Issue #54, Tuesday, March 6th 2012 | 100,980 subscribers | Previous issues
Editorial
Dear Readers,
It's been two years already since we first started sending out the Smashing Newsletter. We've received a lot of various feedback since then, which motivates us to constantly keep improving on the quality of our newsletter issues. An anniversary post is planned for tomorrow on Smashing Magazine with some fantastic hand-picked books to give away — so be sure to pass by, find out how to win and try your luck!
The Smashing editorial team has been very busy in putting the final touches to the Smashing Books #3 and #3⅓ coming up next month. If you still haven't pre-ordered, there's still time left for you to add your name among the other smashing readers on a special double page feature within the book.
In today's newsletter issue, we'll be covering a discovery engine for curiosity, responsive navigation techniques, a free quality font, a color tool, how to use your phone to stop paper junk mail in your mailbox, and many more interesting topics.
We're also giving away 1 ticket for the 2-day Interlink Conference taking place in Vancouver, Canada. The giveaway includes 1 conference pass, 1 morning workshop and 1 afternoon workshop to one lucky individual. To win the ticket, please tweet @smashingmag I'm ready to play some good ol' Vancouver dodgeball! #interlinkconf and we'll be happy to announce the winner on the 13th of March.
We hope you enjoy the newsletter!
Yours sincerely,
The Smashing Team
Table of Contents
01. Explore: Discovery Engine For Curiosity
02. Pull Down For Responsive Navigation
03. Is Your Front-End Applicant A Keeper?
04. Free Font: Poly, A Quality Serif Font
05. Color Encyclopedia
06. PaperKarma: The Junk Mail Nemesis?
07. Hackershelf: Free Books For Nerds
08. A Quote A Day
09. Designer As Craftsman: Made By Hand
10. Smashing Highlights
11. New on Smashing Job Board
12. New on Smashing Magazine
1. Explore: Discovery Engine For Curiosity
As creative people we love to discover new things, random curiosities or inspirational artworks to challenge our creative thinking and imagination. What's a better way to learn about them than a well-curated blog in which every single post is dedicated to a random interesting thing that you probably wouldn't stumble upon otherwise?
If you're interested in exploring culture, art, history and design, Explore is just the project for you. Dedicated specifically for students, this tumblog is a cross-disciplinary lens on what stimulates, what enriches, and what matters — an intellectual and creative incubator for cultivating your interests, and a discovery engine for things you didn't know you were interested in, until you are. It features short snippets of knowledge, be it news, quotes, video presentations, artwork or history. Explore is edited by Maria Popova who is also the editor of Brain Pickings, another human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, creativity and curiosity. (vf)
2. Pull Down For Responsive Navigation
Responsive design is difficult and time-consuming. Adjusting elements to fit the available screen size is not enough, the much more difficult part is to actually consider new patterns and solutions to present information and interaction meaningfully in every possible context. For example, when it comes to navigation, is turning inline-links into block-level elements for mobile the only solution? Maybe not.
Tom Kenny suggests to use Pull Down For Navigation as an option. "Pull down to refresh" was a concept first introduced to the mobile world by Loren Brichter in his Twitter app, and Tom applies the same paradigm to a different situation. His technique basically replaces a UI element with a natural gesture — when a user visits a website on a mobile device, a navigation bar is displayed. And when a user pulls down the bar, it displays all available navigation options which are not displayed by default.
Tom uses jQuery to get the height of the mobile navigation and then move the website up by that number of pixels. The script doesn't quite work on Android yet, but it is released on Github, so you can improve it and build upon it. And if you're interested in more responsive navigation solutions, make sure to read Brad Frost's article on Responsive Navigation Patterns. (vf)
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3. Is Your Front-End Applicant A Keeper?
Job interviews are a must to evaluate if an applicant is capable of what his CV claims. But if you really want to test his/her knowledge, you have got to ask some questions that go a bit further to get under the applicant's skin. Darcy Clarke and a group of expert front-end developers compiled a useful list of interview questions for front-end job interviews.
Pick a couple of questions and the applicant will soon reveal his skills. The questions cover topics ranging from community involvement and coding to personal sources of creativity and blogs. Your next job applicant will have to be well prepared. The questions are also available on GitHub, so you can easily add more questions to it if you want. (sp)
4. Free Font: Poly, A Quality Serif Font
Everybody loves a nice-looking quality free font. Designing type is a very time-consuming effort, so when quality free fonts are released for free, usually it's either designer's generosity or a student type design project. José Nicolás Silva Schwarzenberg from University of Buenos Aires, has designed Poly, a free font designed specifically for a South American indigenous language Wayuunaiki. Fortunately, the tyepface can be used noy only by 305,000 Wayuu people but everybody across the world.
Poly Free Web Font is a medium contrast serif font, optimized for the Web, and efficient in smaller sizes. Originally designed for agglutinative languages with long words, they are now complete with additional diacritic characters. The typeface is carefully balanced between the x-height and the character width, with attention to diacritics, bringing high legibility to even the smallest of sizes. Poly is available in the Google Web Fonts library as well. (af)
5. Color Encyclopedia
As designers, we work with colors, their nuances and combinations every single day. However, sometimes we need more information than specific values, be it CIE-Lab, Hunter-Lab, CIE-Luv, CIE-LCH, XYZ and xyY values, color shades or appropriate color schemes. If you're working with colors regularly, you might be interested in ColorHexa, a free color encyclopedia.
You can use it to convert the color code to other systems, blend two or more colors, create a gradient between two colors, and match schemes with complementary colors. Even if you don't need to create a pallete, it's fun to study each color and their possibilities. (tt)
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6. PaperKarma: The Junk Mail Nemesis?
Have you ever come home after your vacation, unable to open your door because the junk mail piled up waist-deep behind the door? That's an exaggeration you'll probably only experience in slapstick comedy. Still, the annoyance caused by all the excess paper in your mailbox is real, not to mention the horrendous waste of wood. If this bothers you, you could give the PaperKarma a try.
The tool allows you to unsubscribe from the junk mail in your snail-mailbox. All it needs is a clear photo of the senders information — which can be just the company name and the mailing address — and your own postal information. The app takes care of the rest by contacting the junk provider and asking him to stop filling your mailbox. Here's the snag: so far PaperKarma has a big database of only US companies — which means, Smashing Magazine will still keep receiving junk mail for quite a while. The tool is available for iOS, Android and Windows Phones. (jc)
7. Hackershelf: Free Books for Nerds
Have you recently been on Amazon looking for a book, say Menezes, Oorschot and Vanstones Handbook of Applied Cryptography, and wondered how many meals you would have to skip, until you could afford it? Okal Otieno came out with a new, legal book-sharing site, Hackershelf where you might find it.
Hackershelf caters to tech-oriented readers and nerds. At the moment you will mostly find theoretically oriented books — many of which deal with programming and computer linguistics. A book can only be submitted to Hackershelf if the author has granted explicit permission to distribute or share links to their work, accessible at no cost to the reader. On Hackershelf, you will find many books released in the Public Domain, and you won't be defrauding the authors of the books. (jc)
8. A Quote A Day
What once began as a simple idea of posting a new image with a related quote every day became a huge project named 365 Days of Tumblr. Aaron Christopher Judd gathered beautiful photos and artworks and assigned each picture with a quote that fits perfectly to the picture's mood — for every day in a year.
In this showcase, all images are tagged and have notes from the author himself as well as by the readers of his tumblog. Now, that's a dedication worth pursuing! (tt)
9. Designer As Craftsman: Made By Hand
Because of the nature of the Web, we tend to think of our creations as volatile creatures with a short lifespan. They're usually neither permanent nor enduring; they're changing and adjusting, so we don't put a lot of thought into the timeless aspect of our work. When was the last time you thought about your project as a lasting artifact, as something that you leave behind for other people to use many years, or even a decade, later? As a designer, do you see yourself as a marketer, artist or a craftsman?
Made by Hand is a short film series celebrating the people who make things by hand — sustainably, locally, and with a love for their craft. The project was created out of the belief that the things we collect, consume, use, and share are part of who we are as individuals. It tells the stories of craftsmen who put a lot of time and effort into producing quality work, and features the objects and products that they create. Be it a knife maker, a distiller, a cigar roller or a beekeeper — every story has something to learn from and to apply to our craft. We should be proud of the work we do and how we do it, and this project teaches us to do just that by exploring how professionals from other industries are doing that. (vf)
Smashing Highlights (From Our Archives)
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Technical Web Typography: Guidelines And Techniques
Creative typography involves making design decisions such as which face to use, what mood the type should create, how it should be set, what tone it should have — for example, should it be airy, spacious and open (light) or condensed, bold and tight, with less white space (dark)? These decisions must be made on a per-project basis.
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20 Time-Saving Tips To Improve Designer's Workflow
Want to save some time? Of course you do! You are probably always looking for ways to do this faster and make that easier — it's human nature. One of the best ways to save time is experience. The more experience you have, the more comfortable you are working, the more you have developed your own best methods, and with experience you know how to better avoid mistakes and disasters. So always stay hard at what you do and you will definitely save more than "just" time!
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10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs
Web design consists, for the most part, of interface design. There are many techniques involved in crafting beautiful and functional interfaces. Striking the right balance between what you show and what you hide is a delicate art and is completely in your hands as the designer. Don't use a technique just because it exists: use it if it makes sense in your context.
New on Smashing Job Board
Here are the job openings published recently at our very own Smashing Job Board:
Visual Designer/Web Designer at The Big Studio (Boston, MA)
"In this role, you will bring an informed passion for users as you guide the look-and-feel of a site redesign for one of our Fortune 100 clients. To succeed you must have excellent interpersonal and ommunication skills, a skilled design sense, strong self-motivation, a great ability to work at a quick pace."
Product / UX Lead at ChallengePost (New York, US)
"You understand that user experience is more than just a buzzword. You're curious about the world and the web and like to try new things. You enjoy taking complex concepts and designing flows and features that simplify the experience and delight users. You believe in testing to prove your hypothesis. You know when to use a pen and paper, low-fi wireframes or other to get your point across."
Product Manager at The Landmark Group (Dubai, UAE)
"Lead, own and drive the evolution for select web product(s) by partnering with the Web, design, development and online marketing teams."
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