“A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.”

The Roman poet Ovid may have said this over 2,000 years ago, but his words are just as relevant today as they were then.

(From Uncle Ed - 02/22/2017)

Daily execution of practicing consistent, reliable, predictable, effective, thoughtful, compassionate, and yes, even courteous communication.

Instructions
Your mission is simple: achieve pleasant and readable text by distributing the space between letters. Typographers call this activity kerning. Your solution will be compared to a typographer's solution, and you will be given a score depending on how close you nailed it. Good luck!

Animating elements in your mobile applications is easy.

Animating elements in your mobile applications properly may be easy, too… if you follow our tips here.

While everyone is using CSS3 animations in mobile these days, many are not doing it properly. There are best practices to take into account that are constantly and considerably disregarded. This happens mainly because there are still people who don’t really understand the real reasons why those practices exist and are so vigorously endorsed.

These are the 40 best free web fonts available on Google Fonts, in my humble opinion. They are all open-source and 100% free for commercial use. This collection focuses on typeface families from reputable type designers and foundries that contain multiple weights and styles. I’m purposefully avoiding single-weight display faces as they have limited usefulness in real-world design projects.

That’s why Buttons are arguably a design system’s most important component. Devilishly simple, they offer a simple label in a defined region I can press. As such, buttons are where you apply a design language’s base attributes in ways that’ll ripple throughout more complex component later.

Here’s 12 lessons I’ve learned when working the primary button, secondary buttons, and a whole host of other button types in an emerging system.

Zines about computer science! Each zine focuses on one concept & is filled with comics, diagrams, stories, examples, and exercises.

Some readers, who are not familiar with our School of Strength, the system, and the exercises, may not know all the drills, which are mentioned in the chapter. They can of course spend some time trying to find them on YouTube, but what they find may not necessarily be exemplary of what we do in StrongFirst.

To make life easier (regarding searching for info, not practicing), my wife Justyna and I created a short overview video of all the exercises featured in Pavel’s chapter.

A design system is a collection of documentation on principles and best practices, that helps guide a team to build digital products. They are often embodied in UI libraries and pattern libraries, but can extend to include guides on other areas such as 'Voice and Tone'.

Voice and Tone

Great example including branding

The Basics of Node-KSS

To achieve our goals of a platform agnostic, low-friction style guide, we landed on kss-node, which is itself a Node.js implementation of Knyle Style Sheets (KSS), a Ruby library that:

... provides a methodology for writing maintainable, documented CSS within a team. Specifically, KSS is a documentation specification and styleguide format.

The basic principle is that your style guide is generated via comments you create in your CSS, SCSS, Sass, LESS, etc.

Use velocity.js instead!

Velocity.js is a free, lightweight library that you should be using - developer Neal O'Grady gets you started.

Secret to cohesive color schemes: pick a bunch of colors you want to do (purple, blue, etc like you did here), then pick an overall color (let's say orange, for playfulness) that you want to tint everything towards... Overlay the "overall color" (or soft light, or whatever blending mode depending on if you want darker or lighter colors) and play with the opacity till you get something you can work with.

I did #ff9c00 set to Overlay and opacity set to 25% over your original choices to get this scheme.

In September 2012, I had two courses of computer graphics behind me and had a lot of spare time. So I got an idea to make a simple web-based photo editor. I was working on it for 3 months in 2012 and 2 months during this summer, and I really enjoyed it! :) I learned many new things and realised, that it is not going to be as easy as I expected.

A fun and colorful explanation of how DNS works.

Hey there! We made this comic to explain what happens when you type a website address in your browser.

Almost five years ago, I had the honor of writing a post on Smashing Magazine about my Photoshop panel GuideGuide. Since then it has seen wild success as the most installed third-party Photoshop extension, an achievement I’m quite proud. In that time, I’ve added some powerful features and, most recently, expanded it to Illustrator. This post will give you a taste of how GuideGuide can change the way you use guides in Photoshop and Illustrator.

There’s more to spaces than the key you instinctively hit between words with one of your thumbs. Let’s find out what other space characters there are, what their heritage is, and how they can be useful today.