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Design Focus: Animate.js

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Check out these dynamically designed sites that all happen to be JavaScript conferences.

Designs of the Week

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Nordic.js
Nordic.js

Wingdings is that you? There are a lot of “back-to-basics” making their way into website designs these days, like the bright blue and the pixelated, low-resolution images, and on top of that it’s the famous symbol font whose glyphs are gliding through a 3-dimensional stream. Even the circular shadowed bullets are used as markers for the carousel.

JSConf Budapest
JSConf Budapest

Quite the elegant triangle animation in the header that lets you interact with it too. I also like that the speaker avatars have their corners cut off in the shape of triangles too.

Dinosaurjs
Dinosaurjs

Also greets you with this cool glitchy effect applied to a block of code, this site is probably the kookiest of all with its oversized cursors and headings. I also like the black and white not just as a color scheme but as a negative filter when the text scrolls through the edges.

Social Media Weekly

Design – Design debugging
“Developers typically split the task of finding issues from building a project for wider release. These modes are often called debug and release. I think designers should take a similar approach.”

CSS – Flexbox Patterns
“Flexbox is awesome, but it introduces many new concepts that can make it difficult to use. These interactive examples will show you practical ways to use it to build UI components. They start out simple and get more complex near the end. You can start using these patterns in your own code right away, though I recommend you apply accessibility best practices to the markup (like using semantic HTML5 elements).”

Design – The Way We Build
“This process led us to the development of our new Design Language System (or DLS), as well as a suite of internal and third-party tools that allow our teams to not only work smarter, but also closer. The DLS is a collection of components defined by shared principles and patterns. This allows for rapid iteration using a shared vocabulary across design, engineering, and other disciplines. The structure of the DLS is simple and coherent, easing communication across teams.”

Build on DIYThemes’ Thesis Framework for rock solid SEO and great layout customization options.

Smart and Easy Remote Web Conferencing

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The ability for teams to communicate with each other has grown rapidly in the past decade. We can find examples all over the Internet which provide companies a method of teleconferencing meetings and tutorials. You can even locate fun examples online related to technology and educational speakers from around the world.

I think a good place to start is by asking what is a webinar? The explanation is a web-based seminar – something that can teach and educate listeners directly from the web. Lectures, workshops, keynote speeches, and similar events will all work perfectly as webinars. One important aspect is that webinars allow viewers to share data back and forth with each other. This is not simply a static video stream, but it offers dynamic interactions from team members.

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Friday Focus 12/26/08: Attention-Grabbing Headers

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Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas celebration! This Friday we’re going to look at whimsical, chaotic, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink headers that will certainly grab your attention.

Designs of the Week

Webdesigner Depot

One of the big questions you have to answer when dealing with more “chaotic” designs is, how do you control the viewer’s eye movement? The site title on the header is pretty easy to find, actually, but I wish the header were a little more useful and contained a navigation menu, for starters.

Patagonia Creative

Huge header alert! Again, I wish it had something a little more useful with the amount of space it is taking up. A tagline maybe. The list of services at the upper right could have been a little bigger as well.

Candy Candy Jewellery

What a cute header—I love the spinning wheel of hearts, it looks like an otherworldly ferris wheel! And it matches the quirky jewelry designs this site is selling. Might have a little too much pink for some people, though. A dash of contrasting colors could make it better.

Vakendod

And now for something surreal, bordering on the creepy! I like how unusual this site looks. Unfortunately there’s this empty part in the middle that gets filled only when you select something from the menu. I’m all for whitespace, but the about text is already at the footer.

Social Media Weekly

Design – 5 Inspiring Web Design Conference Speeches you Shouldn’t Have Missed in 2008
You may not have attended these conferences, so here’s your chance to learn from the masters of web design.

Programming – Top 10 Web Platforms of 2008
Which web platform should you be developing for?

Conferences and Confluence

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Recently, I was at the Northern Voice conference in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia Canada, where I was able to meet up with people from a variety of different backgrounds. It got me wondering about how each conference brings in different groups of people, and how the best conferences are the ones that have a blurry line between different groups and specialties.

At Northern Voice there were people that ranged from just starting out with blogging all the way up to blogging as a full time job. Some didn’t know what tagging was, and others couldn’t stand software that didn’t allow them to use WordPress’ native tagging.

It reminded me that the gap between those that are just starting out and those that understand every nook and cranny of the growing industry that is online media. I think far too many of us are concentrating on talking about the end result, instead of teaching others how to gracefully enter the different arenas they are interested in.

If you want to capture some attention online, some of the biggest questions at the event were:

  • How do I change themes in WordPress? This includes changing header graphics, and sidebar items.
  • How can I learn to theme WordPress?
  • What are the best tools to monetize my blog?
  • How do I use tools like Flickr, Stumble Upon, Youtube to improve my blog?
  • I know PHP, but how do I make this into a WordPress plugin?
  • Should I start a blog, or is it too late?

As a developer, designer and blogger, these different questions could make great posts that would appeal to the growing group of new bloggers looking to make their mark on the world. If we take a step back, and take the time to answer these questions, we could quickly become the resource used by bloggers looking to answer these questions.

Bringing large groups of people together, from a variety of skill sets and backgrounds was interesting, but I think it is the knowledge shared between everyone that was the most amazing part of the event.

What conferences have you attended, and what did you think of them? Let me know in the comments below.

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