It prevents you from getting caught up in the technology, and instead allows you to focus on the best possible solution. Giving you the freedom to take risks that you might not otherwise take.
Have you ever heard the phrase “Content is King”? Being a Web developer, and therefore having a job that’s often linked to content creation, it’s likely you have. It’s a fairly overused but true statement about what draws visitors to a site. From a Web developer’s perspective, however, some may argue that speed is king. More and more, I’m starting to favour that stance. In recent years many experienced front-end engineers have offered their suggestions on how we can improve the user experience by means of some performance best practices.
Unfortunately, CSS seems to get somewhat overlooked in this area while many developers (for good reason) focus largely on JavaScript performance and other areas. In this post, I’ll deal with this often overlooked area by introducing you to the concept of object oriented CSS and how it can help improve both the performance and maintainability of your Web pages.
Editor's Note: Please note that this article is one of the previously published articles on our new subsite, Design Informer. Our aim is to bring professional discussions on Web design and development forward, and also encourage the community to engage in meaningful conversations on design processes. Design Informer was originally created by Jad Limcaco and is now part of Smashing Magazine. Feel free to take a look at the previous articles on DI as well as our subsites Coding, UX Design and WordPress.
Do you know what makes a design good? Is it merely an opinion, or is there something more to it? Breaking design down seems like such an abstract thing. Even the designers who are able to create thought-provoking work seem purely talented and have natural abilities that can’t really be nailed down to a process. But what if there were principles that captured why design and art worked the way that they do?