Brain Candy
As a front-end web developer, it’s my job to keep up on the latest web trends and technologies. It’s one of the reasons I love what I do: there’s a steady stream of new stuff to learn.
Way back in the day, I bookmarked web design & development resources, meticulously dragging sites into skill-specific bookmark folders (CSS, jQuery, Design, etc.), but that quickly became an unmanageable mess, and an impossible way to digest information.
Cue my obsessively curated reading lists in Google Reader. To date, I have 15 folders in my Reader, pulling in everything from fashion to science to web dev blog feeds.
My web folder is a one-stop shop for web resources and inspiration, and provides a breath of fresh air when I need a break from work, or a headful of brain candy.
Here are my favorite web design & development reads:
- A List Apart
Cross-disciplinary journal for web people - 456 Berea Street
Great front-end development resource, including a lot of good standards and accessibility tips - Atomic Robot Design
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery tutorials, along with musings about technology - Code as Craft
Process and tech posts by the ever-growing engineering team at Etsy - Codrops
Web design & dev articles and tutorials about latest technologies - CSS Tricks
HTML,CSS and jQuery tutorials, demos, musings by Chis Coyier - Denise Jacobs
Writings about CSS and web standards by web designer Denise Jacobs - Elated
Web design and development articles and tutorials - Inspect Element
Web design and development blog with articles, tutorials, etc. by Tom Kenny - Lea Verou
Tons of demos, explanations & musings about latest technologies by front-end rockstar Lea Verou - Line 25
Tutorials, design freebies, design showcases - Little Big Details
Users submit examples of creative and innovative UI and UX pieces across the Interwebs - NetTutsPlus
Tutorials and articles on technologies, skills and techniques for developers: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, CMS’s, PHP and Ruby on Rails - Noupe
Tutorials and showcases for designers and developers, everything from Photoshop to Ajax - One Extra Pixel
Inspiration, design and development articles - Owltastic
Meagan Fisher’s blog about life, design, and building web sites - Pattern Tap
UI pattern library - Pattenry
UI pattern library with useful explanations - Quirks Mode
ppk’s blog is chock full of browser compatibility info: browser compatibility tables, CSS and JavaScript, W3C standards assessments - Six Revisions
Tutorials, articles and freebies for designers and developers - Slash7
Blog by Amy Hoy, coder and designer extraordinaire - Smashing Magazine
Huge inventory of coding & UX tutorials and aricles, and design freebies, showcases, inspiration - Snook
Web design and development tips, tricks, bookmarks and musings by Jonathon Snook. - Stephanie Hobson
Posts about CSS, life stuff, and web stuff - Stubbornella
Object-oriented CSS (OOCSS) – among other things – guru Nicole Sullivan’s blog
And look, I made you a bundle! You can subscribe to my favorite web reads! Do you have some faves I didn’t include here? Send them my way!
