Inspect Element

Web Design & Development Blog

Bundle Hunt from Noura Yehia

August 11th, 2010 — No Comments

The founder of Noupe, Noura Yehia, has launched the web design equivalent of the excellent MacHeist. $49 for a selection of apps, WordPress templates, icons, ebooks, photos amongst other goodies. Worth it for Smashing Magazine’s eBook and Icon Dock’s Moi Vector Set of icons alone. The rest can be considered a bonus and a very good one at that.

Photoshop and Designing in the Browser

July 30th, 2010 — No Comments

Smashing Magazine has posted an article by Thomas Giannattasio who argues that Photoshop should not be dropped and forgotten about in favour of designing in the browser. Here are a few interesting points:

Experimentation is the key to creativity. Without it, the brain simply follows what it regards as the safest route, and the result is as mundane as the thought behind it.

Every designer experiments. Why does designing in the browser prevent that? If anything it makes it quicker and easier through the use of CSS and the lack of an equivalent in Photoshop. Designing in the browser is just using another tool which you can certainly still experiment with.

Designing with mark-up, however, creates a disconnect with the medium. Ideas no longer flow fluidly onto the screen. They must first be translated into a language that the computer understands.

Again, it’s just an alternative tool to Photoshop. How can it create a disconnect with the medium if you are designing directly in the environment of the medium?

Any tool that is meant to translate visual elements from canvas to code will inevitably fail in the semantic realm.

I agree. Auto-generated code is almost always never pretty.

I certainly don’t think designers should bin Photoshop but rather evaluate how it can be used in conjunction with the process of designing in the browser. The two can work together in harmony.

Essential Criteria for a Real Web Design Application

July 27th, 2010 — No Comments

Type rendering seems to be Jason Santa Maria’s main complaint with current software used for web design and many would agree, myself included.

I would also like to add to his list of a what a web design app should consist of is an accurate (and easy) way to reproduce CSS effects such as the many different types of border styles. Basically we’re in agreement that CSS should play a more integral role earlier on in the design stage.

So why not build a desktop app for web design around WebKit? I’m not talking about an in-browser AJAX toolkit for dragging elements around and changing fonts, but an actual desktop application built with WebKit as the core to its display.

It’s clear whoever creates a piece of software blending both a graphics editor with the concept of designing in a browser (with WebKit) could have a very bright future. Who knows, Adobe could do it. Stranger things have happened.

Let me know what you thing by sending me an @tkenny reply on Twitter.

Trust Your Designers, They Know What They're Doing

July 21st, 2010 — Comments Off

Having worked as an in-house designer for a major travel company, I know the pain of having to deal with upper management trying to take things into their own hands.

I always find it interesting when a client hires a designer because of their expertise but then decides to nitpick every decision they make. I can assure you that professional designers have got your best interest in mind. They know what they’re doing and they all want to create something truly incredible for you.

The exact same thing happened to me on a daily basis and no matter what I said or how I tried to reason with them, they were always ‘right’. One of the main mistakes clients makes is to forget to look at their site from their customers’ point of view. If they would only do that then maybe they could become more trusting of the work we do, the experience we have and our expertise.

I think we need to educate out clients to think more like a user and less like most of them do know. What do you think? Let me know on Twitter @tkenny.

HTML and CSS Layers in Photoshop?!

July 20th, 2010 — No Comments

Hands up if you’re a web designer who uses Photoshop and ever thought that this might be a possibility? Yeah, me neither. John Nack, the Principal Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop, has put forward an idea of Photoshop gaining the ability to include actual rendered HTML and CSS (via WebKit) elements within a .psd file. The main reason why I think this could be a great idea and has a lot of potential is we’ll finally be able to render elements and text as they will be seen in the browser.

On the other hand however, you will need to create the elements with HTML and CSS in the first place before using them in Photoshop so why not just design in the browser? This could be useful but if you’re going to create something in HTML and CSS so it can render as it would in a browser will you not have to create everything within HTML and CSS due to the vast differences between the way Photoshop renders elements (especially text) differently?

I’m interested what you think of this idea. Personally I think it’s great to see Adobe reaching out to web designers which isn’t something they traditionally do or have ever done as far as I know. I don’t think they’ve paid paid us much notice judging from the last few updates of Photoshop so it’s certainly encouraging. Send me an @tkenny reply on Twitter with your thoughts.

Textarea Auto-Resize Plugin for jQuery

July 19th, 2010 — No Comments

I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. Avoids the annoying problem of typing too much text and not being able to see all you’ve typed without having to scroll in a small box. It’s also smart enough to resize down when you delete text that has caused it to grow. I may even install it as a local browser script and apply it too ALL textarea fields I come across if only for my own sanity.