Ideas are fundamental to the concept of change, but by themselves they are next to meaningless. An idea without some form of implementation doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t demonstrate how things could change, it doesn’t mean anything.

@font-face is an amazing tool for providing custom fonts on the web. There are a couple of ways to do add fonts to a site. The first is by usng a service like TypeKit to serve the fonts for you. The second is to use a service like FontSquirrel to convert them for you. FontPrep is a Mac App that lets you do this from the comfort of your computer, all for a mere $5. Sold.

CSS gives us a lot of control over how things look and feel in our projects, but I find time and again, that there is a single element that seems to consistently cause issues. The beloved <select> element.

A couple of weeks ago I publicly introduced Simply Written to the world. It’s been an idea in my head for some time now, and I’m really happy that it’s finally out where people can start using it.

In the design community there is a lot of sharing. Information, ideas, concepts, and suggestions. Feedback, criticism, and Q&A sessions. There’s a lot of consumption. People wouldn’t share the things they do if nobody was noticing them.

Globally Recognized Avatars, AKA Gravatars, serve as a really easy way to implement avatars that are attached to your email address, not to an account on a site. It makes setting up avatars on sites simpler and gives people better control over what appears on sites. It’s pretty awesome and, if you’ve not already registered an account with them you really should.

Symbolset is a rather awesome semantic font (soon to be collection of fonts) for use on the web and elsewhere. What’s so awesome about it? Write twitter and get the twitter icon. If a browser doesn’t support the font, then they get the word twitter, as opposed to a random character. Awesome stuff. $30. Sold. Get yours now.

HTML5 form validation is pretty cool. I’m a big fan, even if it needs to be supported with some client-side magic and server side validation. What I don’t like is when a form tells users that they are doing something wrong… before they have even had a chance to do anything. So I made something to fix that.

We are four days into the month of July, the month that marks the half way point of the year. On New Year’s eve I wrote a little regarding my plans for 2012. Six months in, how are things looking?

At the start of this series of posts I gave an overview of some of the best ways to start optimising a site. Last week I looked more in-depth at images and this week I want to turn my attention to the other files I brought up: CSS and JavaScript.