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QuirksBlog: There is no WebKit on Mobile
PPK details the myth that is the idea that “WebKit on mobile is taking over.” His point, which is totally valid, is that while WebKit is indeed becoming the dominant rendering engine on mobile platforms, each of those platforms has distinctly different versions of WebKit, so the idea that if you build for WebKit, all of these devices will render your site the exact same way is a misconception. His point is well taken, if a bit dramatic. It’s true that there are subtle differences between each version, and it’s also true that most people don’t realize this. But, in the real-world, they’re “close enough” that targeting WebKit will generally get you a very similar experience on all these platforms.
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Uploadiify JQuery File Upload Plugin
What it says it is.
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Designers’Couch: Interview with Jeff Croft
Honored to have been interviewed by Designer’s Couch. Note that a few of the screenshots in the page are not actually my work at all. The version of the New York Review of Books is not the redesign I did for them, but rather the old version, and the Explore Steamboat design shown is a newer incarnation than the one I did.
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CSS Prism, a CSS color inspector, by Ryan Berg
Ryan’s little CSS toy is pretty awesome. Check it out.
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Elliot Jay Stocks: How to Design a Portfolio Site
I plan to redo the portfolio portion of this site, with my new focus on freelance and contract work, so I’m anxious to watch this. I trust EJS implicitly!
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John Daggett’s proposel to the W3 on advanced typography features in CSS
Yes, please!
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Paul Robert Lloyd: Social Media Icons
Apparently it’s icon day at jeffcroft.com. These are potentially very useful. Hope the trademark police stay at bay.
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Helveticons
Must. Have. Now.
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34 Web Rockstars, 1 Question: What do you listen to?
Gavin asked me to participate, and I was happy to do so. I’ve never heard any other web designer (besides myself) say they don’t listen to music while working, and I’ve certainly never heard anyone else cite their musical background as a reason why they’re unable to listen passively, but that’s exactly what Zeldman said. Interesting that he and I share an answer here, when I think our personalities are drastically different (that’s not an insult at all — I love the guy, we’re just very different, is all!).
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Jeremy Keith: Misunderstanding markup
Easily the best overview I’ve seen of XHTML, XHTML2, HTML5, and the related concerns for your typical standards-oriented front-end web developer. Bottom line: the death of XHTML2 and the move to HTML5 does not mean you lose all the things you love about XHTML 1 and 1.1. Relax, folks. It’ll be okay. :)
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Danny Blackman
Beautiful portfolio site for Danny Blackman.
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Introducing Typekit
Jeff Veen, who I have mad, mad respect and admiration for, announces his company’s new project: TypeKit. It’s basically a hosted solution for web fonts, wherein Jeff and team negotiate a license with font foundries, and then you (the average web developer) pay Jeff and team a fee in order to use the fonts. It will use standards CSS @font-face embedding, and automatically switch out Opentype for EOT based on a user’s browser. This all sounds great, but the post is a bit short on details, and I definitely have questions: will it scale? How much will it cost? What will the license look like? All concerns people have over a subscription-based music service versus the iTunes model apply, here. What happens when you unsubscribe? Are the plans per-site or per-designer? And so forth. So, bottom line: sounds like there’s a lot of potential, here, but I’ll save my fanboyish excitement for when I have more information.
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On applying OOP concepts to CSS
Last night, while work on a very cool client project for Blue Flavor, I took a short break to make the following tweet: “It’s amazing what you can do in very little code when you apply object-oriented principles to CSS. Wish more front-end devs understood OOP.”
I got a surprising number of responses from people asking what I meant, exactly, and for examples. I also got several responses, and a few IMs, from people touting Compass and Sass, a pair of Ruby projects that provide useful language features and syntax to CSS and CSS frameworks, allowing you to do all sorts of fancy things.
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Don’t Lose That Creative Thinking
Blue Flavor’s Keith Robinson has a lengthy and thought-provoking piece on creativity in our profession, questioning established patterns, and the drive to keep innovating and not get comfortable with the status quo. Good stuff.
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360° MP3 player UI demo (SoundManager 2)
Really great Canvas + JS audio player.
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Fuck the foundries
+1
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50 Totally Free Lessons in Graphic Design Theory
That’s a lotta free into right thurr. Via @RubyVelle.
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Nicole Sullivan: Object Oriented CSS video on YDN
Really great talk by Nicole Sullivan on what she calls “Object Oriented CSS.” This is more or less the methodology I started using a coupe years ago that got me talking about what I called CSS “frameworks,” and I still believe it’s the best way to write, re-use, and maintain CSS. Nicole has some great tips, including some I hadn’t heard before. You can also view the slides on Slideshare.
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Jeffrey Zeldman: Web Standards Test: Top 100 Sites
I still have a hard time seeing any good reason to ever validate someone else’s code, but I guess maybe research for a book is one. Still, I don’t understand the point of posting the results here. Jeffrey says himself, “If all the home pages of the top 100 sites were valid, it would not mean that the pages beneath the home page level were valid, nor would it prove that the sites were authored semantically,” and “nothing causal or predictive can be determined from these results.” I agree with him, and that begs the question: then why post it at all? Because I know enough about Zeldman himself, I am guessing the answer is simply, “I thought it was interesting,” but I’m afraid it feels like the point is simply to publicly praise some and berate others.
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Emily Lewis: So, I’m Writing a Book
Emily is writing a new book on Microformats. Big congrats to her — I know how exciting it is to get your first book deal, and I know how badly she wanted this kind of thing. She’s also sweet enough to say a few words about me, which was totally unnecessary, but feels good, nonetheless. Congrats, Em!
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Josh Works: Worksology
The talented Josh Works has redesigned his personal site with a great mid-century style. He also used my Savoy as the basis for the site’s backend, so it’s another example of what Savoy can do. Check it out!
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jQuery Sparklines
Pretty sweet-looking implementation of sparklines using jQuery.
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WebVisions 2009, Portland
I’ll be speaking, along with a great list of other smart folks, at this conference in PDX. I’ve always heard great things about Web Visions, so I couldn’t be more excited. Be there!
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Smashing Magazine: 9 Common Usability Mistakes
Good stuff here.
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5 options when website budgets get slashed
Good stuff from Mr. Boag.
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Mike Davidson: Presto Chango
My good friend and Newsvine founder/CEO Mike Davidson has redesigned his personal site for the first time in — I don’t know, a long time. It’s looking good. Dig it.
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42 Web Design Companies
Hits most of the HTML/CSS/Javascript-focused ones I’d seriously consider.
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fuck web 2.0
Funny
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Fluid 960 Grid System
A really complete and nice-looking CSS framework that satisfies one common complaint about many CSS framework: lack of fluid-width support (I personally usually go fixed-width, but I know this is an issue for a lot of people). By Stephen Bau](http://www.domain7.com/WhoWeAre/StephenBau.html). Good stuff!
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24 ways: Making Modular Layout Systems
Jason Santa Maria details the CSS framework he built to craft the beautiful layouts he uses on his blog. It happens to be very similar to what I’ve been using for sometime, and also similar to how Blueprint CSS handles layout. I’m glad to see more people getting on board with this kind of thing. CSS should be used to build layout systems, not individual layouts.
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10 Webpage Design Lessons learned from a trip to Las Vegas… seriously!
Cute, and with good tips. I like it. Personally, I would have chosen another Vegas staple to demonstrate number six, “make it easy to enter.” But that’s just me.
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Five Simple Steps
Mark Boulton’s new book looks like it’ll be a must-have. Check it out.
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Bryan Zmijewski: User Experience Design Does Not Exist
> Designers need to stop thinking that they’re creating experiences. They’re allowing them to unfold with sound design decisions.
I’m not 100% sure I agree with this yet, but it’s certainly a fresh and interesting look at user experience. Give it a read.
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Web Designer Wall: Best of CSS Design 2008
Some great work showcased over at Nick La’s Web Designer Wall.
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Michael Paul Young
I’m not sure about this design from an information hierarchy perspective, but it certainly looks great. Dig it.
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Nate Klaiber Book Reviews
Nate Klaiber’s been reviewing books on his blog for a while, but he now has a (very well-done) site dedicated to the cause. If you like web and tech books, check it out!
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Survey: The State of the Web 2008
My good friends at Web Directions/Scroll Magazine have put together a “State of the Web” survey. It’s sort of akin the the annual survey A List Apart has done, only this one focuses more on tools, technologies, and web development techniques moreso than the business of our industry (salaries, clients, etc.). If enough people take it, it could definitely yield some interesting results. Go do it! It’ll take you maybe 10 minutes, max.
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24 ways to impress your friends: 2008
Drew McLellan’s advent calendar for web geeks is back this year! Each day throughout December they publish a daily dose of web design and development goodness. This year’s new design is clearly about impressing your friends with CSS tricks and not so much about looking good, but that’s okay; it fits with the purpose of the site. The past couple years’ calendars have had tons of great content — I’m sure this year will be no exception.
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Cartoon of me on my deathbed in .net magazine
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Israeli Candidate Borrows a (Web) Page From Obama
Web design ripoffs go mainstream! This is the kind of progress Obama brings, people. :)
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with Simply Measured, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my past clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, Django, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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