Type is the backbone of good web design Lately, I've been getting into calligraphy in my art. I've gotten obsessed with how the letters are formed and how to draw them effectively. In fact, I find that most of the art I'm doing tends to deal with letters in some fashion. And it's fun to use type decoratively. What's interesting is that I hadn't really thought too much about this when it comes to Web design. Sure, I have lots of information on my site about fonts and typography, but even though I put it together with my offline designs, I didn't make the connection to online.
Then I found this post on The Design Cubicle: Type is the backbone of good web design. In it, Brian discusses many simple ways to improve your designs just through how the type is displayed. I love it!
Type is the backbone of good web design originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 11:26:06.
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Speaking at IASA Architecture ConnectionsI will be giving an updated version of the following talk at the IASA Connections Architect Connections Conference. This unique conference, devised especially for software architects, will be held in San Francisco from October 6-8, 2008. I am honored to be included amongst a great bunch of speakers, and am really looking forward to attending a number of the presentations myself. Even if you can't make it to this conference, you may want to check out the International Association of Software Architects.
Do You Feel like You?ve Peaked as a Software Developer?It happens to most software developers sooner or later. You get to that point in your career when it seems like you?ve gone as far as you can go. You know you?re there when it feels like you?re just doing the same thing over and over again. You might have pushed hard to learn new languages or tools over the years, but now you?ve got that sinking feeling like you?ve been there before and it?s just gotten boring. Perhaps when you started you had a real passion for the craft. Nowadays, however, you?re tired of it all, and it?s hard to motivate yourself to keep coding when you know that whatever you learn will probably be obsolete in a few years. You struggle to make sense of some new API, but the programs you write make you feel like Bill Murray in Ground Hog Day. Uggghhh!!!! This is a time for reflection, a time to investigate where you want to take your career. You?ll undoubtedly consider whether your career as a developer is merely a way to earn money, a stepping stone on to something else, or a true calling. Some may be swayed by the traditional belief that you?ve got to move on to management. Be forewarned, that career path isn?t as rosy as you might think, and requires an entirely different set of skills. Others may still feel an attraction to writing software, but just don?t know how to bring the zest back again. This article is for those who want to breathe new life into their careers as software professionals.
REST vs WS-Star SmackdownTwo camps have risen in the SOA world, the RESTafarians and the WSDL-ites. Each has passionately argued that they are the one true path. Now they need battle no longer, for in .Net 3.5 they have been brought together into the same happy WCF family. In this session we?ll dive into the tenets of REST, and consider when to use it versus WS* types of services. Not only that, but we?ll see how the same service can be created in the REST and WS* styles with C# and WCF.
View the "REST vs WS-Star Smackdown" presentation here.
View the "REST vs WS-Star Smackdown" code samples for WCF here.
Anti-Patterns in Software Projects ? The Human FactorThe creation of software products is a highly complex endeavor. Technology and programming are the easy part. The hard part is the human factor, the ingredient which ultimately has the greatest influence upon the success of any software project. Join us in this session to see how we can be our own worst enemies, and even subvert the benefits that we should be realizing from methodologies like Agile.
The talk will be given at Code Camp 5: Code Frenzy!
Are We Being Unrealistic?I?ve consulted for a number of organizations in several industries over the years and I keep seeing the same things. The issues are pretty well known and catalogued in a couple of Steve McConnell?s books (re: Rapid Development, Taming Wild Software Schedules, check out the chapter on Classic Mistakes; and Software Project Survival Guide, How to be Sure Your First Important Project Isn?t Your Last), so I won?t bother covering that ground again. Anyway, I was heavily influenced both by these writings and also by my schooling in computer science, and I developed an unshakeable belief that there was a ?right way? to conduct software projects. This was further supported by my good fortune in occasionally finding my way on to teams where such principles were put into practice. I saw that this stuff actually did work, and both the developer teams and business customers were happier with the results. Regardless, time and again, I continued to witness organizations that kept making the same mistakes in software projects and have seemd to accept that this was just the way it was. Still, I held on to the belief that if I could just show the involved parties that there was a better way, then business-as-usual could change in a revolutionary way within those organizations. In recent times, however, I?ve come to think that maybe we technologists have been unrealistic all along.
