Snippets

  • Ask DN: How did you learn HTML & CSS?

    Added my quick thoughts to this discussion on Designer News:

    I started out purely as a designer and quickly built my first ever portfolio site in Flash because I didn’t have the time to learn HTML and CSS until I was suddenly made redundant and I had plenty of time to teach myself. I watched all the videos from the Lynda.com course, CSS for Designers by Andy Clarke and Molly E. Holzschlag: http://www.lynda.com/CSS-tutorials/for-designers/216-2.html

    I went from thinking I could never learn to understand CSS to being confident. It covers the basics very well, although it’s now almost 7 years old, so definitely isn’t the best place to learn everything but I still think it’s a great place to start, especially if you don’t know anything at all. Then you can branch out and learn CSS3.

  • Layers App

    Layers is a Mac app which takes a screenshot of your screen, outputting as a PSD with each window and element separated out into layers. Quite impressive.

  • Learning How to Program to Become a Better Designer

    Jonas Downey, of 37signals argues that learning Rails has made him a better designer.

    An interface isn’t just a series of static screens pasted together. It’s a flow, with inputs and outputs. You can’t truly evaluate an interface until you can use it, and you can’t use it until you build it. Anything less than the real thing is a fuzzy approximation.

    It’s fine to bring in a programmer when you’re confident that your idea is worth building, but what if you’re not so sure? Now you’ve used someone else’s time and mental energy to make something that might hit the dumpster. That stinks.

    Funnily enough, I recently started the Ruby course on Codecademy. I’ll let you know how it goes.

  • More CSS Secrets from Lea Verou

    Some interesting bits and pieces here. Some of the presentation seems confusing and unfinished but I assume it’s because Lea was demonstrating effects on the fly directly in the presentation.

  • Seven things still missing from CSS

    Molly Holzschlag finds out what the main frustrations are with CSS. I learnt CSS from the Lynda.com video tutorials from Molly Holzschlag and Andy Clarke, so she knows a thing or two.

    It might just seem to be an annoyance that the “bang” itself represents NOT to many programmers, who first look at !important and think “not important” rather than “really, really, really important” which is what !important actually means, at least in CSS. Not so much a small annoyance when you’re trying to educate a programmer who has held the idea that “!” = “not” in their head for 20 years.

    I get where this is coming from here but CSS isn’t a programming language. It isn’t hard to mentally switch between the two.

    I blame the entire issue on naming. Relative? TO WHAT? Not many of us were clear that meant “an element remaining in the normal flow positioned in relation to a positioned ancestor or the document’s root element.”

    Again, this is just something you learn and once you learn it, you don’t think about it anymore. You just know how it works.

    Fine control remains elusive – kerning, character spacing – controlling these aspects are both difficult to specify for numerous reasons. This is frustrating to designers who love typography and want to have that finer control.

    I can get behind this. I’m surprised there hasn’t been finer typographical control in CSS.

    Just as we can’t choose our ancestors in real life, we can’t select elements from a descendent and travel up the tree in HTML.

    If you haven’t ever wanted this feature, you’re either very new to CSS or you don’t write CSS at all. Apparently it is technically difficult to implement.

  • Quick Responsive Device View

    A neat tool for seeing a site design on multiple devices at a glance. Certainly not a tool for testing responsive designs but still may have some value, even just for the novelty. The link shows Inspect Element in action.

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