Dave:
A danger I am constantly battling is becoming too tied to my tools. By tools, I mean the things I use to get work done. It could be Photoshop, CSS, a CMS, pen, paper, anything I use to do my job. Why is this so dangerous? Aren’t tools there to make our lives easier? Well, they are, but we often lock in out toolset too early on projects and it ends up hurting our product in the long run.
Karen:
In the Town of Lake Clarke Shores, Florida, citizens no longer have to wait to access valuable information about their town hall meetings, thanks to a new web site powered by OpenPublic and built by the team at Big Couch Media Group. Seeing a need for not only a site makeover but an overhaul of the tools that community members needed most, John Studdard and the Big Couch team put OpenPublic to the test, utilizing the responsive design theme and maximizing the available tools for citizen engagement, while also building new functionality for the platform. I sat down with John this week to hear more about the build.
Josh:
Primer:
I thought that I would start a series of fairly straight forward posts that refer to the basics that are so often overlooked in web development and more specifically the realm of front end development. Utilizing sprites should be one of those techniques that it’s a no brainer and have no second thoughts/reasons on why not to use them. In case you did forget, the sprite is in reference to early video game developers who used a large image to contain multiple states of an entity while preserving precious space on the game media at the time.
Shawn:
As Luke Wroblewski puts it, "Mobile is Exploding". As smartphone sales surpass PCs and more and more people are doing their casual surfing from the couch or the line in the grocery store, everyone is talking about how to meet mobile user's needs. Moreover, an increasing number of users are using smartphones or tablets as their only personal computer. We think that for the public sector, especially for any organization that wants to provide equal access to everyone, this means that you need a strategy for reaching these devices.
Sharon:
Over the years I’ve watched my wireframes go from scribbles on the back of a napkin to architectural-looking blueprints complete with gradients and icons and detailed pagination mechanisms. And, truth be told, it saddens me. The spirit in which wireframes were intended, way back when we first realized that websites had to be planned out, was to get ideas for content down on paper before we started plodding away at development. They should inform, not dictate, the information architecture, content development, and visual design processes that follow.
Samantha:
At Phase2, open source web development is a big part of our culture and our mindset. The idea of giving back to a community to support the greater good has a lot of potential, and it really energizes me as a designer. Last week the League of Movable Type, a community for Open Source Typography relaunched their website and with it came a lot of talk about giving things away for free, and it got me thinking about the potential of open zource as a concept in mainstream society.
Laura:
"Why use parentheses instead of brackets?" These are the types of basic questions asked by designers learning PHP. Such questions befuddle instructors and annoy developer-types in PHP classes, but making PHP accessible to designers is a huge leap toward advancing Drupal adoption. Drupal instructors are fumbling to create PHP courses that are designer-friendly and don't scare away this huge group of potential Drupal users.
And designers are hungry to learn PHP. While they've been walking down the website creation street with their bag of design, CSS and HTML tricks, their PHP-literate sister is zooming by in her shiny black Cadillac.
Josh:
CSS3 is great fun! It can speed up our work process with simple syntax for creating awesome drop/text shadows, gradients, rounded corners, animations etc. It’s a virtual wonderland for any web developer/designer for easily whip up visual elements that would normally take at least a few sprites, several hours of writing code and countless Advil when trying to get it all to work cross-browser.
Dave:
Last time I looked at a few example of how designing responsively affects some areas of the project process. I wanted to expand on that and actually develop these thoughts into a series that will hopefully cover those parts of the process more in -depth along with some others.
I think Content is a good place to start as it’s a) usually an early part of the process and b) one that will make a substantial impact on your project
Okay, so we’re designing responsively. How does that affect content?
Karen:
We're co-hosting an Apps code sprint at BADCamp and we want you there.
