Desk Talk - Front-End Development + Web Design: toolkit

Friday, March 14, 2014

Developer Toolkit - Essentials

I've made a post before about developer toolkits and stuff to add to them, but I haven't really mentioned the essentials. In today's post, I'm going to go over items that I use almost on a daily basis. Sometimes, I don't even realize I am using them because they are part of my boilerplate. Let's get started:

1. HTML5 Boilerplate

This is basically an HTML5 ready template to get started with your projects. It includes a lot of stuff that I'm going to go over, but I have just started using this boilerplate. Before, I had to download everything separately.

2. Normalize.css / Reset.css

These stylesheets reset CSS so that your document is pretty much clean from styling. It's a great way to start projects because you don't have to tackle with any predefined CSS styles. These stylesheets are also great for browser compatibility. For example, a line height might look different across several computers.

3. HTML5 Shiv

This makes older versions of IE understand HTML5 tags. Very useful, but it looks like the days of supporting XP are numbered.

4. jQuery

Download the full or minified versions and slap them on your <head> tag. This is the most popular Javascript library out there.

5. Modernizr

Another Javascript library. This one checks to see if your browser has certain features.

6. Adobe Kuler

This tool is more for a designer, but I have really grown to enjoy the application. It comes in both a desktop and mobile version. It basically helps you choose color palettes. You can also take pictures with your phone and it will auto detect the color palette of the picture.

That's about it for my toolkit. Again, these are my most-used tools. There are plenty of tools out there and I ocassionally I will use them, but these are a must-have.

Take care and stay tuned for more updates!

Monday, February 24, 2014

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.