Monday have you down? Why not start your week with a little challenge in the form of kerning and shaping letterforms!
Kern Type and Shape Type provides a much needed escape from endless meetings and pushing pixels. Go for 100%!
–Brittany
Cat Commerce – Denis Sazhin
I’m not a cat person, but I am an animated GIF person! I really only like Holly’s cat, but that is probably because her cat acts like a dog, and is friends with my fluff dog Stella.
I receive a lot of emails relating to design, inspiration, and little gems of the internet like this Cat Power dribbble set of animated cat illustrations. The set is fun to look at even if you don’t like cats. I was drafted on dribbble a while back (crazy story…) and I finally posted my first shot! Now that the initial anxiety is over I’m determined to figure out the magic steps to be granted an invite to pass off to my partner in crime. Posting more shots I’m sure is a prerequisite, so I’m going to work on that. In the mean time, check out the link to Cat Power and sing the soft kitty song from Big Bang Theory. If you don’t know it, that should be the next thing you look up today.
-Brittany
Equations for Organic Motion – Test Sheet by Justin Windle
Anytime you want to stare at some incredible examples of what people are creating in the front end dev world just start exploring CodePen. If you are a CodePen first timer, you can start with the curated list of the 2013 Most Popular. Fair warning that minutes can turn into hours. Not from personal experience of course… In a practical sense, I’ve used the site to ferret out some bugs and play around with CSS before talking to devs on quick projects. Saves the “Can you make that larger? No a little smaller… still smaller. Ok, too far, slightly bigger.” You get the idea. I didn’t get the nickname Pixel Perfect Girl at work for nothing.
–Brittany
When it comes to mockups where I need names I typically fall back on characters from movies, famous people or whatever random thing comes to mind. Names that have made appearances in my internal mockups are everything from Betty White, Justin Timberlake, Minions, Walter Bishop, Olivia Dunham… anything weird I don’t mind staring at.
Behold the brilliant project uinames.com that randomly generates male and female names. Looking at the links in the about, the names are pulled from common names over the last 100 years from the social security database and common surnames in the US. This solves the problem when you need to show a mockup beyond the internal team that is in on your practical naming jokes or when a design is customer facing. It is an interesting idea, I like it.
-Brittany
I like crazy examples of people pushing normal patterns with personal websites. In terms of designing your resume online, this interactive resume has to be one of the most elaborate I’ve seen recently. When you scroll the site plays out like a video game going through different levels to show skill levels and content. The illustrations are bright and remind me a bit of video games I used to play with my brother as a kid. I like the subtle details put in like the bubbles when underwater and the timed animations. Overall a fun idea.
–Brittany
As I get excited to go see the new Despicable Me movie tomorrow, I give you a Pure CSS Minion. I’ve been seeing a lot of great examples of what you can do with CSS beyond styling text these days. Another example to check out is Logos in Pure CSS, where each of the logo images hover over the CSS example to show how much the shapes match up. Only the Github logo seems like one little shape on the tail is missing. Pretty impressive overall I think.
-Brittany
I can’t say like the girl in the beginning of this video I wanted to be a mermaid growing up, but I never knew I wanted to work in software till much later. I started by working on a lot of small website projects. It wasn’t until I came to Seattle and tasked to start building prototypes when I really started to love it. Learning how to code is empowering. Having amazing mentors for me has been everything. It’s all about solving problems. Big complex puzzles that ultimately have an answer, you just need to take the time to find it.
“You don’t need to be a genius to learn how to code, just determined.”
Vanessa – created Girl Develop It
It’s not hard, just at first glance it may appear that way because it’s unfamiliar. Ever enjoy the Where’s Waldo Books? Trying to fix an error is sometimes like finding Waldo, but instead of a guy wearing a winter hat and striped shirt Waldo is a missing semicolon ; something so small, but makes a big difference. When things work just how it was planned, it’s magic. -Brittany
Above video is how Code.org is growing computer programming education.
