10.01.12 |
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I agreed with the design and development philosophy laid out by Dave Rupert in the latest issue of A List Apart:
Those of us involved in CSS and Web Standards groups are well acquainted with the concept of progressive enhancement. It’s important we stick to our collective guns on this. Pixels, whether in terms of device real estate or device density, should be treated as an enhancement or feature that some browsers have and others do not. Build a strong baseline of support, then optimize as necessary. In fact, learning how to properly construct a progressively enhanced website can save you (and your clients) lots of time down the line.
His core methodology for handling responsive images is simple: Rely on CSS first, SVG and icon fonts secondarily with the picturefill as a final solution.
09.25.12 |
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I really enjoyed this extended design post by Mark Boulton. What’s awesome is the specificity here: detailed recommendations for characters per line to maximize readability, how to avoid hanging punctuation and much more.
09.18.12 |
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Upstatement is a small web firm that assisted with the massive Boston Globe switch to a fully responsive design. In this blog post they go through some of their choices made: workflow, tools, break point decisions and more.
Biggest surprise for me came with their primary design program: InDesign. Not Photoshop or Illustrator? Strange at first, but their reasoning appears pretty sound.
09.14.12 |
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Jess Cartner-Morley, writing for The Guardian:
Remodelling the grand structure into a bricks-and-mortar version of a website is a clear statement to the world that, for Burberry, digital now comes first.
Christopher Bailey, the firm’s chief creative officer, said: “We designed it like that because when you’re shopping at home online, you are on the sofa with your credit card. You don’t stand up and queue.”…
For Bailey, the primacy of the digital experience is self-evident. “I find it weird that anyone would find it weird [digital-first thinking].
“Most of us are very digital in our daily lives now. Burberry is a young team and this is instinctive to us. To the younger generation who are coming into adulthood now, this is all they know.”
Hats off to Burberry for getting the message loud and clear. It’s still shocking that so many high end labels refuse to put their stock online or have such a poor branding experience on their respective websites. There’s an amazing opportunity with this market, both for web designers and developers.
09.11.12 |
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Now that I’m teaching a front end web development class over at General Assembly, I’ve been researching HTML and CSS tutorial sites to get ideas for class. Most are pretty bad, but Don’t Fear the Internet stood out. Lots of really simple, well done videos to get web newbies on the right track. Love their intro:
Are you a print designer, photographer, fine-artist, or general creative person? Do you have a shitty website that you slapped together yourself in Dreamweaver in that ONE web design class that you took in college? Do you not have a site at all because you’ve been waiting two years for your cousin to put it together for you? Well, we’re here to help.
09.07.12 |
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If you’re a web designer, developer, work in a web company or are just curious about the industry in general, ALA‘s annual survey is essential reading. It’s pretty heavily favored by responses from developers (39.4%) and designers (25.1%) yet pretty indicative of the industry as a whole.
09.05.12 |
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TechCrunch posts a fairly troubling article on what’s become commonplace in Facebook land: UI slickness to make it more likely that you’ll allow apps to access your personal information.
09.04.12 |
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Designer Lukas Mathis:
Lots of designers seem reluctant to rely on buttons when designing user interfaces for touchscreens, opting to go with more unusual interactions instead. Sure, gestures are sexy. They’re also easy, allowing you to remove clutter from your user interface.
But buttons are discoverable. They can have labels that describe what they do. Everybody knows how to use them. They just work. It’s why we use them to turn on the lights, instead of installing Clappers everywhere.
Exactly. When I developed my little web based weather app Blue Drop gestures were tempting. But when you want something as straightforward as possible, it’s hard to beat simple button taps.
08.29.12 |
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Smashing Magazine contrasts the mobile strategy by both candidates in this year’s presidential election. Mitt Romney’s camp goes with a separate optimized mobile only site, while Obama leans on responsive design. Which is better, and why? I liked the level of detail author Brad Frost brings to this piece, a regular highlight of Smashing Mag articles.
08.24.12 |
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A great read over at Smashing Magazine; designer Reda Lemeden has a comprehensive overview of the tools available for front end designers and developers to account for responsive, “retina friendly” imagery on their web sites. From device-pixel-ratio to SVG and Javascript, it’s all here.