anotheruiguy

I admit it, I have a print background. As much as I try to leave that all in the past, it always creeps up and bites me in the ass.

Pixel based image asset management is a mystery to many in print and in the new purely digital world. What constitutes a quality asset file to be reproduced? In print there are clear rules, but in digital display, there are many other variables at play. This post is a description of my journey in finally figuring this out.

The principals of an image

With every image, regardless of intended output, it has three primary attributes; pixel width and height, physical width and height, and dpi. Of course there is color space, color profile and a few others, but that is outside the scope of this discussion.

Images and print

anotheruiguy

Here is a quick rundown without all the typical blah blah blah ...

Create new snippet

Create a new snippet, go to Tools > New Snippet

This step creates an empty file for you to enter your new code snippet into. It should look like the following:

<snippet>
  <content><![CDATA[
Hello, ${1:this} is a ${2:snippet}.

anotheruiguy

Web fonts are pretty much all the rage. Using a CDN for font libraries, like TypeKit or Google Fonts, will be a great solution for many projects. For others, this is not an option. Especially when you are creating a custom icon library for your project.

Rails and the asset pipeline are great tools, but Rails has yet to get caught up in the custom web font craze.

As with all things Rails, there is more then one way to skin this cat. There is the recommended way, and then there are the other ways.

The recommended way

Here I will show how to update your Rails project so that you can use the asset pipeline appropriately and resource your files using the common Rails convention.

anotheruiguy

So I was presented with this interesting problem by a co-worker to come up with a CSS solution for a very common problem. Basically we are looking at a common layout for a list of items that will be placed into a grid with two columns. Simple, right?

Wrong. How do we do this? There are so many ways we can solve this problem that the solutions are a problem in itself. In this article I will walk through the process that I went through and how I came to a solution that I feel is pretty flexible and will carry us into the future of better layout solutions.

Rows and columns

A VERY common solution is to pretend this is a table and think of this as a series of rows and columns. I personally think that this is a very poor solution, why would we want to recreate tables for the sake of creating a table layout? For the sake of argument, I will walk through how this works.

anotheruiguy

Or Bash to the UNIX kids

If you are reading this, you have been introduced to something called the Terminal on your Mac by one of your overly pushy developer friends/colleagues.

I am thinking that the conversation went something like this?

You: How can I get to that file?

Them: Just open Terminal and then $ cd ~/Projects/boilerplate/ && vi .gitignore