Things I love: Clean, organized, performant code Collaboration across teams Creating usable interfaces CSS With those passions in mind, I’ve been enjoying crafting our CSS design system as the UI Architect for URBN the last two years (babies and broken bones have made this blog post is past due). For us, CSS is not just an afterthought for adding pretty colors; it’s the perfect collaboration tool…
How to ensure your fallback font is not replacing your primary typeface Some engineers pride themselves on having a “designer’s eye.” They can spot if vertical alignment is off or if line-height isn’t set appropriately for the text size. Other times, we could use some help knowing for sure if a UI element is appearing as the designer call far. One challenge is knowing if the web font you are…
We’ve all heard it: “sitting is killing us”, “screens will keep you awake at night”, “desks are bad for your health”, “computers will give your robot eyes”, etc, etc. Yet for many of us, our jobs are at a computer and at a desk and until we can code from the beach while doing an inverted pose or with a laptop hammock stand, what are we to do?…
Links and talking points from my talk: “Interactions in Responsive Web” Why add interactions to our web pages? Illustrate a change on the page Let users know something has changed Make changes less jarring Allow other changes to happen in the background Appear current Use of new technology lets users know you are up-to-date Add entertainment Surprise and delight Value in fun factor Should you add…
Here is a collection of useful links for designers and developers from my presentation The Developer’s Ampersandwich . Articles/Examples Where to find info on Web Font Trends (Jenn Lukas/A List Apart Blog) Disabling Typekit (Jenn Lukas/The Nerdary) Testing the loading of fonts with screen size media queries (Dave Rupert/CodePen) Multiple Kits for Mobile Device Fallback Fonts (Jordan…
I wrote a post about a formula to use for calculating a speaker fee if you are looking to charge one. There’s been great, open dialogue surrounding this topic lately. This is awesome as money is always a tough subject to discuss. I’ve enjoyed reading different responses and takes on the subject. This is always going to boil down to what you feel comfortable with. Web designers, plumbers, singers,…
I was on a panel about public speaking recently and the topic of getting paid to speak came up. My answer: I do charge a speaking fee for most conferences I speak at. Ideally every person (full time, self employed) will be paid for speaking, but now that I’m a freelancer, it is imperative for me. When I speak at a conference, I am committing to spending time away from traditional client work to…
I’ve had the pleasure of teaching Intro to HTML/CSS for Girl Develop It here in Philly since our inaugural class! Sharing my knowledge of front-end code with women who want to learn it has been incredibly rewarding and one of my favorite things to do! GDI has chapters throughout the world and I’ve been asked a few times to share advice to first-time teachers about to head up a class.…
Edit: Typekit has posted some more info in response on their fantastic blog: http://blog.typekit.com/2014/02/20/using-typekit-web-fonts-on-mobile/ I’m putting some finishing touches on a talk coming up and I was looking into some details when including different web font options on our sites. I use Typekit a lot. I love it. I never really paid too much attention to the Kit settings > Mobile…
I occasionally receive questions through the Nerdary or over at my site about web topics. Often someone else has that same question, so thought I’d share some here. Here’s a question I received about getting started with responsive web design: I built my website portfolio BUT! I need some resources for helping me make it responsive. Any hints or sites for help with this would be much…
Since heading into the freelance word, I’ve been experimenting with new applications and workflows. One of the first solutions I needed was for time tracking. I’ve used Harvest before and liked it, but in this “experimental” phase, I decided to look into a free option or five to see what the competition is like before I commit. Free vs Paid Apps Here’s the thing about…
So you know I love hovers . I was recently trying to implement a hover that has the image as the link, and on hover the text of the link appears. The information that is hidden and shown on hover is vital to understanding what the link is and where it goes. Something that without knowing, a user might never want to click on the link. This hover/focus interaction works perfectly fine for keyboard…
I’m manually moving my EE posts on jennlukas.com over to Tumblr. True story: I once went from MySpace blogs to EE! I’ll miss EE and it worked well for my site for a long time but I plan on having more of a static site and then linking off to Tumblr/my blog since I love tumblr so much. I often get asked how many Tumblrs I have. I’ll say more than 10, less than 30. With my most…
Great news! Laravel 4 is out! Mini-review Laravel 4 is a different kind of framework than its predecessor, and that comes with its own pluses and minuses. The documentation isn’t fully fleshed out (for example, try finding the URL class in the documentation easily) and the learning curve is much steeper to understand the system. Yet, Laravel 4 is a very fast framework with some very smart…
Testing Laravel Controllers : Jeffrey Way is such a prolific writer on the topic of Laravel. I particularly enjoy this excellent article on writing tests for controllers. You should support Jeffrey by signing up for tutsplus and soaking in all his knowledge. You can also pre-order his book on testing. He’s an excellent instructor.
Laracasts : You know what’s great? Laravel . You know why? Because people throw together stuff like Laracasts, a central place for Laravel screencasts. They don’t make the screencasts there, they just find them so you can click and learn. Lovely.
Craft has recently gone into beta and it’s definitely worth a look. Here, we interview one of its creators, Brandon Kelly on the philosophy behind Craft and its technical aspects. Why does the world need another CMS? Let’s face it: all of the popular CMS’s out there today are a mess. They’ve been mismanaged, taken in directions the code was never meant to go, warped to…
Laravel 4 Update : Taylor Otwell runs through a bunch of new features he’s added to Laravel 4. I highly recommend you watch this screencast as it shows a lot of cool new toys.
I read the A List Apart article: Hack your Maps . It was an interesting scenario that got me thinking about maps. I’ve really only used Google maps for my mapping needs so today I figured “why not try something new?” and looked into some others. I needed an interactive map, not a static image, so that was one requirement. I looked into a variety of options out there, also read…
Craft CMS Sample Plugin : Created by the very talented Adrian Macneil , and based on a lot of the samples in the documentation, the Craft sample plugin is a great way to get a look at how Craft plugins are built. It also is an excellent preview of the Craft API. If you see anything you don’t like make sure to tell the Craft team on their community page .* Yes, their community page is on Google…