You've probably noticed a lot of chatter lately about the Ember.js framework and rightfully so. It aims to make it substantially easier to build single-page web apps by abstracting a lot of the complexities for writing scalable and maintainable MVC-based code. And developers are jumping on-board in droves.
Automation is useful in the work of every designer. It saves precious time on repetitive tasks and helps us solve certain problems more quickly and easily. You can automate your workflow in Photoshop with actions, which are pretty popular and which most of you already know about and use. Today, we’ll introduce you to an advanced automation technique: scripting. All you need for this is basic knowledge of JavaScript, which some of us Web designers already have.
CSS is a mess. First introduced in ~1995, it was meant to style basic text documents. Not websites. Not applications. Text documents. It has come a long way since then. Probably a bit too long. A lot of things were not intended in the first place like multi-column layouts, responsive web design and more; this is why it has become a language full of hacks and glitches, like some kind of odd steam machine with a bunch of extensions.
This is 2013. If you are going to build a webapp, you must add real-time capabilities to the app. It is the standard. Meteor does a pretty good job at helping you to quickly build and make apps real-time. But meteor is tightly coupled with MongoDB and it is the only way to add real-time capabilities. Sometimes, this is overkill.
This article features just one of the many, suboptimal solutions for responsive images.With all the talk of new HTML5 standards such as the srcset attribute and <picture> element, as well as server-side techniques such as Responsive Web Design + Server Side Components (RESS), you'd be forgiven for concluding that simple, static websites can’t support responsive images today. That conclusion might be premature, however. In fact, there’s an easy, straightforward way to deliver responsive images that’s supported by all of today’s Web browsers: CSS background images.
The recently popularized “flat” interface style is not merely a trend. It is the manifestation of a desire for greater authenticity in design, a desire to curb visual excess and eliminate the fake and the superfluous. In creating new opportunities, technological progress sometimes leads to areas of excess. In the 19th century, mechanized mass production allowed for ornaments to be stamped out quickly and cheaply, leading to goods overdecorated with ornament.
A website has a personality — it is a reflection of the person or organization behind it. When people visit your website, you want it to stand out from the crowd, to be memorable. You want people to come back and use your website or get in touch with you. So, to distinguish itself from the unwashed masses, your website not only needs remarkable content, but also has to be innovative yet functional.
If you code websites, it’s a good bet that at least one of your clients has asked about or requested a mobile-friendly website. If you go the responsive design route (whereby your website is flexible enough to adjust visually from mobile to desktop widths), then you’ll need a strategy to make images flexible, too — a responsive image solution.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the staggering array of resources and options available to designers. In this article, we’ll explore the idea of consciously restricting yourself to a set of core tools that you know, love and trust. Take a traditional craftsman — let’s say a carpenter. While they may have access to a wide range of tools in their workshop, they will take a bag with just a few carefully chosen tools when working away. Similarly, an artist may have a wide range of paints, brushes and accessories in their studio, but will carefully select a limited palette and a few choice brushes when painting in the field.
Frameworks are hot topics in the web-industry and have been for some time. In this vast sea of flavors is Symfony – an extensive PHP framework that follows the ever popular MVC paradigm. Its learning curve is probably a little steeper than its fellow competitors, like CodeIgniter. Don’t worry, once it grows on you, you’ll feel more powerful than ever and you’ll be able to develop fantastic applications.