24 ways is the advent calendar for web geeks. For twenty-four days each December we publish a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring you all a little Christmas cheer. Learn more
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Mark Boulton completes our calendar with some typographic techniques to improve the reading experience. Typography, like Christmas and advent calendars, relies on the accumulation of small gains for its best effects.
Impress your friends with ‘Run Ragged’2 comments
Andrew Clarke squeezes into his leathers and mounts his Fat Boy® to foster healthy negotiations around price. With family demands and needs over the holidays we all need to compromise for peace at Christmas.
Impress your friends with ‘The Command Position Principle’7 comments
Emma Boulton maintains that better research leads to better design and shows how research can solve common problems during a project’s life cycle. Santa does his research well every year — let’s hope you’ve been good this year…
Impress your friends with ‘Bringing Design and Research Closer Together’22 comments
Christopher Murphy pauses to reflect on his personal experience of mental distress and enjoins us to understand the powerful psychological forces that motivate us and can lead us astray.
Impress your friends with ‘Managing a Mind’6 comments
Nicole Sullivan understands how the accumulated weight of small typographic decisions can mount up into a tangle of CSS declarations. With a new tool at your disposal you can take stock and clear up the mess like it’s Boxing Day.
Impress your friends with ‘Untangling Web Typography’11 comments
Jonathan Snook knows that writing and publishing are different things, and relates his experience of creating an ebook, exploring the formats and the tools to set you on your merry way. Will 2014 be the year of your book?
Impress your friends with ‘How to Write a Book’17 comments
Anna Debenham guides us through the basics of using GitHub Pages with Jekyll to create simple, template-based collaborative websites. So hitch your huskies to your dogsled and set off at a racing start!
Impress your friends with ‘Get Started With GitHub Pages (Plus Bonus Jekyll)’16 comments
Brad Frost outlines a simple tool that can track a project’s design decisions and assets, and keeps everyone involved up to date and in the browser. It’s like a deep spoon scooping the brandy butter of progress onto the Christmas pudding of web project management.
Impress your friends with ‘Project Hubs: A Home Base for Design Projects’5 comments
Geri Coady lavishes us with her generous spirit of appreciation and approbation for co-workers, webfellows and colleagues. By crediting everyone involved, you can be a not-so-secret Santa.
Impress your friends with ‘Credits and Recognition’1 comment
Owen Gregory winkles answers out of authors of web books, the whys and wherefores of writing and publishing them. Everyone loves a book for Christmas, so spare a thought for the misguided soulsbrave folk who write them.
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Meri Williams brings her kanban work home with her — but to solve problems, not cause them. There’s a trick or two here that Santa could use instead of making a list and checking it twice.
Impress your friends with ‘Home Kanban for Domestic Bliss’2 comments
Aarron Walter adds a powerful hit to your Christmas cocktail in the form of advice on putting together user surveys to gather important data you can use to inform design decisions. If you build it, they will come.
Impress your friends with ‘Data-driven Design with an Annual Survey’15 comments
Jenn Lukas twinkles like a guiding star in the deep Christmas night, casting her light on the interactivity issues raised by combined hover- and touch-enabled devices. With a little thought about designing for our content, we can add some seasonal sparkle.
Impress your friends with ‘The Responsive Hover Paradigm’73 comments
Chris Coyier grabs Grunt by the snow-white fur of its Santa suit and places it firmly (but gently) in your webdev grotto to dish out its Christmas gifts — and maybe even chuck you under the chin and sit you on its broad and comfy knee. Not at all creepy. No. Nope.
Impress your friends with ‘Grunt for People Who Think Things Like Grunt are Weird and Hard’13 comments
Laura Kalbag stamps the snow off the boots of web accessibility, making positive cases for its foundational place in our work. Accessibility is like the washing up after dinner on Christmas Day: you could leave it to someone else, but it won’t be done right.
Impress your friends with ‘Why Bother with Accessibility?’7 comments
Harry Roberts prepares for Christmas by squirrelling away experiments and drafts in private Git repositories, and here he neatly explains how he puts it in his pantry with his cupcakes. Once you’ve stuffed a stocking, most of all you’ve got to hide it from the kids.
Impress your friends with ‘Keeping Parts of Your Codebase Private on GitHub’9 comments
Lisa Maria Martin decries the common reliance on FAQs to deliver important content to users, asking us to bring that content out of the cold and offer it some Glühwein to put some colour in its cheeks.
Impress your friends with ‘Kill It With Fire! What To Do With Those Dreaded FAQs’9 comments
Brian Suda dashes out a quick technique for animating SVG line drawings using JavaScript. Way better than falling snowflakes and a Santa hat on your logo.
Impress your friends with ‘Animating Vectors with SVG’18 comments
Ashley Baxter recounts her experience of developing an app better suited to her customers’ needs, even though she isn’t a programmer. With a new year approaching as fast as the old one can carry it, get building.
Impress your friends with ‘Levelling Up’7 comments
Tom Ashworth exhorts us to become more familiar with JavaScript so we can better understand and use new tools like Node and Grunt — it’s always the box the gift comes in that’s more useful and fun, right?
Impress your friends with ‘JavaScript: Taking Off the Training Wheels’10 comments
Emma Jane Westby recommits us to version control by pushing a more mature approach to Git that merges relevant application with practical tips. Christmas might be for the children, but learning is for everyone, in[n]it?
Impress your friends with ‘Git for Grown-ups’9 comments
Charlie Perrins reminds us of a fundamental requirement of our work: accessibility; and that there’s more to accessible interfaces than screen readers. Want to unplug at Christmas? Start with your mouse and don’t look back.
Impress your friends with ‘Coding Towards Accessibility’15 comments
Ruth John ushers the Christmas party disco online using the Web Audio API to festoon your browser with some twinkling scripted lights that pulse along with your favourite festive tunes. So don’t be a wallflower — Santa’s up all night to get lucky…
Impress your friends with ‘Make Your Browser Dance’40 comments
Drew McLellan opens 24 ways’ ninth annual advent calendar with a primer on the sometimes arcane lore of rewriting URLs. But while Drew may ably match URL patterns using regular expressions, that shirt with the snowflake pattern clashes hideously with his holly and ivy tie…
Impress your friends with ‘URL Rewriting for the Fearful’