Designers and developers have known Microsoft is developing a new browser for some time now – it was previously known as “Project Spartan”. At their recent Build conference, Microsoft has unleashed a re-branded Internet Explorer (IE)/Project Spartan: Microsoft Edge. Don’t let the similar looking logo fool you: this browser has been stripped down, rethought, and built back up from the ground floor.
Before you launch your brand-spankin’ new website, check your print styles! Why? Because your users will be printing your site, whether you like it or not.
We often rely on photography to get a point or idea across at a speed that words just cannot match because so much can be said with the right photo. When you are creating a new website or marketing campaign, you will be faced with a choice…
The date, January 9, 2007. It was a controversial day, feelings of anxiousness and excitement clashed with feelings of envy and jealousy. It was a day to change the face of the mobile world. A day that would revolutionize the way content was designed, developed, and deployed across the globe. It was the day the world changed forever, the day of…the iPhone.
As a web designer, one of the day-to-day challenges is staying up-to-date with the newest tools and programs available. One of the most important for designers in the past couple of years has been the rise in popularity of CSS pre-processors. Sass, or Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets, is one example and provides many useful features that speed up writing CSS, maintaining a CSS design code base, and ultimately aids in the faster completion of projects.
Many website owners have heard about Google’s Analytics, and many are using it right now. But few know the full features and benefits that this tool holds. For those who are unfamiliar with Google Analytics, it is an entirely free tool that allows a website owner to monitor the traffic that their website receives and provides detailed metrics based on those visits. For the un-initiated, this might seem like a fairly mundane tool.
In recent years, one of the biggest and most timely movements in web development has been the push towards responsive web design (a.k.a. RWD). And with good reason. For those who are unfamiliar with this concept, it allows your website to be viewed on an almost infinite number of devices and screen sizes, all while allowing you to control the message, design, and user experience that you want to deliver to your customers.
Ever come across a site that has a different font for every type of information? It’s a little disconcerting, and will more than likely turn potential users away, typically because the site is hard to read and navigate quickly. It’s sites like this that prove typography is taken for granted when used on the web.
Using SVG’s in web design and development has taken off in the last year or so. For those who don’t know, SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics, is an image format for vector graphics, much like an Illustrator or EPS file that can be scaled to any size without losing any clarity (as opposed to bitmap pixel based image formats like JPG, GIF, or PNG, which lose their clarity when scaled).