Web developers and designers have debated with each other for years about how to declare font sizes: Should they use the PX unit of measurement, or should they use EM? The truth is, it depends — and recent trends are bringing new rules with them.
Many designers have built web sites and applications that employ a different color scheme depending on the time of day. It often has a charming effect, but it can probably accomplish something more. Instead of focusing on whether we can do such a thing, I’d like to pose the question of whether we should.
For years, web designers have argued amongst each other whether layouts should have a fixed width, or a liquid layout. Thanks to CSS3 Media Queries, this storied debate has a new chapter.
IE8 doesn’t support HTML5 or CSS3. IE7 supports even less of the ancient HTML4 and CSS2 standards. Yet, thanks to a few tricks, you can still dabble with new front-end development techniques without IE holding you back.
Cheer up, Gawker readers! On the plus side, the redesign of the popular blog network offers users a thought-provoking new way to experience news. On the down side? The design itself sends these websites headlong into an identity crisis.
I recently went to the Mix conference in Las Vegas, where I got to learn and see a lot of very cool things, but undeniably, one of the stars was design researcher Bill Buxton. I’ve been putting a lot of thought into what he said in his portion of the keynote, and I think it boils down to one simple sentence.
We all have heard the speech about how dangerous it is to post personal information on Facebook. We know people who get angry at Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for arguing Facebook users don’t want privacy online. However, I think a fundamental part of the disagreement about privacy in social media is not on its value, or its virtues, but its definition.
For a company with a rich history of passing off iteration as innovation, it’s pretty weird to see almost all of IE7’s design decisions being implemented — and improved upon — in almost every other browser.
When 37 Signals redesigned their signup forms, the goal was to find a way to make the page shorter, but equally effective. I think they did a great job of it. What they ended up doing reminded me a lot of what I wrote about in my post about a lossy text compressor.
I recently stumbled upon the Edustyle awards page, because I wanted to see what ideas other designers bring to academic websites. Brown University’s gateway definitely has some interesting ideas – interesting enough to win a most innovative award from Edustyle.