Archives for “CSS”

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 a custom font in the headlines, there are a variety of solutions we can recommend, [...]


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 applied to form elements. When possible, using the native form elements is the most accessible [...]


Big news for web fonts and video today

WebM Video The codec wars around the HTML5 video element might be settled sooner than you think: Basically, Google just open-sourced VP8, a video codec. VP8 is being combined with the Vorbis audio codec to create a new video format called WebM. This wouldn’t be news at all except that a ton of groups have already [...]




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 it a little tooltip-style popup when you moused over the footnote reference. I didn’t want [...]


The Importance of Terminology

There are certain terms used in the web industry that most people think of as “industry-standard,” but are actually used in slightly different ways at different companies. For instance, I’ve run into several definitions for “alpha,” “beta,” “wireframe,” and “comp” at different shops I’ve worked at. Learning how a new company uses these terms isn’t [...]


How to Hire a Front-End Web Developer

The following is an email exchange I had with a friend at another company about a year ago. We were talking about the best way to go about hiring a front-end developer, and I was sharing some tips from our hiring process. “Hi Scott, we are in need of a CSS expert/ninja. Our company has [...]


How to Avoid Paragraph Gaps when Using Superscript and Subscript

Frequently, when I see a webpage with superscript or subscript text, I see associated gaps in the paragraph. This is caused because the default way browsers render super and subscript text is to add enough vertical space in the paragraph to show them. The result is ugly, but as you can see in the following [...]


Key Takeaways from An Event Apart

I’ve attended An Event Apart four years running now. It is, hands-down, the finest web conference around, and if you work on the web at all, whether you’re a designer, developer, copywriter, or client-services, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Reviewing my notes from previous conferences, I noticed that there were some running themes. Each [...]


Who’s Afraid of HTML Email?

Anyone who tells you creating HTML email is easy has either never done it, or is lying. Inexperienced designers tend to think, “Oh, no problem, it’s all tables and font tags!” Grizzled veterans, however, know all too well the difficulties of getting anything but the most simple design to render well in a variety of [...]


Pop Art Redesign

The redesign of the Pop Art site is live! I’m really proud of the work I did on this, and I’ll write a longer post soon with details about the process and some of the coolest features. In the meantime, I wanted to make a quick post and encourage everyone to check it out.



An Event Apart San Francisco 2008

I’ve managed to attend An Event Apart every year so far, and this year was particularly exciting because the nearest location was in San Francisco. I went to Seattle the last two times, which was fine, but I know Seattle pretty well, so the opportunity to play tourist in a new city was very appealing [...]



I’m Working on Something Special

Most coders and programmers are familiar with the concept of “flow” or “getting in the zone.” In a nutshell, it’s a mental state you get in when you’re working on something where it almost becomes effortless. This state can be difficult to achieve, and usually takes the right combination of energy level, motivation, and little [...]


Third Annual CSS Naked Day

Happy CSS Naked Day! Dustin Diaz started this in 2006 as a way to promote web standards. “In the spirit of promoting Web Standards along with good semantic markup and proper hierarchy structures, [today] will be a day of nakedness for all webmasters to remove their style sheets from their website for one day. …The [...]


The Email Standards Project

In 1998, Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the Web Standards Project to fight for better support of web standards from the browser manufacturers and web developers. It was a success, if for no other reason than it provided a flag to rally behind. This year, the Email Standards Project was founded to rally support for web standards [...]







An Event Apart Seattle 2007

Last year, I attended An Event Apart 2006 in Seattle. It was a great event, although I remember it being really rushed, because they seven sessions packed into one day. So when I heard that they were coming back to Seattle, and had changed the format to two days, I signed up right away. I’m [...]


How Web Standards Made a Better Site for LP

What started as a simple project with LP to redesign their top-level landing pages quickly grew to encompass their entire site. This brought with it some surprising logistical difficulties, which the Pop Art team overcame through clever use of web standards. The end result is a new look applied across the entire site, with the [...]