An Overview of the Source

On looking through the source for Kickstarter’s Team page, we can infer a few things. First, they are almost certainly using Rails. This comes as little surprise, as most of the team’s Github pages are packed with Ruby repositories (alongside JavaScript and Objective-C, used for iPhone/iPad Apps usually).

The next thing we can see is a consistent reliance on CDN-powered assets. Six (or seven if you’re IE) external stylesheets and eight external scripts (some loaded asynchronously) are all coming from various CDNs. We can also immediately see that Kickstarter at least partially supports IE, all the way back to IE6. All of these assets are minified and, when applicable, compressed.

Further inferences can be made about the Kickstarter Team’s approach to CSS; a compass.css file is loaded just after a fonts.css file, likely generated by Compass and Sass. These are the first two style files loaded.

Kickstarter utilizes Facebook connect as well as the Apple touch/iPad link icons for saving web apps to the home screen of iOS.

Kickstarter is also using a variety of analytics services. Quantcast, Mixpanel, New Relic, Chartbeat, andGoogle Analytics scripts are all included on the page.

We can also see markup for Zendesk, a customer relations service, as well as jGrowl, a growl-esque notifier. These are likely used by other pages on the site and added dynamically via JavaScript.

Not surprisingly, Kickstarter relies on jQuery and/or Zepto, depending on the situation.

Today we will take a look at how to add some sense of depth to your photographs and thus make them become alive and more interesting to the viewer. By making use of some simple but very effective factors that can be applied at the time of exposure, you can make a your picture pop. Today, we’ll talk about perspective, depth of field, and framing.

Today we will take a look at how to add some sense of depth to your photographs and thus make them become alive and more interesting to the viewer. By making use of some simple but very effective factors that can be applied at the time of exposure, you can make a your picture pop. Today, we’ll talk about perspective, depth of field, and framing.

Rules of Engagement

Play nice! We deliberately select work which will benefit from advice and pointers. If you can’t be constructive in your comments, don’t. Other than that, offer any advice you can give. Feel free to link to examples and images which back up your points.

I’m a beginning web designer and developer that is looking for constructive comments on my work. Every bit is welcome. – Michiel De Wilde

The Design

Through the course of this web design Session you’ll learn many things from Adi Purdila; from setting up a baseline grid in Photoshop, working with adaptive layouts, refining your coding workflow, to WordPress theme and plugin creation. There’s a lot to take in, but if you stick with it we guarantee you’ll walk away with a host of new skills under your belt.

There’s article after article on websites that talk bout how to make a great logo. But If you’re a logo machine, and you’ve been doing it for a long time, chances are that you’ve developed some pretty awful habits. How do I know this? Because I suffered from some of the same habits I’m about to talk about. A true master of logo creation will refine their work on every project, forcing themselves to get better with each design. It all boils down to a few key things to avoid when you’re creating a logo. While you can take a stab at selling generic logos on places like GraphicRiver, you’ll do your best work when you deeply understand your clients and their company.

It’s a no-brainer: well performing websites enjoy higher visitor engagement, retention and conversion. Given how fickle users can be, plus the fact that mobile devices are very significant these days, never before has the speed of websites been so important! In this article I’m going to highlight ways in which you can improve the performance of your own sites.

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