Odds and Ends

After writing the post listing my favorite podcasts, I realized that I should probably list some helpful ones for Web Designers as well as the general technology talk.

The Best Podcasts for Web Designers

Boagworld

Paul Boag and his co-host Marcus get together weekly to record this podcast on everything design-oriented.
Rating:5/5

Freelace Radio

A great periodical podcast that comes from the folks at freelanceswitch. Not specifically web design oriented, but they talk about things that every web designer can apply to their business.
Rating:5/5

Photoshop Quicktips

Video Podcasts that really help to increase the speed and efficiency of my photoshop use. They’re really great tips that will help photoshop users of all experience levels.
Rating:5/5

Conferences

These can be really good resources, but you have to know what information to take from them. You can generally get panels and sometimes keynotes from conferences like South by Southwest as podcasts from the websites after the conferences are complete. Listening to Johnathan Snook or Dan Cederholm talk about web design is great.
Rating:5/5

This is a common question asked by web designers in forums and emails. The most common resolution is changing, and unfortunately there are few reliable ways to get statistics on browser display resolutions. One of the few reliable sources is the W3Schools website. Here are some statistics gathered from the logs of W3Schools. (note: the statistics may not be entirely accurate; because W3Schools is visited mainly by people with a web development interest, there probably is some bias toward higher resolutions.

Continue reading What Resolution Do I Design For?

I dropped by my local Barnes and Noble today, and picked up a few books. Two of them are from the hit Web Design: Studios series (books 1 and 2 of the series, infact), and they are truly AWESOME pocket sized books. Note that I call them pocket sized books only because they’re 8×5.6 inches and although you couldn’t really fit that inside your pocket, they are quite small.

They feature 90 or so Web Design Studios, giving the name, “mission” or services that the studio provides, year founded, team size/members, tools used, location, awards, clients, and contact details. Each design firm has 2 pages to itself (you open the book and all you see if one studio), and there are full color screenshots of websites and work that the studio has done.

These books are excellent and a must for a web designer looking for inspiration or a web studio looking to scout out some community members/competition.  I think it’s great to see what the best studios out there are creating on print, and how’s this for an idea for taschen, the publisher of the book: Create a book with the best designs out there on the web. Get 100 of the best of the best from CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) galleries, Smashing Magazine, and any other sources and put it all into a full color 8×5.6 book. Brilliant! 

After my last post about using the <code> element along with entities for > and < to display HTML or PHP on your blog, and setting out to better style the <code> element on this site, I wondered how others were styling the <code> element. So I thought I'd take a look at how Nyssa Brown, Andrew Nesbitt of Teabass, Veerle, Dan Cederhold of SimpleBits fame, Jonathan Snook(of Snook.ca), and Steve Smith(from Ordered List) style their code blocks.

Continue reading Make The Code in Your Blog Posts Look Great

This is a great tip if you write HTML and PHP tutorials on your blog. You know that if you try to simply show your readers the code by typing it in, it will be parsed and outputted as normal HTML, and rendered by the browser. Here’s how to fix this, and be able to display code that your viewers can read and even copy. Continue reading How to Properly Write Code in Your Blog Posts