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Australian designer Rob Morris
Some terrific design work here by Rob Morris. Love the grid and type work on this site.
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5 Sickening Habits of Mainstream Websites
> The big guys think that just because they entered in the game early, or because they have some popular print publication backing them up, they can get away with whatever they want.
It is, frankly, astonishing that any of these five habits are still tolerated by users in 2008.
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Flickr Developer Blog: Lessons Learned while Building an iPhone Site
Some nice tips and lessons-learned, here.
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2008 Election Maps
I’m with Kottke: The New York Times’ map was the best of the bunch in terms of both information design and aesthetics. These are fun to look at side-by-side.
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Jon Tan: @font-face in IE: Making Web Fonts Work
Jon has a good piece on @font-face, and specifically how to make it work in both IE and other browsers. Great stuff.
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typeface.js
sIFR-alike, written in JavaScript using
Visitcanvas. Looks pretty nice at a glance, if not as developed as sIFR. It’s certainly unfortunate that we still have to use these kind of hacks, but as long as we do, I’ll keep noting them here. -
web.without.words
Clever gallery of popular websites in wireframe form.
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Wilson Miner: Relative readability
Wilson’s great a thought-provoking piece on text size on the web, where he suggests that a 16px base size online is more or less equivalent to a 11pt size in print. He’s got some good evidence to back it up, and the discussion that follows is pretty interesting.
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A List Apart: Working From Home: The Readers Respond
A lot of really great tips for us WFH types, here.
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Jeff Croft at Web Directions South: Elegant web typography
The great folks at Web Directions have posted the slides and audio from my recent typography talk in Sydney. Enjoy!
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CSS Browser Selector
This seems like such a smart, elegant, simple solution to targeting browsers with CSS - I’m surprised no one thought of it before.
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John Allsopp: Ubiquitous web font embedding just got a step closer
John Allsopp has some really great thoughts on the trickier issues around embedding fonts in web pages. As you probably know, the real isn’t isn’t the technology, but rather the legalities and licensing. The reality is that font embedding is here (it’s supposed now by a few of the cutting edge browsers), and font foundries are just going to have to deal with it. There are several ways they can make money off it, if they’ll just get a little creative with their business model.
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Designer In The Spotlight: Emily Lewis
A nice interview with Emily Lewis, who I first met a year ago in Dallas and re-connected with in Atlanta a few weeks ago. She’s a passionate and talented web standards advocate with a lot to say. I like people with a lot to say. Check her out on Twitter, too.
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Wilson Miner redesign
Four score and seven years ago, there was a designer and blogger who went by the name “Wilson Miner,” and he was good (at both design and blogging). Then, he was swallowed up by some large company with a fruit for a name, never to be seen again. Today, he has resurfaced, with a new design for his personal site. And it is awesome. Love the classic 60s posters inspiration and the treatment of Wilson’s trademark green. Speaking of the green: check out the way everything on the page is opacity-driven, so that he can change the green to some other color with little to no effort.
“Little to no effort” is really important to guys who only blog once a year, it seems. :)
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CSS Browser Hacks For Firefox, Opera, Safari & Internet Explorer
A nice selection of CSS filters for many of today’s browsers. While I certainly advocate avoiding these kinds of hacks whenever possible, there are times when you really do need them. Via Inman.
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Dave Shea: Zoom
Dave chimes in on a topic that is very relevant to me lately. He says:
> I wonder whether designing around scaling text is still a skill we need to hold on to, and for how long.
I also wondered aloud whether we still need to be using relative unit for type in my typography talk in Sydney a couple weeks ago, and the Twitter haters came out of the woodwork to say that I didn’t care about accessibility and and I was “not thinking about about my fellow man.” It’ll be interesting to see how they react when Dave wonders the same thing.
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WebKit Web Inspector Redesign
Some really, really nice additions and changes to both the functionality and design of my favorite browser debugging tool.
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When can we stop talking about “supporting” certain browsers?
Even at a progressive, Web Standards-friendly agency like Blue Flavor, the topic of which browsers to “support” comes up. Clients ask us, “Will our site be supported by IE6?,” for example. And even in the Web Standards community, there’s still a lot of talk about “dropping support” for IE6, and the like.
But doesn’t this whole idea of browser “support” kind of go against what Web Standards is all about in the first place? Because of the way we build sites (and by we, I mean me, Blue Flavor, and most readers of this site), our projects inherently “support” every browser, from Lynx to Mosaic 1.0 to Netscape to IE to Safari to the no-name browser on your crappy flip phone.
And yet, we still talk about browser “support.” What we really mean when we ask if a site will “support,” say, IE6, is “will the site look the same in IE6 as it does in the latest and greatest browser?” But we all know this is a silly question. Of course it won’t. And what’s more, it shouldn’t.
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Jina Bolton: Make it modular
More great thoughts on markup and CSS coding practices, this time from my homey J.B., who I am (apparently) doing a world tour with this month.
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Raphaël: vector graphics JavaScript library
I got to chat with Dmitry Baranovskiy, the creator of Raphaël, at Web Directions South, and I was impressed with both him and his work. This JavaScript library is Really Smart Stuff™. I don’t think there’s any doubt that SVG, Canvas, and VML are part of the future of web graphics, and Raphaël is making it possible to use them today. Awesome.
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Natalie Downe: CSS Systems for writing maintainable CSS
Natalie (who, for the record, is one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met!) has some really great tips for writing CSS in her slides from a recent talk. Be sure to download the PDF version, which includes her notes. One of my favorite bits in here is her definition of the difference between a framework and a library. It may not be perfect, but it’s the best I’ve heard, especially as it relates to CSS frameworks (and God knows I’ve struggled to come up with a definition myself):
> I feel the need to de?ne what I call a framework. For me this is something that alters how you write HTML itself. This is different from a library, which simply provides individually reusable components.
This is a really solid definition (even if it means I’ve been using the word “framework” incorrectly), and it pretty well encapsulates the reason why I really liked Blueprint when it was released, and am not such a big fan anymore. When Blueprint first came out, it was much closer to the library side, wherein it didn’t define how you write your HTML (at least: not very much). Today, it requires you to liter your markup with tons of
divelements — and while this doesn’t do much real-world harm, it does sort of bother the aesthetics of us who grew up on web standards and best practices.As you might expect from something coming out of the Clearleft camp, Natalie’s CSS System presentation seems pretty focused on their usually-fluid-width, non-pixel-precise sort of design, but I think most of the concepts within can be tweaked to work for those of us who are more about the whole “make something in Photoshop and then make the browser version of it replicate that as closely as possible” approach.
Even though Natalie says she doesn’t like CSS frameworks, I think her CSS system approach actually has a lot in common with the idea of a framework (or library, or whatever you want to call it). In the end, the point of both is to come up with reusable, consistent development patterns that allow you to work in a way that’s more efficient, maintainable, and elegant.
People — especially those who seem to oppose the idea of frameworks for CSS — like to point out that CSS isn’t programming. Of course it’s not. But it is code. And it turns out that our programmer friends are a helluva lot better at managing code than most of us designers are. One of the main ways programmers manage code is to refactor things into a framework. And although not all of the framework concepts may translate well to CSS, the core idea of writing, storing, and maintaining your code in such a way that encourages reusability, offers “baked-in” browser compatibility, provides sensible defaults and hooks for overriding them, and keeps you from repeating yourself is smart stuff, and I’m glad to see other front-end developers finally starting to get on board.
As I talk to people who write CSS for a living, I’m constantly shocked at just how much people repeat themselves and make their life more difficult in the long run by not reusing code (and by “reusing,” I don’t mean copying-and-pasting).
Well done, Nat!
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Beautiful new city homepages / The EveryBlock Blog
Wonderful design work by Wilson Miner on the new EveryBlock city homepages.
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Five CSS design browser differences I can live with
Good stuff by Andy Clarke. I would suggest if you can’t live with these browser differences, you’re not really understanding the way modern CSS is supposed to work.
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Andy Clarke: Time to stop showing clients static design visuals
I totally agree with Andy that it makes a lot of sense to show clients HTML/CSS/JS prototypes rather than static visuals, but I’m not sure how to reconcile this with the needs of our clients, as well as our resources at Blue Flavor. For us, the trouble with interactive prototypes is twofold:
- Clients tend to want to see constant updates along the way. If we don’t show them anything until we’ve got an interactive prototype, they’re not going to be very happy.
- Getting all the way to an interactive prototype is a lot of work. If we get there, show it to clients, and it turns out they’re not happy with the direction, we have to re-do a ton of work. This is one of the main reasons we like to show a lot of progress along the way. If at any point the client isn’t satisfied, we can’t quickly change course without redoing a whole lot of work.
In short: I totally agree with Andy, but saying “we should do interactive prototypes instead of static design visuals,” is the easy part. Figuring out how to actually make that work within your business model is harder. If you can pull it off, awesome.
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Darren Jones: Don’t Sweat the Unsemantic Stuff
A really smart post on the “unsemantic” nature of CSS frameworks that deal with layout, by Darren Jones, who created the Sparkl framework. The best line in the article is this:
> Remember [layout class names] don’t add any semantic value, but your page doesn’t lose any semantics by having them either.
This is the point I wish people would remember. Class names aren’t actual semantics, they’re fake semantics. They’re just a way for you to add some useful hooks for scripts and styles to hang on (and possibly for other people to mash with, in the case of something like microformats). Validators, screen readers, browsers, and the like couldn’t give one iota of a damn what your class names are. Likewise, is it really worth getting bent out of shape about too many
divandspanelements? Remember, these elements were specifically designed to have no meaning. It doesn’t matter if there is onedivor five hundred, the net gain is no meaning.Sure, it makes sense to use less presentational class names whenever you can and to only use as many
Visitdivsas you need to, but if the aesthetics of your fake semantics and countingdivelements starts to overtake getting your design just right, on time and under budget, then I’d say your priorities are out of whack. -
Krylon redesign by Happy Cog
Really nice work by Dan Mall and our friends at Happy Cog. Love it.
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Two thousand twenty two
Today, it was brought to my attention that HTML 5 Editor Ian Hickson, in an August 27 interview with TechRepublic outlined a timetable for the “new” spec, which began life back in 2003. Hixie suggests HTML 5 will reach the “Proposed Recommendation” stage sometime in 2022. Go ahead, read it again. It’s not a typo. Two thousand twenty two.
I immediately stopped reading. Didn’t even bother with the rest of the interview. Why? Because it just doesn’t matter. The whole concept of web standards, which I once strongly advocated for, has now become so incredibly ridiculous as to be not even worth the time and attention of serious web designers and developers.
As I pointed out on Twitter today (much to the dismay of certain standardistas, who have previously asked me to name names instead of referring to a “shadowy cabal”): it ultimately doesn’t matter if HTML 5 is available next month, next year, or fifty years from now. Those of us who do real work in this industry know that the only thing that really matters is what specs and technologies are supported by the browsers real people use.
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CleverCSS
Quite interesting. Certainly the best implementation of dynamic CSS, including literals and the other typical functionality you see in these sots of things, that I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure if I could get into the habit of writing CSS this way, but it certainly would be pretty efficient if I could get myself into it. Hmm…cool stuff, even if I may never use it.
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Back to the great frameworks debate
Yeah, I’m going there. I want to talk about frameworks again. Bear with me…
I know I’ve discussed this topic at great length before, but it keeps coming up, and I still don’t have a very good understanding of all the positions people have taken on the topic. Last time I discussed this, I jumped to my own conclusions about why some people don’t like frameworks. This turned out to be a horrible idea, because people got on the defensive instead of trying to answer the simple questions I had asked. Let me be perfectly clear: I don’t care what your position is. If you don’t like frameworks, that’s fine. I’m just sincerely curious about why you don’t. I’m in no way trying to sell you on frameworks or tell you you’re wrong for not using them. I’m just trying to understand all sides. That’s what I do.
So, with that out of the way: if you’re not a fan of frameworks, I have some questions for you. I hope you’ll take the time to answer.
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Capital Radio
Wonderful radio station site from the talented team at GCap. Really nice from the bottom up — Django-based CMS, nice design, good content. I dig it. Congrats to Simon Willison, Robert Lofthouse, and whoever else was involved in this one.
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Matt Brett redesign
Matt has redesigned his personal site. It’s brown and pink, so you know I love it. Matt’s stuff is always full of great texture, good typography, and awesome little details. Check it out.
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Las Vegas Sun Weather
Really nice design work on The Las Vegas Sun’s new weather page. And of course, I’d be remiss to not point out that it’s Ellington and Django-powered. ;)
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Jon Tan: Typeface != Font
The difference between “typeface” and “font” is one of those things where you know it doesn’t really matter when people use them interchangeably, but when you know the difference, it still grates on your nerves to hear them used incorrectly. By the way, if I haven’t said it before: Jon Tan’s site has some of the best web typography around. Check it out.
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Zeldman on web design
From Jeremy Keith’s live blog of Jeffrey Zeldman’s talk at An Event Apart San Francisco:
> It’s hard being a web designer. The unmotivated need not apply. You have to constantly educate yourself. There are plenty of tutorials out there on using web design tools like Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, and so on. But teaching Excel is not the same as teaching business. Knowing how to use Photoshop and Illustrator doesn’t make you a web designer.
Yes. Yes. YES!
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Addictionary redesign by Bryan Veloso
An absolutely gorgeous design by Bryan here. Great typography, great simplicity in the colors. I love it all. Also, how about that product name? Addicitionary, for a social dictionary? Perfect. I read it three different ways: “A dictionary,” “Add dictionary,” and “Addicition-ary” (which I assume is the way it’s pronounced). Clever.
Also, see Bryan’s retrospective on the design.
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Jina Bolton: Sushi & Robots
My good buddy JB drops a new personal site on us. As you’d expect, it’s full of great typography and illustrative flourishes. Awesome job, Jina. Happy birthday, and I’ll see you in Sydney!
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WSJ: How to Create a Successful Web Site
Wow. It’s absolutely astonishing — and frankly, appalling — that the Wall Street Journal, a respected business publication, would pushing such a steaming load of shit as this article. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen something so incredibly stupid in a serious publication in my entire life. Wow. This really sums up everything that sucks about our industry.
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Small Talk with a Web Designer
By Cameron Adams. Freaking brilliant. Hilarious. And so true.
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Smashing Magazine: Top Ten Web Typography Sins
Probably nothing you don’t already know here, but they’re good reminders, nonetheless.
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An alternative to sIFR: Facelift Image Replacement
Looks interesting at a glance. I haven’t checked out the code, so I’m not sure. If you’re needing non-web fonts in sucky browsers, it may be worth looking into.
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with Simply Measured, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my past clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, Django, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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