The Objective Blog

Keep up with what we're thinking, reading, and doing.

The Radar: May 27, 2015

May 27th, 2015 - by Julie Hale - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with design and technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. The Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Objective.

Web Design Trends

Stay ahead of the curve by putting stock in these seven future web design trends.

Full Article

Free Dynamic DNS

Sandstorm is an open source project that is trying to make it easier to install other open source web applications. They’ve just launched Sandcats, which automatically gives you a domain like alice.sandcats.io, so you don’t have to buy and set up your own domain name.

Sandcats

Stock Photography

Pexels is the best free stock photography in one place. You can use them in any personal or commercial project for free no attribution required.

Pexels

Emotional Intelligence

EQ, the “emotional intelligence quotient” is an important indicator of how successful people are. These are signs of high emotional intelligence.

Full Article

Strategic Marketing Campaigns

Here are fifteen marketing strategies that will definitely spark your creative energy.

Full Article

3 Ways Friction Can Improve Your UX

Is a “frictionless” user experience always good? Well… it depends. You need to understand the relationship between friction and incentive for your user base and how it applies to their context.

Full Article

Typography Cheatsheet

Quickly reference proper usage of typographical characters like quotation marks, hyphens, accents, and more.

Typewolf

How to Name Things

A good presentation on what conventions to use and what not to use when naming functions and variables in your code.

Slideshare

The 10 Commandments of Web Forms

10 very useful tips to make your web forms more user friendly and functional.

Full Article

The Radar: May 20, 2015

May 21st, 2015 - by Julie Hale - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with design and technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. The Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Objective.

The Good and Evil of Content Strategy

Good read on when and how to use personalized content.

Full Article

Speeding Up the Web

Google’s new QUIC protocol aims to combine some of the best features of UDP and TCP with modern security tools.

Full Article

3D Holographics…Finally?

Despite all the movies about the future, it is still amazing when something from one of them actually looks like it could become a reality.

Full Article

Speaking Hexadecimal

Is it time to create English words to pronounce hexadecimal number combinations? You be the judge.

Full Article

The Accessibility Project

Excellent resource detailing how to make web applications accessible for everyone.  Also helps dispel common myths that developers believe about building accessible applications.

How-tos and Myths

Makerbook

Need fonts, photos, graphics or music for your project? Here’s a hand-picked directory of the best free resources for creatives.

Makerbook

The Secret of My Success

Graphic Designer, Paula Scher, discusses her worst jobs, her biggest challenge as a designer, and her productivity secret (EMBRACE BOREDOM!).

Full Article

Javascript Promises

Here’s an article that demonstrates some common pitfalls when working with Javascript promises. If not used correctly, your code may not run in the order that you’d expect it to. This link is an example from the author demonstrating that.

Full Article

Be Mobile-Friendly or…

Google’s new algorithm will greatly hinder search results for websites that aren’t mobile-friendly. Time to go mobile or get buried.

Full Article

Input Type Sandbox

A way to test the near-infinite combination of input types, validation patterns and attributes across any device, OS or browser, to see how onscreen keyboards and HTML5 validation behaviors react.

Sandbox

The Radar: May 14, 2015

May 14th, 2015 - by Objective - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with design and technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. The Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Objective.

Backbone Forms

By default, Backbone lacks data binding between your data domain and your views. This small library helps bridge the gap by providing an easy and declarative way to render forms.

Backbone Forms

Sketch for Designers

Sketch, our new favorite design tool, is popular elsewhere.

Full Article

Piano App

This app lets you skip real piano lessons and play classical piano pieces using your keyboard. It’s not about what keys you hit, just the timing of your keystrokes.

Piano App

Electron

Electron is a way to package desktop applications backed by node.js. It is currently used in the atom.io editor and for slack’s client.

Electron

Language and World View

The language you speak can affect how you view the world.

Full Article

Brand Evolution

A bit of discussion about how brands can evolve to stay current, yet consistent.

Full Article

Freeze Your Keys

To protect from thieves, you may want to start keeping your key fob in your freezer if you own a newer car with keyless entry.

Full Article

Tips for a Fast Vagrant Environment

If you’re using Vagrant for your development environments, Rails projects that compile Sass and CoffeeScript on each page refresh can load very slowly. Here are three things you can do to speed it up.

Full Article

Lilly

A drone with a camera that follows you.

Lilly

100 Days of Fonts

Do-Hee Kim is showcasing a different Google font pairing every day for 100 days.

100 Days of Fonts