Joshua Johnson
Equal parts editor, writer, designer, & photographer. Hit me up on Twitter, read my Mac tutorials or check out my photos.

Every week we take a look at a new website and analyze the design. We’ll point out both the areas that are done well in addition to those that could use some work. Finally, we’ll finish by asking you to provide your own feedback.
Today’s site is Surfcamp Portugal, a site from Rapture Camps. Let’s jump in and see what we think!
November 30th, 2012 Posted in Critique

I love the challenge of building something with CSS that uses one item to trigger another. It can get pretty tricky to wrap your mind around all of the pieces involved and come up with a way to flow your HTML in a way that is easily controlled in your CSS.
Today we’re going to embark on just such a challenge. We’ll build a basic home page that swaps out background images based on the link that you’re hovering over in the navigation. Along the way, you’ll learn all about the idea of remote hovers and how to wield them in your projects.
November 29th, 2012 Posted in CSS

Who has two thumbs and loves to push the bounds of CSS? This guy. Let’s jump into a project that does just that. It’s pretty experimental and won’t pass the semantic police, but it’ll teach you a heck of a lot about advanced CSS tactics and will be tons of fun.
What we’re going to build is a pure CSS horizontal accordion slider. You’ll be able to insert as many slides as you want, each with unique content and each accessible via a click event, all without a lick of JavaScript. Impossible you say? Never!
November 28th, 2012 Posted in CSS

Forms can be one of the most complex aspects of your front-end development work. They’re far more complicated than most of the items that you’ll work with from both an HTML and CSS perspective.
If you’ve been frustrated with forms in the past, don’t worry, there is hope! Today we’re going to go over some tools and frameworks that help you get the job done without the headaches.
November 27th, 2012 Posted in HTML

Despite the predictions of countless skeptics, Sass hasn’t proved to be a fad at all, but rather a remarkably robust set of tools that genuinely improve CSS authoring.
I’m a huge Sass fan and I know many of you are too, so I’ve compiled this list of thirty amazing resources for Sass lovers. In it you’ll find all kinds of goodies built on and for Sass: frameworks, plugins, apps and a lot more.
November 26th, 2012 Posted in CSS

Every week we take a look at a new website and analyze the design. We’ll point out both the areas that are done well in addition to those that could use some work. Finally, we’ll finish by asking you to provide your own feedback.
Today’s site is Oomph. Let’s jump in and see what we think!
November 23rd, 2012 Posted in Critique

Ratchet is an awesome new framework that allows you to quickly and easily create prototype iPhone app layouts using only HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Simply create a container div in your HTML, toss in a few items with preset classes and you’re ready to go.
Follow along as we jump into Ratchet to see how it works. We’ll kick the tires, try out some features and decide whether or not it’s worth a download. (Spoiler alert: it is.)
November 21st, 2012 Posted in HTML
Twitter Bootstrap makes creating complex page layouts a breeze. Drop in a few lines of HTML, apply a few classes and you’ve got yourself a decent looking, minimal working mockup.
Wouldn’t it be nice if things were even easier though? What if Bootstrap had a visual interface? What if you could build Bootstrap pages by dragging and dropping elements onto an empty canvas? With Easel.io, you can do exactly that. Let’s see how it works.
November 20th, 2012 Posted in CSS
Riot is a small software company currently comprised of only five people. Out of nowhere, this team has dropped two web development apps for Mac users that have blown me away. This is an app category that, in my opinion, hasn’t received much true innovation in recent years and apparently the good people at Riot are out to change that, because their ideas are truly unique and incredibly useful.
Today we’ll take a brief look at both Hammer and Anvil to see what each does and how they can collectively improve your workflow, particularly if you’re a front end developer working with static sites.
November 19th, 2012 Posted in Software

Every week we take a look at a new website and analyze the design. We’ll point out both the areas that are done well in addition to those that could use some work. Finally, we’ll finish by asking you to provide your own feedback.
Today’s site is Photofolio, a Drupal theme by More Than (just) Themes. Let’s jump in and see what we think!
November 16th, 2012 Posted in Critique