Foundation: A New Grid

New grids for new experiences and applications. Highly recommended.

Using a Hammer When You Need a Nail Gun
Building things is hard. Building things with the wrong tools is even harder. The web has changed over the past several years and will continue to rapidly change. We’re racing away from an advertising web that discusses things to a web of doing and creating things.

The shift from native apps to web apps has begun. Yet, we’re using the wrong tool to build these web apps — hacking away at frameworks and grids meant for marketing sites. In other words, we’re still swinging a hammer when we could be shooting a nail gun.

A 960° Look at the Grids of Internet Past
Nearly every grid system today is based on the same principals of the 960 Grid — a grid nearly a decade old — that has affected how nearly every site is coded today. A model that uses rows and columns, set to 12 or 16 numbered increments, to create nearly any layout.

The 960 Grid allowed for rapid prototyping on the web and lowered the learning curve for designers to wrangle code. It gave us the start. And more powerful frameworks emerged offering UI libraries, predefined styles and JavaScript capabilities, yet the same grid style remained.

Over the last three years, Foundation has taken this grid style and made huge improvements in functionality. We were the first framework to go responsive with the grid and also the first to take the grid mobile-first. We’ve built upon it, adding offsets, source ordering right-to-left options and block grids. We’ve even harnessed the awesome power of Sass to have powerful Mixins that allow designers to build fully semantic markup with little-to-no presentational classes.

These things are all great, but they were still built for a different type of web experience.

Web Apps are the Future
As we said above, the web is changing. We’re transitioning to a more app-centric web. It’s time our grids followed suit.

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Font Awesome Symbols for Sketch

It’s all the goodness of Font Awesome in easily accessible symbols crafted specifically for Sketch 3!

Just go to Insert > Symbols and choose the Font Awesome icon you’d like to include. The icons are organized alphabetically and aliases are included.

You can safely delete the Instructions artboard and/or page and start your own Sketch project with the power of Font Awesome!

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Simplifying the Bull: How Picasso Helps to Teach Apple’s Style

CUPERTINO, Calif. — Apple may well be the only tech company on the planet that would dare compare itself to Picasso.

In a class at the company’s internal training program, the so-called Apple University, the instructor likened the 11 lithographs that make up Picasso’s “The Bull” to the way Apple builds its smartphones and other devices. The idea: Apple designers strive for simplicity just as Picasso eliminated details to create a great work of art.

Steven P. Jobs established Apple University as a way to inculcate employees into Apple’s business culture and educate them about its history, particularly as the company grew and the tech business changed. Courses are not required, only recommended, but getting new employees to enroll is rarely a problem.

apple-picasso

Although many companies have such internal programs, sometimes referred to as indoctrination, Apple’s version is a topic of speculation and fascination in the tech world.

It is highly secretive and rarely written about, referred to briefly in the biography of Mr. Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Apple employees are discouraged from talking about the company in general, and the classes are no exception. No pictures of the classrooms have surfaced publicly. And a spokeswoman for Apple declined to make instructors available for interviews for this article.

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Affinity Designer – Vector Illustration Software

Vector design software for OS X. Beta available as of 8-11-14.

We don’t do spinning beach balls. Working in Affinity Designer is always live – pan and zoom at 60fps, transform objects in correct z-order, make adjustments or apply effects in realtime and always see live previews of brushes or tools. Whether it’s a 100 megapixel image or the most complex vector drawing with thousands of curves, it’s still the same and never runs out of memory. You have never experienced anything like it.

affinity-designer-vector-software

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CSS at Groupon

This post was inspired by the recent wave of people sharing info about their CSS: Mark Otto at Github, Ian Feather at Lonely Planet and Chris Coyier at Codepen.

About two years ago I was working on a redesign of Groupon’s consumer website (which was later scrapped) when I was asked if I wanted to work on our internal tools team. “You won’t have to support Internet Explorer,” they said.

* Cue chorus of angels *

As Groupon had been experiencing exponential growth, many of our “internal tools” consisted of a bunch of Google Docs and things scribbled on cocktail napkins. The internal tools team was tasked with streamlining those processes. We had a half dozen or so dev teams working on different tools supported by just two designers. The challenge we faced was how to quickly crank out designs for these tools without having a horrible mishmash of CSS.

At first we debated the merits of using Twitter Bootstrap, which had just started gaining popularity at the time. We also looked at Zurb’s Foundation. Eventually we decided that we would roll our own CSS framework in order to keep things light and consistent with our designs. We called it Toolstrap (Bootstrap for Internal Tools).

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