About to board a 14 hour flight, one of the things I really wanted to do was to re-learn CSS.
I know how to do pixel-perfect layout using tables, but I’ve learned CSS hackery here and there, and the designer in me hates the fact that I don’t really know what I’m doing. So I decided I’d devote some chunk of that flight to learning it “from the beginning”.
charliepark @superamit I really like the O’Reilly CSS Pocket Reference book, by Eric Meyer. But I find that it’s most useful when I can’t remember, for example, that small caps is defined by “font-variant” whereas all-caps or lowercase is defined by “text-transform”.
What I really liked about the book is that it does a great job
explaining how css works conceptually. I wouldn’t consider it a
beginner book, it definitely goes in depth and you should be able to
redesign sites w/ css after reading it. Sadly, not too much has
changed w/ css since 2006, so I wouldn’t consider it dated. The way I
see it is you can always find a blog post/tutorial for some cool new
css technique, but this books provides a foundation so you can easily
understand/implement new techniques.
jonathanpberger @superamit the lynda.com videos are great. Also, the O’Reilly Head First series is too cutesy, but great for filling in knowledge-gaps
Initially I was leaning towards the Lynda.com videos, but while the subscription was cheap ($25/mo) it was streaming-only, and the DVD version cost $100. With no reviews online, and a power outlet at my seat uncertain, I decided I’d try the other options first. Likewise, HTML dog was out for being online.
So I’m headed to the airport with Head First CSS (it is cutesy, but I think it makes the dry underpinnings lively, and I like that) and CSS Mastery. And I bought a copy of O’Reilly’s CSS Pocket Reference for later reference. From what I’ve seen of them so far, they all look great.
Thanks to Liz Danzico (who edited it) and Khoi Vinh (who illustrated it) for putting it on their wonderful site!
If you haven’t checked out A Brief Message before, you should.
A Brief Message features design opinions expressed in short form. Somewhere between critiques and manifestos, between wordy and skimpy, Brief Messages are viewpoints on design in the real world. They’re pithy, provocative and short — 200 words or less.
Since the lions-share of these rankings come from battles across CommandShift3 (ie. pitting one of these sites against another site on CommandShift3, not against another political site necessarily) it’s freer of political bias than you’d expect.
A few quick observations:
Obama’s site is clearly the cleanest and most modern. Lots of room for design elements to breath, gradients, and well thought-out typography. This feels like a Web 2.0 site. It’s ranked #1
Hillary’s site has the clearest above-the-fold calls to action. If you check out Hillary’s design history, you’ll notice that wasn’t always the case.
Ron Paul’s site features a live donation counter, with a callout to the most recent donor. Neat idea!
Red, white, and blue.. Especially blue, are the dominating colors everywhere.
Christine and Justin are a couple in NYC. They’ve made paintings of things they want, and they’re selling each painting for the amount of money it’d cost to buy that item. Simple genius. This is a story built to spread.
A new project I’ve been working on with Darrell Silver, Erin Sparling, and Lee Semel launches today: CommandShift3.
It’s like Hot or Not, but for websites.
Started on a lark during a NYC Jelly session with Adam Varga, Darrell Silver, Dan Lurie, Erin Sparling, and Lee Semel, we’re really proud to open it up to the world today.
One of the annoying things about Safari if you’re a web designer is that it uses the system-level Webkit rendering engine, meaning that it’s not possible to use the same machine to see how different versions of Safari will render a website.
I’ve talked about personal fabrication on this blog before, and I think it’s an idea whose time is near.
Ponoko was at TechCrunch40 today and I think their model — gather a community of object designers, work with a network of distributed fabrication service providers, and power a market for the output — is incredibly well thought-out. It makes the designer in me itch to learn Solidworks! I hope they make this work.
More and more in the course of my daily work, I find the need to share a quick screenshot with a friend of colleague to get a point across. I’ve been using Skitch for this, and it makes the process butter smooth. And with its friendly sounds and the UI snapping and sliding in and out of view, it’s a joy to use.
But sometimes I need to capture something in motion to truly explain it, and Skitch doesn’t do video. So I’ve been looking for something that makes video capture and sharing as great as Skitch makes image sharing. Preferably in flash. With one-click upload.
Today my friend soxiam pointed me to Jing. It’s just the ticket.
Still under development, and not quite as gooey and snazzy as Jing yet, but it uploads in one click, outputs flash, and does it all with a minimum of clicks. Mac and Windows, too. Wowza.
I was stoked to see our new forum design pop up on the 37signals blog this afternoon. The post highlights the progress-bar like interface I designed to give people an at-a-glance look at the amount of activity in a particular forum thread. (Thanks to Luke for the heads up!)
The UI’s still under development, but I think it’s a lot better than most other forums so far. And Susan’s done a phenomenal job getting our forum software to work with this design, and doing the amazing Flickr-integration that makes registration a breeze.
When was the last time you got an email that was this simple and sweet from a company?
I don’t think I ever have. I have no idea who these guys are or when I signed up for their list. I kind of suspect I never did. But their email made me visit the site right away anyway.
His latest project is Photojojo. If you like photography, you will like Photojojo.
Before Photojojo, he was a founder of The Daily Jolt, an online community on 100 college campuses, helped create a non-profit called ChangeThis with Seth Godin, and brought the technology un-conference BarCamp to NYC. He also started a weekly casual coworking session called Jelly.
And he's consulted for companies such as Pearson, Apple, and Creative Good and co-authored The Big Moo, a WSJ best-seller, with Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Guy Kawasaki, Tom Peters, and others.
charliepark @superamit I really like the O’Reilly CSS Pocket Reference book, by Eric Meyer. But I find that it’s most useful when I can’t remember, for example, that small caps is defined by “font-variant” whereas all-caps or lowercase is defined by “text-transform”.
ericds @superamit The head first css book is fantastic: http://tinyurl.com/6boba2
jonathanpberger @superamit the lynda.com videos are great. Also, the O’Reilly Head First series is too cutesy, but great for filling in knowledge-gaps
dantekgeek @superamit - CSS Mastery (Book)
deprimer @superamit i really like http://htmldog.com 
I have a brief piece called 
A new project I’ve been working on with Darrell Silver, Erin Sparling, and Lee Semel launches today: 
Well, kinda.
