Category: webfonts

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The Next Generation of Web Layouts

Who will design the next generation of readable, writerly web layouts?

Layouts for sites that are mostly writing. Designed by people who love writing. Where text can be engaging even if it isn’t offset by art or photography. Where text is the point.

With well considered flexible typesetting, modular scaling, and readable measures across a full range of proportions and devices. With optional small details that make reading screens of text a pleasure instead of a chore. With type sizes that are easy to read without needing to zoom in. And with a range of interesting sans and serif fonts (including variable fonts) that support reading and encourage creative exploration where headlines are concerned.

Well? How did we get here?

The web has come along way since design meant crafting UIs in Photoshop and exporting them as sliced GIFs. Flash. SiFR. Table layout. Rebellion and rethinking. Liquid layout. Semantic HTML and CSS layout. Adaptive layout. Responsive layout. Intrinsic layout. Web fonts. Big type and super lightweight UX emphasizing readability was new (and controversial!) in 2012. We’ve long since accepted and improved upon it. Today’s news, magazine, and blog pages are more flexible, readable, and refined than ever before.

So what comes next? For writers, one hopes that what’s next is a fresh crop of small, innovative advancements. Improvements that are felt by readers, even when they aren’t always consciously noticed. Layouts that are not merely legible, but actually feel inevitable, at all sizes and in all contexts.

Beyond outside the box

Services like Typetura may point the way. A marriage of type and tech, Typetura is different from other typesetting methods. An intrinsic typography technology, it “enables you to design with more flexibility, while dramatically reducing code.” Disclaimer: I’m friends with, and have long admired the work of, Typetura founder Scott Kellum. Designing With Web Standards readers will recognize his name from the Kellum Image Replacement days of the early 2000s, but that ain’t the half of what he has done for web design, e.g. inventing dynamic typographic systems, high impact ad formats, new parallax techniques, and fluid typesetting technology. Scott was also the coder, along with Filipe Fortes, of Roger Black’s late, lamented Treesaver technology. But I digress.

The tech is not the point—except in so far as it improves our ability to think beyond our current understanding of what design and layout means. Just as Gutenberg’s printing press was not the point, but it was the point of departure. Initially, the invention of movable type reproduced the writing we already knew (i.e. the King James Bible). But ultimately, by freeing writing and reading from narrow elite circles and bringing it to more (and more diverse) minds, Gutenberg’s invention transformed what writing was and could be—from the invention of newspapers to the fiction of Virginia Woolf to multimedia experiences, and perhaps even to the web.

Let us all to play with Jen Simmons’s intrinsic web layout ideas and Scott Kellum and partners’s Typetura. While we also sketch in pencil and spend time looking at well designed books —printed, bound ones as well as digital publications in various devices. And specifically, not just fabulous coffee table books, but books that you’ve reread over and over, to understand what, beyond the text itself, encourages that reading response. So that, together, we may take the experiences of both reading and writing to the next level.

Appendix: Resources

If you’re new to the interplay between design and code on the open web, or if you just want a refresher, here are some evergreen links for your further learning and pleasure:


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Advocacy art direction Design Designers Ideas industry interface IXD Jason Santa Maria links Off My Lawn! Redesigns Responsive Web Design State of the Web Tech The Profession User Experience UX Web Design Web Design History webfonts

The Web We Lost: Luke Dorny Redesign

Thumbnails from Luke Dorny’s recently redesigned personal site.

Like 90s hip-hop, The Web We Lost™ retains a near-mystical hold on the hearts and minds of those who were lucky enough to be part of it. Luke Dorny’s recent, lovingly hand-carved redesign of his personal site encompasses several generations of that pioneering creative web. As such, it will repay your curiosity.

Details, details.

Check Luke’s article page for textural, typographic, and interactive hat tips to great old sites from the likes of k10k, Cameron Moll, Jason Santa Maria, and more. 

And don’t stop there; each section of the updated lukedorny.com offers its own little bonus delights. Like the floating titles (on first load) and touchable, complex thumbnail highlights on the “observer” (AKA home) page. 

And by home page, I don’t mean the home page that loads when you first hit the site: that’s a narrow, fixed-width design that’s both a tribute and a goof.

No, I mean the home page that replaces that narrow initial home page once the cookies kick in. Want to see the initial, fixed-width home page again? I’m not sure that you can. Weird detail. Cool detail. Who thinks of such things? Some of us used to.

And don’t miss the subtle thrills of the silken pull threads (complete with shadows) and winking logo pull tab in the site’s footer. I could play with that all day.

Multiply animated elements, paths, and shadows bring life to the footer of Luke Dorny’s newly redesigned website.

Now, no site exactly needs those loving details. But danged if they don’t encourage you to spend time on the site and actually peruse its content. 

There was a time when we thought about things like that. We knew people had a big choice in which websites they chose to visit. (Because people did have a big choice back in them days before social media consolidation.) And we worked to be worthy of their time and attention.

Days of future past

We can still strive to be worthy by sweating details and staying alive to the creative possibilities of the page. Not on every project, of course. But certainly on our personal sites. And we don’t have to limit our creative love and attention only to our personal sites. We pushed ourselves, back then; we can do it again.

In our products, we can remember to add delight as we subtract friction.

And just as an unexpected bouquet can brighten the day for someone we love, in the sites we design for partners, we can be on the lookout for opportunities to pleasantly surprise with unexpected, little, loving details.

Crafted with care doesn’t have to mean bespoke. But it’s remarkable what can happen when, in the early planning stage of a new project, we act as if we’re going to have to create each page from scratch.

In calling Luke Dorny’s site to your attention, I must disclaim a few things:

  • I haven’t run accessibility tests on lukedorny.com or even tried to navigate it with images off, or via the keyboard.
  • Using pixel fonts for body copy, headlines, labels, and so on—while entirely appropriate to the period Luke’s celebrating and conceptually necessary for the design to work as it should—isn’t the most readable choice and may cause difficulty for some readers.
  • I haven’t tested the site in every browser and on every known device. I haven’t checked its optimization. For all I know, the site may pass such tests with flying colors, but I tend to think all this beauty comes at a price in terms of assets and bandwidth. 

Nevertheless, I do commend this fine website to your loving attention. Maybe spend time on it instead of Twitter next time you take a break?

I’ll be back soon with more examples of sites trying harder.

Simulcast on Automattic Design

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art direction Bandwidth Best practices Brands CSS CSS3 Design Designers development Fonts Real type on the web software State of the Web Typekit Typography Web Design Web Standards webfonts Websites

A Helvetica For Readers

A Helvetica for readers–introducing Acumin.

ACUMIN by Robert Slimbach is a new type family from Adobe that does for book (and ebook) designers what Helvetica has always done for graphic designers. Namely, it provides a robust yet water-neutral sans-serif, in a full suite of weights and widths. And unlike the classic pressing of Helvetica that comes on everyone’s computers—but like Helvetica Neue—Acumin contains real italics for every weight and width.

Reading about the design challenges Slimbach set himself (and met) helps you appreciate this new type system, whose virtues are initially all too easy to overlook, because Acumin so successfully avoids bringing a personality to the table. Enjoying Acumin is like developing a taste for exceptionally good water.

Nick Sherman designed the website for Adobe, and its subtly brilliant features are as easy to miss at first look as Acumin’s. For starters, the style grid on the intro page dynamically chooses words to fit the column based on the viewport size. Resize your browser and you’ll see how the words change to fill the space.

Heaps of behind-the-scenes calculation allow the page to load all 90 (!) fonts without breaking your pipes or the internet. Developer Bram Stein is the wizard behind the page’s performance.

Nick uses progressively enhanced CSS3 Columns to create his responsive multi-column layout, incorporating subtle tricks like switching to a condensed font when the multi-column layout shrinks below a certain size. (This is something A List Apart used to do as well; we stopped because of performance concerns.) In browsers like IE9 and earlier, which do not support CSS3 Multiple Column specification, the layout defaults to a quite readable single column. Nick adds:

It’s the first time I’ve used responsive CSS columns for a real-world project. This was both frustrating and fun because the CSS properties for controlling widows and orphans are very far behind what’s possible in InDesign, etc. It also required more thinking about vertical media queries to prevent a situation where the user would have to scroll up and down to get from the bottom of one column to the top of the next. If the viewport is too short to allow for easy reading across columns, it stays as a single column.

He describes the challenges of creating the site’s preview tool thusly:

We had to do some behind the scenes trickery in order to get the sliders to work for changing widths and weights. It’s a good way to allow people to type their own text and get a feeling for how the family can be used as a system for body text and headlines (unlike Helvetica, which is more limited to the middle range of sizes). Chris Lewis helped out a lot with getting this to work. It even works on a phone!

Book designers have long had access to great serif fonts dripping with character that were ideal for setting long passages of text. Now they have a well-made sans serif that’s as sturdy yet self-effacing as a waiter at a great restaurant. Congratulations to Robert Slimbach, Adobe, and the designers and developers mentioned or interviewed here. I look forward to seeing if Acumin makes it into new website designs (perhaps sharing some of Proxima Nova‘s lunch), especially among mature designers focused on creating readable experiences. And I pray Acumin makes its way into the next generation of ebook readers.

(Just me? In both iBooks and Kindle, I’m continually changing typefaces after reading any book for any period of time. All the current faces just call too much attention to themselves, making me aware that I am scanning text—which is rather like making filmgoers aware that they are watching projected images just when they should be losing themselves in the story.)

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@font-face and Web Performance

Some time in 2009, Firefox and Opera began shipping @font-face support with the former behavior: text would render with fallback fonts until downloadable font resources became available. But this choice frustrated many users (see the Firefox bug report) and was quickly dubbed FOUT, the Flash of Unstyled Text . Articles were written about fighting the @font-face FOUT. It wasn’t long before most browsers were hiding text while fonts downloaded. Unfortunately, the main issue with @font-face now is what many wanted to avoid years ago: the FOIT, or Flash of Invisible Text.

Source: The @font-face dilemma | Viget

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Design industry Interviews Web Design Web Design History Web Standards webfonts Websites wordpress Zeldman zeldman.com

Typelab interview with Jeffrey Zeldman | Typetester

The interview was conducted by Nick Sherman at TypeLab on June 13, 2015. The website is part of Typographics TypeLab and is a demonstration of what can be done with web typography within 24 hours.

Source: Typelab interview with jeffrey zeldman | Typetester

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Design type Typography webfonts

Webfonts with Stylistic Sets from Hoefler & Co.

Now there’s a way to transform your web typography at the touch of a button: introducing Stylistic Sets for webfonts at Cloud.typography.

www.typography.com/blog/webfonts-with-stylistic-sets/

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Responsive Typography

Responsive Typography: The Basics | Information Architects

“NOT EVERYTHING always works in your favor when you design for the screen. Interaction design is engineering: it’s not about finding the perfect design, it’s finding the best compromise.”

Responsive Typography: The Basics | Information Architects

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Web Design Manifesto 2012

THANK YOU for the screen shot. I was actually already aware that the type on my site is big. I designed it that way. And while I’m grateful for your kind desire to help me, I actually do know how the site looks in a browser with default settings on a desktop computer. I am fortunate enough to own a desktop computer. Moreover, I work in a design studio where we have several of them.

This is my personal site. There are many like it, but this one is mine. Designers with personal sites should experiment with new layout models when they can. Before I got busy with one thing and another, I used to redesign this site practically every other week. Sometimes the designs experimented with pitifully low contrast. Other times the type was absurdly small. I experimented with the technology that’s used to create web layouts, and with various notions of web “page” design and content presentation. I’m still doing that, I just don’t get to do it as often.

Many people who’ve visited this site since the redesign have commented on the big type. It’s hard to miss. After all, words are practically the only feature I haven’t removed. Some of the people say they love it. Others are undecided. Many are still processing. A few say they hate it and suggest I’ve lost my mind—although nobody until you has suggested I simply didn’t have access to a computer and therefore didn’t know what I was designing. This design may be good, bad, or indifferent but it is not accidental.

A few people who hate this design have asked if I’ve heard of responsive web design. I have indeed. I was there when Ethan Marcotte invented it, I published his ground-breaking article (and, later, his book, which I read in draft half a dozen times and which I still turn to for reference and pleasure), and I’ve had the privilege of seeing Ethan lecture and lead workshops on the topic about 40 times over the past three years. We’ve incorporated responsive design in our studio’s practice, and I’ve talked about it myself on various stages in three countries. I’m even using elements of it in this design, although you’d have to view source and think hard to understand how, and I don’t feel like explaining that part yet.

This redesign is a response to ebooks, to web type, to mobile, and to wonderful applications like Instapaper and Readability that address the problem of most websites’ pointlessly cluttered interfaces and content-hostile text layouts by actually removing the designer from the equation. (That’s not all these apps do, but it’s one benefit of using them, and it indicates how pathetic much of our web design is when our visitors increasingly turn to third party applications simply to read our sites’ content. It also suggests that those who don’t design for readers might soon not be designing for anyone.)

This redesign is deliberately over the top, but new ideas often exaggerate to make a point. It’s over the top but not unusable nor, in my opinion, unbeautiful. How can passages set in Georgia and headlines in Franklin be anything but beautiful? I love seeing my words this big. It encourages me to write better and more often.

If this were a client site, I wouldn’t push the boundaries this far. If this were a client site, I’d worry that maybe a third of the initial responses to the redesign were negative. Hell, let’s get real: if this were a client site, I wouldn’t have removed as much secondary functionality and I certainly wouldn’t have set the type this big. But this is my personal site. There are many like it, but this one is mine. And on this one, I get to try designs that are idea-driven and make statements. On this one, I get to flounder and occasionally flop. If this design turns out to be a hideous mistake, I’ll probably eventually realize that and change it. (It’s going to change eventually, anyway. This is the web. No design is for the ages, not even Douglas Bowman’s great Minima.)

But for right now, I don’t think this design is a mistake. I think it is a harbinger. We can’t keep designing as we used to if we want people to engage with our content. We can’t keep charging for ads that our layouts train readers to ignore. We can’t focus so much on technology that we forget the web is often, and quite gloriously, a transaction between reader and writer.

Most of you reading this already know these things and already think about them each time you’re asked to create a new digital experience. But even our best clients can sometimes push back, and even our most thrilling projects typically contain some element of compromise. A personal site is where you don’t have to compromise. Even if you lose some readers. Even if some people hate what you’ve done. Even if others wonder why you aren’t doing what everyone else who knows what’s what is doing.

I don’t think you will see much type quite this big but I do think you will see more single-column sites with bigger type coming soon to a desktop and device near you. For a certain kind of content, bigger type and a simpler layout just make sense, regardless of screen size. You don’t even have to use Typekit or its brothers to experiment with big type (awesome as those services are). In today’s monitors and operating systems, yesterday’s classic web fonts—the ones that come with most everyone’s computer—can look pretty danged gorgeous at large sizes. Try tired old Times New Roman. You might be surprised.

The present day designer refuses to die.

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Big Web Show No. 65 | Tim Brown of Typekit and Nice Web Type

Tim Brown of Typekit and Nice Web Type

IN EPISODE NO. 65 of The Big Web Show (“everything web that matters”), I interview Tim Brown of Typekit and Nice Web Type on where we are with web fonts, real web type in real web context, using Dribbble to develop a tone of voice, how saving small snippets of other people’s content can turn you into a blogger, Samantha Warren’s Style Tiles, molten leading orbital content, pages versus chunks, the type-driven design, web font fallbacks, the connection between leading and font family, transitioning from university work to Typekit, and much more.

Listen to The Big Web Show #65: Tim Brown.

Show Links

Links mentioned in this show are numerous, enlightening, and available for your pleasure.

Subscribe to The Big Web Show

The Big Web Show features special guests and topics like web publishing, art direction, content strategy, typography, web technology, and more. Get episodes delivered to you automatically:

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Web type links from an interview with Typekit and Nice Web Type’s Tim Brown

Tim Brown

MY BIG WEB SHOW INTERVIEW with Tim Brown of Typekit and Nice Web Type will be posted tomorrow. Meanwhile, here are some of the links our rapid-fire idea exchanged touched upon:

FacitWeb on Typekit:
https://typekit.com/fonts/facitweb

Responsive typography:
http://nicewebtype.com/notes/responsive-typography/

Modular scales — meaningful numbers for layout:
http://modularscale.com/

More Meaningful Typography:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/more-meaningful-typography/

Build talk:
http://vimeo.com/17079380

Web Font Specimen:
http://webfontspecimen.com/

Real Web Type in Real Web Context:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/real-web-type-in-real-web-context/

How I use Twitter:
http://nicewebtype.com/notes/2009/09/01/how-i-use-twitter/

On leaving Vassar:
http://nicewebtype.com/notes/2010/02/05/on-leaving-vassar/

Font Events – Typekit Blog:
http://blog.typekit.com/category/font-events/

Ffffallback – a webfont fallback app:
http://ffffallback.com/

Nice Web Type:
http://nicewebtype.com/

Typekit:
https://typekit.com/

Adobe:
http://www.adobe.com/

The Articulate Web Designer of Tomorrow – 24 Ways:
http://24ways.org/2010/the-articulate-web-designer-of-tomorrow

Orbital Content – A List Apart:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/orbital-content/

Fonts in Use:
http://fontsinuse.com/

Facit web font:
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/justanotherfoundry/facit/

Typekit blog:
http://blog.typekit.com/

Nice Web Type:
https://twitter.com/#!/nicewebtype

Build Conference:
http://2012.buildconf.com/

Design by Front:
http://www.designbyfront.com/

Typecast app:
http://beta.typecastapp.com/

Style Tiles – Samantha Warren:
http://badassideas.com/style-tiles-as-a-web-design-process-tool/

Responsive Summit:
http://responsivesummit.com/

Molten Leading – Nice Web Type:
http://nicewebtype.com/notes/2012/02/03/molten-leading-or-fluid-line-height/

Tim Brown on Dribbble:
http://dribbble.com/timbrown/projects

Principles of Typography on the Web:
http://webtypography.net/

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Design Web Design Web Standards webfonts Websites webtype zeldman.com

A Better Franklin

I’VE TWEAKED the layout here with ITC Franklin Condensed from Webtype.

It’s funny. My daughter always asks what’s my favorite color, and I can never answer, ’cause I love them all. With color, it depends on context and it’s all about combination. But a favorite font? You bet I’ve got one. It’s Franklin Gothic, and especially Franklin Gothic Condensed. Has been for years.

For several years now I’ve used a licensed Franklin Gothic web font by someone other than Webtype here. It was good but not perfect.

Webtype’s Franklin Condensed is as close to perfect as web fonts can come in October, 2011. (And as they improve it, the look and feel here will improve as well.) The font is so good that it emboldened me to apply it to other parts of the page that formerly had to make do with Helvetica. See, for instance, my footer. It’s not a work of art, but it’s now much more pleasant to read in every environment I’ve tested.

I’m still conservative about web fonts (primarily because of bandwidth issues); this site’s body text is still set in Georgia, one of the world’s most beautiful screen fonts as we all agree. This morning, simply to break away from the herd, I tried replacing Georgia with Palatino, an engaging, readable, widely available font that comes with Windows 2000/XP (“Palatino Linotype”) and the Macintosh (“Palatino”). On its own, the Palatino was lovely. But it couldn’t stand up to the heavier elements of this site’s somewhat cartoonish look and feel. So back to Georgia I went.

The site is overdue for a redesign: the last redesign (e.g. the current look and feel) was a retro tribute to the site’s 1990s look. A new look is coming, but for the interim, I’m grateful to my friends at Webtype for their craftsmanship.

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CSS3 Design mobile The Profession Touchscreen Typekit Typography User Experience UX W3C Web Design Web Design History Web Standards webfonts webkit Working Zeldman

The Web Comes of Age – DIBI Keynote Address by Jeffrey Zeldman

Jeffrey Zeldman – The Medium Comes of Age from Codeworks Ltd on Vimeo.

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An Event Apart Atlanta 2011

YOU FIND ME ENSCONCED in the fabulous Buckhead, Atlanta Intercontinental Hotel, preparing to unleash An Event Apart Atlanta 2011, three days of design, code, and content strategy for people who make websites. Eric Meyer and I co-founded our traveling web conference in December, 2005; in 2006 we chose Atlanta for our second event, and it was the worst show we’ve ever done. We hosted at Turner Field, not realizing that half the audience would be forced to crane their necks around pillars if they wanted to see our speakers or the screen on which slides were projected.

Also not realizing that Turner Field’s promised contractual ability to deliver Wi-Fi was more theoretical than factual: the venue’s A/V guy spent the entire show trying to get an internet connection going. You could watch audience members twitchily check their laptops for email every fourteen seconds, then make the “no internet” face that is not unlike the face addicts make when the crack dealer is late, then check their laptops again.

The food was good, our speakers (including local hero Todd Dominey) had wise lessons to impart, and most attendees had a pretty good time, but Eric and I still shudder to remember everything that went wrong with that gig.

Not to jinx anything, but times have changed. We are now a major three-day event, thanks to a kick-ass staff and the wonderful community that has made this show its home. We thank you from the bottoms of our big grateful hearts.

I will see several hundred of you for the next three days. Those not attending may follow along:

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HTML5, CSS3, UX, Design: Links from An Event Apart Boston 2011

Meeting of the Minds: Ethan Marcotte and AEA attendee discuss the wonders of CSS3. Photo by the incomparable Jim Heid.

Meeting of the Minds: Ethan Marcotte and AEA attendee discuss the wonders of CSS3. Photo by the incomparable Jim Heid.

THE SHOW IS OVER, but the memories, write-ups, demos, and links remain. Enjoy!

An Event Apart Boston 2011 group photo pool

Speakers, attendees, parties, and the wonders of Boston, captured by those who were there.

What Every Designer Should Know (a)

Jeremy Keith quite effectively live-blogs my opening keynote on the particular opportunities of Now in the field of web design, and the skills every designer needs to capitalize on the moment and make great things.

The Password Anti-Pattern

Related to my talk: Jeremy Keith’s original write-up on a notorious but all-too-common practice. If your boss or client tells you to design this pattern, just say no. Design that does not serve users does not serve business.

What Every Designer Should Know (b)

“In his opening keynote … Jeffrey Zeldman talked about the skills and opportunities that should be top of mind for everyone designing on the Web today.” Luke Wroblewski’s write-up.

Whitney Hess: Design Principles — The Philosophy of UX

“As a consultant, [Whitney] spends a lot of time talking about UX and inevitably, the talk turns to deliverables and process but really we should be establishing a philosophy about how to treat people, in the same way that visual design is about establishing a philosophy about how make an impact. Visual design has principles to achieve that: contrast, emphasis, balance, proportion, rhythm, movement, texture, harmony and unity.” In this talk, Whitney proposed a set of 10 principles for UX design.

Veerle Pieters: The Experimental Zone

Live blogging by Jeremy Keith. Veerle, a noted graphic and interaction designer from Belgium, shared her process for discovering design through iteration and experimentation.

Luke Wroblewski: Mobile Web Design Moves

Luke’s live awesomeness cannot be captured in dead written words, but Mr Keith does a splendid job of quickly sketching many of the leading ideas in this key AEA 2011 talk.

See also: funky dance moves with Luke Wroblewski, a very short video I captured as Luke led the crowd in the opening moves of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

Ethan Marcotte: The Responsive Designer’s Workflow (a)

“The next talk here at An Event Apart in Boston is one I’ve really, really, really been looking forward to: it’s a presentation by my hero Ethan Marcotte.”

Ethan Marcotte: The Responsive Designer’s Workflow (b)

Ethan’s amazing talk—a key aspect of design in 2011 and AEA session of note—as captured by the great Luke Wroblewski.

An Event Apart: The Secret Lives of Links—Jared Spool

“In his presentation at An Event Apart in Boston, MA 2011 Jared Spool detailed the importance and role of links on Web pages.” No writer can capture Jared Spool’s engaging personality or the quips that produce raucous laughter throughout his sessions, but Luke does an outstanding job of noting the primary ideas Jared shares in this riveting and highly useful UX session.

An Event Apart: All Our Yesterdays—Jeremy Keith

Luke W: “In his All Our Yesterdays presentation at An Event Apart in Boston, MA 2011 Jeremy Keith outlined the problem of digital preservation on the Web and provided some strategies for taking a long term view of our Web pages.”

Although it is hard to pick highlights among such great speakers and topics, this talk was a highlight for me. As in, it blew my mind. Several people said it should be a TED talk.

An Event Apart: From Idea to Interface—Aarron Walter

Luke: “In his Idea to Interface presentation at An Event Apart in Boston, MA 2011 Aarron Walter encouraged Web designers and developers to tackle their personal projects by walking through examples and ways to jump in. Here are my notes from his talk.”

Links and Resources from “From Idea to Interface”

Compiled by the speaker, links include Design Personas Template and Example, the story behind the illustrations in the presentation created by Mike Rhode, Dribble, Huffduffer, Sketchboards, Mustache for inserting data into your prototypes, Keynote Kung Fu, Mocking Bird, Yahoo Design Patterns, MailChimp Design Pattern Library, Object Oriented CSS by Nicole Sullivan and more!

An Event Apart: CSS3 Animations—Andy Clarke

“In his Smoke Gets In Your Eyes presentation at An Event Apart in Boston, MA 2011 Andy Clarke showcased what is possible with CSS3 animations using transitions and transforms in the WebKit browser.” Write-up by the legendary Luke Wroblewski.

Madmanimation

The “Mad Men” opening titles re-created entirely in CSS3 animation. (Currently requires Webkit browser, e.g. Safari, Chrome.)

CSS3 Animation List

Anthony Calzadilla, a key collaborator on the Mad Men CSS3 animation, showcases his works.

Box Shadow Curl

Pure CSS3 box-shadow page curl effect. Mentioned during Ethan Marcotte’s Day 3 session on exploring CSS3.

Multiple CSS Transition Durations

Fascinating article by Anton Peck (who attended the show). Proposed: a solution to a key problem with CSS transitions. (“Even now, my main issue with transitions is that they use the same time-length value for the inbound effect as they do the outbound. For example, when you create a transition on an image with a 1-second duration, you get that length of time for both mousing over, and mousing away from the object. This type of behavior should be avoided, for the sake of the end-user!”)

Everything You Wanted to Know About CSS3 Gradients

Ethan Marcotte: “Hello. I am here to discuss CSS3 gradients. Because, let’s face it, what the web really needed was more gradients.”

Ultimate CSS3 Gradient Generator

Like it says.

Linear Gradients Generator

By the incomparable John Allsopp.

These sessions were not captured

Some of our best talks were not captured by note-takers, at least not to my knowledge. They include:

  1. Eric Meyer: CSS Anarchist’s Cookbook
  2. Mark Boulton: Outing the Mind: Designing Layouts That Think for You
  3. Jeff Veen: Disaster, DNA, and the Fathomless Depth of the Web

It’s possible that the special nature of these presentations made them impossible to capture in session notes. (You had to be there.)

There are also no notes on the two half-day workshop sessions, “Understand HTML5 With Jeremy Keith,” and “Explore CSS3 With Ethan Marcotte.”

What have I missed?

Attendees and followers, below please add the URLs of related educational links, write-ups, and tools I’ve missed here. Thanks!

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The Big Web Show No. 46: Get Your Web Type on with FontDeck co-founder Richard Rutter

RICHARD RUTTER, designer, technologist, information architect, writer, and co-founder of Fontdeck and Clearleft, joins Dan Benjamin and me to discuss the technical, aesthetic, and business aspects of putting real type on the web in Big Web Show Episode No. 44, now at 5by5.tv and iTunes for your listening pleasure.