Since the very beginning of our magazine we had only one goal in mind: helping out fellows designers and developers, smashing them with the information that will make their lives easier. Since then we have explored a number of different ideas and topics in our magazine. Some of them were extremely popular, some haven’t interested our audience at all. Probably the first “tipping” article has been the post 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without which appeared in January 2007.
This was the point when we realized that what we do is actually considered valuable by thousands, literally thousands, of designers and web-developers across the globe. We have received numerous e-mails then. Some of people who contacted us then still have contact with us, support us and send us useful stuff which they consider to be useful for our readers. This first tipping point brought us a lot of backlinks and strengthened our community which we’ve started to build in the beginning of 2007.
With the post Data Visualization: Modern Approaches we’ve managed to achieve something we have never achieved before: gain support for our research and respect for the work we invested in it. This post has become popular in scientific circles, in academia, professors have linked to us in their blogs, popular bloggers have mentioned us in their articles, even some article in New York Times has mentioned us. It was August 2007.
We realized then that we shouldn’t be afraid of rather complex issues and topics, research them being hard and stubborn, find relationships, identify important issues, think about them, evaluate them and come up with our personal opinion about what is best and what should be avoided. Today we still continue to research intensively, identify ideas, evaluate them and present them to our readers. This is how our Monday Inspiration series was born – and we have 28 issues so far.
The third tipping point was the post Wanted: Your 404 Pages where we’ve asked our readers to create beautiful, functional and user-friendly 404 error pages for their own web-sites. Afterwards we’ve collected the most creative, usable and elegant solutions. This post was a tipping point, because we’ve finally managed to involve our community in making the Web better, prettier, more useful and more effective. We continue to do it today. And we’ll make sure our readers will have something to do in the future as well. ;-)
