Color does not add a pleasant quality to design—it reinforces it. ~ Pierre Bonnard Starting a website from a blank slate is always a wobbly moment. You’ve got this new client whom you’re wanting to genuinely help and impress, you’ve never met this person before (most of the time), but because you’re a designer you’re [...]
We just went through another round of hiring here at 12 Spokes. We always get a flood of applicants for open positions, and of course, all the stereotypical job-seeking advice applies here—write a cover letter that addresses the individual job posting, keep your resume to one page, yada, yada, yada. There’s one stereotypical piece of [...]
When I first got my CSS on (did I really just say that?) back in 2006, managing color values in my style sheet was pretty simple: I had my colors for text, and then my colors for elements with solid backgrounds, and that was about it. If I had my act together, maybe I’d write [...]
For one of our current projects, we developed a Pinterest-style ‘share’ bookmarklet which, when clicked from your bookmarks toolbar, injects an iframe containing a share form on top of the page you’re currently on. We spent a good chunk of time really polishing it up and making for a good user experience. You can even [...]
The latest major version of FactoryGirl came out last week, which coincided with an internal debate here on the best use of factories. Often, out of habit, when we’re writing tests, we reach for a Factory when we’re testing a new method. It’s convenient because it gives you some test data to work with, and [...]
I’m working on an MVP for a great client right now. Although the two guys behind the app are really design-y by nature, their goal with this iteration is to produce a basic desktop version, get it in front of users, and see if it’s worth pursuing further. So on the front end, I felt [...]
This happened to me the other day: “ERROR: Password must be 8-12 characters long.” Oh, shoot me now. Better yet, shoot the developer who wrote that line of code. Who in their right mind puts an upper limit on the number of allowable characters? I understand the sites that push you into making a weak password [...]
A commit should not be taken lightly. A commit is a work of art, a labor of love chiseled down to the bare essentials. Think of a project repo as a novel, with each branch as a chapter, each line of code as a sentence, and each commit as a paragraph. I don’t have a [...]
We’re happy to introduce the world to the Pericles Project, an awesome application we helped build and launched just a few weeks ago. Our client had a great idea for a news aggregator that offers you personalized recommendations for which news to read, based on your similarity to other users. It also helps you break [...]
Believe it or not, 12 Spokes has not always been the large team that it is today. (I know, shock). When we started, we were just a couple of really talented developers working at home, building hot software for a small cadre of clients. It was 2006, and we’d been drinking the 37 Signals “Less [...]