Medium has brought some interesting ideas to the idea of reading as user experience. Among them: estimated reading time.

A developer or designer using Jekyll who wants to add a Medium-style reading time estimate to a blog template will likely find that accomplishing this a simple matter of getting Jekyll to do some math and output the result – sorta.

The reading time equation is the number of words divided by typical reading speed of words per minute. The only catch is that Jekyll’s math syntax is a bit uglier than syntax used in programming languages such as... More

I find myself drawn to clever solutions for common problems.

One recent design I built called for side-by-side buttons. The user could click a button, which would maximize while other the choices would minimize. One solution would be declare CSS styles – btn -- default and btn -- active – and then toggle states on click using JavaScript or jQuery.

Even though the controls were buttons visually, functionally they behaved like radio buttons, something devs already have in their HTML toolbox.

Styling forms can be tricky, but it is possible to apply a little CSS... More

I’ve been to several design conferences in the past couple years, and typically within the first few hours some sort of discussion will break out – usually on Twitter – over “should designers code”.

A lot of pixels and a some vitriol have been also spilled on the subject. But it’s really nothing but a bunfight. Opinions get tossed around but no one actually gets hurt.

My position has always been of course designers should code. Why would you not? It’s the fundamental technology of the web.

But “designers should code” sounds a little bossypants.... More