Amazon Redesign
I especially like the new oversized search bar and hidden departments. Even the Shop By Department dropdown is simple and slick. The more monochromatic color palette highlights products and features, which is nice, but it also makes ads stand out more — hmmm, maybe I should switch to Valvoline.
Seems to still be rolling out, even our office gets mixed results when trying to view the update.
Watch Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam explain how he creates his famous cut-out animations.
(via KC Green on Twitter)
(Source: youtube.com)
Yesterday Vimeo unveiled its PRO account for businesses. They’ve had a long-standing policy against commercial videos on the site, though many have slipped past the radar if they were creative or artistic enough. Now they welcome business accounts, but with a catch:
Vimeo PRO lives as a separate service — invisible to the Vimeo.com world…. Vimeo PRO accounts do not have access to the Vimeo community by default, meaning PRO accounts’ activity and videos will not show up on Vimeo.com, and they do not have the ability to like or comment. We’ve taken this step to keep commercial content hidden and maintain the current Community Guidelines.
Commercial videos are housed in customizable portfolio pages, and the Vimeo player can be fully customized to your liking (including company logo). But the message seems clear: Pay us to host your commercial videos, but don’t mess with the incredible community we’ve cultivated.
I think it’s a bold, austere approach, and it’s the right one. I plan on becoming a PRO user myself, but I would hate for that to trample the Vimeo community — one of the most respected creative communities anywhere online.
by me via flickr.
The service tells the story. Delightfully.
/via @carson
I really enjoyed this fantastic behind-the-scenes video from caricaturist John Kascht showing his approach to drawing Conan O’Brien.
(Link via Ricardo Latorre)
Thanks to co-worker, Will, I now can spare myself some of the pain of dealing with pulling elements out of a 1GB+ PSD.
Normally, I would have to isolate a button/photo/whatever in a design screen and flatten/merge layers just so that I could crop it without taking 5 minutes. But, then I need to get some more objects in the design. So, undo a few times or revert to the Open state (waiting…) and repeat (more waiting…).
But now, all I have to do is make my marquee or selection on the object and as long as there aren’t any funky “designery-things” I can simply Cmd+Shift+C and it copies everything visible in that selection. If the object has straight edges, just open a new document, paste and Save for Web in all it’s glory. If it has some roundedness, you might be out of luck; unless it doesn’t need to have a perfect alpha edge, then just matte and GIF it.
Hope this helps someone besides me. BTW, I’m on a Mac, so I’d imagine just replace the Cmd with Ctrl for the PC users.
The goal of this technique is to deliver optimized, contextual image sizes for responsive layouts that utilize dramatically different image sizes at different resolutions. Ideally, this approach will allow developers to start with mobile-optimized images in their HTML and specify a larger size to be used for users with larger screen resolutions — without requesting both image sizes, and without UA sniffing.
jQuery is fast becoming a must-have skill for front-end developers. The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of the jQuery JavaScript library; when you’re done with the book, you should be able to complete basic tasks using jQuery, and have a solid basis from which to continue your learning. This book was designed as material to be used in a classroom setting, but you may find it useful for individual study.
Tempest Freerunning Academy promo
(via Wuori)
jQuery plugin to support some neat image transitions.
(via Joe)
Install helpers/packages into a CodeIgniter2 app for quick integration.
(via Zack)
A reverse of traditional responsive design. Starting sites from small mobile pages to normal full desktop displays.
