Web Design Weekly #39

April 19, 2012 - Jake Bresnehan

Headlines

A Baseline for Front-End Developers

Once upon a time, editing files, testing them locally (as best as we could, anyway), and then FTPing them to the server was the essential workflow of a front-end dev. ‘Times are a changin’. Rebecca Murphey gives a comprehensive overview of the new set of baseline skills required in order to be successful as a front-end developer. (rmurphey.com)

Responsive Viewport Units

With all this new fangled talk of responsive web design, it’s about time that we had a poster child CSS unit to go with it. So move over ’em’, CSS3 Values and Units introduces a bunch of new viewport units that are getting ready for their time in the limelight. (generatedcontent.org)

CSS Variables published as First Public Working Draft! (w3.org)

Extending CSS (with SASS) (viljamis.com)

Silly list scroll effects (lab.hakim.se)

Articles

What’s Going On In The WordPress Economy?

It’s an economy that thousands of people, the world over, are benefiting from. It is an economy built on free, open source software. In this Smashing Magazine article Siobhan McKeown talks to people who are active in the WordPress economy, people from all over the globe. (smashingmagazine.com)

Refactoring >14,000 lines of CSS into Sass

Eugene Fedorenko talks about how Beanstalk refactored the whole app to use SASS. Some really great insights into the process and I am sure if you are about to refactor your CSS, you could learn a thing or two. (wildbit.com)

A New Front-End Methodology: BEM

BEM stands for “Block”, “Element”, “Modifier”. It is a front-end methodology: a new way of thinking when developing Web interfaces. The article elaborates on the theory as well as the practice of building websites. (smashingmagazine.com)

Let’s Talk about Semantics

Mike Robinson gives you the low down about HTML semantics. This post will hopefully give you a good understanding and help your markup shine. (html5doctor.com)

Making the Most of Personal Projects: A Designer’s Secret Weapon (designfestival.com)

Learn all about Breakpoints in Chrome Developer Tools (developers.google.com)

World’s Best Designed (news) website (snd.org)

Semi-colons (christianheilmann.com)

Last But Not Least…

Fred Boyle’s Code Challenge

Between now and the end of May 2012, code a small project using a language or environment that’s new to you or that you’ve only casually messed around with. (fredboyle.com)