November 5, 2015 — When we talk about the user’s perception of time, we mean psychological time, or brain time. This time is of interest to psychologists, neuroscientists and odd individuals like me. Objective time is dealt with by technical means, and those means have limits that become insurmountable at some point. As web developers, we should aim to deliver fast and reliable web services to make users feel comfortable. We can use technological means to control the objective performance of a website. However, technology and resources eventually hit a limit, at which point it becomes difficult to change objective performance. Then, we have to aim to exploit what psychology and neuroscience tell us. Read more…

November 5, 2015 — In record time, our smartphones have become indispensable, and as mobile technology has become integrated into nearly every aspect of our lives, our smartphones are shifting from device to dependency. But while it’s now clear that we are locked in an intense relationship with our smartphones, one has to wonder why this courtship hasn’t turned into a love triangle with tablets. What is it about our smartphones that makes them so attractive? And why is the addiction we feel toward them so much stronger than to our tablets? Read more…

November 3, 2015 — Flexbox today is very, very real. After many years of development, the specification has become much more stable, making it easier to achieve those CSS layout dreams. In this article, Dennis Gaebel Jr will discuss layout patterns well suited to flexbox, using the interface from the Tracks application, which also takes advantage of atomic design principles. He’ll share how flexbox proved useful and note the pitfalls of pairing it with particular layout patterns, and also look at those patterns that caused concern, provide suggestions for fallbacks and share additional tactics to start using this CSS property immediately. Read more…

November 2, 2015 —

At StaticGen, our open-source directory of static website generators, we’ve kept track of more than a hundred generators for more than a year now, and we’ve seen both the volume and popularity of these projects take off incredibly on GitHub during that time, going from just 50 to more than 100 generators and a total of more than 100,000 stars for static website generator repositories. Influential design-focused companies such as Nest and MailChimp now use static website generators for their primary websites. Vox Media has built a whole publishing system around Middleman. Carrot, a large New York agency and part of the Vice empire, builds websites for some of the world’s largest brands with its own open-source generator, Roots. And several of Google’s properties, such as “A Year In Search” and Web Fundamentals, are static.

Static websites are hardly new, going all the way back to the beginning of the web. So, why the sudden explosion in interest? What’s up? Why now?

October 31, 2015 — Each month we challenge you, the design community, to get your creative juices flowing and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative wallpapers. And, well, it wasn’t any different this time around. We give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works. This is why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves. A big thank you to all designers for their participation Read more…

October 30, 2015 — What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at. Read more…

October 29, 2015 — Many of us struggle silently with mental health problems and many more are affected by them, either directly or indirectly. It’s {Geek} Mental Help Week and we would like to help raise awareness with a couple of articles exploring these issues and offering solutions. In this article, Scott McGregor will help you become more informed about the impact that noise has on your life. He’ll discuss the good and bad sides of noise and sound, so that you can use both to benefit your personal well-being. Read more…

October 28, 2015 — You’ve probably heard about ECMAScript 6 (or ES6) already. It’s the next version of JavaScript, and it has some great new features. The features have varying degrees of complexity and are useful in both simple scripts and complex applications. Read more…

October 26, 2015 — Many of us struggle silently with mental health problems and many more are affected by them, either directly or indirectly. It’s {Geek} Mental Help Week and we would like to help raise awareness with a couple of articles exploring these issues. We’ve all experienced that burnout moment. It’s that moment when we’ve got nothing left to give but keep trying anyway, when we’re left without much more than a shell to live in and motions to go through. In such moments all we want is for our work to feel like our work and not like torture. Read more…

October 24, 2015 — HTTP Archive shows that images make up 64% of a web page’s total size on average. Given this, image optimization is key, especially considering that many users will abandon a request if it doesn’t load within a few seconds. The problem with image optimization is that we want to keep file sizes small without sacrificing quality. WebP is an image format that was created in 2010 and is currently being developed by Google. This format delivers lossless and lossy compression for images. Several big names are campaigning for WebP, most notably Google, Facebook and eBay. Read more…