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Table of Contents
1. Design Moo: Discover and Share Quality Design Resources
2. Baker eBook Framework: Better eBooks for the iPad
3. Make Web Forms Look Consistent Across Browsers
4. The Aloha Editor: WYSIWYG Editing the HTML5 Way
5. Politely Decline Speculative Work
6. Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web
7. The Endless Mural: Global, Interactive, Collaborative Art
8. New on Smashing Magazine
9. Smashing Network Highlights
Editorial: Smashing Book 2 Is Coming: Add Your Name To The Book!
We've got some exciting news: the printed Smashing Book 2 is coming. We will launch pre-orders in January 2011 and will start shipping the book in February 2011. We are just putting the final touches on the brand new book, and we are confident that it will be a valuable, timeless and affordable book for you, our dear readers, and all designers and developers worldwide. After much difficulty with the first book, we have learned our lessons: Smashing Book 2 will have a much better stitched binding, a hardcover, more pages and a bit larger size.
Our readers deserve credit. And that's why we'd like to print the names of our readers in the book. To do this, we have reserved a double-page spread on which to print together all of the names of readers who comment on this article in the shape of the Smashing Magazine logo: ASCII art at its best!
To participate, just write a short comment on this post and tell us why you read Smashing Magazine and how we can improve it. We hope to meet your expectations with the new book. Please stay tuned for updates.
1. Design Moo: Discover and Share Quality Design Resources
"Join together and share valuable free Web design resources." This could be the slogan of the design community Design Moo, created and curated by front-end developer Chris Wallace. The project is a network of designers and a high-quality collection of free design resources: fonts, icons, illustrations, patterns, textures and Web layouts.
All of these useful goodies are tagged for easy navigation, and you can follow new releases on Twitter. You might want to check Premium Pixels by Orman Clark as well, another website featuring free high-quality resources. (cs)
2. Baker eBook Framework: Better eBooks for the iPad
The iPad has become the digital reading device of choice for many people, thanks in part to its iBooks app. However, how would one go about creating an eBook for iPad? Of course, there are many possibilities: you could just use InDesign, OpenOffice or Apple Pages to generate the book in the ePub format, however you may run into formatting problems.
Baker eBook Framework is a nice new alternative. Based on HTML5, Baker makes creating a book for the iPad as easy as coding a basic Web page… even easier, considering it comes with a full framework for you to use. The idea is to give designers a set of templates to build HTML5 pages with a fixed width of 768px and use the power of WebKit for styling and animations. The format of Baker is HPub, which is basically one folder, book/, that contains all of your HTML files, all enumerated . It even comes with information on how to get your book into the App Store. It's all free and BSD-licensed. You can download a sample book made in Baker for free. (cc) (vf)
3. Make Web Forms Look Consistent Across Browsers
One of the most difficult browser inconsistencies to deal with is web forms. Some designers advocate for styling form elements to match the brand, whereas others prefer to leave them unchanged so that they match the native look and feel of the operating system. The debate bounces between proponents of pixel-perfect design and those who embrace the flexible nature of the Web. Whatever side you take, you should know what can be done to achieve a unified appearance of Web forms.
Nathan Smith has come up with an interesting solution for consistent cross-browser design of Web form elements. Formalize CSS is a set of HTML templates that use CSS and JavaScript to bridge the gap between various browsers and operating systems. The templates are available for various JavaScript libraries, such as jQuery, Dojo, MooTools, Prototype and YUI. Formalize CSS takes the best ideas from each and implements what is practical across the board. The post announcing the release also contains screenshots of what the forms will look in various browsers on various operating systems. (tb) (vf)
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4. The Aloha Editor: WYSIWYG Editing the HTML5 Way
The Aloha Editor is a new concept in online editing for CMSs and blogging platforms. The heart of this jQuery plugin is a floating menu. The context-sensitive navigation bar is modeled on the ribbon from Microsoft Office. But the menu appears where you do the actual editing. And if that doesn't suit you, you can pin it anywhere else.
The developers rave on their (rather boastful) website about the incredible speed of the editor, but you will need a modern browser to see everything work as expected. You can edit content directly in accordions, sliders, tickers, captions and slideshow footers. Previews, reloading and pop-ups are no longer required.
Thus far, the whole thing looks like a very good effort. For example, you can add and edit tables, but you cannot upload or edit pictures. The tool is not quite ready yet, but the idea and implementation look very promising. (sl)
5. Politely Decline Speculative Work
There's some disagreement in the design community on the value of working "on spec." There is a definite movement against it, and it has very solid reasons to back up its denouncement of it. But that doesn't necessarily help your everyday designer who isn't quite sure how to deal with a prospective client who asks them to do spec work. After all, a lot of designers are doing work for people they know in their community, which can make getting out of doing spec work a tricky situation.
That's where this form letter comes in. "I won't do free design work to win your business — here's why" is a Web page that offers a stock letter you can send to clients explaining why spec work is bad for everyone involved. It's concise and professional, and it presents clear arguments against spec work, with links to additional information. Plus, you can personalize the letter by adding the recipient's name to the end of the URL. (cc)
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6. Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web
For most of us, the Internet is part of our daily lives, even if we don't know everything there is to know about it. For things you've always wanted to know about the Web but were afraid to ask, we've found a book for you to flip through. Built in HTML5, this guide has it all: starting from the meaning of "Internet" all the way to open source and modern browsers.
The guide 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web is a brief reminder for anyone who's curious about the basics of browsers and the web. The neat little red man was illustrated by Christoph Niemann. (ik)
7. The Endless Mural: Global, Interactive, Collaborative Art
Everybody is talking about HTML5, and online creators are eagerly exploring its possibilities and limitations. The Endless Mural is an interactive, collaborative art website built in HTML5. You are encouraged to play and draw using the tools and artwork provided and to join the global collaboration.
The settings give you a fair amount of control over how your mural turns out. You can submit your drawing to The Endless Mural, explore other submissions, rate the creations and share them in four different ways. This is an inventive and engaging project by Joshua Davis Studios and Automata Studios. (ks)
8. New on Smashing Magazine
Designing for Content Management Systems (by Rachel Andrew)
Designing and indeed front-end development for a website that will have content edited by non-technical users poses some problems over and above those you will encounter when developing a site where you have full control over the output mark-up. By considering the CMS as you design, you can maintain far more control over the final output. If your designs will be implemented and integrated into the CMS by a developer, then taking control at the design phase will help you to keep control over the design as opposed to leaving decisions to the developer or the content editors.
Where Have All The Comments Gone? (by Robert Bowen)
Years ago, the online design community was a thriving conversationalist — of sorts — through the comment sections across the community. It was through leaving meaningful comments that the thought-provoking ideas presented and discussed in a post were examined by others whose perspective and experiences may have provided them with a slightly different take. Comments are becoming less and less expansions on the ideas presented, and more and more just simple offerings of praise or agreement.
How To Use the "Seven Deadly Sins" to Turn Visitors into Customers (by ZURB)
Since the beginning of time people have exploited the human desire to sin, to achieve their goals. Finding out what causes people to sin helps us understand the triggers which prompt people to take an action. The Web has made it even easier to exploit these tendencies to sin, in order to build user engagement and excitement about your service or product. In this article we'll show examples of how successful companies exploit the tendency to conduct all the famous Seven Deadly Sins, and in turn generate momentum with their website visitors. Ready? Let's roll.
Designing for iPhone 4 Retina Display: Techniques and Workflow (by Marc Edwards)
The iPhone 4 features a vastly superior display resolution (614400 pixels) over previous iPhone models, containing quadruple the 153600-pixel display of the iPhone 3GS. The screen is the same physical size, so those extra dots are used for additional detail — twice the detail horizontally, and twice vertically. For developers only using Apple's user interface elements, most of the work is already done for you.
Web Typography: Educational Resources, Tools and Techniques (by Smashing Editorial)
Web typography has evolved a lot over the last years. Today we see rich, accessible typography, a plethora of type design choices for the web and a number of remarkable, type-based web designs. It's a great time for web design, and it's a great time for web typography. Still, being as excited as we are, we should not forget about the foundational principles of good type design on the web
9. Smashing Network Highlights
- Web Designers vs. Web Developers (Infographic)
- 50 Ways to Get Your Site Noticed
- Freebie: Contained Sticky Scroll jQuery Plugin
- Useful HTML5 Code Snippets You Can Use Today
- The Ultimate InDesign Toolbox
- How to create a mobile WordPress theme with jQuery Mobile
- Slide-Down Mega Drop-Down Menus with Ajax and jQuery
- Perfect Full Page Background Image
- 30 Must See Text Effect Illustrator Tutorials
- Ultimate Collection of Printable Mobile Sketching Templates
- A Comprehensive Guide to CSS 3 Transitions
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