Amazing web design Tools

Writing code all day gets tiring, and for those of us with Carpal tunnel syndrome or in the stagings of getting it, saving some keystrokes is great. For the rest of you, it’s often hard to remember all the syntax of some more complex CSS rules, like the CSS gradients, or border radius. There’s a few awesome websites that generate easy CSS rules.

CSS3 Generator by @Randy Jensen.

CSS generator can generate about a dozen CSS3 rules, including border radius, and Columns. It’s generally awesome.

Gradient Editor by @colorzilla.

Gradient Generator is a truely amazing and time saving tool, as with a few clicks you can generator CSS3 gradients (As well as filter gradients for IE), that support transparent gradients, rgb and rgba, hex,hsl and hsla formats, and can even import gradients from images, so you can import your mock ups and get exactly the same gradient.

Ceaser by @Matthew Lein

One of the most complicated CSS3 specs is the transitions. While CSS3 generator has some support for it, Ceaser provided very detailed in depth, configurable transitions quickly and easily.

FontSquirrel Generator by @FontSquirrel

When a font isn’t in their gallery or Google webfonts, the first place I head is the font squirrel generator. Just upload a font from your computer, select the formats and a few other options, and it will provide you with a zip file download of your webfont. Its pretty amazing for those free fonts you find online and want to use, but know your readers will not have installed on their computers.

CSS3 Ribbon Generator by @CSS3D

Need a fancy ribbon, look no further than CSS3 ribbon Generator. It will let you pick the angles ad all sorta of fun stuff. For even more fun, use it in combination with the gradient generator for slick gradients on ribbons.

Androidifacation

Its been a long time since posting last, partially due to school and at least a little bit due to my new toy, an android phone. It allows me to toy with the mobile web on top of everything else. Since android is so awesome, I have just ordered an EEE pad transformer from Asus with android 3.0 honeycomb and they’re rolling out 3.1 as of last week. I hope to find time to post a lot of what I’ve learned lately on here soon, and will be breaking open the text editor for a new theme soon, removing the blog from the front page and making outward links and aggregated content the goal.

Posted from WordPress for Android

Does your computer make you stupid?

As a student technology advocate, I try to promote the use of computers in the classroom, with restrictions of course, but to allow for modern, smart, competent students. Recently I was really offended to see a local professor, saying computers were dumb and they make the users stupid. So of course I had to comment, and this is most of my response, almost word for word. Continue reading

Bulletproof CSS3 gradients

CSS Gradients are wonderful things. They can cut down http request, condense document size, and just flat out look awesome. But every browser has to be different, and when mixing every browsers preference, it becomes a pain in the butt. While trying to set it up, i made a fatal flaw in one of my normally untested browsers, firefox 3.6, and the menubar disappeared in it. Continue reading

Why Crowdsourcing works (And how)

Crowdsourcing, be definition is a community based design model. It uses the power of many people to get a task done, vs using a few people for a very long time. It work well because people  are willing to contribute small amounts of time or money to help the greater good, but often not willing to dedicating themselves to a project for a long period of time.

Early versions included the phone tree, where when a school or workplace closed due to bad weather, the boss called off work, and called the managers, who then called all employees in their departments to tell them work is closed. What could’ve taken 2 hours to call all the employees, can be cut down to maybe half an hour by crowdsourcing the work. Continue reading