вторник, 29 мая 2012 г.

Smashing Newsletter #60: Freebies - CSS3 - Mobile - Email - CV - Slides

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The Smashing Email Newsletter

Issue #60 | Tuesday, May 29th 2012 | 107,402 subscribers | Previous issues

Dear Friends,

Here at Smashing Magazine, we embrace innovation and experimentation in every sense—be it in design, layout or content. We invite you to the Smashing Daily—a new series on Smashing Magazine in which our dear colleague Vasilis van Gemert highlights the most recent Web design gems to help you stay on the top of what's going on in the Web industry. You'll find the link to the latest editions of the Smashing Daily in the sidebar of Smashing Magazine. As always, please feel free to provide us with feedback (#smashingdaily on Twitter) and share your thoughts with us!

Editorial

As many of you already know, we've been busy bees organizing the upcoming Smashing Conference—a friendly, valuable and inspiring community event we hope you won't miss out on! The conference will be taking place in our home town Freiburg, Germany, on September 17th-19th 2012. There are only a limited amount of tickets left, so get your ticket as soon as possible! We'd be honored to meet you there!

On a sidenote, we wanted to mention how sincerely grateful we are to everybody who has purchased our new Smashing Books, as well as to those who have posted photos on Twitter or Facebook, or have written a review of the book(s). Your opinion is very important to us, and if you like the books, please spread the word to your friends and colleagues. Your support means the world to us!

— The Smashing Team

Table of Contents

01. Create The Illusion Of Stacked Elements With CSS3
02. Inspiration For Mobile Aficionados
03. WorkFu: Social Job Board For The Network Age
04. Should I Check My Emails?
05. Creating Beautiful Résumés On The Fly
06. Because Everybody Loves Freebies!
07. A Hotline For All Your JavaScript Problems
08. Flow: Figure Out Where Your Users Go And When They Leave
09. Beautiful Slide Decks On Note & Point
10. Smashing Highlights (From Archives)
11. New On Smashing Job Board
12. Recent Articles on Smashing Magazine


1. Create The Illusion Of Stacked Elements With CSS3

Many of the visual effects that we used to carefully design in Photoshop, Fireworks or Illustrator only to later slice them and embed into our websites with nasty CSS hacks aren't needed any longer these days. The advent of CSS3 leaves it to creative designers and developers to come up with smart CSS techniques to produce more flexible and responsive visual effects using simple CSS. Tom Kenny's Stacked Elements technique with CSS is a wonderful example of that.

Create The Illusion Of Stacked Elements With CSS3

Tom Kenny used :before and :after pseudo-elements to produce a simple "stacked" look for images. The simple illusion is generated using a couple of images hidden underneath the one you can see. Rotate the :before and :after elements a bit with CSS transforms, and you've got the result you wanted to achieve! It's important to note that currently only Firefox supports transitions on :before and :after, so if you'd like to integrate some fancy transitions, you'll need to play around with jQuery or CSS hacks. (vf)


2. Inspiration For Mobile Aficionados

You spend a lot of time on the Web using your phone? Then you may have noticed how much more restrictive and challenging design for mobile actually is. If you are developing mobile apps for Android or iOS quite often, you might want to bookmark Meerl.li—where exceptional mobile designers connect, show off their designs and promote themselves. In fact, the website is a great place to browse if you'd like to see how good-looking mobile apps can be.

Inspiration For Mobile Aficionados

You can leave feedback, find ideas or just catch up with the current developments in mobile development. Admittedly, not all the designs are exceptional, but you still might find quite a few beautiful gems in there. (jc)


3. WorkFu: Social Job Board For The Network Age

You've just graduated from university, or just quit your old job, or even consider quitting your present one. Unless you're highly talented, employers won't necessarily line up at your door to offer you a highly payed, fascinating job or career. Most of us have to hit the many job boards, put on ties and go through a grueling gauntlet of job interviews. WorkFu could be an interesting addition to those conventional job websites.

WorkFu: Social Job Board For The Network Age

The interesting thing with this job website is that it doesn't just present you with a list of jobs you might be suited for. Because you join up using your Twitter account, it also rates the job opportunities according to the connections you have to the potential employers or employees. This sets WorkFu apart from other websites—they acknowledge the importance of networking. So whether you're looking for the best possible fit (as an employee or as an employer), or just want a place people can find you (should something really exciting come up), this might be the happening place to provide a profile. (jc)


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4. Should I Check My Emails?

The ubiquitous connection to the Web through diverse devices—computers, tablets, smartphones, or even TVs—makes it irresistible to look up your emails every now and again. But have you noticed an increase in the frequency you look at your inbox lately? If the answer to that question is "yes", then we have a solution for you.

Should I Check My Emails?

To check or not to check: that is the question behind the email flowchart by Wendy Macnaughton. In a very well-humored way, it helps you decide how urgent a peek into your inbox is depending on the situation you are in. Reading between the lines will show you (literally) that most of the time constant checking is unnecessary. Think twice before opening your email client next time! (tts)


5. Creating Beautiful Résumés On The Fly

You have an impressive career and remarkable experience behind you, yet a generic MS Word template doesn't quite reflect the professionalism that you'd like your CV to reflect? You deserve something better than that! In fact, this is where Resumonk might be just the tool that you are looking for.

Creating Beautiful Résumés On The Fly

With this tool, you can fill in your details, choose one of the templates and save it as a PDF. The free version includes a couple of nice templates that you can use right away, while the pro version allows you to import your LinkedIn profile and get access to more resume templates. You might want to look into alternative tools such as JobSpice or LinkedIn Résumé Builder. And if you're looking for more resume ideas, check out our article on CVs as well as CVParade.com. (vf)


6. Because Everybody Loves Freebies!

Quality freebies are always difficult to find, yet once you have found them, they are always a valuable tool in your design arsenal. PixEden is a community that provides all kinds of beautifully crafted freebies. You will find print-ready resources such as logo sets, business cards and flyers, as well as Web design templates, icons, vectors and graphics. Register to download exclusive freebies or ask for a specific resource.

Because Everybody Loves Freebies!

Another resource with a large number of freebies is Creative Market: Free Goods. This section features a hand-picked selection of goodies that were submitted to Creative Market, a platform which gives designers an opportunity to promote and sell their work. You can find even more freebies on Orman Clark's PremiumPixels as well. The resources are growing, so if you're looking for freebies, make sure to visit them from time to time! (ml)


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7. A Hotline For All Your JavaScript Problems

Do you feel like giving up? Nothing makes sense anymore? Your problems seem insurmountable? Wouldn't it be great if you could talk to someone who cares and knows your woes? Why don't you give the friendly, supporting folk at JS Hotline a call when your JavaScript wisdom is at an end?

A Hotline For All Your JavaScript Problems

Garann Means created JS Hotline as a helpline for people who are stuck with a JavaScript problem. This call-service powered by Pocket Hotline promises professional help to people who need advice concerning JavaScript. They'll talk you off the ledge when you just can't make it work. And it won't cost you anything but a smile. (jc)


8. Flow: Figure Out Where Your Users Go And When They Leave

You might have used at least a couple of tools that help you visualize traffic activities on your website. Do you really need a new one? Well, maybe. Flow is a free analytics tool that uses flowcharts to show all the visitors of a certain webpage, and which pages they clicked to when they left this page. Clicking on the subsequent pages will bring up a new chart and new information. This will allow you to track every step users take through your website.

Flow: Figure Out Where Your Users Go And When They Leave

Like Google analytics, the tool only requires a single line of JavaScript code to be installed. The advantage of the tool over some other products is the real-time display of data. You can monitor conversion and drop-off rates and dive deep into user paths. The interface of the tool helps you quickly follow the paths your users take and better understand their flow as well as when they leave. Perhaps it's a good additional analytics tool for your website, after all?! (ml)


9. Beautiful Slide Decks On Note & Point

Imagine this situation: you have an opportunity to develop a design project and have to prepare a proposal. There are so many ideas for the content of the proposal, but how do you present them properly? Should you invest time for developing an extra design just for this presentation? Well, Note and Point can help you find the starting point you need.

Beautiful Slide Decks On Note & Point

On their site, Dave Ruiz and Christian curate beautiful presentations from Keynote, PowerPoint and SlideRocket, and provide a PDF deck for each presentation. You can reach for reference anytime, or if you have a beautiful presentation that you made yourself, just submit it and enrich the collection with your design! (tts)


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10. Smashing Highlights (From Archives)

  • Turning Small Projects Into Big Profit: A Case Study
    We were struggling to find work. It became clear to us that we needed to take a serious look at our business practices, our development and design processes, and ourselves. We needed to find a way to make money. Let's take a few minutes to discuss how we overhauled our operations and started making a living off of small projects.

  • The Lost Art Of Design Etiquette With Photoshop
    We work with a ridiculously large number of things, and how we organize them (or choose not to) is often left to personal preference. But our messy habits result in confusion for the designer or developer who inherits your work. Does it really need to be this way?

  • Web Design Questionnaires, Project Sheets and Work Sheets
    Here we've collected questionnaires and worksheets used by actual Web design companies, including some of the leaders in the industry. Both online and downloadable forms are included, as well as the pros and cons for each format.


11. New On Smashing Job Board

    Here are the job openings published recently at our very own Smashing Job Board:

  • Web, iOS, Ops Engineers at FiftyThree, creators of Paper for iPad (New York, NY)
    Over the years we noticed that software that's designed to help us be creative actually made us less creative. Ideas aren't born in slide decks, documents, or image editors. They begin freeform. On paper. In conversations. As sketches. We founded FiftyThree to build tools that work the way we do. Tools for the creative space—the 53 centimeters that magically link head, heart, and hand. Tools as simple as pencil and paper. Tools so essential, we really can't imagine working without them.

  • User Experience Architect at Garrigan Lyman Group (Seattle, Washington)
    Garrigan Lyman is a no-doors-and-walls digital creative agency. Designers, developers, writers, strategists, and account teams working side-by-side to create something unique and remarkable, infused by a two-decade heritage of digital agency leadership. It starts with a high bar; to lift every brand, be it Fortune or Future 500, through the art of beautiful disruption. We get there by a strategic process we call WHAT, IF, WOW; discovering the essence of what is and reimagining what could be.

  • Front-End Developer 80-100% at Cargo Media AG (Basel, Switzerland)
    The Cargo Media AG has its offices in the very heart of Kleinbasel, no more than 100m away from the river Rhein. Our team consists of six members, who have been developing a Web framework over the past 3 years. We create leading Web applications that serve and handle more than 50 million pageviews a month.


12. Recent Articles on Smashing Magazine


Thank You For Reading!

Yours sincerely,
The Smashing Family

Join our community: follow us on Twitter and join us on Facebook

The authors are: (vf), Jan Constantin (jc), Talita Telma Stöckle (tts), Melanie Lang (ml), Iris Lješnjanin (il), Vitaly Friedman (vf), Sven Lennartz (sl), Christiane Rosenberger (research), Elja Friedman (tools), John von Bergen (proofreading).

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пятница, 25 мая 2012 г.

We invite you to the first Smashing Conference!

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Dear Friends,

In September this year, we are delighted to invite you to come together for the very first Smashing Conference — a friendly, valuable and unique community event for Web designers and developers.

Located on the outskirts of the beautiful Black Forest, in the shadow of the legendary Historical Merchants Hall built between 1520 and 1530, we've put a lot of effort into organizing a truly smashing conference experience for you. We'd be honored to meet you at a very personal and inspiring community event that will help us all become better at what we do!

17–19th September 2012 in Freiburg, Germany

We will host a two-day single-track conference and four workshops. It will take place in our beautiful home town Freiburg, Germany, at the legendary Historical Merchants Hall at the foot of the Black Forest. We've thoroughly handpicked all of the speakers to ensure the high quality of the event. More details about the conference, speakers, talks and workshops are available on the Smashing Conference website.


The legendary Historical Merchants Hall, a late-Gothic building built between 1520 and 1530. A unique location for the very first Smashing Conference.

Speakers and Workshops

Aarron Walter The Real Me (+ Workshop)
Andy Clarke (Workshop)
Chris Heilmann TBA
Jeremy Keith The Spirit of the Web
Jonathan Snook Your CSS Is a Mess (+ Workshop)
Josh Brewer Responsive Is as Responsive Does
Lea Verou TBA
Paul Boag Better Websites and Happier Clients
Rachel Andrew The Future of Content Management
Stephen Hay TBA
Tim Ahrens Web Fonts: Backstage and On Stage

So far, 10 out of 15 speakers have been officially confirmed. Please note that the topics presented here are subject to change. The conference will cover a wide variety of Web design topics, such as visual design, front- and back-end development, UX design, mobile, responsive design, the business aspects of running a website as well as the intricate details of the designer and developer's workflows. We're encouraging our dear speakers to share details on how they work, what tools they use, and what their design and coding process looks like.

The venue of the first Smashing Conference
The main hall of the venue. Only 350 tickets are available for the event.

Get Your Ticket!

All tickets include two full single-track conference days — on Monday and Tuesday. Only 350 seats are available. The first 70 early-bird tickets are available for €249. Once the tickets are gone, the regular price will be €349. All prices already include the German VAT of 19% and booking fees. We'd love to meet you in September! Grab your ticket now before it's too late!

Get your ticket!

We’re very excited about the Smashing Conference, and we’ll do our best to make it a valuable and memorable event. We can’t wait to meet you, and please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about accommodation, participation or sponsorship.

Have a truly smashing weekend,
The Smashing Team


Join our community: follow us on Twitter and join us on Facebook

вторник, 15 мая 2012 г.

Smashing Newsletter #59: Type - Gmail - Dropbox - Coffee - 3D Google Maps

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The Smashing Email Newsletter

Issue #59 | Tuesday, May 15th 2012 | 106,577 subscribers | Previous issues

Dear Friends,

After seven months of production time on our new Smashing Book #3, we've finally received our very first copy. At the same time, thousands of copies were sent out worldwide to the diverse Web design community. Since then, numerous reviews, tweets and photos have been submitted by our readers across the world who have already received their brand new Smashing books. The photo below by Olivier Bertil is just one of them.

Smashing Book #3 Photo

We are very excited and proud of the brand new Smashing Book #3, and we sincerely hope that you'll find it useful and valuable. Feel free to buy a printed or eBook version if you haven't already. Publish your feedback, reviews and/or photos, and share them with your friends using the hashtag #smbook3 on Twitter. Be honest and be critical—we want to know what you really think!

Yours sincerely,
The Smashing Team

Table of Contents

01. Art In My Coffee
02. Which Type Of Type Do You Like?
03. Beer Equals Creativity
04. QArt Codes: Putting Pictures In The QR Codes
05. Gmail Backup And Restoration At Will
06. Decorated Playlists
07. Privacy For All Concerned
08. Organize Your Dropbox With Filters
09. Cube: Fun With 3D Google Maps Maze
10. Smashing Highlights (From Archives)
11. New On Smashing Job Board
12. Recent Articles on Smashing Magazine


1. Art In My Coffee

Coffee is the world's most consumed beverage, and we bet this is reality for you, too. Just picture your meetings, breaks, brainstormings, or the long nights working, and you'll find a cup of coffee in the scenario. Indeed, coffee can be very inspiring—it accelerates the brain activity, can help prevent some diseases, and plays a social role of binging people together.

Art In My Coffee

Jina Bolton and Megan Fisher saw the artistic side of this beverage and created the Tumblr blog Art In My Coffee, which gathers photographs from beautifully prepared cups of coffee. You'll see faces, hearts, teddy bears, flowers and many other decorative foam shapes. It's amazing to see how people's creativity can be applied in such a specific area. (tts)


2. Which Type Of Type Do You Like?

You're looking for a new typeface. Sure, there are plenty to choose from through the various font delivery services like TypeKit or Fontdeck. But which ones to choose? How to combine those typefaces meaningfully? Content is type, and without properly set type, communication can be weak, ineffective and even counter-productive. To get some inspiration for your typography you might want to take a look at some interesting examples and samples from Daniel Eden's Just My Type.

Which Type Of Type Do You Like?

Some of the typeface combinations aren't necessarily revolutionary, but Eden delivers a nice, visually pleasing collection, nevertheless. And some of the fonts are even free. Whether you're looking for a new font to please a client, or just to play around with, you won't waste your time visiting Dan's website, either way. And if you are looking for a more thorough article on combining type, make sure to check Four Techniques for Combining Typefaces as well. (jc)


3. Beer Equals Creativity

Don't you wish you could be creative every day for a whole year? Finding daily inspiration daily does sound odd, and unlikely, when juggling work, responsibilities, and possibly even a private life. But the German graphic designer Hannes Beer showed us in 2011 with his All Day Every Day Project that it can be done.

Beer Equals Creativity

Whether you're just looking for your own spark of inspiration or want to see some cool designs, you will be served. Veerle Pieters reposted part of the project on her website. A more appropriate forum could not be found, as these respective styles intermesh nicely. You can spend a long time onsite, and come out both amazed, as well as invigorated. (jc)


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4. QArt Codes: Putting Pictures In The QR Codes

By now, everyone should know what QR Codes (Quick Response Codes) are. QR Codes are two-dimensional codes which are used for encoding different URLs. For example, if you want to get information about a hairdresser and you see a QR Code on the door of his barbershop, you only need to scan it on your cell phone. The website will be loaded immediately on your phone.

QArt Codes: Putting Pictures In The QR Codes

But do QR Codes have to look as boring as they usually are? Not really. It is possible to create a QR Code with a picture on it which makes the whole thing more exciting. Russ Cox explains in his post on QArt Codes the math behind making such QR Codes—step by step. Russ's post might be very interesting for you if you want to understand the making of creative QR Codes in detail including the mathematical background. (sw)


5. Gmail Backup And Restoration At Will

Anytime we're using a cloud-based product, there's always the risk of something happening that's beyond our control, causing us to lose our data. And while we like to think that larger, older companies like Google are immune to this, they're not. That's why it's important to have a backup of your data.

Gmail Backup And Restoration At Will

Gmvault lets you create a full backup of your Gmail account that you can restore at will. It lets you backup all of your emails, keep them regularly backed up, and even encrypt those saved emails so you can store them securely in the cloud. It also lets you restore your emails in any Gmail account (a great feature if you need to consolidate two Gmail accounts). It's highly customizable but easy to use for both tech-savvy and not-so-tech-savvy users. (cc)


6. Decorated Playlists

The idea of creating personalized playlists is not new. Cassette recorders first allowed creating mix tapes, followed by self-burned CDs, but these practices have become obsolete. The growth of online mixes and playlists have allowed the creation of personalized cover designs for those lists.

Decorated Playlists

The Web Designer and former DJ Simon Foster shows how music and design are closely related through a collection of mixes and covers called Decorated Playlists. The mixes are classified by the content, and each design is consistent to the theme chosen for the playlist: with "Ca$h is King", all the songs are related to money. In "Shapes" you'll hear "Bizarre love triangle", "Four Corners" and "Square Dance Rap". (tts)


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7. Privacy For All Concerned

As we all realize more and more, privacy is a huge concern in today's Web usage. You download an app, and right away you're asked whether you want to receive Push-messages and would you like to turn on the geolocation, so you can be tracked all the time? Obviously we all trust Facebook, Google and Twitter to handle our data, with the utmost delicacy... don't we? Well, the folks at PrivacyPatterns are doing something about it.

Privacy For All Concerned

Nick Doty, Mohit Gupta and Jeff Zych are attempting to translate all the privacy-oriented concerns into a "standard language for privacy-preserving technologies". By documenting general solutions, they're hoping to ease the privacy-question for designers and developers. Maybe soon we won't have to deal with the typical hundreds-of-pages-long privacy contract. (jc)


8. Organize Your Dropbox With Filters

Sortbox is a very handy tool to keep your Dropbox organized. The concept behind it is similar to e-mail filtering—you can create filters based on keywords, file extensions, or name patterns. Just drop files into the Sortbox folder of your Dropbox.

Organize Your Dropbox With Filters

Behind the hood, the contents of your Sortbox folder is checked every 15 minutes. If your rules match with any file Sortbox will automatically allocate those files to their right location. Of course, all file moves are also logged, so you never lose a file. Sortbox is free, open source and BSD licensed. The tool was created by Mustafa, Kanishka and Sid, and it is also hosted on GitHub. (ml)


9. Cube: Fun With 3D Google Maps Maze

What if you combined the utility of Google Maps with... gaming? Well, it is possible and Cube utilizes the power of Google Maps into a game. The challenge is to navigate a ball on a 3D Google maps cube, avoiding 3D buildings, traffic jams or other obstructions. You navigate the ball by rotating the cube, and try to reach the defined destination.

Cube: Fun With 3D Google Maps Maze

There are eight levels to complete, each set in a different city. The game becomes more interesting as you progress through the levels, and there are some nice features to explore indeed. For example, in London you are able to go underground and use the Metro lines to move closer to your target. In order to play the game, you need a HTML5-ready browser and a broadband connection. Make sure that you don't have anything urgent to finish though—the game is addictive. (ml)


10. Smashing Highlights (From Archives)


11. New On Smashing Job Board

    Here are the job openings published recently at our very own Smashing Job Board:

  • Django Developer at Potato (Sydney, Australia)
    Freelance developer required to work on fun Web projects. You'll be working at our client's office in Sydney, Australia, developing Web tools and apps for huge audiences. Our clients currently (and previously) include Google, YouTube, News International, BBH and numerous other agencies. This role will see you working as part of a small local team. The workload will sometimes be hectic, but the atmosphere is cheerful and proactive.

  • Website Developer/Engineer (PHP, MySQL, HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, etc.) at InertiaIM (Costa Mesa, CA)
    We are looking for a Web developer who has a wide range of experience and who is not afraid to take on any challenge. Ideally, we are looking for a developer with a strong background in PHP, but who can also handle coding HTML5 and CSS3, as our project schedule may demand.

  • User Experience Specialist at Pepperdine University (Malibu, CA)
    Pepperdine University, situated in sunny Malibu, California, has a proud team of award-winning designers and coders, and is looking to add another UX professional to the mix. If you're up for tackling the challenge of improving the UX of large, complex websites, read on.


12. Recent Articles on Smashing Magazine


Join our community: follow us on Twitter and join us on Facebook

The authors are: Talita Telma Stöckle (tts), Jan Constantin (jc), Swetlana Senkevitch (sw), Cameron Chapman (cc), Melanie Lang (ml), Iris Lješnjanin (il), Vitaly Friedman (vf), Sven Lennartz (sl), Christiane Rosenberger (research), Elja Friedman (tools), John von Bergen (proofreading).

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