Wedged between boomers and millennials, Gen X has been the quiet, get-things-done generation nobody paid much attention to. Now they’re getting pushed out of their jobs—and boy, is Boston gonna miss them. —By Kris Frieswick

The beginning of hand-lettering journey, I started by tracing fonts to familiarize myself with typography. I started with the Learn Lettering course with Seanwes and did some other one’s as well.

In Learn Lettering, Sean McCabe suggested to trace fonts, and suggested some basic ones as well. I set out into the woods (you can do it from home) and started with Baskerville, Geogrotesque and Museo Slab.

If you are looking for fonts that have a hand-lettering style, that’s a different conversation but you can find those here.

Shadows And User Interface Discoverability Link
There’s a reason GUI designers incorporate shadows into their designs — they help create visual cues in the interface which tell human brains what user interface elements they’re looking at.

Instead I’m going to show you a simple color workflow that you can use in your next web project.

After immersing myself in it for a year, I find Swift to be deeply web in its soul. From its expressive, functional syntax and its interpretive playgrounds to its runtime performance and recent foray into open source, Swift is the web developer’s compiled language (with the mature and convenient safeguards characteristic of the compiled environment).

Everything you need to get you started is here. It’s free. And the community is amazing.

Here are the rules:

Light comes from the sky (see Part 1)
Black and white first (see Part 1)
Double your whitespace (see Part 1)
Learn the methods of overlaying text on images
Make text pop— and un-pop
Only use good fonts
Steal like an artist

What if I told you there was an image format like GIF, but it worked with vectors? What if I said it was possible to reverse the direction of its animation? What if you could take one base image and animate different parts of it separately, at different speeds? Well, the image format, SVG, already exists. It just needs a little gentle encouragement.

Page Layers is a website screenshot app for Mac OS X. It converts web pages to Photoshop files with separate layers for all page elements.

It enables you to open web pages in Photoshop and saves you lots of time when re-designing or improving existing web page designs.

Just open any page in the embedded browser and save the page as PSD with layers or as plain PNG image. In the HTML to PSD conversion every web page element (every image, link, block, ...) will be rendered as separate, named layer. Layer groups will be created according to the site structure.

When I review icons submitted to Iconfinder, I have a responsibility to our designers and to our customers to make sure all premium icons on the site are the highest possible quality. But the difference between “not quite good enough” and “premium quality” is often very small and usually involves minimal changes. In this article I have distilled my design guidelines into Six Easy Steps to Better Icon Design. The steps follow the basics of sound icon design and should be seen as a guide, not a dogmatic rule book. The savvy designer knows when he or she can break the rules for the greatest benefit.

So I became a bit obsessed about how further we can push the limits of what we can draw with CSS only. Basically, I noticed that you can play around with basic shapes like circles, rectangles and triangles to draw virtually anything. You can even put some drop-shadows and CSS filters to get some pretty cool effects as well.

In this pocket guide I'll write some examples from really easy to more complex things you can do to create cool drawings and animations with CSS.

1. What does success look like for this project?
2. How can failure be avoided with this project? What are you worried might go wrong?
3. What will happen to your business if nothing changes?
4. Where do you see your business a year from now? Three years from now? Ten years from now?
5. What is the single hardest thing in your business right now?

Here are some ways people ask questions the wrong way -- and how you can ask the right way:

1. Don't Lead the Witness
   "What do you think we should do about that order?"

2. Don't Stick to Either/Or Questions
   "There are defects throughout the whole order. What do you think we should do?"

3. Look for Clarification
   "That sounds really good. Let me make sure I don't miss anything, though. Can you walk me through it one more time?"

Talk as little as possible. You already know what you know.

The most productive engineers I’ve ever worked with aren’t the engineers who pull all-nighters or clock in 80 hour work weeks. Nor are they the engineers who can effortlessly craft an elegant five lines of x86 assembly to succinctly and efficiently solve a problem.

Focus on the problem – each and every time

#3f343d #5b9d9e #9fe2e3 #ebe5d5 #ff597b

The pen is mightier than the laptop
Ditch the computer and break out the paper for more effective, interesting, and visually stimulating note-taking

You Are My Sunshine
House of Rising Sun
Four Leaf Clover

Inter UI is a typeface specially designed for user interfaces with focus on high legibility of small-to-medium sized text on computer screens.

The family features a tall x-height to aid in readability of mixed-case and lower-case text. Several OpenType features are provided as well, like contextual alternates that adjusts punctuation depending on the shape of surrounding glyphs, slashed zero for when you need to disambiguate "0" from "o", tabular numbers, etc.

A styleguide is a set of standards, principles and rules every developer or designer should follow in order to improve the digital presence of the product.

In this article we will walk through effective techniques used in designing a reliant style guide.

Creating a logo is design distilled. You need to make this little piece of branding that forges a connection with the people who come into contact with it. I find that challenge immensely fun. You get to be the storyteller of a brand. You get to help shape many people’s perception of an entity. You get to make a difference for someone– all with the use of your creativity.