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
Visual prototyping tools are fast but lack the flexibility of hand-coded HTML prototypes. Why not both? Pingendo is a visual tool based on Bootstrap 4.
We like to imagine that our morals and ethics are set in granite, but the reality is they are much more fluid over a 24 period. Can you design for that?
Research shows that looking at faces changes the way we think. Can you use this knowledge to trigger empathy in your users?
As 'web people', we talk a lot about 'capturing customers', but not so much about what to do with them when we succeed. We can learn a lot from airlines.
The Trolley Problem is one of the great 'thought experiments' in ethics. But it's a thought experiment that's about to play out in the real world.
'Push button' image filters have developed a bad reputation with design professionals. But perhaps a new image filter called Prisma can change their minds.
We'd all played with computers for years but SitePoint's Hack Day gave us a chance to make electronics with our first IoT project.
Pantone 448C – a dark olive-brown – is used on Australian cigarette packaging because it is visually unappealing. But context changes how we see color.
Think you know Flickr? Did you know they store a vast reservoir of copyright free photos imagery from the world's great libraries, museums, & archives?
Read Conversational UIs, R2-D2 and Avoiding the Uncanny Valley and learn with SitePoint. Our web development and design tutorials, courses, and books will teach you HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and more.
SVG is powerful, but finding a place to put your image is harder than it should be. Here's a scalable, reliable, free SVG image hosting method.
It doesn't matter how crisp your SVG text is if it's too small to be read. Responsive SVG lets you prioritize the important parts of you graphic.
While today we LOL, smile :) and wink ;), a hundred years ago people were encoding their thoughts and feelings into the position of their postage stamps.
SVG patterns are a great low-bandwidth tool for designers but setting them up can be hard. Alex shows how Boxy SVG makes things much easier.
Sometimes it helps to think of SVG, not as an 'image format', but as a 'recipe'. And once you *really* know a recipe, you can start to change it.
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.
Alex Walker looks at seven new and interesting fonts that you can start using in your designs affordably.
PNG-32 has glorious alpha-transparency support but the files are huge. Can help come from an unlikely hero – SVG?
Read Making Crafty UIs with Sketch and Photoshop and learn with SitePoint. Our web development and design tutorials, courses, and books will teach you HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and more.
Ssometimes we need to be mindful of how classic print techniques translate to digital. Pull Quotes are a good example.
Failure is a wonderful teacher – as long as it doesn't kill you. CyberCity lets hackers and security experts practice without anyone getting hurt.
Slack is a business tool built on the lessons learned by a failed gaming company. Ali Rayl recently recounted the Slack origin story.
Having a device that knows you better than your mom could be great for security. But it also marks a change in the power dynamic. Are you ready for that?
SVG is great but what's the best way to convert your existing JPEGs and PNGs into SVG format?
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.