OddBird is a small company – a shared vision and brand that transforms seven remote contractors into a Web Software Agency. 2016 was a year of big changes for us, individually and as a company. We can’t distance ourselves from the world we work in, or the lives of…
Ongoing education in our industry is a must. Attending conferences is a great way to learn and network with other industry professionals. Unfortunately, not everyone is able to attend conferences, but have no fear! Many of the best conferences post videos online, giving our community an easy way to learn…
How do you select a set of colors that express the attitude of your brand, look great together, and pass WCAG accessibility standards? How many colors is too many? This step-by-step guide outlines OddBird’s process for tackling these challenges.
It’s important to define your brand goals first and review them throughout the process. Next, do some research for inspiration. What colors are the other companies in your field using? Use Paletton to generate a cohesive color palette. Test color contrast to ensure accessibility. Finally, create prototypes to make sure you colors work well in context.
How do you choose the best fonts for a brand identity among the thousands of options available on the interwebs these days? Whether you’re starting from scratch or rebranding like us, this step-by-step guide can help focus and direct your process. First, define your brand goals. Next, explore your options…
If you want to make sense of your git history more easily when you go back, try rebasing as you go. Rebasing while collaborating with others can get hairy quickly. But here’s one way to make it work.
Using an emphasized initial letter is a technique that has been used for centuries. Let’s dive in to see some ways you can apply it to your project to help guide your reader with visual hierarchy.
You can’t always get away with a single-page app; sometimes you need server-side rendering. When you need both, here’s one approach.
No matter what acronym drives your selectors (BEM, OOCSS, SMACSS, ETC), loops can help keep your patterns more readable and maintainable, baking them directly into your code. We’ll take a look at what loops can do, and how to use them in the major CSS preprocessors.
Experience design is a collaboration
Net Magazine featured Miriam this month with a Beyond Pixels profile. “Miriam Suzanne creates experimental experiences with her band and her fellow developers.”
What follows is an in-depth look at our brand design process thus far as we work towards a new look and feel for this, our OddSite. Details. Confessions. What worked. What flopped. And why.
I joined Tim Evko and M. David Green for their SitePoint podcast – The Versioning Show. We discussed going from lurker to speaker, the importance of writing about what you’re learning, stumbling into fame, approaching new projects, and unit testing in Sass.
Chris Coyier interviews Miriam when she joins the CSS-Tricks team as a Staff Writer. We talk about getting started in the industry, name confusion, founding OddBird, building Susy, and more.
I did a live Q&A at SitePoint in August, talking about: Customizing Susy for your projects Other ways to do layouts (and why you might not even need a toolkit) How to select a toolkit, or build your very own!
With the release of kanban-style project boards, we decided to move our open design process over to GitHub and give it a try.
It was a pleasure speaking at CSSConf 2016 in Boston! Here are some of my notes from the event – covering everything from creativity and the Bauhaus movement to SVG 2 internals, React styles, CSS grid layouts, and custom properties (e.g. CSS-native variables). I included links to slides and video…