A short activity to run early in a project or workshop, focused on sharing fears, anxieties, and uncertainties related to the workshop theme. The purpose is to create openness within a group. The stinky fish is a metaphor for "that thing that you carry around but don’t like to talk about; but the longer you hide it, the stinkier it gets." By putting stinky fish (fears and anxieties) on the table, participants begin to relate to each other, become more comfortable sharing, and identify a clear area for development and learning.

Recently I had some fun implementing an image carousel for Pinafore. The requirements were pretty simple: users should be able to swipe horizontally through up to 4 images, and also pinch-zoom to get a closer look.

In 2014, Jackie Balzer wrote an excellent piece for Smashing Magazine on using Sass to automatically manage the z-index of elements using lists.

I’ve been using this technique since an ex-colleague introduced me to it in early 2015, but the disconnect between maintaining multiple lists was starting to bug me.

So, I’ve come up with a variation which uses Sass maps and lists, and allows me to clearly see the hierarchy of the different elements.

certainlyakey starred davidtheclark/focus-trap

One of the most common use cases for SVG graphics is icon systems, and one of the most commonly-used SVG spriting techniques is one that uses the SVG element to “instantiate” the icons anywhere they are needed in a document. via Pocket

At Alley, we frequently design sites that require any given component to appear in a variety of contexts. A visual style guide allows us to view the site not as a series of pages, but grouping of reusable components. Ultimately, this simplifies and standardizes the way our designs communicate. via Pocket

SVG can be used as an icon system to replace icon fonts. The reasons why SVG makes for a superior icon system are numerous, but we won’t be going over them in this article. via Pocket

Z-index is an inherently tricky thing, and maintaining z-index order in a complex layout is notoriously difficult. With different stacking orders and contexts, keeping track of them as their numbers increase can be hard — and once they start to spread across CSS files, forget about it! Because z-index can make or break a UI element’s visibility and usability, keeping your website’s UI in working order can be a delicate balance.

Typography is an important part of web design nowadays and free services like Google Web Fonts or Adobe’s Typekit make custom fonts on the web a commodity.

Let’s take it slow and start with a core principle of typography, vertical rhythm. Vertical rhythm is about spacing body text or, more generally, vertical stacked elements, in a consistent manner to give structure and hierarchy to your content.

Some use the body text’s line-height as the measuring unit for the vertical rhythm. But using half of this value is a better choice because it can give you more reliability on automatic calculation of line-height for different font sizes using mixins.

Those colorful filters uses css blend modes and were heavily inspired by Spotify new 2015 ads.

This technic is called "DuoTone", and today, with the power of CSS we can play around with some blend-modes properties, to get some cool visual results.

SublimeText is my current text editor of choice. While I use a few others for specific tasks1, if I’m just going to chuck words in a file I’ll probably find myself using Sublime Text. One of the nice things about ST is the extensive plugin framework: a series of python files in a pretty simple file hierarchy makes for a bunch of hackability.

SThe latest sleep research has revealed a good night's rest is more important than we ever thought. Sleep doesn't just reinforce memories and make you feel alert the next day—it flushes…

A look at navigation and global menus in responsive website design. Presented at the Responsive Day Out conference, 1st March, Brighton, UK.

A complete grid system for super fast wireframing and visual design.

Paper prototyping is a commonly used low cost usability method for testing and evaluating web designs and applications. This method lets developers conduct tests before a single line of code has been written, and allows you to identify and fix any potential issues early on in development.In this post we have collected our top 10 videos that not only illustrate how effective paper prototyping can be, they also show you how to cost effectively conduct your own tests and some of the videos have been animated, which are just amazing to view.

Smart Objects are magical containers. They can hold an image, a vector graphic, or a complex set of layers. You can duplicate a Smart Object many times within your file and update the Object once to change all instances. You can apply filters to a Smart Object non-destructively, so you can remove them at any time. You can also transform Smart Objects (scale, rotate, skew, distort, etc etc.) without losing the original image data or quality.

The perceived speed of your website relies heavily on the browser being able to paint to your user's screen. For this they must construct a "render tree" which consists of the DOM and the often forgotten CSSOM.
The critical path which the browser takes to gather this information is the only thing standing between your server and the user's screen. Using new research and real world examples, Patrick Hamann will cover a range of techniques – from the controversial to bleeding edge – the Guardian is using to make their CSS load as fast as possible, and ultimately keeping it off the critical path.

Виджет jQuery UI для автодополнения адреса при вводе.

The main principle with Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is the use of Classes (Functions in JavaScript) to create objects, and that objects are implemented in a manner that allows them to adopt Inheritance, Polymorphism, and Encapsulation. We are only concerned with Inheritance and Encapsulation, since only these are applicable for OOP in JavaScript. Essentially, objects can encapsulate functionalities and inherit methods and properties.

If you can identify and complete (eat) your most important task (the frog) each day, it will have a great impact on your life and make you more productive. This is the key concept behind Brian Tracy's time management technique, Eat That Frog!, and Toodledo is a great tool to help you accomplish this.