It’s that time of the year when people all round the world gather in their homes, with their loved ones. They sing songs, consume beverages both warm and cold, and tell stories of the greatest portfolio sites they’ve ever seen. Then Jeffrey Zeldman comes down the chimney, hauling a bag full of books on usability.

How great would that be, if it were true?

This month’s theme is, if anything, the French. Well, a few of this month’s sites are French, anyway. Besides that, I’m seeing an upturn in the number of sites that divide the design in vertical halves, at least on the home page. Enjoy!

David Robert

I wasn’t kidding about the French. Our first entry is from David Robert, a French designer with a penchant for monochrome designs paired with minimalism. Okay, we’ve seen a lot of that lately, but it’s done well here, and the layout is atypical.

Plus, I kinda love the little “film-blur” effect applied to some text on hover. It’s kind of classic and grunge at the same time. Oh go look, it works.

Playful

Playful has yet another site that’s more presentation than site. They live up to their name, though, with lots of vibrant color and subtle animation.

The one thing I’d criticize is the way text is placed over images. It makes the text less-than-readable. You can steal good ideas from the rest of the site, though.

Christopher Hall

Christopher Hall is an interior and furniture designer. His site brings us some more of that “split-down-the-middle” design. In this case, it’s a form of categorization. His furniture is on the left, and his interiors are on the right.

Other pages stick with the two-column layout, if not the dimensions, tying the whole design together. From there on out, it’s all minimalist, serif-heavy goodness.

ueno

ueno combines beautifully-executed minimalism with a timeline layout for the portfolio. This is one you’ll be looking at just for the typography.

Made Together

Made Together starts off with a lot of solid blue, and some geometric shapes. This is almost a design style in its own right, these days.

From there, the site moves on to a familiar layout. The typography is eye-catching and feels perfect for the style of the site overall.

blackballoon

blackballoon gives us a proper dark website design. This is one of those sites that doesn’t make you worry about mundane things like “text” or “reading” very much. It’s all about the imagery, the animation, and the sheer sense of style. It works, too.

Standard

Standard is a video production studio that, as you may expect, depends on background video to start off their showcase. From there, you can browse through their videos, or through their rather massive list of directors. Take a look at this section especially,it’s quite stylish.

It’s got that now-typical presentation feel to it, but given the content, it works rather well.

Zengularity

Zengularity doesn’t do anything particularly out of the box, but everything is done quite well. Look at it for color ideas, typography, and general style.

Lundgren+Lindqvist

Lundgren+Lindqvist is one of those sties where you might feel like you’ve seen this before, but it’s still definitely “theirs”. It walks the line between minimalist and brutalist, with the occasional pixel-graphics touch.

I think I’m going to start calling this “low-fi minimalism”. I kind of like it.

Adam Widmanksi

Adam Widmanksi’s portfolio takes us far away from brutalism to deliver some of that post-modern minimalism that was all the rage earlier this year. Combining this with distinctive typography, striking images, and asymmetry, it’s a visual feast.

B14

B14 put a lot of thought, time, and effort into this modern design. But whatever impression they intended to make has been overshadowed by what may be the single greatest compliment my fianceé has ever given to a website: “Well, my grandma could read those letters.”

After that, I can’t bring myself to put in any other description. Usability is what it’s all about, people.

Nicolas Paries

Some websites go for a collage-like feel in their design. Nicolas Paries’ portfolio site almost feels like it’s an actual scrapbook. While that does make for reduced text legibility sometimes, it’s a refreshingly chaotic site experience. And yet, it’s still pretty usable.

Colin Simpson

Colin Simpson uses the now-classic single-column, full-width style of portfolio. What he does to stand out is make great use of skewed perspectives to show off his design work. Inside his case studies, he lays out the individual design elements in each project: the color palette, the typography, any custom elements, and even wireframes.

It gives you a lot of context for each project, and a few clues about how he works.

Daru Sim

Daru Sim uses a card-style UI to show off his portfolio in a masonry layout. When you consider just how well-suited a card-style UI is to a portfolio, I do kind of wonder why people don’t use it more.

João Amaro da Costa

João Amaro da Costa brings us a minimalist layout that manages to be responsive while still proving that “pixel-perfect” quality that everyone used to advertise about five years ago.

It may be flexible, but it is also meticulously executed, and it looks all the better for it.

Design Militia

Design Militia’s site is largely enterprise-looking, which makes sense, given their clients. A simple layout with dependable typography lands this site a spot in the article this month.

Metin Bilgin

Metin Bilgin’s site is a veritable smorgasbord of different styles with no apparent overarching theme. At least when you’re looking at the portfolio, the site’s style seems to change depending on which of his projects you’re looking at.

The rest of the site is minimalist, with the text-overlapping-other-elements style that we’ve all come to know.

LAST DAY: Art Text App for Mac Turns Text into a Masterpiece – only $19!

Source

There have been a couple of articles lately regarding fluid type.

Matt Smith (calling it “flexible type”):

My preferred approach for more flexible type is to calculate the font size based on the viewport height and width using the :root selector

Richard Rutter (calling it “Responsive Display Text”):

In one fell swoop you can set the size of a display heading to be proportional to the screen or browser width, rather than choosing from a scale in a series of media queries.

Both are all about leveraging viewport units to size type that doesn’t jump from size to size at breakpoints, but gracefully scales.

I’d highly recommend checking out Mike Riethmuller’s Fluid type though, which is nearly just as simple but allows for setting minimum and maximum sizes, which feels like the way to go for me.

I moved to fluid type on CodePen blogs recently and I love it. Notice we also stole Mike’s fluid modular scale as well. As in, on large screens, the size difference between h1-h6 is more dramatic, while on small screens that scales back, all fluidly.

“Fluid Type” i?n?s?p?i?r?e?d? stolen from @MikeRiethmuller now live on @CodePen blogs. Including “Fluid Modular Scale!” pic.twitter.com/0yJk8Iq8fR

— Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) October 27, 2016

A “CSS lock” is how Tim Brown calls those minimums and maximums, and he demonstrates it can be useful for line-height as well as font-size.

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That Fluid Type Stuff Again is a post from CSS-Tricks

? by Glen Maddern:

I don’t think most front-end developers are as comfortable as SVG as they should be. It’s one of the most powerful technologies available on the web.

He makes a very strong case for inline SVG, which I wholeheartedly agree with. This screen from the video does a nice job of that:

You could do worse in leveling up your SVG knowledge than picking up a copy of Practical SVG.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

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Why Inline SVG is Best SVG is a post from CSS-Tricks

With the holidays almost here and the new year already in sight, December is a time to slow down, an occasion to reflect and plan ahead. To help us escape the everyday hectic for a bit and sweeten our days with a delightful little surprise each day up to Christmas, the web community has assembled some fantastic advent calendars this year. They cater for a daily dose of web design and development goodness with stellar articles, inspiring experiments, and even puzzles to solve.

To make the choice of which ones to follow a bit easier, we collected a selection of advent calendars in this Quick Tip for you. No matter if you’re a front-end dev, UX designer, or content strategist, we’re certain you’ll find something to inspire you for the upcoming year. So prepare yourself a nice cup of coffee, cozy up in your favorite chair and, well, enjoy!

The post Tech Advent Calendars For Web Designers And Developers In 2016 appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Web components are an amazing new feature of the web, allowing developers to define their own custom HTML elements. When combined with a style guide, web components can create a component API, which allows developers to stop copying and pasting code snippets and instead just use a DOM element.

By using the shadow DOM, we can encapsulate the web component and not have to worry about specificity wars with any other style sheet on the page. However, web components and style guides currently seem to be at odds with each other.

The post Styling Web Components Using A Shared Style Sheet appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Imagine yourself surfing the web. You click on a link, wait for the page to load … Still loading? You lose patience, quit that page and try another link. This slow load time is a death knell for a website, particularly since today’s users are impatient and expect to access content quickly, regardless of device or location. As developer, you need to make sure the content – particularly images and videos – loads as fast as possible, in the best possible quality, to increase the chances of engaging users.

No matter where the users are located, delivering a fast, consistent web experience is critical to improving the user experience.

Improving the performance of images can significantly improve the page load time but is complicated, as you have to:

1. Minimize, or at least reduce, the number of bytes used to represent the content, and
2. Improve the efficiency of delivery, measured by availability, latency, and throughput.

To reduce the number of bytes a user has to download to view your images, you’ll have to serve the right version — resolution, format, and quality — of every image to every user.

Cloudinary already enables developers to upload one high-resolution copy of any image and then automatically adapt it, on the fly, to responsively deliver the picture to any device in any resolution or pixel density with the most optimal quality and encoding settings.

The next logical step is to make sure that the right version of the image gets delivered to the user with minimum possible latency. Content delivery networks (CDNs) enable you to move the content closer to the end-user to reduce the page-load time.

When it comes to evaluating a CDN, the latency, availability and reach matters. A single CDN solution might be “good enough.” But, on a global scale, one size does not always fit all.

CDN performance varies significantly across different regions, and performance can change continuously depending on the end-user ISP, time of access and content. You also have to factor in that each CDN could have outages or slow-down times.

Some CDNs offer a global coverage, while some offer faster invalidations. Some CDNs work well with live streaming; others specialize in security and DDoS protection.

So, why settle for a single CDN that “closely” matches most of your requirements, but makes you compromise on certain aspects that could negatively impact performance? Wouldn’t it be ideal to use the best features offered by a variety of CDNs?

The multi-CDN approach enables you to leverage a combined network of various CDN providers as a single comprehensive delivery solution. With this method, you can match different users to different CDN solutions based on their specific requirements.

Websites with truly global reach and scales – such as eBay, Netflix, Facebook, and others — have all adopted a multi-CDN strategy. While it offers significant performance benefits and improved reliability, the approach comes with challenges:

1. Integration of multiple CDN solutions can be time-consuming
2. Greater complexity of maintenance and administration
3. Total cost of ownership (multiple vendor contracts)
4. Operation overhead that can take the focus away from the core business

Cloudinary eliminates all these challenges by transparently combining the network of multiple CDN providers to operate as one large globally distributed network, improving the content availability and reach. For every user request, content will be served from the best performing or the most suitable source.

And using real-time monitoring and performance data, Cloudinary can dynamically switch between different CDN providers and networks to match the end-user characteristics, request by request.

Cloudinary manages the configuration sync, load balancing and the mapping between domains, so resource URLs don’t require any change. You can deliver content via multiple CDNs without any operational overhead – one console, one contract.

This makes it easy for you to efficiently deliver content to users across the globe — from Beijing to Boston, Singapore to Sao Paulo. Click here to learn more!

For all you freelancers out there, Jessica Hische has written some copy to help you articulate saying no to things you should be saying no to.

I’ve created this handy tool to help you say “no” to free and low-budget work and to help ask for more favorable contract terms before the start of a project.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

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Client Email Helper is a post from CSS-Tricks

My name is Mason Ellwood and I’m currently working on Flatiron School’s Online Full Stack Web Development Program. Each week, I’ll be writing about my experience, what I’m learning, and tips on learning to code.

When I started at Flatiron School, the last language I expected to start in was Ruby. Maybe it was different from my last approach to learning front-end development; which started out in design, HTML, CSS and then progressed from there as projects continued to progress in difficulty. But nope… Flatiron starts in Ruby.

When I sat through orientation, Avi touched on this, because I assume others had the same question.

He said basically, Ruby, as a programming language, is the simplest programming language to learn and the most fun to learn. A language where most keywords and values defined by the language closely resemble what the outcome will be, but dynamic enough to build and produce very powerful programs.

Developed by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto in the mid-1990’s, with his motto MINASWAN, or Matz is nice and so we are nice. He set out to develop a dynamic object-oriented language that was simple to understand and fun to write.

“Make Ruby natural, not simple, in a way that mirrors life.” – Matz

“Ruby is simple in appearance, but I very complex inside, just like our human bodies.” – Matz

Avi said that because of the way Ruby is displayed to the user, it is easy for most students to grasp quickly without the constant frustrations that come with other programming languages like Javascript. Avi continued to touch on what a program is and how to choose the best tool to accomplish the task.

A program is just a file on your computer filled with text, but the text has special syntax we call code. The programming language you are using defines the syntax of the code you are allowed to write. Then your programs are converted to machine code so that your computer can understand it.

You will either use compiled or interpreted languages dependant on the language. Compiled programs will be converted to machine code which can then run the program, unlike interpreted programs which will be interpreted and converted at run time.

Flatiron School starts off the in an intro to Ruby course which progressively teaches you the skills to write your own program – Tic Tac Toe. Once you set up with your learn.co IDE program, which is supplied to you by the school, you are basically ready to begin! Make sure you have your Github set up prior to beginning this school. Built into the learn.co IDE program is a auto authentication of your ssh keys with your Git repo, so setup is incredibly easy.

In learn.co IDE’s built in terminal you can then begin your first Ruby program, first always check which version of Ruby you are currently working in using ruby -v.

Lastly, title all Ruby files with the extension of filename.rb, this tells the interpreter what syntax you are going to use you write your program.

Thank you for reading. Next post will cover debugging Ruby, reading error messages, what is a Rspec file and how to set it up, and how to assign variables.

Read More at My Journey Of Learning Programming Through Flatiron School #2

My name is Mason Ellwood and I’m currently working on Flatiron School’s Online Full Stack Web Development Program. Each week, I’ll be writing about my experience, what I’m learning, and tips on learning to code.

When I started the Flatiron School, the last language I expected to start in was Ruby. Maybe it was different from my last approach to learning front-end development; which started out in design, HTML, CSS and then progressed from there as projects continued to progress in difficulty. But nope… Flatiron starts in Ruby.

When I sat through orientation, Avi touched on this, because I assume others had the same question.

He said basically, Ruby, as a programming language, is the simplest programming language to learn and the most fun to learn. A language where most keywords and values defined by the language closely resemble what the outcome will be, but dynamic enough to build and produce very powerful programs.

Developed by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto in the mid-1990’s, with his motto MINASWAN, or Matz is nice and so we are nice. He set out to develop a dynamic object-oriented language that was simple to understand and fun to write.

“Make Ruby natural, not simple, in a way that mirrors life.” – Matz

“Ruby is simple in appearance, but I very complex inside, just like our human bodies.” – Matz

Avi said that because of the way Ruby is displayed to the user, it is easy for most students to grasp quickly without the constant frustrations that come with other programming languages like Javascript. Avi continued to touch on what a program is and how to choose the best tool to accomplish the task.

A program is just a file on your computer filled with text, but the text has special syntax we call code. The programming language you are using defines the syntax of the code you are allowed to write. Then your programs are converted to machine code so that your computer can understand it.

You will either use compiled or interpreted languages dependant on the language. Compiled programs will be converted to machine code which can then run the program, unlike interpreted programs which will be interpreted and converted at run time.

The Flatiron school starts off the in an intro to Ruby course which progressively teaches you the skills to write your own program – Tic Tac Toe. Once you set up with your learn.co IDE program, which is supplied to you by the school, you are basically ready to begin! Make sure you have your Github set up prior to beginning this school. Built into the learn.co IDE program is a auto authentication of your ssh keys with your Git repo, so setup is incredibly easy.

In learn.co IDE’s built in terminal you can then begin your first Ruby program, first always check which version of Ruby you are currently working in using ruby -v.

Lastly, title all Ruby files with the extension of filename.rb, this tells the interpreter what syntax you are going to use you write your program.

Thank you for reading. Next post will cover debugging Ruby, reading error messages, what is a Rspec file and how to set it up, and how to assign variables.

Read More at My Journey Of Learning Programming Through Flatiron School #2

Steve Souders:

Comparing the ASYNC and DEFER waterfalls, we see that using DEFER makes DOM Interactive fire sooner and allows rendering to proceed more quickly.

Even though is more commonly seen in the wild, defer is typically preferable as they can never block other syncronous scripts, as well as load in predictable source order.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

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Prefer `defer` Over `async` is a post from CSS-Tricks