RED FROG CONSULTING ARTICLES
Various articles that we have written on web development, with a "Focus on the Front End".
Red Frog Consulting is a Toronto-based web design
firm, who focuses on HTML/CSS and Javascript.
Been
awhile since I wrote an article due to the birth of my daughter on April 30th of 2011. Hopefully I will
get back into writing soon, but at the moment family comes first! ;)
by Matt Garvin April 19, 2011
I have read many books on UI design, some good, some bad, but I think that 90% of it can be summed up with some very short principles. On that note, I have read
some very short principles on UI design, and many of them seem like they don't follow their own guidelines. Specifically, they can
often be too wordy and too alienating. Too stuffy and too academic. In short, too user-unfriendly. So here are my own guidelines, in plain English easy enough for my
grandma to understand...
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by Matt Garvin January 7, 2011
I have said it before and I will say it again: Jquery is amazing. Jquery and Firebug are the two biggest advancements in Front End Development in the past few years. I absolutely love Jquery. It is hard to imagine doing what I do without it. And the Jqueri UI? It's a phenomenal piece of engineering. And I hate it.In a nutshell, here are the problems with the Jquery UI. It is too bloated, it is too complicated, and worst of all, it is very, very far from being W3C compliant. And that drives me crazy. (Just how many "zoom" errors can one piece of software pile on?) It is, in so many ways, the opposite of what spartan, you-take-control, Jquery is...
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by Matt Garvin - October 15, 2010
As Front End Developers, one of our most frequent tasks is to translate Photoshop mockups created by a designer into HTML/CSS. We pride ourselves on our ability to create Pixel Perfect translations that keep the designer smiling and make sense code-wise for when we hand our templates of to the rest of the team. Here are the top five goals that I strive for when translating a design into code, which I present in order of priority from most desirable to nice-to-have.Goal Number 1: Your pages must look like the designs you were given in all targeted browsers.I love being looked at by graphic designers as "the guy that made my designs look the way I designed them" in a browser. Those are the...
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by Matt Garvin - September 26, 2010
I remember the first time I used Firebug. I was blown away, and immediately realized "This is a game changer!" The second thing I thought was "How did I ever get by without this?" I still would say that Firebug is the #1 tool in the arsenalt of a Front End Developer, but there are also a number of other "must haves" in the Front End Developer's tool belt. And not all of them are simply Firefox Addons.#1 is Firefox with FirebugOk, for starters, as of 2010, you have to use Firefox and the aforementioned Firebug. But there are tons of other handy addons, besides Firebug, although they are not in the same league as Firebug. Nothing is in the same league as Firebug. ...
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by Matt Garvin - September 5, 2010
I hate hacks. I hate dirty code. When I see a inline styles, I cringe. But probably the thing I hate most is when I look at someone's CSS and see the dreaded "Asterisk hack". Sadly, even as I write this in 2010, even at this late stage of the game, I still see hacks like this all too often. Even people that call themselves "Front End Developers" still resort to dirty little hacks like these, seemingly oblivious to a better solution that has been around for years. Put a Fork In ItWhen it comes to IE, Put A Fork In It! That is, use IE's forking technology -- also known as "conditional comments" -- to load specific stylesheets that cater to different breeds of IE. If you don't know...
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by Matt Garvin - July 11, 2010
Flash is getting increasingly less popular. It is a phenomenal technology, and in many ways can do things with polish and flair that cannot be done though any other means on the interweb. None-the-less, as time goes on Flash use gets increasingly scarce. Here are the four biggest reasons why Flash is getting less and less popular.Poor design by Flash Developers and Designers. Remember the days when every website had an annoying splash screen with different size text sliding and scaling and tweening all over the place for about 10 minutes, until you found the "Skip Intro" thingy, located in a different place for each site? I remember them too. That sucked. And the...
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