Making websites is tons of fun, but sometimes you need to break free and do something a bit unusual. That’s what Paul Lewisis will be doing today. He’ll be using the excellent Three.js engine to create an interactive metallic ball. As you click and drag the ball distorts and then slowly settles back to its original shape. To do this he’ll be covering spring physics, 3D vectors and ray casting all in an effort to create a compelling and fun interactive experience.

User interface design patterns are solutions to common design challenges, such as navigating around an app, listing data or providing feedback to users. Mobile apps and sites have unique UI design requirements because, compared to their desktop counterparts, they’re used in smaller screens and, at least with today’s modern mobile devices, rely on fingers instead of a keyboard and mouse as input mechanisms.

Responsive web design requires a very different way of thinking about layout that is both challenging and exciting. The art of layout was already complex enough for the centuries that it was defined by fixed elements, now things are becoming exponentially more complicated as layouts become increasingly adaptive.

The February edition of what’s new for web designers and developers by Webdesigner Depot includes new web apps, frameworks, jQuery plugins, icons, productivity tools, responsive design resources, and some really great new fonts. Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.

In this tutorial we'll discus how to integrate the Facebook like box into the sidebar and make it responsive. As it uses an iFrame, it has to have a set pixel width and that means it won’t behave how we want it to as it can’t grow or shrink. Turns out, there’s an easy solution with a bit of CSS and a div to enclose the iFrame.

Clean, simple web designs have become a popular trend. This article will cover the subject through a two-part discussion. First, we’ll talk about a few traits that clean designs tend to have in common. Secondly, we will share some tricks and techniques that can be helpful when trying to achieve a clean design.

Responsive design isn’t a fad that arose because of a cool CSS technique, it’s an answer to a problem. Always remember that and constantly ask yourself whether or not you’re really adequately addressing that problem. If you’re using copy and paste to insert your media query breakpoints, your solution might be flawed.

Smaller touch targets are harder for users to hit than larger ones. When you’re designing mobile interfaces, it’s best to make your targets big so that they’re easy for users to tap. But exactly how big should you make them to give the best ease of use to the majority of your users? Many mobile developers have wondered this, and most have turned to the user interface guidelines provided by the platform developer for the answer.

We’re going to begin to wrap up our tutorial on creating a responsive website this week by creating a secondary services page to feature the necessary, and important, content of our site.  Keeping a sites layout visually appealing is a crucial aspect of keeping a visitor on your site.

Learn how to improve your responsive website layouts with 5 useful techniques: Hiding content, collapsing content, scaling images, responsive images, and type resizing. In this article, you learn five additional techniques that will help you build great responsive layouts. You'll put each technique into practice as you build on the responsive layout created in the previous article.