Strategies For Staying Educated About Interactive Media, Front-end Development, and Web Design

A lot of professions require keeping up to date with standards and trends, but for interactive media, it is almost a weekly commitment and should be a part of the job.  With interactive media, there are trends that appear every year and it is usually a good idea to follow them.  It is almost expected that people accept these trends and throw away the old ones; if you don't, you'll quickly be called outdated.  I've been there.  Within development, there are frameworks are pop up every now and then.  If you want to stay in the business, you must learn these new frameworks.  Every couple of years, the semantics of code is changed and you must learn the new tags.  Browsers are always being updated, operating systems change, platforms are introduced.  So how do you stay up to date?  Let's explore how.

Front-end Development

I've already made a post about this, but following the key players is probably one of the best ideas.  All of the big developers are on twitter and some of them have blogs.  It's important to keep up to date with these guys because some of them are the ones making changes to the markup.  Some are developing the  platforms where your future code will rest.  Others create new libraries, like jQuery for example.  However, the best thing is that you can have a one on one interaction with these internet celebrities.  More than not they will answer your questions.  Additionally, you get access to their thought process, their random ramblings, their weird lunch thoughts.  Today is a weird world; we pretty much have access to everybody's journal through twitter and blogs.  Use it and hopefully you'll get a peak into an artist's process.  Attend conferences.  Here you will have a chance to see the most up to date technologies and trends.  Attend field-specific conferences too, like front-end development conferences.

Web Design

Staying up to date with web design is pretty much on the same level as front-end development.  In order to be the best web designer, you must know how the web works.  If you don't know how stuff is made interactive, then you definitely have a disadvantage compared to other more well-rounded designers.  To stay up to date requires observing others.  Dribbble, for instance, is a great way to see what other web designers are doing.  You can take a peak into their process because a lot of the shots are works in progress.  Dribbble is also a great way to see what is trending; the most popular page is full of trendy designs, fonts, colors, and methods.  It is worth taking a lot at some agencies as well.  These are the guys making the products for the startups.  They should be making the most up to date stuff. And it usually looks good.  Attend conferences.  These conferences will be showcasing the most up to date technologies and trends.  There are conferences all over the United States, but a must is SXSW.  Attend the web design specific conferences as well; they'll have workshops and lectures.

Overall

Create.  It's that simple.  One of the best ways to keep learning is to keep working.  Keep working on your own skills, but also explore some new methods.  Experiment.  Who knows, you might stumble upon the next trendy element in design.

Twitter: Who to Follow?

Twitter is inescapable.  With 200 million active users, Twitter is one of the most successful start-up companies of all time.  Twitter also just recently joined the NY Stock Exchange.  With that many heads talking, Twitter can provide a great wealth of knowledge and resources for any subject. With that said, Twitter should be a part of every web developers toolkit and should be treated as a resource.

Informative websites and founding developers can both be found on Twitter, but for this week, we will target some important people to follow so that you can get up to date information straight from the people developing the future.  In a sense, you’ll get to see history be written in the development community.  Ok, let’s not get too geeky here.

Developer Twitter Accounts:

John Resig - @jeresig

John is the founder of jQuery, which is by far the most popular Javascript library.  John currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and is working at the Khan Academy.  Previously, he worked for Mozilla.

Eric A. Meyer - @meyerweb

Eric Meyer is best known for his writings on web standards and cascading style sheets (CSS).  He is an active writer and has published several books.  He is also extremely active on Twitter with over 23,000 tweets.

Jeffrey Way - @jeffrey_way

Jeffrey Way is an extremely active voice within the developing community.  He frequently writes at Nettuts+, where he breaks down concepts into easy to digest tutorials. He is the founder of Laracasts.

Paul Irish - @paul_irish

Paul was previously on the jQuery team for a few years, but has switched to the Google Chrome Developer relations team.  He created the HTML5 boilerplate and also created the familiar Modernizr tool.

That’s it for now, but keep it mind there are hundreds of developers actively tweeting!  On top of developers, there are also website gathering resources on Twitter such as Nettuts+. 

What is an API? A Brief Overview

If you’re new to the world of front end development, you might have heard the term “API”. API stands for “Application Programming Interface” and is something that we use all the time without knowing about it.  APIs allow for the communication between two different applications.  For example, a project can author an API that allows for other projects to pull features or data from their interface.  The original project doesn’t have to share any of their code for the features or data.

Here’s a definition from Wikipedia:

“An Application Programming Interface (API) is a particular set of rules and specifications that a software program can follow to access and make use of the services and resources provided by another particular software program that implements that API. It serves as an interface between different software programs and facilitates their interaction, similar to the way the user interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers.”

Mentioned previously, APIs are everywhere.  Let’s take a news article for example.  At the bottom of the page, articles usually have a social media bar that has links to facebook, twitter, reddit, etc. so that you can share the article on your own social media page.  All of these features are powered by APIs.  Even the comment system, which is sometimes powered by facebook comments, uses the facebook API to pull your profile name, picture, location, etc.

The LATimes uses the facebook commenting system for their news articles

What can you do with them?

If you’re a blogger or journalist, having those sharable social media buttons would be a nice touch for your content.  However, we’re not all journalists.

I think most people have a Twitter account nowadays.  Twitter has built a widget that uses their API to create a timeline for one individual.  You can then link this timeline on your webpages.  I’ve used this for several projects and it is a great way to show off tweets without having to actually go to Twitter.  Again, Twitter is using an API to share their features with another application without having to share their code for Twitter.

To access this widget, just go to your settings menu, then go to Widgets, and Create A New Widget.  

I decided to create a timeline for my master’s program:

Tweets by @EloniMedia

This is just one example of what can API can do.  I’ve also recently worked with Vimeo’s Player Embedding API to show all of my account’s videos on a web page without having to go to the actual Vimeo website.

For your next project, explore how you might possibly display something with an API rather than the normal way.

Developer Toolkit: Web-safe Font Generator

Fonts are incredible tools for designers.  A font is just like every other visual tool out there in that it has the capacity to: spark an emotion, carry a message, or be so well emerged with its surroundings that its aesthetics are easily overlooked.  There are literally thousands of fonts for a designer to choose from, but it is believed there is only one true font to fit a specific need within a project.  Picking that font can be a huge task, especially if you’re lost in the sea of downloaded fonts, but implementing that font on the web should be hassle free.

If you’re a developer, I’m sure you have already discovered that a custom font coded via the @font-face tag doesn’t always work across every browser.  The problem is that each browser supports different fonts.  For example, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox do not support SVG fonts.  And mobile support is a different story.

To combat this problem, it is as simple as referencing every font file type for the font you want to use.  However, getting every file type is not so easy.

Have no fear; Font Squirrel’s Webfont Generator is here!

Font Squirrel’s tool takes away the painful task of finding every file type for a font by converting one file type into four.  To use the tool, the user must own the font they want to use and make sure that it is legal for the font to be used on a personal level.  Sites like Font Squirrel or dafont provide fonts to download and they usually provide the license and rights information.  Once you have cleared your font for use, you may upload the font and Font Squirrel will convert the font to four formats: .eot (Embedded OpenType), .svg (Scalable Vector Graphic), .ttf (TrueType), and .woff (Web Open Font Format).

The process is very nifty, but don’t go writing code just yet.  Font Squirrel also provides the lengthy bit of code to use in order to get the fonts to show up on the web.

Font Squirrel’s Webfont Generator provides an incredible service at no cost.  That’s right: it’s free. So go ahead and give it a try. This tool really excels when you have several fonts that you want to use across your project; it saves a lot of time.  I recently used the tool for one of my projects and it couldn't have been easier.

Resource Roundup - Keep Your Skills Up To Date With These Five Resources

Coding is similar to every other profession in that one needs to keep up to date with their knowledge and skill sets so that they don't fall behind.  This is possibly true for coding more so than any other profession because the technology changes so rapidly.  If you fall behind, you might fall out of your job.

Luckily, the coding community is an active bunch of bloggers, writers, and networkers.

In this week’s blog post, I’ll share some of my favorite resources that I have been following since my venture into front end development.

For Beginners:

CodeCademy

If you have never coded a single line of text in your life, then CodeCademy is a great stepping-stone towards front end development.  It has detailed, interactive tutorials on multiple languages including HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, Python, and Ruby.

For Everybody:

Hey, designer!

Hey, designer! is a great resource for both developers and designers.  A small portion of my blog is dedicated to web design, so why not share a resource that has both subjects underneath one website?  Hey, designer! is basically a resource gathering board; all of the links lead to external sites.  Posts range from educational blurbs about design to in depth JavaScript library tutorials. The best part of the site is the trending section, which shows which articles have been clicked on the most for the day, week, or month.

HTML5 / Javascript Weekly

If you’re looking for a once a week update that comes as one newsletter, these resources are great.  Once a week, an email will be sent in a newsletter format with the latest news surrounding each subject.  Each newsletter features a featured section, code and tools, watch, read, and a job openings section (ding ding!).  I recommend signing up for both.

Here’s an example issue for HTML5:

http://html5weekly.com/issues/125

Codepen.io

Like art, checking out other people’s work is a part of being an artist.  It keeps you on your toes, culturally up to date, and it might spark some inspiration.  Codepen.io is a great resource if you want to see what other people are doing.  Projects are hosted on Codepen with all of their code available for the world to see.  Most creations are on the brink of falling apart, but these people are trying to push the boundaries of coding.  However, when something works well and you want to use it on your site, you are able to by just copying and pasting the code.  Everything is shared.  After all, everything is stolen from somewhere nowadays.  You just have to steal correctly.

THE Front End Development Resource

I saved the best for last.  Yes, I meant to capitalize the; this resource is the resource to end all resources. I’m not sure who this person is, but they have combined every front end development resource out there into one, easy to navigate document.  Everything is split up into categories, so it’s easy to digest.  It might take you a year to go through it all, but it is definitely worth playing with.  And look, it’s hosted on GitHub.  This could be a project that a lot people have worked on.