If web design is art and art is interpretive, can there be such a thing as design etiquette? While it’s true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there are certain standards and conventions to follow when dealing with design, otherwise you may face a lot of difficulty with people accepting or understanding your work.
For my latest project, I created a great interface for an administration panel, complete with great looking forms and buttons. The one thing that stuck out like a sore thumb, however, were the ugly radio buttons and checkboxes I had to use repeatedly throughout the panel, so I decided to fix them.
Just came across this on HN and it looks incredibly exciting – a feature in the upcoming version of Photoshop that allows you to fill spaces seamlessly and intelligently. The video highlights using it for removing unwanted artifacts (instead of using the spot healing tool) and patching large chunks of an image.
Earlier today the JQuery UI team announced the final release of JQuery UI 1.8. In case you’re not familiar with JQuery UI, it is an extension of the JQuery library that provides “abstractions for low-level interaction and animation, advanced effects and high-level, themeable widgets, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, that you can use to build highly interactive web applications.”
There’s a huge debate stirring around the internet about the capabilities of HTML5 and it’s threat to Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and other rich internet application (RIA) technologies. The amount of support behind HTML5 is encouraging and great to see, as it will only help it’s adoption by both browsers and users, however it is important to understand it’s capabilities and limitations. As the hype builds up, so does the flash-bashing around forums and blogs – something that needs to change.
When you’re starting a new business or launching a new website, building up traffic is one of the biggest hurdles you’ll run into. It’s especially difficult if you’re on a shoestring budget, but before you spend all of your hard earned money, make sure you’ve tried the following:
A new and exciting opportunity was announced today and it’s certainly worth sharing. Google has unveiled a new marketplace for Google Apps, appropriately named (you guessed it) the Google Apps Marketplace. There are more than 2 million businesses with over 25 million users currently using Google Apps, many of whom are willing to spend money for a useful app, as they’re already paying Google for using the base service.
While playing around with JQuery UI’s slider widgets, I decided to throw together a quick freelance project estimator. This is not based on science or statistics, so use it with your own judgement. The ‘Client Information’ bits shouldn’t be taken too seriously either, I added that in to emphasize that the type of client can often dictate quotes too. By the way, I apologize but the first two sliders can be a little fidgety, likely the result of my poor scripting.
DevGrow is a journal on web design, development and usability written by Monji Dolon.
