I really like Dan’s take on using Photoshop (or Fireworks) as part of today’s web design process. The problem is not with the tool; the problem is with the expectations set by showing comps to clients.
By default, presenting a full comp says to your client, “This is how everyone will see your site.” In our multi-device world, we’re quickly moving towards, “This is how some people will see your site,” but we’re not doing a great job of communicating that.
It might seem like an obvious point, but what Tim is talking about here happens over and over again: a technique is dismissed based on bad implementation.
This post is ten years old, but I think it might still be the best attempt to demarcate a difference between web “sites” and web “apps”: think of them as stories and tools.
It’s also remarkably prescient about the need for an effort exactly like HTML5:
A widely-distributed, standards-compliant, browser and platform-independent library of functions that would perform the basic user interface functions for a web-based tool, relying on the server side only for the logic and data sourcing.
This is a very in-depth look at how to become a power user of the Web Inspector in Webkit browsers. I’m sitting down with a nice cup of tea to go through all of this.
This seems like an eminently sensible thing to do when building responsive sites: ditch mock-ups entirely. The reasons and the workflow outlined here make a lot of sense.
Mark has put together this rather excellent prototyping tool. It’s basically the V from an MVC system. You can easily move stuff around, change data …all the good stuff you want to do quickly and easily when you’re prototyping in the browser.
How designing in the browser works for rapid iteration.
Mark talks about the tools web designers use and the tools web designers want. The upshot: use whatever you’re most comfortable with.
Jonathan gives a thorough overview of the various tools and frameworks out there to help build native, hybrid and mobile web apps. He also shares his decision-making process on when to build what.
A handy little tool for quickly generating ratios (like the golden section) from a number.
Nicholas and Nicole have unveiled the CSS companion to JS Lint. And yes, it will your hurt your feelings.
A handy little GUI for generating CSS declarations for shadows, gradients, opacity and border radius.
An excellent design technique from Samantha that allows you to nail down a visual vocabulary without using something as wishy-washy as a mood board or as rigid as a fully-blown comp. Brilliant!
The style tile is not a literal translation of what the website is going to be, but a starting point for the designer and the client to have a conversation and establish a common visual language.
A handy bookmarklet that allows you to examine any piece of text on a website to determine what font it is set in.
A supremely useful tool from Google for measuring performance.
This looks like it could be a handy little tool for creating test cases with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
I like this idea: stencils for common interface elements to be used with good ol' pen and paper.
A cute little tool to help refine colour palettes.
An all-in-one validator from the W3C: markup, CSS and feed validation.
A handy little tool to help you get started with building offline apps by suggesting which files should go in your cache manifest.
A handy tool that generates font-sizing CSS based on a drag'n'drop interface.
Finally! A lint tool for HTML (including HTML5) so you can enforce strictness in your writing style.
A very handy GUI for figuring out the somewhat complicated syntax of border-image in CSS3.
A nice collection of design tools and methodologies.
Some very handy Textmate tips from Emil ....especially the bit about doing calculations for vertical rhythm.
A tool from Google to help you see how your microformated content is showing up.
A very handy tool to help you check the outline algorithm in HTML5.
Kevin Kelly on mankind's love/hate relationship with technology.
A detailed comparison of jQuery and MooTools.
Vint Cerf announces M-Lab: an excellent resource which will allow people to find out if and how their internet access is being throttled. Viva l'internet!
A handy microformats toolkit from Microsoft(!) making it easier for developers to write, style and find microformats (hCard and hCalendar in particular). Neat!
A handy little tool that's beautifully designed. View typeface/style/size combinations and then grab the CSS.
A great little tool for creating favicons.
Tim Lucas is using machine tagging to aggregate Flickr pics from the "I work on the web" meme started by Lisa Herrod.
Crows is smart. And yes, I am using the "Bookmark this..." link at the end of the article.
Christian's wish list for JavaScript libraries.
