Working in a beautiful enviroment can help in creating great products. I'm not sure what Microsoft is making in Vienna but their products might just get better in this new office with lots of lines and actual slides between floors!

Combining two typefaces can result in a great looking design. It can also cause destruction. Here's a simple game that helps you with finding the right comination of typefaces. Very helpful!

Here are the sildes from a full day workshop by Andy Clarke about responsive web design. Some parts are a bit hard to follow without Andy talking but this huge presentation is filled with lots and lots of good information.

Multi-column layout works great with long articles on paper. It's a bit harder to get it right design-wise on the web but it is possible. Technically it is very hard to get it right, explains Stephen Hay in this thorough article about how CSS columns work and how they should work. A great read.

Bigger companies with specialists (interaction designers, visual designers, front-end developers, bakc-end developers) have a hard time finding new workflows for designing and building responsive websites. An often heard argument against responsive design is that it results in more deliverables, more work. In this clever article Drew Clemens proposes a rather smart solution to this issue which actually uses the talent of all specialists on a much more efficient way. I think this article is an important piece of the new workflow puzzle. A great read.

The Twitter website was probably one of the worst websites around, from a performance and durability perspective, but things are changing. Dan Webb explains why the site was built like it was and what is about to change. A great read about real performance, about percieved performance, about ttft, and much more. Yes, you should read it, especially you JavaScript-only nerds out there.

De dertiende aflevering van de Wasstraat al weer (en ja, de dag na de opname brak mijn v-snaar en blies ik de motor bijna op; genieten voor de bijgelovigen onder u). Peet Sneekes en ik praten over artikelen die we hebben geschreven, over geld verdienen met content maken, over promotie en veel meer. En we staan tegenwoordig ook op Soundcloud zodat u ons kunt Flipboarden. Is dat niet fantastisch?

Here are some simple but valuable tips for optimizing your sites for touch devices. I'd like to add the idea to make touch the default and treat mouse interaction as a possible enhancement. You might want to get used to this idea.

Here's a nice idea by Paul Scrivens: he combines the term minimum viable product and one of Zeno's paradoxes and applies them to design. What comes out is an early form of design that can be shipped, that makes the content accessible and readable. The design can then be later refined (or bloated, as happend from 75% onwards in the examples). Nice idea which is pretty practical in an agile workflow.

There's a rumour that Facebook is planning to buy Opera, the company that makes a browser (among other things). Peter-Paul Koch wrote this excellent, thorough analysis of why Facebook would want its own browser. You should definitely read it if you care about the future of the web (and you lazy developers who never tested on Opera, you made a mistake).

What you see when you die if the world is completely owned by lawyers and marketers. Hilarious and scary at the same time, this short film by Tom Scott.

Here's a good article by Johan Ronsse about tools and learning in which he explains that, yes, as a designer you should know HTML and CSS, at least what they can do and how they work, but no, you don't have to be able to design in the browser. That way you understand what works and you'll be able to talk to nerds. And he says we need better tools. I couldn't agree more.

The weekly update by Typediea for all font nerds, with some beautiful new typefaces (there's even one with a windmill!) and lots of links to all the things that happened in the world of letters.

In this very long post Brandan Eich explains why Firefox will support the H.264 video codec on devices that have hardware support for it. If you're interested in this matter you can go ahead and read all of it, it is interesting stuff.

Do you need more to read for the weekend? Here's a great—inspiring and informative as always—link dump by Blair Millen with posts about SVG, simple ideas, words that should exist in English, and much more.

Did your designer create an aside that's exactly 437px wide with a padding of 9px and does he really believe these are exactly the right proportions? And at the same time you promised your client to create a fluid, responsive site? Here's a tool by Stuart Robson that translates designer pixels to human percentages.

Many people have a hard time understanding and getting used to git. This site tries to help these people in the best possible way: git code is illustrated with animated gifs of animals.

On mobile we test our sites on Opera Mini, Opera Mobile, Safari on iOs (a few versions), the Browser in Android (many versions), and Chrome on Android 4. But there's another browser you might want to start learning and that's Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox.

Here's an incredible list with resources about the mobile web. Important articles, clever bookmarklets, books, frameworks, presentations, tools, useful sites, and much, much more, everything is in there. Isn't this how Yahoo started? Kidding. The rest of the site is pretty interesting and well informed too.

Je onderscheidt je pas echt van je concurrenten, betoogt Robert Jan Verkade, als je echte service weet te verlenen, als je echte kennis van zake hebt.

How do you design something that's new, something that's not completely understood yet, like a digital book. Should you mimic what came before it, or shouldn't you? Craig Mod explains that it's not just a black and white answer in this beautiful and intelligent presentation. If you have some spare time take your time to watch it, it's really good.

A few weeks ago there was this row about responsive images, about two competing proposals that somehow clashed. Jason Grigsby takes another look at both these proposals from the viewpoint of the lookahead pre-parser and concludes that they both conflict with this idea and that they are a maintenance nightmare. He concludes with the fact that this issue should be solved from within the image itself, and he's right about that. We'll just have to wait a while. Anybody at Adobe listening?

Collega Wybe Weysters heeft besloten om zijn site opnieuw te gaan bouwen. Dat niet alleen, hij gaat er ook nog eens over schrijven! Hij stelt alvast een erg interessante vraag: hoe belangrijk is een hoofdnavigatie nu eigenlijk? Ik ben benieuwd wat het gaat worden.

Wow. The things you can do without JavaScript are getting more impressive by the day. Here's an excellent tutorial about how to create a stopwatch with CSS only. I absolutely love the the way the tutorial is made, you see the code being typed on the left and you immediately see the results on the right. Fantastic!

One of the most clever things GitHub did was creating a desktop application for the Mac that typical Mac users could understand without too many problems and without too much explanation. The next clever thing they did is creating a similar application for Windows. This means that Windows users don't have to pretend they understand Git anymore! They can just use it!

The Mozilla Developer Network is trying to create the best documentation about the web. They already have some of the best documentation on CSS and JavaScript and other languages like HTML are getting better and better. You can actually help improve it by writing articles or keeping the up to date, or, easier, by linking to them.

Mobilism 2012 is over. For those of you who, like me, can't get enough of it, here's a page with links to everything that's related to the conference. Presentations, videos, photos and blogposts, there's enough to read already. This page is not just interesting for people who attended, you should check it out.

Do you need more to read? Here's a nice eclectic link dump by Blair Millen with links about parenting, cheap laptops, negative proximity and photo tampering.

One of the best productivity appsshowcases for modern web developmentI know is Laser Eyes, an app that adds lasers to your photo's. If you don't know how it works but you do know Taiwanese (that's not a language? It's probably Chinese), here's an instruction.

Definitely: Dr. Reggie Watts is the new emperor of Marketing Mullshit Bingo. In this presentation he proposes some new, revealing insights on innovation and out of the box thinking in a new world of challenges for the organizational production funnel in business value environments of seemingly unrealistic, concrete demands from new, experienced entrepreneurs. Exactly.

Jason Grigsby argues that the most important thing you can do if you want to optimize your site for mobile is to focus on performance first. Once performance is good you can start focusing on things like mediaqueries, but only then.

Screenshots and screencasts are OK if you're presenting how things work on a mobile device but a real-time video is always better. There are ways to stream your screen from your iOs device to your computer via AirPlay, and that works alright. A better solution might be to use this CamHolder by Heiko Behrens, which not only shows iOs screens, it shows all kinds of devices and it shows your fingers as well.

Here's a recap of what happened in Firefox-Land in 2011 and what will happen in 2012. A good read by Robert Nyman which clearly shows that the web has changed and is changing rapidly.

Robert Jan Verkade geeft het uitstekende advies om niet aan cold reading te doen bij het serveren van content, in tegenstelling tot mensen geven apparaten niet altijd het antwoord wat je zou verwachten. Prima metafoor voor het idee dat je de context van de bezoeker gewoon niet kunt raden.

We all agree that the mobile web is important and we all try to provide a good experience for our mobile visitors. There's another type of devices that might become important: smart TV's. Jason Grigsby gave this excellent presentation at Mobilism.

Design is een vak en van een vakman mag je verwachten dat hij gewoon aan het werk gaat als je hem inhuurt. Soms is het voor designers wat lastig om te beginnen. Hier zijn wat tips van Joris Hens om het creatieve proces op gang te brengen en te houden. Sommige tips zijn wat algemeen (sport bijvoorbeeld kan je prima vervangen door ga eens wat vaken luieren in de hangmat en reis is te vervangen door kijk eens naar de details in en om je huisje) maar er zit vast iets tussen waar je wellicht iets aan hebt.

These days, until sometime during the 25th of May, the Unix Time Stamp starts with the numbers 1337.

For the first time this millenium Internet Explorer is not the biggest browser anymore, according to Statcounter. Yes, this is incredible news. Of course these statistics vary greatly from region to region (just check the stats for China or South-Korea for instance) and from site to site (on my own site IE is marginal, around 4%), but It's an important milestone.

One of the series of articles I think are worth following are the Webkit and Chromium update posts by Peter Beverloo; they are a great way to keep up to date of what's about to land in major browsers. This week Tab sizing, the ability for iframes to inherit styles from their parent iframe, and the fact that Japanese children are now able to play Pokemon again definitely stand out.

Together with Peter Nederlof I did the introductory talk for the first Fronteers Hackathon. We live coded this silly little multyplayer "game" where all the attendees could create a creature, walk around and shoot lasers. It was great fun.

Emeric Florence created this self-portrait with CSS 3d (move your mouse), inspired by this slightly disturbing video by Cyriak. I believe Emeric Florence is now recteating the whole video with CSS animations.

Zoltan Hawryluk, AKA User Agent Man, specializes in cross browser front-ens development and he prides himself in getting new stuff working in old browsers. Here's an article in which he explains how to style HTML5 forms, even in old browsers. You might understand that things get a bit complex, but now you know where to go when you have a project that somehow needs full browser support.

Most of us front-end developers learned our profession by reading blogs, asking questions on twitter, copying code from GitHub. Most of us don't give anything back to the community that helped them grow – which I think is OK, there is enough happening out there, not everybody has to participate. A colleague of mine decided to start blogging and sharing code. Here's the story why, and it's a nice read. (I hope that by linking he feels the pressure to keep writing, hahaha).

Steve Souders argues that you should first optimize your website for mobile. When you're done you can start thinking about a native app. He came to this conclusion after seeing a few talks on Mobilism. You should read this article.

So is this the final piece written about native vs. web? Tim Bray wrote down all the reasons for making a native or a webapp, concluded nothing, and shared a lot of links on the subject. Go ahead and read it if you're still amused by this discussion.

There's lots and lots of content online and it's not always easy to see if a source is credible. In this long article Colleen Jones explains why it can be hard and what you can do to be(come) a credible source.

On the 10th and 11th of May the second edition of the Mobilism Conference was held in Amsterdam. It was an excellent conference and I even think is was an important one as well. Here are my extended thoughts.

Cyrille Rentier en Dagmar Tolenaar zijn naar het pretcongresintensieve congresUX Lx geweest. Om dit uitje nog enige waarde te gevenOmdat helaas niet iedereen mee konhebben ze van alle drie de dagen uitgebreid verslag gedaan op Frankwatching. Elke user experience nerd die er niet bij was doet er goed aan om de verlagen te lezen. Hier is dag twee te vinden en hier staat dag drie. Doe er mooie dingen mee!

Christian Heilmann argues that brevity in code does not stand above everything, on the contrary, he says that clear, understandable and precise code is much more important, especially in HTML. He definitely has some good points in this article, every markup geek should read it.

I linked to this article about ligatures before, which explains what ligatures are and how you can use them on the web. A ligature is a character consisting of two or more letters, mostly used in classic typography. The people at oak just found out that you can do other other smart stuff with ligatures. Very clever!

There are more ways to communicate with your browser than a keyboard, a mouse or a finger. Some browsers support speech input and here's a simple but nice looking example of what you might do with speach input. Looks really nice (only works in Chrome at the moment, I think).

So how do type designers design their letters? How do you start a gargantuan job like that? Here's a lengthy and beautiful article about the process Christoph Dunst followed when he created his Novel type family. It makes you realize just how much work goes into creating a good, new font. The attention to detail is incredible.

Are the links I provided not enough? Do you need more to read? Here are the weekly links by the Mozilla Developer Engagement team. Always good, and this week with some hilarious stuff as well.

If you're as old as I am you'll remember that suddenly we weren't allowed to use the and elements because they were purely presentational. And now suddenly we are allowed to use them again because their meaning changed. In this article Oli Studholme explains that not only and changed, the meaning of and has changed too!

One of the absolute highlights during the excellent Mobilism conference was this talk by Jake Archibald about Application Cache. Hilarious but also extremely well researched. Be sure to read the accompanying article (you'll need it when you start working with AppChache) and the AppCache Diagram (and be sure to attend a conference where he's giving this talk).

I'm not sure what the weather is like at your place but right here in The Netherlands winter has not ended yet. It's not snowing but it feels like it might. In that case I'll try to make one of these snowdecahedrons. And if the weather turns out to be good I'll just cut down a tree and copy this beautiful idea.

There was a row in responsive-image-land yesterday and I linked to it in the heat of the moment, something I usually try to avoid. If you wait a while things get much clearer. In this case Jeremy Keith published an excellent braindump which clearly explains the situation, the ideas and the (current) solution. You should read it if you build web sites.

Some people promote a fixed set of predefined mediaqueries based on common screen sizes. You should never listen to them and this article explains why: there are no common screen sizes. Just use break points when the content (or layout) breaks and you should do just fine.

One of the things I love most about our industry is the fact that everybody shares their knowledge freely. Now imagine if every link I post here would direct you to a shop where you could buy a paper, that wouldn't help you much, you wouldn't gain knowledge as fast as you do right now. In academics this is a common problem: articles get published exclusively in expensive magazines and are not freely available, which means that it's harder to gain knowledge. This is of course contradictory to what universities are all about and it clashes with the idea that publicly funded research should be freely available.

Veel mensen denken dat het nooit wat zal worden met shoppen op het mobiele web, anderen, zoals ik, zien het puur als een usability probleem en weer anderen, zoals Luke Wroblewski laten aan de hand van data zien dat het idee dat het nooit wat zal worden met mobiele ecommerce flauwekul is. Marrije Schaake vertaalt de data naar begrijpelijk Nederlands.

De boekenbranche in het algemeen en in het bijzonder die in nederland snapt er echt geen ene reet van. Boeken worden niet verkocht in de iTunes store, niet op Amazon, als je een beetje mazzel hebt kan je een enkel boekje kopen in een obscuur digitaal formaatje voor een nóg obscuurdere ereader met een vijandig DRM systeem er op. Als het aan de boekenbranche lag dan bestond dat hele verrekte internet met die rare typmachines met een beeldscherm niet. Boeken zijn van papier en daarmee basta. Ik word al gefrustreerd van zo veel domheid, Bas Vermond heeft jarenlang geprobeerd de boekenbranche in nederland te veranderen en hij heeft opgegeven. Zijn relaas staat hier. Erg treurig.

You don't want to serve a 1024px wide image to a 320px wide screen, that's a silly waste of bandwidth. There is no easy way to do this so a group of web developers tried to work on a new HTML element to solve this issue. A few days ago a different solution was added to the spec without consulting these developers or without considereing the work they had already done. You can understand that not everybody is happy about this. If you're interested in this subject (it actually is very interesting, it's about the future of the web) you should definitely read this article, read about the beautiful HTML design principles mentioned and after that be sure to read this thread too.

Yes, all these new webtechnologies like canvas look absolutely great, but can you actually make something useful with it? Two years ago Simon Willison created this extremely handy canvas tool, I can't wait till we finally see it implemented everywhereM.

This is not just an excellent explanation of the difference between a geek and a CEO (or between a true pioneer and a douchebag), it's also a beautiful essay about one of the greatest inventors ever, Nikola Tesla, lovingly created by Matthew Inman.

One of the hardest parts of responsive design is the fact that we have to change the way we work, we have to change our workflow drastically, the deliverables we've been delivering in the past ten years just don't work anymore. More and more clever people start thinking about this new workflow and Stephen Hay is one of them. On Mobilism he gave this excellent presentation. Just pick and choose the ideas you think will serve you, your team and your clients well. I'll link to the video once it's published, you should definitely see it.

People like to use apps and people don't really care with what technology these apps are built. There are good reasons to use so called native technology for an app on a desktop or desknot computer, there are many good reasons why you'd want to use HTML. Mozilla is working on a Web Run-Time which lets you create launcher-apps for web-pages, here's an in depth explanation on how it works.

People obviously find it inspiring to look at the offices of famous web people. What strikes me is that most of these offices are rather small. Bruce Lawson realized there are more small rooms that might inspire you and launched this next successful tumblrblog.

Here's a nice tool that suggests a font stack based on your font. It knows fonts served by Typekit, it doesn't seem to know too many Google Fonts though. Still, a very handy tool.

One of the only reasons to keep supporting IE6 is when you work for a company that does a lot of business in China, marketshare of IE6 was always very high over there. This graph shows us that something significant happened a few weeks ago. On the positive side: IE6 usage has suddenly dropped below 20%. On the negative side: IE8 usage is close to 50% now. A long, long way to go.

A while ago a study was presented about the impact of WCAG on user problems which caused a bit of a roar in the accessibility world. According to the study the accessibility guidelines had no significant effect for blind users. Now, before you all start builing your sites with tables again, please first read this article in which Detlev Fischer debunks the study.

Everybody is always looking for success stories about interface changes that somehow caused enormous growth. Here's one nice little story by Joshua Gross about a new interface for paying in New York City cabs which resulted in $144,146,165 of additional tips per year.

Your app needs a map but you want something else than good old boring Google Maps? You could try OpenStreetMap with one of these beautiful map tiles.

A lot has been written about responsive image solutions but the perfect answer is not available yet. Chris Coyier wrote this practical article which helps you choose the right responsive image solution for your current project.

CSS selectors can be pretty hard to understand, especially the difference between nth-child and nth-of-type can be confusing. There are many tools to visualize the difference, here's another one by Ben Howdle.

About 8% of the male population—that's about 4% of all people—have some kind of color blindness. We do optimize our websites for browsers with that many users yet we do not always think about these men. Here's a whole website dedicated to colorblindness, with good articles, for example on buying clothes, and good examples like finding the links in Readability. A section with tools would be a good addition to this site

Type on the web is mostly awful. It can be beautiful though. Elliot Jay Stocks started this new series about future-facing techniques to do with typography on the web. This first article is about ligatures (a character consisting of two or more letters). If you care about type you should definitely read these articles.

You should never just link to scripts hosted on other domains, the possible advantages – caching, gzip – are not always enabled. This gets explained in detail in this excellent article. Yes, you should definitely read it.

Met collega Peet Sneekes ben ik een tijdje geleden weer eens door de wasstraat gereden. Ons gesprek hebben we weer op video vastgelegd. We praten over archiveren van film, over licenties, over vrijheid, over de krankzinnige telefoonaanbieders, kantlijnnotities en nog veel meer.

Jake Archibald wrote this definite article about Application Cache with all the info you need about appCache. Yes, AppCache is hard. But it's also easy to get thanks to Jake's pleasant style. (If you're offended by the word douchebag in the title and refuse to read it because of it, tough shit, you're missing out on some crucial information for modern webdevelopers). An absolute must read.

Here's a great presentation about polyfills by Jason Johnston, filled with links to extra information, links to polyfills, examples and an important section about the pros and cons of different polyfills. You should definitely read it.