The Planetarium

Mozilla has developed a truly impressive demo for its newest kid, Firefox 4: The Planetarium.

ColorSnapper

It’s true, ColorSnapper is an app we were missing.

ColorSnapper is an easy-to-use tool for quickly finding out the color of any pixel on the screen. It is activated via a system-wide hotkey, giving you a magnifying loupe to easily pick the pixel you need. The resulting color is copied to clipboard in a format of your preference.

Web Standards Sherpa

What is a Sherpa?

A member of a Himalayan people living on the borders of Nepal and Tibet, renowned for their skill in mountaineering.

How about Web Standards Sherpa?

The goal of WebStandardsSherpa.com is to provide web professionals the opportunity to receive feedback, glean advice and learn best practices from experts in the field to help them improve the quality of their own work.

That’s fantastic!

Andy Clarke on .net Magazine

This guy preaches the principles of modern web design.

Not every browser supports the same CSS at the same time. We need to accept that that’s just a fact of life. We have to learn to live with it and realise the hard, cold truth: websites can’t look the same in every browser. To expect that a website will look identical in Safari on an iPad and in IE6 on a PC is crazy.

Clarke suggests, we should start at the top, design for the best browsers first and then think about different capabilities.

A few people have asked, ‘Isn’t that approach just graceful degradation?’ and, of course, it is! But to hell with being graceful! We need to be really ambitious.

I think every web designer should read this interview. In fact I think we should read it twice.

Method & Craft

Method & Craft is a fresh and very promising web magazine around design.

As the authors say:

We like to think of Method and Craft as the DVD extras of design: the stories behind the work, who made it, how they did it, and the techniques people have developed throughout their professional career.

How To Pick the Right Clients

Here’s one of those articles you wish you’d read them earlier. A few years earlier.

Beware of clients that wait to call you until they have a perfect diagram of what they need. If they’re not coming to you for strategy and problem-solving, they’re not coming to you for design, they’re coming to you for production. And if you take on production work, you don’t get to call yourself a designer.

A fantastic read.

Instagram API Playground

Instagram. We know and we heart it. But we really miss a proper website of the service.

Wait no more. There’s the Instagram API Playground which acts like a real Instagram home.

On pricing power

This is one of the most profound articles I’ve read lately.

In a word:

The goal, no matter what you sell, is to be seen as irreplaceable, essential and priceless. If you are all three, then you have pricing power.

Written by the wise Seth of course.

New and a bit older CSS techniques and solutions

Yesterday Smashing Magazine published a great round up. It’s about CSS, mostly CSS3 of course, and it embraces a respectful number of techniques and solutions.

Some of them are experimental but some other can be used right now. A useful resource.

Glyphicons

Beautiful set of monochromatic icons for your next best project.

A preview:

Download or buy Glyphicons.

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