In January 2012, we began creating this solid, yet flexible, foundation that will help Google’s designers and vendors to produce high quality work that helps strengthen Google’s identity. What you see here is a visual summary of the guidelines

A lot of design gold to learn from in Google’s Visual Assets Guidelines. Part two is here. (Via my mate Dan.)

A year ago I travelled to Oslo in Norway to teach a two day responsive design workshop at FINN. The team there have (obviously) been working hard and yesterday they let me know they’d a new responsive design. It looks great

Whenever I’m asked what aspects of design developers should learn, I always answer grid ratios and typography. From now on I’ll also point people to this great little slide deck by Dan Barber.

Today’s Squidfingers.

I sometimes struggle with creating colour schemes, so this is exactly what I need. Using it on a touch device is fun, or on the desktop try hacking the URL if you have a starting colour in mind and carry on from there. Just replace the hex value with your starting colour, color.hailpixel.com/#fa52a6,

(via)

BLOKK is a font for quick mock-ups and wireframing for clients who do not understand latin.

Brilliant! (via)

Dan Mall, following up on Brad Frost:

As an industry, we sell websites like paintings. Instead, we should be selling beautiful and easy access to content, agnostic of device, screen size, or context.

Reminds me of:

Worse still are the expectations that static visuals set in the minds of clients, particularly when designers use these visuals as a method to get sign-off for a design. Is the fact that so many web pages are fixed width and centered a direct result of clients signing off fixed width design visuals?

Funny how things come around.

Britain’s first independent television channel, ITV, unveiled both its new logo and a responsive new home page today. I’m a fan of the curvy new logo and how it changes to match a backdrop. The home page is full of thoughtful details too, made all the more interesting to me because my work at STV (the Scottish franchise for ITV) over the last year has tackled many of the same problems.

Pasteup is where design meets development. It is where the Guardian’s globally recognised design language is turned into code for the web, and the starting point when styling GNM branded products for both internal teams and third parties.

This is from the Guardian Developer Blog. We’re aiming to do something similar at STV.

In a fantastic A List Apart double bill, Matt Griffin tackles Responsive Comping: Obtaining Signoff with Mockups:

Sending clients in-browser comps is remarkably easy, as it turns out. We just e-mail them a URL. Clients can look at the designs in various browsers and on various devices, resize them, click links and navigation, and check out hover states. Instead of asking our clients to pretend that an image is a website, we show them a website.

Keep in mind though, that showing clients a prototype instead of showing them static visuals is about setting realistic expectations and not about designing a browser.

Chris (I so want to say “Stretch”) Armstrong:

Absolute units like pixels effectively give a layout a sell-by date, locking it to a finite resolution range in which it will “work.” Proportional units (ems, rems, and percentages) enable you to define the important relationships between elements, and are a crucial first step on the road to resolution independence.

Jordan Moore (who has a name like a country singer, but doesn’t like country and can’t sing):

There have been calls recently from Andy Clarke and Jeremy Keith to have a standard icon for revealing navigation in small contexts, and rightly so — this is a new technique and we need to set users’ expectations about the consequence of the reveal action.

My design hero, TrentWalton, on how he and his amigos responsively redesigned the Microsoft.com homepage.

While we’re talking about talks about design, here’s a recent one by Adobe’s Divya Manian from Web Directions Code in Melbourne.

The talk’s called ‘Designing in the browser’ and while Divya delivers it well (except, speakers please remember to take your conference badge off when you go on stage) and she hits all the points you’d expect to hear, what struck me was how little of the talk was actually about the ‘designing’ from the title.

Take a look at the list of resources and what you’ll find are developer tools that I’ll bet you would leave most designers scratching their heads.

Now I fully understand that the lines between designing and developing are being redrawn. I know I also said in my talk at An Event Apart in Austin:

Design doesn’t work when it’s separate from development.

But for me, Divya (and others) gets something fundamentally wrong when talking about this subject. We would never expect a developer to learn bezier curves in Illustrator in order to work with a designer. On the flip side, the notion that designers should learn Docpad or Jekyll demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how designing and developing involve different experiences, knowledge and skills.

This is something that toolmakers like Adobe need to consider when making new tools, and a subject I think I’m going to write a lot about another day.

A fascinating first in a series article. (I’m very much looking forward to meeting Oliver in person at Smashing Conference in September.)

Designer Andrew Kim set himself a three day challenge, to update Microsoft’s branding and messages. The results are stunning.

This couldn’t have come at a better time because at STV, we’re designing and prototyping something very similar.

CodePen is all about front end code inspiration, education, and sharing.

Like Dribbble for code? I like it. A lot.

Roger references me and Brad and suggests a better way to solve small screen navigation than the all too common select menu navigation pattern.

I like this a whole lot better.