Glenn Fleishman:

At an increasing number of publications, [curly quotes have] been ironed straight. This may stem from a lack of awareness on the part of website designers or from the difficulty in a content-management system (CMS) getting the curl direction correct every time. It may also be that curly quotes’ time has come and gone.

I know it’s highly uncool in this community to get quotes wrong and highly cool to remind people how to type them. I’m on the uncool side of the fence on this one. I go so far as to standardize on straight quotes on this site. I’m not worried about the encoding, but laziness is some part of it. It’s a weird key command (? [) especially for coders who are so used to straight quotes being required. Not to mention a different key command for the closing version (e.g. ? ? ]), and both are even harder on any non-macOS system). Straight quotes of both varieties have a dedicated key.

You know what is a cool-these-days sentiment? The fact that language evolves, including written language. I’m not anti-curly-quotes, I just don’t care. If you’d like to write in straight quotes, but publish in curly quotes because “algorithmically, it’s a solved problem”, be my guest. Perhaps written English, on the web, has evolved to “whatever, either way”. Oooooo look at that period outside the straight quotes. I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

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Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes? is a post from CSS-Tricks

New year, new beginnings! To cater for a fresh start into 2017 and all the challenges, endeavors and adventures it might bring along, artists and designers from across the globe put their creative skills to the test and created unique desktop wallpapers for you to indulge in.

This monthly wallpapers mission has been going on for eight years now, and we are very thankful to all the creative minds who contribute to it tirelessly each month anew. Today’s wallpapers all come in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free. Happy New Year!

The post Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: January 2017 appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

Blind faith

Jealous designer

New rotary

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

Source

While designing a landing page, poster, presentation or just an image for your blog, there are always certain things you need to highlight. In this case, a proper typeface could be really helpful. If you want to make an impact and get people’s attention, you need to use huge bold headline fonts. Even bold font may have its own personality: elegant, light, funny, energetic or serious.

In this list we have put together 20 bold free headline fonts. To download the font you need to go to the primary source, so make sure to read a licence of the font before using it.

Intro Condensed Free

LIBERATOR

PIER

DUAL typeface

AXIS Typeface

Bushcraft Font Family

Billy

Berlin

Jaapokki

ACHI FONT ($5)

JACK Font ($10)

Panama

Barry Free Font

Natasha

Dense

Oduda

Origicide

REKLAME SCRIPT

Biko Font Family

ONTWERP

Read More at 20 Bold Free Headline Fonts

2017 is right around the corner and people are making some interesting predictions regarding typography.
“Gone were the days when the digital sphere is very reluctant on using flashy typography on websites. As one of the most powerful and straightforward ways to create brand personality and tone, expect that more brands will take advantage of over-sized and hand-drawn typography on their websites this 2017.”

To be honest, that doesn’t surprise me. I’ve read a gazillion articles with tips and tricks for using typography in branding, and almost every single one contained this advice. “Use hand-drawn fonts to give your brand a human touch”

However, while designing a landing page, poster, presentation or just an image for your blog, there are always certain things you need to highlight, and a hand-drawn font might now always do the trick. In this case, a proper typeface could be really helpful. If you want to make an impact and get people’s attention, you need to use huge bold headline fonts. Even bold font may have its own personality: elegant, light, funny, energetic or serious.

In this list we have put together 20 bold free headline fonts. To download the font you need to go to the primary source, so make sure to read a licence of the font before using it. Also, we’ve rounded up a few amazing helvetica alternatives that you should deffinitley check out.

Intro Condensed Free

LIBERATOR

PIER

DUAL typeface

AXIS Typeface

Bushcraft Font Family

Billy

Berlin

Jaapokki

ACHI FONT ($5)

JACK Font ($10)

Panama

Barry Free Font

Natasha

Dense

Oduda

Origicide

REKLAME SCRIPT

Biko Font Family

ONTWERP

Read More at 20 Amazing Free Headline Fonts You Must Use In 2017

Those not completely familiar with Samsung’s Galaxy S7 smartphones may not have heard about Gear VR, the company’s mobile virtual reality headset. Users wearing the Gear VR get to utilize their phone as their display and processor, but the Gear VR unit is the controller.

Different iterations of the headset have been released to good reviews, so users will be excited to know that the latest release of the Oculus-powered app that controls the experience comes with an improved browsing experience.

According to a news release on Samsung’s Newsroom, version 4.2 helps users get greater control and a more immersive experience.

All this is centered on one of the biggest improvements in the browser, which is support for WebVR 1.0. This is the premier iteration of the VR web browser standard that’s been developed by Mozilla and Google. As far as users are concerned, they’ll experience this improvement by now being able to look at 3D images and streaming VR content more easily on the device.

Another big change is the ability to alter the background of their VR environment, courtesy of the aptly named Change Background feature. High-quality images are provided in-app, so users just have to make the selection for the background they desire. Thanks to VR tech, these vivid scenes infuse more depth than ever to a user’s browsing experience, which has the effect of bringing them to an environment that’s realistic enough to stimulate the interest for exploration.

The end result of this update is a far richer browsing experience. When you include the Skybox feature, which was added to Gear VR in an earlier update, users get to enjoy a truly immersive way of browsing.

One last feature should also have a positive impact on users’ browsing habits.

The File Explorer feature gives users the chance to both seamlessly browse and view videos and pictures on their mobile devices or USB storage, thanks to the USB OTG (on the go) support tool.

All of these updates should be considered in conjunction with other, powerful Gear VR features like:

• Voice-recognition support
• An on-screen keyboard that includes 11 languages (among them English, Korean and French)
• Bluetooth-device integration (mouse, keyboard, gamepad)

Together, version 4.2 now offers users a very comprehensive, immersive experience to explore and browse the most interesting content on the Internet.

What has always made Gear VR stand out is how it allows users to experience the web as if they were watching a movie in a theater. The big, virtual screen—now made richer with these improvements—is a key component of this experience.

80 Unique Custom-Made Abstract Paintings – only $21!

Source

In macOS, users have the ability to set when they want to see scrollbars in windows. This affects all windows in the operating system, including in web browsers. They have three choices:

• Automatically based on mouse or trackpad
• When scrolling
• Always

Which means you are either in a state where you see them all the time, or a state where you only see them once scrolling has been started through some other means.

The Always option is pretty straightforward. If the window needs scrolling, the scroll bar will be there. If not, it won’t be. If the scrollbar is there, it squishes the page inward to make room for it. Here’s an example where a page goes from needing scrolling to not needing it with the Always setting on:

This is different than the When scrolling option, in which the scrollbar overlaps the content. Here’s an example of that:

These screenshots are the reason I was thinking about this at all. We had a user write in at CodePen because they couldn’t click that notifications icon. Before I added some extra space to prevent that overlapping, some coverage was possible:

Exacerbated by the fact that this user would zoom out, making the target even smaller, to the point it would be totally consumed:

This is only really a consideration with clickable things hugging the right side of the page. If it’s ever a problem for you, adding some padding over there is likely good enough. Or make the clickable area not confined to that narrow of a target. Here in the WordPress admin, some overlap is possible, but the clickable area is big enough that it doesn’t matter:

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Designing for “Show scroll bars” is a post from CSS-Tricks

News to me! There is a spec for it and Firefox says then intend to ship it. It’s just like display: block; only:

It always establishes a new block formatting context for its contents.

Meaning: you don’t have to use clearfix hacks. There is a bit more to it though. Fiona Chan has a mini-talk all about block formatting context. I think it affects z-index and transforms in some cases too. Anybody?

I suspect Nicole Sullivan will approve. She’s been writing and talking about new formatting contexts forever. In 2010 she even wrote:

I wish we had a simple property value pair that would do the same thing in standards-based browsers.

.lastUnit {
  formatting-context: new; /* please! */
}

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

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display: flow-root; is a post from CSS-Tricks

We have all encountered names that are difficult to pronounce. Having a challenging name myself, I get different pronunciations of my first name, Atif, all the time. In order to solve my own naming problem, I built a Javascript plugin called Vocalizer. In this article, I will introduce what Vocalizer is and a few different ways to use it.

Earlier this year, I redesigned my portfolio website. During this process, I decided to add a feature that educated visitors on how to say my name. One day, I opened the “Voice Memos” app on my iPhone, tapped “Record”, and asked my wife to say my first name. Then, I embedded a small button onto the landing page after my first name. Clicking on that button would play the audio file of my name.

The post Improving The UX Of Names With Vocalizer.js appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Prototyping can be perfected, specified, exaggerated. If you simply need a functional, clickable mockup, the open source project „Pencil” could be entirely sufficient for you. In late summer, the RC of the new version 3 was released.

Pencil V3: Basic Mockup Abilities

At a glance, Pencil is attractive not only for its price. The product is completely free, yet available for Linux, Windows, and mac OS. It comes with UI sets for Android and iOS; clipart can be taken from the integrated OpenClipart.org interface. Aside from native apps for smartphones and other mobile devices, the tool is also suitable for web apps. Furthermore, Pencil is a solid alternative to Balsamiq.

Pencil allows you to create any number of pages that can be linked in different ways. The entire workflow functions via drag and drop. Thus, speaking of an intuitively usable solution is not an exaggeration. For Pencil, there are tons of collections with additional elements from the active community.

HTML is one of the available output formats, even allowing you to present the prototype live on the web. For version 3, Pencil was completely rewritten and has now grown out of the borders of a Firefox extension, which is what it was until now.

Apart from raw, and more refined mockups, Pencil can create flow diagrams, which could then be used for the logical presentation of the customer journey, or other procedures.

However, Pencil is not a good pick for using it in teams. There are no collaboration features at all. There is no integration of cloud applications, like Dropbox, either. Thus, it will never be able to go to toe with larger solutions, such as InVision, and others. However, if you are the typical freelancing lone wolf, there’s no reason not to give Pencil a try, sparing your wallet.

Pencil is so simple that even John Doe from the marketing department can handle it, hack, even the boss can understand it. Maybe, this will help to find a common language for mutual communication 😉

You can download the release candidate on this website. For Windows, the download weighs 62 MB. Under Windows 10, the app works smoothly as well. Take a look for yourself. I expect you to stick with it.