BlogmyQuery – BMQ

We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And as designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one—desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This creativity mission has been going on for over four years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month.

This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for October 2012. Many of the wallpapers this month are related to Halloween which seems to have become a tradition on Smashing Magazine over the years. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper!

Please note that:

• All images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper,
• You can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our Desktop Wallpaper Calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?

Halloween

Designed by Mohamad Khatib from Lebanon.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1400×1050, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1400×1050, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 2560×1440

Autumn Is The New Spring

“Who says Autumn isn’t fun? It’s the new Spring, after all!” Designed by Marina Zhukov from USA.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080

Watercolor Autumn

“There is nothing like being surrounded by beautiful, fiery, natural art for 2.5 months every year. This piece was inspired by the Falls I remember back in my New England hometown.” Designed by Rachel Ladew from USA.

• preview
• with calendar: 640×1136, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1200, 2048×2048, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 640×1136, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1200, 2048×2048, 2560×1440

Sweet October

“I love eating candy corn in the Fall time. Especially around Halloween. It just makes me think of Fall.” Designed by Lindsay Ebner from USA.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 1366×768
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 1366×768

Departing Monsoon Clouds

Designed by Paarva Creations from India.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1920×1080
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1920×1080

Fallen Woods

Designed by Dan Ioanitescu from Canada.

• preview
• with calendar: 1280×720, 1280×800, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1280×720, 1280×800, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 2560×1440

Will Miss You On This Halloween

“It’s the Halloween tonight… Jack-o-lanterns and spooky ghosts are coming to fight the haunted house, witches all alive again! But this time don’t miss your friends. It’s time to scare the family, pals and mates with ghosts! Wish you a happy Halloween night again and again.” Designed by Debobrata Debnath from India.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Autumn Squirrels

Designed by Jenny Hurman (Evoluted New Media) from United Kingdom.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1366×768, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1366×768, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Autumn Leaves

“Altering tints bringing belief.” Designed by Lubos Volovar from Slovakia.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Halloween

Designed by Cheloveche.ru from Russia.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 395×512, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Pac Man

“A tribute to the iconic video game, Pac Man.” Designed by Simona Gosu from Romania.

• preview
• with calendar: 1280×720, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1600×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1600, 2880×1800
• without calendar: 1280×720, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1600×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1600, 2880×1800

Stinging Nettle

“Stinging nettle in front of Vienna.” Designed by Kai Szendi from Austria.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440

Halloween

Designed by Katerina Bobkova from Ukraine.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080

Halloween Moon

“A simple Halloween wallpaper for October.” Designed by Andy Murphy from Northern Ireland.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080
• without calendar: 320×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080

Dream Of Autumn

“Graphics and hand-drawing picture a cat.” Designed by Irina.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Say “Bye” To Summer

“And hello to Autumn! The Summer heat and high season is over. It’s time to pack our backpacks and head for the mountains — there are many treasures waiting to be discovered!” Designed by Agnes Sobon from Poland.

• preview
• with calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Sweet Halloween

Designed by Cortando Pixeles from Argentina.

• preview
• with calendar: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1600×1200, 1920×1440
• without calendar: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1600×1200, 1920×1440

Delusional

Designed by Andrei R. Terbea from Romania.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200

Cheerful Autumn Days

“This photo was taken in an English garden in Prague. It was a beautiful Autumn day. I was walking in the park and suddemnly saw leaves, cones and other nature objects on the bench. What I saw inspired me to shoot this image. At first I created this photo, and then I photographed still life at sunset.” Designed by Larina Yevgeniya from Ukraine.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Blue October

Designed by Elise Vanoorbeek from Belgium.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Whoops

“A vector illustration of a dragon tipping over a wheelbarrow of pumpkins in a field with an illustrative fox character.” Designed by Cerberus Creative from USA.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Autumn Chillout

“It’s Autumn — chill out and prepare yourselves for the Winter.” Designed by Lasuperbaa from Poland.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1680×1050
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1680×1050

Autumn Red

“The colors of autumn captured in New Zealand.” Designed by Ashley Hau from Singapore / Malaysia.

• preview
• with calendar: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1680×1200
• without calendar: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1680×1200

Creepy October

Designed by Christina Mokry from Germany.

• preview
• with calendar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 2560×1440

Autumn Deer

Designed by Amy Hamilton from Canada.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2048×1536, 2560×1440, 2880×1800
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2048×1536, 2560×1440, 2880×1800

Zfort Autumn

“When nature prepares to rest, it brings very beautiful transformations – immense inspiration resource. That’s how Zfort is inspired by Autumn.” Designed by Zfort Group from Ukraine.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Scent Of Autumn

“After october’s rain you want to go to the backyard, wrap yourself in a blanket and feel the scent of Autumn.” Designed by Sotnikova Antonina from Ukraine.

• preview
• with calendar: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1600×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1600
• without calendar: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1600×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1600

Rose

“October in Poland was always nostalgic. I also love to draw things with a pencil, ink and stuff and then colorize and manipulate it in an image editing application. So I’ve mixed nostalgy and my skills and here it is!” Designed by Kanze from Poland.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Spooky Forest

Designed by Colin Whitehurst from USA.

• preview
• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

October Quotes

Designed by Jonathan Guillou from France/Canada.

• preview
• with calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Superman Goes Halloween

“Superman, chubby bee, and pink rabbit, hit the streets for their first Halloweeen!” Designed by Sean Bobbato from Canada.

• preview
• with calendar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200

Eat, Drink And Be Scary

“This calendar is a play on the olds saying, ‘eat, drink, and be merry.’ I am a huge fan of clean, minimal design. As my college design teacher would say, “give me exactly what I want, no more, no less, do it well, get the A, and let’s move on.” Designed by Brandon Barringer from USA.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Fancy Sugar Skull

“Day of the Dead fanciness inspired by a make-up and rock and roll.” Designed by Barbra Ignatiev from USA.

• preview
• with calendar: 1280×1024, 1366×768, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1280×1024, 1366×768, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 2560×1440

Weird Season

Designed by Ryan Thompson from USА.

• preview
• with calendar: 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440

Roger That Rogue Rover

“The story is a mash-up of retro science fiction and zombie infection. What would happen if a Mars rover came into contact with an unknown Martian material and got infected with a virus? What if it reversed its intended purpose of research and exploration? Instead choosing a life of chaos and evil. What if they all ran rogue on Mars? Would humans ever dare to voyage to the red planet?” Designed by Frank Candamil from USA.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Join In Next Month!

Please note that we respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. This is why we give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works. This is also why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves.

A big thank you to all designers for their participation. Join in next month!

What’s Your Favorite?

What’s your favorite theme or wallpaper for this month? Please let us know in the comment section below.

Stay creative and keep on smashing!

(vf)

---

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

Last week at the fabulous Smashing Conference in Freiburg, I gave a new talk, one I’d written just a few hours prior. I chose not to use slides, but instead to speak about three things that I’m incredibly enthusiastic about:

1. Responsive design is not (just) a design or development problem;
2. The client participation process is broken;
3. How to call your client an idiot, to their face.

Here are the (slightly expanded) notes that I made before my talk.

Responsive Design Is Not (Just) A Design Or Development Problem

In all the excitement about responsive Web design over the last few years, someone forgot to tell our bosses and clients, so we’ve been treating responsive design like it’s a design or an implementation problem, whereas in fact it’s as much an issue for business. In fact, it’s an issue for everyone involved: designers, developers, content specialists, the people who commission websites and those who structure the teams who make the websites.

The Traditional Workflow

Here’s a common, if grossly over-simplified, project workflow:

• Plan,
• Design,
• Develop,
• Deploy.

Into planning, you might roll up content audits, requirements, user issues, wireframes and the like. (Aside: Perhaps it’s because I’ve had too many bad experiences with too many bad UX specialists, but I’ve a problem with any part of the process that limits our potential for great design. This includes wireframes — typically desktop-only wireframes — that are produced and often signed off by a client long before they arrive in the design studio. Nothing is wrong with UX per se, only when it’s prescriptive and not part of a flexible, iterative design process.)

Design is where you’ll find a myriad of creative activities, including graphic and layout design and more. Here, static design visuals — you might call them comps — have been the traditional currency of the visual designer. They’re what designers use to experiment with creative ideas, then exchange with clients for sign-off, and subsequently deliver to front-end engineers as blueprints for building.

Development is likely the responsibility of front-end engineers. I know from experience that engineers often work separately from designers and might have only limited interaction with them.

As for deployment, I know I’m making light of this, but it’s black magic and I simply don’t understand it.

This waterfall-style process is similar to the old-fashioned pre-press workflow that I remember when I worked in pre-digital photography. It took up to seven people to take a transparency from a camera to a color proof. Each person’s work was an opportunity for sign-off, but more importantly it was an opportunity for billing. The same is mostly true of our Web design processes today.

Compare that to what I’ve cheekily been calling a “post-PC responsive workflow�:

• Plan,
• Combined and iterative design and development,
• Deploy.

In this agile-style iterative process, everyone works more closely together, designing, developing, testing, redesigning and refining.

Design Testing and Device Testing

I find testing my designs on real smartphones and tablets while I’m working to be incredibly useful. This means that I have access to several devices. But how can we afford to buy all of the devices we need? This year, Stephanie Rieger wrote about the range of devices we should use. She included iPhones, iPads, Kindle Fire and three different versions of Android. But I think her advice could be misleading.

Do we really need to own a myriad of smartphones and tablets or do we need just a few to develop an affinity for them? Image: opensourceway.

It’s important to remember that there is a big distinction between two types of testing: design testing and device testing.

Designers need use only a subset of devices, because what matters most is that we develop an affinity for how our designs work on any type of device when we hold it our hands. To be clear, how a menu feels when used on a smartphone is a very different issue from whether it technically works on a particular make or model of smartphone. That’s why designers don’t necessarily need to buy a myriad of smartphones and tablets, just those they need to develop an affinity for.

Responsive Design Requires Rethinking

Businesses (agencies, companies, customers) now need to refactor many aspects of their businesses to allow for better responsiveness. Our clients now need to restructure their buying process. For example, at my agency, Stuff and Nonsense, I still get prospective clients asking us only for static design visuals. They assume we work in Adobe Photoshop, Fireworks or the like and that we deliver static visuals, because that’s what designers have provided them with for well over a decade. That’s why, while many of our clients don’t often expect responsive templates as a deliverable, they love it when they find out that that’s what we deliver.

Design and development teams need to reorganize. It’s a fact that purely visual designers have the most to learn.

Those Photoshop or Fireworks static visuals I spoke about are no longer equipped to provide what we need from them in a responsive context. As I’ve said before, it’s like bringing a knife to a gunfight. More on that in just a minute.

The Client Participation Process Is Broken

I know that most people know me from my writing and speaking about CSS, and some people might not know that I make my living by designing for clients. In the last year, I’ve worked on projects with STV, where I’m part-time the design lead; the Hillsborough Independent Panel, whose report into the tragic deaths of 96 Liverpool fans in 1989 I designed the website for; and the ISO, the International Organisation for Standards.

Every designer should want to make the best work possible, feel proud about that work and make their clients happy. Unfortunately, the ways that designers and developers and our clients have communicated in the past has so often lead to frustration, unhappiness and, most importantly, work that failed to meet everyone’s expectations.

For a designer, sharing regular feedback with clients and involving them in every step of the design process might sound like a risky proposition, but it is necessary and beneficial to the design process — when done properly. Image: opensourceway.

Think of the traditional media that we used to communicate our designs: static wireframes and visuals (comps) that we made using drawing tools such as Photoshop or Fireworks, many of which pre-date the Web. These visuals are like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Think about the aspects of design that a static medium cannot communicate and all of the possibilities for misunderstanding that this creates. Static visuals cannot do any of the following:

• Display Web fonts or browser font rendering;
• Demonstrate different browsers’ CSS capabilities;
• (Easily) demonstrate percentage-based layouts;
• (Easily) demonstrate animations, transitions and pseudo-classes (states).

When I say “easily,� I mean not without hours of tedious repetition that we could otherwise spend being creative.

This isn’t to say that designing in a browser is always better. Unlike Stephen Hay, I use Fireworks to design atmosphere (typography, color and texture) and to develop fine design details, an extra layer of polish, after all of the sketching and interactive prototypes are done.

Design Atmosphere

What do I mean by “atmosphere�?

Many people continue to mix layout with other aspects of design. How often has a client said to you, “I don’t like the design� when they really meant, “The sidebar should be on the left, not the right�? That’s why we need a new word for what’s left when we remove layout from a design. I call what’s left “atmosphere� because atmosphere is often about something that you feel but can’t explain, like the atmosphere in a room after two people have been arguing, or like the atmosphere at a great concert or football game.

Worse than being inefficient, static visuals set the wrong expectations in the minds of our clients. I wrote about this very thing back in 2009.

Aside: Why are most websites fixed and centred at 960 pixels? Could it be because a designer showed their client a 960-pixel-wide static visual and asked them to sign off on it? That’s what developers have been told to build. That’s why, in the past, we’ve spent hours hacking HTML, CSS and JavaScript to make rounded corners display in old versions of IE. We sold rounded corners to our clients through those visuals. It’s our own stupid fault. No one else’s.

Even small “snapshots” of the design, such as these from Dribbble, can communicate atmosphere — the visual direction, style and overall feeling — of the new website. Images: Fluid Type, Fig. 49 by Trent Walton.

Work in Photoshop and Fireworks, by all means (I do). Make static visuals as rich and as detailed as you want them to be. Just don’t set the wrong expectations by showing them to your clients as examples of how their website might look across browsers and devices or by using them as sign-off artefacts. The same goes for screenshots of Web pages. Set the right expectations by demonstrating interactive designs made using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

How To Call Your Client An Idiot, To Their Face, Without Getting Fired, And Then Have Them Thank You For It

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that clients love to feel involved in the design process. Sometimes, though, they make suggestions only so that they feel they have put their stamp on the project. I know that occasionally designers think that such requests aren’t necessary and that sometimes they’re stupid. Don’t worry. You are allowed to say that to clients (more about that later), but better still, avoid the issue entirely. Here’s how…

Don’t email pictures of websites to your clients and then ask for their “thoughts.� Are you mad?! In the same vein, don’t simply upload static visuals to Basecamp and expect constructive feedback without providing some direction on how to receive them.

Don’t wait until after weeks of work before having a “big reveal.� Down this road lies frustration and resentment. Instead, keep clients involved at every step, all the way through the design process, and not only at those traditional sign-off points. That’s why for the last few years I’ve tried hard to physically work alongside my clients as often as possible. When that’s not an option, I set up shared Dropbox folders so that the client can check in on my progress as I work. We even keep a Skype window continually open.

Set up the proper environment to receive structured feedback, and then ban all unstructured feedback you might receive by telephone or email. Insist that your feedback sessions be face to face when possible, and then limit their scope to aspects of the design. For example, ask for answers to specific questions about typeface choices and typography.

At my design agency, I help facilitate structured feedback by organizing feedback workshops with our clients. More on those now.

Please remember: you are the designer. You are the person who has been hired to solve a problem that the client either couldn’t or doesn’t have the time to solve themselves. Your solution to that problem is worth a lot to their business, so never underestimate your role, skills and influence in the design process.

With that in mind, remember that you can set rules about receiving the constructive, structured feedback that’s so important to helping you make a great design.

Rule 1

As mentioned, don’t ask for unstructured feedback out of context. Emailing or uploading static visuals just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore. You must control the discussion, so take the time to explain your designs and the thinking behind the decisions you’ve made. I’ve found that, because of this approach, my clients enjoy learning about what goes into making a design and are far less likely to request unnecessary changes simply to put their mark on the project.

Rule 2

Take control of the environment in which you present your designs. Host feedback workshops or design “crits,� and use them to get to know your clients better and to develop a deeper relationship with them. Make these workshops face to face when possible, and set time and scope limits, even if you hold them over Skype. These workshops work best when everyone is encouraged to be honest and to let their ideas out in the open. That’s why, although it may seem a little old fashioned, it’s important for someone to keep a written record of what everyone has said.

Make it clear to your client that only the people who show up to a workshop may have an opinion about the design. This must include even the CEO, who sometimes makes “helpful� suggestions 24 hours before launch (or when you want to get paid).

Rule 3

Remind everyone to leave their feelings at the door, because in a design crit only the work matters. Personal feelings don’t matter; so, inside the crit, frame the conversation so that your clients can openly express their opinions. Encourage them to speak their minds, to be brutally honest if they need to be and to scribble across your notes and sketches to get their point across. By the same token, you’re free to disagree with any suggestions they make. Be free to say the suggestions won’t work, and suggest better alternatives. This shouldn’t be about ego, only about the integrity of the work.

If you feel they aren’t listening, you’re free to call them an idiot, too, if you must. Say it to their face, and don’t worry about getting getting fired — if you’ve established a good enough relationship with them, they’ll thank you for it, too, because they’ll know you have their interests at heart and are passionate about doing your best for them and their business.

(al)

---

© Andy Clarke for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

Every now and then you will find yourself having to repeat the same value for a particular property in several CSS rules. Sometimes doing so is necessary, but there are some situations when you can use the “inherit� value to avoid repeating yourself.

In my experience, the properties I use inherit for most often are color plus properties related to background and font (both shorthand and the individual properties like background-color, font-size and font-family).

A few examples, then.

Read full post

Posted in CSS.

Copyright © Roger Johansson

Unless you’re developing completely new products at a startup, you likely work in an organization that has accumulated years of legacy design and development in its products. Even if the product you’re working on is brand spanking new, your organization will eventually need to figure out how to unify the whole product experience, either by bringing the old products up to par with the new or by bringing your new efforts in line with existing ones. A fragmented product portfolio sometimes leads to an overall broken user experience.

Understanding an organization and its users and designing the right interaction and visual system take exceptional effort. You also need to communicate that system to teams that have already produced work that doesn’t align with it. This isn’t easy work. In this article, we’ll introduce you to a strategy for fixing the broken experience that starts with surface improvements, goes progressively deeper into structural issues and ends with a big organizational shift.

The Hierarchy Of Effort

Many large successful companies end up in a situation where they must maintain dozens, if not hundreds, of applications in their product portfolios. These huge suites are the result of mergers, acquisitions, different sets of user needs, legacy services and contracts, and the inefficiencies that naturally develop in huge organizations. Sometimes the reasons for so many different product lines are legitimate; other times, the wide set of offerings doesn’t serve anyone’s needs particularly well. Users will often struggle to learn a suite of related products because of major differences in how they look and operate.

The initiatives to fix these broken experiences are referred to in ambitious and somewhat generic terms, such as “common look and feel,� “unified online experience� and “unified look and feel.� Regardless of the term, the common elements represent a drive to bring consistency to a large set of products in multiple stages of development and spearheaded by a centralized internal group. There’s a sense of urgency; we often meet with some internal resistance; and frequently we’re charged with fixing a previous agency’s failed attempt to deliver design and guidelines that can be metabolized by the client.

The hierarchy of effort to fix a broken user experience

One effective approach begins with surface improvements, goes progressively deeper into structural issues and ends with big strategic organizational shifts. We start with the low-hanging fruit and at each step reach higher to develop products that will ultimately deliver great experiences. It’s worth noting that this approach was developed to make it possible for a team to make incremental improvements to products already under development, but also to look ahead to future releases, when rewriting code or rethinking interactions won’t be so disruptive.

If your organization is working on its first product, then this approach would be totally backward. But in a large organization with a lot of history and many products, this approach will help you articulate both a short-term and long-term strategy for building a product portfolio that delivers a user experience that is learnable and builds confidence and a portfolio that makes your work easier and more effective.

Visual Consistency and Simplification

The lowest amount of effort required is at the bottom of the pyramid, so we suggest starting there. Sure, it’s lipstick on a pig, but simply taking a consistent visual approach will help to bring many different products under a shared brand experience.

Assuming you’ve done the groundwork to articulate the design of an ideal experience, the simplest and arguably easiest way to start implementing it is to reskin the products currently under development. Finding ways to simplify and excise unnecessary information, unifying the information architecture, and adopting standard fonts, colors and controls are all relatively low-effort ways to improve existing products.

This is the foundation. It won’t improve a poorly designed interaction, but it could dramatically increase the appearance of unity to the end user. Products that have a consistent visual language will clearly convey their membership in a single portfolio. The benefit of improving the visual system first is that changing or adjusting the skin of an application is much easier than changing things such as behavior, which will require rethinking and recoding fundamental aspects of the application.

Behavioral Consistency

If your organization has simplified and unified the visual language, the next step is to make the behavior consistent. This is basic stuff: disciplined reuse of patterns instead of applying patterns ad hoc from a grab bag of widgets, and unifying the nomenclature and conceptual frameworks. Hopefully, any individual product will have internally consistent patterns; it’s when you look at sets of applications that were developed by different groups or obtained through acquisitions that you usually see wide discrepancies.

Assuming that the given design expresses high-level principles and provides a basic set of pattern libraries, the goal at this stage is to evaluate individual products and figure out how much work is required to align them. This work entails at the very least replacing widgets in some applications. It usually also entails a decent amount of coding and testing to ensure that the revisions contribute to a consistent experience. Maintaining a shared approach and understanding will require more coordination between development groups.

Behavioral consistency makes it easier for the end user to learn a tool and then to transfer those skills when picking up related tools. The user has to build only a single mental model of how the applications work. This gives them confidence and enables them to pick up new products without facing a steep learning curve and without being confused about how things are done.

Behavioral Optimization

The prior step was done solely to align the behavior of the various products. A deeper level of work is required to optimize the behavior and to make the applications more powerful and easier to use.

This step reworks the products even further. It means evaluating the current products against the user’s needs and goals and looking for ways to eliminate work and to simplify the patterns. This assumes some measure of design effort beforehand to identify the areas where this will make the most difference. It assumes a commitment to user-centered product design, some research, as well as personas and scenarios. Without these, you’ve got no way to decide what patterns to simplify, which work to excise, and what user needs to anticipate and solve for.

An optimized experience enables users to perform their tasks with less or more effective work. Any work that’s performed is captured in such a way that users aren’t asked to perform the same task twice. Smart defaults are captured and leveraged to make tasks flow more quickly. Where possible, shift computing work to computers, and judgements to humans. Mine data to see broader patterns and opportunities that allow the system to anticipate and meet needs before they become issues.

This is where you do everything you can to make each application the best it can be. It takes a lot of work, with new interactions introduced and much code rewritten. A considerable investment of time and effort is required.

Unified Experience Strategy

The result of the last iteration is a set of products that do what they do best. The point of this iteration is to rethink how the suite works together. This often means rethinking product strategy.

Designing a unified experience requires looking at the big picture, reevaluating the internal product silos in the organization, and reconsidering the ideal workflow for individuals and between roles. It could lead to collapsing multiple products into one, bridging gaps with new products, eliminating redundancies in capabilities or refocusing the service. This kind of work takes deep organizational commitment and a strong mandate. It takes long-range, instead of short-term, planning. It can’t be done quickly, and doing it well takes organizational honesty and courage.

The real beneficiary of this kind of effort is the end user, because this product strategy is user-centered. The company recognizes that the product exists to help people perform their work and that they might use other tools and services to accomplish their goals. Users don’t exist in isolation; they share work with others. Success isn’t measured by how well they perform a task, but in how competently they traverse a complex and dynamic ecosystem of people, data, devices and services. When a company brings their product line to this stage, both the organization and the product line have been transformed.

UX Culture

All of the prior steps were aimed at fixing a broken user experience. By following them as an iterative path, it becomes possible to greatly improve a severely broken user experience. The way to avoid having to repeat this cycle in a few years is to transform the organization itself. Software and services are conceived and developed in a particular organizational culture, and this has a profound effect on the products. Products coming out of an engineering-oriented organization bear the unmistakable focus on technology; services with a focus on sales deeply communicate this; and products that come out of organizations with a UX bent cannot avoid their focus on a good user experience.

If you want to repeatedly deliver a great user experience, you need to go deeper than applying design to the surface. Your organization needs to understand and commit to making user experience a core priority. Executives have to support or advocate for the unique perspective that design brings; capable designers have to work for a user-centered approach; and a user-centered way of building things has to be integrated into the organization.

A great user experience almost never just happens. Understanding the user and keeping their needs as your priority throughout the design and development stages take deliberate effort. Products and services are created by teams of people who collaborate to bring an idea to life. The output is ultimately shaped by the agreements about what is important, the methods of performing the work and decisions on how to measure things. A shift in organizational culture takes the most effort and the longest time, but it results in the largest, most pervasive and most coherent shift — not just for the organization and its products, but for those who use them.

Isn’t This All Backwards?

“But wait,� you’re thinking. “Isn’t this all backwards? Shouldn’t you design the whole system around the right workflow, optimize the behavior within it, make sure it’s consistent with other products, and finally make sure it’s visually simple and clear?� Yes. Yes, you should, especially if you’re making a brand new product.

But we see again and again that few large companies really have the ability to clear the table, start with a clean slate and build something utterly new and great. Most start with a line of products that cannot be abandoned. They have applications that are supported by various teams around the world, perhaps owned by different subsidiaries and in various states of compliance. While you can design the ideal experience, you can’t just build it. Moving toward something whose design really delivers will take many iterations. This situation isn’t great, but it’s the reality. When you find yourself here, you can’t boil the ocean. You have to start somewhere. In our experience, starting at the bottom is a very practical way to move forward.

(al) (jc)

---

© Stefan Klocek for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

If you have a problem and need a solution for it, chances are high that a JavaScript library or jQuery plugin exists that was created to solve this very problem. Such libraries are always great to have in your bookmarks or in your local folders, especially if you aren’t a big fan of cross-browser debugging.

A JavaScript library isn’t always the best solution: it should never be a single point of failure for any website, and neither should a website rely on JavaScript making the content potentially inaccessible. Progressive enhancement is our friend; sometimes JavaScript won’t load, or won’t be supported — e.g. users of mobile devices might run into latency issues or performance issues with some JavaScript-libraries. Often large all-around JavaScript libraries such as jQuery might be an overkill, while tiny JavaScript micro-libraries could serve as good, “light” alternatives for a particular problem. We’ll present some of them today.

In this two-part overview, we feature some of the most useful JavaScript and jQuery libraries which could be just the right solutions for your common problems. You might know some of these libraries, but you probably don’t know all of them. In either case, we hope that this overview will help you find or rediscover some tools that you could use in your next projects.

Due to the length of this post, we’ve split it into two parts for your convenience:

• Part 1: Web Forms, Typography, Time-Savers and Images
• Part 2: Text, Tables, Lists and Useful Development Tools

Quick Overview:

Below you’ll find a brief overview and links to the libraries and tools featured in this post. They are supposed to help you find just the right tool quickly without browsing the whole page.

• Web Forms:
  forms framework – auto-saving drafts – file upload (and resuming large downloads) – <select> boxes – modal boxes – form accordion – dynamic labels – drop-down with images – tooltips – extended input – form validation – credit card validation (alternative) – email check – password complexity
• Web Typography:
  repairing vertical baseline – align text to a grid – responsive measure – fixing widows – fluid line height – scalable headlines (or smart headlines) – Lettering.js – Kerning.js
• Little Time-Savers:
  exchange rates and currency – date/time formatting – relative timestamps – number and currency formatting – cookies.js – zip.js – countdown.js – sticky content – Google Maps – interactive maps – progress bar – favicon notifications (or Notificon)
• Images, Maps, Graphs:
  world maps – subway map – Google maps – open source maps – SVG fallback – gauges – graphs – timeline – Retina display – magnifying glass – interactive graphs – plots – time visualization

Web Forms and Input Validation

Select2 jQuery Plugin
A jQuery-plugin for replacement and enhancement of <select>-boxes. The plugin supports search, remote data sets, and infinite scrolling of results. Users can just start typing what they’re looking for. Non-matching entries are removed from the view, and options can be selected using “Enterâ€� or a mouse click. The plug-in works with standard select input fields as well as with multiple selects and optgroup. It also has support for selected, disabled and default text (HTML5’s placeholder attribute). The plug-in is based on Chosen, an alternative solution which is currently available in jQuery, MooTools and Prototype flavors and as a Drupal 7 module.

 

jQueryCoreUISelect
Another cross-browser solution to enhance the <select> element with jQuery and CSS. Requires jQuery 1.6 or higher. It provides full customization, support of optiongroup, automatic calculations, keyboard support, callback functions and is compatible with mobile devices.

Sisyphus.js
This script allows Gmail-like auto-saving of drafts. It stores form data to the HTML5 local storage of the user’s browser and restores it when the user reloads or reopens the page or opens the page in a new tab. The data is cleared from local storage when the user submits or resets the form.

jQuery Credit Card Validator
This library attaches to the input event (with a fallback to the keyup event) and so every time a number in the input field changes, it calls a validation function. When a card is recognized, the credit card type is highlighted; and if the credit card number is correct, it is highlighted with a green checkmark as well. The plugin supports American Express, Diners Club, Discover Card, JCB, Laser, Maestro, MasterCard, Visa and Visa Electron. You might want to consider credit cards JavaScript validator and the Smart Validate Credit Card Validation plugin.

TextExt
This library allows you to transform HTML text into input fields, without resorting to code inflation. The plugin inserts aesthetic as well as practical input possibilities, e.g. Tags, Ajax, Focus and others.

Avgrund: Better Modal Boxes
A jQuery plugin for displaying a depth illusion between popup and page. The original script by Hakim El Hattab uses CSS transitions and transformations, and the plugin gracefully degrades in those that do not support transitions and transforms. MIT licensed.

VisualSearch.js
This library enhances ordinary search boxes with the ability to autocomplete faceted search queries. You can specify the facets for completion, along with the completable values for any facet. You can retrieve the search query as a structured object, so you don’t have to parse the query string yourself.

Ideal Forms Framework
A very comprehensive jQuery plugin for building and validating responsive HTML5 forms. It provides keyboard support, customizable input types, “on the spot” validation, localization and HTML5 placeholder polyfill. Supported in IE8+, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, iOS5+, Android 4.0+.

Mailcheck
With this JavaScript spell-checker you can suggests another domain when the user misspells it in an email address. Mailcheck helps effectively reducing sign up typos. While it already includes some  domains, you can easily supply your own.

Validate.js
A lightweight JavaScript form validation library. You can validate form fields using over a dozen rules and set custom messages; the library doesn’t have any dependencies and you can define your own validation callbacks for custom rules. Works in all major browsers (even IE6!).

jQuery File Upload
File Upload widget with multiple file selection, drag&drop-support, progress bars and preview images. It supports cross-domain, chunked and resumable file uploads and client-side image resizing. Works with any server-side platform (PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, Java, Node.js, Go etc.) that supports standard HTML form file uploads.

Grumble.js
This jQuery plugin provides tool tips without being limited to cardinal directions. A grumble can be rotated around a given element at any angle, all 360 degrees and at any distance — with CSS. Works in Internet Explorer 6+ and modern browsers. Also, check Tipped, a larger library of various designs and implementations of tooltips with an extensive API.

Dialogs for Twitter Bootstrap
A small JavaScript library which allows you to create dialog boxes using Twitter’s Bootstrap modals, without having to worry about creating, managing or removing any of the required DOM elements or JS event handlers. You might want to check out the Date Range Picket for Bootstrap as well as a growing library of HTML Snippets for Twitter Bootstrap.

ddSlick
Prashant Chaudhary has realeased a free lightweight jQuery plugin that lets you create a custom drop-down that can include images, a short description, along with your usual text and value. It also supports callback functions on selection. You could use CSS3 Drop-Downs as well.

noty
This jQuery plugin makes it easy to create alert, success, error, warning, information and confirmation messages. The notification can be positioned anywhere on the page and you can customize the text, animation, speed and buttons easily.

jQuery.complexify.js
Complexify helps you to accurately gauge the quality of a user’s password to give them visual feedback, and to enforce a minimum level of security.

Numberfy
With Numberfy you can integrate native support for line numbers in your website’s text areas. On every key press in the text area, the text area’s current value is split into lines. This script will not work in IE due to a bug in the text-wrap properties.

FormAccordion
A jQuery plugin for easily hiding and revealing related form fields conditionally.

jQuery.superLabels
You can use the library to give your forms a fade-out label. This implementation makes the label slide across the field when gaining focus and fade out when a value is entered. A fallback is provided as well.

cryptico
An encryption system utilizing RSA and AES for JavaScript.

Web Typography Libraries and Plugins

Baseline.js
A jQuery plugin for restoring baselines thrown off by odd image sizes. To use it, you just call the plugin passing the height of your baseline as a variable. You can also define multiple baselines for different responsive breakpoints.

FTColumnflow
Developed by the development team of Financial Times, this library is essentially a polyfill that fixes the inadequacies of CSS column layouts. With the library, you can provide configurable column widths, gutters and margins, define elements spanning columns, keep-with-next to avoid headings at the bottom of a column, group columns into pages and standardize line height to align text baseline to a grid.

Responsive Measure jQuery Plugin
A simple script that allows you to pass in a selector (ideally the container where your primary content will go), which generates the ideal font size needed to produce the ideal measure for your text. The script also  generates a resolution-independent font-scale based on the ideal font-size. Created by Josh Brewer.

The Widow Tamer
The Widow Tamer is a small JavaScript library that automatically “fixes” typographic widows. It’s designed to work with responsive sites, fixing widows as it finds them on resize or orientation change.

Fluid Line-Height
With his article, Tim Brown inspired developers to release tools that adjust line-height for optimum readability on responsive websites. The so-called molten-leading binds the height of the line to an element’s minimum and maximum width. jQuery-minLineHeight is a jQuery plugin that works similarly with minimum and maximum width association.

FitText.js
This jQuery plugin helps you create scalable headlines that fill the width of a parent element in your fluid or responsive layouts. You might want to check out Lettering.js as well to get a complete down-to-the-letter control of letters in your projects.

Kerning.js
This library lets you kern, style, transform, and scale your Web type with CSS rules, automatically. You can adjust pairings, introduce font conditionals and augment properties.

SlabText.js
The script splits headlines into rows before resizing each row to fill the available horizontal space. The ideal number of characters to set on each row is calculated by dividing the available width by the pixel font-size – the script then uses this ideal character count to split the headline into word combinations that are displayed as separate rows of text.

Little Time-Savers

money.js: Open-Source Exchange Rates and Currency Conversion
Joss Crowcroft has created an Open Source Exchange Rates API, which provides up-to-date, flexible and portable currency-conversion data that can be used in any application, framework or language (not just JavaScript). It has no access fees, no rate limits, no nasty XML: just free, hourly updated exchange rates in JSON. Joss also built money.js, a JavaScript currency conversion library that can be easily integrated in any website. A demo playground and detailed documentation are provided on the website, and the source code is available on GitHub.

Accounting.js: Easier Number and Currency Formatting
This simple, tiny JavaScript library will solve your currency and numbers-related formatting hassles, and it even includes optional Excel-style column rendering to line up symbols and decimals. It will make all of your numbers and currencies look much more uniform and professional.

Moment.js: Format Dates And Times
Moment.js is a lightweight JavaScript library which lets you format, parse and manipulate dates. You can add or subtract dates from one another, as well as parse things like Unix Timestamps. Display options include formatted dates, time from now, difference, time from another moment, native date and support for leap years.

Smart Time Ago
This little jQuery library provides you with an intelligent way of updating relative timestamps in your documents. Smart Time Ago checks and updates every 60 seconds the relative time, within a scope which you specify at the start. It checks the newest time in your scope and tunes the checking time interval to a proper value. The tool can be used as a jQuery plugin, or – if using node – can be installed from npm.

sortByTimeAgo.js
A little JavaScript library that takes an array of objects with TimeAgo properties and sorts them from newest to oldest.

Piecon
Piecon is a tiny JavaScript library for dynamically generating progress pie charts in your favicons. It has been tested to work in Chrome 15+, Firefox 9+ and Opera 11+.

Notificon: Favicon Notifications and Alerts
Matt Williams’ Notificon is a JavaScript library for creating favicon alerts and notifications. Instead of having to create a number of favicons and serving them to the client, you can specify a label and a favicon (the default being the current favicon), and it will generate a favicon notification for you. The script currently works with Chrome 6+, Firefox 2+ and Opera, but it’s a nice little add-on for browsers that support it.

jQuery Stick ‘em: Make Content Sticky on Scroll, to a Point
A problem: some of the images in the layout are very tall, so by the time you scrolled down to the bottom of the images, you would have to scroll back up just to read the description of the images or navigation items. The solution: make the content sticky as you are scrolling. This library solves this problem.

Countdown.js
Human descriptions for a span of time are often fuzzier than a computer naturally computes. For example, how long does “in 1 month” mean? We casually talk about four weeks, but in fact there is only one month in a year which is four weeks long. Countdown.js tackles this problem by producing an accurate and intuitive description of timespans which are consistent as time goes on.

geolib
A small library to provide some basic geo functions like distance calculation, conversion of decimal coordinates to sexagesimal and vice versa.

Cookies
Cookies.js is a small client-side JavaScript library that makes managing cookies easy. It caches cookie values, making sequential reads faster, supports AMD / CommonJS loaders and is supported in Chrome, Firefox 3+, Safari 4+, Opera 10+ and Internet Explorer 6+.

firstImpression.js
firstImpression.js is a micro-library (1 Kb minified) that answers the simple question, “Has this user visited this site before?� The detection doesn’t require much logic, so the majority of the code is just a plain JavaScript port of the popular jquery.cookie plugin.

Chirp.js: Tweets on Your Website
A lightweight templating JavaScript library that enables you to display tweets on your website. Client-side caching is available; and you can set if you’d like to show retweets and replies, too.

simpleWeather jQuery Plugin
A simple jQuery plugin to display the weather information for any location. The data is pulled from the public Yahoo! Weather feed via the YQL API.

zip.js
A JavaScript library to zip and unzip files. zip.js provides a low-level API for writing and reading large zip files (up to 4GB with File Writer API). Works with Chrome, Firefox, Safari 6 and (unfortunately) Internet Explorer 10+. With Safari 5 and IE9, you must disable Web Workers and use a Typed Array polyfill.

Images, Maps, Graphs and Visualization Libraries

jVectorMap
jVectorMap is a jQuery plugin that renders SVG and VML vector maps in browsers ranging from the ancient Internet Explorer 6 to modern browsers. jVectorMap uses JavaScript, CSS, HTML, SVG or VML, and no Flash or any other proprietary browser plugin is required.

Subway Map Visualization jQuery Plugin
If you often deal with government projects, university departments or any websites of sophisticated organizations, every now and again you’ll be asked to design a nice visualization that would explain the various divisions, structures and internal hierarchy of those organizations. Where do you start? Well, creating a Subway Map-alike visualization is an option worth considering.

GMaps.js
This library allows you to easily use Google Maps in your projects. Extensive documentation or large amount of code aren’t required anymore. You might want to check out Gmap3 jQuery plugin as well.

Leaflet: Open-Source Interactive Maps With JavaScript
A library for creating tile-based interactive maps for desktop and mobile browsers. An easy-to-use API is available, and the tool emphasizes usability, performance, flexibility and excellent browser support. The library offers a variety of map layers, including tiles, markers, pop-ups, image overlays and GeoJSON. It supports panning on both mobile and desktop browsers, double-tap zoom on mobile browsers (plus multi-touch zoom on iOS) and more. On iOS, hardware acceleration is enabled, and Leaflet has a modular structure that lets you reduce the size of the library to make it even faster. The project is open source and available for further development and forking on GitHub.

SVGeezy: a JavaScript plugin for SVG fallbacks
A JavaScript library which detects SVG images on your website and automatically “looks” for a standard image fallback for those older, less capable browsers. Created by Ben Howdle and Jack Smith.

Retina.js
A script that checks each image on your website, when it’s loaded by a user, and replaces low-resolution image with their high-resolution equivalent, if available. It’s assumed that you use Apple’s high resolution modifier (@2x) to designate high resolution versions of images.

JustGage
A JavaScript library for generating and animating gauges. Based on Raphaël library for vector drawing, it’s resolution-independent and works in all modern browsers.

arbor.js
A graph visualization library for building trees with connected nodes of data. Arbor.js is essentially a layout algorithm with abstractions for graph organization and screen refresh handling.

Timeline: Generate Timelines To Visualize Data
This library is supposed to pull in media from different sources. It has built-in support for pulling in data from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Google Maps and SoundCloud—and more will be included in the near future. You can easily fill in data from a Google spreadsheet, or use a more detailed method such as JSON to create your time-line. You can also host it on your website by using the Timeline jQuery plugin. The library is available on GitHub, or as WordPress plugin.

Unicon
Unicon is a Grunt.js task that makes it easy to manage icons and background images for all devices, preferring HD (retina) SVG icons but also provides fallback support for standard definition browsers, and old browsers alike. From a CSS perspective, it’s easy to use, as it generates a class referencing each icon, and doesn’t use CSS sprites.

Foresight.js
This device recognition library, gives websites the ability to gauge the users device capabilities before the image is requested from the server. Judging display resolution and network speed, it customizes the img src attribute to optimize the websites image resolution to the individual users hardware.

A Magnifying Glass With CSS3 And jQuery
This technique achieves an aesthetically pleasing visual effect. The CSS3 box-shadow and border-radius properties are used to create the magnifying glass itself, while jQuery is used to detect the cursor coordinates and mouse movements and present the larger image. And when your cursor moves off the image, the magnifying glass elegantly fades away. The included tutorial makes it very easy to learn and understand how to achieve this effect. The technique includes both a small and a large image in the markup, so optimizing the technique to load a larger image on demand might be a good idea.

Rickshaw
This free and open source JavaScript toolkit provides the elements which you need to create interactive graphs, such as renderers, legends, hovers and range selectors. Rickshaw is based on D3, graphs are drawn with standard SVG and styled with CSS.

Flot: Plotting for jQuery
A JavaScript plotting library for jQuery, supports Internet Explorer 6+, Chrome, Firefox 2+, Safari 3+ and Opera 9.5+. You can use different types of graphs, use multiple axes, annotate a chart, update graphs with AJAX, provide support for zooming and interaction with the data points, use stacked charts, theresholding the data, apply pie charts and plot prerendered images.

Chronoline.js
Chronoline.js is a library that allows you to create a chronology time-line out of events on a horizontal timescale. From a list of dates and events, it can generate a graphical representation of schedules, historical events, deadlines, and more.

Cubism
This D3 plugin helps you to visualize time series and construct better real-time dashboards, pulling data from Graphite, Cube and other sources. Cubism scales and reduces server load by pulling only the most recent values. Cubism can scale easily to hundreds of metrics updating every ten seconds. Cubism’s horizon charts allow you to see many more metrics at-a-glance space than standard area charts.

Envision.js
An alternative library for creating fast, dynamic and interactive HTML5 visualizations.

Data Visualization JavaScript Libraries
A growing, curated collection of data visualization JavaScript libraries that make it easier to create meaningful and beautiful data visualizations. If you haven’t one a useful data visualization library in the list above, you’ll definitely find the right one in this overview.

Last Click

jQuery Fundamentals
This HTML book is designed to get you comfortable working through common problems you’ll be called upon to solve using jQuery. You can read the content and try the various interactive examples. Each chapter will cover a concept and give you a chance to try example code related to the concept. Written by Addy Osmani.

JavaScript Patterns Collection
A JavaScript pattern and anti-pattern collection that covers function patterns, jQuery patterns, jQuery plugin patterns, design patterns, general patterns, literals and constructor patterns, object creation patterns, code reuse patterns, DOM and browser patterns.

JavaScript Garden
A growing collection of documentation about the most quirky parts of the JavaScript programming language. It gives advice to avoid common mistakes and subtle bugs, as well as performance issues and bad practices, that non-expert JavaScript programmers may encounter on their endeavors into the depths of the language.

Useful JavaScript and jQuery Libraries: Two Parts

Due to the length of this resource, it was split into two parts:

• Part 1: Web Forms, Typography, Time-Savers and Images
• Part 2: Text, Tables, Lists and Useful Development Tools

---

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2012.