This Week’s Tabs [Expanded Holiday Edition]

January 23, 2015 at 8:44 pm

It never fails that my post­ing fre­quen­cy drops around Christmas and New Years. I seem to fall into a win­ter hiber­na­tion or maybe it’s a food coma. Whatever it is, I’m shak­ing it off and unload­ing all the cool links I’ve been sav­ing up.

Chris Allen has an awe­some­ly sim­ple port­fo­lio site full of nice work.

I loved land­ing on Benjy Stanton’s site because you get a bit of his per­son­al­i­ty right off the bat.

Ivo Mynttinen has a gor­geous hero image and well-designed site over­all. I also love the trans­paren­cy he took with his business.

Build your own over­head desk image with this free­bie of Designer Desk Essentials from Graphic Burger.

I love the details in this free­bie of food themed icons.

And speak­ing of food, “C” is for cook­ie. “L” is for letter-pressed.

Speaking of free­bies, Freebbble lets you search Dribbble resources by license so you can find free for com­mer­cial use design items.

These off-canvas menu effects would add a nice touch to your user experience.

Do you won­der how some­body else solved that tricky design prob­lem you’ve been hav­ing with a dia­log box, login form, or other ele­ment. Well, Codepen put togeth­er a library of design pat­terns for you to draw inspiration.

There’s also this list of user inter­face ideas to check out.

Kenneth Cachia put togeth­er this SVG-based seam­less pat­tern maker in your browser.

Quickly and eas­i­ly build an ani­mat­ed CSS gra­di­ent with this tool by Ian Forrest.

The Lost Type crew share a few of their favorite draw­ing tools.

New tech meets old tech in Richard Ardagh’s idea of a 3D-printed let­ter­press font.

Speaking of new tech, Gyroscope har­ness­es your social media activ­i­ty and health data to build a web­site about your life.

Motive — Digging the design of this WordPress theme by ThemeZilla

I also like this free theme from Automattic — Goran

More WordPress — eas­i­ly add employee/team pro­files with this Staffer plu­g­in.

I’m always check­ing out the CMS, website-building land­scape so this list was super help­ful in find­ing new contenders.

I’m get­ting one of these t‑shirts for my birth­day because my wife loves me.

Mmmm… Typography poster… So nice…

Aerial Wallpapers — inter­est­ing satel­lite imagery opti­mized for use as iPhone 6 Plus wallpapers

I’ve always want­ed to get into using Gantt charts to get orga­nized. Maybe I’ll give this free tool from Twproject a shot.

Great sug­ges­tions about what could be slow­ing down your team and how to fix them. Don’t Blame the Designer.

Need some sug­ges­tions for how to struc­ture and write your code? Check out Mark Otto’s Code Guide for HTML and CSS.

Is that new client or job worth tak­ing? Here are three ques­tions to help you con­sid­er the true value of every design job.

And here’s anoth­er six ques­tions to ask dur­ing inter­views to find out about a com­pa­ny’s cul­ture and environment.

Another post from the busi­ness side — Pay People for Commitment. He def­i­nite­ly has a point about the chang­ing dynam­ics of work/life balance.

An extreme­ly long read, but def­i­nite­ly worth it if you are think­ing of strik­ing out on your own. How I Wrote and Sold My First Ebook

And we’ll end this mon­stros­i­ty of a list with a video — Guardians of the Galaxy: 8 Bit Cinema

Busy, busy, busy.

December 8, 2014 at 8:41 pm

You might have noticed the post­ing fre­quen­cy here at SpareType has dropped off a bit the last few weeks. Client work has picked up and hope­ful­ly I’ll be able to share some of that soon as items get com­plet­ed. In the mean­time, here’s a huge list of awe­some things from around the Internet that have been col­lect­ing dust in my brows­er tabs. Enjoy!

The State of Web Type — Do you need to know which OpenType fea­tures are sup­port­ed in which browsers? Then here is the Can I Use for typo­graph­ic features.

Do you know how many rules, selec­tors, and dec­la­ra­tions are in your CSS? Maybe you’re curi­ous how many col­ors or font fam­i­lies are hid­den in your style sheets? Plug in your URL or raw code to CSSStats and get the breakdown.

The folks at Tower are cel­e­brat­ing OS X Yosemite with An Illustrated History of Mac OS X. The illus­tra­tions are mar­velous. I think the Lion in the space­ship is my favorite, though Snow Leopard is close too.

Turn sta­t­ic mock­ups into trans­par­ent, float­ing guides with GluePrint.

Just want to code and not worry about web servers, data­bas­es, engines, or deploy­ment? Cactus is a free, sta­t­ic site gen­er­a­tor that com­piles Markdown, SASS, and Coffeescript out of the box. It also auto­mat­i­cal­ly refresh­es your brows­er when you save changes and can deploy to Amazon S3 to make your web­site public.

Flakes is a clean, open source design frame­work for build­ing inter­nal busi­ness appli­ca­tions — think sales lead man­age­ment and inven­to­ry track­ing screens. Just look at this form for enter­ing info.

Flakes Framework Screenshot of Form Entry Screen, Admin UI, CSS framework

How to Make a Performance Budget? What should you be mea­sur­ing, how should you mea­sure it, and what should your goal be in deliv­er­ing the best web­site performance.

DeviantArt has a new brand. I love the write­up about the process, but I’m not entire­ly sold on the logo yet.

Awesome home­page and all-around awe­some web­site by the folks at Underbelly. Really nice touch­es with the URL names.

Underbelly.is - Screenshot of creative agency homepage, blue washed desktop, full screen background

Tis the sea­son for cute, wintery-themed hol­i­day icons. Here’s an awe­some free set on Dribbble.

Speaking of the hol­i­days, here’s a Christmas present I would have liked as a child. Typeblocks — maple wood alpha­bet blocks.

Typeblocks - maple wood alphabet blocks, font blocks, laser cut

Finally, let’s wrap the post up with a lit­tle self-promotion. Society6 — which I have some art­work avail­able on — has some great hol­i­day dis­counts going on this week. Be sure to check out my store and pick out any last minute gifts you still need to get.

This Week’s Tabs

September 12, 2014 at 8:10 am

Dan Rhatigan on type…Type on Dan Rhatigan from Grey London.

Interesting user inter­face idea — Monocle (via Smashing Newsletter)

Glitch effect — Chris Coyier breaks down Lucas Bebber’s neat CSS only technique

This is a shirt. Funny, very meta idea.

Why Starbucks Spells Your Name Wrong (via swiss­miss)

Tools Outline Icon Set by Oxygenna

Beautiful inspi­ra­tion for color gra­di­ents — uigradients.com

iPhone 6 Screen Sizes Infographic — This is the best break­down in terms of res­o­lu­tion for Apple’s new toys released this week.

This Week’s Tabs

September 5, 2014 at 8:00 am

Jeffrey Zeldman: 20 years of Web Design and Community from lynda.com on Vimeo.

Map Glyphs — hun­dreds of scal­able vec­tor map icons

Build a quick flexbox lay­out just by divid­ing a box.

I would­n’t mind hav­ing one of these tables when I get a new house.

Or maybe I’ll just string up a treehouse.

Codio — my IDE of choice — just launched edu­ca­tion fea­tures for teach­ers to run cod­ing classes.

And speak­ing of teach­ing, Tal Leming teach­es you how to cook OpenType fonts.

This Week’s Tabs

August 29, 2014 at 8:10 am

Drew Wilson has an awe­some home­page and tons of awe­some projects to check out.

Totally dig­ging Dustin Hysinger’s logo.

Oh, and his zom­bie thumb stick­ers are freak­ing cool.

A quick look at changes hap­pen­ing in WordPress 4.0 (via Smashing Magazine) Super excit­ed about the changes to the post edi­tor and how it scrolls.

Speaking WordPress, there’s this clean, media focused port­fo­lio theme over at Themezilla that looks real­ly good.

Jake Giltsoff points out twelve ital­ics over on Typecast. Some have empha­sis, while oth­ers have EMPHASIS.

A What If? book comes out next week.

Jamila Hodges has a diverse set of pic­togram icons for free over on Behance.

This Week’s Tabs

August 15, 2014 at 7:45 am

Pure CSS par­al­lax scrolling — what sor­cery is this!?!

Countable.js — a 1KB func­tion to add live paragraph‑, word- and character-counting to an HTML element

Harry Roberts has put togeth­er excel­lent guide­lines for writ­ing CSS

I’m pret­ty big into WordPress but I might have to fire up an instance of this Pagekit CMS and give it a try. I cer­tain­ly dig the design.

DesignCuts has a $29 font bun­dle for sale for the next few days. All twelve fonts are very hand­made and roughed up.

Input — a flex­i­ble sys­tem of fonts for cod­ing. 168 styles of width and thick­ness. Free of charge for pri­vate use.

Awesome port­fo­lio of a fel­low Auburn grad — Ryan Lundy

RSS Feed Zero

August 1, 2014 at 3:14 pm

I final­ly sat down today and tack­led my back­log of RSS feeds. There were over 1300 items that have been pil­ing up because of a con­fer­ence and mov­ing. After read­ing head­lines and sort­ing through the riff-raff, I have for you the gems of the last week.

Game About Squares — Simple, min­i­mal­ist brain teas­er of a game

Greater Than or Equal To — Wonderful con­cept for a writer’s web­site, exe­cut­ed perfectly

Some details on Github’s CSS by Mark Otto

Chris Coyier pulls back the cur­tain on Codepen’s CSS

Dave Rupert talks about respon­sive web design bloat, then increas­es his site’s per­for­mance.

Wordmark.it — Have a lot of fonts on your com­put­er? Ever won­der what a word would like in every font loaded on your com­put­er? Boom, prob­lem solved.

VIDE — jQuery plu­g­in for video back­grounds

A visu­al­iza­tion of cre­atives’ salaries from a Designer News survey

Elliot Jay Stocks is con­sol­i­dat­ing his web typog­ra­phy knowledge

A dis­sent­ing opin­ion about Monotype buy­ing FontShop

And we fin­ish with this exple­tive laden video of every Samuel L. Jackson Mother######.

This Week’s Tabs

November 25, 2013 at 10:06 pm

A new user inter­face — code­named Australis — is in the pipeline for Firefox. Looking good.

#WorkCanWait — find that work/life balance

An easy to fol­low intro­duc­tion to CSS flexbox.

53 per­cent of the time Waldo is hid­ing with­in… (via Kottke)

ish. — a pret­ty sweet view­port resiz­er. Hay! mode for the win. (via Sidebar)

This is a moth­er­fuck­ing web­site. (again via Sidebar)

Need a lit­tle inspi­ra­tion for a badge design? Abduzeedo has pulled a few great ones together.

Adam Mottau — nice, super clean port­fo­lio site

Another sim­ple port­fo­lio site with awe­some inter­ac­tion and ani­ma­tion — Bradley Haynes