The February edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, frameworks, jQuery plugins, WordPress tools, and some really great new fonts.

Many of the resources below are free and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.

As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments.

And if you have an app or other resource you’d like to see included next month, tweet it to @cameron_chapman for consideration.

Dolody

Dolody is a new weekly online magazine for the design community. They cover design, coding, graphics, and WordPress, with commentary from some leading designers, quick tutorials, interviews, and more.

Zip.js

Zip.js is a JavaScript library for zipping and unzipping files. It’s a great addition to an online file management system or site where users need to upload content.

WP Remote

WP Remote lets you manage and maintain all of your WordPress sites from a single dashboard. You can update your core, plugins, and themes, track site status, and have daily backups run and stored to Amazon S3.

Bear CSS

Bear CSS is an online app to help you build a stylesheet based on your HTML markup. Just upload your HTML file and Bear CSS will generate a CSS template based on it.

Zoey

Zoey is a framework for developing mobile apps. It includes a range of UI elements and is lightweight and customizable.

Arctext.js

Arctext.js makes it easy to create curved lettering with CSS3 and JavaScript. It calculates the right rotation for each letter to distribute it across the arc of a given radius.

SlabText

SlabText is a script that lets you create a big, bold, responsive headline for your web designs. It splits headlines into rows before resizing each row to fill the available horizontal space, and even lets you specify preset word combinations.

HTML KickStart

HTML KickStart is a set of HTML5, CSS, and jQuery building blocks for rapid website development. It includes files, layouts, and elements that will give you a headstart and save you hours on your projects.

Fokiz

Fokiz is a content management system designed for ease of use by designers, developers, and users. It has a minimal learning curve, with a simple templating system and easy-to-develop module system for expanding functionality.

GuideGuide

GuideGuide is a Photoshop plugin for creating grid-based designs with pixel-accurate columns, rows, midpoints, and baselines, all of which can be created with the click of a button. Frequently used guide sets can be saved for repeated use, saving you even more time.

deCSS3

deCSS3 is a free bookmarklet for testing the graceful degradation of your designs so you can see exactly what they’ll look like on older browsers that don’t have CSS3 support. It currently supports Chrome and Safari.

Bootstrap Generator

Bootstrap Generator makes it easy to get started with your Twitter Bootstrap project the way you want. Just alter the options to suit your needs and it will generate your compiled Bootstrap CSS file.

Gridpak

Gridpak is a responsive grid generator that creates PNG, CSS, LESS, JavaScript, and SCSS files to your specifications. Just enter the number of columns, the padding for each, and the gutter width.

Create

Create is a new web editing interface that uses a browser-based HTML5 environment for managing your content. It can be adapted for use with virtually any content management backend.

Dabblet

Dabblet is a CSS and HTML sandbox that lets you test out your code and preview it instantly. You can save files anonymously or create an account for more options. You also have a variety of views available, including a results-only view for previewing your entire design.

Impress.js

Impress.js is a presentation tool that uses CSS3 transforms and transitions to create more interesting slideshows. It’s currently supported in Chrome and Safari, and will be supported in Firefox 10.

EaselJS

EaselJS is a JavaScript library for working with HTML5 Canvas. It provides a retained graphics mode, including a full, hierarchical display list, helper classes, and a core interaction model.

Notification Control

Notification Control is a one-stop source for resetting your email notifications for popular web services, including Forrst, Facebook, Twitter, Path, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Tumblr, and more. Just visit the page, and click the links to go directly where you need to to adjust your email notifications for each site.

IconBox 2.5

IconBox is “like iPhoto for your icons”, and lets you organize and customize your icons. It also includes tools and an “Icon of the Day” that features a new icon from a different artist each day.

The Shock Free Bundle 2

WordPress Theme Shock is now offering the Shock Free Bundle 2, a collection of 99 PSD themes, all for free. Each comes with home and internal pages, in a wide variety of styles. The free version includes a personal license, but a commercial license is available for purchase.

youRhere

youRhere is a jQuery plugin that gives your users a chance to mark their article-reading progress just by clicking. It’s an incredibly useful plugin for sites that post long-form content, and uses the HTML5 local storage API.

Eenox Designer

Eenox Designer is a tool that lets you create dynamic and interactive touch-optimized websites for computers, smartphones, and tablets, using HTML5. It lets you design and animate without coding, and then lets you download your design to host on your own servers. There’s a free plan with limited functionality, while paid plans start at $99 for 2 months.

Reverie

Reverie is an HTML5 responsive WordPress framework based on Zurb’s Foundation. It uses media query to adjust for all kinds of devices, is optimized for iPhone and iPad, and is hNews microformat ready.

SyntaxHighlight.in

SyntaxHighlight.in is an online tool that displays formatted source code. It doesn’t use dynamic styling (so there’s no flash of unstyled content), is only about 6kb (JS and CSS), and code can be opened in a popup for easy printing.

Enlight

Enlight is an open source e-commerce framework created by Shopware. It’s based on both the Zend and Symphony 2 frameworks, but focuses on creating rich internet applications and individual e-commerce applications. It’s highly adaptable, uses a simple plugin system, and is specifically adapted to e-commerce.

Bemio (Name your price)

Bemio is an ultra-bold sans serif typeface that bridges the gap between old fashioned signage and modern forms. It includes more than 1000 glyphs and full language support.

Hagin (free)

Hagin is a new serif typeface with strong geometric forms and old school style. It’s perfect for a variety of graphic design, including web, print, motion graphics, and more.

Veles (free)

Veles is a handwritten-style Cyrillic and basic Latin Ukrainian style font that comes in regular and bold weights.

Meander (free)

Meander is an experimental script font with a freestyle winding and intertwining style. It was created by doodling with felt pens, and is best used at larger sizes.

Wonder Brush ($29.95)

Wonder Brush is an incredibly versatile script typeface that’s perfect for display use. It was inspired in part by a 1969 typeface called Poppl Stretto, but fused with ideas found in interwar designs.

Made for Japan ($20)

Made for Japan is a glyph typeface that was created to raise money for relief efforts after the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan. All proceeds from the sale of this typeface are delivered directly to organizations in Japan.

Anodyne ($19)

Anodyne is a weathered all-caps font with hand-printed texture. Layering regular and shadow versions offers a variety of unique shadow options.

Memoir ($59)

Memoir is a very romantic script font, inspired by handwritten letters, journals, and documents dating to the 18th century. It’s designed to allow letters to connect fluidly, as if they were actually written.

Eterea ($134)

Eterea is an antique-style font that comes in 12 weights and styles. It includes italics, small caps, swash caps, handtooled caps, ornamented caps, and calligraphic caps.

Uniwerek ($46)

Uniwerek is a hand drawn font reminiscent of university sportswear. It includes six fonts, including stencil and light versions.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

Know of a new app or resource that should have been included but wasn’t? Let us know in the comments!

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A Tech-Happy Professor Reboots After Hearing His Teaching Advice Isn’t Working
by Jeffrey Young, The Chronicle for Higher Education

Michael Wesch has been on the lecture circuit for years touting new models of active teaching with technology. The associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University has given TED talks. Wired magazine gave him a Rave Award. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching once named him a national professor of the year. But now Mr. Wesch finds himself rethinking the fundamentals of teaching—and questioning his own advice.

The professor’s popular talks have detailed his experiments teaching with Twitter, YouTube videos, collaborative Google Docs—and they present a general critique of the chalk-and-talk lecture as outmoded. To get a sense of his teaching style, check out a video he made about one of his anthropology courses. In it, some 200 students designed their own imaginary cultures and ran a world-history simulation by sending updates via Twitter and a voice-to-text application called Jott.

To be fair, Mr. Wesch always pointed to the downsides of technology (it can be a classroom distraction, for instance). But he saw tech-infused methods as a way to upgrade teaching.

Then a frustrated colleague approached him after one of his talks: “I implemented your idea, and it just didn’t work,” Mr. Wesch was told. “The students thought it was chaos.”

It was not an isolated incident. As other professors he met described their plans to follow his example, he suspected their classes would also flop. “They would just be inspired to use blogs and Twitter and technology, but the No. 1 thing that was missing from it was a sense of purpose.”

Mr. Wesch is not swearing off technology—he still believes you can teach well with YouTube and Twitter. But at a time when using more interactive tools to replace the lecture appears to be gaining widespread acceptance, he has a new message. It doesn’t matter what method you use if you do not first focus on one intangible factor: the bond between professor and student.
Learning From an ‘Old Fogy’

Christopher Sorensen also teaches at Kansas State University, and he too has been named a national teacher of the year. But Mr. Sorensen, a physics professor, is decidedly old-school in his methods.

“You could say I’m an old fogy,” he tells me sheepishly. “I worry about that a little bit.”

He has avoided “clickers,” those remote-control-like gadgets that let students ring in answers, out of concern that they would take up too much class time and limit the amount of material he could cover. And Mr. Sorensen has a hunch that PowerPoint—which he finds valuable at professional conferences—would get in the way of his teaching. “PowerPoint takes away, I think, from a true engagement,” is how he put it.

Exactly how he connects with a roomful of students is unclear to him, but he senses that it happens. “I walk into the classroom, and I get into a fifth gear, you might say. My voice goes up and down. It’s almost like being an actor. But don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been an actor or anything.”

Even though he has been teaching for some 34 years, he still spends the morning before each class preparing—rehearsing the material in his mind. When I spoke with him one morning last week, he was reading over his notes before teaching a lesson on Copernicus for an astronomy course. “It’s sort of like running laps before you compete in a true race. You have to get warmed up,” he says.

Mr. Sorensen has heard increasing questions about whether the lecture—his preferred method—is an effective way to teach. One study he saw found that students in after-class interviews remember only 20 percent of the material. Yet he still champions the approach.

“The way I look at it is, I’ve plowed the ground,” he says. “Now they’re susceptible the next time they see the material. And you’ll give them an assignment, and that forces them to look at the material in a new way.”

As he sees it, his job is less about being an expert imparting facts and figures, and more about being a salesman convincing students that his material is worth their attention. “The messenger, ironically enough, is more important than the message,” he says. “If the messenger is excited and passionate about what they have to say, it leaves a good impression. It stimulates students to see what all this excitement is about.”

The things that make a good teacher are difficult—if not impossible—to teach, he thinks. Which is why technology may be so attractive to some teaching reformers. Blogging, Twitter, and other digital tools involve step-by-step processes that can be taught.

Meanwhile, when Mr. Sorensen recently met a job candidate who appeared warm and friendly, he felt immediately that he would be a good teacher. “I said, you seem like a good guy—you’ll make a great teacher,” he remembers saying. “Be a good guy with your students, and you’ll be a great professor.”
Searching for ‘Wonder’

As Mr. Wesch began to rethink his teaching, he visited Mr. Sorensen’s class and was impressed by how the low-tech professor connected with students: “He’s a lecturer. He’s not breaking them up into small groups or having them make videos. That’s my thing, right? But he’s totally in tune with where they are and the struggle it takes to understand physics concepts. He is right there by their side, walking them through the forest of physics.”

At its best, Mr. Wesch believes that interactive technology—and other methods to create more active experiences in the classroom—can be used to forge that kind of relationship between teachers and students where professors nurture rather than talk down to students.

In one of his courses, he teamed up with students to produce an ethnography of YouTube users. The project helped the students feel more like collaborators because the technology allowed them to immediately publish their work online.

But Mr. Wesch has also found that a high-tech method like asking students to write blogs can actually reinforce what he sees as an “authoritarian” tendency of lectures.

One example he has seen: a professor whose first comment on a student’s blog is, “Hey, great ideas here, but just so you know, there are a few typos there in your first line.” To Mr. Wesch, that sends the message that the blog is just another spot watched by the grammar police, rather than a new arena to explore. “Students can all sniff out an inauthentic place of learning,” the professor argues. “They think, If it’s a game, fine, I’ll play it for the grade, but I’m not going to learn anything.”

Technology rarely plays more than a passing role in the work of teacher-of-the-year winners, says Mary Huber, a consulting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching who has overseen the judging process since 1991. “We see people making interesting use of technology without it being the star player,” she told me.

She said it is not too surprising that others have had trouble replicating what Mr. Wesch did. “None of this work is off-the-shelf,” she said, noting that the group promotes a “scholarly approach” to teaching. “That means you aren’t just picking something and plopping it in there, but you’re really thinking through what its value is and what you would have to do to change it.”

This semester Mr. Wesch is on sabbatical, working on a book about teaching that will sum up his latest thinking.

He is still giving talks, and the titles now all include the word “wonder.” Whatever tool professors can find to conjure that—curiosity and a sense of amazing possibilities—is what they should use, he says. Like any good lecture, his point may be more inspirational than instructive.

“Students and faculty have to have this sense that they can truly connect with each other,” he concludes. “Only through that sense of connection do you have this sense of community.”

College 2.0 covers how new technologies are changing colleges. Please send ideas to jeff.young@chronicle.com or @jryoung on Twitter.

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot

Take a look at the past: the Illustrated History of Web Forms http://ow.ly/8TBns

Interesting article about layering or multitasking that actually works http://bit.ly/y8QQ3G

Take a look at these awesome examples of websites using mainly light colors on its designs http://bit.ly/yQdLXY

The inner workings: great examples of movies typography, SF style http://bit.ly/z99GCt

Get lost in the details of these really impressive Illustrations by the Estonian artist Heikki Leis http://cot.ag/wJ6ELV

Moving Web Page Elements Using The CSS3 Translate Transform http://su.pr/32Abn2

Inspiring Steve Jobs excerpt on taking a calligraphy class http://cot.ag/Afx7CR

Amazing things to do with PHP and cURL http://cot.ag/wVGZg9

Superbowl 2012 Adverts: take a look at some of the best which interspersed the on-field action: http://bit.ly/wHH4YB

Charming stop motion animation by Alfalfa Studios for Kate Spade in celebration of the color chocolate brown http://bit.ly/yc6XAY

Avoiding Social Networks and Staying on Task. YES, it is possible! http://bit.ly/An3o5E

Royal Mail unveils Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake stamps! http://bit.ly/zgmQe5

Ouch! Know Why Your Website’s Header Is Driving People Away http://bit.ly/xPg8bI

“Dancing Plague of 1518“ by Niege Borges = All choreographies from cult movies in posters Now dance! http://bit.ly/zcsRkw

Are you using SASS? Musings on Preprocessing: http://cot.ag/yALC5M

Francesco Franchi is brilliantly explaining why “Infographic Thinking” is the future and not a fad http://bit.ly/AuSqoT

Keeping up with “office reading” is keeping you from getting to the “real” work? Then read on: http://cot.ag/xOEqH1

Check this out: WordPress Theme Trends For 2012 http://bit.ly/zcSpog

A cool infographic on HTML5 vs. Flash Games http://bit.ly/xwf13A

Colllor is a new webapp that deals with one of the most basic aspects of design – color. Take a look: http://colllor.com/

Very interesting perspective about books: the dialogue between the reader and the object http://ow.ly/90CLh

Want more? No problem! Keep track of all our tweets by following us @DesignerDepot

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Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

Less than perfect

Wrong password, right hook

The praying designer

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

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We’re well into 2012, and many designers and developers around the world are planning their travels for the year, which may include attending one of the many Web design and development conferences that will be held in the upcoming months. To help you out with your plans, we’ve once again put together a list of conferences and events that you might want to consider.

As always, this post covers events taking place in about a seven month timeframe that ends in early September. In August, we’ll post another article like this that will cover events for the six or seven month period beginning in September.

There is no way for us to include every possible event, so you are more than welcome to help us out and provide a comment to an upcoming event that you feel would be of interest to Smashing Magazine’s readers. This may also be a chance for you to meet members of the Smashing Team this year.

Using the in-page links below, you can choose the month that interests you most:

• February 2012 Events
• March 2012 Events
• April 2012 Events
• May 2012 Events
• June 2012 Events
• July 2012 Events
• August/September 2012 Events

February 2012 Events

Multipack Events
“The Multipack is a community of multi-talented Web professionals from across the West Midlands. Every month we get together to discuss design, code, standards and technology, and share our knowledge, skills and talents.”

When: Various dates throughout 2012
Where: Various UK locations

Web Direc­tions’ “What do you know?”
“Come by at 6.30pm and we’ll kick off around 7.00pm. There’ll be ten fast and furi­ous five minute pre­sen­ta­tions show­ing off a cool web devel­op­ment or design tech­nique. There’ll be free beer and a bite to eat, and it’s a great chance to see who’s doing what in the local web indus­try. See you there!”

When: Various dates beginning February 16, 2012
Where: Various cities in Australia

WordCamp
“WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other.”

When: Various dates beginning February 17, 2012
Where: Miami, Phoenix, Slovakia, Bangkok, The Netherlands, San Diego, Ponce

SES Conference & Expo
“SES Conference & Expo is the leading global event series that educates delegates in search and social marketing, putting a special focus on tactics and best practices. SES Events provide instruction from the industry’s top experts, including representatives from the Search Engines themselves.”

When: Various dates starting February 20, 2012
Where: London, New York, Shanghai, Toronto, San Francisco

In Control Conference
“Learn from a diverse array of Web experts to use modern tools and techniques to refine your Web design craft now. Harness creative inspiration to unlock your potential, amplify innovation, and broaden your reach. Immerse yourself in two days of idea exchange with potential business partners who are as forward-thinking as you are.”

When: February 20-21, 2012
Where: Orlando, FL, USA at the Embassy Suites Orlando

iStrategy
“iStrategy is an inspirational, two-day, digital media conference for senior executives who believe that the success of their business requires a sound digital strategy. iStrategy is held bi-annually at each of our four regional event locations in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia.”

When: Various dates beginning February 21
Where: Sydney, London, Chicago

LessConf
“LessConf is not like other events you’ve heard about. Sure there’s speakers, after parties, people with laptops, but LessConf has been called ‘Summer camp for startups’, ‘the best time of my life,’ and even ‘the world’s worst conference’.”

When: February 23-24, 2012
Where: Atlanta, GA, USA

No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposiums
“This conference will focus on the latest technologies and best practices emerging in the enterprise software development space. Our speakers are authors, consultants, open source developers, and recognized industry experts. NFJS brings a high quality conference to your city, making the event accessible not only to senior engineers, but to the whole team. ”

When: Various dates beginning February 24, 2012
Where: Various cities in the USA

SuperConf
“SuperConf 2012 is where web development & entrepreneurship converge. We will have 9 startups & 8 speakers over 2 days in perfect weather during February.”

When: February 24-25, 2012
Where: Miami, FL, USA at the Miami Beach Convention Center

PHP UK Conference
“PHP UK Conference 2012 is PHP London’s seventh annual conference, powered by PHP London, a community-run, limited company of the UK. For the first time, it is a two day event. The conference planning committee is made of up of the five members of the PHP London executive committee and five additional volunteers.”

When: February 24-25, 2012
Where: London, UK at the Business Design Centre

OpenCF Summit
“OpenCF Summit is a community gathering focused exclusively on advancing free and open source software in the CFML community. If you’re interested in diving into the free software CFML engines, learning more about the free software movement, and interacting with the most progressive thinkers in the CFML community, OpenCF Summit is for you! 72 hours of CFFreedom for the low, low price of only $72. Sleep optional.”

When: February 24-26, 2012
Where: Dallas, TX, USA at the Hyatt Place Dallas/Garland

Usability Week Conference 2012
“Many conferences offer cavernous exhibit halls, brief seminars on second-hand discoveries, and a sense of anonymity that can be truly alienating. Usability Week takes a different approach. In place of scattered, shallow talks, Usability Week offers up to 6 days of deep learning as international experts lead full-day tutorials”

When: Various dates between February 26 and May 18, 2012
Where: New York, Las Vegas, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Washington

FITC Amsterdam
“FITC Amsterdam features renowned speakers from around the world, all of whom have signed up to share their knowledge and expertise; attendees will leave inspired, educated and challenged to set the bar even higher.”

When: February 27-28, 2012
Where: Amsterdam, The Netherlands, at the European Centre for Arts and Sciences

Confoo
“PHP, Python, Ruby, Java and .NET Conference.”

When: February 29 – March 2, 2012
Where: Montreal, Canada

Design Indaba Conference and Expo
“With a focus on international thought leadership, the Design Indaba Conference has become one of the world’s leading design events and hosts more than 40 speakers and 2 500 delegates. The Design Indaba Expo was inaugurated in 2004 and provides a commercial platform for the finest South African designers to leverage goods and services to the local and global markets.”

When: February 29 – March 4, 2012
Where: Cape Town, South Africa

March 2012 Events

QCon
“QCon London is the sixth annual London enterprise software development conference designed for developers, team leads, architects and project management is back! There is no other event in the UK with similar opportunities for learning, networking, and tracking innovation occurring in the Java, .NET, Html5, Mobile , Agile, and Architecture communities.”

When: March 7-9, 2012
Where: London, UK in The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre

SXSW Interactive
“The 19th annual SXSW Interactive festival will take place March 9-13, 2012 in Austin, Texas. An incubator of cutting-edge technologies, the event features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders and an unbeatable line up of special programs showcasing the best new websites, video games and startup ideas the community has to offer. From hands-on training to big-picture analysis of the future, SXSW Interactive has become the place to experience a preview of what is unfolding in the world of technology.”

When: March 9-13, 2012
Where: Austin, TX, USA

Greenville Grok
“A small thing, in a great place, with wonderful people, asking a ton of questions and making headway on some decent answers.”

When: March 15-17, 2012
Where: Greenville, SC, USA

Webcoast
“We offer a weekend where you expand your knowledge and your network of contacts, a weekend you will remember and enjoy for a long time.”

When: March 16-18, 2012
Where: Gothenburg, Sweden

London Web Summit
“The two largest web & start up conferences in the UK & Ireland, GeeknRolla and the Dublin Web Summit, are merging to create the London Web Summit. LWS will take place on March 19th in the Brewery.”

When: March 19, 2012
Where: London, UK in the Brewery

DrupalCon Denver
“DrupalCon Denver is the official conference of the Drupal community. DrupalCon is a biannual event presented to an ever-expanding international audience since Drupal became an open-source project in 2001. It’s put on by the Drupal Association, as well as a fabulous group of volunteers and organizers from across the globe.”

When: March 19-23, 2012
Where: Colorado, USA, at the Colorado Convention Center

IA Summit
“The IA Summit is the primary event for those redefining strategy and structure in support of cross-channel systems and user experiences.”

When: March 21-25, 2012
Where: New Orleans, LA, USA at the downtown Hyatt Regency Hotel

FITC Spotlight: JavaScript
“Nearly everyone with a personal computer has some sort of JavaScript interpreter on it, making this language essential to the developer’s toolkit. JavaScript has become even more important with the increasing popularity of HTML5, as it is one of the language’s building blocks. By the end of event day, attendees will have enough information to get started with JavaScript development.”

When: March 24, 2012
Where: Toronto, Canada, at the University of Toronto Campus

Made by Few Web Conference
“Made by Few is a 1-day conference featuring talks from entrepreneurs, designers, developers, and creatives. It’s part showcase, part education, and part inspiration.”

When: March 24, 2012
Where: Little Rock, AR, USA at Little Rock River Market

Photoshop World Conference & Expo
“Designed to help you boost your skills, Photoshop World offers three days of pulse-pounding training with classes from renowned experts in the fields of Photoshop, photography and lighting and a once-in-a-lifetime experience guaranteed to enhance your skill set and help your work soar to new heights!”

When: March 24-26, 2012
Where: Washington, DC, USA at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center

DevConnections
“Join us and explore the latest trends and get the most up to date information and training available. All while networking with your colleagues and building a valuable network of peers in one of the most entertaining cities in the world.”

When: March 26-29, 2012
Where: Las Vegas, NV, USA at the MGM Grand

ArabNet Digital Summit
“The region’s largest digital event just got bigger! This year’s summit will go on for 5 action-packed days featuring cutting-edge panel discussions, specialized workshops, exciting competitions, focused networking sessions, social activities and more.”

When: March 27-31, 2012
Where: Beirut, Lebanon

April 2012 Events

JSConf
“We have been doing JSConf for 4 years and every single one has been better than the last, it is something we take a great deal of pride in. We make events that aren’t from the standard conference playbook because we believe you deserve more than that. We focus on two things, presenting mind-altering JavaScript technology and uses during the daytime and providing exceptional ‘networking events’ AKA killer parties during the evenings.”

When: April 2-3, 2012
Where: Scottsdale, AZ, USA at the Firesky resort

An Event Apart Seattle
“An Event Apart is an intensely educational two-day learning session for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design. If you care about code as well as content, usability as well as design, An Event Apart is the conference you’ve been waiting for.”

When: April 2-4, 2012
Where: Seattle, WA, USA at the Bell Harbor Conference Center

TYPO San Francisco
“San Francisco is renowned as a creative hub. The unique blend of innovative thinking, design, software and technological development in the Bay Area has changed the way the world works. Well designed connections have improved and made our lives more fulfilling. Greater connections mean life can be more challenging, and that requires innovative design solutions. TYPO San Francisco brings together incredible speakers from American and European design communities to share and discuss what it means to connect.”

When: April 5-6, 2012
Where: San Francisco, CA, USA at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

TYPO3 Developer Days
“So, here is the deal. You have a project related to TYPO3 / FLOW3 / Phoenix or the TYPO3 project in general? You need some manpower to get it done? You want to share your idea and probably find someone who joins your team? You just want to implement the coolest feature mankind has ever seen? Well, then the TYPO3 Developer Days 2012 is the event to go!”

When: April 12-15, 2012
Where: Munich, Germany at MACE

MADinSpain
“Breathe creativity. MADinSpain is an international design event and venue for the most remarkable creative minds of our time.”

When: April 13-14, 2012
Where: Madrid, Spain

360|Flex
“360|Flex has quickly become THE conference for Flex/AIR/ActionScript developers to attend to connect with the community, learn from the Adobe Engineers, as well as community experts, and get the deepest, most technical understanding of Flex and what’s coming for Flex, anywhere.”

When: April 15-18, 2012
Where: Denver, CO, USA

DIBI Web Conference
“Design it. Build it. The two-track web conference.”

When: April 16-17, 2012
Where: Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Breaking Development
“Breaking Development focuses on new, emerging techniques for web development and design for mobile devices. Our speakers are hand-picked to make sure you get challenging, well-delivered talks from a variety of different perspectives.”

When: April 16-18, 2012
Where: Orlando, FL, USA at the Gaylord Palms

The World Wide Web Conference
“The World Wide Web Conference is a yearly international conference on the topic of the future direction of the World Wide Web. It began in 1994 at CERN and is organized by the International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee (IW3C2). The Conference aims to provide the world a premier forum for discussion and debate about the evolution of the Web, the standardization of its associated technologies, and the impact of those technologies on society and culture.”

When: April 16-20, 2012
Where: Lyon, France

140 Character Conference
“The take aways from this event will provide the attending delegates knowledge, perspectives and insights to the next wave of effects twitter and the real-time internet will have on business.”

When: Multiple dates beginning April 17, 2012
Where: New York, USA

Great Indian Developer Summit
“With over 14000 attendees benefiting over four game changing editions, GIDS is the gold standard for India’s software developer ecosystem for gaining exposure to and evaluating new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software and standards.”

When: April 17-20, 2012
Where: Bangalore, India

UX London
“Presented by Clearleft, UX London is 3 days of inspiration, education and skills development for User Experience Designers.”

When: April 18-20, 2012
Where: London, UK, at the Cumberland Hotel

BACON
“BACON is a two-day, two-track technology conference on things developers love. Thirty-two tasty sessions on topics including web development, machine learning, astronomy, and electronic music.”

When: April 20-21, 2012
Where: London, UK

FITC Design & Technology Festival
“The game has changed and FITC is on it! Featuring over 70 renowned digital creators from around the globe, FITC Toronto 2012 attendees will be privy to the knowledge of the best and brightest in the digital space. Covering everything from HTML5 to making digital art, this three day festival will leave attendees inspired to create in new and innovative ways.”

When: April 23-25, 2012
Where: Toronto, Canada at the Hilton

beyond tellerrand – play!
“This a 4 day event with affordable ticket pricing. 2 workshop days feature full-day workshops and the conference covers 2 tracks with over 20 presentations about technology, design and inspiration on 2 days. Who ever wants to hear the latest buzz and exchange with other creative minds has reached the exact right event. And ticket prices start from just €99,00 including German VAT (19%) and booking fees.”

When: April 24-27, 2012
Where: Cologne, Germany

TNW Conference
“The 7th edition of The Next Web Conference will be packed with high quality content, networking events, parties and dealmaking opportunities. It’s the place to be for all web and mobile professionals.”

When: April 25-27
Where: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Front-Trends
“This is a gathering for front-end lovers to discover the current trends to build a professional career out of innovative front-end development.”

When: April 26-27, 2012
Where: Warsaw, Poland at the Soho factory

ConvergeSE
“Peel back the layers and examine the intersection between design, development and marketing over two days of workshops and lectures.”

When: April 27-28, 2012
Where: Columbia, SC, USA at IT-ology

Future Insights Live
“Future of Web Apps, Future of Web Design, Future of Mobile, and Future of Web in the Enterprise have joined forces to bring you our most comprehensive event EVER!”

When: April 30 – May 4, 2012
Where: Las Vegas, NV, USA at the MGM Grand Conference Center

May 2012 Events

GRAVITY FREE
“If you aren’t finding the inspiration you need to think big ideas, to boldly imagine, to create surprise, to do things a little differently, consider the place you aren’t looking — GRAVITY FREE: Design That Opens Minds.”

When: May 1-2, 2012
Where: Chicago, IL, USA at The Spertus Institute

webDU
“The conference offers the opportunity to get hands-on technical training, gain new skills, hear breaking news from the Web Industry, network with peers and industry leaders, and ultimately become more successful developing and delivering web applications. Nowhere else in ANZ can this audience find the volume and quality of information available under one roof at webDU.”

When: May 3-4, 2012
Where: Sydney, Australia at the Four Points by Sheraton Sydney, Darling Harbour

Next Berlin
“The leading European conference for the digital industry. ”

When: May 8-9, 2012
Where: Berlin, Germany

CMS Expo
“2012 CMS Expo showcases the world’s leading Content Management Systems and the incredible people who power them. Come discover the most innovative CMSs on the planet. Connect to the growing CMS Community. Learn the best ways to deploy your content and tune your CMS to perfectly match the demands of an ever-changing mobile, social, interconnected marketplace.”

When: May 8-10, 2012
Where: Chicago, IL, USA

J. Boye Web and Intranet Conference
“J. Boye’s conferences grew out of our international groups for online professionals. We are in regular contact with our 400+ members from large and complex organisations and we know their agendas and projects. This puts us in a unique position to assess and determine what is happening in every corner of the field at any given time and enables us to put together a relevant program that really reflects the current challenges of our delegates.”

When: May 8-10, 2012
Where: Philadelphia, PA, USA at The Hub CityView

Mobilism
“Mobilism is one of the best-respected web conferences in the world, concentrating exclusively on mobile web design and development.”

When: May 10-11, 2012
Where: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Semi-Permanent Creative Conferences
“Semi-Permanent is a world leading design conference that to date has hosted 29 events in 9 cities, covering 5 countries, with over 200 speakers and 50,000 attendees. In 2012, Semi-Permanent celebrates ten years of events- that’s a decade full of stories and wisdom from industry idols. ”

When: Various dates beginning May 11, 2012
Where: Sydney, Auckland, Brisbane, Melbourne (Australia)

Future Of Web Design London
“The Future of Web Design proudly presents three days of cutting edge learning and inspiration. Join us for a day of in-depth workshops, followed by two action-packed conference days in the heart of London!”

When: May 14-16, 2012
Where: London, UK at The Brewery

PEPCON
“Join the world’s top InDesign experts and the Adobe InDesign team, May 14-16 in San Francisco for the InDesign event of the year! Find answers and valuable insight on the topics publishing for eBooks, print, interactive documents, and more! Be inspired by fresh ideas and new products. Includes a 2-day multi-track conference followed by three full-day post-conference tutorials.”

When: May 14-16, 2012
Where: San Francisco, CA, USA

Confab
“As the leading conference of its kind, Confab plays a major role in driving the content strategy conversation forward.”

When: May 14-16, 2012
Where: Minneapolis, MN, USA at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis

Internet Week New York
“Since its debut in 2008, Internet Week New York has quickly become one of the world’s top festivals celebrating digital culture, as well as a global showcase for New York City’s thriving technology industry. Internet Week New York 2012 is expected to bring more than 30,000 people from around the world to nearly 300 events at the festival’s headquarters and at dozens of locations throughout the city. ”

When: May 14-21, 2012
Where: New York, USA

UX Lx
“3 fantastic days with User Experience Professionals from all the over the world. 16 workshops to develop your skills, 10 talks to inspire you and 16 slots open for you to share your experiences. All this coupled with lots of parties and meetups in sunny Lisbon.”

When: May 16-18, 2012
Where: Lisbon, Portugal at the FIL Meeting Centre

WebVisions Portland
“It’s our 12th big year in Portland, and we’re celebrating with a fabulous lineup of experts in web and mobile design, technology, user experience, DIY, strategy and more!”

When: May 16-18, 2012
Where: Portland, OR, USA at the Oregon Convention Center

D2W Conference
“Workflow is what we do. Day in and day out, although you may not think about it like that. Do you work with multiple applications during the day? Do you work with a developer or designer (depending on which you are)? Then that is what the D2W is all about.”

When: May 16-18, 2012
Where: Kansas City, MO, USA at the Plaza Marriott

TYPO Berlin
“For decades, design has been looking for something new, for something different – often at the expense of resources and global justice. Many companies have already had to learn things the hard way, because they ignored contemporary social values. Others have learned from the crisis and take social and ecological matters into consideration in their business strategies. Discover at TYPO Berlin 2012 sustain the long-living and the constant in design!”

When: May 17-19, 2012
Where: Berlin, Germany at Haus der Kulturen der Welt

J and Beyond
“J and Beyond, an International Joomla! Conference, is back for the third year. For 3 days in May Joomla! developers and site builders from over 30 countries will gather in Bad Nauheim, near Frankfurt, right in the heart of Europe.”

When: May 18-20, 2012
Where: Bad Nauheim, Germany

phpDay
“We’ll show new development traits, best-practices and success cases related to quality, revision control, test-driven development, continuous integration and so on. There are also talks about design, project management, agile and various php-related technologies like Zend Framework2, Symfony2, Codeigniter, Drupal, WordPress.”

When: May 18-19, 2012
Where: Verona, Italy at San Marco Hotel

A Web Afternoon
“A Web Afternoon is a mini event intended to inspire and educate people who love the web. Think TED, but for the web. Both speakers and attendees will be people from a variety of disciplines, but who all share a common passion for making the web a better place.”

When: May 19, 2012
Where: Atlanta, GA, USA at the GTRI Conference Center

AgIdeas International Design Week
“agIdeas International Design Week is the largest and most prestigious design festival in the world. Established in 1991 by Ken Cato, developed and presented by the Design Foundation. agIdeas offers an extraordinary program of events that celebrate design excellence and promotes the value of design driven innovation. ”

When: May 21-23, 2012
Where: Melbourne, Australia

Web Rebels
“The Web Rebels conference is a non-profit community driven conference for everyone who loves programming applications and services using web technology. Our focus is on the art of programming the web based solutions that we all use and cherish.”

When: May 24-25, 2012
Where: Oslo, Norway

UXcamp Europe
“The main rule of the conference is: No spectators, just participants! This BarCamp-rule does not mean everybody has to do a Session, but everybody should come prepared to participate in an active manner.”

When: May 26-27, 2012
Where: Berlin, Germany at Erwin-Schrödinger-Zentrum of the Humboldt University

O’Reilly Fluent Conference
“The O’Reilly Fluent Conference is about everything JavaScript. If you’re developing for the Web, desktop, or mobile, knowing the ins and outs of JavaScript and related technologies is critical. Come to Fluent to learn from expert developers who are using JavaScript in all kinds of contexts, to do things that no one ever expected JavaScript could do, and do so well.”

When: May 29-31, 2012
Where: San Francisco, CA, USA

Interactive Design International Festival
“Taking place over 3 days in Limoges, the Festival focuses on interactive design on a regional, national and international (15 countries) level. Businesses, professionals, research institutions and colleges all share and explore the latest design innovations on themes that respond to large economic, cultural and social issues.”

When: May 29-31, 2012
Where: Limoges, France

Big Design Conference
“Experts from across the country will gather to present theories, research, experiences, and best practices to students, professionals, and executives looking to stay on the bleeding edge.”

When: May 31–June 2, 2012
Where: Addison, TX, USA at the Addison Crowne Plaza Hotel

June 2012 Events

webinale
“The conference is to grow revenues, which shines through the web holistically, focusing not only on individual fragments. The conference is, thus bridging the gap between designers, web developers, managers and entrepreneurs, providing an incredibly lively forum for inspiration, networking and practical know-how.”

When: June 4-6, 2012
Where: Berlin, Germany

International PHP Conference
“The International PHP Conference is the global recognized event for PHP developers, webworkers, IT managers and everyone interested in web-technology.”

When: June 5-6, 2012
Where: Berlin, Germany at The Maritim proArte Hotel

Eyeo Festival
“In 2011, eyeo brought together an incredible group of creative coders, data viz pros, designers and artists. For 2012 we’ll raise the bar. Expect lectures, conversations and workshops with some of the most fascinating minds and makers today.”

When: June 5-8, 2012
Where: Minneapolis, MN, USA at the Walker Art Center

Interlink Web Design Conference
“Interlink Conference is a small hand-crafted event created for web professionals of all types. Explore the intersection of web design, code, and content during 2 empowering days of curated talks and workshops in Vancouver. (Plus, there’s dodgeball.)”

When: June 6-7, 2012
Where: Vancouver, Canada at Robson Square

Valio Con
“Conference at the beach where it’s all about actual fun and not sitting in a hotel lobby the entire time.”

When: June 7-10, 2012
Where: San Diego, CA, USA at the Hyatt Mission Bay

Front-End Design Conference
“The Front-End Design Conference is an annual event dedicated to content, presentation and behavior. The speakers and attendees are made up of awesome people from the web design and development community.”

When: June 8, 2012
Where: St. Petersburg, FL, USA at the Palladium Theater

NXNE Interactive
“With over 80 presentations, NXNEi bridges the gap between creators of all kinds and interactivity. Whether you’re a musician, film producer, marketer, public relations pro or community manager, NXNE Interactive programming has you covered. Join us for three days of tech and social media exploration to learn how to boost ingenuity while enhancing your marketing and business efforts.”

When: June 11-17, 2012
Where: Toronto, Canada

Ampersand 2012
“Combining the worlds of web & type design.”

When: June 15, 2012
Where: Brighton, UK

Nordic Ruby Conference
“Learn stuff. Meet people. Have fun. Nordic Ruby is a two-day, single-track Ruby conference. At a Japanese spa in the beautiful Stockholm archipelago. All-inclusive.”

When: June 15-16, 2012
Where: Stockholm, Sweden at Yasuragi Hasseludden

An Event Apart Boston
“An Event Apart is an intensely educational two-day conference for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design. If you care about code as well as content, usability as well as design, An Event Apart is the conference you’ve been waiting for.”

When: June 18-20, 2012
Where: Boston, MA, USA at the Marriot Copley Place

HOW Design Live
“In 2012, Boston is the meeting point for the biggest gathering of designers, freelancers, creative team managers, and other creative professionals in the country. That much creative energy under one roof? It’s a recipe for revolutionary ideas and life-changing inspiration. You’ll rethink your approach to work and life, connect with like-minded allies, hear from creative visionaries, and discover new tools to make your job more satisfying and productive than ever before.”

When: June 21-25, 2012
Where: Boston, MA, USA at the Hynes Convention Center

O’Reilly Velocity Conference
“Most companies with outward-facing dynamic websites face the same challenges: pages must load quickly, infrastructure must scale efficiently, and sites and services must be reliable, without burning out the team or breaking the budget. Velocity is the best place on the planet for web ops and performance professionals like you to learn from your peers, exchange ideas with experts, and share best practices and lessons learned.”

When: June 25-27, 2012
Where: Santa Clara, CA, USA

Google I/O
“After Google I/O 2011, you consistently told us you wanted more time to attend sessions, visit our partners in the Developer Sandbox, and meet 1:1 with the engineers behind Google’s developer platforms and APIs. We recently received an unexpected opportunity to extend Google I/O to three days, so as we announced on our +Google Developers page, we are moving the conference to June 27-29, 2012.”

When: June 27-29, 2012
Where: San Francisco, CA, USA at Moscone Center West

Lone Star PHP Conference
No description available.

When: June 29-30, 2012
Where: Dallas, TX, USA

Scottish Ruby Conference
“The Scottish Ruby Conference started life as Scotland on Rails in 2008 and has grown to become Europe’s premier multi-track Ruby conference. And by premier, we mean the one with the most whisky consumed.”

When: June 29-30, 2012
Where: Edinburgh, Scotland at the Royal College of Physicians

July 2012 Events

WebVisions Barcelona
“WebVisions heads to Europe for three days of workshops, sessions and keynotes by leading web, mobile, UX, DIY and strategy experts.”

When: July 5-7, 2012
Where: Barcelona, Spain at Pompeu Fabra University

An Event Apart Austin
“An Event Apart is an intensely educational two-day conference for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design. If you care about code as well as content, usability as well as design, An Event Apart is the conference you’ve been waiting for.”

When: July 9-11, 2012
Where: Austin, TX, USA at the Hilton

WDCNZ
“Tech talks for web devs. JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3. Mobile, Security, Scale. Web dev conversations.”

When: July 14, 2012
Where: Wellington, New Zealand

O’Reilly OSCON
“OSCON is where all of the pieces come together: developers, innovators, businesspeople, and investors. In the early days, this trailblazing O’Reilly event was focused on changing mainstream business thinking and practices; today OSCON is about how the close partnership between business and the open source community is building the future. That future is everywhere you look.”

When: July 16-20, 2012
Where: Portland, OR, USA

CSS Summit
“The online conference for CSS. Speakers include Chris Coyier, Lea Verou, Estelle Weyl, Jonathan Snook, and more.”

When: July 31 – August 2, 2012
Where: Online Conference

August/September 2012 Events

RIACon
“The Rich Internet Application Conference: Where architects and developers of all levels gather to share and learn about creating the next generation of web and mobile based applications. At RIACon you’ll get to network with fellow industry professionals and community leaders while being exposed to the most up to date skills needed for building great applications leveraging the best technologies available today.”

When: August 6-7, 2012
Where: Washington, DC, USA

An Event Apart DC
“An Event Apart is an intensely educational two-day conference for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design. If you care about code as well as content, usability as well as design, An Event Apart is the conference you’ve been waiting for.”

When: August 6-8, 2012
Where: Washington, DC, USA at the Westin Alexandria

DrupalCon Munich
“DrupalCon Munich is the official conference of the Drupal community. DrupalCon is a biannual event presented to an ever-expanding international audience since Drupal became an open-source project in 2001. It’s put on by the Drupal Association, as well as a fabulous group of volunteers and organizers from across the globe.”

When: August 20-24, 2012
Where: Munich, Germany at the Westin Grand

UX Week
“UX Week is the premier user experience design conference. Design professionals from all over the world gather for four days of community, inspiration and skills building.”

When: August 21-24, 2012
Where: San Francisco, CA, USA

An Event Apart Chicago
“An Event Apart is an intensely educational two-day conference for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design. If you care about code as well as content, usability as well as design, An Event Apart is the conference you’ve been waiting for.”

When: August 27-29, 2012
Where: Chicago, IL, USA at the Westin Chicago River North

UX Australia
“UX Australia 2012 is a 4-day user experience design conference, with two days of workshops and two days of presentations about designing great experiences for people.”

When: August 28-31, 2012
Where: Brisbane, Austalia at Sofitel Brisbane Central

UX Australia also presents Agile UX and Service Design 2012.

dConstruct
“”Our 8th year!””

When: September 7, 2012
Where: Brighton, UK at the Brighton Dome

Related Links

• Conference Roundup
  A web app inspired by the original conference roundup here on Smashing Magazine.
• Lanyrd
  The Social Conference Directory. Also check Smashing Magazine’s Profile.
• ontwik
  Lectures, Screencasts And Conferences For Real Web Developers & Designers

(il)

---

© Louis Lazaris for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

Are you fascinated by dynamic data? Do you go green with envy when you see tweets pulled magically into websites? Trust me, I’ve been there.

The goal of today’s tutorial is to create a simple Web app for grabbing movie posters from TMDb. We’ll use jQuery and the user’s input to query a JSON-based API and deal with the returned data appropriately.

I hope to convince you that APIs aren’t scary and that most of the time they can be a developer’s best friend.

APIs Are The Future But, More Importantly, The Present

JSON-based APIs are a hot property on the Web right now. I cannot remember the last time I went onto a blog or portfolio without seeing the owner’s tweets or Facebook friends staring back at me. This interactivity makes the Web an exciting place. The only limit seems to be people’s imagination. As demonstrated by everything from pulled tweets to a self-aware exchange-rates API, data is currently king, and websites are swapping it freely.

Developers are allowing us to get at their data much more openly now; no longer is everything under lock and key. Websites are proud to have you access their data and, in fact, encourage it. Websites such as TMDb and LastFM allow you to build entirely separate applications based on the data they’ve spent years accumulating. This openness and receptiveness are fostering an intertwined network of users and their corresponding actions.

This article is aimed at people who are competent in HTML and CSS and have basic knowledge of jQuery techniques. We won’t delve deep into advanced JavaScript techniques, but will rather help the beginner who wants to create more complex Web tools.

APIs in a Nutshell

In basic terms, an API enables you to access a website’s data without going near its databases. It gives us a user-friendly way to read and write data to and from a website’s databases.

Sure, Great, But What Code Do I Need?

Like many developers, I bounce merrily between back-end and front-end development, and I am as happy working in PHP as in jQuery. It just depends on which hat I’m wearing that day.

Because this article is mainly about jQuery-based JSON API clients, we’ll focus on client-side code (i.e. jQuery).

When dealing with APIs, and armed with jQuery, one is more likely to encounter JSON.

Player 1: JSON

JSON (or JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight, easy and popular way to exchange data. jQuery is not the only tool for manipulating and interfacing with JSON; it’s just my and many others’ preferred method.

A lot of the services we use everyday have JSON-based APIs: Twitter, Facebook and Flickr all send back data in JSON format.

A JSON response from an API looks like this:

([{"score":
null,"popularity":
3,"translated":true,"adult":
false,"language":"en","original_name":"The Goonies","name":"The Goonies","alternative_name":"I Goonies",
"movie_type":"movie","id":9340,"imdb_id":"tt0089218",
"url":"http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/9340",
"votes":16,"rating":9.2,"certification":"PG","overview":"A young teenager named Mikey Walsh finds an old treasure map in his father's attic.
Hoping to save their homes from demolition, Mikey and his friends Data Wang, Chunk Cohen, and Mouth Devereaux runs off on a big quest
to find the secret stash of the pirate One-Eyed Willie.","released":"1985-06-07",
"posters":[{"image":{"type":"poster","size":"original","height":1500,"width":1000,
"url":"http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/76b/4d406d767b9aa15bb500276b/the-goonies-original.jpg",
"id":"4d406d767b9aa15bb500276b"}}],"backdrops":[{"image":{"type":"backdrop","size":"original","height":1080,"width":1920,
"url":"http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/242/4d690e167b9aa13631001242/the-goonies-original.jpg",
"id":"4d690e167b9aa13631001242"}}],"version":3174,"last_modified_at":"2011-09-12 13:19:05"}])

A bit of a mess, right? Compare this to the same JSON viewed in Google Chrome’s developer console:

The JSON response is accessible via a jQuery function, allowing us to manipulate, display and, more importantly, style it however we want.

Player 2: jQuery

Personally, I’d pick jQuery over JavaScript any day of the week. jQuery makes things a lot easier for the beginner Web developer who just wants stuff to work right off the bat. I use it every day. If I had to complete the same tasks using native Javascript, my productivity would grind right down. In my opinion, JavaScript is for people who want a deeper understanding of the scripting language and the DOM itself. But for simplicity and ease of use, jQuery is where it’s at.

In essence, jQuery is a JavaScript library, with handy functions like getJSON. This particular function will be the glue that holds our API client together.

The Goal: A jQuery-Based JSON API Client

I recently submitted to An Event Apart the Web app that we’re about to go through now. It’s called Front Row.

The idea of the Web app is to take a movie title inputted by the user, run it through TMDb’s API, and return the relevant poster. The user could then share it or save it to their computer.

The Web app is split into HTML, CSS and jQuery. We’ll focus on the jQuery, because that’s where the magic happens.

The HTML

Below is the basic structure of the Web app. Nothing special here.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
   <meta name="author" content="Ben Howdle and Dan Matthew">
   <meta name="description" content="A responsive movie poster grabber">
   <title>Front Row by Ben Howdle</title>
   <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0">
   <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.6.2.min.js"></script>
        <!--jQuery, linked from a CDN-->
   <script src="scripts.js"></script>
   <script type="text/javascript" src="http://use.typekit.com/oya4cmx.js"></script>
   <script type="text/javascript">try{Typekit.load();}catch(e){}</script>
   <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" />
</head>
<body>
<div class="container">
   <header>
      <h1>Front Row</h1>
   </header>
   <section id="fetch">
      <input type="text" placeholder="Enter a movie title" id="term" />
      <button id="search">Find me a poster</button>
   </section>
   <section id="poster">
   </section>
   <footer>
      <p>Created by <a href="http://twostepmedia.co.uk">Ben Howdle</a></p>
   </footer>
</div>
</body>
</html>

All we’ve got is a bit of Twitter self-indulgence, an input field and a submission button. Done!

The CSS is a bit off topic for this article, so I’ll leave it to you to inspect the elements of interest on the live website.

The jQuery

$(document).ready(function(){

   //This is to remove the validation message if no poster image is present

   $('#term').focus(function(){
      var full = $("#poster").has("img").length ? true : false;
      if(full == false){
         $('#poster').empty();
      }
   });

I like validation messages to disappear when the user starts retyping in an input field. The script below checks whether an image is present (i.e. a movie poster), and if not, empties the container of the validation message once the input field gains focus.

//function definition

   var getPoster = function(){

        //Grab the movie title and store it in a variable

        var film = $('#term').val();

         //Check if the user has entered anything

         if(film == ''){

            //If the input field was empty, display a message

            $('#poster').html("<h2 class='loading'>Ha! We haven't forgotten to validate the form! Please enter something.</h2>");

The reason why we store the main code that retrieves the data in a function will become clear later on (mainly, it’s for DRY programming).

We then store the value of the input in a variable, so that when we use it again in the code, the jQuery doesn’t have to rescan the DOM.

Basic validation is performed on the input, checking that something has actually been entered in the field.

In an attempt at humor on my part, I display a message warning the user that they haven’t entered anything and asking them to please do so.

} else {

            //They must have entered a value, carry on with API call, first display a loading message to notify the user of activity

            $('#poster').html("<h2 class='loading'>Your poster is on its way!</h2>");

If the input contains a value, we then process the user’s request. Another message is displayed, letting the user know that something is happening.

$.getJSON("http://api.themoviedb.org/2.1/Movie.search/en/json/23afca60ebf72f8d88cdcae2c4f31866/" + film + "?callback=?", function(json) {

               //TMDb is nice enough to return a message if nothing was found, so we can base our if statement on this information

               if (json != "Nothing found."){

                  //Display the poster and a message announcing the result

                     $('#poster').html('<h2 class="loading">Well, gee whiz! We found you a poster, skip!</h2><img id="thePoster" src=' + json[0].posters[0].image.url + ' />');

Here we get to the meat of our API client. We use jQuery’s getJSON function, which, by definition, loads “JSON-encoded data from the server using a GET HTTP request.”

We then use the API’s URL, suppled in this case by TMDb. As with many other APIs, you have to register your application in order to receive a key (a 30-second process). We insert the API key (23afca60ebf72f8d88cdcae2c4f31866) into the URL and pass the user’s movie title into the URL as a search parameter.

One thing to mention is that appending callback=? to the end of the URL enables us to make cross-domain JSON and AJAX calls. Don’t forget this, otherwise the data will be limited to your own domain! This method uses what’s called JSONP (or JSON with padding), which basically allows a script to fetch data from another server on a different domain. To do this, we must specify the callback above when jQuery loads the data. It replaces the ? with our custom function’s name, thereby allowing us to make cross-domain calls with ease.

In the function’s callback, we have put the word json (which holds our retrieved data), but we could have put data or message.

The next check is to see whether any data was returned. TMDb is kind enough to supply us with a message of “Nothing found” when it can’t find anything. So, we’ve based our if statement on this string’s value.

This check is API-specific. Usually if no results are found, we would expand the object to find a property named length, which would tell us how many results were returned. If this happens, the code might look something like this:

   if (json.length != 0){

As a side note, before writing even a line of code in the callback function of the JSON call, we should become familiar with the results returned in Chrome’s console or in Firebug. This would tell us exactly what to check for in if statements and, more importantly, what path to take to grab the data we want.

Let’s add console.log(json);, like so:

$.getJSON("http://api.themoviedb.org/2.1/Movie.search/en/json/23afca60ebf72f8d88cdcae2c4f31866/" + film + "?callback=?", function(json) {
         console.log(json);

This will output something like the following in the console of your favorite browser (click the image to see the full size):

The last line of this code outputs our poster. We display another message to the user saying that we’ve found a result, and then proceed to show the image.

Let’s spend a moment figuring out how we got to the poster images using the line json[0].posters[0].image.url.

The reason we use json[0] is that — since we want to display only one poster, and knowing how relevant TMDb’s results are — we can gamble on the first result. We then access the posters array like so: json[0].posters[0]. Chrome even tells us that posters is an array, so we know what we’re dealing with. Again, we access the first value of the array, having faith that it will be most relevant. It then tells us that image is an object, so we can access it like so: json[0].posters[0].image. By expanding our object further, we see that image contains a property named url. Jackpot! This contains a direct image link, which we can use in the src attribute of our image element.

} else {

   //If nothing is found, I attempt humor by displaying a Goonies poster and confirming that their search returned no results.

   $.getJSON("http://api.themoviedb.org/2.1/Movie.search/en/json/
23afca60ebf72f8d88cdcae2c4f31866/goonies?callback=?", function(json) {

      $('#poster').html('<h2 class="loading">We're afraid nothing was found for that search. Perhaps you were looking for The Goonies?</h2><img id="thePoster" src=' + json[0].posters[0].image.url + ' />');

   });
}

Having determined that the API has no results for the user, we could display an error message. But this being a movie-related Web app, let’s give the user a preset poster of The Goonies and let them know we couldn’t find anything. We’ll use the exact same src attribute for the image that we used before, this time with goonies hardcoded into the API call’s URL.

});

          }

        return false;
   }

   //Because we've wrapped the JSON code in a function, we can call it on mouse click or on a hit of the Return button while in the input field

   $('#search').click(getPoster);

   $('#term').keyup(function(event){

       if(event.keyCode == 13){

           getPoster();

       }

   });

});

It is now clear why we wrapped our JSON call in a function: doing so allows us to run the function when the user hits the submission button or presses Enter while in the input field.

The Full Code

The HTML

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
   <meta name="author" content="Ben Howdle and Dan Matthew">
   <meta name="description" content="A responsive movie poster grabber">
   <title>Front Row by Ben Howdle</title>
   <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0">
   <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.6.2.min.js"></script>
        <!--jQuery, linked from a CDN-->
   <script src="scripts.js"></script>
   <script type="text/javascript" src="http://use.typekit.com/oya4cmx.js"></script>
   <script type="text/javascript">try{Typekit.load();}catch(e){}</script>
   <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" />
</head>
<body>
<div class="container">
   <header>
      <h1>Front Row</h1>
   </header>
   <section id="fetch">
      <input type="text" placeholder="Enter a movie title" id="term" />
      <button id="search">Find me a poster</button>
   </section>
   <section id="poster">
   </section>
   <footer>
      <p>Created by <a href="http://twostepmedia.co.uk">Ben Howdle</a></p>
   </footer>
</div>
</body>
</html>

The jQuery

$(document).ready(function(){

   $('#term').focus(function(){
      var full = $("#poster").has("img").length ? true : false;
      if(full == false){
         $('#poster').empty();
      }
   });

   var getPoster = function(){

        var film = $('#term').val();

         if(film == ''){

            $('#poster').html("<h2 class='loading'>Ha! We haven't forgotten to validate the form! Please enter something.</h2>");

         } else {

            $('#poster').html("<h2 class='loading'>Your poster is on its way!</h2>");

            $.getJSON("http://api.themoviedb.org/2.1/Movie.search/en/json/
23afca60ebf72f8d88cdcae2c4f31866/" + film + "?callback=?", function(json) {
               if (json != "Nothing found."){
                     $('#poster').html('<h2 class="loading">Well, gee whiz! We found you a poster, skip!</h2><img id="thePoster" src=' + json[0].posters[0].image.url + ' />');
                  } else {
                     $.getJSON("http://api.themoviedb.org/2.1/Movie.search/en/json/
23afca60ebf72f8d88cdcae2c4f31866/goonies?callback=?", function(json) {
                        console.log(json);
                        $('#poster').html('<h2 class="loading">We're afraid nothing was found for that search. Perhaps you were looking for The Goonies?</h2><img id="thePoster" src=' + json[0].posters[0].image.url + ' />');
                     });
                  }
             });

          }

        return false;
   }

   $('#search').click(getPoster);
   $('#term').keyup(function(event){
       if(event.keyCode == 13){
           getPoster();
       }
   });

});

Conclusion

That’s it: a handy method of reading data from a remote API with jQuery, and manipulating the JSON output to fit our needs.

Every API is different, and every one returns different results in a different structure — it’s all part of the fun! So, get used to using console.log(), and familiarize yourself with the results set before trying to access it with code or using it in your application.

Start with something practical and entertaining: build a check-in checker with Gowalla’s API; visualize trends with Twitter’s API; or make a face-recognition app with Face.com’s API.

APIs are fun. By definition, the data they bring to the page is dynamic, not static.

If you have any problems with the API we’ve used here or you have any success stories with other APIs, please do leave a comment.

Further Resources

• “How to Use JSON APIs With jQuery,” Joel Sutherland, HiFi
• “How to Use jQuery With a JSON Flickr Feed to Display Photos,” Richard Shepherd
• “Bing Instant Search With jQuery and Ajax,” Srinivas Tamada, 9Lessons

(al)

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© Ben Howdle for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

For America, creating a government website from the states, all the way down to the federal government can be an interesting but controversial task.  It’s important to follow a user-centered design process and make it easy for citizens to find the information they’re looking for.

Any confusion in the way the site is setup, its search functions or even the appearance can create large amounts of controversy between citizens and governments; as history has shown.

With that said, we’re going to look at the best practices for creating government websites by comparing local with federal, the usability of these sites and their designs.

Note: To eliminate the chance of political debates in the comments, any reference to government hierarchy will be according to the US Constitution instead of their socially accepted hierarchies.

Transparency

Let’s start by taking a look at two .gov websites, the White House and the Santa Monica City Council.

White House (top) and Santa Monica City Council (bottom) websites

When considering the issue of transparency, which is priority #1 for most citizens when looking at a government website, the White House fails miserably.  Important information is extremely hard to find and may require hours of research to get a clear understanding of what’s going on inside the White House due to its lack of organization.

On the other hand, the Santa Monica City Council does a decent job of providing transparency.  When you first arrive to the site, it’s easy to find the last meeting that was held, all of the issues that were discussed, and any resolutions that occurred.  Minutes are accounted for, and it’s even easy to find out when the next meeting will be held so that you can watch it online.

It’s also important to provide an easily accessible and user-friendly search.  This is an area where the White House website performs well.  The search box is easy to find and the results are well organized, allowing the user to put them in chronological order.

The Santa Monica City Council also has an easy to find search box, but when the results are directed to Google it completely breaks the consistency of the website.  Results are difficult to sort through and the information isn’t always relevant to your search.

So when looking at these two government websites, we can learn the proper way and the wrong way to provide transparency.  By focusing on transparency on the homepage, the Santa Monica City Council website can be perceived as caring about its citizens as its primary concern. Adversely, citizens may get frustrated with the White House because their website makes it increasingly difficult to find important information.

In conclusion, while it’s important to maintain an aesthetic appeal, it’s even more important to make transparency easily accessible.  I see no reason why both can’t be done, with the aesthetic appeal of the White House website, and transparency put on the homepage like the Santa Monica City Council website.

Issues

This is a dramatically important piece of any government website.  Let’s start by taking a look at one that has done this well.

Sen. Rand Paul website

The website of Sen. Rand Paul lays out the issues in a very cohesive manner.  By simply hovering over a menu item that clearly states “issues” you get a nice drop-down menu with all of the issues laid out for you.  This is a very simple, straightforward approach to delivering the information citizens need.  Not only that, but when you choose one of the issues, the information is laid out thoroughly and in a user-friendly way.  It’s a very good example of what you should do when creating a government website.

Now let’s take a look at a government website that hasn’t done this so well.

Gov. Rick Perry website

Now even though the website of Gov. Rick Perry has a nice feature slider, digging deeper it’s actually pretty unorganized.  Finding the issues where the governor stands can be a fairly daunting task.  The website is more centered around mainstream news rather than focusing on information that’s important to citizens, such as the issues.

To summarize, when you are creating a government website, you never want to make the issues hard-to-find.  Make sure these are easily accessible to help citizens make informed decisions.

Mainstream Design

It’s extremely important that government websites have a professional and polished look.  In order for a government website to be taken seriously, as statistics have shown, it needs to look and feel mainstream.  With that said, let’s take a look at a government website that has plenty of mainstream appeal.

Congressman Ron Paul website

A website such as Congressman Ron Paul’s has this mainstream look and feel, so therefore it can be taken seriously.  When a government official comes to you asking to create a website for them, it’s important that you understand what the mainstream looks and feels like.  Blue and red are common colors that government websites like to use, especially when they are federal.  A large header with the representative’s photo, their name, and what position they hold is a very common practice as well.  Study what mainstream government websites look and feel like, and you’re almost guaranteed to get repeat customers.

Now when looking at a government website that isn’t so mainstream, we go back to the Santa Monica City Council.

Santa Monica city Council website

This is a good example of where the notion “content is king” holds true as the websites bounce rate hovers around 58% in the past month, which isn’t terrible.  It’s hard to look past the fact that this website looks like it was created in 1995, however, you’ll see that there is plenty of important information and it’s easily accessible at that.  Putting the content aside though, it’s not a website many people will stay on for the design alone.

So how important is design in a government website?  Well, with the bounce rate at 58% and the average user staying on the site for 2 min., the Santa Monica City Council website shows that the importance of the design is moderate.  However, it is noticeably important when you compare their website with Congressman Ron Paul’s website, which has a bounce rate of around 52% and an average time on site of around 3 min., whose design follows more along the mainstream guidelines.  Those numbers may not seem like a very big difference, but if you know anything about usability testing then you know they are significant.

So in closing, the importance of a government website design is the reason why it is number three on the priority list.  However, if you want to have repeat customers and referrals, you may want to consider understanding what government mainstream websites look and feel like.  Officials want to be taken seriously through their websites design just like anyone else, so you should provide that for them.

Conclusion

Spend some time going through various government websites and ask yourself the following questions.

• What do they look like?
• What is the feel that they are trying to generate?
• What do people complain about on the forums or do they have one?
• What do they have in common?
• What don’t they have in common?
• Whose user data looks better and why?

These are just a few questions that you could ask yourself when studying government websites and how to create them.  However, if you can nail down these three core features that I have outlined for you; transparency, issues and mainstream design, you’ll be well on your way to a career in creating awesome government websites.

Justin Hubbard has been helping businesses since 2007 by creating timeless, memorable logos as part of a branding package and modern, user-friendly websites.

What other practices do you think are important when creating government websites?  Let us know in the comments!

Never Ending WordPress Business Bundle – only $14!

Source

This special is the first in our series of Smashing Specials — extended articles and studies dedicated to a specific topic. The special features current WordPress theme trends for 2012, covering past trends, new developments in theme design and trends in the theme development.

2011 was a great year for WordPress, with some excellent new updates that saw the introduction of a drag-and-drop uploader, distraction-free writing, the HTML5 Twenty Eleven theme, and movement towards a fully responsive dashboard. As well as changes to WordPress core, theme development continued to evolve, as whispers of responsive design spread like wildfire across the WordPress community.

(image credit: Bowe Frankema)

Over the next year, some recent developments will become standards. Others, now just remote flickerings in the eyes of a few theme designers and developers, will start to take hold. Now that 2012 has properly started, let’s look at some trends that have emerged and are emerging.

Due to the length of this special, it was split into three parts:

• Part 1: Past Predictions
• Part 2: WordPress Design Trends for 2012
• Part 3: WordPress Development Trends for 2012

Past Predictions

When thinking about future trends, it’s fun to look back and see what people predicted before to see whether any of their predictions came to fruition. Thankfully, with the power of Internet, combined with Ian Stewart’s “Future of WordPress Themes” posts (as well as WPCandy), doing this is very easy.

So, just what were people predicting when WordPress was growing up?

The Demise of the WordPress Premium Theme Market

At the start of 2008, when creating a premium WordPress theme was frowned upon, Ian Stewart wrote this in a post:

It’s prediction time: The premium WordPress theme phenomenon has approximately one year left before collapsing entirely, leaving a rather large hole between completely free WordPress themes and custom themes $1500 and up. If you’ve got a “premium” WordPress theme waiting in the wings, I advise releasing it sooner rather than later. As in, now.

We don’t really need to add a comment to that one.

“Cluttered and Pimped Out”

Here’s what Robert Ellis said about the future of WordPress themes in 2008:

The vast majority of themes will still be garish mutations of Kubrick, but more cluttered, more pimped out with widgets, scripts and effects. There will still be premium themes that push the envelope in terms of built-in options and quality, but the market will become saturated, setting off even more accusations of copying (as we’ve seen with magazine themes; though personally, I think most of them look like they were “inspired” by CNN).

This was more on the money, and we have seen amateur designers cram in a lot of different scripts and effects. This has diminished over time. Hopefully, our direction now is more Zen.

Early Niche Predictions

Justin Tadlock had this to say in 2008:

I do hear some talk of moving into designs for specific niches, so theme developers could cater to particular users. I think this is a great idea, which could be a nice trend as we’ve seen with magazine-styled themes. Users want something that works for them before unwrapping the packaging.

Justin was definitely prescient then, as niche themes became more popular in 2011. And we’ll see much more of them in 2012.

Everyone Loved Theme Options

In 2009, themes that allowed you to customize the layout and design started to appear. Here’s what Dougal Campbell had to say:

The main change I see happening here is with themes which provide some sort of customizing feature on the back end which lets you choose options like: header graphics; one, two or three sidebars, along with their positions; color schemes; They will also be pre-bundled with several plugins which allow you to pull in your content from other sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. These kinds of themes already exist, but I think we’ll see the ease of customization rise to a new level.

By 2012, this trend towards adding options and customizations reached its zenith, and it will hopefully decline over the coming year.

Want to have fun reading past WordPress theme predictions. Check them out here:

• “The Future of WordPress Themes in 2008,” Theme Shaper
• “The Future of WordPress Themes in 2009,” Theme Shaper
• “The Future of WordPress Themes in 2011,” WPCandy

A Trip Down Memory Lane

Let’s look at how theme design has changed over the past few years.

Free Themes: The WordPress Repository

Below are the most popular themes downloaded from the WordPress theme directory since 2009 (thanks to Otto for getting this information). You can see how WordPress themes have moved away from looking like blogs to a more professional appearance.

2009

iNove was the most popular theme in 2009, followed by Atahualpa and then Pixeled.

2010

Mystique was the most popular theme in 2010, followed by Atahualpa and then TwentyTen.

2011

Delicate was the most popular theme in 2011, followed by TwentyEleven and then Platform.

The Most Popular Themes in the Forest

To see how things have fared on the commercial theme front, we scoured the archive of ThemeForest. Below are the best-selling themes from the last quarter of each year.

Here were the top themes:

2008

Sharp was the top theme for the end of 2008.

2009

Twicet topped downloads for the last quarter of 2009.

2010

Striking was the most popular theme in the last quarter of 2010.

2011

The multi-optioned uDesign was the most downloaded theme in the last quarter of 2011.

What Happened In 2011?

Before getting to our predictions for what will take hold in WordPress themes this year, let’s quickly look at what has happened over the past year:

• Theme frameworks
  Theme frameworks were everywhere in 2011. As someone who blogs regularly about WordPress, I found myself announcing the launch of three different frameworks in one week. WordPress staples such as Thematic, Thesis and Genesis continued to grow in popularity, but more and more frameworks appeared on the scene, including the likes of Wonderflux, Bones and Roots. Perhaps in 2011 we’ll see fewer new frameworks and more themes for existing ones.
• Child themes
  Child themes took off in a big way in 2011. Once people grasped the concept that creating a child theme and making edits to it was better than hacking away at the parent, they started to have fun. Will we see child themes in the WordPress repository in 2012?
• The “CMS” theme
  At the start of 2011, everyone seemed to be calling their theme a “CMS” theme, implying that their awesome theme gave WordPress the characteristics of a CMS, as opposed to WordPress itself being a CMS. Thankfully, that trend petered out towards the end of the year, perhaps as it became less imperative to convince people that WordPress was a CMS.
• Sliders everywhere
  Every theme seemed to have a slider on the home page. This might have been due to the gorgeousness of Nivo and other sliders that make it easy for anyone to include a jQuery slider in their theme. Hopefully, designers will be more inventive with their jQuery this year.
• Tumblr themes
  All of a sudden, creating a Tumblog became easy. Designers first achieved this with the Woo Tumblog plugin, but the introduction of WordPress post formats made it possible to create a Tumblog with WordPress core functionality.
• Custom post type mania
  As predicted by Brad Williams in WPCandy’s predictions for 2011, we saw loads of themes that made use of custom post types, including ones for job rollers, e-commerce websites, real estate websites, review websites and so on and so on. Not to mention a plethora of WordPress custom post type plugins.

Now we’ve got the past out of the way, let’s look at the future!

Smashing Special: A Three-Part Series

Due to the length of the series, it was split into three parts:

• Part 1: Past Predictions
• Part 2: WordPress Design Trends for 2012
• Part 3: WordPress Development Trends for 2012

(al)

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© Siobhan McKeown for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

Before the very first page of a book has been read, you’ve already analyzed it in countless ways without even noticing. The paper stock, the thickness of the binding, the aroma, the color of the type and even the texture of the cover; the very character of the book is being dissected by the hand and eye at every moment.

In this brief second there is a dialogue between the reader and the object. This conversation is subtle and complex, but for most people it is entirely subconscious. This is because we rarely think about these things  —  we feel them instead.

Before this dialogue can take place however, the ideas of the author must be given shape. By examining the relationship between the form of the book and the information contained within, we can begin to understand how these visual and sensory components work, but it will also teach us how to create long-lasting emotional bonds that we’ll want to keep forever.

Lost In Translation

I recently read The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins. His book explores the wonder of evolution and scientific discovery in fabulous detail and also goes into explicit detail as to how these ideas better our society and affect our perspective of morality and philosophy. But its uncomfortable size and shape as well as its flimsy typesetting gives the book characteristics of apathy and exhaustion.

The object reveals much about the world in which it was made: a heartless, ignorant and illiterate world, filled with people that viewed the author and the reader as a stepping stone to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

And yet, these aesthetic and ergonomic failures are more than skin deep as they interfere with the relationship between writer and reader. Dawkins’ evidence seems less empirical, less established and somehow less wonderful, as the book miserably fails to explain the poetry of its content.

Notice how jarring and uncomfortable it is as these glossy, brightly colored pages sit next to ordinary blocks of text.

Dawkins’ argument is damaged by these cluttered, noisy and mistreated illustrative pages. Whilst he describes the wonderful and unique beauty of life, his ideas feel ordinarily ugly. The images to the left of the spread, their jarring and chaotic arrangement, the tension built by their seemingly random position, fail to reflect the ideas of wonder, beauty and order that the writer so eloquently describes.

The ideas contained within have lasted centuries, yet this book has barely lasted a single reading.

Walk into any large, commercial bookstore and you’ll see thousands of books treated in a similar way  —  each with layer upon layer of unnecessary information that conflicts with the intent of the author. Something crucial is destroyed in this journey as the object disrupts vital information on transit.

To understand why these books are not working, we must first examine how information passes from writer to reader.

The Journey

For centuries, the book was a tool that existed for a single purpose; to transfer information from one mind to another. Although much has changed, there will always be a problem with this form of communication, and in our reliance on systems to safely relay data.

In bookmaking these systems are traditionally enforced by a publisher, as they have complete control over the quality of the binding, the typographic details, the use of color and the overall physical identity of the idea. All of these visual and sensory elements combine to produce the system by which the idea is given form. However, as in the case of the majority of books out there, this system poisons and infects it.

These systems comprise of an immense number of components, such as the combination of typefaces, the paper density, the use of color, the printing method, the measure, the width of margins, and other typographic details. But the problem with these systems is that they are incapable of reflecting the ideas of the writer with the form of the book. They act as a barrier that the information must travel through to be able to find the reader.

Cheap paper, bad typesetting and an awkward binding cause confusion and disrespect to the author’s ideas. But if we understand how these elements work together we can make systems that provide useful signs to the reader, and also manage to safely transport the ideas of the writer at the same time.

Emotional Information

When a visual component accurately represents the ideas of the writer, it becomes a source of emotional information. This aids in the transferral of ideas, and promotes and persuades the reader that the content is worthy of their precious time.

It’s more than just a pretty cover, visual pun or marketing gimmick that creates emotional information. It’s everything from the size of the type to the texture of the page, because these components not only help to explain the content of the book but also continue to engage and stimulate the reader throughout.

The Vintage Classics edition of As I Lay Dying is almost lifeless, whereas Trevor Baum’s redesign provides the reader with an emotional experience as they must carry this dying woman in their hands, much like the characters in the novel.

A system can bind the ideas of the writer to the form of the book with these carefully chosen elements, but it’s when the form and the idea become inseparable that unique relationships begin to emerge.

Take for example Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? that was published by the Chin Music Press back in 2008. The book is focused primarily on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the impact it had on the music, economy and spirit of the city.

The physical elements of the book act as a rhetorical device, directing the reader with subtlety and charm.

Nineteenth century engravings flourish beside carefully set blocks of text and each page has been lavishly printed on high quality paper. These components, amongst many others, combine to create a distinct sense of pace that sets itself apart from legions of other books. The idea of the book and the form of the book become one  —  they merge into an emotional cornucopia that is impossible to ignore.

The texture of the page, the subtle typographic details and the distinctive illustrations implies a specific tone and atmosphere.

This is emotional information and it coerces the reader to take notice of the subject and to read each page with as much attention and focus as those that designed and published it.

Another book that provides the reader with emotional information is the Book of war, mortification and love. The author, Ruud Linssen, investigates why people suffer voluntarily whether it be for love, war, religion or art. The blend of fiction and non-fiction, and the haunting accounts of depression and loneliness are only reinforced by the physical elements of the object.

The text also acts as a specimen for the typeface Fakir. This dark blackletter eloquently explains the subject and forewarns the reader of the book’s ghostly nature. It is even printed with the author’s own blood, the ink on the cover blends into the background as if the words are shaking with anxiety.

Texture, ink, type: three dimensions of emotional data that captures the spirit of the writer’s intent.

It’s these extra pieces of information, these tangible components of a unique sensory and visual language that must be pieced together in order to accurately reflect the author’s ideas. It is the format, the texture, and the combination of the printed word and the weight of the object that ignites this special relationship, and aids in the transfer of information between writer and reader. Ideally, these extra pieces of information provide the reader with the unspoken history, idea and argument of the book. Without them, the conversation between the book and the reader would be less interactive and engaging.

Of course, not every book can feel like Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?, or Book of war, mortification and love – but then why should they? Each book should be treated as a unique problem requiring a distinct and innovative solution.

Emotionless Systems

This is the problem with the current state of ebooks. As e-readers split content numerically or into ‘real’ turning pages they impersonate the form of the book, whilst disregarding the unique nature of the writer’s ideas. This gives us books that all feel and look the same.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and Shit My Dad Says by Justin Halpern look and feel the same, but are different in every meaningful way.

The system disregards the writer almost entirely; all ideas have the same graphic character, tone and appearance. But just as unique and brilliant writers follow a certain pattern and rhythm within their work, so too must the visual and sensory elements of a system. This indicates to the reader that the content is one of a kind and worthy of their precious time, but these systems are also capable of creating emotional experiences that can entertain, persuade, teach and inspire.

So the problems on screen are very similar to that of the problems on paper: the system is acting as a barrier into the author’s ideas.

Why Should We Design Emotional Systems?

In a perfect world we would share ideas through a semipermeable membrane; we would absorb ideas via osmosis and send them around the world as casually as we breathe. Sadly, we cannot do this. Instead, we have systems set in place to communicate. The problem is that these systems are failing us. They are hurting us. They are making beautiful things boring and are getting in between us and the ideas that we need.

This is not about nostalgia or the glorification of a particular medium. This is about information, and how best to communicate the content as a visual and sensory device. These systems have an obligation to not only safely and quickly transfer data, but also to make us care.

Of course, this is subjective and very little of this article goes into the specifics as to how to create emotional experiences, but this is because each idea requires a different visual and sensory tone. Some books require explosive typography and thick paper to feel revolutionary, others require a softer and more delicate tone to feel calm or charming.

The form of the book is merely a tool, a sometimes wonderfully beautiful and effective tool, but a tool nonetheless. It is the ideas within that give us wonder, and these tools must be built for their purpose if they are not to be thrown away, lost or forgotten.

We can embed within these systems a lasting piece of our culture if only we are willing to change the way we think. So instead of us asking the question, “How do these things look?” perhaps we should rather be asking, “How do these things feel?”

Further Reading

• The Crystal Goblet
  The classic essay by Beatrice Warde on the art of printing, still applicable to book and Web design today.
• Designing for Emotion
  The lead UX designer at MailChimp, Aaron Walter, discusses how emotion can be used in interfaces.
• On Book Design
  Richard Hendel examines how and why books are designed in the way that they are.

(il)

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© Robin Rendle for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

For the past few years, we’ve been admiring Radim Malinic’s work, and his bold stunning illustrations have been gracing our website since its very beginnings.

Malinic is a leading London graphic designer and illustrator. In his latest project, The West End Show, he explores the magical and bustling part of the capital in a series of elaborately illustrated poster designs, bringing together classic old century design with the dazzling neon future of the 22nd century.

Through a combination of bold typography, illustration and poetry, each piece tells the delicate story of classic design over-shadowed by the limitless offerings of this exciting city.

Malinic interprets his love for London by exploring the true characters of the real life musical that is London’s West End. ‘The West End Show’ offers an inspiring touch of nostalgia for the frenetic capital resident.

The show is now open to public at Nancy Victor Gallery, London, admission is free until March 2. Check out the promo video and the posters after the jump…

The show is now open to public at Nancy Victor Gallery, London, admission free until March 2. Limited edition prints and merchandise are now sold at the gallery, online store fully opens on March 3.

Please share your comments on Malinic’s work below…

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Designing for responsive websites can be a bit challenging at first because the process is so different.

As designers, we’ve gotten used to building pixel-perfect mockups as our web blueprints. But responsive design takes a different approach.

A designer’s role is no longer to produce a mockup and then pass it off to the developer because responsive design is not just a two step process, it is a series of revisions. Most of which are made in the browser. It is a collaborative effort between the designer and developer, no longer two separate tasks.

Here are some tips and a general workflow to make the transition from designing static sites to designing responsive ones a little easier.

Knowing your viewports

Before starting any project it is important to determine your viewports. A typical approach would be to build one layout for smartphones, one for tablets and smaller viewports, a larger desktop version, and maybe a second desktop version for even larger/wider screens, say 1200 or 1400 pixels or more.

Planning ahead

Sketching can be your best friend. Take one piece of paper and make 3-4 boxes to represent each viewport. Having all of your viewports on one page helps you to not focus on any one design more than the others. When laying out your design, take the most important content first and add it to each of the viewports, working your way down to the less important stuff as you go.

You will quickly realize that not all of the content may fit in the smaller viewports. Better to find that out now while doing sketches, instead of trying to make changes to a finished design.

Yup, those are my actual scribbles. You might not be able to make out what each element is but those are from an actual project. I did the design and development so I didn’t have to make it clear for anyone else. The point being, nothing is faster than pen and paper for quickly jotting down layout ideas.

Wireframes and mockups

The most important part of wireframing, is having the developer take an active role. He or she should know right away if your idea is going to work or not and can give suggestions on ways to get your vision across without having to reinvent the wheel.

With responsive design you can no longer spend 90% of your design time before the development begins. So mockups need to be quick and rough. Also, be open to changes because chances are your original ideas may not work exactly as planned.

The browser

Because of the large amount of testing involved, responsive design is best done as a process of revisions in the browser. As soon as a basic layout is agreed upon it is best to begin the development right away. Having your layouts viewable from a browser helps prevent a lot of design problems.

Another thing to consider as a designer is what elements of your design can be created with CSS alone. Many devises today are able to display drop-shadows, gradients, borders, rounded corners and other design elements created with CSS. CSS only elements are easier to change, takes less design time to create, and don’t require images or image slices to implement. Of course if you are not developing the site yourself you will need to be able to communicate your layout ideas with the developer.

Taking it into Photoshop

I highly recommend using one .psd for all the layouts. Here is a quick example using 1200 pixels as the largest viewport. So start with a new .psd at 1200 pixels wide by 2000 pixels tall. The other viewports will be 480, 1020, and 768 pixels wide.

To start, unlock your background layer and duplicate it for as many viewports as you need plus one. Fill in the original background layer black and leave the rest white. Put each white background layer in a folder and name it for its viewport (example: “480”).

Next set up each viewport in the .psd. Remember you only need to do this one time and just reuse the template for all of your projects.

First add guides at the edges of each viewport. (View -> New Guide and select “Vertical”). Add guides at 90, 216, 360, 840, and 1110 pixels.

Next create Layer Masks on each folder, which will form the edges of each viewport. Use the Rectangular Marquee Tool to select the area inside the center two guides (480 pixels).

Having Snap checked (View -> Snap) makes this a lot easier. With the selection made and the correct folder selected in the Layers Pallet, click the Add Layer Mask Button to apply it. Do the same step for the other viewports.

Now to see a given viewport simply turn off the other folders. I also included a photo of the Layers Pallet if you wanted to see what that should look like.

Mockups

If you already have a rough site developed, take a screenshot at each viewport and add those into your .psd in the correct folder.

Generally it is easier to start with the smallest viewport and work your way up to the larger ones in Photoshop. So flesh out your 480 pixel design, then duplicate the layers and drop them into the 768 pixel folder.

There is no need to be pixel perfect with any of your layouts. I tend to get one viewport looking correct but for the rest I only change the elements that are truly different in each. Don’t worry about getting the margins around text blocks perfect. Really just ignore text as much as you can because Photoshop cannot render it the way it will appear in the browser, and most of the text design will be done with CSS.

Understand how content changes

When thinking about the design you need to understand how the layout will be altered as it changes from one viewport to another. You also need to consider what happens if a layout is slightly smaller or larger than the viewport you are designing for.

There are a few options for allowing your content to adapt to each layout. Each element can be fixed, hidden, floated (left or right), liquid, or they can scale. Any give responsive design will use a combination of all of these.

Floating elements are most commonly seen in content areas that sit side-by-side in large layouts, but stack on top of each other in smaller viewports. As the viewport begins to get smaller and each element is floated left, the elements on the right side will begin stacking below the elements on the left side.

Liquid content adapts best to changing viewports but can become awkward if used on large viewports. Liquid content is typically used for columns of text that scale as wide as the viewport allows. They work great on smaller viewports but can become too wide on larger ones, so it can be best to switch to fixed for those.

Similar to liquid, scaling elements are given a percentage size and scale as small or wide as the viewport allows. These are different in that it can apply to images and text sizes. These elements are given a percent width and/or height and adjust to the viewport.

Fixed is the most rigid way of laying out content. If you have a piece of content that you don’t want it to scale or change size in any way, it will be fixed. The best thing to do with fixed elements is design them to fit the smallest viewport. It is a lot easier to use a small elements in a large viewport over trying to fit a huge element in a small viewport.

When you want to remove an element or just don’t have room for it you can hide it. Hidden elements will not be seen by the user but will still be downloaded. So if you are using large images but hiding them from mobile users, the page will still take the same amount of time to load whether the images are visible or not.

Remember that you can and should use a combination of all of these on the same element. That means a text box will be fluid in one viewport, fixed and floating left in another, and may be hidden in a third.

Designers are not being forgotten

Because so much of a layout can be created with CSS it may feel like your role as a designer has diminished. Really, your role has just changed. Web design for too long has been about designing the interface while neglecting the content.

The layout is still important but the developer can do much of it. The designer should focus on making sure the goals of the website are met. Spend the most time on strengthening the conversion process, emphasising important content, and making it more palatable and digestible.

To be perfectly honest, I tried looking for some good examples of this in responsive design, but really couldn’t come up with any good examples.

Graphical elements and images

There are some special considerations to make when dealing with images in responsive design. The safest approach is to make images that fit the smallest viewport. This way you keep the file size down and have images that will work in each viewport size.

Here is an example images that can easily be displayed in multiple viewports from Orestis.nl.

Large background images can be particularly problematic when scaled down for smart phone use. If you plan on using them make sure to do it in a way that keeps file sizes and load times to a minimum.

Consistency

One of the biggest problems with responsive design is the lack of consistency. Users may have trouble navigating your site on a tablet when they are used to their desktop design.

Make sure to use the same color scheme on every layout and keep at least one consistent element throughout. The logo being the easiest element to transition through all. Always make navigation clearly marked and easily found. If you have to remove elements from smaller viewport designs, have other methods of getting to that content.

Don’t reinvent the wheel

When you are designing a static website you can have a lot of freedom but in responsive design there are more things to account for. Use a method that works and spend your time making that look great. If people can make email templates look awesome you can do the same with a responsive design, it just takes a little creativity.

Tyler Herman is a web designer and blogger. You can follow him on Twitter @couchable where he serves up design and web business related news and articles worth taking a look at. Or at his blog Couchable.

What do you think is the most difficult thing to keep in mind when designing a responsive site as opposed to separate mobile and static sites? Let us know in the comments!

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from THE Journal
By John K. Waters
10/12/11

Educators play a critical role in the development of the essential skills students need to navigate the blizzard of unfiltered information available to them via the Web. Michael Wesch, associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, said he believes they should also be fostering something more basic: curiosity and imagination.

“The new media landscape is a ‘pull’ environment,” Wesch said. “Nothing is pushed to you from the Web, which makes it essential that we inspire students to seek out the knowledge that’s out there. The content isn’t fundamentally different, but the environment just demands more curiosity and imagination.”

Wesch, a cultural anthropologist and researcher in the modern discipline of digital ethnography, will expand on this idea during his keynote presentation at FETC 2012, the annual education technology conference, held this year at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, FL, Jan. 23 to 26. This will be Wesch’s first appearance at FETC.

Wesch is a well known thought leader who burst into the public consciousness in 2007 when a video he created to launch Kansas State’s Digital Ethnography Working Group became a YouTube sensation. “The Machine is Us/ing Us” was released to the video publishing site Jan. 31 of that year. Within a month, the little video created in Wesch’s basement in St. George, KS, had been seen by more than 1.7 million people, translated into five languages, and shown to large audiences at major conferences on six continents. To date, the video has been viewed more than 11 million times in its original form and translated into more than 10 languages.

Wesch is best known as a researcher, but he’s also an active developer of innovative teaching techniques, including the semester-long World Simulation project, which is the centerpiece of Kansas State’s Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course. On his Mediated Cultures Web site, Wesch described the project as “a radical experiment in learning, created in a fit of frustration with the large lecture hall format which seems inevitable in a classroom of 200 to 400 students.”

Before turning his attention to the effects of social media and digital technology on global culture, Wesch spent two years studying the implications of writing on a remote indigenous culture in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea. Wesch found himself for the first time in a culture that was not mediated. He has described how “new media” in the form of printed census books changed the village dramatically.

“We have to recognize in our society that the new media we see in our environment are not just new means of communication, not just tools,” he told attendees at the Campus Technology 2011 conference in July. “Media change what can be said, how it can be said, who can say it, who can hear it, and what messages will count as information and knowledge.”

Wesch compared the need to “re-inspire curiosity and imagination” in students with bridging the digital divide.

“We’ve talked for years about the digital divide and how, if you’re on the wrong side of that technology access gap, you get left behind,” he said. “I think there’s the potential now for a kind of curiosity gap. Consider how much further ahead a curious student will be, compared with a student who lacks curiosity, in an environment in which he or she can reach out and grab new knowledge anytime, anywhere on all kinds of devices. If you’re a curious person, you’ll learn and grow; if you’re not, you could just drift along while others race ahead.”

Wesch is also likely to talk with FETC attendees about teaching students to become “knowledge-able,” his term for the ability to find, sort, analyze, criticize, and ultimately create new information and knowledge.

“It’s just not enough anymore to know a bunch of stuff,” he said.

Being knowledge-able, he added, is also about recognizing that, while we’re using these tools, the tools might be changing us.

“I think of all this in terms of a shift in focus away from the idea that we need to stuff students’ heads with information,” he said. “Instead, we should be concentrating on making them truly knowledge-able. Imagination and curiosity are the heart of that idea; if we have those qualities, learning becomes joyous.”

News release prepared by: Beth Bohn, 785-532-2535, bbohn@k-state.edu

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

AS 2011-2012 COFFMAN CHAIR, WESCH PLANS TO HELP FACULTY UNDERSTAND AND INCORPORATE NEW MEDIA IN TEACHING

MANHATTAN — Many of the careers that Kansas State University students are now preparing for are in a state of transformation because of new media like blogs, wikis and more, according to Michael Wesch, K-State associate professor of cultural anthropology and an internationally recognized expert on the effects of new media on culture and society.

But are faculty members keeping up with the changes new media are bringing?

That’s why Wesch will make improving new media literacy across campus his project as K-State’s 2011-2012 Coffman Chair for Distinguished Teaching Scholars. The chair highlights the university’s commitment to excellence in undergraduate teaching and learning.

“With his appointment as our next Coffman Chair, Michael Wesch brings to the forefront the importance of effective use of new media in learning at Kansas State University,” said April Mason, K-State provost and senior vice president. “Understanding how to effectively use the latest teaching tools is not only essential to providing our students with the best education possible, but it also shows the expertise required for K-State to become a top 50 public research university by 2025.”

New media can create new types of conversation, exchange and collaboration in teaching and learning, but understanding how they work is key to using them effectively, Wesch said.

“While new media bring new possibilities for openness, transparency, engagement and participation, they also bring new possibilities for surveillance, manipulation, distraction and control,” he said. “The negative side of this ledger seems especially eminent in the face of widespread ignorance about the uses, misuses, power and consequences — sometimes unintended — of new media.

“If we do not quickly raise our new media literacy rates we stand to lose much more than we gain from the promises of new media. Regardless of whether we imagine our primary goal as educators to be the creation of tomorrow’s work force or for creating well-informed and engaged citizens, new media literacy is essential,” he said.

Wesch will use two complementary approaches to improve new media literacy at K-State. He first wants to make it easier for faculty and students to incorporate new media and the associated skills needed into their learning.

“I hope to achieve this by helping the K-State Online team integrate wikis and blogs and design and build other new media tools and tutorials right into K-State Online, so they can be easily integrated into courses across the university,” he said. “These tutorials will include real examples from other courses around the world to demonstrate how such tools can be used as part of an effective learning environment.”

Second, Wesch said, is the creation of a campus culture that recognizes the importance of preparing students to navigate, harness and leverage new media effectively, and one that provides a supportive environment for faculty to rethink and retool their courses so students learn and practice new media literacy under the guidance of knowledgeable faculty. To this end, the core of his goal for this coming year is the creation of a New Media Literacy Faculty Fellows Program.

For the pilot program, six faculty members who have demonstrated excellence in teaching and who are already or would like to begin incorporating new media literacy in their courses will be selected from a broad range of disciplines.

“Much like the Peer Review of Teaching Program, for which I served as coordinator from 2007-2009, we will meet frequently and visit each others’ classrooms periodically as we reflect on the effectiveness of our teaching,” Wesch said.

“All fellows in the program will be encouraged to share their progress, successes and failures through an open blog and other new media methods — tweets, videos, wikis, etc. — in such a way as to invite other teaching scholars across the campus and around the world to help us achieve our goal of improving new media literacy in our respective disciplines,” he said.

Wesch uses new media in his teaching with award-winning results. He was named the 2008 CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities; received a Rave Award from Wired magazine, which dubbed him “the explainer” for his expertise in new media; earned the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology; and was named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic.

At K-State, Wesch created and leads the Digital Ethnography Working Group, a team of undergraduates exploring human uses of digital technology. He and 200 of his students created the widely acclaimed and viewed video “A Vision of Students Today,” which explores the state of higher education today. Wesch is currently working on a new video, “Visions of Students Today.” The collaborative project involves submissions of videos from students across the world about their educational experiences today.

Wesch is the 17th faculty member appointed to the Coffman Chair for Distinguished Teaching Scholars since it was created in 1995. He will retain the title of distinguished teaching scholar after his term ends.

Published in Campus Technology. 03/23/2011.

In January 2009, Jay Mathews of the Washington Post disparagingly labeled the call for new media literacy and 21st Century skills “the latest doomed pedagogical fad,” asking “How are millions of students still struggling to acquire 19th-century skills in reading, writing and math supposed to learn this stuff?” [“The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad: 21st-Century Skills” by Jay Mathews, The Washington Post, January 5, 2009]

Though I disagree with his conclusions, Mathews was right to point out the movement as the latest fad. As long ago as 1938, John Dewey was able to write about “Traditional vs. Progressive Education” [in Experience and Education, by John Dewey, 1938] and recount several decades of debate. “Traditional” education, even in Dewey’s time, could be summarized as content-centric, authoritarian, and “sharply marked off from other social institutions” (Dewey, 1938). Progressives countered with student-centric, communal schools that were integrated with the local community and its relevant issues.

Flash forward to 1957 after the Russians launched Sputnik, forcing the US to examine its educational system. The famous Woods Hole Conference [1959] called together top scientists and educational theorists to help our schools. Traditionalists expected a bigger, deeper, richer, and more refined definition of the body of content students must learn to keep up with the Russians. Instead, the scientists overwhelmingly noted that it was not the content that mattered. What mattered was that students learn how to think. Jerome S. Bruner’s The Process of Education explicated the position (1960). Progressives largely agreed, but felt that Bruner and the Woods Hole team had not gone far enough, as they failed to address larger systemic and organizational issues that made the traditional classroom inadequate for the critical and creative thinking they were championing. By the late 1960s a slew of books emerged lambasting our school system. Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age (1967), Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), and Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969) were just a few of the revolutionary titles.

As Postman would later note, these revolutionaries “ripped into the curriculum, the regimentation, the industrial mentality, the grading system, standardized tests, school bureaucracy, homogeneous grouping, and all the other assumptions and conventions which gave the classroom its peculiar character … and then suddenly,” he continues, “it was over” [Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979)]. He gave several reasons for the revolution’s demise. First, the Vietnam War had inspired a spirit of revolution. That spirit faded along with the war itself. Second, the stagnating economy of the 1970s hindered any implementation of plans that were built during the utopian hype of the 1960s, which Postman named as the third factor. And fourth, a “back to basics” movement emerged against the revolution and won over school administrators.

We revolutionaries should be humbled by such events and our similar circumstances. Nearly a decade of war is now fading. Our economy is stagnating, making it difficult to implement broad-scale changes. And there is a solid and entrenched “back to basics” movement to counter our own, of which the article by Jay Mathews is just one example.

But there are reasons to believe that this revolution will not fail. The urgency of our movement is not grounded in a single political issue. It is grounded in broad cultural and technological shifts pervasive enough to be recognized by virtually everybody in our society. The tools that enable us to experiment with new modes of education are mostly free, and they can be implemented in many diverse bits and pieces without the need for large-scale top-down planning or intervention. And perhaps most importantly, [this revolution] is driven by what one might call a “rethinking the basics” movement, in which educators everywhere cannot help but see a disconnect between their traditional modes of teaching and the world in which we all now live.

As Dewey noted, the goal is not to counter traditional education and its strict organization with its perceived opposite (disorganization)—but instead to create what Web designers today might call an “architecture for participation.” The learning environments we need may be more fluid, adaptable, collaborative, and participatory, but they are not unstructured and unorganized. As Maurice Friedman noted while explaining Martin Buber’s educational philosophy, “The opposite of compulsion is not freedom but communion…” (1955). [Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue, by Maurice S. Friedman, 1955]

n the pursuit of these new learning environments we find ourselves asking those wonderfully fundamental questions: What are “the basics” and “basic literacy skills” today? How might our students best learn them? How are schools/classrooms/desks/subjects/schedules/teachers necessary to this learning process, and how are they not? And these are the best kinds of questions, because their best answers are just more questions. And so we find ourselves exactly where any great learner would want to be, on a quest, asking question after question after question.

[Editor’s note: Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist, researcher in digital ethnography, and an associate professor at Kansas State University, will present the opening keynote, “From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able: New Learning Environments for New Media Environments” at Campus Technology 2011 in Boston, July 25-28, 2011.]

Last semester some students joined me for an interview with Lynda Weinman of Lynda.com to discuss how our class works. You can see the full webinar here: http://nmc.adobeconnect.com/p21022812/

When conducting user research, we all know that asking the right questions is just as important as how you ask them, but how do you know exactly what questions to ask? What if the discussion topic is very personal? How do you get a complete stranger to open up? There is a better way to conduct an in-depth interview, and it doesn’t involve a clipboard. Just imagine what you could discover if the participant’s answers weren’t limited to a predetermined set of questions. This is where collaging can help.

Collaging is a projective technique by which participants select images that represent how they feel about a particular topic. The participants then explain to the moderator the reason they chose each image. The collage becomes an instrument through which participants are able to express needs and feelings that they might not otherwise have been able to articulate. This information enables us to better understand the user’s world and how to design for it.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

So, you might be asking yourself, “Why should I have people make collages, rather than just ask them point-blank questions about their needs and feelings?” It’s a great question, and the answer is, sometimes the most valuable answer is not in response to a direct question, but one that’s elicited. An image can be a powerful stimulus that evokes a strong response, triggers a memory and draws out feelings that exist below a person’s own level of awareness.

Gerald Zaltman, author of How Customers Think, states that “95% of our thoughts and feelings are unconscious.” There is just so much that we carry around in thought but never share until something triggers it. When we ask a participant a set of pre-defined questions, we are predetermining the scope of the interview. Instead, by presenting a visual stimulus, we are letting the participant start the conversation and bring up topics that are meaningful to them.

There are also times when you don’t know the right question to ask. Sometimes you do, but you don’t know how to ask it. Depending on what you’re researching, participants might have difficulty opening up to you. The research topic might be too personal, controversial or sensitive for the participant to just open up and start discussing with a complete stranger. The collage becomes a catalyst for discussion, an ice-breaker.

What You Can Learn

Collaging is a method of building empathy with your users. You gain an emotional understanding of the user’s feelings, problems, state of mind and so on, which is imperative to know when designing for them. Collaging can also help you better understand the user’s needs, in turn helping you to address them in your product.

The wonderful thing about this method is that participants might reveal stories that prompt a line of questioning about a topic that you never expected to explore (as we’ll see in the examples below). You honestly don’t know what you will learn from each participant’s collage.

A Brief History Of Projective Techniques

Collaging is not new. The method has been well used to conduct qualitative marketing research for at least 40 years. Its use in marketing has mainly been to assess feelings towards brands and products. Other projective techniques — tests such as the Rorschach, word and sentence completion, draw-a-person, and thematic apperception — date back to the early 19th century. All of these methods are rooted in psychology, but their application has expanded to other fields such as advertising, management, sociology, anthropology and, more recently, user experience (UX), to name a few. Collaging as a user research method has yet to be widely adopted in our industry, but I’ve seen a steady increase in its use and popularity over the past few years.

Conducting A Collaging Exercise

Listed below are all the steps necessary to conduct your own collaging study. Let’s walk through them together.

1. Choose Your Topic of Interest

The collaging exercise should focus on a specific topic. You will be asking participants to choose pictures that reflect how they feel about this topic. For example, if I were redesigning a website, I might ask the participant,

“Select pictures that reflect how you would and would not want the new website to greet you.”

You could word this in a lot of different ways, such as,

“Create a story about how you would want the website to communicate with you. What qualities should it have? What qualities should it not have?”

Or, to learn more about a participant’s day-to-day struggle with a problem, you could simply say,

“Select pictures that reflect your experience with using [x].”

2. Create a Collage Board and Get Pictures

You will need a board or a large piece of paper to which the participant can tape their pictures. It doesn’t need to be fancy. In the past, I have just used 11 × 17-inch ledger paper. If I were asking the participant to create two separate collages, I would divide the paper by drawing a line down the middle. I’ve seen other people put a target on a collage board and ask participants to stick pictures on the board according to how closely they “hit home” for them. Feel free to be creative here, and find what works best for you.

Example of a completed collage.

Participants will need to be able to choose from a pool of about 150 to 200 pictures. The pool of pictures must be a mixture of random pictures. They should not have a running theme (i.e. no pictures of just animals or people or medical scenes or nature, etc). The pool should be a good mixture of all sorts of pictures. You can use stock photography or even pictures clipped from magazines. Here are some online sources of free images:

• Flickr Creative Commons,
• morgueFile,
• FreePhotosBank,
• FreeMediaGoo.com,
• FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Print the pictures small enough (approximately 3 × 3 inches) for participants to have plenty of room to put as many as they want in their collage. You’ll also want multiple copies of pictures to replace the ones used by participants. In the past, I’ve printed pictures on stickers, which worked well but was a little more expensive.

3. Moderate the Study

1. Set up the room.
   Lay out all of the pictures on a big long table. Make sure they do not overlap so that the participant can see them all. Put the collage board, some tape and a pen on another table.
2. Give the topic and instructions.
   Instruct the participant to pick out at least four or five pictures that reflect how they feel about the given topic. Then ask them to tape those pictures to the collage board, and add a caption to each one explaining why they chose it.
3. Leave the room.
   I prefer to leave the room for five to ten minutes to give the participant time to peruse the pictures without feeling any pressure. When I reenter the room, I tell them to take as long as they need and to let me know when they have completed the collage.
4. Discuss the collage.
   The collage is finished. Now comes the fun part! Have the participant explain to you why they chose each picture. This is your opportunity to learn as much as you can about how the participant feels about the topic. Let the collage and the participant guide the interview. Be sure to follow up with questions and to probe deeper when needed and appropriate. Keep in mind that the experience can be very personal and revealing for some participants, depending on the sensitivity of the topic. The collage might make it easy for a participant to open a door that they don’t necessarily want to walk through. Be mindful of the participant’s comfort level when probing deeper into something personal.

4. Conduct Analysis

When conducting your analysis, keep in mind that what’s really important is not the pictures they chose, but why they chose them. The analysis and report should focus on what the collage reveals about the participant, not the collage itself. It would be interesting if multiple participants chose the same pictures, but even more interesting if they chose them for the same reasons.

When to Conduct a Collaging Exercise

Consider collaging during the early stages of product development, when user requirements are being gathered. The method is also helpful at any time in the product’s development if you feel the design team is having trouble understanding and identifying with the users. Sometimes designers need to step back and remember exactly who they are designing for.

As mentioned, this method can be most useful if the topic is sensitive, but it’s great for impassive topics, too. Collaging can be used if you just need a fun activity to put the participant at ease and break the ice before a formal interview. For example, I have conducted collaging exercises with cancer patients, with people dealing with chronic pain and even with women about their menstrual cycles and feelings about birth control. On the other hand, I’ve conducted collages to learn more about people’s daily commutes and how they feel about public transportation — much lighter topics.

Collage Examples

The examples below are from collage exercises that I’ve moderated. Each one shows how a picture can change the line of questioning in an interview. The topics, which were discussed because of these images, might never have been brought up in a traditional interview.

Picture from a collage done for research on people suffering from chronic pain.

The participant wrote the caption, “That’s my daughter consoling me when I’m in pain.” When discussing this picture, I was able to probe deeper into how the participant’s pain affects their family and how they deal with it. We were then able to discuss what role family plays in how they manage their pain.

Picture from a collage done for research on how people feel about their commute.

The participant wrote the caption, “Wish my commute was this enjoyable.” I was able to follow up with questions about what their ideal commute to work would be like and what they wished they could change about their current commute.

Picture from a collage done for research on cancer patients.

The participant wrote the caption, “Vomiting!” This led to a line of questioning about the side effects of the participant’s cancer treatments and their coping mechanisms.

Pitfalls To Avoid

Sometimes a stimulus can be too strong and can disrupt a participant’s train of thought and be a distraction. The example below resulted from two participants choosing the same image for the same study:

The participants wrote the captions “Disgusting” and “Gross.” Their captions and their reasons for choosing the image were similar, but in no way did they relate to the topic of interest, which was pain management. The participants couldn’t explain how the image related to what they felt about the topic, but they still chose it because they were drawn to it and it provoked a strong emotion. In this case, we decided to remove the image from the pool because it was obviously a distraction. When conducting a collaging exercise, remove any pictures that you find derail the participants.

Conclusion

Collaging is a great method for learning more about your end users. Depending on when the collaging study is conducted during the product’s development cycle, your findings could do any or all of the following:

• Aid in persona development,
• Be used in early ideation for creating new products,
• Reveal how people feel about the experience of using an existing product,
• Help to define new requirements or enhancements for features.

The method might not be right for every user research initiative, but try it if you feel something is lacking from your traditional interviews. You will be amazed at what you can learn when you throw away the clipboard and let participants direct the interview.

Resources

• How Customers Think: Essential Insights Into the Mind of the Market, Gerald Zaltman
• Customer Intimacy: Pick Your Partners, Shape Your Culture, Win Together, Fred Wiersema

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© Kyle Soucy for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

We at Webdesigner Depot are big fans of Threadless and you can often see us sporting their awesome t-shirts. They’re a lot of fun and feature some awesome designs that often spark conversation.

One of the great things we love about Threadless is that the designs are submitted by designers like you and get voted on by their community. The winning designs are then printed on clothing and other products and sold through their website (designers get paid for their designs!).

Today, in partnership with our site Mighty Deals, we bring you an awesome giveaway where you can win 5 gift vouchers for Threadless merchandise, worth $100 each!!

You can use them in anyway you wish on Threadless.com - whether you want to get yourself some cool t-shirts, books, iPhone cases, etc.

Read on for more details:

Check out just some of the many awesome designs and let the drooling start…

Terms of contest and how to participate:

• Enter your email address in the form below and then leave a comment.
• Results will be announced here on WDD on February 15th, 2012
• Coupons must be redeemed within 1 year

Good luck to everyone!!!

This contest is sponsored by Webdesigner Depot and our own MightyDeals.com which we believe is the best place to find awesome deals for designers. Note that Threadless is in no way affiliated with our sites or sponsoring this contest in any way.

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At one of my first jobs, my lunch constantly disappeared from the community refrigerator. There were no clues and, being New York, “nobody saw nuttin!”

I tried marking my lunch. I tried notes pleading with people to not take my lunch. I tried hiding my lunch behind cans, etc. Nothing worked. One day, after my lunch disappeared, I shut the refrigerator door and laughed maniacally. Someone asked me what was so funny.

“Today is the day I find out who has been stealing my lunch,” I replied. “I put rat poison on my sandwich! We’ll find the thief in about an hour when he or she starts dying.”

Sure enough, a coworker screamed and ran around like she was on fire. As she was about to be taken to the hospital to have her stomach pumped, I laughed and admitted it wasn’t really poisoned. Naturally, I was fired. It didn’t matter that this woman had stolen my lunch for her mid-morning snack every day. It seems my “joke” was considered “dangerous” and I was chastised for possibly “giving (her) a heart attack.”

In one office, coworkers had small refrigerators in their cubicles to keep their lunch and drinks cold and safe. The energy bills must have been too much for the company so a memo went around informing people that these appliances were against the fire code. The kitchen refrigerator then became a repository of science experiments as people forgot half sandwiches and slabs of meatloaf for weeks and months. Sometimes you couldn’t even tell what was in the Tupperware it was so furry and moldy.

Being a smoker, I often found that people would pop into my cubicle to borrow my lighter, which sat out with my pack of cigarettes. Switching to gag lighter that gave those who pushed the button to light it a severe shock, I was once again chastised for a dangerous item that could “give someone a heart attack!”

Again, it would be a telltale sign of who was stealing my lighters. Sometimes there’s just no justice in the world and certainly not an office.

When you are hired by a large company or corporation, you are shown a video on office harassment. The video looks like a 1970s porn film without the sex. Bad acting and rhythmic guitar rifts, but the common thread throughout the video is that even when you are in the right, if someone complains about you, then you are guilty and wrong. With a small cast of characters in this video, it’s always the same person being offended by the actions of coworkers. One might wonder why the old rules of society aren’t followed and the constant complainer isn’t just buried up to his or her neck and hit in turn by every other employee with a polo mallet until dead. The modern office has a strange political hierarchy and it will not bend or break to your will or common sense. Learn to deal with it safely and with a sense of good-natured flair!

Save your lunch

And do it without the expense of poison and explosive booby traps that blow off human fingers! Try these sickening lunch bags with horrid mold or cockroaches printed on them.

Of course, if you’re like the people in my last office, mold and disease-carrying vermin will not get in the way of a free meal. Try nuclear waste and the threat of mutated offspring!

Having been situated in Missouri, the threat of mutant AND inbred children was just too exciting for my coworkers, so if you have the same territorial problems, far from civilization, try this locker that fits in a refrigerator.

I would, however, suggest testing the Fridge Locker before placing expensive food items into it. Judging by the claws on former coworkers, some people will just tear through the lock and plastic as if it was made of freshly-baked Twinkies. Nothing, aside from a freshly-baked Twinkie, will draw out the animal hunger in an office thief like a nice, juicy, meaty meatloaf. An inflatable meatloaf, like the one below, will fool the hungry animalistic worker and at least give them plastic poisoning as they won’t realize what they are chewing until it’s too late!

“What about my precious condiments?” you might ask. Do you relish a sandwich with expensive mustard? Well, then screw on the mustard head cap and know that most coworkers will be sickened by the yellow ooze spewing forth from his mouth. Some coworkers, unfortunately, will be turned on and suck the mustard right from the mouth as if they were deriving pleasure in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

There’s nothing worse then finding lipstick marks on your cup and it’s not the shade of lipstick you wear! So, guys, why not use this handy mug with a removable plug you can put on your key ring when you’re not using your personal cup. It’s like an evil dribble glass that will scorch the heck out of a mug thief when they try enjoying a hot cup of tea or coffee with someone else’s private property.

Who will you catch with their hand in the cookie jar? Not one person when they think you’re storing toxic waste in your cubicle! If people ignore the obvious warning, just bake some cookies with glass chips and keep them on the top of the pile. Pilfering will stop within the first day…or first hour.

Show ‘em who’s boss!

On your first day of work, coworkers will size you up to see how far they can push and dominate you. Why not let them get the message the minute you walk in? Hope for rain so you can start by appearing heavily armed with these katana and tanto umbrellas strapped to your side or slung at your waist. Nothing say, “don’t borrow money from me” like implements that can cleanly slice off the outstretched palm of the biggest office mooch.

Meetings can be soooo boring and stressful. Sit among coworkers and relieve stress with this cute stress squeezer that resembles a real set of brass knuckles! Well, it will relieve YOUR stress. Those around you may have increased stress levels but they will be very receptive to your ideas and probably won’t offer any of their own.

If brass knuckles is a bit too over the top for you, just consider wearing finger tentacles for a more demure and friendly appearance. Just make a “brouuurp!” noise every now and then to convince doubters you actually have real tentacle fingers.

Evetually, coworkers will enter your office or cubicle to chat, drop off work, discuss a project or steal something while you’re not there. People will judge you by what they see, aside from the company phone, chair, and computer. Toys and accessories say a lot about the person, so let them see the real you when they glance at your bulletin board and see these little, chrome “stars of the office!”

If you’re in an area of the world that experiences colder then average winter weather, chances are that your employer wants to save money to spend on expensive cars and prostitutes by turning down the heat in the office. Most people will leave a sweater in their office for just such an occasion. Some people will dare the sarcasm and cruel taunts by using a Snuggie™. Don’t become the office joke…use this warm outfit and coworkers won’t so much as snicker. In fact, they will probably avoid walking by your cubicle or office altogether!

Are your interoffice memos not effective? Do people smirk at your note taking in meetings? Well, use these fun post-it notes and people will pay attention. In fact, they will agree to anything you ask and give you money and other gifts, even if it’s not your birthday!

Naturally, there’s something you don’t want people to see in your cubicle. One former coworker had a small TV in her desk drawer. One coworker actually had a camping mattress and pillow and blanket under his desk. One coworker LIVED in his cubicle! Small things can be hidden in this handy keyboard-slash-storage compartment. If anyone finds it, they can be a coworker-slash-sorry-they-ever-came-into-your-office!

Life goes fast in the age of technology and sometimes you need to make a personal call… like to report your employer to the labor board or tell your five year-old that he or she has to make their own dinner because uncle mean-boss is making you work until two in the morning again. With these stealth covers for your iPad and iPhone, you can fool coworkers into believing you have an Etch-a-Sketch for amusing down-time…as if you are suppose to have down-time. GET BACK TO WORK!

Working 9-5 is an old Dolly Parton song and an even older concept to employers who believe in gulag-style work hours. Sometimes you might need to spend your ten minute lunch break shutting your eyes for a power nap. Well, lunch break or not, employers aren’t fond of sleeping employees using company heat and chairs for such personal time. Just slip into this cute bear sleeping bag and chances are, no one will stay in the are long enough to figure it out.

Curious coworkers might pluck up the courage to peak into your workspace while you’re not there. Maybe they’ll touch your stuff! Well, with this handy pen/video camera, you can keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Catch someone in the act and you can blackmail them for money, or blackmail them first and THEN have them fired!

Although the image for the video pen seems to show the male coworker using video to look directly at his female coworker’s er, breastular region…probably for later use, which I won’t go into here but trust me, it’s not office appropriate…like the rest of this article…sometimes you need to know what coworkers may suspect about you…or are just making up in office gossip. Use this sound enhancer to overhear conversations far away. People will think you’re just wearing a Bluetooth but you’ll really be hearing tidbits of information that will make you king or queen of the office. Forewarned is forearmed!

Don’t get mad…get even!

So, maybe some of your coworkers haven’t heeded the message that you will kill them and gnaw on their bones. Some people are just a bit slow when it comes to obvious signs. A little extra persuasion may be needed. With this little device, hidden somewhere in their office, it will only take about three days for them to go completely insane. Buy two and hide one in their car, too! There’s a reason they call it the “Annoy-a-Tron!”

Sometimes, as the old saying goes, a little sugar attracts more flies than vinegar. So does the rotting carcass of a missing coworker, lying in a ditch at the edge of town, but please don’t get me wrong. Making nice is the best way to win over the hardest heart in the office and what could be better then sealing an interoffice memo with a kiss? Of course, you might not want to kiss every memo or wear lipstick, so just use this innovative pre-inked stamper. If someone is still mad or suspicious of your intentions, just stamp their shirt collar and let their spouse become enraged and divorce them, causing emotional problems and a downward spiral in the person’s life that usually ends with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

A dose of reality

As this is a global publication, some readers from other cultures as well as Americans who will take this article as good ideas, may not understand that I’m writing this with humor and I am not suggesting one should threaten or harm coworkers. If one were to act out on any one of these scenarios, they would probably be fired (and possibly imprisoned).

When you are fired, or so I have heard, you are usually walked out by security, sometimes with a guard holding each one of my limbs…er, your limbs, and you will not be allowed to return to your office to pack your personal items. Coworkers will usually loot your items like wild dogs fighting over a dead carcass. Having worked at places where we produced collectible licensed merchandise, things can disappear very easily. As creatives, we tend to like having colorful things around us like collectible vinyl figures and such. It’s best to keep personal items of any value out of the office.

So, what can we have around to brighten our personal workspaces, set in Nazi-gray office color schemes? It should be things we can throw away without a second thought. So, try custom paper toys! Buy a book of them and you can have all the cute and cool you want until it’s time to walk the last mile out of your place of employment, leaving nothing but memories and perhaps…burning paper toys?

Speider Schneider is a former member of The Usual Gang of Idiots at MAD Magazine and has designed products for Disney/Pixar, Warner Bros., Harley-Davidson, ESPN, Mattel, DC and Marvel Comics, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon among other notable companies. Speider is a former member of the board for the Graphic Artists Guild, co-chair of the GAG Professional Practices Committee and a former board member of the Society of Illustrators. Follow him on Twitter @speider

Do you have a favorite office toy? What web site do you like for great, fun office toys? Do you understand this article was written tongue-in-cheek and you shouldn’t scare coworkers? Is it just too late to write a disclaimer?

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Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot

The Psychology Behind Color In Design or Nothing Should be Random http://cot.ag/zpB2NM

The Amazing World of Icon Fonts http://cot.ag/y0oAP6

Interesting insights from Aaron Gustafson: From “Mobile Friendly” to “Mobile First” http://bit.ly/qukmio #css #rwd /via @smashingmag

5 Tips to Help Home-Entrepreneurs Set Up a Great Office http://cot.ag/yPx1EP

We like this: Responsive Design Test Bookmarklet http://bit.ly/yIiIyp

The amazing drawing world of Pat Perry http://cot.ag/y5mbYP

The Future Of Screen Typography Is In Your Hands http://bit.ly/yZpy9D (via @smashingmag)

27 Best free WordPress Plugins for Musicians http://bit.ly/vZtOz4 (thanks @daviddas for the mention)

Leeds Print Festival posters or the beautiful art of marbling by Jemma Lewis http://cot.ag/ziNp1R

Working locally: providing a greater flexibility and creativity? http://cot.ag/zIL8ET

Ten Things To Think About When Designing Your iPad App http://bit.ly/zNmLdW *Great read

The gap between traditional and digital mediums illustrated perfectly for China Mobile in “Wireless City” http://bit.ly/xYeBJs

Sleep: Are you getting enough? http://bit.ly/zff73Z *Interesting read for those of you staying up all night

Time to Ruby dooby do? Perhaps. Take A Quick Look at Ruby on Rails http://bit.ly/yYUm1u

A super fun calendar for those obsessed with bubble wrap – it has a bubble to pop for every single day of the year! http://bit.ly/yBXQSa

Take a look at the making of Novum’s magazine geodesic front cover and get inspired! http://bit.ly/zPcJVb

Make Funky Animations With CC Circle And Radio Waves http://bit.ly/A4s0le

Gentlemint: Pinterest For Men http://bit.ly/xRb3A0 *Looks fun

Yosemite HD: amazing time lapse video collaboration between Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty http://bit.ly/yz6vao

This Short Film About Letterpress Will Make You Yearn For An Ink Roller http://bit.ly/AFqDjE

Want more? No problem! Keep track of all our tweets by following us @DesignerDepot

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Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

A little preoccupied

Almost daily

The whiz kid

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

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