Viget Inspire

We are certainly at an interesting point in time with the web. There are new techniques being created every day, and as developers, we have the privilege of deciding how and when to use them. I'm the new guy at Viget (only been here a few weeks), and every company is different, so it is interesting adapting to Viget's standards. Some companies utilize progressive enhancement more than others, and I love that we utilize it when we can.

One big item for me is how much we use CSS3. Yes I know, it is not fully supported across all browsers. If you still want everything to look exactly the same across all browsers, you should probably just close this article and not read about CSS for another 10 years. A user is not going to pull up your site in two different browsers to compare the experience, so they won't even know what they are missing. Just because something is not fully supported, that does not mean that we can't use it to an extent. In this article I'll show you some practical uses for CSS3.

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I recently had a chance to implement a custom design for a Shopify storefront. This was my first time using the e-commerce site, but Shopify's known to be easy to customize and work with, so I was excited to dive in and take on the challenge. I was ready for Mount Everest or Iditarod levels of difficulty; Triathalon-hard at least. But luckily, Shopify makes customizing a shop's design very easy even for the less-than code savvy like myself, and its customizing tools make the process as painless as possible.

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Are you looking for that perfect gift for an artsy loved one? Or your brother in-law who wears skinny jeans and is always on his iPhone? Or maybe even your Grandmother who's looking to spice up her social life? Look no further. I've compiled a list of ten fabulous design related t-shirts that is so good it will make you want to sing the intro to the Lion King... TWICE.

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In my "Breaking Bad Habits in Photoshop" post, I briefly talked about Photoshop's Smart Objects. It seems like many designers are still ignoring them. Maybe you're confused about how and when to use them, or too ingrained in your existing ways of doing things to explore. I sympathize. But whatever the excuse, if you aren't using Smart Objects for your comps you're missing out. They are an easy way to save yourself from tedious maintenance tasks in your Photoshop docs. Keep reading for ideas on speeding up your workflow with smart use of Smart Objects.

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Ah, the holiday season has arrived. This past weekend in Washington, DC we saw our first snow of the season blanket the area. This of course leads to an instantaneous rush (and complete loss of sanity) to the market for toilet-paper, milk/eggnog, and whisky. With the mad rush to prepare for various holiday traditions, a fury of frantic activity settles into the DC area. Traffic accidents go through the roof, air-travel becomes a nightmare, and shopping for anything, anywhere, anytime, becomes a mammoth feat of personal self restraint.

Continue reading "The Winter Scrooge: A Design Reading List"

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I'm so excited about Amy Martin's design style I can hardly contain myself. I happened to be image-Googling "retro-futurism" as research for an upcoming project and one of her posters showed up in the search. A few clicks later, I've developed a designer crush the size of Pangaea.

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From time to time creatives in our field are bound to run low on creative juice. Like many others, I've recently felt my brain needing a good creative spark to get going. I started looking for a couple of outlets that would give me this creative spark with some requirements in mind: something I could do fairly quickly and preferably away from the computer screen. I wanted to get back to the basics of being creative.

As luck would have it, I came across "Caffeine for the Creative Mind: 250 Exercises to Wake Up Your Brain" by by Stefan Mumaw and Wendy Lee Oldfield.

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