I’ve just finished reading the latest short book from the A Book Apart series. It’s called Design is a Job, by Mike Monteiro. Mike is the owner of Mule Design, though if you’ve heard of him, it’s probably from his … Keep reading
Category Archives: Professional
2012 Presidential Candidate Web Design Review
A couple weeks ago, I gathered my coworkers in the big conference room for a design critique. Instead of reviewing one of our own projects, however, I put up the websites for each of the current candidates for president. The … Keep reading
Customer Service Showdown: Zappos vs Federal Direct Loans Servicing Center
Recently, I had to spend some time in the customer support channels for two very different organizations: Zappos.com and the Federal Student Loan Servicing Center. The difference between these two, while sadly unsurprising, was still dramatic. TL;DR: The federal government … Keep reading
Blinded by the Light
Today, everyone was linking to the new Qwikster landing page. Most people who saw it probably thought about the business implications of Netflix spinning off the DVD rental part of their company, or wondered if they would have to recreate … Keep reading
The False Economics of Twitter Auto-Follow
In the last year, I tried to drive up my follower count on Twitter. I used a program that auto-followed people who mentioned keywords I was interested in. While this did dramatically increase my followers, the gains were misleading — … Keep reading
It doesn’t matter how secure your WordPress installation is if you have insecure hosting
I recently struggled with a nasty case of Pharma spam on my blog. I’ll post soon with a more detailed run-down of what happened and how I dealt with it. In a nutshell, however, it appears that the hackers got … Keep reading
How we made the Metal Toad site more mobile-friendly with media queries
There’s been a lot of buzz lately about Responsive Web Design, and in particular about CSS3 Media Queries. When our CEO recently asked me to make our site easier to view on his mobile phone, I jumped at the chance … Keep reading
How to use @font-face to avoid faux-italic and bold browser styles
Did you know that if you declare a custom font using @font-face, the browser will try to fake the bold and italic styles if it can’t find them? This is a clever little feature that avoids a scenario where a … Keep reading
What Makes HTML5 so Great?
When the W3C started working on HTML again in 2007, they posted a set of guiding principles for the new version, emphasizing compatibility, utility and interoperability. I’d like to highlight four of these principles that I think are especially important. … Keep reading
optimizeLegibility does not work with @font-face
Recently, twitter was buzzing with news of a CSS technique called optimizeLegibility that enables better kerning and font ligatures. It’s enabled by default in Firefox above 20px text, so you may have already seen it in action. I’d noticed the … Keep reading
Best Practice: Use @font-face for Custom Fonts
I just wrote the following for our marketing team to understand how to sell font solutions to our clients. If you have any feedback, I would love to hear it in the comments section! When a client’s design calls for … Keep reading
Best Practice: Use native form elements whenever possible
I just wrote the following for our marketing team to understand why we recommend not styling forms. If you have any feedback, I would love to hear it in the comments section! Our recommendation is that only minimal styling be … Keep reading
jQuery Slide-Down Language Selector
A site I worked on recently had an international link, and when the user clicked on it, the whole page was supposed to slide down and reveal a language picker. I found some jQuery to slide the page down, but … Keep reading
jQuery Popup Footnotes
A recent site I worked on had footnote references throughout the body copy, and a corresponding list of footnotes at the bottom of the page. That’s easy enough to mark up, but the client also wanted the footnote to display … Keep reading
Design For Yourself Fast
“Design for yourself fast. You shouldn’t need to think about what you want, you are what you want. It just comes out of you, and it will be good. But sometimes, you have this feeling that you have to think … Keep reading
Followers vs Friends
It’s always bothered me that most social networking sites only have one level of friendship. You are either someone’s friend, or you are not. In the real world, we have multiple levels: spouses, partners, family, friends, coworkers, acquaintances, etc. Since … Keep reading
Six WordPress Tips from the Pop Art Blog Redesign
When we converted the Pop Art Blog to use WordPress, I learned some clever tricks that I would like to share with you. If you like what we’ve done around here, you might be interested in some of these techniques … Keep reading
How to Get Your Most Recent Twitter Posts Using PHP with Caching
When we started redesigning the Pop Art blog, one of the chief requirements was to integrate everyone’s Twitter feeds into the site. In addition to the Pop Art Twitter feed in the sidebar, we wanted to add individual twitter feeds … Keep reading
Tables Don’t Have a HEIGHT Attribute
I am absolutely stunned. For a few months now, I’ve been discovering that some of my websites don’t render correctly on Netscape. Now, like any web designer, I’m aware that none of the major browsers render HTML exactly according to … Keep reading