One of the most frequent hurdles (and one which I’ve ran into myself) Web Designers face is how to correctly size text using CSS. The most straightforward way to do this is by using absolute px values, but this comes at a price: IE6 users won’t be able to resize the text, and will be stuck with whatever you decide is best. If one of your users has some type of vision impairment, congratulations, you’ve just made someone’s life a little harder. (…) more after the jump ›
Sometime during the last week, I was sent an e-mail asking If I was interested in giving an interview. Before you start to wonder, of course I said yes. Today it was published, much to my delight, at Spicy Web Designers, a blog dedicated to interviewing and showcasing Web Designers around the world. Being my first interview ever, it was pretty fun to come up with interesting answers to the questions posed, and I hope I accomplished that. Without further ado, you can check it out here.
You’ve all heard the news: Twitter is the greatest thing ever since bacon. If you hope to establish some kind of web presence for yourself, then, aside from keeping a blog, signing up with Twitter may very well be your best chance.
If you’re familiar with designing for the Web, then you’ve probably heard about the principle of Graceful Degradation. This concept focuses on being able to provide a fault-tolerant system, assuring that a system can continue to operate should one of it’s components fail.
Translate that into the Web world, and all it means is that you should somehow support older browsers. You develop using the latest and greatest and then, by the end of the project, you test your product on older browsers, making fixes here and there. Also, you frantically strive to design a wholly equal experience for all the browsers you “support”. What ends up happening is that you get a relatively watered-down experience in all platforms, all because of the need to support older browsers. (…) more after the jump ›
In today’s issue of A List Apart (which I featured yesterday) there’s an excellent article written by Leslie Jensen-Inman about the state of Web Design teaching at the higher education level. The article is quite in-depth, including some thoughts from established web professionals on why students who come out of college with a degree fail to live up to industry expectations.
Having had a Web Design education myself, I can sure relate to most of the points Leslie makes during her very well written and researched article. For example, back in 2006 my school was still teaching its students (including me) how to layout websites using a rather sinful combination of Dreamweaver and tables. As Leslie says, however, this was probably not a fault on the part of the educators themselves, but rather it’s the learning institutions that must strive to make funds available so its educators can get up to date on technologies and best practices.
If you’re interested in these issues, make sure you read the article and join the discussion!
