http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/08/15/mind-your-en-and-em-dashes-typographic-etiquette/
Fancy Scrolling Sites In the last year or so, there's been enough sites that do fancy things when you scroll down that it's kind of a trend. I thought I'd blog it, you know, for the sake of history. By "fancy things" I mean something happens when scrolling down besides the site scrolling down. Elements might move around in unexpected ways or change their size/shape/color/content in some way. It's easier to just experience some of these yourself than listen to me try to fumble through explaining it. These screenshots also don't do much justice. Why Subtle Typographic Choices Make All The Difference Advertisement A strong understanding of how designers control meaning is essential for anyone interested in graphic design or typography. In a previous article, we discussed how sophisticated and complex visual and verbal language can get, examining instances that show how type can be used to effectively take control of meaning. In this article, we’ll look at the reasons why subtle typographic changes can create considerable effect. We’ll refer to one or two linguistic and semiotic examples, as well as design case studies, to get to grips with why subtle changes can make all the difference.
The Secret to Writing Incredible Blog Posts — Career Pathing People always ask me what they should blog about. Should they write about this fancy topic? This complicated process? This trendy thing that they don’t really know much about but everyone is talking about it? 10 HTML Entity Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit It has been over a couple of years since I posted my HTML tag and usability crimes posts, both of which are amongst the most popular articles here on Line25. There’s something about this title people just can’t resist! Let’s take a look at ten crimes you may be committing in your HTML content. These won’t exactly land you a life sentence, but I bet almost every one of us will be guilty of at least one of these petty crimes. Crime 1: Not converting your ampersands One of the most common HTML validation errors I see when checking the code behind Sites of the Week features are unconverted ampersand characters.
Web Typography: Educational Resources, Tools and Techniques Web typography has evolved a lot over the last years. Today we see rich, accessible typography, a plethora of type design choices for the web and a number of remarkable, type-based web designs. It’s a great time for web design, and it’s a great time for web typography. Still, being as excited as we are, we should not forget about the foundational principles of good type design on the web and use them properly within our projects. Great choice is good, but, most importantly, we should be making meaningful typographic choices in our designs. In this post we present an extensive overview of educational resources, tools, articles, techniques and showcases all related to web typography.
The Dash Use a dash [ — ] (or two hyphens [ -- ] on old-fashioned typewriters) or dashes as a super-comma or set of super-commas to set off parenthetical elements, especially when those elements contain internal forms of punctuation: All four of them—Bob, Jeffrey, Jason, and Brett—did well in college. In most word-processors, the dash is created by holding down the option key and hitting the key that has the underline mark above the hyphen. This can vary, though, from program to program. Usually, you get an en dash (see below) with the option + hyphen key, and you get the larger em dash (used more frequently) with option + shift + hyphen keys. Do not use dashes to set apart material when commas would do the work for you.
Javascript in Modern Web Design In today's web design, Javascript is a must-have component. Aside from its functionality, Javascript can enhance user experience by creating transitional effects such as fading and sliding animation. Thanks to the open source Javascript frameworks, we don't need to write custom Javascript from scratch anymore. Here are 47 Javascript plugins that you can use to enhance the user experience and functionality of your website. The Writer as Meme Machine: How Has the Internet Altered Poetry? What if the poetic has left the poem in the same way that Elvis has left the building? Long after the limo pulled away, the audience was still in the arena screaming for more, but poetry escaped out the backdoor and onto the Internet, where it is taking on new forms that look nothing like poetry. Poetry as we know it—sonnets or free verse on a printed page—feels akin to throwing pottery or weaving quilts, activities that continue in spite of their cultural marginality. But the Internet, with its swift proliferation of memes, is producing more extreme forms of modernism than modernism ever dreamed of. Wershler calls these activities “conceptualism in the wild,” referring to the aspect of nineteen-sixties conceptual art that concerned reframing, and thereby redefining, the idea of artistic genius (think of Duchamp’s urinal). And he’s right.
The Science of Looking Good in the Inbox CSSHow do I add margins to my image so text will wrap around it? Outlook 2007 and 2010 do not support the margin or padding CSS properties when placed within an image. Try using hspace and/or vspace:<img src=“ align=“left” vspace=“10” hspace=“10” /> Or add the additional spacing to the image itself (in pixels). CSSHow do I make a long text string wrap to the next line? If you have text within a table, for instance “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa” and you want it to wrap, try adding this style: When do you call yourself a writer? Some days, it seems as if everybody thinks they’re a writer. A few years back I was visiting my mother-in-law in Cherry Valley, California, where I spent the mornings writing at a local Starbucks. As I sat outside sipping my latte and working on my laptop, at least five people a day approached me to ask what I was doing. When I said I was a writer, most of the people proceeded to sit down and tell me their own writing dreams. Guess I just have one of those faces. One woman, a teacher, hoped to retire and write full time.
Bootstrap, from Twitter Need reasons to love Bootstrap? Look no further. By nerds, for nerds. Built at Twitter by @mdo and @fat, Bootstrap utilizes LESS CSS, is compiled via Node, and is managed through GitHub to help nerds do awesome stuff on the web. Made for everyone. Bootstrap was made to not only look and behave great in the latest desktop browsers (as well as IE7!) Google Authorship - are we there yet? Around and around we go. Google’s changed the rules again. In the last week we’ve been introduced to the new Hummingbird algorithm, and then John Mueller (Google Webmaster Tools Analyst) dropped this bomb: “Well, we don’t use Authorship for ranking.” Hold your horses and don’t jump to conclusions because this gets interesting.
How to Develop Task Management Skills as a Freelancer The life of a freelance web designer varies in many ways to that of a corporate entity. Software firms and design studios are able to work together on big budget projects to earn a lot more than the average freelancer would. This often means when going solo you’ll work with a larger number of clients and have to divide your time up into unfair portions. For anybody in the industry it’s absolutely essential to understand task management. Henry Gustav Molaison: The Basis for 'Memento' and the World’s Most Celebrated Amnesiac In the movie “Groundhog Day,” the TV weatherman Phil Connors finds himself living the same day again and again. This has its advantages, as he has hundreds of chances to get things right. He can learn to speak French, to sculpt ice, to play jazz piano, and to become the kind of person with whom his beautiful colleague Rita might fall in love. But it’s a torment, too.