A gorgeous example of analog UI design. I love the blue colour used throughout and the presence that the knobs have.

The use of textures help to add depth to the overall design.

This design was featured on the Sunday 5th of February 2012. It falls under the category of Element, and has a layout style of Other.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

A simply brilliant re-imagining of the Carolina Panthers logo. Their most recent branding update has met some hostility, and I certainly prefer this.

I love the agression that's been captured, and the teeth!

This design was featured on the Sunday 5th of February 2012. It falls under the category of Logo, and has a layout style of Other.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

A beautiful theme that lends itself perfectly to a news site, blog, or magazine.

I love the use of typography throughout and the intuitive layout.

This design was featured on the Sunday 5th of February 2012. It falls under the category of Design, and has a layout style of Two Column.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

A good example of an icon for a Mac app. I like the colour palette and the coherent overall design.

I particularly like the attention to detail throughout.

This design was featured on the Saturday 4th of February 2012. It falls under the category of Mac App, and has a layout style of Other.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

A good example of a logo that takes a simple idea but adds depth using detail.

The colour palette really works, as does the way the background mirrors the shape of the logo.

This design was featured on the Saturday 4th of February 2012. It falls under the category of Logo, and has a layout style of Other.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

A fantastically engaging portfolio site for a freelance graphic designer.

I love the consistent use of illustrative style, and the continuously intriguing string of designs.

This design was featured on the Saturday 4th of February 2012. It falls under the category of Portfolio, and has a layout style of One Column.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

Welcome to another installment of our weekly collection of awesome design freebies from around the web. This time we have a real treat: thirty gorgeous free fonts from Behance. There’s a ton of great work on that site and if you know where to look you can score some spectacular finds.

Peruse the options below and download your favorites, then feel free to leave a comment to let us know what you think.

Like the article? Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter to stay up on recent content.

Poly – free web font Accent™ Free Display Typeface Otama e.p. Typeface Mosaic Leaf Free Font Bigmouth Font Bispo free font Sketchetik (FREE) Infinity Kilogram Origram Free Font Adamas Regular – Free font PLSTK – Free Font Manteka Lorena —Free Font MOLESK font (free) Five Minutes / Free Font Glide® Font Deibi v1.0 – free font Novecento font family: 32 styles, 12 Opentype features GRN Burgy [Free Download] CODE free font Tetra Free font VAL™ Hexa (free font) Urbe – Free Typeface Tall Boy Construthinvism – Free Font Typeface Adec2.0 (free) Absinthe – Free Font Dekar free font Love it? Share It!

If you enjoyed this week’s collection of freebies, share the love and send out a link on your favorite sites. Here’s a convenient snippet for you to copy and paste as you please!

30 Amazing Free Fonts from Behance: http://goo.gl/ox9dI

Interesting idea by Felipe G on using a new at-rule, @-vendor-unlock, to tell the browser to use it's experimental implementation of any particular property, rather than using a vendor prefix on that property. Unfortunately at this point, even if you could get all the browsers on board, you'd need to use this and vendor prefixes to get deep support, which makes the problem worse. What we really need is for all browsers to implement auto-updating so eventually "supporting older browsers" is something we can look back and laugh at.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

A proposal to drop browser vendor prefixes is a post from CSS-Tricks

Digging Into WordPress (the book) is now updated to v3.3. Includes new chapters specially on what's new in 3.2 and 3.3, all the rest of the chapters tightened up and refreshed, better internal hyperlinking (in the PDF), and more. It's a free update (PDF) to all previous buyers. New print copies are on order and will be available soon.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Digging Into WordPress 3.3 is a post from CSS-Tricks

To increase and broaden participation in its activities, W3C announces today a new startup membership level for small organizations new to W3C. Organizations are eligible for the new level depending on their size (10 or fewer employees) and annual revenues.... W3C Staff

  

Custom post types add a level of flexibility to WordPress that makes this open-source Web development platform more useful on many levels. Whenever I have been faced with a Web-based task, especially one that involves organizing information, the first thing I do is examine WordPress to determine if it can handle the job. It usually can.

As an Internet marketer and analyst, I need to be able to organize online marketing campaigns in a way that is trackable in Google Analytics. This is the perfect task for WordPress custom post types. In this article, we’ll explain how to create a WordPress plugin that enables you to organize Internet marketing campaigns using trackable URLs, shortened versions of those URLs, and trackable QR codes that you can also use for offline marketing activities.

A great example of icon design that shines through its use of detail.

I like the colours used and the overall feel of the design.

This design was featured on the Friday 3rd of February 2012. It falls under the category of Mac App, and has a layout style of Other.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

A simple but effective wolf logo that uses shape to create a strong image in your mind.

The subtle textures here add depth, as does the detail in the cutout shape.

This design was featured on the Friday 3rd of February 2012. It falls under the category of Logo, and has a layout style of Other.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

An immediately engaging personal portfolio for a web developer that captures your imagination.

I love the comic book style and the unique illustrative feel of the whole site. It really makes an impact.

This design was featured on the Friday 3rd of February 2012. It falls under the category of Portfolio, and has a layout style of Other.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

Local coding environments are great, but it’s often the case that I don’t want to crack open Espresso and spend a few minutes setting up to code when all I really want is to test out an idea or work on a bug. Also, sharing options for most local coding apps are limited and typically require integrating an outside app like Dropbox.

Online playgrounds or sandboxes such as jsFiddle solve this problem by providing you with an instantly ready coding environment for you to begin experimenting in as soon as the page loads. These tools let you combine CSS, HTML and often even JavaScript to create and share coding examples. I’m completely addicted to these things and have extensively tested every one I can get my hands on. Today I’ll go over my five favorites and discuss not only why what I like about each option, but also where they fall short.

Like the article? Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter to stay up on recent content.

CSSDesk

I’ll start with CSSDesk because it’s one of the oldest on this list. It’s been around for years now as a quiet and obscure little tool that is extremely helpful for playing with basic web code. CSSDesk is a very simple tool that focuses purely on HTML and CSS.

What I Like About CSSDesk

There are a lot of things that I just love about CSS Desk. There are three main sections: HTML, CSS and live preview, the sizes of which can all be easily tweaked with a click and drag. I like that you can easily see everything you need in one simple view. There’s no effort or setup here, just load the page and start creating.

There’s also basic syntax highlighting just like all of the other tools on this list. However, one fairly unique feature that you don’t often see in these types of tools is line numbers. It’s such a simple addition but I tend to like line numbers so I really appreciate the inclusion.

The toolbar features are pretty cool as well, providing some options that you simply don’t find other places. In addition to the standard sharing feature, you also have the option to download what you just built. Further, there’s a set of default tiling background textures that are applied if you don’t manually override them. These are fun if you’re just building a button or widget of some kind and want something other than the typical plain white background.

What I Don’t Like About CSSDesk

Honestly, there’s not much to dislike about this one. Sure, it’s simple and doesn’t have some of the fancy features the other options have, but that’s also what makes it great. I hardly ever use this one anymore but every time I do it’s so nice I think I should stop by more often.

The biggest downside for hardcore coders is the lack of JavaScript support. If this is a deal breaker for you, try checking out one of the other options.

JS Bin

JS Bin is another popular place to tinker around with your code. The design of this app is quite minimal and really allows you to focus on the code. By default, the page only shows the HTML and live preview panes, but you can easily add JavaScript to that as well.

What I Like About JS Bin

There are quite a few nice features on JS Bin. The first thing that I found myself appreciating is the fact that refreshing the page doesn’t kill your work. The preview updates automatically but for those rare times when you do need a manual refresh, it’s nice that your first instinct (Command-R) doesn’t result in the accidental loss of an hour’s worth of tinkering.

As with CSSDesk, you save, share and download your work. The place where this obviously pulls ahead though is the JavaScript implementation. You can obviously enter your own JS but as a bonus you can choose to include popular libraries like jQuery.

Another cool feature is the ability to control which panes you see by manipulating the URL. For instance, “http://jsbin.com/#javascript,html,live” will get you all three panes while “http://jsbin.com/#html,live” will just get you two.

What I Don’t Like About JS Bin

To be honest, JS Bin is my least favorite option on this list. It’s not bad, but it definitely lacks the charm of the others. One thing that always gets me is that there’s no dedicated place for CSS, forcing you to embed it into your HTML. This works just fine, but it’s not as nice as the intentional separation seen in the other options.

jsFiddle

jsFiddle has completely taken off in the past few months to a year and is probably the most popular option on this list at the moment. And for good reason, this is one amazing app. Let’s face it, once you dig into jsFiddle, you may never look at any of the other options again.

What I Like About jsFiddle

There are a ton of great things to cover in my list of reasons why you should use jsFiddle. First up is the layout. There are four panels (HTML, CSS, JavaScript and preview) so you can see everything you need to at once and resize each area on the fly. The layout system here feels really flexible and is actually sort of fun to play with.

While we’re discussing panels, you can customize the CSS and JavaScript panels to utilize your favorite third party tools. You’ll find support for the Sass SCSS syntax and CoffeeScript.

jsFiddle lets you create a login and view a dashboard of your past saved work. There are a ton of menu options and tools once you’ve saved a fiddle, my favorites are the ability to quickly create a fork and the option to automatically tidy up your messy code structure.

In addition to the panel customization options, the sidebar has a bunch of other great features as well. For instance, you can quickly add both any major libraries that you want to include (jQuery, MooTools, etc.) and your own JavaScript/CSS resources.

One last amazing jsFiddle option that I only just discovered the other day: you can embed fiddles into a webpage. This option is found under the share menu and is a great alternative to other code embedding services.

What I Don’t Like About jsFiddle

My main beef with jsFiddle is the lack of an auto update option for the preview. Once you’ve used all the other options on this list and experienced the joys of auto update, it’s hard to put up with manual refreshes every few seconds in jsFiddle.

As far as other features go, it’s the best on the list but that one annoyance often drives me elsewhere if I just want to bust out a quick test. Keyboard shortcuts help, but they’re still not as nice as something automatic.

Dabblet

Dabblet is a fairly new kid on the block in this genre. Like CSSDesk, it focuses on only HTML and CSS with no JavaScript. However, don’t count it out because it brings some serious innovation to the table that you won’t find in any other editor.

What I Like About Dabblet

By default, Dabblet is split into three tabs: CSS & Result, HTML & Result and Result. This provides flexibility and focus while allowing you to always keep an eye on the result.

You can change things up with the controls shown below. The split can be vertical, horizontal or taken out completely. There’s also an interesting “behind code” mode where your result is simply the background for the coding area. Notice there’s also a message about using prefix-free. I use Dabblet all the time and never noticed this until just now! This means that you don’t have to use crazy vendor prefixes and can code the simple defaults, the hidden JavaScript will make sure your browsers interprets it correctly.

Dabblet has some great saving options as well such as “save anonymously.” It also links to your GitHub account, which coding nerds like will love.

My favorite Dabblet feature is the super slick hover effect integration in the CSS. They’re easier to show that describe. Here two few examples:

As you can see, hovering over certain bits of CSS brings up these little tooltips that are really great. You can get previews for fonts, colors, sizes, and even images.

What I Don’t Like About Dabblet

Dabblet is a bit quirky from a visual perspective, you either love it or hate it. I personally really enjoy using it but really wish that I had more control over the panel size. Having an auto 50/50 split is great, but I should be able to manually adjust that however I choose.

As far as I know, there’s also no way to view your HTML and CSS at the same time, which is a little annoying if you’re used to options like jsFiddle where you can keep an eye on everything at once.

Tinkerbin

Tinkerbin is the closest alternative to jsFiddle that I’ve found. Though it doesn’t have all of the fancy features found in jsFiddle, it has a few tricks of its own that are really nice.

What I Like About Tinkerbin

The default panel layout on Tinkerbin is probably my favorite on this entire list. It’s a very logical layout that puts the code on the left and a nice big auto-updating preview on the right. The HTML, CSS and JavaScript sections are all stacked on top of each other, with optional tabs that allow you to focus on just one of these.

Further, Tinkerbin supports even more alternate syntax options than jsFiddle. You can choose HTML or HAML; CSS, SCSS (with Compass), the old SASS syntax or LESS; and JavaScript or CoffeeScript. Needless to say, if you dig preprocessors, this is the option for you.

Tinkerbin is the only option that allows you to swap out your preview for a nice, extensive “View Source” window.

What I Don’t Like About Tinkerbin

Even more so than Dabblet, the Tinkerbin layout is completely rigid. Sure, I like the default setup the best, but sometimes I want to make that preview wider and I simply don’t have the option here.

Further, the saving options aren’t the best. There’s no account setup, dashboard, GitHub integration, etc. You simply save your experiments to a shortened URL.

Conclusion

By now I’m sure you can see the benefits of having a few of these sites bookmarked. I encourage you to experiment as often as possible with new ideas to keep yourself fresh and these services provide an awesome way to do it.

I hope this review has served as a helpful look into the details of each of these solutions. You should now know not only what makes each option unique but also where each falls short. This will help you make an informed decision about which one or two to primarily focus on.

I personally bounce back and forth with all of them fairly regularly but lately I’ve been hanging out mostly in jsFiddle, Dabblet and Tinkerbin. Which of these is your favorite and why?

A showcase of creative logos where the "pen" is the focal point.

Dave, Jonathan Longnecker, Nate Croft and I talk shop. Topics include website building apps, where to start designing, when not to design for modern browsers, and more.

Sponsored by LessAccounting.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

ShopTalk Episode 4 is a post from CSS-Tricks

What do you think folks? Is a new language going to come along in the next ten years that deals with layout / style / design and unseat CSS? Or at least give it a run for its money?

You should vote not based on if there will be any attempt at it, which there certainly will be and already has. But instead if you think one of those attempts will actually make it into native support by a browser with significant market share and see a significant number of web workers building web sites in it.

Poll is in the sidebar (or, down pretty far if on a small screen).

New Poll: In The Next 10 Years, Will We See CSS Competitor? is a post from CSS-Tricks

I recently ran into a problem that was really hard to figure out. I was working on a responsive design where I used img {max-width:100%;} to make sure that images would be downsized rather than overflow in narrower viewports.

It worked great everywhere… until I went to check in IE8. The site’s logo was gone! None of the usual IE bug fixes cured the problem, and it took me quite a while to realise that max-width was part of the problem.

Read full post

Posted in Browsers, CSS.

Copyright © Roger Johansson

  

Every now and then, we release useful freebies for all of our highly valued readers. Today, it is our pleasure to present to you Cuberto's fantastic St. Valentine's icon set  —  exclusively designed for Smashing Magazine and its loyal readers. The icons presented are available in transparent PNGs as well as Photoshop PSDs (128x128 px) and are perfect for any projects you have coming up for St. Valentine's Day. Enjoy!

This icon set is completely free to use for commercial or personal applications without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word.