A designer who freelances or runs their own agency, may find that they need to confidently explain technical concepts to clients. The end client is often unaware of the various specialisms behind launching a new site and relies on their web designer to guide them through the process. Therefore even if you tend to outsource development work, having an understanding of development can pay dividends in allowing you to discuss the technical parts of the job with your clients. In addition, when working with developers your knowledge will help to speed up communication and prevent misunderstandings.
A great article from Rachel Andrew.
.net magazine: 10 web development concepts designers should know
Made with HTML/CSS (no images, no JS) this is a simple interactive experiment with responsive design techniques. Using simple layout wireframes, this illustrates how a series of pages could work across these different devices, by simulating how the layout of each page would change responsively, to suit the context.
This Man’s Life: Responsive Layouts, Responsively Wireframed
Back in 2011, Microsoft has revealed a Compact Inspector feature for Internet Explorer 9, which allows web developers to quickly notice the IE’s platform changes and tweak sites accordingly.
Now, with the new Metro UI overtaking pretty much everything, the software giant has revealed a tweaked version specifically for IE10 and as you might have guessed, it does use Metro tiles.
FavBrowser: New For Internet Explorer 10: Compat Inspector
Compat Inspector is a JavaScript-based testing tool that analyzes your site while it runs. Compat Inspector reports patterns of interaction which cause issues in recent modes. This allows you to identify problems quickly without memorizing a bunch of documentation or searching through the entirety of your site’s code. We developed Compat Inspector during the course of IE9 to speed up the process of recognizing common issues across different sites and have now updated it for IE10. Along the way, many members of the IE team contributed to the set of test cases that make up the rules in Compat Inspector.
IEBlog: IE10 Compat Inspector
The state of the web is about to get a whole lot better, as the living dead release their stranglehold on the Windows desktop and a new generation of beautifully standards-compliant IE browsers rolls out automatically to tens of millions of computer users.
MSIE auto-updates: a holiday gift to web developers everywhere.
As a designer, I use iconography in nearly every project I work on. Whether it’s just one arrow icon, social media icons or an entire site filled with badges – icons are something I could never live without. I tip my hat to the illustrators who create such invaluable resources for the rest of us to use.
There are endless amounts of free and paid icons all over the web, but finding a set with a large quantity of icons that that are customizable, scalable, and of high quality can be hard to come by.
Think Vitamin: Finding the Perfect Icon Set
Have you ever heard the phrase “Content is King”? Being a Web developer, and therefore having a job that’s often linked to content creation, it’s likely you have. It’s a fairly overused but true statement about what draws visitors to a site.
From a Web developer’s perspective, however, some may argue that speed is king. More and more, I’m starting to favour that stance. In recent years many experienced front-end engineers have offered their suggestions on how we can improve the user experience by means of some performance best practices.
Unfortunately, CSS seems to get somewhat overlooked in this area while many developers (for good reason) focus largely on JavaScript performance and other areas.
In this post, I’ll deal with this often overlooked area by introducing you to the concept of object oriented CSS and how it can help improve both the performance and maintainability of your Web pages.
Smashing Magazine: An Introduction To Object Oriented CSS