We all know that feeling: some time after we launch a site, new designers and developers come in and make adjustments. They add styles that don’t fit with the content, use typefaces that make us cringe, or chuck in bloated code. But if we didn’t leave behind any documentation, we can’t really blame them for messing up our hard work. To counter this problem, graphic designers are often commissioned to produce style guides as part of a rebranding project. A style guide provides details such as how much white space should surround a logo, which typefaces and colours a brand u...

I am quite excited about ECMAScript 6, after watching David Herman’s talk at YUIConf 2011. I am especially looking forward to seeing some of these features landing up on V8 soon, so that I can use it on node.js. These additions will solve many common sources of frustration that newcomers face when working with JavaScript. Although the spec is not expected to be finalized till 2013 (so says David in the video), a lot of these features are expected to hit Chrome and Firefox much before that. I am personally looking forward to the following: let keyword The let keyword has a block scope. ...

TL;DRThe Mozilla Platform keeps improving: JavaScript native file management is an undergoing work to provide a high-performance JavaScript-friendly API to manipulate the file system.The Mozilla Platform, JavaScript and FilesThe Mozilla Platform is the application development framework behind Firefox, Thunderbird, Instantbird, Camino, Songbird and a number of other applications.While the performance-critical components of the Mozilla Platform are developed in C/C++, an increasing number of components and add-ons are implemented in pure JavaScript. While JavaScript cannot hope to match the spee...

Most of the design books you read, including my own, are about how to be a good, competent designer. They are about how to make strong, reasoned design decisions and about design methods and tools. But what they won’t—can’t—teach you is how to become a great designer.The only way to be a great designer is to produce great products. Everything else is…well, everything else. I’m convinced that the people who are great designers, while assuredly they’re both talented and experienced, have taken extra measures to ensure that what they produce...

It's deceptively easy to maintain traffic once you've scored that initial boost of visitor hits. In fact, one of the greatest determinations of this relies on a single make or break entry.Every blogger knows, if they look at their web analytics at all, that one of the most consistently viewed pages is the biographical entry. If it's linked on the home page or throughout the blog, the audience will invariably stay long enough to read it, at least 25% of the time if the initial trafficing content is good.Users want to satisfy their cusiosity. If what they read...

I just returned from Dave McClure’s excellent Warm Gun Conference, and I haven’t been this excited to be a designer in a while. The entire event was about design, metrics, and products, and even more importantly the people at the conference were many of the who’s who in Bay Area design. From what I saw and experienced there I daresay there are signs we’re entering a golden age of Design. The evidence: 1. The startups being invested in are designer-led. Take the new Designer Fund that funds startups with designer-founders and helps mentor them. Consider the companies...

The goal of a reset stylesheet is to reduce browser inconsistencies in things like default line heights, margins and font sizes of headings, and so on. The general reasoning behind this was discussed in a May 2007 post, if you're interested. Reset styles quite often appear in CSS frameworks, and the original "meyerweb reset" found its way into Blueprint, among others.The reset styles given here are intentionally very generic. There isn't any default color or background set for the body element, for example. I don't particularly recommend that you just use this in its unaltered state in you...

Introduction Web Consistency Testing is a new form of Web testing that aims to answer the simple question: does this page look right? It's an automated approach to making sure a page looks the way we expect, whether that be cross-browser, over time (regression), in multiple locales, or whatever else we can think of. Kevin Menard, founder of Mogotest, presented an in-depth talk about what Web Consistency Testing is and presented a roadmap for building such a system at GTAC 2011. You can see his presentati...