24 Ways to impress your friends

24 12/2011 Crafting the Front-end

Ben Bodien fosters seasonal goodwill with his sparkling vision of web workers as dedicated craftspeople: understanding and sharpening the tools of our trade; appreciating the challenges, nuances and responsibilities of our craft; and instinctively knowing when something just works. Hope and joy for the new year!

Impress your friends with your webcraft apprenticeship

23 12/2011 There’s No Formula for Great Designs

Andy Clarke re-examines the formula used to convert static to fluid grids, and describes how he adapts it within his own custom grids to maintain connectedness in designs across devices. Like great design, there’s a perfect Christmas out there somewhere, but there’s no formula for it.

Impress your friends with your fluid connectedness

22 12/2011 From Side Project to Not So Side Project

Elliot Jay Stocks meditates on the success of 8 Faces and the delicate balance of passion and profitability that he strives for. New years can inspire new adventures: is it time to set out on yours?

Impress your friends with your passionate projects

21 12/2011 Taming Complexity

Simon Collison wonders why we sometimes sacrifice powerful complexity in the name of empty simplicity. To create engaging experiences with loyal communities we should embrace and tame complexity. Easier than Christmas with your in-laws, surely?

Impress your friends with your complexity complex

20 12/2011 Raising the Bar on Mobile

Scott Jehl unties the ribbon on his cross-browser method of clearing away the address bar from small mobile screens to make more room for your design. So clear a space under the tree and on your phone for more Christmas pixels.

Impress your friends with your address bar toggling

19 12/2011 Going Both Ways

Jonathan Snook saddles up to take us on a whirlwind tour of the world of bidirectional documents. “What’s left to write about internationalisation?” you may ask. Allow Jonathan, if you will, to offer you some festive words of direction.

Impress your friends with your change in direction

18 12/2011 Getting the Most Out of Google Analytics

Matt Curry demystifies some of the more complex and powerful reporting functions of Google Analytics from page goals to event tracking and beyond into custom reports and multichannel attribution. With the mounting stress of Christmas, we all need a bit of analysis.

Impress your friends with your flair for web statistics

17 12/2011 Designing for Perfection

Greg Wood confesses to student kitchen rage and abandons his pursuit of that goal – perfection – impossible in our agile, fast-moving, rapidly iterating milieu. The perfect Christmas dinner, however, remains a worthwhile ambition.

Impress your friends with your appropriate embrace of imperfection

16 12/2011 CSS3 Patterns, Explained

Lea Verou unlocks the mysteries of CSS background gradients and investigates how they can be used more creatively to replace images. You’ll soon rather be throwing shapes at work than the Christmas party dance floor.

Impress your friends with your CSS pattern recognition

15 12/2011 Extracting the Content

Relly Annett-Baker, everyone’s friendly Alien Overlord, powers up the Humongous Mechanoid of Content to wreak carefully planned strategic Christmas on your web projects. And this time next year, you’ll all be asking for page tables as stocking fillers.

Impress your friends with your mighty morphin content strategy

14 12/2011 Design the Invisible to Tell Better Stories on the Web

Robert Mills gathers us round the fireplace to listen to his story of the invisible elements of design. Such intangible effects deserve our attention, or the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come will pay us an unwelcome visit…

Impress your friends with your never-ending storytelling

13 12/2011 Your jQuery: Now With 67% Less Suck

Scott Kosman administers an optimizing shot in the arm to your seasonally sluggish jQuery with some simple ways to improve performance. Get your jQuery running so fast that Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen will struggle to keep up.

Impress your friends with your jQuery's super speed

12 12/2011 Displaying Icons with Fonts and Data- Attributes

Jon Hicks slips the lambswool cardy of minimal markup beneath the stout tweed of CSS to discuss the elegant and practical potential of icon web fonts. Make simple, scalable icons on links, buttons and menu bars the port to your site’s stilton this Christmas.

Impress your friends with your data-icon attributes

11 12/2011 Nine Things I've Learned

Mike Kus rummages inside his sack of personal design experience and pulls out nine gifts to share with us. From finding reasons to stay motivated, to thinking in new ways and overcoming creative block, there’s enough food for thought for all the twelve days of Christmas.

Impress your friends with your designerly self-awareness

10 12/2011 Context First: Web Strategy in Four Handy Ws

Alex Morris flips open his well-thumbed journalist’s notebook to approach web projects through four powerful lines of enquiry that can set your product’s strategy on the right track. “Winter? Wonderland? Wellies?” Stop right there. “Wassail?” Oh, dear.

Impress your friends with your questioning mind

9 12/2011 Composing the New Canon: Music, Harmony, Proportion

Owen Gregory raises his baton and conducts an extended exploration of some simple musical principles and their relevance to modern web design practice. TL;DR? It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that Yuletide swing.

Impress your friends with your antiphonal geometry

8 12/2011 Adaptive Images for Responsive Designs… Again

Jake Archibald scratches the responsive images itch with a client-side riposte to Matt Wilcox’s server-side solution. Christmas is all about giving and receiving, after all.

Impress your friends with your server- and client-side equipoise

7 12/2011 Front-end Style Guides

Anna Debenham spruces up your workflow by surveying the snow-strewn field of web style guides, and explaining how to tie them up nicely with a bow for the benefit of you, your faithful team of developer huskies, and your ever-loving clients.

Impress your friends with your guidelines that keep on giving

6 12/2011 Defending the Perimeter Against Web Widgets

Rich Thornett lowers the portcullis and raises the drawbridge to fend off downtime caused by third-party widgets on your site. So let in light and banish shade this Christmas with some robust defensive scripting.

Impress your friends with your fail-safe widget wrangling

5 12/2011 Collaborative Development for a Responsively Designed Web

Paul Robert Lloyd unfurls his seraph wings to proclaim peace on Earth and the importance of goodwill between designers and developers. It’s not the office Secret Santa that unites them, but constant contact and shared appreciation of different skills.

Impress your friends with your mutual understanding

4 12/2011 Adaptive Images for Responsive Designs

Matt Wilcox regales us with an in-depth explanation of his Adaptive Images technique, showing how we can serve an appropriate size of image to web devices without altering our <img> markup. Secret magic and bottled pixie dreams? Almost.

Impress your friends with your on-the-fly image rescaling

3 12/2011 Subliminal User Experience

Chris Sealey sweats the sometimes imperceptible details of user experience by looking closely at some finer points of interface design. At Christmas, it’s decorations and mistletoe that should be left hanging, not the user.

Impress your friends with your attention to unconscious detail

2 12/2011 Conditional Loading for Responsive Designs

Jeremy Keith loads up his sleigh this year with a nifty mobile-first approach that responds to onscreen conditions. So, no matter the size of your Christmas stocking, there’s something the right size to fill it.

Impress your friends with your delayed gratification

1 12/2011 Creating Custom Font Stacks with Unicode-Range

Drew McLellan dazzles us with the creative typographic possibilities of unicode-range, a little-used property of @font-face declarations. More than just a unloved bauble on the CSS Christmas tree, unicode-range can extend a site’s typography in useful and eye-catching ways.

Impress your friends with your Unicode code points