Making Pretty Things on the Web
I’ve been spending a lot more time doing front end web things, and found the following to be quite helpful:
Avoiding Helvetica and Arial
- Google has a great hosted collection of OpenType Embeddable web fonts and an API available:Â https://developers.google.com/webfonts/
Visualization
- D3 is fantastic: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/1256572
- Rickshaw is a convenient abstraction of D3 for basic graphs: http://code.shutterstock.com/rickshaw/
- Google Charts for something less flexible and pretty, but well baked:Â https://developers.google.com/chart/
UI Frameworks
- Twitter’s Bootstrap framework is great for layout and basic components: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
-  JQuery (and JQuery UI) are staples for DOM manipulation and AJAX: http://jquery.com/ , http://jqueryui.com/
- LESS for more dynamic CSS: http://lesscss.org/
- TimeAgo, a JQuery plugin for fuzzy dates:Â http://timeago.yarp.com/
- Google also hosts a bunch of the above for you here:Â https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/devguide?hl=fr