Page speed and load times are the foundation for a positive user experience on the web. Let’s face it, if your page fails to load in time, all the effort put towards information architecture, content strategy and interaction design will be for naught. During my formative front-end coding days, I did a fair bit of assuming that as Internet connections transitioned from dial-up to DSL I’d be able to make compromises. Piling sprite-less PNGs upon redundant CSS upon tons of HTTP requests became commonplace,… Read More
We were fairly surprised and even more excited to see that Paravel was nominated for a Net Award for Design Agency of the Year along with 24 other excellent teams. I’d like to extend a big thank you to .Net Magazine for their continued support and to Dave and Reagan, who have devoted more blood, sweat and tears to Paravel than I could have ever expected. Click here to visit the Net Awards site to vote
Early in the Summer I had a series of conversations with Phil Coffman about side projects- how they’ve benefitted us, how to balance them, and how much fun they are. Taking the initiative, Phil gathered a group and submitted a panel discussion for SXSW 2011. In addition to Phil and myself, Yaron Schoen, Noah Stokes and Sam Brown have signed on with Josh Brewer serving as our Moderator. Please do check it out. If you think it’d be worth attending, vote it up! Our… Read More
Originally when I CSSed the round avatars on the DesignSwap comments area, I used the -webkit-mask-image property. I was really proud of how neat and effective this was until I realized you could apply border-radius to an image directly. To achieve a round avatar with a 2px beige border, I applied the following CSS to an avatar loading within a div class called avatar-frame. .avatar-frame{border: 2px solid #c7b89e;} .avatar-frame,.avatar-frame img{ width: 50px; height: 50px; -webkit-border-radius: 30px; /* Saf3+, Chrome */ border-radius: 30px; /* Opera… Read More
After really enjoying Inception over the weekend, I thought I’d make a graphic featuring 3 of the totems that the main characters carry around to keep track of whether or not they’re dreaming. My initial Dribbble shot has evolved into this tribute poster. While I was at it, I threw together a few desktop wallpapers for kicks. Download options: Poster 2560 x 1600 2560 x 1400 1920 x 1080 1440 x 900
FontShop has done a lot for web fonts. Their latest contribution, FontFonter, lets you test an ever-expanding set of available fonts on any site you wish. Aside from being the easiest & lowest commitment way to test web fonts, it will come in handy here at Paravel, letting us mix & match web type on the fly. While I don’t think it overrides the font settings on a site currently using @font-face, it’s really fun to see what FF Dagny Web would look like on Dribbble,… Read More
