Rob Marshall blogs. Fox’s code-savvy developer has been writing interesting and thought-provoking articles on his site, thoughtsandstuff, for nearly three years now. Writing on a diverse range of topics across creative and dev, and producing his weekly ‘Creative/Development Inspiration’ rundown, his site features a whole heap of inspiring think pieces, creative examples and more.
We’ve grown accustomed to our Rob sharing the best of the net with us to brighten our Monday mornings, and he thought it’d be nice to share it with you too. We agree – here’s January’s creative and development inspiration.
This week’s design and developer inspiration rundown has even more of the good stuff. Want to know more about accessibility? Check. How about the newest CMSs on the scene? I got you. Enjoy!
Website inspiration
Beauregard
Beautiful beautiful website. Smooth movement, great imagery and subtle copy. Only one issue… it auto-plays music you cannot turn off. Are they being serious?!
Designer resources, examples and inspiration
Designing for accessibility is not that hard
Seven easy-to-implement guidelines to design a more accessible web.
Merge
Build one component, apply everywhere. Keep an eye on this. It could be big. Making web dev smoother and faster.
The dilemma of designers’ empathy delusions
Taking a bit of a reality check on how empathetic you really are and for whom can help make you a more effective designer, not just an idealistic one.
Development Snippets, Samples, and Articles
Remove image background
Using AI and come clever code, this website (it has an API) removes an images background in 5 seconds. So much potential for apps…
Destyle
Think normalise.css. Think reset.css. But think better.
Twill
Slim, sleek and sexy new CMS built on Laravel. Open-source and flexible. Will be trying this one out for size.
Jigsaw
Another static site. This one seems cleaner and easier to set up though? I’ll let you be the judge.
A bit of everything
The rise of the content mesh
Use best-of-breed solutions tailored to specific-use cases like e-commerce or blogging; it provides a modern framework for rapid iteration and it generates lightning-fast websites out of the box. Enter the content mesh!
Story mapping, visual way of building product backlog
Story mapping is a top-down approach of requirement gathering represented as a tree. Story mapping starts from an overarching vision. A vision is achieved via goals. Goals are reached by completing activities, and to complete an activity, users needs to perform tasks. These tasks can then be transformed into user stories for software development.
Are your analytics lying?
Most people are not ready to convert right away and you shouldn’t expect them to do so anyway…
Basically I’m saying you need to focus on long-term conversion strategies too!
Milanote
Capture your teams ideas, all in one place.
Screen Guru
Take a screenshot of any website, really easily.
Spotify Design
Spotify’s very own blog section on design. Well worth a scroll through!