The Secret Handshake is a fabulous project, aimed at helping young designers (18–25) find their way into the industry.

You should always quantify the advice you take based on who’s giving it to you, and The Secret Handshake — set up by Bright Bright Great — offers advice from some hugely successful industry names, as well professionals who’ve looked through thousands of job applications.

The advice is filterable based on résumés, application processes and organizing your portfolio. There’s also a series of events, although to date these have mostly taken place in Bright Bright Great’s backyard of Chicago.

With advice like this, any would-be designer would be wise to spend some time browsing the site. And if you’re already established, why not try contributing some of your own experience? 

Do you disagree with any of this advice? What advice would you contribute? Let us know in the comments.

Beautiful Samantha Script Font – only $17!

Whatever we might think of Edward Snowden’s release of classified documents detailing the NSA’s snooping on America’s - well, everyone’s - communications, at least we all now know what’s going on.

Sure, most of us on the coding side of the screen already knew the deal. I haven’t found a programmer who was surprised by the news that our emails, text messages, and phone calls are being logged and stored. If anything, most of them are surprised that the general public seems so shocked. What were people thinking? That Google just gives us services like Gmail for free? We pay for this stuff - not with cash, but with our data.

None of our data may be so interesting in itself, but when it’s combined with everyone else’s it reveals a whole lot of information about us. Using factor analysis and other statistical techniques, big data can identify members of a population who might be about to purchase a new car, trying to have a baby, or even about to change political affiliations. No logic is required; the people and machines analyzing big data sets don’t care about why one set of data points might indicate some other data point; they only care that it does.

As long as corporations from Facebook to Twitter are collecting and using this data, why shouldn’t government get in on the act? Instead of looking for potential car buyers or new mothers, however, government is looking for potential terrorists. Or at least that’s what they say. In reality, the sample size of known terrorists is so small that it’s essentially impossible to draw statistical conclusions about their data. The only way to know what they’re saying is to listen to what they’re saying. Luckily (or terrifyingly, depending on your perspective) voice calls can be scanned for keywords as easily as a text document. The conversation can then be parsed by humans to determine whether there’s a threat.

The big news here, if any, is that now this stuff is public knowledge. Most of my friends and colleagues knew about government surveillance of digital communications, already. Some former students had even told me about installing switches at cell phone companies to be used for government snooping. Others helped write the database architecture for facilities that store voicemail long after it has been “deleted” by its recipients. Most of them were relieved that the information they were afraid to leak themselves is finally out.

But they aren’t the only ones who had foreknowledge of this recent leak. Pretty much anybody who knows how code works was prepared for this sort of revelation. Because becoming code fluent is about more than simply knowing enough javascript to get a job. It’s a way to become familiar with the operating system on which the human drama is playing itself out.

Moreover, the better you understand the programs and platforms you use - and the permanence of almost everything you do online - the better equipped you will be to choose what the data watchers know about you, and what they don’t.

May the digitally illiterate proceed at their own risk. Once again, you have been warned.

This is part one in a two-part series on Projects Gone Bad. Next week we’ll look at how to avoid this problem and keep projects running smoothly. This week, we’ll look at what do when projects have already taken a turn for the worst.

We’ve all been there. What started out as a great project ends up souring. Maybe it’s your fault, maybe it’s your client’s fault. Whatever the reason, you find yourself with a client who is unhappy and no longer has faith in you.

Just in case you think this is uncommon, it’s not. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will. If you are a freelancer or an entrepreneur, you need to prepare for those times when projects don’t go as planned.

Maybe your in that place right now. You have a project that has gone bad, your client is unhappy and the trust between you is damaged. What now?

Be Honest

It may seem like obvious advice, but you would be surprised at how tempting is to shift the blame. Self-preservation is a strong motivator and before we know it, we’ve rationalized a million reasons why it’s not our fault, why we’re not to blame and how we can weasel our way out of the problem.

But no one likes to hear excuses or finger-pointing. In fact, this will only cause more alienation and loss of trust. Honesty is the single best way to salvage a project gone bad. Be honest about what has gone wrong and take responsibility for it.

Have a Solution

Unless you want your client to panic, don’t just state the problem and leave them to figure it out. After being honest and taking responsibility, offer a solution. Or better yet, offer several solutions. Be creative and think of ways to turn a problem into an opportunity. If you don’t have a solution yet, you at least need to have ideas for the next steps involved in reaching a resolution. Clients will respect this more than you know.

Put Your Client’s Needs Above Your Own

Be willing to do what it takes to make the problem right, even if it’s not your fault. I once had a project go bad because I failed to set the right expectations. The client kept adding more and more work to the scope and, not wanting to disappoint them, I agreed to it all without extending our timeline. Needless to say, I soon found myself in a position where I was over-committed and unable complete the work.

Even though the project was more than 80 percent complete, I chose to take a drastic cut in my payment and help them find someone who could complete the project. Technically, I could have fought for 80 percent of my fee, but instead I chose to put their needs ahead of my own. A lot of trust was built in that moment and, to this day, that client still comes back to me for additional projects.

Conclusion

Be honest, have a solution and put your client’s needs above your own. We’ve all been on the receiving end of bad customer experiences. Think about a time when this happened to you. What did the person or business do that made you feel worse or made you feel valued? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

The post Projects Gone Bad Part 1: What Now? appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

The following is a guest post by Ben Terrill. Ben is co-author of the e-book Tablet Web Design Best Practices and is the VP of Customer Success at Mobify, where he works on big client sites like British Telecom, Starbucks and Expedia.

The tablet revolution is upon us. New data from Adobe shows that global websites now get more traffic from tablets than smartphones. And yet, a standard desktop site doesn’t work very well on a tablet. The typical desktop 12-pixel font is too small, as are buttons. Images aren’t sharp and, worst of all, some features simply don’t work.

The good news is you don’t have to completely revamp your website. A working desktop site is a great place to start building an effective tablet site. In this article, I’ll share six techniques from Mobify’s latest ebook Tablet Web Design Best Practices for significantly improving desktop websites on tablets.

Go 100% Touch Friendly

One of the best ways to make your desktop website sing on a tablet is to make it touch friendly. If website elements look as though they can be swiped, tapped or pinched, then you’ll need to build in that functionality to make your website tablet ready.

Consider adding elements like carousels and accordions, drawers and panels. Mobify has a variety of open source JavaScript modules you can use for this purpose.

Editor's note: We recently covered the JavaScript for touch-friendly sliders. I also think Royal Slider is a nice slider that is touch-friendly and also responsive.

Bump Up Default Font Size and Line Height

Don’t make users double tap or pinch your content. Instead, increase the font size to at least 16px. You can also use a line height of 1.5 to allow for breathing room between text on content-rich pages, as Mashable does in the example below. Remember, text must always be legible, no matter how a user holds their tablet.

Be Finger Friendly

Our fingers are much clumsier than a cursor, so bumping up the spacing between different touch targets will improve user accuracy. And, make those touch targets big! Our fingertips typically require upwards of 44px to comfortably fit within a touch target so design for that.

Enable Contextual Keyboards

The great thing about software keyboards is that they’re dynamic. That is, you can change their layout to suit context. For instance, if your input field requires an email address, the keyboard should feature the ‘@’ symbol, underscores and hyphens. If the user is asked to input a phone number, provide a numeric keypad. Try using the following input types on form fields:

• Standard keyboard | <input type="text" />
• URL parameters | <input type="url" />
• Email-specific keyboard | <input type="email" />
• Numeric keyboard | <input type="text" pattern="[0-9]*" />

Editor's note: I also detailed data about HTML5 input attributes/types/elements. It's getting a smidge old, but still useful.

Font-Based Icons for the Win

Resolutions and pixel densities on tablet screens are far greater than on desktop and laptop screens. As a result, graphics can look pixelated if they’re not designed with high resolution screens in mind. For this reason, font-based icons are a good choice because they scale well on super high­ resolution displays; they’re easy to colour and shade using CSS; and they only require one HTTP request to download. Plus, you don’t have to deal with a sprite sheet.

Create your own icon font sets, or use existing sets like Font Awesome, glyphish, iconsweets, symbolset, or icnfnt.

Editor's note: I once did a massive roundup of icon fonts (which I still have to add to). I'm a fan of using these HTML techniques for adding them to the page, which keep them accessible. I'm also a fan of IcoMoon for the creating trimmed down, customized icon font sets.

Performance is Design

Modern web design techniques, like responsive design, can cripple website performance. Since 57% of users are likely to leave your website if it takes 3 seconds to load, performance considerations are critical. Some tips for improving mobile website performance include compressing images and concatenating CSS and JavaScript to reduce the number of HTTP requests and overall page size. With these fixes, you’ll notice significantly speedier page load time and happier, higher converting users. Use tools like Uglify, Sass, Compass and Mobify.js to automate performance improvements.

Editor's note: I cover some of these performance techniques and some others in #114: Let’s Do Simple Stuff to Make Our Websites Faster

Go Forth!

With these tablet transformation techniques in your toolbox, there’s no reason to get stressed out about not having a totally tablet-optimized website. For more ways to make your desktop site tablet friendly, read Mobify’s free ebook, Tablet Web Design Best Practices.

A Couple of Best Practices for Tablet-Friendly Design is a post from CSS-Tricks