Team Collaboration for Building with Open Source Code

Working together with other developers is the quickest and most efficient way to master backend programming. The art of developing websites in PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python, or any other language will take time and lots of practice. But studying with open source code provides the benefits of understanding common structures for setting templates, frameworks, databases, and other features. In this article I want to share tools and ideas for…

Streamlining The Front-End Development Process With The Gumby Framework

Last month Digital Surgeons launched the latest version of their responsive front-end framework, Gumby. Gumby 2 is a complete re-imagination of its version 1 counterpart. It adds a ton of new features and has been rewritten in Sass to allow for easier customization and maintainability. Many of it’s new features are incredibly helpful in streamlining the front-end development process.

Websites That Inspired a Generation

The period at the end of the last millenium was a heady mix of political change, economic optimism and for those working in the digital industries the phonemenon that was the dot.com boom and subsequent bust. I was very lucky to land my first job as a web designer during this time – armed with a working if basic knowledge of the Adobe and Macromedia suites as well as HTML…

Designing for Drupal

In a perfect world, it wouldn’t matter to a designer what content management system a site uses. But for most of us, projects are actually a combination of design and site building. It’s with this last bit that things get tricky. Each content management system that we work with requires a significant investment of time to gain the expertise required to make our projects successful. The preferred CMS among designers…

Exploration of Single Page/One-Pager Navigation Systems

The navigation of most books is linear. You start at the beginning and flip pages until you reach the end. Perhaps reference books are slightly different, and (for those born in the 1980s) Choose Your Own Adventure books had a unique navigation that led the reader to choose their navigation based on the situation described in the book. I’m at a loss as to whether a book has been written…

Storytelling For Freelancers

Several years ago, I worked as an in-house copywriter and designer for a prominent marketing firm. When I first applied for the job I didn’t have any of the credentials my employers were looking for, and yet I got the job anyway, out of a pool of more qualified competitors. Why did I get chosen? The boss liked my story. I had no experience with working at a firm, nor…

Write less, do more: CSS Style

I recently had the good fortune of being put on an exciting project involving a large not-for-profit agency with operations spanning right around the globe. My role was frontend development and the client was well versed with !YSlow analytics so the name of the game here was speed with a capital ‘S’. Trouble in Paradise Midway thru the project, I began to realize that an increasing amount of my time…

The Dark Side of User Experience Design

User Experience Design became a huge trend in the Interactive Industry. Working as a UX designer, UX manager and finally creating UXPin – The UX Design Online App – I soaked up the design field. Even so, this UX revolution came to me as a surprise. Time for UX Design “Design and marketing aren’t just as important as engineering: they are way more important” says Dave McClure, founder of 500…

The Flat Design Aesthetic: A Discussion

A growing trend in web and UI design lately has been the use of “flat design” and it’s clearly a hot topic at the moment – full of lively discussion and plenty to learn about. I’ve always been drawn to minimalism, so flat design is an aesthetic that has inspired me, especially while working on the recent redesign of QuoteRobot, the proposal writing app I co-founded back in 2010. In…

User-Centric Website Design

Website design is a complex process. When I say “complex”, I’m not simply refering to the design and development part. Overall, the thought process and the decision taking stages are complex as well. Thus, right from inception to implementation, getting a website up and running is no piece of cake, especially if you are the type of designer or developer who likes to put his or her heart and soul…

Dynamic Open Source JavaScript Libraries for Web Projects

The open source movement has created a sea of new code libraries to work with. You can’t search through Google without finding a heap of new open source projects based on PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Python, really any popular language. In this guide I would like to focus on some popular JavaScript libraries used in front end web development. Each project you create will have a different need for dynamic effects….

Type Scan Alphabet: Amazing Creativity Using Scalpel and Paper

Creativity knows no limits. No matter what your medium of expression is — paper, glass or the digital screen — if you are creative, your talent will be visible in every aspect of your work. Alphabets, typography, design and art — ah right, you know where I’m going, don’t you? These four words have already suggested you that this probably is just another showcase about some fonts or some typographical…

The Speckyboy iOS App has arrived!

In this era of mobility, not everyone has the luxury of being in front of a huge desktop screen all the time. Owing to this very reason, we have seen the evolution of mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, etc. So, how do you check your favorite design blog (popularly known as Speckyboy; you already know that, don’t you) when you’re on the move? Have no fear! Because our iOS…

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