Topic: Uncategorized

Your career is alive, complex, and trying to grow in the right direction—but finding that path can be confusing. When you don’t know what you don’t know, or need just a nudge to kickstart your next step, a healthy dose of guidance can do the trick. In a live Q&A this December, Jeffrey Zeldman brings “Ask Dr. Web” to ALA events, answering viewer questions in real time with cohost Sarah Parmenter.

One person focuses on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Another writes JavaScript tests all day. And they both have the same job title: front-end developer. Mat Marquis talks about why that’s okay, and introduces our latest event, “The State of Front-End Dev”.

What grabbed our attention this week? We’re glad you asked. We’re digging the new design standards being shared by 18F and USDS; reading up on accessibility in design (and the notorious PDF!); learning to run better meetings; noodling around with responsive typefaces; and championing better ways to read the comments. Also, somebody likes raccoons. We think. We think that’s what they meant.

Your team came up with all those great ideas for the website, but how do you sort through them all and decide what to include? Eileen Webb shares her framework for evaluating ideas and encouraging teams to focus on the ideas that actually meet their goals.

What the ALA staff has found around the web lately: how we can support Ahmed Mohamed and other young makers; reading the comments (no, really!) on the Coral Project; a plain-language guide to Amazon developer tools; the life and times of a type design legend; icon fonts vs. SVGs, revisited; learning to think first, challenge later; and a robot riding a unicorn (come on, who doesn’t need to see that?).

We all have those moments when we’re asked to do something new and we cringe. It’s tempting to just stick with what we know, but pushing through those moments of uncertainty is how we learn.

The tools we use as designers are changing rapidly. With responses from thousands of designers around the world, Khoi Vinh’s recent survey showcases some surprising trends in the new (and old-school) tools we use for brainstorming, interface design, version control, and many other aspects of our work.

On our radar these days: Google rebrands. A web animation expert refuses to speak at your conference if it doesn’t have a code of conduct. Preload hints can help you load your web fonts faster. A new site launches that hopes to bridge the gender gap in communication design. Your weekend reading awaits!

Between bots and blogging, newsrooms are getting into Slack in some very cool ways (take some inspiration and apply for a Knight-Mozilla Fellowship!). Plus more recommended reading: revisiting Cameron’s World; the joy of generalists; the finer points of faving; and one really excellent gif of cats.

In our recommended reading this week: saying adieu to the Ada Initiative, which did so much work for conference codes of conduct and women in tech; project budget-setting (who wants to see some spreadsheets!); speaking up in the type community; and smartphones, smartwatches, and smart gifs (er, maybe we need to cool our Wet Hot American Summer binge).