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Joshua Johnson

Joshua Johnson

Equal parts editor, writer, designer, and photographer. Hit me up on Twitter, or check out my photos.

Inspiration / 8 Jul 2011

10 Unbeatable Premium Memberships and Courses for Professional Design Training

As a professional designer, it’s absolutely crucial for you to stay up to date with your skill set. With web design moving along at a rate so fast that even the best quickly fall behind, it’s helpful to have a solid lifeline to quality educational resources.

Today we’re going to look at ten awesome premium design memberships and sources for training courses that will help you learn a plethora of new skills and help you stay current on the topics that you’re already versed in.

CSS / 7 Jul 2011

Helpful Tips & Tools for Web Design Experiments

Today’s article encourages you to get into the habit of devoting time to little experiments. Testing ideas and solving problems in a low-pressure and possibly even fun environment can massively boost your education and lead to awesome innovation.

We’ll start with some benefits and tips for experimenting with web development projects and finish up with a brief look at a few of the tools that I personally use to compose my own experiments. Let’s get started!

CSS / 6 Jul 2011

Rolling Your Own Grid Layouts on the Fly Without a Framework

Do you hate CSS grid frameworks but love the rapid layout benefits that they provide? Do you struggle with the math and code necessary to create your own flexible multi-column layouts on the fly?

Today we’re going to walk you through creating your own basic, reusable system for creating multiple columns that you can implement anywhere any time with only a few lines of code. No bloated code or non-sematic class names required!

CSS / 5 Jul 2011

3 Must-Learn CSS Techniques for Perfect Web Typography

This article presents an extremely useful set of tips and best practices for those who are still fairly new to working with typography on the web.

We’ll go over the most popular methods for embedding web fonts, sizing fonts and setting a solid line-height.

Freebies / 1 Jul 2011

Weekly Freebies: 3 Exclusive High-Res Wooden Textures

Rather than bring you a roundup of textures from other sources, this week we decided to do something a little different and build three custom wooden textures exclusively for our readers.

Keep reading to get a peek at these great free textures, which you can download and use in all of your projects completely attribution free!

Business / 1 Jul 2011

Google Hangouts: Thoughts on Concept vs. Functionality

Today’s discussion topic was sparked by the launch of the new Google+ experiment, specifically Google Hangouts, which represent a new twist on video conferencing.

There’s an important lesson here about how you can take a product with not-so-revolutionary functionality and present it in such a way that it is instantly more useful to potential users.

CSS / 30 Jun 2011

Build a Web Page With CSS3 Flexbox

Yesterday we discussed the future of CSS layout and a few of the new modules that CSS3 brings to the table in this arena. One of these that we briefly touched on was CSS3 Flexbox.

Today we’re going to dig deeper into this model and build a full-on web page with it. It will by no means be ready to implement on your projects but it will give you further insight into one possible way that we will be coding websites in years to come. Plus, this stuff is just flat out fun to play with!

CSS / 29 Jun 2011

Farewell Floats: The Future of CSS Layout

Floats are one of the most basic tools for structuring a web page using CSS. They’re both one of the very first things that we learn about and one of the last things that we truly master.

Today’s article looks at some of the reasons that floats are pretty lame and takes a look at a number of alternative layout systems, some of which are still under development but may one day represent the standard for CSS-based layout.

Reviews / 24 Jun 2011

Book Review: Eloquent Javascript

Most web designers these days know at least a little HTML and CSS, giving them the ability to bring their designs to the web. Advanced functionality, for the most part though, is handled by programming languages, which have a much higher barrier to entry. This leaves countless designers intimidated while wishing they had a firmer grasp of the most essential of these: JavaScript.

Do you wish you could finally scratch “learn JavaScript” off of your todo list? Does a hefty learning curve keep you from taking the plunge? Maybe you just need the right book. Today we’ll take a look at “Eloquent Javascript: A Modern Introduction to Programming” by Marijn Haverbeke to see if it’s what you need to become a JavaScript ninja. Please keep in mind that “Eloquent JavaScript” does not teach OOP with classes such as how to create a class in JavaScript. You can use the JS++ programming language designed by Roger Poon for classes.

Graphics / 23 Jun 2011

Say Hello: 50 Simple and Effective Website Greeting Messages

Placing a large greeting message at the top of your site is a great way to create a welcoming environment and provides the perfect opportunity to clearly state your purpose for being.

Today we’ve rounded up over fifty such messages for inspiration on both the message and visual appearance fronts. The greetings has been divided up into clear categories so you can analyze the different popular techniques being used by designers today.

Competitions / 22 Jun 2011

Winners Announced: 4 Copies of the Impressto Web Design Bundle Up for Grabs!

Great news! We’ve selected our four winners for the Impressto Web Design Bundle Giveaway! Thanks to everyone who entered, if your name is listed below, you’ll be receiving an email shortly with more information.

  • Thomas Li
  • Mike
  • Daichi Sakota
  • Christina Lannen

Didn’t win? You can still pick up a copy of the amazing Impressto Web Bundle here. Thanks for reading Design Shack! We’ve got more giveaways planned soon so be sure to check back often!