Process

Amy Hupe prepares a four bird roast of tasty treats so we can learn how the needs of many different types of users can be served through careful implementation of components within a design system.

Jina Anne silences the night to talk about how we talk about Design Systems. Can the language we use impact the effectiveness of the solution? Fear not, if mighty dread has seized your troubled mind. Design systems of great joy we bring to you and all mankind.

Anna Debenham harnesses up the huskies and puts them to work to figure out how teams distributed across multiple locations can work effectively to all pull in the same direction. With modern workforces distributed from north pole to south, can they all be kept running in step?

Frances Berriman asks us to give the gift of consideration to those who are using the web on constricted devices such as low-end smart phones or feature phones. Christmas is a time of good will to all, and as Bugsy Malone reminds us, you give a little love and it all comes back to you.

Christopher Murphy channels the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come by not just look into the future, but shaping the form it takes. By taking action now you can affect the outcome down the road, making all the difference when it comes to a big life change such as leaving full time employment.

Mel Choyce harnesses the huskies of hard toil to the sled of flexibility to slide off to a location of her own choosing. In a time when it makes less sense than ever to all be cooped in the same room staring at our magical screens, Mel offers up words of wisdom on how to survive, nay, thrive out there on your own.

Jina Anne circles back to carefully look again at the popularity of design systems and how they impact the different roles within our teams. A good system enables all the reindeer to pull forward in a cohesive motion, yet has space for individuals with very shiny noses.

Phil Hawksworth dashes through the snow towards his launch deadline with some tips for easing the path to production. Going live can be a scary thing, but that shouldn’t be down to technical concerns.Nail your deployment early, don’t leave it to the night before Christmas.

Denise Jacobs hits pause on the avalanche of social media posts, harnesses up her huskies and rides a sled of serenity to a calm mountaintop. When working online we’re always connected, but is that for the best? Perhaps it’s time to step back.

Jessica Rose sets out her recipe for identifying and caring for the symptoms of professional burnout. This time of year is the perfect opportunity to pause and reflect – are you burning the advent candle at both ends, and if so, what should you do about it? Let’s find out.

Una Kravets takes some time to consider the implementation of design systems, and how and why they might not succeed. Don’t let your design system be like a New Year’s resolution that starts off well but fades by the Spring. With appropriate care it should start to blossom as the snow melts away.

Christopher Murphy puts distractions to one side to discuss the issue of time management and procrastination. Whether you’re trying to finish up projects for Christmas, or are yet to buy your final gifts before the holidays, this could prove some well timed advice to take you into the New Year.

Amy Simmons conducts us in five lessons but sadly no carols, sharing the experiences gained in coming to a dev role from a background in journalism. Like seeing Christmas through a child’s eyes, sometimes the best lessons are learned from newcomers, not just the old-timers.

Heydon Pickering questions whether accessibility is really the name of the game, and asks if perhaps inclusivity might be a more broadly acceptable term for the valuable design work we do. Would a cinnamon spiced latte by any other name smell as sweet? Someone has to call it.

Lara Hogan stands up and goes it alone to expound on the benefits of presenting on stage with a buddy. Preparing and delivering a presentation to a room full of people can be a daunting task, and sometimes two heads are better that one. Not even Rudolph could pull that sleigh alone.

Gillian Sibthorpe rearranges the doors on our advent calendar by looking at how to manage those tougher projects. Like a game of limbo at the office holiday party, it pays to remain flexible in the face of adversity.

Drew McLellan brings our 2015 calendar to a motivational close with some encouragement for the year ahead. Year’s end is a time for reflection and finding new purpose and enthusiasm for what we do. By tackling the thorniest design and development problems, we can make the greatest impact – and have the most fun. Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

Elizabeth Galle extends goodwill to all customers this Christmas (and beyond) with some insights into establishing and maintaining good relationships through effective customer support.

Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman manages to turn something that makes most of us cringe – meetings – into learning experiences that benefit everyone in the room. The new year is the perfect time to make a lifelong resolution to always be learning.

Inayaili de León Persson guides us gently away from the bustle of the party season with some advice about introversion and how we can help ourselves and others be more understanding. Merry is all well and good, but peace is part and parcel of Christmas too.

Charlie Perrins wonders why agencies sometimes struggle to adopt agile web development processes, particularly in relation to business structures and working with clients. Could it be like celebrating the spirit of the season without overegging the Christmas pudding?

Sibylle Weber finds ways to make our workflows more collaborative, and advocates more positively asserting the benefits of responsive design to the people who matter: colleagues and clients.

Darren Beale explains how Vagrant can fit in to existing development workflows and bring many benefits to those of us maintaining multiple virtual development environments. Set and forget – a gift that keeps on giving.

Rachel Andrew shakes us out of our winter slumber to wake us up to better, safer and more productive processes using version control, Git repositories and deployment services. You just know that Santa uses a staging server before deploying that final list…

Christopher Murphy pauses to reflect on his personal experience of mental distress and enjoins us to understand the powerful psychological forces that motivate us and can lead us astray.

Brad Frost outlines a simple tool that can track a project’s design decisions and assets, and keeps everyone involved up to date and in the browser. It’s like a deep spoon scooping the brandy butter of progress onto the Christmas pudding of web project management.

Geri Coady lavishes us with her generous spirit of appreciation and approbation for co-workers, webfellows and colleagues. By crediting everyone involved, you can be a not-so-secret Santa.

Meri Williams brings her kanban work home with her — but to solve problems, not cause them. There’s a trick or two here that Santa could use instead of making a list and checking it twice.

Stephen Fulljames places the reindeers of thought before the sleigh of action, encouraging coders everywhere to plan ahead when implementing JavaScript libraries.

Trent Walton celebrates the collaborative DNA of the web community. We make the web better when we work together, and we should seek out ways of contributing for the greater good. A little bit like Christmas, really.

Bethany Heck slips warming cloves and spices into the web designer’s mulled wine by sharing some of the methods she uses to encourage and maintain creative success in new projects.

Ben Bodien fosters seasonal goodwill with his sparkling vision of web workers as dedicated craftspeople: understanding and sharpening the tools of our trade; appreciating the challenges, nuances and responsibilities of our craft; and instinctively knowing when something just works. Hope and joy for the new year!

Greg Wood confesses to student kitchen rage and abandons his pursuit of that goal – perfection – impossible in our agile, fast-moving, rapidly iterating milieu. The perfect Christmas dinner, however, remains a worthwhile ambition.

Anna Debenham spruces up your workflow by surveying the snow-strewn field of web style guides, and explaining how to tie them up nicely with a bow for the benefit of you, your faithful team of developer huskies, and your ever-loving clients.

Rich Thornett lowers the portcullis and raises the drawbridge to fend off downtime caused by third-party widgets on your site. So let in light and banish shade this Christmas with some robust defensive scripting.

Andrew Clarke whittles his early photographic experience into an innovative approach to deciding what matters most in a user’s experience of a visual design – capture and order what needs to remain consistent, and share the process (and the port and stilton) with clients.

Meagan Fisher mines her dissipated youth for ways of coping with procrastination and distractions, and gives us some advice for dealing with those times when concentrating on the task at hand is difficult. Just in time for your new year resolutions, perhaps?

Simon Collison transmutes established design vocabularies and principles into new patterns and methods for modern web design. By immersing ourselves in the language and uses of visual design, we can speak and think more eloquently about what we do. Even after a schooner of sherry.

The Standardistas (Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson) extol the virtues of getting away from the computer and (dare we say it?) abandoning the default use of Google and Wikipedia as conduits of inspiration, in favour of simple tools and lateral thinking to grease the runners of your creative sled.

Frances Berriman puts the sled firmly behind the reindeer with her approach to documenting feature-rich APIs. Creating good documentation needn’t be a chore and it reaps benefits – you wouldn’t expect presents at Christmas without writing your list to Santa first, would you?

Veerle Pieters tames the behemoth with her tips on getting the most out of Photoshop as a web design environment. Until Santa delivers the perfect web design application, boost your productivity with these gift-wrapped techniques.

Hannah Donovan recounts her recent retreat (with twelve other web geeks) to /dev/fort “to think up, build and finish something – without readily available internet access”. Usually there’s only one kind of cold turkey suitable around Christmas, but it paid dividends for the project’s outcome.

Meagan Fisher tackles the issue of designing in the browser head on by looking at some of the practicalities of ditching Photoshop and setting your foundations markup. Sorry Photoshop, it’s not me, it’s you.

Ross Bruniges demonstrates a way JavaScript can be used during the development phase to highlight errors in the markup as they occur. By constructing simple tests you can spot problems fast and fix them before they become an issue.

Jason Santa Maria details his approach to building a modular system for laying out pages with CSS. Devising a method for dealing with the presentational when presentation is all you’ve got, this can be a handy way to predictably tame content without becoming predictable.

Tim Van Damme tackles the thorny issue of overcoming designer’s block with a handy list of do’s and don’ts to help you get back on track. Creative block hits nearly all of us at some point, and so having some simple methods of breaking it can be invaluable.

Richard Rutter brings an interesting new tool to the wireframing table with the introduction of a smart and exceptionally useful jQuery plugin. If you ever get involved in designing or prototyping modern multi-state web sites or applications, you’ll want to check this out.

Matt Riggott demonstrates how to use Google App Engine as a CDN for serving your site’s images, CSS and JavaScript files from a location close to your users. Find out how using this free service from Google could be just the performance kick your site needs.

Jon Hicks takes a peek at using CSS to apply custom user styles to change the appearance of sites within your own browser. Put your existing knowledge of CSS to good use to make your own browsing experience more pleasant and productive.

Drew McLellan sets our 2008 series rolling with some practical tips for helping a project smoothly transition from the design to the development phase. Consider it a designer’s preflight check list to ease you into the festive season.

Eric Meyer describes a technique for using CSS as a diagnostic tool for finding potential problems or issues within a page. Going beyond the styling for the delivery of a site, the use of CSS as an author-time development tool holds many possibilities. Now if only there was a selector to show me which presents I’ve forgotten to buy this year.

Gareth Rushgrove runs us through some of the useful tools available to help minify code and images to increase web site performance. No need to feel slow and bloated this yuletide; get your site in shape without breaking so much as a sweat.

Natalie Downe describes a simple approach to usability testing for those of us working to tight timescales or budgets. That’d be nearly all of us then. Learn how to make the most of your available user testing time, and perhaps this year you’ll not end up quizzing auntie as she stuffs her face with turkey.

Andrew Clarke details an approach for embedding production notes inside your document – a useful aid to project management and team communications throughout the development phases of any project. Sounds like Santa isn’t the only one who’ll be getting notes this Christmas.

Rachel Andrew delves into the world of CSS generation and looks at some CSS techniques that will prevent you from tearing your hair out as well giving you more time to shop for a hat to cover the bald patches.

Jon Hicks demonstrates how to use the Firefox DOM Inspector to debug problems in your CSS. It may not be the ideal time of year for seek and destroy missions, but I’d be prepared to overlook that. It’s the season of goodwill, after all.