Jason Grigsby of CloudFour has posted an interesting (as always) article on the latest trends in mobile first responsive web design and the numbers show the majority of responsive designs provide very little, if any, file size savings for their mobile versions.
Bypass Lane: Skip the concessions line with an app
Bypass Lane is a service that lets you use your phone to order food and then skip the concessions line at ballparks. It’s a great looking app and well designed website too. There’s an HTML5 web app along with native apps for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry. I originally saw it advertised at the Ballpark in Arlington. I didn’t get to try the app at the game (the service isn’t available up in the cheap seats) but it seems like a great idea to avoid long lines at a big game.
Dribbble introduces Browse by Color
Incredible. Pick a color use the color picker, browse pages and pages of shots that use that color. You can even define your own hex value, color variance, and color minimum. Great source of inspiration. Check out the blog post describing how it works.
Using Modern Techniques for Great Web Typography
Great typography use is one of the most important factors in creating beautiful design. Unfortunately, at the same time web typography has been the most limiting and frustrating technology in web design and development for some time. Not too long ago, nearly every creative brief or brand conversation with clients would include the topic of which fonts we could use on their website. The answer would always lead to the depressing answer of choosing between Arial, Verdana, or a half dozen other typically supported fonts. Modern browsers and modern techniques are finally changing that.
There have been many different font replacement techniques over the years but each has had critical limitations that made them only practical for certain uses with certain designs. Image replacement using CSS looks and works great and is great for SEO but it could only be used sparingly because it requires creation of a new image and CSS changes to implement. sIFR was an ingenious workaround using Flash to replace text on the fly with beautifully rendered text, but alas it had many performance and occasional display issues and was difficult to maintain as new browser updates were released.
So, are we just stuck with Georgia headings until the end of time? Thankfully, no…
CSS3 and @font-face to the Rescue.
There are finally new tools at our disposal (and more importantly browsers that actually support them) that are helping create a more beautiful web. Newly supported CSS3 properties and some clever web services give us the ability to easily and securely embed thousands of different fonts that we were never able to use before. And using the @font-face rule these fonts are treated no differently* by the browser from the websafe fonts we’ve been using for so long.
Check out this example using CSS (rendered in your browser):
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
As you can see from the example, there is a lot of power in using regular HTML text and CSS for the typography. And almost all of it works in every modern browser. The cool Lobster font is embedded from Google and then just like any other text we’re able add a link with a hover effect, a CSS3 text-shadow, and a dotted underline with a tooltip to define the word. And of course it’s as easy to change as any other text on the website using a CMS.
Continue reading “Using Modern Techniques for Great Web Typography”
I really, really want a Microsoft Courier tablet/portfolio
Please, please buy this new tablet/portfolio thingy for me for Christmas…
Wow. It’s been a long time since a piece of electronics has excited me this much. And I’m pretty damn nerdy and pretty damn excitable. But the Microsoft Courier, or whatever it’s really called, is beautiful and everything I’ve ever wanted. This thing is perfect for the creative professional or for a student. I really hope they don’t cut corners in order to put this at a more palatable price. I want what is exactly in this video regardless of price. Watch this concept video and be amazed…
How absolutely incredible is this thing? Tons more photos and a little more info on Gizmodo.
Hello world!
New WordPress blog finally installed, old Movable Type version retired.
View the old blog at brianbehrend.com/blog. Stay tuned for more updates via automation of links, photos, videos, twitter, etc.