Blogging and all that Malarkey

I like to think that at Stuff and Nonsense, our house isn’t so much a place to work as it is a house of fun and although we take the work we do very seriously, we don’t take ourselves too seriously at all. We hope that sense of fun comes across on our site and today we’re putting aside our embarrassment, putting on our baggy trousers and unveiling a new header on our home page.

Endless possibilities for mischief.

Flexible layouts. Equal height columns. Presentation independence from your HTML source order. These things haven’t been so easy to achieve with CSS — until now. The flexible box layout, the new flexbox specification, makes creating any of these layouts easy and much more. Backwards compatibility is still an issue, but there’s no doubt that flexbox is (part of) the future of CSS layout.

Jordan Moore (who wears rattlesnake skin shoes) on how to give users the option to “Toggle a Responsive Design On and Off”:

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.

I’ve been using Emmet these last few months in Espresso and find it incredibly useful. I suppose between this and Sass, I write half the code I used to. (Now I just need to write the Emmet shortcuts reminder sheet I’ve been planning for months too.)

Today’s Squidfingers.

After I mentioned on Unfinished Business about wanting to improve Rock Hammer’s typography Sass, Zachary Kain got in touch to tell me about Typeplate, a “typographic starter kit” that’s worth your attention too.

We know that it’s only web designers who habitually resize a browser window to see if a site’s responsive. But why not reward their dedication with a little something special? Add this to your stylesheet: @media only screen and (min-width: 960px) and (max-width: 970px) { body { -webkit-transform: rotate(180deg); -moz-transform: rotate(180deg); -o-transform: rotate(180deg); transform: rotate(180deg); } } This could be the most essential CSS3 media query you’ll need today.

Following my visit to the University of Ulster in Belfast, in this week’s; Unfinished Business, Anna and I talk about how hard it is to keep up with new technologies and techniques and how to decide what aspects of web design and development to learn next.