Joshua Johnson
Equal parts editor, writer, designer, & photographer. Hit me up on Twitter, read my Mac tutorials or check out my photos.
Learn by Example: 6 Lessons for Designing Restaurant & Food Websites
Today’s topic is a delicious one: restaurant and food websites. Small businesses pay the bills for freelance designers and local restaurants can serve as a major source of revenue. If you’re embarking on your first restaurant site design though, there are a few things that you should know.
In this article, we’ll learn by example as we take a look at lots of mouthwatering food and restaurant websites. By examining what these designers got right, you’ll help ensure your own success in this area.
October 17th, 2012 Posted in Graphics
Create Shaped Avatars With CSS and Webkit
In case you haven’t noticed, square avatars are so 2010. These days circles are all the rage. Every app worth its salt, from Path to Basecamp, is jumping on board this fad and waving goodbye to the squares who are stuck in the past.
Ever the forward thinker, I asked myself, “what’s next?” Let’s look beyond squares and circles and into the future of the avatar! Using CSS and Webkit, we can use pretty much any shape as the mask for an avatar. Let’s see how.
October 16th, 2012 Posted in CSS
The New Arby’s Logo: Better or Boring?
Everyone’s favorite roast beef sandwich fast food chain (ok, maybe the only roast beef fast food chain anyone can name) just jumped headlong into a brand refresh. Their new logo, menu and website is meant to bring the admittedly old-timey restaurant into the 21st century.
The question of course is, did they succeed? Follow along as we take a look at the logo and website to see what we think.
October 15th, 2012 Posted in Inspiration
50 Amazing Resources for Dribbble Lovers
Here at Design Shack, we’re huge Dribbble fans. Sort of a Twitter for design, this awesome site is home to beautiful bite-sized work samples from the web’s best designers.
To showcase our love for Dribbble, we’ve put together a collection of fifty fantastic resources for anyone and everyone who uses Dribbble. From open source developer projects and quirky web projects to desktop and mobile applications, we’ve got enough Dribbble goodness to keep you occupied for months.
October 11th, 2012 Posted in Software
What the Heck Is CSS Specificity?
CSS specificity is a topic that many new front end coders avoid for as long as possible. It sounds complicated, there are all of these rules, you might even have to do some math! How lame is that?
Ultimately, you can only avoid it for so long. Specificity is an essential concept that you need to grasp to be an effective developer. Today I’ll walk you through the concepts of specificity in a simple and easy to understand manner. It’s easier than you think!
October 10th, 2012 Posted in CSS
Check Out Design Shack on Your Mobile Device With Google Currents
Great news! Design Shack is hitting your tablet and smartphone in a big way with Google Currents, a beautiful and free newsreader app for iOS and Android. With just a quick click or tap, you can get a daily dose of design goodness delivered right to your Google Currents feed. Read on to see how!
October 9th, 2012 Posted in Design Shack
Battle of the LESS Mixin Libraries: LESS Elements vs. LESS Hat vs. Bootstrap
LESS is a friendly, easily-approachable CSS preprocessor. Though ultimately, Sass and Stylus are more powerful and robust, LESS has a certain charm that keeps it as a forerunner in the battle of the preprocessors.
If you’re a Sass fan, then you can take advantage of Compass, an incredible framework that makes coding with complex CSS3 properties a breeze. But what about LESS users? Where’s their Compass? Today we’ll look at three awesome mixin libraries that will help fill that void.
October 8th, 2012 Posted in CSS
How to Use Adobe Edge Web Fonts on Your Site
Adobe recently launched a free web font service to complement Typekit, their amazing premium service. Adobe Edge Web Fonts currently gives you around 500 free font families that you can use on your site today with little effort. How great is that?
The process for implementing these fonts isn’t quite as straightforward as some of the other services that you might be used to, so today we’re going to dive in and take a look at how it all works.
October 4th, 2012 Posted in CSS
40 Awesome MooTools Plugins You Need to Check Out
Recently, we published an outstanding collection of 40 jQuery plugins that every developer should check out. Today we’re following that up with some love for the MooTools crowd.
Like jQuery, MooTools has an awesome community of developers that constantly churn out stellar free plugins for all types of tasks and interfaces. In this collection you’ll find plugins for sliders, lightboxes, tags, navigation and a lot more.
October 2nd, 2012 Posted in JavaScript
How to Avoid Stupid Screw-Ups With Adobe Template Files
Don’t you hate it when you use some important file as a template and then accidentally save over it? I used to do this all the time and it frustrated me to no end.
Fortunately, Adobe has invented these great little template file types that fundamentally function differently than your normal files to make sure you don’t screw anything up. Read on to see how they work.
October 1st, 2012 Posted in SoftwareSubscribe
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