Archive for November, 2009

A nice tutorial on creating your own textured backgrounds from two stock images by Ali Felski (who’s site is beautifully textured in its own right).

Ligature, Loop & Stem, “creators and curators of fine typography-related products”, has launched. Ingenious site layout and presentation, and some wonderful ampersand-related products are already for sale.

Microsoft announced an early look at IE9 for developers. Notable stuff includes support for the border-radius property. No vendor-specific extension. Good reason to include actual CSS3 properties along with vendor-specific ones today. Also mentioned is support for more CSS3 selectors. I’ll be more excited if there’s word on text-shadow, box-shadow, RGBA and transforms.

The FontFont library is now availble on Typekit. This is quite huge news. It also looks like the available fonts have been optimized for web use. Bar: raised.

Typekit, “… a subscription-based service for linking to high-quality Open Type fonts”, is now live and available to all.

A superb desktop wallpaper by Alex Cornell. Loving the subtle text and texture of this one. Looks nice on the iPhone as well. (via ISO50)

Birdhouse for Your Soul is a touching post by Greg Knauss on why he loves the internet. Absolutely worth a read. (via)

Craig Robinson of Flip Flop Flyin’ has a new iPhone app out that boasts, “… 1,000 Minipops on your iPhone/iPod touch which you can look at whenever and wherever you want.” Minipops are blocky, pixel art renderings of famous people.

Authentic Jobs is having a No Retweet Necessary Contest with some pretty excellent prizes, some of which were hand-selected by partner sites (we chose a Nintendo DS Lite).

I also saw donut seeds for the first time. (via)

Ten years ago, two of my biggest fears were: flying and public speaking. I’ve done enough of both (usually combined) over the last several years to where I’m now OK with either. At times even comfortable with it. I’ll probably always get nervous right before a talk — but the anxiety has shifted from, “crap, how am I going to get through this” to, “I want this to be good. I don’t want to let anyone down”.

With that confession out of the way, the next year is filling up with some great events, and I thought I’d list them here:

• Future of Web Design NYC — November 17th, 2009. I’ll be talking about “Progressive Enrichment with CSS3“. (Get 15% off the conference pass with promo code SPEAKER)
• Carson Workshops presents Handcrafted CSS — November 23rd, 2009. Join Ethan Marcotte and I in London, as we present our book in a unique, one day event. Space is limited! (Get 15% off the workshop ticket price using promo code CWDC)
• An Event Apart Seattle — April 5-7, 2010. I’ll also be splitting a full-day seminar with Jeremy Keith after the conference proper. I’ll cover CSS3, while Mr. Keith covers all things HTML5. It will be most excellent.

Ethan and I are also looking for other unique cities to bring the Handcrafted CSS event to. Have an idea, or know of an event that needs a full-day course that covers CSS3, fluid grids, bulletproof design and more? We’d love to hear about it (in the comments on this post).