2013

Mark Boulton completes our calendar with some typographic techniques to improve the reading experience. Typography, like Christmas and advent calendars, relies on the accumulation of small gains for its best effects.

Andrew Clarke squeezes into his leathers and mounts his Fat Boy® to foster healthy negotiations around price. With family demands and needs over the holidays we all need to compromise for peace at Christmas.

Emma Boulton maintains that better research leads to better design and shows how research can solve common problems during a project’s life cycle. Santa does his research well every year — let’s hope you’ve been good this year…

Christopher Murphy pauses to reflect on his personal experience of mental distress and enjoins us to understand the powerful psychological forces that motivate us and can lead us astray.

Nicole Sullivan understands how the accumulated weight of small typographic decisions can mount up into a tangle of CSS declarations. With a new tool at your disposal you can take stock and clear up the mess like it’s Boxing Day.

Jonathan Snook knows that writing and publishing are different things, and relates his experience of creating an ebook, exploring the formats and the tools to set you on your merry way. Will 2014 be the year of your book?

Anna Debenham guides us through the basics of using GitHub Pages with Jekyll to create simple, template-based collaborative websites. So hitch your huskies to your dogsled and set off at a racing start!

Brad Frost outlines a simple tool that can track a project’s design decisions and assets, and keeps everyone involved up to date and in the browser. It’s like a deep spoon scooping the brandy butter of progress onto the Christmas pudding of web project management.

Geri Coady lavishes us with her generous spirit of appreciation and approbation for co-workers, webfellows and colleagues. By crediting everyone involved, you can be a not-so-secret Santa.

Owen Gregory winkles answers out of authors of web books, the whys and wherefores of writing and publishing them. Everyone loves a book for Christmas, so spare a thought for the misguided soulsbrave folk who write them.

Meri Williams brings her kanban work home with her — but to solve problems, not cause them. There’s a trick or two here that Santa could use instead of making a list and checking it twice.

Aarron Walter adds a powerful hit to your Christmas cocktail in the form of advice on putting together user surveys to gather important data you can use to inform design decisions. If you build it, they will come.

Jenn Lukas twinkles like a guiding star in the deep Christmas night, casting her light on the interactivity issues raised by combined hover- and touch-enabled devices. With a little thought about designing for our content, we can add some seasonal sparkle.

Chris Coyier grabs Grunt by the snow-white fur of its Santa suit and places it firmly (but gently) in your webdev grotto to dish out its Christmas gifts — and maybe even chuck you under the chin and sit you on its broad and comfy knee. Not at all creepy. No. Nope.

Laura Kalbag stamps the snow off the boots of web accessibility, making positive cases for its foundational place in our work. Accessibility is like the washing up after dinner on Christmas Day: you could leave it to someone else, but it won’t be done right.

Harry Roberts prepares for Christmas by squirrelling away experiments and drafts in private Git repositories, and here he neatly explains how he puts it in his pantry with his cupcakes. Once you’ve stuffed a stocking, most of all you’ve got to hide it from the kids.

Lisa Maria Martin decries the common reliance on FAQs to deliver important content to users, asking us to bring that content out of the cold and offer it some Glühwein to put some colour in its cheeks.

Brian Suda dashes out a quick technique for animating SVG line drawings using JavaScript. Way better than falling snowflakes and a Santa hat on your logo.

Ashley Baxter recounts her experience of developing an app better suited to her customers’ needs, even though she isn’t a programmer. With a new year approaching as fast as the old one can carry it, get building.

Tom Ashworth exhorts us to become more familiar with JavaScript so we can better understand and use new tools like Node and Grunt — it’s always the box the gift comes in that’s more useful and fun, right?

Emma Jane Westby recommits us to version control by pushing a more mature approach to Git that merges relevant application with practical tips. Christmas might be for the children, but learning is for everyone, in[n]it?

Charlie Perrins reminds us of a fundamental requirement of our work: accessibility; and that there’s more to accessible interfaces than screen readers. Want to unplug at Christmas? Start with your mouse and don’t look back.

Ruth John ushers the Christmas party disco online using the Web Audio API to festoon your browser with some twinkling scripted lights that pulse along with your favourite festive tunes. So don’t be a wallflower — Santa’s up all night to get lucky…

Drew McLellan opens 24 ways’ ninth annual advent calendar with a primer on the sometimes arcane lore of rewriting URLs. But while Drew may ably match URL patterns using regular expressions, that shirt with the snowflake pattern clashes hideously with his holly and ivy tie…