I got stoked on Typography and you can too (if you're at SXSW)

A few days ago, I sat in on a presentation on Typography from one of our designers, Samantha Warren. It was a run through of the talk she is giving today at SXSW. To be truthful, I wasn't that interested in typography before, but the talk really inspired me to rethink type everywhere I see it - from liquor bottles to cars to posters in the Metro.

Phase2 Drupalcon 2010 Proposed Session Topics

Session voting for Drupalcon 2010 in San Francisco started today and I am very proud of the great entries that our team at Phase2 has prepared for the conference. In total our team proposed 13 sessions that cover 5 of the 6 categories and run the complete range from business topics to graphic design, architecture and code development. We would love your vote and chance to share what we have learned this past year.

CSS Specificity Scoring

Most folks realize what the "cascading" part of Cascading Style Sheets means for styling Web pages. However, some of the inner workings of CSS specificity are lost on many of them. Especially when it comes to those maddening CSS selectors that should be taking effect, but aren't.

What Does the Open Government Directive Look Like?

On the first anniversary of the President's inauguration, I wanted to share some thoughts about the historic Open Government Initiative and discuss the implementation details of last month's Open Government Directive. Since we are developers, we wanted to do more than talk and write about what open government is, we are interested in how it actually looks and works to a user on the web. So we prepared some mock-ups for this purpose and shared it around town. This mock-up demonstrates both our concept for the user interface and content of a great /open site, but also prototypes what a simple approach to open government data and communications could be through a templated installation of Drupal we would like to build if some agency wants one?

New Year's Resolutions for Designers

New Year's resolutions can sometimes be a little tough, especially in an industry that moves so quickly you pretty much need to make resolutions for every month of the calendar year. Looking for some ideas? Here are some suggestions, including some of my own goals for the year.

Thank you, Virginia.gov, for a Better User Experience

State government websites have the enormous challenge of presenting a unified presence on the web while also giving autonomy to the hundreds of organization sites within them - and on a limited budget.

My 5 Essential Web Design Tools & Apps

When designing websites there are a few online tools that I regularly utilize. Thinking back on my growth as a designer, its hard to imagine what it was like before these tools were lurking in my web design toolkit. From typography and color to layout and design patterns, these tools help me cut down on time during the design process.

Firefox 3.5 released, and the townfolk rejoiced!

Today, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5. And, while there is an outdated plug in with the same name, maybe it should have been called "Faster"fox 3.5.

Create Headlines With Cufon

For years, web designers have been faced with two choices when creating a text-element on a page: 1) Stick with web fonts: Arial, Tahoma, Georgia, et al, and use HTML text, or 2) Use text as images.

The incredible shrinking main navigation

Recently someone mentioned to me the main navigation on cnn.com. I've read that site every day for about 6 years, but I couldn't tell you what even one of the main navigation items was. Lorem? Ipsum? No idea. What's interesting about this to me is that it was never a conscious decision on my part. I never realized that I never used it - I just didn't because, apparently, I didn't need it.

Now that I'm paying more attention, I'm noticing all kinds of creative ways that online publishing sites are de-emphasizing main navigation in favor of robust and well-designed homepages, user-driven navigation, and tag linking techniques. In this blog entry I share a few of these different techniques.