The Responsive Web Design War Strategy It seems like everyone is hailing Responsive Web Design (RWD) as the savior for the mobile site development in 2013. That’s reasonable too, since RWD is currently the only sounding approach that deals with any device resolution universally and effectively. It tries to unite this chaotic browser-based universe littered by the fragmentation resulted from hardware business competition. (Image Source: Michael Schmid, Subtle Patterns) But alas, Responsive Web Design is not the messiah you’re seeking, for it has its own range of imperfections. Since we strictly practice the philosophy of ‘Make Design, Not War’, today we are just here to explore 5 core disadvantages of Responsive Web Design, and the respective arguments and solutions to lessen the destructive consequences that designers and clients are forced to bear. Recommended Reading: 50 Useful Responsive Web Design Tools For Designers 1. The first rule to successful web design: make it as fast as possible. (Image Source: Seth Waite) 2. 3.
20 Free E-books For Web Designers E-books are great way to learn more about web design. E-books can truly provide you a fountain of knowledge of information and there’s a lot to be learnt. The beauty of ebooks is that there short and insightful not as a long as a book but not as short as a blog post. This blog post we have collected a personal collection of well of thought out web design related ebooks, which can be downloaded and read all for free. If your a tablet owner i would certainly recommend putting them on your ebook to read. There’s not too many great ebooks currently out their which are available for free, you should certainly take advantages of this post and read one of the ebooks listed in the post. I hope you enjoy the blog post and we would love for you to share your favourite free ebook featured in are post, or recommend any good free ebooks which we may have missed out. 1. 2. Web Designer’s Success Guide is the definitive guide to starting your own freelance Web design business. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Blogs - Internet blog - BBC TV Channel Homepages: Responsive Design 65 Best Free Fonts From 2012 Font compilation roundups always seem to go down a treat with our readers. This post we have been on a scavenger hunt all over internet, in search of all the best fonts which were created in 2012. The post includes over 65 fonts perfect to use in print and web design projects. Sit back and download some pretty sweet fonts. I hope you enjoy the post, and would love for you to share some of your favorite fonts in the comments section below. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. odstemplik 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. vezus 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 40. sn Blinds 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. akadora 50.
Progressive And Responsive Navigation Advertisement Developing for the Web can be a difficult yet rewarding job. Given the number of browsers across the number of platforms, it can sometimes be a bit overwhelming. But if we start coding with a little forethought and apply the principles of progressive enhancement from the beginning and apply some responsive practices at the end, we can easily accommodate for less-capable browsers and reward those with modern browsers in both desktop and mobile environments. A Common Structure Below is the HTML structure of a navigation menu created by WordPress. Please note: Any ellipses (…) in the snippets below stand in for code that we have already covered. Our navigation, unstyled. Our Tools CSS ResetHTML5 elementsLESS CSSjQuery CSS Reset Resetting our CSS styles is where we’ll start. HTML5 and CSS3 Elements We’ll be wrapping the menu in HTML5’s nav element, which is one HTML5 feature that we should be using right now. CSS3 will give our menu the progressive feel we’re looking for. jQuery
25 Free Must Download Design Programs 25 free must download design programs, the article features a range of different design programs including alternative programs for some of the most popular design programs such as Photoshop, flash and illustrator. A great collection of programs available for free which is perfect while currently suffering from a recession. Image Editing 1) Paint.net Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. 3) Xara Xtreme Xara Xtreme is quite simply the best value and fastest all-in-one graphics package you’ll find. 4) Active Pixels Great free app which is very similar to Photoshop. 5) PaintStar PaintStar is a versatile digital image processing software suitable for such tasks as retouching of photographs, composing and authoring images, image morphing, screen capture, and displaying image thumbnail in Windows Explorer context menu. 6) Picasa 3.1 Build 71.43 7) Art weaver 8) VCW VicMan’s Photo Editor 9) Photo Pos Lite 13) Karbon
Children's Museum Gets Responsive Children’s Museum Gets Responsive by Matt Griffin At some point in the last five years you may have visited the website for the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. If you had visited on your smart phone or iPad, you’d have been greeted with Flash menus that rendered the site inoperable. A couple of weeks ago, we quietly launched their new site. MenusHorizontal layouts are a useful and highly conventional approach to main navigation design. The Children’s Museum agreed that on smaller screens, it would be fine to display the four most important items (whichever were arranged first in the CMS), followed by a dropdown “More” menu. Calendar Calendars often employ table-based layouts. Both views come from the same semantic markup, with events entered by the site administrator through a single point in the CMS. Grid OK, this is where I get significantly more nerdy. And then we can apply column attributes with the following mixin: So now we can simply apply column widths to containing elements.
55+ Extremely Useful Online Generators for Designers In 2008 when I launched my personal blog to share my experiences, I decided to call it Balkhis instead of using my full name (Syed Balkhi). As time passed on, I regretted that decision because it created a lot of confusion. People thought that my last name was Balkhis instead of Balkhi. I basically combined my last name with the first letter of my first name.I was @syedbalkhi across all social media platforms, so the brand wasn’t consistent.People didn’t know about my personal blog as much because they didn’t relate Balkhis with me. Well as I focus more on my personal brand in 2015, I made the crucial move of switching domain names. As you noticed with this change, I got a new site design. I didn’t want to spend too much time creating a custom theme, so I used my friend Michael Hyatt’s theme which you too can buy if you like: GetNoticed. I did customize it to give it a bit of personal touch. The main reason why I chose this theme is because of all the amazing functionality it comes with.
» Media Queries in SVG images Cloud Four Blog “Wait? What was that Bruce Lawson just said?” That was my reaction last week as I listened to the audio from Bruce’s presentation at Responsive Day Out conference. What had Bruce said that blew my mind? It was the fact that you can embed media queries inside SVG images. Maybe this is common knowledge for everyone else, but I was stunned by the news. I recommend starting the video at the 3 minute 25 second mark. The really cool thing about the way media queries work inside SVG is that they react to the viewport of the image itself, not the viewport of the browser. Here is the source from one of the example images that Andreas uses: SVG images with media queries embedded in them seem perfect for the responsive images art direction use case. The examples that Andreas shows in the video can be found at: And I would be remiss if I didn’t also share his post from 2009(!) Finally, I highly recommend listening to all of the audio from Responsive Day Out.
PHP for Beginners: Building Your First Simple CMS The Magic of PHP + MySQL It’s safe to say that nearly every website that’s up-to-date these days is using some form of content management system (CMS). While there are a ton of great free options that provide us with a CMS to power a website (WordPress, Drupal, etc.), it doesn’t hurt to peek under the hood and get a feel for how these systems work. To get our feet wet as back-end developers, we’ll be creating a simple PHP class that will: Create a databaseConnect to a databaseDisplay a form with two fieldsSave the form data in the databaseDisplay the saved data from the database Download Files This class is intended to give you a feel for how PHP and MySQL interact together, and to show the basics of a CMS. Building the Class Our first step is to simply lay out the class in a file named ‘simpleCMS.php’ so we have a road map to work with. As you can see, we’re creating one class with four variables and five methods. The Variables Build the Database Connect to the Database Build the Form <! <?