Val Head is totally into design, type, code, coffee & the internet.

I had such a wonderful time at FITC Toronto this year. It was great to see so many new faces this time around. And to meet so many of them!

I did two talks while I was there: Designing Motion with CSS and JavaScript and CreativeJS Typography. That’s a lot of talking over a few days! I was psyched so many folks came out to my sessions. It was super fun to share some handy tips and cat jokes with all of you!

For those who were asking (and anyone else who’s curious) here are my slides from my main talk as well as a couple notable links. For my main session, we talked about tricks to make sure your animations are awesome no matter what’s behind them. And demystified how CSS transitions and animations can be useful and fun.

Download the PDF version

Ceaser, the Penner Equations approximated for CSS

An expanded version of the code example I ran through

For my Influxis lounge talk, I shared some little experiments I’ve been working on with type and canvas. All the code stuff I talked through is up on github now too. Check out fitc-creativejs-typography for all the fun.

Reading these reactions to screen resolution research on .net got me thinking. It’s really easy to just dismiss any findings about screen resolutions these days as completely irrelevant. I mean, we’re totally beyond measuring things in those terribly outdated pixels for web design now, right? But this research also helps verify an opportunity for us.

As an industry we’ve gone years without giving mobile proper consideration and we’re doing our best to make up for that. This tends to have us thinking responsive web design is just 960-ish and smaller. That isn’t really looking at the whole picture. Screens aren’t just getting smaller, they’re getting bigger too!

Take this research with a grain of salt for sure, there are many caveats. But we can also take it as proof there’s an opportunity to do creative things with bigger screen sizes. That there is really a potential audience there. Being resolution and viewport-size independent means considering how we look on the big screens too. The systems (media queries, breakpoints, etc.) we write to make our designs effective on small screens rarely work as-is on the big screens. If you want to look good on the big screens, you need to write rules for that too.

It’s one more thing to consider and one more opportunity to do something creative and awesome