In an age where so much web design is already neat, clean, and simple, I can think of three ways to distinguish your site from the norm:
Stunning visuals that cannot be created in UI vector editors, like Figma and Sketch Beautifully-animated interactions that cannot be dreamt in the language of Stacks of Rectangles Typography
The third is the most accessible, and an awesome place to differentiate your brand. Accordingly, look for a renaissance of type — a flourishing of … Read article &
(This is a sponsored post.) Pluralsight is giving away 25 courses on JavaScript for free to celebrate JavaScript’s 25th birthday. It’s no cheapie, either. The courses range from getting your hands dirty with JavaScript for the first time, to full-on reactive development. Pluralsight’s been around a long time and they know how to design a great course. Five free courses are being released each week throughout this month, December. The $0 price tag is probably enough of an …
I spent a good chunk of my work life this year trying (in collaboration with the amazing Noam Rosenthal) to standardize a new web platform feature: a way to modify the intrinsic size and resolution of images. And hey! We did it! But boy, was it ever a learning experience. This wasn’t my first standardization rodeo, so many of the issues we ran into, I more-or-less anticipated. Strong negative feedback from browsers. Weird, unforeseen gotchas with the underlying … Read article “
When I first got this writing prompt, my mind immediately started thinking stuff like, “What tech have I learned this year?” But this post isn’t really about tech, because I think what I’ve learned the most about building websites this past year is simplification. This year, I’ve learned that keeping it simple is almost always the best approach. Heck, I’ve been banging that drum for a while, but this year has really solidified those sort of thoughts. I’m trying to … Read article “Le
There was a time when I felt overwhelmed by how fast the web developed. It seemed like not a single day passed without a new plugin, framework, technique, or language feature being released. I believed that in order to survive as a freelancer and to compete with others I had to learn everything everyone else was so good at: webpack, React, Angular, SVGs, Houdini, CSS Grid Layout, ES6, you name it. Being active on Twitter and going to conferences didn’t … Read article “Slow Movement&
I enjoyed this blog post from Shawn. Lampshading is apparently the idea of a TV show calling attention to some weakness (like an implausible plot point) so that the show can move on. By calling it out, it avoids criticism by demonstrating the self-awareness. For developers, Shawn notes, it’s like admitting to your teammates/boss that you don’t know some particular technology so the team can move on. Not only is this useful, it’s powerful. Higher-ups need to call out anything &
I was recently looking for a way to perform scrolling effects on a project and I stumbled on the Locomotive Scroll library. It lets you perform a variety of scrolling effects, like parallax and triggering/controlling animations at scroll points. You might also call it a “smooth scrolling” library, but it doesn’t leverage native smooth scrolling — it does just the opposite by virtualizing scrolling and ensuring it’s always smooth. You could probably consider this “scrolljacking” so if you …
In the short term, opinions about technology often follow a compressed form of Laver’s Law:
Everything just before me was completely broken. Everything that comes after me is completely unnecessary. Everything I use right now is perfectly fine; stop changing things.
We tend to judge things based on where we started, our personal “Year Zeros.” But what’s “Year Zero” for us isn’t “Year Zero” for others. And in the fullness of time, the good ideas win out and hindsight … Read article ̶
When Chris asked me to write about “one thing I learned about building websites this year” I admit my brain immediately went through a list of techniques and CSS properties I started using this year. But then I paused. Other people can write about that much better than I can. What’s something that I specifically have learned? Then I realized that I’ve been “learning” the same lesson for the last five years, yet I keep falling into the same trap … Read ar
Speaking of cool CSS stuff you can buy, Julia Evans’ zine Hell Yes! CSS! is hot off the presses. A “zine” being 28 pages of “short, informative, and fun comics which will quickly teach you something useful.” Some parts of it are like cheat sheets. Some parts of it are like concepts made digestible through the relaxed format. Some parts of it are like mini-tutorials. There is definitely some uhmmmm wow weird moments in there that might stump … Read article