Design
A List Apart turns 10!
Congrats to the folks at A List Apart on their 10 year anniversary. It's one of the best web design knowledge resources around.
"When Google was little more than a napkin sketch and the first dot-com boom was not even a blip, we started a magazine for people who make websites. Celebrate A List Apart's first decade. Join Zeldman for a look back at the way we were—and why we were that way. Find out what we've done and who did it with us, peek into our process, and get a clue about what's next."
Two book reviews
It’s not every day that two books currently in my possession are reviewed one after another on the same site. Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street recently published a short review of The Art and Science of CSS and Simply Javascript, both published by Sitepoint. I purchased a PDF version of the former and have a hardcover of the latter and they’re beautiful books to look at. Anyway, check out the take-away from each review below:
With that in mind, reading The Art & Science of CSS will teach you how to use CSS to accomplish a number of useful design tasks, so I think it's worth its price unless you already know most of what there is to know about CSS.
Revisiting the sub-title of this book, I think the audience that will get the most out of it falls somewhere in between the novice and expert levels. To me it seems best suited for designers or developers with a decent knowledge of HTML and CSS and some familiarity with JavaScript. If that describes you, I can recommend Simply JavaScript.
On reading and current books
A few weeks ago, someone asked me to write a post about all the books in my bookshelf. The excuse I’m using for not writing that post is that the bookshelf in my room was moved to the basement last winter so I don’t have a bookshelf. Seriously though, the truth is that most of the books on said shelf were my university textbooks and honestly, who reads calculus and engineering economics textbooks unless they have to? Okay, to be fair, some people might and they’re probably way smarter than me so, good for them, hehe. There were some textbooks that I actually liked reading while I was in school (Labyrinth of Technology) but those are so few in number that I can’t remember them off-hand.
Actually, if you asked me about all the books I’ve read from cover-to-cover over the past year, I would say “none”. Casual yet meaningful reading is something I’ve seldom done in my life and is something I feel I’ve missed out on. Reading is important. Just reflect on the fact that Divine Revelation sent down to Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessing of Allah be upon him) started with the word ‘ikra (read).
So, in an effort to ramp up my meaningful reading, I’m starting off with some technical books. As mentioned in a previous post, I’ve great interest in web design (not to be confused with web development) and one of the most famous books on the subject is “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability” by Steve Krug. I got a hold of that book through work today and have started reading it with great anticipation. So far, it’s been a pleasant read and I hope it gets better and better with each passing page. “Simply Javascript” by Kevin Yank and Cameron Adams also arrived at work today and from what I’ve skimmed through, it looks like a good one too.
I hope to write a review of those books but don’t expect them anytime soon, hehe.
Typography, Layout and Colour
Admittedly, it’s been a little quiet here on my blog, with my previous posting taking place about three weeks ago. It’s not that I haven’t had topics to blog about, it’s just that I haven’t really had the enthusiasm to blog. Of course, another reason is that I’ve been lazy but not as much as you think.
Now that it’s been about a year since I’ve graduated from university, I’ve considered getting a Masters degree but have held off on it in an attempt to cater to my web design interests.
During my last year of my Computer Engineering degree, I started working with the Ruby on Rails framework and began to appreciate web design. That appreciation has stuck with me and I’ve had some time to enrich myself with some excellent web-design resources on the internet. I don’t want this to be a big post about what web design is or how passionate I am about it, I think it would be good to offer some background into it since I’ve brought it up.
Oftentimes, the terms web designer and web developer are used interchangeably. They are not the same thing. A web designer is someone who’s concerned with typography, layout, colour, usability and other such things whereas a web developer deals mainly with how a web application functions. It’s a pretty big difference and although I’m interested in developing web applications, I’ve found that my real interest lies in web design. I love reading about typography, layout, colour and usability and would like to get to know more about it. If you haven’t heard of these terms as they’re applied to the web, don’t worry, I intend on writing a post about each one of them at a later time. For now, I just wanted to get something on this blog since it’s been so long!
By the way, I’ve found some great web design resources over the past few days and intend on sharing them but in the meantime if you have a favourite site, don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments!