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. Visit site »
Web design ripoffs go mainstream! This is the kind of progress Obama brings, people. :) Visit site »
Some terrific design work here by Rob Morris. Love the grid and type work on this site. Visit site »
The big guys think that just because they entered in the game early, or because they have some popular print publication backing them up, they can get away with whatever they want.
It is, frankly, astonishing that any of these five habits are still tolerated by users in 2008. Visit site »
Some nice tips and lessons-learned, here. Visit site »
I’m with Kottke: The New York Times’ map was the best of the bunch in terms of both information design and aesthetics. These are fun to look at side-by-side. Visit site »
Jon has a good piece on @font-face, and specifically how to make it work in both IE and other browsers. Great stuff. Visit site »
sIFR-alike, written in JavaScript using canvas. Looks pretty nice at a glance, if not as developed as sIFR. It's certainly unfortunate that we still have to use these kind of hacks, but as long as we do, I'll keep noting them here. Visit site »
Clever gallery of popular websites in wireframe form. Visit site »
Wilson’s great a thought-provoking piece on text size on the web, where he suggests that a 16px base size online is more or less equivalent to a 11pt size in print. He’s got some good evidence to back it up, and the discussion that follows is pretty interesting. Visit site »
A lot of really great tips for us WFH types, here. Visit site »
The great folks at Web Directions have posted the slides and audio from my recent typography talk in Sydney. Enjoy! Visit site »
This seems like such a smart, elegant, simple solution to targeting browsers with CSS - I’m surprised no one thought of it before. Visit site »
John Allsopp has some really great thoughts on the trickier issues around embedding fonts in web pages. As you probably know, the real isn’t isn’t the technology, but rather the legalities and licensing. The reality is that font embedding is here (it’s supposed now by a few of the cutting edge browsers), and font foundries are just going to have to deal with it. There are several ways they can make money off it, if they’ll just get a little creative with their business model. Visit site »
A nice interview with Emily Lewis, who I first met a year ago in Dallas and re-connected with in Atlanta a few weeks ago. She’s a passionate and talented web standards advocate with a lot to say. I like people with a lot to say. Check her out on Twitter, too. Visit site »
Four score and seven years ago, there was a designer and blogger who went by the name “Wilson Miner,” and he was good (at both design and blogging). Then, he was swallowed up by some large company with a fruit for a name, never to be seen again. Today, he has resurfaced, with a new design for his personal site. And it is awesome. Love the classic 60s posters inspiration and the treatment of Wilson’s trademark green. Speaking of the green: check out the way everything on the page is opacity-driven, so that he can change the green to some other color with little to no effort.
“Little to no effort” is really important to guys who only blog once a year, it seems. :) Visit site »
A nice selection of CSS filters for many of today’s browsers. While I certainly advocate avoiding these kinds of hacks whenever possible, there are times when you really do need them. Via Inman. Visit site »
Dave chimes in on a topic that is very relevant to me lately. He says:
I wonder whether designing around scaling text is still a skill we need to hold on to, and for how long.
I also wondered aloud whether we still need to be using relative unit for type in my typography talk in Sydney a couple weeks ago, and the Twitter haters came out of the woodwork to say that I didn’t care about accessibility and and I was “not thinking about about my fellow man.” It’ll be interesting to see how they react when Dave wonders the same thing. Visit site »
Some really, really nice additions and changes to both the functionality and design of my favorite browser debugging tool. Visit site »