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.
Simon Collison questions the use of quote-mark images for the aesthetic styling of blockquotes. In doing so, he demonstrates a method of achieving the same purely with CSS. A worthy thing in my estimation.
Shane Hudson weighs up online map design and finds it (or, rather, us) wanting. Instead of accepting Google Maps as the easy choice, get creative and customise your maps. For his delivery route, do you think Santa relies on defaults?
Jon Hicks slips the lambswool cardy of minimal markup beneath the stout tweed of CSS to discuss the elegant and practical potential of icon web fonts. Make simple, scalable icons on links, buttons and menu bars the port to your site’s stilton this Christmas.
Nate Koechley demonstrates how the compact and powerful YUI Grids stylesheet can be used to conjure up all manner of layouts from the simple to the complex. Take it easy over the festive period, and let the YUI Grids do all the hard work for you.
Sally Jenkinson sets out her recipe for helpful documentation, suggesting you serve up structured, easily digestible and nutritious information for your readers. With a dusting of screencasts and GIFs, it’s a recipe for success at Christmas and beyond.
Eric Meyer describes a technique for using CSS as a diagnostic tool for finding potential problems or issues within a page. Going beyond the styling for the delivery of a site, the use of CSS as an author-time development tool holds many possibilities. Now if only there was a selector to show me which presents I’ve forgotten to buy this year.
Carolyn Wood reminds us of what in recent years we’ve come to overlook, hunched as we are over laptop and tablet: our physical wellbeing. Sometimes, that tingle down your arm from shoulder to fingers isn’t Christmas magic.
Drew McLellan releases the eager huskies of 2014’s 24 ways into the glittering snowy landscape of the web, asking you and other experienced professionals what should be the basis of building websites now. Ten Christmases is a long time, and not just on the web.
Ethan Marcotte dashes through the wintry landscape, his sled of flexboxed content drawn faithfully by a team of well-ordered hierarchical HTML huskies. For when it comes to structure and presentation, we must take care not to put the sleigh before the hounds.
Paul Robert Lloyd runs his finger along the seam between interface patterns and design systems, exploring how a visual design language can underpin and inform a web style guide, with judicious use of CSS preprocessing. Like a good Christmas jumper, sometimes you need to get creative with the rules.
Remy Sharp picks that old chestnut – tabs – and roasts it afresh on the open fire of JavaScript to see how a fully navigable, accessible and clickable set of tabs can work. Everybody knows some scripting and some CSS can help to make your website bright. Although it’s been said many times, many ways, please be careful to do it right.
Meagan Fisher tackles the issue of designing in the browser head on by looking at some of the practicalities of ditching Photoshop and setting your foundations markup. Sorry Photoshop, it’s not me, it’s you.
Rachel Andrew unwraps the new paradigms of web layout, comparing their features and showing how they can free us from grid-based, div-infested frameworks. Beautifully wrapped boxes look lovely under the Christmas tree, but we need to think and break out of them.
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.
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.
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…
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.