Reading is a skill I wanted to improve for ages. I wanted to read faster, because reading faster means I’ll learn faster. So, I tried to learn how to speed read many times in the past.
Speed reading wasn’t too difficult. The sad thing is, I can’t seem to remember anything I read, which makes the speed useless.
In 2017, since my theme for the year is experimentation, I wanted to see if I could improve my reading capabilities. This time, I found some success: I read 1.5 books and remembered most of what I read in three weeks.
I’m so elated by the discovery of this technique and I’m happy to share it with you!
2016 was a strange year. It was full of up and downs. On one hand, I had eye-opening experiences that taught me a lot about myself. On the other hand, I was horrified at the amount of time I wasted accomplishing nothing, so much that I ended the year loathing myself to the core.
But that’s enough. The new year is here. It’s time for me to recollect my experiences and regrets and move on. This article is a summary of my learnings in 2016 and my plans for 2017.
One of the best complement for a custom web design is a custom-made responsive grid system. You can customize everything you need, including the number of columns, the size of columns and gutters and even the breakpoints you change your layouts at.
Unfortunately, many people don’t even try building custom grids for their web designs because they lack the knowledge and confidence to build one.
So, in this article, I want to help you gain the knowledge and confidence you need to build a custom-made grid. Hopefully you can break away from frameworks and try a custom grid for your next project by the end of this article.
I’d be telling you the obvious if I said that grids are important in web design. You already knew that. You probably have even coded a few grids with frameworks like Foundation or Bootstrap. You may even have created a custom grid manually, or using a grid layout tool like Susy.
But have you stopped to think about these questions for the grids you’ve made?
How many columns should you have?
Should the columns be evenly sized?
How big should columns and gutters be?
How does the grid respond to different viewports?
What are your answers?
I have searched high and low for answers to these questions in the past few months. Here’s an article consolidating everything I know about designing grids right now. Hopefully, it’ll help answer the questions you have as well.
It’s an age-old wisdom that’s been passed around between developers since the dawn of time (at least for programming anyway).
It’s also the worst advice you’ll hear from anyone. But we say it on a daily basis. To others, and even to ourselves. It’s just that whenever we say this, we sugar-coat the words in different forms so we don’t feel as hurt.
We say things like:
Just use [insert framework here]
Use [insert plugin here] instead of creating your own. It’s not a priority.
Don’t waste your time building something that has been done before.
Sounds familiar yet? Has anyone said these to you before? How did you feel? Don’t kid anyone. You felt something. Did you feel:
Threatened?
Defensive?
Aggressive?
Angry?
Sad?
Stupid?
Worthless?
A combination of many of these?
Others…
These statements challenge the receiver. With any questions that challenge, it not only challenges the decisions on the surface (for most of us, it’s a choice whether or not to do something for a project), it challenges the core beliefs of the receiver.
Like it or not, it happens unconsciously. And because these questions are directed towards the core beliefs, the repercussions can be severe.
“How do you learn and remember all that stuff so quickly?”, I get one of these questions now and then from well-meaning individuals who seek more knowledge. It’s a common thing for all of us. We want to learn fast, do things fast, get more things done.
However, I never managed to answer the question properly. I always winged it because It triggers a complex mix of emotions within me. Sometimes, I get arrogant. Others, I stay humbled and state the truth: I’m slow. And I want to be faster.
The poor person on the other side of the computer only has half answer, depending on which side I sway towards.
Today, I’d like to challenge this question seriously, both for my future benefit and for countless other ambitious individuals who feel like they need to conquer a never-ending mountain of knowledge.
Did your span or gallery mixin behave unexpectedly (like the image below) when you’re using Susy?
You’re not alone. Many people have faced the same problems I outlined above. When they meet with these problems, the common question was how to “reset” the output from the span, or the gallery mixin, so the weird behavior goes away, but that’s not the best way to fix the problem.
In this article, I’m going to show you why “resetting” is the wrong approach and what you can do instead.
Have you ever asked code-related questions and never got a response? Even if you got a response, did you go through multiple back-and-forth clarification questions before you finally get a useful answer?
It happens. A lot.
It happens because you didn’t ask questions that were good enough for anyone to answer you immediately. In this article, I’ll help you learn the art of asking good coding questions so you’ll always get great answers.
Previously, I shared the theory about adjusting your Modular Scale scale to size your headers for different devices. I also covered how you can do it with the Modular Scale plugin for the 4th method.
Today, I want to share more about the Modular Scale library so you can learn to integrate it into your project easily. I’m also going to share with you how to use Modular Scale with Typi.
I spoke about why you may have problems with large font-sizes on the mobile and the four methods to deal with it in a previous article. In this article, we’re going to look at implementing the fourth method that was mentioned—changing the Modular Scale ratio at different breakpoints.
