quitecurious.com has come up with a great article on why designers should learn to code. I agree with the points made here. The important things about design are BOTH form and function. If you’re doing all form without designing the function I don’t know if you can still call yourself an effective designer… User experience design jobs popping up everywhere should be an indication of how important planning strategy and function is. If you want to make beautiful things that’s wonderful, but they need to be beautiful things that serve a purpose and function in a way that makes people want to keep using them instead of tossing them out the window or deleting them.

Please read the full article here.

Here are a few links for some choice web apps from Zurb you will want to check out to make your design life and testing life easier. Get feedback from clients, critique your web design, share code with nerdy friends…!

Spur

Notable

Bounce

Design shack has a great collection of some creative and inspiring outdoor ad campaigns.

This was one of my favorites. To view the full 50 ads click here.

FitText makes font-sizes responsive and flexible. Use this plugin on your fluid or responsive layout to achieve scalable headlines that fill the width of a parent element.

Download the kit and use Flexslider to create your own customized amazing, fully responsive jQuery slider plugin.

PechaKucha Night in Winnipeg, Vol. 7: Back to School Edition

What: PechaKucha Night, Vol. 7 in Winnipeg
When: Thursday September 15 – doors open at 7:30 pm (first speaker hits the stage at 8:20 pm)
Where: Park Theatre, 698 Osborne Street
How Much: $5 (suggested donation, at the door)

The last event booked up super-fast, so be sure to get there early to nab your seat!

Stephanie Besselt-O’Leary, designer/illustrator
Rodney & Sonja Braun, photographers, Eve Studios
Ace Burpee, radio host, Hot 103 FM
Josh Dudych, designer, True North
James Gillespie, designer/illustrator
Glen Manning, landscape architect, Hilderman Thomas Frank Cram
Tara Miller, photographer, 100 Acre Woods
Sam Posnick, designer/illustrator
Heidi Reimer-Epp, Botanical Paperworks
Carl Shura, designer
The Winnipeg Humane Society

A great new campaign from Absolute encouraging new art and creativity…

Absolut Blank from Protein® on Vimeo.

I’ve been approved for a research project to create an App with Red River College and the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. A student approached me a week or two ago and asked a few questions for an article in the Projector. I’ll be working on the design of the App and some front end work, while Tom Lepp, another instructor who teaches in the DMD department at RRC will be working on developing the Augmented Reality portion of the App. I could not do this without him! We’ll be working with Scott Gillam and Corey Timpson at the CMHR to create the concept, design and user experience.

Check out the online article here.

If you’re a designer or a web developer you’ve probably been dealing with this problem for years – or you may just be starting out and are asking yourself this for the first time. I totally agree with the answer they provide to the question “do web sites need to be experienced exactly the same in every browser?” in this domain… dowebsitesneedtobeexperiencedexactlythesameineverybrowser.com

Check this out. The Boston Globe has just launched a new web site design that is responsive. Very nice!

Think Vitamin continues to be an inspiration for me and is one of very few newsletters that I will never regret signing up for. Recently they’ve written an article that comes with a video on a new jQuery plugin that lets you resize your flash video. Responsive web design is not just for layouts – but for images, type, and videos as well. The great thing is you don’t need to be a crazy programming geek to be able to use this system and create your own responsive video. You just have to use this jQuery. The video explains it all very nicely. Please read the rest of Think Vitamin’s article(s) here.

The jQuery plugin is called fitvidsjs and can be found here.