November 13, 2015 — Microsoft restarted conversations about system UI fonts with its original Windows Phone design language, which relied heavily on typography in general, and on a font named Segoe in particular. No wonder that the idea of using those fonts is spreading through the web world as well. Whether you want your website to feel more like an app, to draw clearer lines between the content and user interface, or to use modern, beautiful fonts with zero latency, you might be interested in using system UI fonts on your website. But it’s not as easy as it could be. That’s because the CSS support is curiously schizophrenic. Read more…

November 13, 2015 — Today, we’re happy to release the Voyage Icon Set, a set of 40 free icons designed and created by Print Express and is free to use in private as well as commercial projects. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms isn’t cool. We’d kindly like to ask you to provide credits to the creator and link to this article if you would like to spread the word about the freebie. Read more…

November 12, 2015 — What the hell is isolate scopes, transclusion, linking functions, compilers and directive controllers? In this article, Nicolas Bevacqua will cover all of that, and more! If the figure looks unreasonably mind-bending, then this article might be for you. This article is based on the AngularJS v1.3.0 tree. Are you ready? Let’s do this! Read more…

November 11, 2015 — Any experienced traveler will tell you that some companies do it better than others. To find out, let’s take a closer look at a few airline websites from around the world. With this article, we start exploring various industries and study the current state of front-end, UX and performance of relatively complex websites. First up are airline websites. Some sections of the article were written by the editorial team. We’d love to hear your flights booking experience in the comments to this article! Along the way, Joshua Johnson will discover the critical steps of booking air travel and how they’re presented by different companies. Read more…

November 10, 2015 — When we shop for a theme, do we get what’s on the tin? Some themes aren’t as fast as what is advertised on the demo websites. When running small tests on themes for other CMS’, like Joomla, Philip Blomsterberg had the same findings. The theme he started out with seemed very good, offering speeds that were quite good, especially for a news website or portal. He tested the theme with demo content; however, regardless of how hard he tried, speeds and scores never reached those on the vendor’s website. This led him to believe that theme vendors sometimes set up demos to make their websites appear faster than they really are. Read more…

November 6, 2015 — 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. Read more…

November 5, 2015 — When we talk about the user’s perception of time, we mean psychological time, or brain time. This time is of interest to psychologists, neuroscientists and odd individuals like me. Objective time is dealt with by technical means, and those means have limits that become insurmountable at some point. As web developers, we should aim to deliver fast and reliable web services to make users feel comfortable. We can use technological means to control the objective performance of a website. However, technology and resources eventually hit a limit, at which point it becomes difficult to change objective performance. Then, we have to aim to exploit what psychology and neuroscience tell us. Read more…

November 5, 2015 — In record time, our smartphones have become indispensable, and as mobile technology has become integrated into nearly every aspect of our lives, our smartphones are shifting from device to dependency. But while it’s now clear that we are locked in an intense relationship with our smartphones, one has to wonder why this courtship hasn’t turned into a love triangle with tablets. What is it about our smartphones that makes them so attractive? And why is the addiction we feel toward them so much stronger than to our tablets? Read more…

November 3, 2015 — Flexbox today is very, very real. After many years of development, the specification has become much more stable, making it easier to achieve those CSS layout dreams. In this article, Dennis Gaebel Jr will discuss layout patterns well suited to flexbox, using the interface from the Tracks application, which also takes advantage of atomic design principles. He’ll share how flexbox proved useful and note the pitfalls of pairing it with particular layout patterns, and also look at those patterns that caused concern, provide suggestions for fallbacks and share additional tactics to start using this CSS property immediately. Read more…

November 2, 2015 —

At StaticGen, our open-source directory of static website generators, we’ve kept track of more than a hundred generators for more than a year now, and we’ve seen both the volume and popularity of these projects take off incredibly on GitHub during that time, going from just 50 to more than 100 generators and a total of more than 100,000 stars for static website generator repositories. Influential design-focused companies such as Nest and MailChimp now use static website generators for their primary websites. Vox Media has built a whole publishing system around Middleman. Carrot, a large New York agency and part of the Vice empire, builds websites for some of the world’s largest brands with its own open-source generator, Roots. And several of Google’s properties, such as “A Year In Search” and Web Fundamentals, are static.

Static websites are hardly new, going all the way back to the beginning of the web. So, why the sudden explosion in interest? What’s up? Why now?