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24 ways to impress your friends

2011

In October, Steve Jobs died. The thorniest part of responsive web design, and an arena for many competing and dissenting voices was images. 24 ways tackled that and many other issues head on: conditional loading; front-end style guides; icon fonts; and the importance of side projects.

  1. Crafting the Front-end

    Ben Bodien

    Ben Bodien fosters seasonal goodwill with his sparkling vision of web workers as dedicated craftspeople: understanding and sharpening the tools of our trade; appreciating the challenges, nuances and responsibilities of our craft; and instinctively knowing when something just works. Hope and joy for the new year!

  2. There’s No Formula for Great Designs

    Andy Clarke

    Andrew Clarke re-examines the formula used to convert static to fluid grids, and describes how he adapts it within his own custom grids to maintain connectedness in designs across devices. Like great design, there’s a perfect Christmas out there somewhere, but there’s no formula for it.

  3. Taming Complexity

    Simon Collison

    Simon Collison wonders why we sometimes sacrifice powerful complexity in the name of empty simplicity. To create engaging experiences with loyal communities we should embrace and tame complexity. Easier than Christmas with your in-laws, surely?

  4. Raising the Bar on Mobile

    Scott Jehl

    Scott Jehl unties the ribbon on his cross-browser method of clearing away the address bar from small mobile screens to make more room for your design. So clear a space under the tree and on your phone for more Christmas pixels.

  5. Going Both Ways

    Jonathan Snook

    Jonathan Snook saddles up to take us on a whirlwind tour of the world of bidirectional documents. “What’s left to write about internationalisation?” you may ask. Allow Jonathan, if you will, to offer you some festive words of direction.

  6. Getting the Most Out of Google Analytics

    Matt Curry

    Matt Curry demystifies some of the more complex and powerful reporting functions of Google Analytics from page goals to event tracking and beyond into custom reports and multichannel attribution. With the mounting stress of Christmas, we all need a bit of analysis.

  7. Designing for Perfection

    Greg Wood

    Greg Wood confesses to student kitchen rage and abandons his pursuit of that goal – perfection – impossible in our agile, fast-moving, rapidly iterating milieu. The perfect Christmas dinner, however, remains a worthwhile ambition.

  8. CSS3 Patterns, Explained

    Lea Verou

    Lea Verou unlocks the mysteries of CSS background gradients and investigates how they can be used more creatively to replace images. You’ll soon rather be throwing shapes at work than the Christmas party dance floor.

  9. Extracting the Content

    Relly Annett-Baker

    Relly Annett-Baker, everyone’s friendly Alien Overlord, powers up the Humongous Mechanoid of Content to wreak carefully planned strategic Christmas on your web projects. And this time next year, you’ll all be asking for page tables as stocking fillers.

  10. Your jQuery: Now With 67% Less Suck

    Scott Kosman

    Scott Kosman administers an optimizing shot in the arm to your seasonally sluggish jQuery with some simple ways to improve performance. Get your jQuery running so fast that Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen will struggle to keep up.

  11. Nine Things I've Learned

    Mike Kus

    Mike Kus rummages inside his sack of personal design experience and pulls out nine gifts to share with us. From finding reasons to stay motivated, to thinking in new ways and overcoming creative block, there’s enough food for thought for all the twelve days of Christmas.

  12. Context First: Web Strategy in Four Handy Ws

    Alex Morris

    Alex Morris flips open his well-thumbed journalist’s notebook to approach web projects through four powerful lines of enquiry that can set your product’s strategy on the right track. “Winter? Wonderland? Wellies?” Stop right there. “Wassail?” Oh, dear.

  13. Front-end Style Guides

    Anna Debenham

    Anna Debenham spruces up your workflow by surveying the snow-strewn field of web style guides, and explaining how to tie them up nicely with a bow for the benefit of you, your faithful team of developer huskies, and your ever-loving clients.

  14. Subliminal User Experience

    Chris Sealey

    Chris Sealey sweats the sometimes imperceptible details of user experience by looking closely at some finer points of interface design. At Christmas, it’s decorations and mistletoe that should be left hanging, not the user.