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.

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.

For the last few years, whenever somebody wants to start building an HTTP API, they pretty much exclusively use REST as the go-to architectural style, over alternative approaches such as XML-RPC, SOAP and JSON-RPC. REST is made out by many to be ultimately superior to the other “RPC-based” approaches, which is a bit misleading because they are just different.

Nice perspective and I love the radio.

Tips for designing and building a consistent design system.

Without doubt, I get asked about design systems more than anything else. So, having spent the majority of the past few years thinking about how to design, build and present design systems for products like Marvel, Bantam and Modulz, I figured I’d share some of what I’ve learned along the way.

In conversation with Co.Design, the eminent design researcher Don Norman offers cutting criticism of Silicon Valley’s brightest.

“Don’t find customers for your product. Find products for your customers.”
— Seth Godin
In this short essay, I’ll be walking you through a method, pioneered by Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman, for making sure that you’re building products that real people want. You’ll learn how to find customers, analyze their pains, write a pitch using their language and create a feedback loop to keep you in lockstep. Each section will be accompanied by a case study where we’ll explore how I’ve used these methods to create Extra, my new social media automation app.

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.

Original dissertation

While it's really hard to immediately win over a crowd, as a speaker it's really easy to lose the room within the first minutes of your presentation.

To make sure you don't lose your audience I asked Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, accomplished speaker and founder of TwitterCounter and The Next Web, for some of the things you should never say during your presentations.

It’s always fun to play around in Adobe Illustrator creating stylised illustrations of random objects. It’s also great practise, which helps you experiment with new tools and techniques that you could draw upon in your future projects. Follow along with today’s tutorial to create a series of tasty vector popsicle graphics in Illustrator. We’ll use a range of handy tools to create the first colourful lollipop, then build upon each subsequent illustration with new techniques that help to further customise the artwork further.

Speaking about using sharp angles and shapes, Tokyo-based illustrator Jun Takahashi uses this technique to create geometric sports characters.

So, you want to become a coder. That’s great! No, really. There is much about coding that makes it worth pursuing. Getting started, however, can be a daunting task. Even with all the enthusiasm and energy you have for learning, you might find certain obstacles are presenting themselves to you, making it difficult to gain momentum.

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.

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.

Using Prototypes

You can think of the prototype mechanisms as providing some sort of inheritance - but it certainly doesn't bring with it any of the other pillars of OOP, encapsulation and polymorphism say. It is a much simpler and much more direct mechanism to make code sharing possible.

If you have a single object then there isn't much practical advantage in designing a prototype object for it. On the other hand having a prototype object with all of the methods that the object is using does provide an organization. The object then has just the instance variables and the methods are all provided by the prototype. If things change and you need a second object, or more objects, then the prototype provides an easy solution.

People are starting to ask: where can I learn about CSS Grid?

There are a lot of fantastic resources out there. When it comes to the technical how-to, most of what’s out there was written by Rachel Andrew. If you don’t know her work, take some time to get to know her and follow her.

So here are the links to resources I recommend. I will keep updating this list:

Static site generators are quickly becoming a big part of the professional website builder’s toolbox. A new static website generator seems to pop up every week. Figuring out which one to use can be like a walk in the jungle.

My favorite CSS “trick” would have to be these 3 lines of CSS:

• { background-color: rgba(0,255,0,0.1); }

I’ve been using this snippet for years! It makes debugging layouts a breeze and is quite insightful when dealing with the box model.