24 ways to impress your friends

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• 24 12/2012 Science!

  Jon Tan opens the final door on the web advent calendar to reveal the glittering star of research evidence shining its light on design decisions. Merry Christmas!

  Impress your friends with your fact-based design decisions

• 23 12/2012 Monkey Business

  Andy Clarke unpicks issues of cost and value, specifically when clients question our prices. It can be uncomfortable, but there’s always wiggle room. Bear left? Monkey right.

  Impress your friends with your business sense

• 22 12/2012 Unwrapping the Wii U Browser

  Anna Debenham harnesses the console browser huskies to the sled of web design and races off into the deeply forested landscape, leaving in her wake only an in-depth analysis of the new Wii U and its internet capabilities.

  Impress your friends with your second screen savvy

• 21 12/2012 Infinite Canvas: Moving Beyond the Page

  Nathan Peretic weighs the page refresh in the balance and finds it wanting – wanting to be brought up to date, that is, with some future CSS sparkle.

  Impress your friends with your in-page off-screen transitions

• 20 12/2012 Content Planning Demystified

  Erin Kissane sets off hopefully into the broad open plains of the new year, vanquishing gooey and chaotic content with a refreshing dose of clear-headed strategy to prevent your post-Christmas content hangover.

  Impress your friends with your long-term content goals

• 19 12/2012 Direction, Distance and Destinations

  Brian Suda packs his compass and map (well, his smartphone) to guide us all home for Christmas. And there’ll be one jolly fellow who’ll find this little web app useful on that annual 24-hour world trip.

  Impress your friends with your keen sense of direction

• 18 12/2012 Giving Content Priority with CSS3 Grid Layout

  Rachel Andrew unwraps the CSS3 grid layout module and sets out how its new properties can break the ties between source order and layout, and rescue us from the quaking ground of floats. Support is limited to IE10 right now, but Christmas and New Year are times for looking forward to the future.

  Impress your friends with your well-ordered content

• 17 12/2012 Cut Copy Paste

  Brendan Dawes raids his Christmas stocking early and shares some interesting and useful code snippets for you to grab, remix and combine into new things for 2013.

  Impress your friends with your rough and ready mixology

• 16 12/2012 How to Make Your Site Look Half-Decent in Half an Hour

  Anna Powell-Smith stirs the silver sixpence of design into the Christmas pudding of web development with some shortcuts and advice to help improve the skills of programmers intimidated by visual design.

  Impress your friends with your quick design fixes

• 15 12/2012 A Harder-Working Class

  Nathan Ford delves deep into the sack of CSS goodies and rewards our attention with a clever object-oriented, scalable and modular approach to attribute selectors. Old wine in new bottles.

  Impress your friends with your classy attributes

• 14 12/2012 Using Questionnaires for Design Research

  Emma Boulton doesn’t let a good question about designing and using surveys as part of a project’s research activities go unanswered. Q: Have you been good this year? A: Yes|No. Think carefully. Santa knows the answer.

  Impress your friends with your well-crafted questions

• 13 12/2012 Redesigning the Media Query

  Les James proposes an alternative to the fully fluid grid as an approach to responsive layout challenges. Sprinkle on some Sass fairy dust and, providing you’ve been good this year, watch your creation spring to life.

  Impress your friends with your column-centric layouts

• 12 12/2012 Design Systems

  Laura Kalbag beckons us in from the cold wastelands of transitional, device-rooted layouts to warm our toes at the hearth of a more systematic way of working.

  Impress your friends with your methodical approach

• 11 12/2012 Responsive Images: What We Thought We Needed

  Paul Robert Lloyd engages with the two main approaches to the matter of responsive images and finds them wanting. Could “Bah, humbug!” be a reasonable response to markup excess?

  Impress your friends with your -perfect response

• 10 12/2012 Fluent Design through Early Prototyping

  Rebecca Cottrell speeds through the dark landscape of web wireframes towards the snowy slopes of early prototypes with glittering animations and transitions that show your developing product at its best.

  Impress your friends with your interactive prototypes

• 9 12/2012 Should We Be Reactive?

  Dan Donald conjures up the ghost of Christmas the Web Yet To Come through the possibilities offered by the contextual data available to us from web-enabled devices.

  Impress your friends with your meaningful contexts

• 8 12/2012 Giving CSS Animations and Transitions Their Place

  Val Head marshals overexcited CSS transitions and animations, which are like naughty children elbowing their way out of the presentation layer and into the behaviour grotto to get at the goodies before Christmas. Santa will be pleased!

  Impress your friends with your very best behaviour

• 7 12/2012 Think First, Code Later

  Stephen Fulljames places the reindeers of thought before the sleigh of action, encouraging coders everywhere to plan ahead when implementing JavaScript libraries.

  Impress your friends with your minimum viable planning

• 6 12/2012 Flashless Animation

  Rachel Nabors brings together the web’s three Magi – HTML, CSS and JavaScript – to create seamless, soundtracked animations in the browser.

  Impress your friends with your keyframes this Christmas

• 5 12/2012 Responsive Responsive Design

  Tim Kadlec broadens the scope of responsive web design to include bandwidth and hardware capabilities. Images too big? Another JS library? It’s time to work off the seasonal weight gain from your responsive website.

  Impress your friends with your responsive performance

• 4 12/2012 Colour Accessibility

  Geri Coady extends goodwill to all with some insights about colour and how it impacts everyone using our sites and apps. Full of practical tips and tools, this gift keeps on giving.

  Impress your friends with your Christmas colours for all

• 3 12/2012 Being Prepared To Contribute

  Trent Walton celebrates the collaborative DNA of the web community. We make the web better when we work together, and we should seek out ways of contributing for the greater good. A little bit like Christmas, really.

  Impress your friends with your caring and sharing

• 2 12/2012 Starting Your Project on the Right Foot (and Keeping It There)

  Bethany Heck slips warming cloves and spices into the web designer’s mulled wine by sharing some of the methods she uses to encourage and maintain creative success in new projects.

  Impress your friends with your strategies for success

• 1 12/2012 HTML5 Video Bumpers

  Drew McLellan invites you to pull up to the 2012 24 ways bumper, baby, with an neat JavaScript solution to an HTML5 <video> branding problem. And that was “24 ways bumper” not “Christmas jumper”. He has enough of those already.

  Impress your friends with your dynamic video bumpers