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Flashback to the mid 90s. You are rocking your Prodigy dial-up, excited to play the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game. You click a link to the game, wait 5 minutes for the page to load, and are confused when you are staring at bright green fluorescent text telling you to “Invest $100k” instead of calculating Leondardo DiCaprio’s Bacon number.
I love writing CSS. I really do. I love spinning straw into gold, rescuing HTML elements from browser default styles, curving corners, softening colors, and cushioning containers. I love abstracting complex design systems into powerful classes and efficient declarations while minding the cascade and the rules of inheritance and specificity. I see a site’s visual design as one giant puzzle, patiently waiting to be analyzed, broken down into component parts, and built back up again. I easily spend 70% of my time at Happy Cog developing the presentation layer, so I’ve had my eye on the hot newness that is the Sass / LESS / CSS preprocessor movement for a little while now.
One of the interesting things about being in front-end development and the open web is that once you publish your website, anyone can see your work. Whether you use Firebug or Web Inspector or good old View Source, you can view everything I do in a quick click. This has always been one part terrifying to me (I swear those extra spans were the CMS WYSIWYG’s idea) and three parts awesome. As someone who loves web standards and the idea of creating a better web for all, I think it’s radical to share what we do with each other. If you threw all of our code from the interwebs into one big room, it would be one heck of a learning party.
When it comes to HTML5 elements, do you ever feel like you’re reaching for a carrot on a stick? The promise of those tasty elements, hanging right in front of you, taunting you, so close, yet just out of reach. What you wouldn’t give for just one bite of a section, one taste of a succulent aside, one thirst-quenching datalist. I bet no one told that donkey it was going to have to wait ’til 2022 to eat that carrot.
At Happy Cog, process is not sacred. We respect process, but we are constantly looking to improve the way our projects run; especially with regard to transitioning between project phases. Last week, Yesenia Perez-Cruz described how she crafts sweet systems and digital cupcakes. This week, I’m going to show you how we turn those cupcakes into a well-built tower of yummy cupcakery.
Viewing source has gotten pretty rad these days! Looking around the web, a good command + u (yes, I use Firefox/Mac) can provide an afternoon of exciting show and tell. One thing I like to look into is at which DTD table everyone is sitting these days. When the HTML5 doctype was introduced, some folks grabbed it and never looked back to the land of system identifiers again; others were cool with rocking a doctype that has been working for them for the last decade or so. This has caused some separation between those who see the choice as the past versus those who see it as the future. The cool table versus the lame table.
Perhaps you’ve stood in line at Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream and said,
“What flavor of ice cream do I want today?”
You’ve probably all wished, as I have, that you could have a dozen flavors at once. Thankfully, someone, possibly Messrs. Ben & Jerry, invented that tiny ice cream spoon. Sample just a taste to see if that flavor suits your mood.
The year 2010 was a wild one for the web. It saw the release of the iPad and all of the subsequent great ideas and discussion about flexible design approaches. HTML was cool again (the cinco!). Twitter got a major overhaul and Facebook got between 35 and 268 small facelifts. It was as if millions of bookmarks cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced when rumor had it delicio.us was disappeari.ng. In fact, someone apparently took the web’s pulse and pronounced it DOA!
Two years ago, my wife and I stopped throwing all of our organic food waste into the trash. Instead, we purchased a composter and started tossing our food scraps into it. The intent behind this change was mostly selfish: we wanted a way to create nutrient rich soil to mix into the planting areas in our backyard. However, a week or two into using it, while pushing our trash can out to the street curb, I noticed another positive side-effect: the trash can was lighter and emptier. We were sending less to the landfill!
When 4 million people want to participate in your party, you better have a fantastic party. Thankfully, that’s what we built in the form of the O Music Awards website. From October 3 to October 31, 2011, the site generated almost 22 million votes, with over 13 million votes shared on Facebook and Twitter, an increase of over 500% over the previous event.
Happy Cog founder Jeffrey Zeldman invites web designers to think strategically at An Event Apart, the design conference for people who make websites.
Copyright 1995–2012 Happy Cog™
On-Site Anthropology
The Importance of Conventions
Thank you, Hillman Curtis.
Rut-Roh! I’m in a Design Rut
