A List Apart has posted the second annual Survey For People Who Make Websites, an attempt to gain and analyze information about web professional’s demographics, qualifications, salary, and more. I took it, and you should, too. Visit site »
Besides the afore mentioned piece from Ms. Bolton, there’s also a great piece from Mr. Boulton in the latest A List Apart. Mark talks about fostering ideas. He notes that the brilliant moment of creative inspiration is rarely a great idea in and of itself — it needs to be honed and fostered, and he presents some suggest on ways to facilitate that process. Visit site »
My good buddy Boltron has a great little piece in the latest ALA about writing a style guide for interface design. Style guides are commonly used for more overarching brand guidelines, but much less commonly address interface design for digital products — which is a shame, because they’re really very appropriate for many organizations, especially larger ones who have several different teams doing this kind of work (like, oh, I dunno…the company Jina works for). Visit site »
Pepi Ronalds makes the very valid point that while copywriters are great, what many web projects really need is a good editor. Employing a talented editor can help avoid the way-too-common problem that is delayed content. Visit site »
Flickr’s George Oates has a great piece on A List Apart about building community around your site — something that Flickr has done as well as anyone. Visit site »
EveryBlock takes over A List Apart for an issue, with Wilson Miner’s awesome piece on using web standards to create data visualizations like bar charts and sparklines, and Paul Smith showing you how to roll your own custom mapping interface. Great issue. Visit site »
Jeremy and Jeffrey have a bit of a shoot-out regarding the IE version targeting mechanism in the latest ALA. For what it’s worth, I come drown more on Jeremy’s side of this one — the version targeting was a good idea; defaulting to the IE7 rendering engine was not. But, I also think this is ultimately not that big a deal. All we have to do is add a single meta tag to our documents, and all is well. No, we shouldn’t have to, but we do, and it will take us no time at all to do it. I just don’t see this as the end of the world. The only part I disagree with Jeremy on is that MS’s plan is “doomed to fail.” It’s not. Yes, people will object to adding the meta tag, but they’ll do it anyway, because the alternative is writing pages for the IE7 rendering engine. Visit site »
Lachlan Hunt has a nice introduction to HTML 5 over at ALA. At this point, I’m pretty much convinced that HTML 5 is the future of our medium (not XHTML). If you’re not up on the latest good, give this article a read. Visit site »
Zeldman’s latest article at A List Apart shows (yet again) why he is still the industry thought-leader in an industry full of thought-leaders. A really great peice on the current state of our profession. Visit site »
Richard, who continues to be one of web typography’s biggest assets, has an ALA article that’s all about sizing type. He evaluates many different ways of sizing type, demonstrating the results of each across several browsers (including when text is resized by users). He ultimately concludes than an em-based approach is best. I would agree with this completely. He also notes in his addendum that the math needed to use this approach can get complicated, especially with deeply-nested elements.
In the typography workshop I’ve done a few times now, I’ve come to much the same conclusion. If you want the absolute best, most ideal way to size type, using ems is the way to go — but it will take you more time and patience, because of the math. Sizing with pixels is definitely easier, but also definitely not as ideal. You’ll have to evaluate the trade-offs and decide what’s appropriate for a given project. Visit site »
Bronwyn Jones, who is an amazing writer and a joy to work with, has a really great piece at ALA wherein she discusses how the design processes applies to writing, just as it does to visual goodness, IA, and so forth. Go read it. Visit site »
I wrote a shot piece for A List Apart on how the concept of frameworks can apply to designers, and specifically to CSS. We hear about frameworks all the time these days, but the concept is usually relegated to programmers doing JavaScript or server-side scripting. It turns out a good set of abstracted CSS idioms can also be very effective in speeding up your web design process. Visit site »
A really nice article by Andy Rutledge on contrast and it’s relationship to information hierarchy and meaning. These are really core, central principles o graphics design that you probably already know, but Andy lays them out really nicely.
If I were a jackass, I’d publicly wonder why, if contrast is so important, all text on Andy’s personal site is bold. But I’m not a jackass. :) Visit site »
Wilson Miner’s first A List Apart article has been posted, just in time for me to cop all the ideas for use in my upcoming workshop on web typography in London.
Wilson’s been working on this for quite some time, and it shows. The topic — aligning text to a baseline grid — is something I’ve been working on a lot myself lately. It’s not quite as simple on the web as it ought to be, but Wilson shows you how it can be done with the minimal amount of pain. And the result — well, the result is just a much more professional-looking page. It really makes a big difference.
Wilson ends the article with a note on sizing text in pixels, which bring me to a slightly related topic. Did you know you can actually resize text set in pixels with IE6? Yup, you can. You can have turn on the “Ignore font sizes…” option in the accessibility dialog, but it can be done. This led me to wonder (again) how much responsibility should fall on users (especially those with unique needs) to learn their tools. In a comment on Roger’s site, I said this:
I have neck and back problems, myself. Because of that, I have to buy a decent chair and take the time to configure it for the optimal support. If I don’t, I’ll end up in pain when I’m reading a book at my desk. If I choose to sit in a crappy chair, or I choose not to configure my chair the way that is best for me, or I simply don’t learn how my chair works — whose fault is that? I’d say it’s my fault. You can maybe make an argument that it’s the chair manufacturer’s fault, because they didn’t make it easy enough for me to use my chair properly. But I don’t see any way in hell you can blame it on the book I’m reading. Do you?
Go read Wilson’s article. It’s really great. Visit site »
Aaron Gustafson (who is a helluva nice guy, and super smart to boot) has a nice piece on ALA which deals largely with sites that require JavaScript. Aaron seems to advocate that one should never require JavaScript in their web app, but rather use it only as an enhancement to improve the UI for that visitors with JavaScript enabled (and this, coming from a JavaScript guy).
I don’t quite agree with Aaron here. I believe there are cases where it’s fair to require JavaScript in a web app. We make all kinds of techniqual requirements for desktop apps (you must have x amount of RAM, you must have such-and-such video card, etc.) , and I don’t see why it should be any different online.
That having been said, we should only make these requirements in cases where the app simply isn’t possible with them — which is definitely not the case in the examples Aaron uses in the article.
Overall, I agree with the sentiment that we should always try to make our apps work without JavaScript. But, I also think there are cases where that simply isn’t possible. Visit site »
Nice piece by Daniel Mall on using Flash to automate image effects (and other things, too!) in otherwise-HTML pages. I’m so happy to see more and more interplay of Flash and web standards. Us standards-aware designers really need to stop shunning Flash — it’s great technology that does some pretty amazing things for us, many of which we could never do otherwise. Visit site »
A great article by Ethan Marcotte on how we need to redefine the message we use in web standards evangelism. He touches on two things that baffle my mind. First, I don’t understand why anyone would ever validate someone else’s code and then speak publicly about the errors they find. If you do that, you’re being an asshole. Period. Validation is a process for you to do on your code, so as to help you avoid the timesink that is working with broken code later — using invalid code will especially kill you when you go to add DOM scripting or CSS to the page. Don’t validate other people’s code. It’s assholish. Second, he mentions how some CMSes are still spewing tag-soup all over our web. I find this, frankly, absurd. If your CMS that doesn’t allow you 100%, full control over its output via a template system of some sort, you’ve got to find a way off of that thing. Any CMS that doesn’t give you full control of the output is not worth anyone’s time. Visit site »
There are approximately 1,342,973 different methods for embedding you SWF files in (X)HTML pages. Ask web-standards oriented developers which is best, and you’ll get approximately 1,342,974 answers. This article does a nice job of breaking down the differences between the most popular methods. Visit site »
Lawrence’s own Ben Henick has a very, very nice piece on the upfront planning and design that goes into a website. While’s there sometimes to be said for a 37signals-style “just jump in and go for it” approach, there’s a lot of vale in proper planning, too. There’s a balance to be struck, here. Visit site »
A nice piece by Rob Swan that is loosely related to my latest blog post. He reminds us that maybe…just maybe…the client is right sometimes. :) Visit site »