Tag: WEBDESIGN

One of the most time consuming activities in graphic and Web design is the picking of fonts. It's basically a crap shoot: there's no way to see what text will look like until after you've selected a font -- and when you have a list of 200 fonts to get through, the process can be painstakingly tiresome. That's where Wordmark.it comes in; it's a Web app that scans your computer for installed fonts, ...

Back for its sixth year and as nerdy as ever, 24 ways gives you a delicious daily dose of design and development between the 1st and 24th of December. Almost every article has something to do with CSS or HTML, and it's definitely not targeted at beginners -- but if you work with websites, or you know someone that does, 24 ways is a must-read. The archives are fantastic, too, if only to see the ...

One of the first things you learn about writing for the Web is that you have an incredibly short amount of time to make a first impression; it's usually said to be around three seconds. So, if you've grabbed your visitor's interest or managed to get your message across within those three seconds, you did a good job. But how do you know if you did? Clue is a new Web app from the fine folks at Zurb ...

This one's for the Web developers in the audience. ColorPicker is a very powerful JavaScript ... color picker. Okay, so maybe the name isn't very original (or searchable, for that matter), but it is very descriptive. In the demo shown on the page, ColorPicker pops up as you click a text field that needs to be filled with a color value (think #ff00ff format). But what you get feels like a ...

Like spam filters, Captcha is one of the necessary evils of the Internet. Google's Captcha is consistently irritating for me. I routinely fail it at least once, sometimes twice in a row, and I'm not a robot (to the best of my knowledge). Google bought reCAPTCHA a while back, and it's nicer (and helps a good cause), but they still seem to be using their older, super-irritating Captcha in many ...

The folks at ZURB have just released Bounce, a nice little tool which lets you take notes on websites and then share the URL with friends or colleagues. Bounce is basically a dressed down version of Notable, ZURB's full featured website feedback tool for teams. The user interface for Bounce is dead simple. Just input the the URL you want to take notes on and in a few seconds Bounce will ...

Developing for the Web can get quite rough at times, especially when IE is involved. Even when you take IE out of the picture (which you can't really do), there are still myriad differences among browsers, particularly in the implementation of newer technologies such as CSS3 and HTML5. When can I use ... is invaluable for answering questions such as "Should I be using the new HTML5 video tag in ...

CSS Grid Builder is a neat tool for Web designers (from ZURB, the company behind Notable). So what's a CSS grid? CSS Grids are often used by Web designers to control page layout and position elements in a somewhat sensible fashion. Grid Builder lets you specify what sort of grid you would like to have and spits out just the CSS you need. The top section of the window has a simple form to fill out ...

GTmetrix is a good tool for figuring out why your website is slow. It uses Yahoo's YSlow performance evaluation tool, but it also adds some intelligence of its own. Using it is quite simple. Feed it a domain name and GTMetrix loads the page in the background while you wait, and then routes you to a report page. The report is manager-friendly: It starts out with a summary in huge letters, grading ...

Hosting Reviews is a neat free service for comparing a myriad of Web hosts. It uses a rich, AJAX-y filtering system with plenty of parameters. The list is dynamically updated as you apply various filter criteria, and it's very easy to narrow down to the exact hosts that offer the features you need. In their press release, they make a pretty bold claim: "Unlike many hosting comparison sites -- we ...

Wikipedia just underwent a pretty significant refresh in the looks department. Here are some of the new features: The navigation menu now uses JavaScript and neatly folds and slides on click. The tabs on top of each page look different, and are actually easier to use. The editing toolbar is still quite busy, but it's been reorganized to make it simpler to use. I don't think there's any ...

Formee is a ready-made framework for quickly developing and deploying forms. That's a fancy description of what is, essentially, a couple of nice CSS files and a demo HTML file. Formee contains a single piece of JavaScript -- which is a way to plug the software itself via Twitter -- and that's all. I don't know ... that fancy graphic had me expecting something much cooler. I was waiting for some ...

If you're part of the development team for a website project, it's important to keep tabs with all parties involved. It's necessary to get everyone's input, track progress to date, and synthesize the feedback so that the project can progress to completion. Some projects are straightforward and easy, while others can be insane at times. Either way, Notable is a great app to help streamline the ...

Did you know that color blindness is surprisingly common -- if you're male, anyway. You know how men are 'XY' and women are 'XX'? That little 'missing leg' in the male Y chromosome supplies women with redundant genes for eyesight. Yes, men are genetically weaker than women -- cool huh? Anyway, if you're a Web developer, or merely curious as to how the Web looks to color blind people, check out ...

Loki is a Rich Text editor for the Web. The current leader in this arena is clearly FCKEditor (which is now called CKEditor), so why does the world need another WYSIWIG editor for HTML textareas? The first thing that caught my eye was... the very first feature on the feature list. That wasn't because it was first either, honestly! It says: Hitting Return produces a new paragraph. Mozilla ...