August 29, 2013 — As usual, we have to put ourselves in the users’ shoes: What do we want them to see first? How will your message be best communicated? We have to ask these questions before we start designing, because the layout will shape the rest of the design. The following websites have some quite unusual layouts. They aren’t necessarily perfect; still, browse through them, and maybe your creative genius will be sparked. Read more…

August 28, 2013 — Jesse Friedman has spent nearly a decade trying to create scalable, predictably insightful, inspirational environments. he has led creative teams in these environments, and is currently doing it as the Director of Web Interface and Development at Astonish. What follows is what Jesse has found to help his team harness inspiration effectively. Read more…

August 27, 2013 — Navigation Timing API provides easy access to accurate page timing information, but it is still insufficient to draw a complete picture. Whether we need to support browsers that do not currently implement the Navigation Timing or get information about resources not included in the current page, be sure to find out more about the user’s network bandwidth or whether their support for IPv6 is better or worse than their support for IPv4. All of the techniques presented here were developed while writing Boomerang though not all of them made it into the code yet. Read more…

August 26, 2013 — Thanks to strong mobile Web adoption worldwide, we have seen the launch of even more responsive designs in 2012 and 2013. Most of these have been in the publishing category, but lately we are starting to see complex transactional websites, such as Currys UK, take a brave step into this new world. Read more…

August 22, 2013 — We have gotten serious about asking how to better serve users, which reflects a significant change in the designer’s skill set. Designers will use the same tools they have always used, but they are now responsible for more than just the interface. Whether or not a designer calls him or herself a product designer is beside the point; to remain relevant, they need to master these new user-centered values and processes. Read more…

August 21, 2013 — While srcset as implemented by WebKit doesn’t address to all the responsive images use cases, it does represent a major step toward a long overdue solution—hopefully the first of many. And as Chair of the W3C’s Responsive Images Community Group, Mat Marquis has been dreading this moment for some time now. Pertaining to “responsive images”: it’s complicated, and it can be hard keeping up with the signal in all the noise. Here’s what you need to know. Read more…

August 20, 2013 — In this article, we will explore an alternative approach to styling Web documents. With the use of “intelligent” selectors, we’ll cover how to query the extant, functional nature of semantic HTML in such a way as to reward well-formed markup. If you code it right, you’ll get the design you were hoping for. Heydon Pickering hopes that employing some of these ideas will make your workflow simpler and more transferable between projects. Read more…

August 19, 2013 — A viral app is the best case scenario for an app developer because word of mouth is far more powerful than any paid advertising. No one trusts ads, and they cost too much for developers anyway. But humans have shared stories since we’ve been using rocks as tools. We’re naturally built for viral sharing. But getting your app to spread faster than celebrity gossip requires strategizing a world of social interaction inside your app. Read more…

August 16, 2013 — Adobe’s InDesign page-layout application has been made faster and more feature-rich with each iteration. But even the best applications lack some features. Luckily, Adobe realized this and opened the doors to allow designers to expand this set of tools through plugins. In this article, we’ve put together a small collection to show a bit of what InDesign can do. Read more…

August 16, 2013 — The proliferation of mobile devices, increased user expectations, and the very real risks of losing customers and dropping in search result rankings have laid a heavy burden on developers to optimize loading time at all costs. The Web development community previously didn’t spend much time concerning itself with load issues and for that reason and more, Web developers aren’t conditioned to think very hard about the unique load requirements of their clients’ websites. We need to include a specification for load requirements as a regular checklist item when bidding and planning Web work. Read more…