Design Tips : Copy & Print Center

A Closer Look At Font Rendering

Posted by Tim Ahrens on April 24, 2012 · Comments Off

The Web font revolution that started around two years ago has brought up a topic that many of us had merrily ignored for many years: font rendering. The newfound freedom Web fonts are giving us brings along new challenges. Choosing and using a font is not merely a stylistic issue, and it’s worth having a look at how the technology comes into play. While we [...]

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Stop Shouting. Start Teaching.

Posted by Christopher Butler on April 23, 2012 · Comments Off

Imagine you are in a classroom. Let’s say a high school classroom. You’re sitting at your desk, listening to your favorite teacher—the one who inspired you, the one who got you excited about that thing you love for the first time. You’ve stopped taking notes because your body just can’t quite function normally when your mind is being [...]

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Mental Model Diagrams (Cartoon)

Posted by Indi Young and Brad Colbow on April 23, 2012 · Comments Off

We tend to carefully create our HTML and CSS, and meticulously place every pixel to our designs. We plan exactly where our content should be placed on a particular site. Among many other decisions we need to make, we always keep in mind to craft a great experience for all our users. But how do we know what our users really want? One way is to understand the motivations [...]

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Decoupling HTML From CSS

Posted by Jonathan Snook on April 20, 2012 · Comments Off

For years, the Web standards community has talked about the separation of concerns. Separate your CSS from your JavaScript from your HTML. We all do that, right? CSS goes into its own file; JavaScript goes in another; HTML is left by itself, nice and clean. CSS Zen Garden proved that we can alter a design into a myriad of permutations simply by changing the CSS. [...]

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Random Redirection In WordPress

Posted by Goce Mitevski on April 20, 2012 · Comments Off

If you run an online magazine, most of your readers will never go through your archive, even if you design a neat archive page. It’s not you; it’s just that going through archives is not very popular these days. So, how do you actually make readers dig in without forcing them? How do you invite them to (re)read in a way that’s not boring? How do you make [...]

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Why We Shouldn’t Make Separate Mobile Websites

Posted by Bruce Lawson on April 19, 2012 · Comments Off

There has been a long-running war going on over the mobile Web: it can be summarized with the following question: “Is there a mobile Web?” That is, is the mobile device so fundamentally different that you should make different websites for it, or is there only one Web that we access using a variety of different devices? Acclaimed usability pundit Jakob [...]

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Designing With Audio: What Is Sound Good For?

Posted by Karen Kaushansky on April 18, 2012 · Comments Off

Our world is getting louder. Consider all the beeps and bops from your smartphone that alert you that something is happening, and all the feedback from your appliances when your toast is ready or your oven is heated, and when Siri responds to a question you’ve posed. Today our technology is expressing itself with sound, and, as interaction designers, we need [...]

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Beercamp: An Experiment With CSS 3D

Posted by Tom Giannattasio on April 17, 2012 · Comments Off

I recently had the pleasure of organizing this year’s Beercamp website. If you’re unfamiliar, Beercamp is a party for designers and developers. It’s also a playground for front-end experimentation. Each year we abandon browser support and throw a “Pshaw” in the face of semantics so that we can play with some emerging features of modern browsers. This [...]

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Beercamp: An Experiment With CSS 3D

Posted by Tom Giannattasio on April 17, 2012 · Comments Off

I recently had the pleasure of organizing this year’s Beercamp website. If you’re unfamiliar, Beercamp is a party for designers and developers. It’s also a playground for front-end experimentation. Each year we abandon browser support and throw a “Pshaw” in the face of semantics so that we can play with some emerging features of modern browsers. This [...]

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A New Front-End Methodology: BEM

Posted by Varvara Stepanova on April 16, 2012 · Comments Off

This article is the sixth in our new series that introduces the latest, useful and freely available tools and techniques, developed and released by active members of the Web design community. The first article covered PrefixFree; the second introduced Foundation, a responsive framework; the third presented Sisyphus.js, a library for Gmail-like client-side drafts, [...]

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