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
Tag Archives: design
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
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
Roger Black’s Advice for Young Designers
“On the skillset side, what you’ve got to do as a young person entering the field, is really equip yourself with some basic development skills. You have to be able to understand HTML and CSS. You have to know what … 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
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 … Keep reading
Talk Like Warren Ellis
A few weeks ago, I called my friend Miles and asked him to help me out with the programming on a project I dreamed up. Here’s how I put it to him: Scott: “I want you to help me with … Keep reading
Bugzilla’s Reset Password Page Sucks
Frequently, my coworkers will forget their Bugzilla passwords. They come to me, because I manage it, and I always send them to the reset password page. Inevitably, they come back a few minutes later and tell me that it didn’t … Keep reading
Why Aren’t You Using Fireworks to Compress Images?
I’m sure you’ve all heard the Fireworks vs. Photoshop debate. When I started at Pop Art, I was a Photoshop user. It was the application that we were taught in my graphic design program, and when I found out that … Keep reading
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 … Keep reading
Version Targeting and IE8 Followup
Hooray! The feedback from the web development community convinced the IE development team to change their minds about the default setting for version targeting in IE8 (as I discussed in a previous post). “In light of the Interoperability Principles, as … Keep reading
Version Targeting and IE8
Previously on Web Developer Controversies: Aaron Gustafson from the Internet Explorer development team announced that IE8 will use a META tag to kick the engine into standards mode by targeting a specific browser version, something that was previously done by … Keep reading
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 … Keep reading
Good Web Designers are like Good Newspaper Designers
“The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages … Keep reading
A Few Dumb Questions
“I’d rather answer a few dumb questions than put up with a few dumb assumptions.” – Aaron Cannon, in reply to a question about whether he tires of people asking him about his blindness
41 Useful CSS Links
I was clearing out my bookmarks recently, and noticed that I had a pretty large collection of web development and CSS-related bookmarks that I never refer to any more, but might be useful to people who are just getting started … Keep reading
Web Design for Sara Ryan
In January, I got an email from Sara Ryan, asking if I would be interested in designing a website for her: Hi Scott — I found your site while searching for Portland web developers who use WordPress, and I really … Keep reading
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 … Keep reading
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 … Keep reading
First Annual Web Design Survey
“People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession.” A List Apart is hosting the first annual Web Design Survey in an effort to learn more … Keep reading
CSS Naked Day ’07
It’s that time of year again when standards-conscious web designers shed their stylesheets and let their sites run around, exposing their raw markup to the world to promote web standards. The idea is that a standards-based site will be marked … Keep reading
An Event Apart Seattle: Liveblogging the Event!
We’re here! It’s 8:50, and the big screen is showing a slideshow of photos that they guys must have taken yesterday when they got into town. The conference room is really nice – slightly elevated rows as you move back … Keep reading
Photoshop Mockup
Work is continuing on the new design for the blog. I’ve moved on from thumbnailing to making mockups in Photoshop. I had a few false starts, and entertained a few odd ideas at first, but I soon got my focus … Keep reading
Thumbnailing
My graphic design teachers would be so damn proud of me. I’m working on the new design for Space Ninja, and I’m finding that it’s a much bigger project than I anticipated. It’s not just a simple new design, I’m … Keep reading
Aqua Skin
I finally finished my Max OSX style skin! Head over to the options page and select “Aqua” from the drop down menu. There’s only one catch. It won’t work right under Internet Explorer on a PC. Microsoft has this stupid … Keep reading