Tag Archives: webdesign

Icon Fonts are Awesome

What's better than telling a web designer how great icon fonts are? Showing them. CSS Tricks does a more than convincing job of showing why you should use icon fonts to display icons on your website, including the ability to resize, recolor, shadow, and transform them on the fly.

Lettering.js – A jQuery plugin for radical web typography.

Just looking at the examples and this looks like a ridiculously awesome plugin. It looks like this does a lot of what you could do if you had complete nth-of-type control over typographic elements in CSS. (Or you could achieve the same thing using tons of superfluous markup and CSS.) As with all plugins like this, there is a visible switch once the page fully loads. That part is a bummer.

McDonalds.com 404 Page

Nice, simple, clean 404 page. They have a beautifully designed fly-out menu (although I don't get the grayed out nav items that look like they're inaccessible). They put their search up top and then list out the most useful links. The subtle 404 lettering in the background is a nice effect too. Most of the time sites throw that number in your face when a lot of users have no clue what it means. (When did we decide it was okay to throw error codes at people anyway?)

Convert a Menu to a Dropdown for Small Screens

The more I explore responsive web design, the more convinced I become that it's only applicable in a very narrow set of situations. If your content is being served dynamically, it's probably easier to just create a mobile template. That said, it's still worth exploring responsive design solutions like this so you know when a responsive layout is the right choice.