2008

Jeffrey Zeldman rounds of our 2008 season with some hard-earned advice for web designers and developers to take into 2009. As the economic climate gets tougher and budgets get cut, our skills need to extend to staying in work, not just completing work won.

Andrew Clarke rides into town to remind us of the importance of having a proper contract in place between those providing a service (usually us) and our clients commissioning the work. Projects that don’t run to plan are a fact of life, so make sure you’re prepared.

Dan Rubin pops down the chimney to deliver a neat little CSS gift that, in certain circumstances, could be just the trick needed to obtain those matched height columns so often desired. Whilst no technique is perfect for every situation, the more sharp tools we have in our CSS toolbox the better.

Ben Ward walks us through the process of building a small client-side application using the Fire Eagle API. Yahoo’s Fire Eagle is a service for disseminating details of your location physical location to other services on the web. Ben shows us how such a thing can be made useful.

Gavin Bell takes some time to consider date-based content and how we publish it on the web. We’re generating more digital content than ever, and the date and time of creation is an increasingly useful metric. But how do we publish that in a way that remains useful for us now and the generations to come?

Brian Suda mooves us up a gear with a look at using the Moo API for print-on-demand services. No web application is an island, so well written APIs can be a great way to hook into specialist services with the very minimum of effort. With a few simple steps, print can be one of those services.

John Allsopp has a shining example of what can be done to customise the look of HTML buttons without resorting to images. Custom button styles are a frequent request, but the use of images can heavily restrict the implementation. Avoid those pitfalls by sticking to pure CSS.

Jon Tan upholds the good British tradition of building follies and talks us through the process of creating one such on the web using only HTML and CSS. Follies themselves are just for enjoyment. However, there’s always interesting things to be learned when we venture out and have some fun.

Meri Williams sets our stomachs rumbling with a festive look at making sure our projects stay on track with some simple and effective project management techniques. Most web work is undertaken as some kind of project, so use these tips to make sure you’re not working late on Christmas Eve.

Jason Santa Maria details his approach to building a modular system for laying out pages with CSS. Devising a method for dealing with the presentational when presentation is all you’ve got, this can be a handy way to predictably tame content without becoming predictable.

Tim Van Damme tackles the thorny issue of overcoming designer’s block with a handy list of do’s and don’ts to help you get back on track. Creative block hits nearly all of us at some point, and so having some simple methods of breaking it can be invaluable.

Kevin Yank gets down and dirty with CSS tables, a technique that offers all the layout properties we loved from long forsaken HTML tables with the clear advantages of modern CSS based design. Remember, just because it looks like a table and flows like a table, doesn’t mean it has to be bad.

Kimberly Blessing takes a look at some different methods for marking up the progress meters commonly found on site checkouts. Particularly looking with respect to semantics and accessibility, Kimberly presents a neat solution of her own. Check it out. (sorry!)

Richard Rutter brings an interesting new tool to the wireframing table with the introduction of a smart and exceptionally useful jQuery plugin. If you ever get involved in designing or prototyping modern multi-state web sites or applications, you’ll want to check this out.

Elliot Jay Stocks steps us through publishing a set of contact details using the hCard microformat. Once the basics are in place follow along as we add some sparkle with the aid of CSS3 web fonts, text-shadow, border-radius and first-child selectors.

Marcus Lillington has some ideas to pitch – to help you to win more of the jobs worth winning. From deciding how to market your services, through to writing a proposal and eventually attending a pitch, let Marcus take you by the hand and walk you through the process.

Jeremy Keith does the maths and presents an interesting equation to help you to decide when to put the effort into providing support for Internet Explorer 6, and when to fall back on pre-existing shortcuts. Browser support is always a tricky business, so why not roll in some complex algebra too?

Henriette Weber argues that there’s no more time for ‘business as usual’. Instead it’s time to turn your company into a rockband and take it on tour. It’s Sunday, so kick back with some tea and toast, put the newspaper to one side and ponder something a little different.

Matt Riggott demonstrates how to use Google App Engine as a CDN for serving your site’s images, CSS and JavaScript files from a location close to your users. Find out how using this free service from Google could be just the performance kick your site needs.

Mark Boulton borrows some techniques from photographic composition to give an insight into how art direction can be conducted on the web. Learn how we can begin to bridge the gap between template-driven pages and content that really communicates.

Christian Heilmann introduces a handy ‘build your own search’ web service from Yahoo that enables ordinary developers to harness Yahoo’s search technology for their own sites and web applications. Roll your sleeves up and get ready for some code.

Jon Hicks takes a peek at using CSS to apply custom user styles to change the appearance of sites within your own browser. Put your existing knowledge of CSS to good use to make your own browsing experience more pleasant and productive.

Veerle Pieters gets up close and personal with geometric patterns and presents us with a handy Photoshop technique for slicing and dicing seamless tiles. Keep your repeating geometric patterns deep and crisp and even with these simple steps.

Drew McLellan sets our 2008 series rolling with some practical tips for helping a project smoothly transition from the design to the development phase. Consider it a designer’s preflight check list to ease you into the festive season.