This is weekly Web Design Digest No.4. Оnce a week, we will publish a digest of the latest news, useful tools for web developers, freebies and many more cool stuff from the world of web design.
Web Coding
CSS Flexible Box Layout gets Best New Web Technology 2013 NetAward!
This a quite a big achievement for the CSS Working Group, showing the importance and relevance of our work. I would like to thank the authors and editors of that spec, and also all the contributors to the document, CSS WG members or external contributors, for their hard work and this important contribution to the future of the Web.
Request Quest
The game is pretty simple, look at some code & decide if it would trigger an HTTP request in the latest stable release of particular browsers.
Show Up To Date Browser Compatibility Information In Your Articles
The “When Can I Use” Web Widget provides authors with the ability to include up to date information about browser support for a feature they are talking about based on the data crafted by CanIUse.com.
Common mistakes in smartphone sites
Here are some common mistakes we see on smartphone-optimized websites and how to avoid them.
Irregular shape rollovers with Canvas and PNG
Creating rollovers is easy. Much easier than it was in the past with the infamous MM_mouseover at least. It gets tricky though when you want to have the rollover only happen on a certain shape and not only in a rectangular area.
Fries lets you create sexy Android-like UI using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Fries is an awesome mobile UI development framework (yes, not just for prototyping!) for Android apps using just HTML, CSS, and Javascript. We all know that you can find loads of iOS development tools out there, so this time let’s give some love to Android. Fries was inspired by Ratchet so I’m extending my huge thanks to the Ratchet team.
Front-End Ops
When a team builds a complex application, there is often a common breakdown of roles. Specifically on the back end, there are database engineers, application engineers and operations engineers, or something close to this. In recent years, more and more application logic is being deferred to the client side. For some reason, though, operations folks aren’t going with it.
How to Design Responsively
In this article I want to share my thoughts regarding responsive design. I made several talks on this subject and this post is some kind of summary. The article presents concepts like mobile first and design in the browser.
Adaptive ≠ Responsive
As I write this, responsive web design turns three years old, and as expected, the bandwagon is well and truly jumped on. But even now, I still find examples of people confusing responsive and adaptive; describing their websites or commenting on other projects and portfolios like these terms are interchangeable.
The mobile-first Web
The growth of mobile web users is staggering. While some of us have been browsing the web on mobile devices for nearly ten years, most of the world population is only now getting there.
Tracing paint operations in Chrome Canary
Using about:tracing in Chrome Canary to debug paints and composites.
Web Audio Stylophone
Get started with the Web Audio API by learning how to recreate the classic miniature synthesizer.
picnicc – custom builds made easy
See custom builds powered by picnicc live with Twitter Bootstrap, underscore.js, HTML5BP or inuit.css, then come back and find out how easy it is to do the same for your own projects.
Gone In 60 Frames Per Second: A Pinterest Paint Performance Case Study
Today we’ll discuss how to improve the paint performance of your websites and Web apps. This is an area that we Web developers have only recently started looking at more closely, and it’s important because it could have an impact on your user engagement and user experience.
Better performance with requestAnimationFrame
This article discusses how you can (and should) improve the performance of your animations, using the requestAnimationFrame API instead of the old setInterval/setTimeout methods, and how requestAnimationFrame is used. And of course, we will show you the mandatory code example of requestAnimationFrame in action.
CSS
Magic css3 animations
Magic is a CSS3 framework with many animations. Is simple to use and many animations are cross-browser compatible.
Creative Button Styles
Modern and subtle styles & effects for buttons (hover and click)
Pizza Time Hovers
Hover Maester Jenn Lukas sent me a link to PizzaTime.com. We agreed that 1) those are some pretty neat hovers! and 2) it’s pretty cool that there is a quality website at all at a domain like PizzaTime.com – in which that she typed in randomly hoping there would be.
Cikonss 1.0
Pure CSS Responsive Icons – IE friendly
IE 10 Specific Styles
Conditional comments are gone in IE 10. That’s good. IE 10 is a very good browser. Feature detection is a better way to go in nearly all cases. But what if you find some styling situation where you absolutely need to target IE 10? I guess you’ll have to do this.
CSS Box-Sizing for Noobies
Box-sizing basically is an alternative to the standard box model we have in CSS. To fully understand box-sizing you need to understand the box model. Practically, they work just about the same but there is one key difference – one that will be discussed in depth later. So, let’s get started by examining the good old box model.
Using CSS attr and content for Tooltips
I’ve found myself in love with CSS content and attr; I’ve recently written about how you can use the property and expression on a basic level, how you can implement CSS counters, and use for the sake of localization. I wanted to share a few tooltip-style uses of the attr expression and content property.
Web Design: How to Convert CSS to Sass & SCSS
CSS is a really simple and straightforward language, but when it is getting too long – let’s say for a thousand of lines, it turns into a maintenance ‘nightmare’. Everything will be too complicated to maintain, and we will get lost with which style rules to keep up with or overwrite. For that reason, a CSS Pre-processor is created to make writing CSS programmable and more maintainable.
CSS stacking with display:table
With responsive design, one of the things that we often want to do is to change the stack order of certain elements, moving the aside on the left below the main text which we want to bring to the top. CSS3‘s Flexbox will do this for us, but there is a quicker, if dirtier, way which we can use now.
Auticons: An automatic icon font
Auticons is an icon font and CSS set that harnesses the awesome power of attribute selectors.
Delta Cycle Hovers
You could get products tighter together if you just show image only and expose more info on hover
Understanding 3D Transforms
Opera 15 adds a lot of goodies under its hood, including three-dimensional CSS transforms (2D transforms have been available since Opera 10.50). In this article we’ll dig in to 3D transforms in detail, looking at the fundamental differences between 3D and 2D transforms, the 3D transforms available, and some demos that show how these work.
Style Scavenger: 7 CSS Snippets to Borrow from HTML5 Boilerplate
The “Scavenger” series looks at large-scale projects and focuses on the small snippets you can take from the project without needing the complete project.
JavaScripts
JSbooks
Free javascript books
Codeblock.js
Editable, runnable javascript code blocks
Hitch – Add some expressive prollyfilled power
A resource for developers looking to put proposed CSS features to use today, including information on specific features and when to use them in your apps.
iDangero.us Swiper
Mobile Touch Slider And Framework With Hardware Accelerated Transitions
Fresh jQuery Tools and Plugins for May 2013
In this post you will find even more awesome and fresh tools and plugins.
The JavaScript Behind Touch-Friendly Sliders
A few weeks ago Chris posted a tutorial for creating a Slider with Sliding Background Images. Around the same time I was working on some new swipeable galleries, so Chris suggested I write up a tutorial for how to add swipe support to his slider. Here it is!
AngularJS 1.2 and Beyond (video)
Angular 1.2 has been long in making, but it’s finally here! Join us to learn what’s new and noteworthy in this feature-packed release as well as what’s next for Angular after 1.2
Changeable vector graphics with SVG and AngularJS
I’ve long been a fan of using SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) to do images that I can change easily on the fly. When I say “long been a fan” I mean that when I first started doing it I hand wrote some SVG as XML to show a donation bar we needed for GameDev.net and I had a program that would change the amount thus far donated on the bar and run it through an early version of the Java Batik library to spit out a JPEG file we could put on the website. It was crude, but it sure beat making a new graphic two or three times a day.
Web Design
Falling Flat
As I’m sure everyone even slightly involved in the tech world is aware, Apple dropped some serious new releases this week at WWDC’13, including a new Mac Pro, a new Macbook Air, a new version of OSX and a new version of iOS. While the upgrades made to Macbooks, the bold new Mac Pro, and the subtle upgrades to OSX were impressive, the new version of iOS blew them all out of the water as far as magnitude of change.
New Apple Look Doesn’t Fully Embrace Flat Design
The web was full of speculation in the weeks and days leading to WWDC 2013 – iOS 7 would be flat.
The start of a more consistent iOS design
Why Apple’s new design is a start, not an outcome.
Showcase of Turquoise Websites
In this collection we have compiled stunning turquoise color websites. We hope you will also feel the magic of this color.
35 Fresh Websites with Photo Backgrounds
Here are some great, must-see examples for those who might want to have a photo or image background in their web design.
The Principles of Typography: Back to Basics
Content is king, but typography is the crown and design is the throne. Typography and design both help content maximize its potential and withstand the test of time.
Flat Design and Fonts
Throughout this post you will see websites using flat design techniques paired with information about fonts used on the site in the top right corner.
10 Best Photoshop Tutorials of May 2013
Photoshop is one of the most popular, graphic designing software. Its comes with loads of image editing and manipulation options. The huge community of designers provide some excellent resources all long the year, and we have collected ten from those in the last month of may 2013.
20 New and Really Clever Logo Designs
In today’s showcase, we bring together simple but cleverly designed logos for your inspiration.Here are 20 fresh examples of simple logo design.
Web Design Inspirational Cocktail #66
Here you’ll find some amazing, funny, creative and sometimes unusual designs.
Freebies
iOS 7 GUI PSD
A Photoshop template of GUI elements found in the beta 1 release of iOS 7.
20 Free Infographic Vector Element Kits
In this post we have gathered high quality free infographic vector elements to use in your upcoming infographic project. The below free graphics are either in EPS or in PSD format. I’m sure you will find some really essential graphic elements in this collection.
Free Flat Icon Set
Here is a FREEBIE! I’ve been working on these icons for a while now and thought I’d share these with this awesome community to help other designers learn and improve just as ppl have helped me.
Huge Collection of Flat Icons that You Can Download Free
In this post we showcased huge collection of flat icons that you can download free and use in your projects. The trend of flat design is already in but flat icons taking more space over flat website designs after Apple announcement of sleeker and flatter icons for iOS7.
25 Free Fractal Brushes For Photoshop
We are showcasing another free brushes collection.Fractal brushes. Fractal art or let’s say these complex geometrical shapes can be shifted and reproduced in an infinite number of ways with awe-inspiring colors and complex patterns.
30 Free Flat UI Kits for Web Designers
In this roundup we’ve gathered 30 Free Flat PSD UI Kits for Web Designers that you might not want to miss!
Gallery of Beautiful and Free iPhone Wallpapers
Today we would like to share with you a great collection of free wallpapers for Apple iPhone.
Collection of Free Photoshop Patterns
They are available in various formats: .eps, .ai, .png, .pat, .psd and .jpg, so all you need is to download the one you like the most.
Thanks for reading!