Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Using the HTML5 Section Element is very helpful.
Interview Questions and Exercises for CSS. This post is about how to interview someone you want to hire as a CSS person, but the exercises would be terrific in a classroom. Take a look.
Storify’s embeddable stories now listed under Twitter’s related headlines section. This is really a useful connection. From a research point of view this will save so much time. From a publishers point of view, it will bring in more traffic.
A visual guide to SASS and Compass color functions. Very interesting and useful page for people using SASS and Compass.
A Complete Guide to the Table Element is an excellent resource. It’s from Chris Coyier at CSS Tricks.
I found this article in Wired about weak ties in networks like Twitter very interesting. Your Casual Acquaintances on Twitter Are Better Than Your Close Friends on Facebook.
Responsive elements is a breakthrough idea. Check it out.
You must listen to this interview with Jeffrey Zeldman: Why Designers Need to Craft Words, Not Pixels.
Here’s a wonderful resource for teachers: Web History, a timeline. Thanks to John Allsopp from Web Directions for compiling this and hosting it.
CSS Fonts by Eric A. Meyer is from O’Reilly Media (2013). It’s a small book. It’s only about fonts. All about fonts. Everything about fonts. Exhaustively about fonts. If you want to learn things you didn’t even know were possible to do to fonts with CSS, this is the book for you.
The book has sections on font families, @font-face, font weights, font size, font style, font stretching, font kerning, font variants, font features (the font features section was all news to me), font synthesis (another new idea for me), the font property, and font matching.
I read an iBooks version which came in at 120 pages, but the Amazon listing for the paperback lists it at 68 pages. That sounds like not many pages for a tech book, but every possible detail about using and controlling fonts with CSS is in this book. There are many code examples and many screen captures of what the code does in the browser.
Summary: Absolutely everything about fonts.
A review by Virginia DeBolt of CSS Fonts (rating: 5 stars)
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher for this review. Opinions are my own. Links to Amazon are affiliate links. Here is my review policy. You can buy the book from O’Reilly, as well as Amazon. The link to O’Reilly is not an affiliate link.
What Women Don’t Want is from Ladybits. Spoiler alert – women don’t want TitStare.
7 Habits of Highly Effective Media Queries is an excellent recap of the UX Summit closing session.
Responsive Design is Not About Screen Sizes Anymore is from Speckyboy.
Using Twitter Effectively in Education is a talk from Alec Couros.
The 6 Simplest Web Accessibility Tests Anyone Can Do is from Karl Groves.
6 Things I Learned about Print Stylesheets from HTML5 Boilerplate. This is by Joshua Johnson from Design Shack and explains how to use a media query to include a print stylesheet with your CSS.
I’m participating in WordCamp Albuquerque this weekend. If you are a WordPress user anywhere in the nearby area, I hope you are signed up for this great event. You’ll learn a lot!
Teaching Web Design to New Students in Higher Education is at Smashing Magazine by Jen Kramer. Must reading for web educators.
Putting Flexbox into Practice: A Presentation at Blend Conference with a lot of supporting material, slides, links, and tools. From Zoe Gillinwater.
Instagram will carry advertising soon. That’s what The Verge says.
TechCrunch apologizes for two misogynistic presentations at their hackathon. Good for TechCrunch!
Now there’s an HTML5shiv for WordPress.
