Web Accessibility: An Overview for Businesses and Consultants
Before becoming a software engineer, I worked as an attorney and a public policy consultant. Web accessibility is right at the intersection of my interest in law, public policy, and tech....
View ArticleExtract Embedded Text from PDFs with Poppler in Ruby
A recent client request had us adding an archive of magazine issues dating back to the 1980s. Pretty straightforward stuff, with the hiccup that they wanted the magazine content to be searchable....
View ArticleSplitting PDFs with HexaPDF
On a recent client project of ours, we built out the ability to split large PDF files into smaller subsets based on page numbers. The UI was simple and (hopefully) user-friendly, and the code that...
View ArticleWebinar Tips from a One-Woman Marketing Team
At Viget, we’ve always loved a good event. Whether it’s a team lunch around our big tables, a community Meetup with neighboring businesses, or one of our epic quarterly TTTs, since our founding, we’ve...
View ArticleLittle Inklings: How to Become a Better Illustrator
Hi, I'm an Inkling. This is an Inkling. They’re great at visually portraying simple advice on specific subjects, but they aren’t the most articulate in their explanations. But, luckily, as I’ve grown...
View ArticleThe Balance of Design Requirements and Tech Constraints
The process of designing software and apps is always a balance between complete creative freedom, business requirements, and technical constraints. Designers are rarely creating UI without any...
View ArticleEmbeddable Web Applications with Shadow DOM
I recently had a fun problem to solve. We needed an embedable web app that a client could either pull from a CDN or install via NPM. Originally, we reached for the tried and true React, but size...
View ArticleHow to Make Your Web Content Accessible
Do you know the difference between decorative, informative, and functional images and what that means for writing good alt text? Are you aware that audio descriptions are required for all live and...
View ArticleSpeaking the Same Language
At Viget we work with dozens of different clients across a broad set of industries and challenges — which means design systems are often crucial to our engagements. A design system is a set of...
View ArticleYour Website Is Never Done
The Golden Gate Bridge is 8,981 miles long. There are more than 10 million square feet of steel that need to be constantly repainted. A few dozen painters battle against the elements to maintain this...
View ArticleHow much does a website cost? Anywhere from $50 to $5,000,000+
So you’re in the market for a new website, whether you’re redesigning an existing site or creating an entirely new one. The question is: how much should it cost? Well, the answer to that question, as...
View ArticleHunting for the Hunt for Bigfoot: Pointless Week 2022
What if there’s a connection between Bigfoot and UFOs? What might Martians think of humans if they encountered us in the woods late at night? Do Martians have museums? These questions — plus Domino's...
View ArticleWedding Websites from a Developer's Perspective
Planning a wedding takes more time than you think. For many, the wedding website reflects your style and needs to be easy to use for yourself and your guests. When my fiancée and I started planning...
View ArticleWeb Scraping for Vaccine Availability
The problem at hand At the beginning of 2021, I was part of the Viget team tasked with creating a website that displayed availabilities/appointments for COVID vaccines in Massachusetts. As a whole,...
View ArticleLocal Docker Best Practices
Here at Viget, Docker has become an indispensable tool for local development. We build and maintain a ton of apps across the team, running different stacks and versions, and being able to package up a...
View ArticleEternal Struggle of the Systemless Design File: Getting Into the Habit of...
The more powerful Figma gets, the more it feels like there are “right” ways to go about things. Components used to be too brittle to be reliably usable, and we all kinda accepted that any robust...
View ArticlePlan a Killer Party with Thrillr
If you’re familiar with Viget, you may be familiar with Pointless Corp. Neither pointless nor an actual corporation, this 48-hour hackathon is our chance to hit pause on client projects and have some...
View ArticleKeeping the Early-Stage Startup Nimble
In March of 2020, a person I follow on Twitter, let’s call her Lex, caught COVID-19. Well, a lot of the people that I follow in New York and the west coast caught the virus in the early weeks, but...
View ArticleHow to Position Your Design System Team For Success
Today’s most valuable companies excel in creating excellent experiences across the entire customer journey. Consider the process of searching for an AirBnB, managing your account on the mobile app,...
View ArticlePandoc: A Tool I Use and Like
Today I want to talk to you about one of my favorite command-line tools, Pandoc. From the project website: If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army...
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