Any one who has ever designed and built for Email knows how frustrating it can be. It can some times be worse than dealing with legacy browsers and all their quirks.

Email has come a long way in the last few years but there are still no standards, although the people at http://www.email-standards.org are trying.

Many great tools exist like Litmus.

A perfect companion to Litmus would be Fractal, It’s a code QA test rather than a visual validation.

http://getfractal.com/

While Responsive design is becoming more and more popular here is yet another great Responsive Grid system, Similar to the Less Framework.

Definitely worth taking a look at, I think responsive web design is a great solution to a wide audience on a budget. While it’s not perfect it does offer some advantages to specifically designing for specific devices.

http://goldengridsystem.com

Use multiple text-shadows to create 3D text on any HTML element.
No extra HTML, no extra headaches, just awesomesauce.

http://markdotto.com/playground/3d-text/

Google + is the new social kid on the block, with limited Beta every one is trying to find a way in.

What I think Google + does better than Facebook is control the way you post your content. The ability to send your posts to selected people/circles is a great idea. I have not used Facebook a tone because I find it frustrating to use, The layout is not intuitive at all.

At the moment Google + is Ad free ( I assume this will change in time ) but the layout matches that of Google Search, and G-Mail.

I would invest the time to share links, images, and videos on Google plus over Facebook. I also consider Google + to be a bit more personal as in it’s not full of other people’s junk. Your profile page looks more or less like a Tumbler blog.

So far so good.

With Google having the +1 button in the search results it is giving a lot of power to users to promote the websites they like. This will most definitely effect SEO as I would think organic recommendations will be valued higher than text-based keywords, and thus adding value and relevance to Advertising. Google will know more about you and in turn deliver more content you “like”, much like Facebook.

Rite now I have noticed an issue with actually finding Google +

http://gplus.to/adampatterson/

CSSEdit does not have support for SCSS or SASS files at all. But it is possible to hack it.

Go in to your Applications folder right click on the app and select Show Package Contents.

Locate the file called info.plst and open it using Coda (or any other Editor).

Look for CFBundleTypeExtension where you will see an array with a string node called CSS. Copy that line and add the SCSS or SASS or both extensions.

Save the file, Restart the app. You can now open SCSS files.

Note: CSSEdit has no idea how to handle the SCSS syntax so don’t expect the Styles or attribute editor to be 100% accurate,

I noticed if you have any nested properties CSSEdit will pick up other attributes until the next closing }

I hope that some day CSSEdit will natively support SASS and will be merged into Espresso.

Enjoy!

Aside from the benefits of SASS we have been using another extension of SASS called SCSS, Read more on the benefits of SASS here.

One Editor that I have been using occasionally is Sublime Text and while it’s not my favorite it is a great text editor.

After manually changing the syntax mode from plain text to CSS on all of my SASS files I had a look for a package. I found that Sublime Text supports many languages and supports some of TextMate syntax highlighting files.

Then I did some hacking and was able to add the SCSS extension with little trouble at all.

Follow these steps:

Preferences > Browse Packages

Download sublime-text-haml-sass from Github and copy the two folders into the Package folder.

Open the SASS folder, Under Syntax’s open up SASS.tmLanguage

Save, restart Sublime Text and Enjoy!

HTML5 takes one more step towards completion with a snazzy new logo, Read more at the W3 Site.

This has been one of my favorite finds this year, I was able to use it on my portfolio as well as the Vision Creative site. The reason it was so attractive over some other jQuery options was its ease of use and its flexibility.

Gilbert Pellegrom made the script easy to use, adapt, customize, and style. Its documentation is straight to the point and applicable.

http://nivo.dev7studios.com/

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http://www.dba-co.com/pen