External links

Juan Pablo Bravo:

Infographic showing 600 Hanna-Barbera Characters. The characters are shown in chronological order, with their respective names in english and spanish (of the TV series and the characters).

Mule Design Studio

A PSD is a painting of a website. We don’t spend weeks or months understanding a client’s complex needs and issues to make them paintings.

Don't say I never told you so.

Zoe Mickley Gillenwater:

I gave a presentation at entitled Highly Maintainable, Efficient, and Optimized CSS. I tried to squeeze as many tips as I could in to cover how to create CSS that is well organized and readable while still keeping efficiency in mind.

Contains some fantastic resources.

Thanks to Andy Clarke’s ‘Contract Killer’, we’ve adapted one of the best design contracts we’ve seen to make it not only relevant to email newsletter design, but fillable in 30-seconds or less!

Oli Studholme on HTML, microformats and WAI-ARIA roles. These are three topics I cover in Hardboiled Web Design, making this article a fantastic primer.

-webkit-background-clip: padding-box;

Have you ever gone clothes shopping for a person that you haven’t met or seen before? I’m not talking kids shopping, I’m talking full grown adults. How do you buy jeans for someone that you know nothing about?

Designer David Airey Shares his process for the branding design for goTeach. I’ve been working separately on the web interface and layouts.

While HTML5’s video support enables us to bring most of the content and features of YouTube to computers and other devices that don’t support Flash Player, it does not yet meet all of our needs. Today, Adobe Flash provides the best platform for YouTube’s video distribution requirements, which is why our primary video player is built with it.

A Belorussian translation of my What does browser testing mean today? for all you Belorussian types.

Jan Quickels with a German translation of my updated killer contract.

I think that what Andy showed us was inspiring and I hope every designer and developer in that room was encouraged and excited by the possibilities. However my take is that an approach that attempts to recreate that experience at least for all modern desktop browser users is a requirement for most of us.

— Pragmatic as ever, Rachel Andrew challenges some of my hardboiled approaches. A very good read.

Jan Quickels with a German translation of my original killer contract. (Revised 2010 version)

Using CSS 2.1 pseudo-elements to provide up to 3 background canvases, 2 fixed-size presentational images, and multiple complex borders for a single HTML element.

Really good stuff from Nicolas Gallagher.

In this article, we look at various types of propaganda and the people behind it, people who are rarely seen next to their work. You will also see how the drive for propaganda shaped many of the modern art movements we see today.

— Smashing Magazine deserve a pat on the back for publishing this.

At Web Directions @media last week, Mircea Piturca (who attended my Advanced CSS Styling workshop) showed me his latest side-project — TypeFolly — a designing in a browser interface experiment made entirely using jQuery pulling fonts from the Typekit API.

TypeFolly is probably the first web typography tool that allows designers to easily create beautiful “type follies”. The result is a fully html & css3 compliant code. TypeFolly gives designers the freedom to create beautiful type compositions, test new font combinations and fully enjoy the power of CSS3.

An amazing piece of work.

Minor updated removing unnecessary :before and :after pseudo-classes.

Brendan Dawes:

If I was doing this in Flash it would take me ten minutes, and it would work consistently. But I want to learn new things and have it visible on the iPad and iPhone. It’s taken me about two days of work to get it to where it is now. As a designer these kind of things are a distraction.

It was brilliant — I learnt a lot and left with a full head, bursting with geekery, tons of new ideas and solutions to old and new problems flying through my mind.  The venue was wonderful, the food delicious. We received a beautiful cloth which is delicately embossed with the #fabw pattern and text. Just gorgeous. And the workshop was just brilliant.

3-D has not only given Hollywood its biggest payday ($2.7 billion and counting for Avatar), but a slew of other hits. The year’s top three films—Alice in Wonderland, How to Train Your Dragon, and Clash of the Titans—were all projected in 3-D, and they’re only the beginning.

I hated Avatar too. (via)

Can you count the number of times Mike Lazaridis says we respect carriers?

LA Times’ Deborah Netburn:

In other words, a seventh-grader writing a book report on Microsoft Word had more font choices than the person designing Esquire Magazine’s website or the IKEA online catalog. But now that is about to change.

No shit.

Want to know if your ‘HTML application’ is part of the web? Link me into it. Not just link me to it; link me into it. Not just to the black-box frontpage. Link me to a piece of content. Show me that it can be crawled, show me that we can draw strands of silk between the resources presented in your app. That is the web: The beautiful interconnection of navigable content. If your website locks content away in a container, outside the reach of hyperlinks, you’re not building any kind of ‘web’ app. You’re doing something else.

Wow

This year, in addition to my traditional appearance at @media in London, I’m running a workshop, Advanced CSS Styling. If you’re coming to the conference, the price is only £299.00 (otherwise £325.00) plus you’ll get a peek at everything hardboiled. I hope I’ll see you there.

I cannot emphasize enough how radically different the frame set is, that iPad interfaces are embedded in. The iPad brings hands and eyes back together.

The three-disk For A Beautiful Web DVD series is a very nice resource for web designers, with roughly two hours per disk on three important topics: CSS, microformats and web accessibility. Presenter Andy Clarke, a web designer based in the UK, knows his stuff.

As of the end of March 2010, we will no longer develop Seller Account pages to be compliant with Internet Explorer 6.

I didn’t see that coming.

Blue Flavor’s Nick Finck presentation from MIX10.

Microsoft’s Ted Johnson outlines Internet Explorer 9 at MIX10 (Warning: Windows Media Video), plus a complete set of videos from MIX.

Here are four tips for navigating the typographic ocean, all built around H&FJ’s Highly Scientific First Principle of Combining Fonts: keep one thing consistent, and let one thing vary.

From Paul Irish, one of the brains behind Modernizr.

How the Wired Magazine user interface will look on the iPad or other devices.

— Expect Hardboiled Web Design to be like no other CSS book you’ve ever seen.

I’ve seen Andy a couple of times in the past and kind of felt he was a bit ‘marmite’ and it was clear from both the verbal feedback during the talk and the Twitter stream that some were keen to disagree with his views but like he said – that’s OK.

At Clearleft, our designers do not mark up their own designs. We require that they can all code well, but they never touch a line of production HTML. By the same notion, our front end developers – the ones who do code up the designs – never push a pixel of design, but we do expect them to have a basic understanding of design principles.

Fun as it is to take a trip to London/Brighton for a web conference it does start to get expensive so the fact that some local boys put on something for us Northerners was really cool.

— Couldn’t agree more. Speak The Web was a triumph.

If you care about how the content on your site is presented I think you get the best results with a designer that knows how to code.

To deem it neces sary to write HTML to be a good web designer is really quite dis respect ful to experts in those sub sets of web design who never go near any HTML, yet have equal value to bring to a design project.

Start asking your clients, “Would you like me to make sure your new site works on Blackberry, iPhone and iPad or spend time hacking for IE6?” I bet I know which one they’ll choose.

From January 2003 but still an illuminating read from Simon St. Laurent.

There’s nothing terribly revolutionary about MTV’s new logo – described aptly by the network as a ‘refresh’ rather than a redesign.

A thoughtful article from Jonathan Christopher on when he feels it appropriate for him to use progressive CSS.

Font-stacks created after considering the font-share percentage on both Mac and Windows platforms and then checked in browser for x-height and other issues (like: readability).

Some people would have you believe that you aren’t reading this because it’s not ‘above the fold’.

— Sending this to my client from hell.

This is why CSS was invented. Read the tutorial.

This weekend saw the minting of not one but two new elements. The summary element (not the summary attribute on the table element) goes inside the details element:

There’s so much to think about when building a web site that it is easy to leave things out, or forget about important considerations. One of the most important of these is accessibility, an area of web design that can seem very daunting.

— Part two is equally as fantastic.

Peachpit have released a short section from my Designing Web Accessibility DVD on YouTube.

Remy Sharp talking to Boagworld.

— Don’t miss out on your place on jQuery for Designers with Remy Sharp workshop in London on May 14th 2010. Tickets on-sale now.