
Alex has been doing cruel and unusual things to CSS since 2001. He is the lead front-end design and dev for SitePoint and one-time SitePoint's Design and UX editor with over 150+ newsletter written. Co-author of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. Now Alex is involved in the planning, development, production, and marketing of a huge range of printed and online products and references. He has designed over 60+ of SitePoint's book covers.
Alex's articles
SVG is hot but easily corrupted. Boxy SVG is a free editor that helps you make the most of what the SVG format is good at.
Humans love to look at eyes. We can't help it. But sometimes that can be a problem for our layouts. Alex looks at how you can direct the eye of your users.
Typographic punctuation is a jumble of glittering successes and hard-luck stories. For every @ symbol, there's a lonely irony mark or neglected interrobang.
Voice-powered UI systems are everywhere we go today, but they're older than we think. Talking UIs were first big news in the 1930's.
There's a nice video effect I'm going to call 'Parallax Ken Burns' you see on a lot of documentaries. Can we mimic it in a single SVG file? Maybe.
Ssometimes we need to be mindful of how classic print techniques translate to digital. Pull Quotes are a good example.
Slack is a business tool built on the lessons learned by a failed gaming company. Ali Rayl recently recounted the Slack origin story.
Sometimes it's fun to trace how great design decision are made. The original Star Wars droids are great case study on how to channel your inspirations.
Talking and reading machines are almost old hat in the age of Siri, but people have been trying to convert text to sound since the first world war.
Often it's the small, random details in a story that make it feel authentic. Advertising great David Ogilvy understood the value of great storytelling.
Designers have always borrowed from other sources, but 'fair use' is a hard idea to pin down. Jeff Koons thought he had an air-tight defence. He didn't.

Read Should You Be Brave with Your Typography? Ask Mr. Robot. and learn with SitePoint. Our web development and design tutorials, courses, and books will teach you HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and more.
From Casablanca to Game of Thrones, maps have been used to help tell stories. AMCharts Pixel Map Editor lets you create customized SVG maps with ease.
A blank page can be a cruel taskmaster. Sometimes randomness is a good way to route around your normal design habits into new ideas.
Alex Walker explains what he looks for in an article intro and details how to write one for yourself together.

While designers seem to like it, Google's new logo has been compared to Comic Sans in some quarters. Why are we seeing such a wide discrepancy in opinion?
Often it's the flaws in a technology – the brush strokes, the audio hiss – that we celebrate most. Khoi Vin celebrates the halftone in his latest design.
Like hand-holds on a climbing wall, paragraphs give us an obvious path to traverse a wall of text - except when we they get lost on a small screen.
Steve Jobs liked simple design, but he wasn't simple-minded. Alex looks at U.S. Presidents and the important differences between dumb and simple.
The ancient Sumerians were the first data nerds, and understood the beauty of tabular data. But how do we keep the power of HTML tables on small screens?
There's a good argument that the skull and crossbones is one of the most enduring graphic designs of the last 1,000 years. Does it still work?

Writing software can seem cool and abstracted until you realise the impact your code can have. Therac-25 was a tragic example of how bad code hurts people.
It's hard to imagine how Illustrator could be improved until you see what a good plugin can do. Simone shows us his favorite plugins for Adobe Illustrator

Dreamweaver's ability to work directly with PSDs is a new approach to bridging the gap between layouts and code. Alex takes it for a test-drive.

Crafting images that are as well-adapted to each device as our code is may be our next big challenge. It's a area of focus for Photoshop CC 2014 release.
Stenography is 'old tech' that still makes sense today. Plover is an open source project designed to deliver 240 wpm typing to authors, bloggers and coders.
Read Smartwatch UI Design: A Battle of Circles and Squares and learn with SitePoint. Our web development and design tutorials, courses, and books will teach you HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and more.

Think you're pretty handy with CSS? Welcome to the Challenge #1: Recreate this GIF in code -- most elegant solution wins.
Often the generated SVG files we get from graphics apps are not well-suited for the web. Alex gives you the perfect intro to working with SVG.

Bauhaus is not only one of the most important design movements in history, but an especially relevant style for Web Designers. Alex and Simone tell you why.