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Posts Tagged ‘Design’

Fundamentals of Web Design Layout: Part 1

28 Sep

Layout is the foundation of all visual design, yet it commonly sits back seat to "sexier" design techniques like depth, color and typography. When layout is ignored, designs become fundamentally unusable, rendering a website useless to both users and stakeholders.

To respect the role of layout requires a solid understanding of what it is.

Layout Defined

The classic definition of layout is "The way in which parts of something are arranged." In web design specifically, layout is "The way elements, content and graphics are organized on the page." A key distinction here is the substation of "arranged" for "organized." Arranging elements without organizing them doesn't create a layout, it creates visual vomit.

The purpose of a layout is organization, more specifically layout uses organization to:

  • Convey relative importance of content
  • Group similar content and separate unrelated
  • Optimize visual flow
  • Establish a basic visual hierarchy

Each aspect of layout might not be compelling alone, but together they make or break a design.

When Good Layouts Go Bad

A great layout makes design look easy. Every element fits so well within the design, you would never consider putting them anywhere else. The "logical" organization of elements makes navigating the website easy. Users don't need to think where desired content is located, the layout tells them. If users are looking for important content, they know to look in the primary content area, typically located in the area with the most space. If they are looking for something less important, like navigation, they look for secondary or tertiary areas which are smaller and placed in less prominent locations.

Because layouts are purely visual, the best way to understand what works and what doesn't is through example.

Well Organized Layouts

Information Architects

The Information Architects website, while minimal to the point of being plain, has a beautiful designed layout. The layout is so predominate, it's actually the strongest design element.

The design makes no attempt to hide the underlying grid structure. Ample whitespace makes it easy to identify where each section within the layout starts and stops. The few graphical elements that are on the page receive maximum attention because they heavily contrast the otherwise white and text heavy design.

In terms of layout, the first element a user encounters is the top navigation which is broken up into four columns (1). That same four column structure is retained at the bottom where the footer navigation lies (2). By using the same column structure, users can easily extrapolate that the footer elements are also navigation. This occurs based on principles of consistency. Elements which look alike are thought as related, elements that look different are considered to be unrelated.

The primary area is bold, and large, equipped with a massive photo and supported with text which is broken up into three columns (3). Immediately below lives a news section, which for all intensive purposes is a single column. By shifting that column to the right and confining it to a smaller column whitespace and legibility are maximized (4).

Why this Layout Works

The primary goal of any layout is to clearly organize and locate information. The Information Architects website does so beautifully. By observing the layout you can decipher what's most important and in what order. Larger, higher up elements are clearly most important and as elements become less importance they shrink and are moved further down the page. The grid keeps everything organized neatly, everything falls into place in a logical way and your focus is never divided between two elements that seem equally important.

In this design, the layout is fitted the content.

Mark Boulton Design

The Mark Boulton Design website also employs a well executed layout. Like Information Architects, the design uses a grid to clearly organize content on the page. Unlike Information Architects, the design is bold, vibrant and graphical in nature. This demonstrating that using a grids and organization doesn't mean the site must be graphically stark.

The page header is placed at the very top of the page and is larger than anything else by a factor of at least 100. This clearly communicates it's the most important element (1). The header content is case studies, intentionally telling the user that above else, they should be aware of the companies previous work. Once you travel past the header, there is a full column tagline describing what the company does (2). Because the tagline is smaller and placed further down the page, it's apparent that Mark Boulton Design feels previous work is more compelling.

Below the tagline resides four equal width columns (3). The content with in those columns seem unrelated, but their size and placement indicates they are of equal importance. The ample whitespace makes it easy to read and digest content within a column, if you choose to do so.

Why this Layout Works

It doesn't feel like it, but there is a lot of content on this page: Case studies, navigation, a logo, the mission statement (or tagline), a brief company description, news, contact information and a portfolio section... phew! Because the content is laid out in a logical, well organized way it is easy to read and comprehend. The layout tells you what to look at and in what capacity.

With a quick glance you know what's most important (the header), almost as important (the tagline) and that everything else is equally important. Additionally, by using four equal width columns you can easily scan the headline of each to determine if the column contains the content you are seeking. If not, you continue scanning until you find the one that does.

Again the design puts content together like a puzzel. Everything fit's into place perfectly.

What's Next

Hopefully these examples illustrate what a well designed layout is composed of. Specifically, the layout organizes the content on the page based on it's importance and relationship. More important content is placed in large containers and located at the top of the page. Less important content is contained in smaller cells and placed lower on the page. Similar content (or content that's related) is grouped together which communicates their relationship.

In our next installment we will cover how to design your own layout in the most effective way.

Read the Whole Series

Fundamentals of Web Design Layout Part 1

Fundamentals of Web Design Layout Part 2

 
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Fundamentals of Web Design Layout: Part 1

28 Sep

Layout is the foundation of all visual design, yet it commonly sits back seat to "sexier" design techniques like depth, color and typography. When layout is ignored, designs become fundamentally unusable, rendering a website useless to both users and stakeholders.

To respect the role of layout requires a solid understanding of what it is.

Layout Defined

The classic definition of layout is "The way in which parts of something are arranged." In web design specifically, layout is "The way elements, content and graphics are organized on the page." A key distinction here is the substation of "arranged" for "organized." Arranging elements without organizing them doesn't create a layout, it creates visual vomit.

The purpose of a layout is organization, more specifically layout uses organization to:

  • Convey relative importance of content
  • Group similar content and separate unrelated
  • Optimize visual flow
  • Establish a basic visual hierarchy

Each aspect of layout might not be compelling alone, but together they make or break a design.

When Good Layouts Go Bad

A great layout makes design look easy. Every element fits so well within the design, you would never consider putting them anywhere else. The "logical" organization of elements makes navigating the website easy. Users don't need to think where desired content is located, the layout tells them. If users are looking for important content, they know to look in the primary content area, typically located in the area with the most space. If they are looking for something less important, like navigation, they look for secondary or tertiary areas which are smaller and placed in less prominent locations.

Because layouts are purely visual, the best way to understand what works and what doesn't is through example.

Well Organized Layouts

Information Architects

The Information Architects website, while minimal to the point of being plain, has a beautiful designed layout. The layout is so predominate, it's actually the strongest design element.

The design makes no attempt to hide the underlying grid structure. Ample whitespace makes it easy to identify where each section within the layout starts and stops. The few graphical elements that are on the page receive maximum attention because they heavily contrast the otherwise white and text heavy design.

In terms of layout, the first element a user encounters is the top navigation which is broken up into four columns (1). That same four column structure is retained at the bottom where the footer navigation lies (2). By using the same column structure, users can easily extrapolate that the footer elements are also navigation. This occurs based on principles of consistency. Elements which look alike are thought as related, elements that look different are considered to be unrelated.

The primary area is bold, and large, equipped with a massive photo and supported with text which is broken up into three columns (3). Immediately below lives a news section, which for all intensive purposes is a single column. By shifting that column to the right and confining it to a smaller column whitespace and legibility are maximized (4).

Why this Layout Works

The primary goal of any layout is to clearly organize and locate information. The Information Architects website does so beautifully. By observing the layout you can decipher what's most important and in what order. Larger, higher up elements are clearly most important and as elements become less importance they shrink and are moved further down the page. The grid keeps everything organized neatly, everything falls into place in a logical way and your focus is never divided between two elements that seem equally important.

In this design, the layout is fitted the content.

Mark Boulton Design

The Mark Boulton Design website also employs a well executed layout. Like Information Architects, the design uses a grid to clearly organize content on the page. Unlike Information Architects, the design is bold, vibrant and graphical in nature. This demonstrating that using a grids and organization doesn't mean the site must be graphically stark.

The page header is placed at the very top of the page and is larger than anything else by a factor of at least 100. This clearly communicates it's the most important element (1). The header content is case studies, intentionally telling the user that above else, they should be aware of the companies previous work. Once you travel past the header, there is a full column tagline describing what the company does (2). Because the tagline is smaller and placed further down the page, it's apparent that Mark Boulton Design feels previous work is more compelling.

Below the tagline resides four equal width columns (3). The content with in those columns seem unrelated, but their size and placement indicates they are of equal importance. The ample whitespace makes it easy to read and digest content within a column, if you choose to do so.

Why this Layout Works

It doesn't feel like it, but there is a lot of content on this page: Case studies, navigation, a logo, the mission statement (or tagline), a brief company description, news, contact information and a portfolio section... phew! Because the content is laid out in a logical, well organized way it is easy to read and comprehend. The layout tells you what to look at and in what capacity.

With a quick glance you know what's most important (the header), almost as important (the tagline) and that everything else is equally important. Additionally, by using four equal width columns you can easily scan the headline of each to determine if the column contains the content you are seeking. If not, you continue scanning until you find the one that does.

Again the design puts content together like a puzzel. Everything fit's into place perfectly.

What's Next

Hopefully these examples illustrate what a well designed layout is composed of. Specifically, the layout organizes the content on the page based on it's importance and relationship. More important content is placed in large containers and located at the top of the page. Less important content is contained in smaller cells and placed lower on the page. Similar content (or content that's related) is grouped together which communicates their relationship.

In our next installment we will cover how to design your own layout in the most effective way.

Read the Whole Series

Fundamentals of Web Design Layout Part 1

Fundamentals of Web Design Layout Part 2

 
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Do users change their settings?

14 Sep

Back in the early days of PC computing, we were interested in how people used all those options, controls, and settings that software designers put into their applications. How much do users customize their applications?

We embarked on a little experiment. We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. Several hundred folks did just that.

We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings in the applications and which settings they had changed.

What we found was really interesting. Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in.

This was particularly curious because some of the program’s defaults were notable. For example, the program had a feature that would automatically save your work as edited a document, to prevent losing anything in case of a system or program failure. In the default settings for the version we analyzed, this feature was disabled. Users had to explicitly turn it on to make it work.

Of course, this mean that 95% of the users were running with autosave turned off. When we interviewed a sample of them, they all told us the same thing: They assumed Microsoft had delivered it turned off for a reason, therefore who were they to set it otherwise. “Microsoft must know what they are doing,” several of the participants told us.

We thought about that and wondered what the rationale was for keeping such an important feature turned off. We thought that maybe they were concerned about people running off floppies or those who had slow or small disks. Autosave does have performance implications, so maybe they were optimizing the behavior for the worst case, assuming that users who had the luxury to use the feature would turn it on.

We had friends in the Microsoft Office group, so we asked them about the choice of delivering the feature disabled. We explained our hypothesis about optimizing for performance. They asked around and told us our hypothesis was incorrect.

It turns out the reason the feature was disabled in that release was not because they had thought about the user’s needs. Instead, it was because a programmer had made a decision to initialize the config.ini file with all zeroes. Making a file filled with zeroes is a quick little program, so that’s what he wrote, assuming that, at some point later, someone would tell him what the “real defaults” should be. Nobody ever got around to telling him.

Since zero in binary means off, the autosave setting, along with a lot of other settings, were automatically disabled. The users’ assumption that Microsoft had given this careful consideration turned out not to be the case.

We also asked our participants for background information, like age and occupation, to see if that made a difference. It didn’t, except one category of people who almost always changed their settings: programmers and designers. They often had changed more than 40% (and some had changed as much as 80%) of the options in the program.

It seems programmers and designers like to customize their environment. Who would’ve guessed? Could that be why they chose their profession?

(Big takeaway: If you’re a programmer or designer, then you’re not like most people. Just because you change your settings in apps you use doesn’t mean that your users will, unless they are also programmers and designers.)

We’ve repeated this experiment in various forms over the years. We’ve found it to be consistently true: users rarely change their settings.

If your application has settings, have you looked to see what your users do? How many have changed them? Are the defaults the optimal choice? Does your settings screen explain the implications of each setting and give your users a good reason for mucking with the defaults?

 
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Interaction Design Tactics For Visual Designers

09 Sep


  

Anyone designing Web-based properties today requires a basic understanding of interaction design principles. Even if your training is not formally in human-computer interaction, user experience design or human factors, knowing the fundamentals of these disciplines greatly enhances the chances of your design’s success. This is especially true for visual designers. Many visual designers are formally trained in art school and informally trained at interactive agencies.

While these institutions focus on designing communications, neither typically provides a strong interaction design foundation. Having a broader skill set not only makes your designs more successful but makes you more valuable and employable (i.e. you become the unicorn). While in no way exhaustive, to get you started, here are five key tactics to understand and implement in your next project.

A Graphic Designed Sculpture
Image credit: Kristian Bjornard

1. Talk To Your Customers

The most important thing to understand when designing an online experience is your audience. Understanding who they are, what they do for a living, how old they are, how they work, what they know about the Web, how they use it, on what devices, where and so on provides invaluable insight into their pain points that you are out to solve.

Setting clear constraints on your design also helps. For example, if your audience will predominantly be using mobile devices to access the Web in hospitals, then your design must be responsive to those devices and be compatible with the environments where the devices will be used. In addition, understanding your audience builds on a communication design foundation by revealing your users’ sensitivities (physical or cultural, for example) to things like color and typography.

Understanding your audience requires conversation with target users. These conversations can happen in a variety of forums. While impersonal approaches such as surveys work well enough, nothing beats face-to-face conversations with your customers. Depending on who you’re targeting with your work, finding your target audience may be as simple as going down to the local coffee shop, buying a handful of $5 gift cards and striking up conversations with the patrons there. Most people will gladly exchange 10 to 15 minutes of sharing their opinion for a coffee shop gift card. Other ways to find users are to post ads on websites like Craigslist, pull names off your customer lists, reach out to trade organizations (for specific user types, like nurses) and spend time in locations where your audience spends time (for example, music fans at a concert).

The initial conversations will be awkward, but as more and more take place, a rhythm develops to the questions. Also, patterns begin to emerge, allowing you to tailor the questions more appropriately with each interview. The lessons you take away from these activities can be used to create personas — i.e. aggregate representations of typical users of your design — that can help provide context to future design decisions.


A persona document. (Image: Todd Zaki Warfel)

2. Orient The User

Now that you’ve got an understanding of who your user is, orienting them when they use your design is important. Orienting your users gives them a sense of place in a non-static experience. To effectively provide that sense, your design should tell users three things:

  1. Where they are
    Critical to any online experience is understanding where, in the broader context of the website, the user is currently transacting. If it’s clear to the user where they are, then there is a greater chance they’ll understand what you need them to do on that page. For example, if the user is aware they are on a “product page,” they should expect to see a purchase link and perhaps some other product options.
  2. How they got there
    If providing clarity on the user’s current location provides context for expected actions, then showing them the path they took to get there provides a safety net. That safety net is the comfort of knowing that if the user has wound up in the wrong place, they can back out and try again.
  3. Where they can go from here
    You’ve made it clear where they are and how they got there; if they are in the wrong spot they can backtrack and try another path. But if they’re ready to move forward or they believe the path back won’t provide the content they desire, then letting your users know what options are available from this point on is imperative. Never leave a user in a dead end. There should always be an option to proceed. A perfect example of this is a search results page that yields no results. While you should let the user know that nothing matches their search query, there should be options that lead them to the answers they seek (for example, related search terms). Ways forward can be manifested in your website’s navigation but can also be implemented as affordances. Affordances are elements in the interface that are obviously clickable, such as buttons and sliders.

Amazon no results page
Amazon does a good job with its no-results page.

(For a great primer on affordances, pick up Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. While a bit dated, it lays a solid foundation for how product designers should think about their products.)

Clear website orientation provides comfort to users. It also reduces the chances that users will make mistakes and increases the chances that, when they do, they’ll be able to recover quickly.

3. Simpler Is Better

Visual designers are driven to add elements to a layout that may be aesthetically pleasing but don’t necessarily serve an interaction purpose. While certainly much is to be said for aesthetics adding to the polish and feel of an experience, when designing an interactive experience, consider opting for simpler design. Simplification means reducing the elements on the screen down to the most basic ones, the ones that will facilitate the task that the user has to complete. Start with that as a baseline, and then add ornamentation sparingly. Consider the brand of the website. The brand is a reflection not only of the aesthetic but of the experience. If a website is gorgeous, but its beauty makes completing a transaction impossible, then the website (and brand) will ultimately fail.

Aesthetics will always have a place and powerful purpose in any experience, yet ensuring that the experience is usable first is critical.

4. Design For A Dialog

Where visual design training focuses primarily on communication, interaction design puts a heavy focus on feedback loops — in essence, a conversation between the user and the website. As you work out an experience, provide ways for the system to communicate back to the user when they’ve done something right or wrong. Ensure that your experience makes clear when the user has succeeded and when an action is required to complete a transaction. Use your visual design and communication skills to build a visual language for this feedback dialogue. Ensure that no matter where the user is in the experience, any information that is coming from the website is consistent in design and presentation method. Different types of information will require different treatments. The user will learn the system quickly, and a dialogue with the website will begin to occur. In essence, you’re humanizing the experience (and the company behind it) by proactively predicting your users’ needs and presenting information and actions that mitigate user frustration.

Think Vitamin
Think Vitamin keeps the conversation going with its readers.

5. Workflow: Understanding The Before And After

Visual design is beautiful. It’s also static. Interaction design builds a workflow from page to page and from state to state. As you design each page, consider what the user can do on this page and how the next step in the process fits into the workflow. If you’ve just added a sign-up form to the page, think about what will happen when the user presses the “Submit” button. Will the page refresh? Will there be a confirmation page? What if there are errors in the form? What if the user hits the “Back” button? These are all components of the workflow of the experience. Each page or state is just one small component in the user’s click stream. The challenge is that each user might have a relatively unique click stream, depending on how they got to your website and why they came. You’ve used your knowledge of the user to orient them, and you’ve provided a simple interface that creates a successful dialogue with them: now ensure that each interaction has a logical next step. That next step should fit into the experience and visual language that you’ve created, so that the experience feels whole and consistent. These elements are what add credibility to the brand and increase users’ trust in your design.

Bonus Tip: Understand Your “Materials”

Jonathan Ive, designer of the iPod (among other things), promotes the idea that designers of all types must understand the material they’re working with. This hold true for interaction design as well. Understanding the “materials” that make up the Web is critical. A cursory education in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and related technologies will only enhance your understanding of the medium and provide a realistic perspective on your designs. A great resource for this is the group of developers who will be implementing your work. Strike up regular conversations with them about your design, and get a taste of whether your proposals are feasible given the technologies they employ. Even better, start learning the basics yourself. You don’t have to become a star coder, but knowing enough about how the medium in which you work behaves can greatly shape the interactions you design.

Summary

Interaction design is a multi-faceted discipline that links static communications together to form an experience. Understanding the basic principles of this discipline is core to designing websites that are not only aesthetically pleasing but that actually solve business problems and bring delight to their users. This article just scratches the surface of interaction design. For Web designers of any kind, considering these fundamentals when designing any transaction or interaction is imperative.

(al)

© Jeff Gothelf for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

 
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Singapore will soon become more garden than city [Urban Design]

11 Aug
In a recently proposed 10-year development plan, Singapore aims to go from being "a garden city" to "a city in a garden." The proposal marks the latest milestone in the city's decades-long effort to become an eco-city. More »
 
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The Falkirk Wheel

05 Aug
The Falkirk Wheel is a rotating boat lift located in Scotland, UK, connecting the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal, opened in 2002. It is named after the nearby town of Falkirk which is in central Scotland. The two canals were previously connected by a series of 11 locks, but by the 1930s these had fallen into disuse, were filled in and the land built upon. (Wikipedia)





















































 
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NASA Graphic Standards Manual — 1976

19 Jul

NASA Graphic Standards Manual

As some of you already know, I’m a little obsessed with finding vintage design materials, especially graphics manuals like this one for the 1976 Montreal Olympics. So you can imagine how far my jaw dropped when I saw this 1976 NASA Graphics Standards Manual. Created by design firm Danne & Blackburn in 1975, this manual outlines the proper use of, in my opinion, one of the best brand identities of the last century. One lucky soul has managed to get some hi-res scans of the some of the pages. The hunt has officially begun.

 
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15 Useful Web Apps for Designers

06 Jul

Advertise here with BSA


There are lots of web apps these days and they are very popular because of time-saving and productivity benefits. Web apps work on almost all platforms and you can access them from any device. You don’t need to install anything and you can save lots of time in this way. In this compilation, I’ve picked 15 useful web apps for web and graphic designers, developers and other creatives who want to save time and achieve more. Hope you’ll become more productive with these handy apps.

Privacy policy generator

Privacy policy generator

Privacy policy generator helps you to create professional privacy policy document that discloses some or all of the ways to your website visitors about what you will do with information gathered from them, how you are gathering that information and how the information will be stored and managed.

Launchlist

Launchlist

Launchlist is a perfect tool for web designers and developers to check their work before launching any project.

Aviary’s Image Editor

Aviaryís Image Editor

Powerful online photo editor with easy to use user interface. Perfect alternative for popular Adobe Photoshop.

Color Scheme Designer

Color Scheme Designer

Very useful tool for any sort of designer. With this tool you can easily create attractive color schemes for your projects.

Buffer

Buffer

Buffer makes your life easier with a smarter way to schedule tweets. Work out all your tweets at one point in time during the day. Then fill up your Buffer with your tweets and Buffer schedules them for you.

deviantART muro

deviantART muro

HTML5-based app that works in all modern browsers, and you can dive in and start drawing on a blank canvas, all without Flash or any other plug-in.

CSS3 Generator

CSS3 Generator

Handy CSS3 generator with a lot of different functions and code preview.

Loads.in

Loads.in

Loads.in gives you the possibility to see how fast your (or any) website loads in a real browser from over 50 locations worldwide.

Bounce

Bounce

Great tool for creating notes on any website, you can share your thoughts, feedback about the project with your friends or colleagues.

Resize My Browser

Resize My Browser

ResizeMyBrowser is simple yet very useful online tool. With this tool you will be able to set the browser size by both Inner window and Outer window.

Kuler

Kuler

Kuler is the web-hosted application for generating color themes that can inspire any project. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.

Typetester

Typetester

The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. Its primary role is to make web designer’s life easier. As the new fonts are bundled into operating systems, the list of the common fonts will be updated.

WhatTheFont

WhatTheFont

Seen a font in use and want to know what it is? Submit an image to WhatTheFont to find the closest matches in their database.

Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator

Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator

Colorzilla has designed this very easy to use CSS3 gradient generator. It uses sliders and color pickers just like Photoshop and is highly recommended.

Twitter Profile Designer

Twitter Profile Designer

Themeleon helps you to create custom Twitter background. You can use lots of patterns and colors available there or you can customize any of the colors or patterns to get just the right design for you.

 
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7 Great JavaScript Resources

03 Jul


As browsers and server-side platforms advance, and libraries new and old grow and mature, JavaScript evolves as well. Staying at the top of your game is important. As a JavaScript developer, you’ll need to keep up with the latest news and learn new skills.

We’ve put together a list of seven of our favorite JavaScript resources to help save you time and energy along the way. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned pro, we think you’ll find the sites below both informative and beneficial. If you know of other great resources, feel free to share them in the comments.


1. Mozilla Developer Network




The MDN has become the de facto resource for JavaScript documentation, and is an excellent resource for beginners and seasoned developers alike. Here you'll find the official and complete JavaScript reference, as well as useful guides, tutorials and articles covering everything from the basics of how JavaScript works to its best practices and design patterns. The MDN also has a thorough DOM reference, which we highly recommend checking out as well.


2. JQAPI




JQAPI is an alternative to the official jQuery.com API documentation. If you're a client-side JavaScript developer, chances are you probably have used, or at some point will use, jQuery in at least one of your projects. Whether your use is occasional or daily, you'll want to keep up with the latest development and new features in JavaScript's most popular library. Each new release improves security and performance via a slick, responsive and intuitive interface for quick browsing and searching of jQuery documentation. The UI here really is top-notch, and as a bonus, there's an offline version available for download.


3. JS Fiddle




JS Fiddle is a JavaScript pastebin on steroids. Create, share, execute and test your JavaScript right in the browser. This is a great tool for collaborative debugging or for sharing code snippets. It's also a fun way to perform quick experiments and test out new ideas. Simply combine your JavaScript, HTML and CSS, then click the "Run" button to see the results. You can also validate your JavaScript code against JSLint and save your Fiddle for use later, or share with others. JS Fiddle provides a number of useful features, like the ability to load up common frameworks automatically (to test your jQuery or MooTools code, for example) and as-you-type syntax highlighting, just like you'd get by writing code in your favorite IDE.


4. Eloquent JavaScript




This free ebook is an introduction to programming and the JavaScript language, written by developer and tech writer Marjin Haverbeke. The book reads much like a tutorial, and introduces a number of concepts and real-world applications in a clean, concise style. Interactive examples are also available, which means you can read about various techniques. You'll also get a chance to see them in action, and tinker with the code yourself. We found a lot of positive reviews for this book, so if you're new to JavaScript, this is definitely a book worth checking out.


5. Douglas Crockford's JavaScript Videos




An undisputed expert in JavaScript, Douglas Crockford is Yahoo's JavaScript architect and is one of the individuals instrumental in the planning, development and future growth of the language. The videos and transcripts on the YUI blog derive from a series of talks given by Mr. Crockford about the history of JavaScript, its future and its use today. Though the series is now about a year and a half old, we still think you'll find the videos informative. We certainly recommend watching them for a better understanding of the language, where it's been, how it works and where it's going.


6. How To Node




Not all JavaScript development takes place in the browser. NodeJS is one of the web's most popular server-side JavaScript frameworks. Whether you're a seasoned Node developer or someone who's looking to add server-side JavaScript to his repertoire, How To Node offers a great collection of articles on NodeJS development. This community-driven site offers an excellent repository of Node tutorials that's proven itself useful on a number of occasions. No Node developer toolkit would be complete without it.


7. DailyJS




We've looked at some great tools and reference material, covered tutorials from our favorite libraries and frameworks and touched on both client and server-side JavaScript development. However, we're always searching for something new. DailyJS is a popular JavaScript-focused blog that brings you the latest and greatest JavaScript news, offers tips and techniques, and reviews libraries, plug-ins and services for JavaScript developers. If you're just itching for your daily dose of JavaScript goodness, DailyJS has you covered.

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