Microsoft Edge has evolved over the past year — from being announced as a brand new browser, with Microsoft moving away from Trident (or MSHTML) to EdgeHTML, to the browser usage share increase curve similar to the one Google experienced when Chrome was first introduced in 2008. This article is part of the web development series from our tech evangelists and engineers on JavaScript skills, community projects and best practices including Microsoft Edge browser and the new EdgeHTML rendering engine.
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Using external SVG sprite maps to deliver lossless scalable vector images is widely used in responsive web design today and well-supported by tools like svg4everybody. At German newspaper Zeit Online, we embraced this technique quite a lot. However, we recently changed this workflow back to completely inlining the SVG into the HTML owing to a bug in Apple’s Safari browsers– the same way GitHub is doing with its octicons.
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Varnishtest can be used to test a cache invalidation method or to reproduce bugs when filing a bug report. To ensure optimal performance from a Varnish Cache deployment, one should integrate Varnishtest into the design. Varnishtest can be used by system administrators in two scenarios: (1) when configuring a Varnish Cache installation, and (2) when writing complex caching policies in the Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) or when tuning Varnish Cache. Code tinkerers who work on extensions written for Varnish Cache (called VMODs) can use Varnishtest to define and test their modules.
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When developers are expected to work in a corner until needed, that isolation from the design process prevents them from crafting the end product just as much as the designers themselves. The person who ultimately pays is the user. Whether you’re a developer, designer, or in another role, our mindsets need to change; we want to provide the best products for our users. Design decisions aren’t the sole responsibility of the design team. Decisions made during the design stages have far-reaching consequences that affect the entire project. A representative of each area, especially development and design, should be included when project-critical decisions are made.
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An ever-growing number of web users around the world are living with dementia. They have very varied levels of computer literacy and may be experiencing some of the following issues: memory loss, confusion, issues with vision and perception. In this article, Laurence Ivil and Paul Myles will share some lessons they learned along the way about making a dementia-friendly front end on a tight budget. By making websites more accessible to a growing group of users who are so often excluded from the benefits that the internet has to offer, designers are not only supporting people living with dementia, but also those with similar accessibility challenges.
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Creating a living style guide is a long but worthwhile process. Steven Lambert made a few mistakes along the way that prevented developers and designers from adopting it sooner or using it effectively. However, he pushed through and eventually made it to the end. This is the story of how Steven developed a living style guide, the mistakes made along the way, and why the current landscape of style guide generators did not suit his needs.
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.
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There’s so much to explore in the world of astronomy, and it’s about time we did. In this article, we bring you an icon set created and designed by the team at Iconshock, No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is not cool. Please provide credits to the creators and link to the article in which this freebie was released if you would like to spread the word in blog posts or anywhere else. So, dear space troopers out there, what are you waiting for?
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In this article, Scott Lewis will share the fundamentals of how to create premium quality icons. These fundamentals are technical skills; anyone can learn and master them with practice. Remember that to create better icons, start from the general and work toward the specific. Every icon set submitted to Iconfinder is reviewed and evaluated for potential appeal to our website users and for potential commercial value as premium icons. When reviewing icon sets submitted to the website, we have a responsibility to our designers and to our customers to make sure all premium icons on the website are of the highest possible quality.
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Systems build on systems, and those simple systems can provide a key to designing for more complex spaces. In the space of digital design, if you ensure that your simplest dynamic systems of content, structure and meaning-making work as intended at a foundational level, then you can lay the groundwork for larger, more complex systems that also work as intended. In this article, Andy Fitzgerald will show you how to use a simple set of open-source tools to introduce real, dynamic content into your prototyping process from day one. This approach allows you to focus on how users understand your content from the very start of a project and to subsequently build structural, visual and technical elements atop that foundation of understanding.
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