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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!

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!

Win a Google Nexus 7 & A Heart Internet VPS (Worth £540)

We have teamed up with Heart Internet to offer you the chance to win a Virtual Private Server worth £540 ($874) completely free for a year, plus an awesome Google Nexus 7.

All you have to do is spend 5 minutes answering a handful of questions about your thoughts on the web design industry. You will then automatically be entered in to the prize draw.

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.

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.

50 Shades of Black: Effective Use of No Color

There has been a bit of debate stirring on the web about black. Ian Storm Taylor’s “Never Use Black” has been shared and tweeted and read by designers all over the world.

You can debate whether you should use black or not all day long. But the reality is that you will use black. Every designer does – by choosing or not. So it’s best to understand the color and how to use it properly in a variety of design projects.

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.

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.

Web Design Critique #89: Discoveries Magazine

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 Discoveries Magazine, a medical research publication. Let’s jump in and see what we think!

Design a Vintage Typographic Wedding Invitation

Today we’re going to take a step back from the web to embark on a good old fashioned print design project. Wedding invitations have become a major target for home-grown design experiments so we’re going to dive into one and see what we can come up with.

We’ll use a major typography focus combined with some simple icons to give the finished product a sophisticated vintage appeal. We’ll also do the whole thing using just two spot colors.