You received this email because you signed up for this newsletter.
Does everything look mixed up? View the online version. Annoyed? Unsubscribe at any time.
Table of Contents
1. Where Would You Like to Work Today?
2. Edited Icon Set: Free Icons for Editors and Writers
3. Online Paper Weight Calculator
4. Simple Straightforward Typography Guidance
5. Mobile Wireframes Inspiration
6. JavaScript-Encrypted Email Addresses
7. Tidypub: Online Text Sharing
8. Open with Photoshop Firefox Extension
9. jQuery + PingPong = jPong
10. New on Smashing Magazine
11. Smashing Network Highlights
Editorial: Merry Christmas and a Smashing New Year 2011!
This newsletter issue is the last of 2010. We started the Smashing Newsletter in March as a project that every member of our team could participate in, and eight months later the email newsletter has grown, gaining over 45,000 subscribers.
We sincerely thank you for your time, interest and support in 2010. We will do our best to keep smashing you with useful tips, ideas and resources in the new year, and we also have something big coming up. Please stay tuned for updates! To make up for the missing issue, this one is a bit longer than usual. The next issue will be sent out on January 4th. Happy holidays!
P.S. Check out our new eBook How to Create Selling E-Commerce Websites (just $9.90). This eBook walks you through the process of preparing your e-commerce project, showing you what it takes to present merchandise beautifully and convincingly, and how to run valid and effective A/B and multivariate testing of various designs.
1. Where Would You Like to Work Today?
Plenty of people are no longer bound to an office. Instead, they enjoy the freedom of mobile working and a regular change of environment. Desks Near Me features places all over the world that nomads might like to work in, be they offices or cafés. The website provides detailed information, including hours of operation and reviews.
Some places charge a small fee for use, and many throw in a few goodies like food, drink and access to equipment. So, get out of your home office, look up a desk near you, discover a new space and meet new people! (sp)
2. Edited Icon Set: Free Icons for Editors and Writers
The perfect icons can take a design from mediocre to awesome. Luckily, a ton of icon sets are out there to help make your design stand out. Edited is a new icon set from WinePress of Words specifically for editors and writers.
Included in the set are an overflowing waste-paper bin, a style manual, a red pencil, a coffee cup, and a marked-up manuscript. The icons are free and would make a fantastic addition to a writer or editor's website. (cc)
3. Online Paper Weight Calculator
Here's a calculator you won't waste time figuring out how to use. On Paper Weight Calculator, with a click, you can calculate the weight of any paper product. Two systems are available: standard and metric. You can choose the weight and height of various paper sizes, from standard letters all the way to ISO A3 sheets. You can also use the advanced feature to convert pounds to GSM (grammage).
For those of you who would like to convert standard pounds (lbs) to metric grams per square meter GSM (g/m²), this is available as well. (ik)
Advertisement
4. Simple Straightforward Typography Guidance
The plethora of subtle rules of typography can be confusing for those who are new to design (and even seasoned veterans sometimes). Figuring out how to use all the different quotes and dashes, where symbols and characters go, how to set footnotes and a host of other rules is a chore. And finding all of the information you need in one place is often hard.
That's where Matthew Butterick's Typography for Lawyers comes in. It provides clear concise guidance on the proper use of various elements of typography. It addresses everything from using ellipses, hyphens and semi-colons to more advanced topics, like ligatures and accented characters. The resource is useful not only for lawyers but for anyone interested in improving their copy or studying typographic rules. You might also want to check out Golden Typographic Rules (PDF), a handy cheat sheet with common typographic rules. (cc) (vf)
5. Mobile Wireframes Inspiration
Wireframing is an integral part of any design project. But while we are quite experienced with designs for traditional websites and applications, mobile is a different medium that requires different techniques, approaches and solutions.
On MOObileFrames, Hannah Milan curates wireframes of websites and applications designed specifically for mobile devices. The resource features many examples that would help designers create better wireframes for their mobile projects or just study how other designers solve common design problems. (tb)
6. JavaScript-Encrypted Email Addresses
Putting your email address up online is a quick way to be bombarded with spam. But a Web form isn't always the best way to put your contact information out there. Sometimes you just want people to be able to send you an email in their preferred format.
The Enkoder Form takes your email address and converts it into a self-evaluating JavaScript that makes it impossible for email-harvesting spiders to decipher it. Just enter your address, link text, link title text and optional subject, and it spits out the code for you. (cc)
Advertisement
7. Tidypub: Online Text Sharing
Online communication is all about the fast, concise exchange of information. Not everyone feels the need to maintain their own blog or website, and for many users Twitter provides a big enough platform most of the time. Sometimes, though, what you have to say won't fit in 140 characters.
Tidypub is a useful utility to publish and share longer text online. Simply copy your words into the box, click "Publish," and you are provided with an easy-to-read page. Your text page has a short URL, making it convenient to share. Tidypub uses plain text, so it doesn't retain any formatting, such as italics and headings, but it does preserve paragraph breaks, which is usually just enough. Tidypub is free to use and a handy way to share longer musings with friends, family and colleagues. (ks)
8. Open With Photoshop Firefox Extension
If you are looking for nifty time-savers, this little Firefox add-on is the perfect companion for any Web or graphic designer. Instead of saving images first, you can just open them directly in Photoshop via a single click. After installing the add-on, right-click in Firefox and you'll see that the context menu gives you the option "Open with Photoshop." If Photoshop is already running, it opens the image in a new window; otherwise, it launches the program.
Note for Mac users: Photoshop takes a while longer to launch this way on OS X if it's not already open. Ensuring that it is loaded prior to using the add-on is an easy fix for this bug. (sp)
9. jQuery + PingPong = jPong
Got a couple of minutes to spare? Challenge the computer and beat it at jPong: 3D Ping Pong. This little game is a jQuery remake of classic table tennis. You can play the game or dig in the code for a closer look at how it was created.
Basically, Sidney te Grotenhuis, the creator of the game, combined jQuery with a collision-detection plug-in, a line-drawing plug-in and some custom scripting. The result is truly exciting. Don't lose too much time playing, though! (sp).
Advertisement
10. New on Smashing Magazine
Preparing Artwork for Screen Printing in Adobe Illustrator (by John Rainsford)
Getting t-shirts printed is an ideal way to promote your business, organization or event. They are a promotional item that people can actually use, and they have the added bonus of being an advertisement for you. In this post, Adobe Illustrator will be used to create a three-color screen print using a fictional company logo, and have it set up to allow a screen printer to easily print the color separations that create the separate screens for each color print.
Using the LESS CSS Preprocessor for Smarter Style Sheets (by Dmitry Fadeyev)
As a Web designer you're undoubtedly familiar with CSS, the style sheet language used to format markup on Web pages. CSS itself is extremely simple, consisting of rule sets and declaration blocks—what to style, how to style it—and it does pretty much everything you want, right? Well, not quite.
Post-Production Trends in 3D Visualizations (by Roland Peelen)
Post-production might well be the most underappreciated part of creating 3D visualizations. It gives you the power to easily make some changes; put in the sky you like, add some dirt, make the colors more vibrant and even correct some little mistakes in your 3D mesh. The techniques and styles of correcting images in post-production have changed a lot over the last couple of years.
A Study of Trends in Mobile Design (by Alexander Dawson)
The industry has evolved in many ways, but one particular area has affected how we build websites to a greater extent than any other. The surge in Web-enabled mobile devices has forged a subculture of visitors who require the adaptation of our websites to meet their needs. The aim of this article is to showcase the variety of methods in which some of today's most popular websites provide an interactive and (hopefully) useful mobile experience for their end users.
Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: December 2010 (by Smashing Editorial)
Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use a specific wallpaper for a longer period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That's why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers for over 12 months. This post features 40 free desktop wallpapers, created by designers across the globe for December 2010. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free.
11. Smashing Network Highlights
- From PSD to HTML: Building a Set of Website Designs Step by Step
- Why Intellectual Property Rights Are So Important
- You Know You're a Freelancer When…
- Web Designer's Guide to PNG Image Format
- 50 Great Web Design Tools That Should Be in Your Toolbox
- Tips for Fighting Freelance Burnout
- 10 CSS3 Properties You Need to Be Familiar With
- The Messiness of Design
- An Experience With User Personas
- Keep Margins Out of Link Lists
- 100 Exceedingly Useful CSS Tips and Tricks
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar