Archive

Life under fire has been getting the best of me lately. If there’s one thing I learned doing web design, is that you have to be able to deliver your best under pressure. And more importantly, you have to know how and when to still make time for yourself. I wouldn’t think about complaining about too much work. It’s the best thing a designer could ever want. But when it comes down to it, sanity is more important. On top of that, if you work with the person you’re dating, it becomes all the more important. This is why I’m starting a series on keeping sane, in web design.

Oddly enough, one of the things that helps me is surfing the web. I know. Last thing most designers would want to spend their down time on. So, I’m starting things off with a few notable finds.

Clean CSS

Clean CSS is a powerful CSS optimizer. It works by taking your CSS code and making it cleaner and more concise. It works by automatically merging same CSS selectors and properties and returning clean, well-formatted code. It’s not a validator, but it works surprisingly well.

Typetester

The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. Its’ primary role is to make web designer’s life easier. They keep their database up-to-date. It’s a great little tool.

cl1p

Every wish you could Copy something on one computer and Paste it on another? cl1p allows you to do just that. Copy and paste from one computer to another. It’s a pretty simple concept and I love it.

what’s special about this number

This is for the geek in me. What’s special about numbers, is all about numbers. ‘Nough said.

The buzz around town for the last year or so has been all about mobile web and for the first time, we’re really starting to see some interesting things in this area of web development. In December of 2006, Read/WriteWeb published their predictions for Web Technology growth in 2007.

Among those predictions, they listed that 27% of people surveyed thought that Online Video and Internet TV would take the lead in growth, while 22% thought Web-based Apps would continue to lead and 15%, Mobile Web. With Companies such as Google, Yelp and YouTube all optimized for Mobile use, the number of people accessing the internet via their trusty hand phone is rising rapidly.

I’ll take mine to go

I wanted to take a look back at these predictions because over the last 6 months I’ve found myself more and more inundated with web application work, that specifically takes advantage of mobile technology. Not necessarily mobile website, but applications that are bridging the gap. In fact, the top 3 areas from the Read/WriteWeb predictions pretty much fill my plate these days.

Despite past claims that Asia is years ahead of the U.S. and U.K. in mobile web use, a recent survey taken in March, by Online Publishers, claims that mobile web use in the U.S. is actually higher now.

The fact that more people are accessing the web from mobile devices, means designing for mobile web is increasingly important. The conundrum for us designers is, “how do we do that?”

I can certainly relate. Design for mobile web? A joke right? The support for CSS among mobile web browsers is abysmal at best, but there are things you can do and things you want to consider, when designing for mobile devices. If you are tasked with designing for mobile devices, the first thing you can do is jog over to Patrick Grifith’s mobile media test page and see what css media types your mobile device supports. This, of course, wont give you an accurate overview of mobile devices at large, but you can see what options are available. The key to designing for mobile devices is simplicity. Regardless of the advances in technology to come, when your workable real estate is smaller than a business card. The second thing you should do is read Cameron Moll’s series on mobile web design. He provides an excellent background and very useful tips.

However, if you need something quick and dirty, to just make your website more accessible from mobile devices, Google has a bare-bones tool that will make your website, a mobile website in a click (and it’s not that bad, at that). If you want to see it in action for this site, go to http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http://www.repeatpenguin.com/ on your mobile device.

By the time you turn 40, you really are grown up enough to get your own place…Chronicle Books

Dear me, but I hope so, but just in case you had any doubt.

This week I’ve been working on the new blog for Chronicle Books, to celebrate their 40^th Anniversary. Here are the highlights from last nights carousal.