Freek.dev

PHPStorm is the application I'm working in most of the time. So I want it to be as pretty as it can be. Right out the box PHPStorm contains two bat shit ugly themes: the default white one and the slightly better Darcula.

Fortunately for all PHPStorm users out there long time Laravel community member Dayle Rees showed us the way to the light! A few years ago he created an abundance of colour schemes that are a pleasure to the eye. You can view all the schemes on the demo page.

More recently Dayle created a new colour scheme called Material Peacock. This is what it looks like:

Very nice! Almost everywhere I open up PHPStorm people ask what that theme is, so I'm certainly not the only one who digs it. At this year's PHP UK Conference a PHPStorm-engineer from Jetbrains said it was the most beautiful theme he ever saw in his own product.

You find instructions on how to install the theme (made by Chris Magnussen) and the colour scheme in Dayle's Material Peacock repo on GitHub.

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... information architecture is the creation of a structure for a website, application, or other project, that allows us to understand where we are as users, and where the information we want is in relation to our position. Information architecture results in the creation of site maps, hierarchies, categorizations, navigation, and metadata.

Information architecture is a task often shared by designers, developers, and content strategists. But regardless of who takes on the task, IA is a field of its own, with influences, tools, and resources that are worth investigation. In this article we’ll discuss what information architecture really is, and why it’s a valuable aspect of the user experience process.

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We think syntax highlighting makes the structure of code easier to understand. But as it stands, we highlight the obvious (like the word function) and leave most of the content in black. Rather than highlighting the differences between currentIndex and the keyword function, we could highlight the difference between currentIndex and randomIndex. Here’s what that might look like:

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Thomas Byttebier wrote down some of his thoughts on copywriting.

... copywriting is an often overlooked aspect of UI design. That’s a serious shortcoming, because if you come to think of it: most of an app’s user interface simply is text. Hide the icons, imagery or colors and every app or web site is basically just letters and numbers. There may be some data in there, a significant part of it is UI. It would be stupid not to take excellent care of it.

Be sure to also check out his posts on icons and typography.

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... any CMS managing any sizeable amount of data needs to support trees. Anything else will lead to an unmanageable mess. However, systems with smaller sets of content, especially with a smaller group of authors, can get away with tagging as well. Facetting only really works well with a system that stores content that is highly structured at least on a per node type basis.

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A nice collection of input field animations:

http://tympanus.net/Development/TextInputEffects/

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BLOKK is a font for quick mock-ups and wireframing for clients who do not understand latin.

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Fontastic is a service for creating custom font icons.

http://fontastic.me

They offer hosting of the icons as well so you can manage them in one place.

http://fontastic.ghost.io/your-icons-in-the-cloud

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