Web Design Weekly #185

May 11, 2015 - Jake Bresnehan

Headlines

Dear Web, I want to make you a better place.

Very powerful words by Viljami Salminen. Viljami expresses the concern that we are breaking the web with all these new tools and frameworks and we should aim to make our sites accessible to everyone. Couldn’t agree more. (viljamis.com)

Designing a good portfolio

Mark Boulton takes a trip down memory lane and shares some of his knowledge about creating a good portfolio to land your dream job. (markboulton.co.uk)

WebdesignerNews The best curated stories for designers

Do you spend hours every morning browsing through hundreds of posts on your RSS feed, hoping to stumble across relevant news stories? WebdesignerNews provides web designers and developers with a single location to discover the latest and most significant stories on the Web. Check it out! (webdesignernews.com)

Articles

Making SVG Accessible

Dudley Storey covers five rules to make our SVG’s more accessible while we wait for SVG 2.0 to land. (demosthenes.info)

Extending In Sass Without Creating A Mess

The @extend directive in Sass is a super powerful directive but generally is used incorrectly. In this post David Khourshid shares some strategies for using it effectively. (smashingmagazine.com)

Obvious Always Wins

Luke Wroblewski reminds us that it’s tempting to rely on menu controls in order to simplify mobile interface designs, especially on small screens. But hiding critical parts of an application behind these kinds of menus can negatively impact usage. (lukew.com)

Fudging masks using CSS blend modes

Jonny Schole’s explains an interesting technique for fudging masks using CSS blend modes. (codepen.io)

Hidden User Experience & Interaction Gems on Airbnb (medium.com)

Tools / Resources

Deployments Best Practices

Great tips from the Beanstalk team about why it is important to have a proper deployment strategy. Especially as your team grows. (beanstalkapp.com)

ES Feature Tests

Feature test ES6+ JavaScript syntax and APIs. Use the in-browser test results to deliver the best code to each browser. (featuretests.io)

Open Source Web Performance Dashboard

An open source tool that helps you analyze your website speed and performance according to web best practices rules. (peterhedenskog.com)

Pintsize – A Sass front end template

Pintsize provides you with the basics to get building quickly. Also, its nice and tidy file structure makes it easy to scale your projects efficiently. (pintsize.io)

Medium’s Image Zoom for jQuery (github.com)

Improve AngularJS Performance (alexkras.com)

Service Worker Sample Code (googlechrome.github.io)

Inspiration

Airbnb – Responsive Web Design Podcast

Dave Augustine explains why Airbnb went responsive even though they have great native apps and the majority of web traffic is from the desktop. (responsivewebdesign.com)

A great collection of Smashing Magazine Conference Videos (vimeo.com)

Jobs

UX Designer – Atlassian

If you live and breathe the user experience, love solving problems and thrive on variety, Atlassian has a great opportunity for you. We’re currently seeking a Designer to join our Growth team in San Francisco. (atlassian.com)