Thursday, December 15th, 2005
One of the best features of Firefox is that it can be expanded with a wide range of optional extensions. There are extensions to help with blogging, privacy, working with RSS files, or just having fun. Here’s my list of the 5 extensions I find most useful when doing web design work:
- Web Developer
Adds a menu and toolbar with many useful tools. Simply being able to open the CSS of a page for live editing makes it essential any web designer or developer. This extension is like an entire toolbox of extensions, and provides numerous useful features.
- GreaseMonkey
Greasemonkey’s user scripts let you customize any aspect of a web page’s design or interaction. Hundreds of user scripts, for a wide variety of popular sites are available and very easy to install.
- del.icio.us
This extension integrates del.icio.us with Firefox. Del.icio.us is an excellent way to find new tips, tutorials and resources—which are important for any web designer or developer.
- Aardvark
When activated, this extension outlines and provides class or id names for any element under the cursor. You can then choose to remove or isolate specific elements on a page. The most useful feature is being able to quickly view the source code of the selected element.
- Colorzilla
Adds an advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies. With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program.
If you haven’t tried it already— Firefox is free, easy to use, and a relatively small download.
Tags: design, development, web
Posted in tools, web design | 27 Comments »
Thursday, July 15th, 2004
Gail Cohen redesigned the website for ScareFest.com using the tips from my “Night of the Image Map” article. The site looks great, and continues the CSS meets Horror trend we started with the site for “Dead Ends Massachussetts. Be warned that ScareFest is a haunted attraction site and as such may not be suitable for the faint of heart…
Only 107 days until Halloween!
Tags: design, spooky
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Monday, January 5th, 2004
PV Comics offers hundreds of pages of free comics from some very talented artists. Subscribers get access to even more content, including new episodes of Nate Piekos’ Lint McCree Mysteries and Logan DeAngelis’ KU-2. A few months ago I was asked to join the team and work on the website. Just like Dead Ends, PV Comics makes use of some of the new CSS techniques I’ve been working on recently.
Tags: design, designmeme, webcomic
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Friday, December 12th, 2003
CSS Design: Night of the Image Map is now featured at A List Apart. CSS design from beyond the grave: all the secret ingredients you’ll need to resurrect the image map using CSS and structurally sensible XHTML. This is the new technique I used on the website for Dead Ends, Massachusetts, and the upcomming PV Comics
Tags: design, designmeme, spooky, tutorial
Posted in designmeme, web design | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, November 4th, 2003
Visit Dead Ends, and step into the graveyards and dank basements of this small New England town. Written by Nate Piekos, and inspired by a love for zombie movies, Dead Ends is an ongoing saga released a chapter at a time. Dead Ends adds a touch of the classic 80s “choose your own adventures” for some interactive fun. Nate asked me to collaborate with him on the website for this project, and the CSS developed there will be the subject of a new article.
Tags: design, designmeme, spooky
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Monday, July 28th, 2003
I’ve updated my list of favlets for web designers. Favlets (also known as Bookmarklets) are short javascript commands stored in your browser’s favourites (also called bookmarks). These scripts can be used to get information about a webpage, or change the way it is displayed in your browser. They can be particularly useful when testing and debugging a website you’re working on.
Tags: design, development, web
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