24 Ways to impress your friends

24 12/2009 Make Your Mockup in Markup

Meagan Fisher tackles the issue of designing in the browser head on by looking at some of the practicalities of ditching Photoshop and setting your foundations markup. Sorry Photoshop, it’s not me, it’s you.

Impress your friends with your browser-based beginnings

23 12/2009 Ignorance Is Bliss

Andy Clarke shares a case study highlighting the benefits of progressively enhanced web design. Ever wondered how to convince your clients to let you use cutting edge web techniques? It may be simpler than you think.

Impress your friends with your happy clients

22 12/2009 Real Fonts and Rendering: The New Elephant in the Room

Jeffrey Zeldman steps back and takes a long hard look at the issue of cross-platform web font rendering quality. It can feel like Christmas morning with the array of font options available – but are we opening Pandora’s box?

Impress your friends with your well-considered caution

21 12/2009 Make Out Like a Bandit

Jina Bolton encourages us to stop and take stock and make sure that we’re getting the most out of all the work we’re putting in. Does your work make you happy, and if not, how do we change things for the better?

Impress your friends with your enjoyment of work

20 12/2009 Cleaner Code with CSS3 Selectors

Rachel Andrew illustrates how, as more modern browsers come online, CSS3 selectors can be used to get some of the junk out of our front and back-end code, and how JavaScript can be used to provide a fall back for older browsers.

Impress your friends with your lean clean markup

19 12/2009 Spruce It Up

Jonathan Snook picks up our theme of font embedding with some ideas on how to reduce font download sizes and load time to lessen the impact of the Flash Of Unstyled Text. The less flashing the better, if you ask me.

Impress your friends with your featherweight fonts

18 12/2009 A Pet Project is For Life, Not Just for Christmas

Elliot Jay Stocks thinks you should have a pet project on the go, and dammit if he’s not about to tell you why. Of course, this very site is a pet project which is explicitly just for Christmas, but we’re prepared to overlook that. As you were.

Impress your friends with your bit on the side

17 12/2009 The Web Is Your CMS

Christian Heilmann uses the Yahoo! Query Language to assert that we already have a content management system in the form of the web. YQL unifies interfaces and combines requests to make working with APIs much easier.

Impress your friends with your easy API access

16 12/2009 Designing For The Switch

Mark Boulton uncovers some ugly truths about font embedding on the web, but being the nice chap that he is, doesn’t leave without teaching us all how we can overcome them through careful typeface selection.

Impress your friends with your carefully chosen font stacks

15 12/2009 CSS Animations

Tim Van Damme continues our advanced CSS theme by introducing what can be done in Webkit browsers when things start to get animated. Get ready to put some motion in your ocean.

Impress your friends with your natty animations

14 12/2009 Going Nuts with CSS Transitions

Natalie Downe segues seamlessly onto the subject of CSS 3 transforms and transitions with some examples of how a little CSS magic and a modern browser can bring what might otherwise be a flat layout to life.

Impress your friends with your subtle transitions

13 12/2009 Rock Solid HTML Emails

David Greiner offers invaluable insight into building HTML emails. Just like HTML for the web, email requires an intimate understanding of the software used to view your work. Allow Dave to share from his wealth of experience.

Impress your friends with your inbox mastery

12 12/2009 Self-Testing Pages with JavaScript

Ross Bruniges demonstrates a way JavaScript can be used during the development phase to highlight errors in the markup as they occur. By constructing simple tests you can spot problems fast and fix them before they become an issue.

Impress your friends with your error-free work

11 12/2009 Incite A Riot

Jeremy Keith issues a call to arms over how passages of dialogue are marked up in HTML, and more specifically, in HTML5. Stand firm, good designers and developers of the web, and don’t let poorly worded specs lead the people astray!

Impress your friends with your semantically sound dialogue

10 12/2009 A New Year's Resolution

Mike Kus get us fired up with some ideas on how to think beyond the web when embarking on a new project. Inspiration is often hard to come by – learn how not to fall into the trap of churning out another identical web design.

Impress your friends with your inspirational design

9 12/2009 Don't Lose Your :focus

Patrick H. Lauke returns our focus to accessibility, and in particular to styling sites to be usable by visitors browsing with something other than a mouse. All this, whilst still maintaining aesthetic appeal.

Impress your friends with your razor-sharp focus

8 12/2009 The Construction of Instruction

Relly Annett-Baker turns our minds to the oft-neglected subject of website copy, and how the small things you say can have a big impact on your customers, revenues, fame, fortune and luck with the opposite sex.

Impress your friends with your dazzling microcopy

7 12/2009 Type-Inspired Interfaces

Dan Mall shows us one technique to combat blank-page syndrome by demonstrating how design inspiration can be taken from the typefaces we use. So put down your pencils, reach for your composing stick and let the type do the talking.

Impress your friends with your lettering-led labours

6 12/2009 Front-End Code Reusability with CSS and JavaScript

Trevor Morris runs us through how JavaScript can be designed to take its configuration directly from your markup. Using the model of a jQuery plugin, learn how adding a simple class name can control how your code functions.

Impress your friends with your reusable code

5 12/2009 HTML5: Tool of Satan, or Yule of Santa?

Bruce Lawson takes us a little further down the rabbit hole of HTML5. This week we’ve seen a glimpse of some of the great stuff coming, but how much of it can we start using right away? Luckily we have Bruce on hand to explain.

Impress your friends with your production-ready HTML5

4 12/2009 What makes a website successful? It might not be what you expect!

Paul Boag challenges us to think about what makes our sites successful, which has interesting implications on how resources are spent. I once asked my aunt what makes her Christmas pud successful, and when I found out I never ate there again.

Impress your friends with your successful websites

3 12/2009 Have a Field Day with HTML5 Forms

Inayaili de León introduces some of the new form field types available in HTML5, and then goes on to look at some more advanced CSS3 techniques which can be used to keep your forms looking sharp and ship shape.

Impress your friends with your fields of dreams

2 12/2009 Breaking Out The Edges of The Browser

Remy Sharp takes us by the hand and guides us through our first steps into the web applications side HTML5 with a look at web storage and offline applications. You’ll need a nice modern browser and some Kendal Mint Cake.

Impress your friends with your cunning offline endeavours

1 12/2009 Working With RGBA Colour

Drew McLellan kicks off our 2009 season with a look at some of the tools CSS3 provides for applying levels of transparency to colour values, enabling you to avoid weighing down a site design with heavy PNG images.

Impress your friends with your voguish hints and hues