In Issue No. 303 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, we question the received wisdom about FAQs, and learn that, in the land of the colorblind, contrast is king.

Contrast is King
by LESLIE JENSEN-INMAN

Being colorblind doesn’t mean not seeing color. It means seeing it differently. If colorblindness challenges the colorblind, it also challenges designers. Some of us think designing sites that are colorblind-friendly means sticking with black and white, or close to it. But the opposite is true. Using contrast effectively not only differentiates our site’s design from others, it’s the essential ingredient that can make our content accessible to every viewer, including the colorblind. By understanding contrast, we can create websites that unabashedly revel in color.

Infrequently Asked Questions of FAQs
by R. STEPHEN GRACEY

We take FAQs for granted as part of our sites’ content, but do they really work, or are they a band-aid for poor content? FAQ-hater R. Stephen Gracey explores the history and usability of FAQs. Learn how to collect, track, and analyze real user questions, sales inquiries, and support requests—and use the insights gained thereby to improve your site’s content, not just to write a FAQ. Find out when FAQs are an appropriate part of your content strategy, and discover how to ensure that your FAQ is doing all it should to help your customers.

Illustration © by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart

Filed under: A List Apart, Accessibility, content, content strategy, Design, User Experience, UX

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Coming soon to a web store near you.

Filed under: Design, Products, Publications, Standards, Web Design, Web Standards

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Brandon Grotesque is a sans serif family of six weights plus matching italics, designed by Hannes von Döhren.

Influenced by the geometric-style sans serif faces that were popular during the 1920s and 30s, the fonts are based on geometric forms that have been optically corrected for better legibility. Brandon Grotesque has a functional look with a warm touch.

The Regular weight is free through April 15.

Filed under: Fonts, type

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Content wants to be free like communism works, like sex is just for fun, like a few days of snow disprove global warming. That the web’s existence makes all content free is a Brooklyn Bridge most of us have bought, but it just ain’t true, as Erin Kissane makes clear in Content is Expensive at Incisive.nu.

Go there, read it, and understand why (just like newspaper reporting and books) web content costs money and must be paid for or subsidized. Either that or it must serve some secondary benefit that brings in the bucks: for instance, a free web design blog might lead to paying web design gigs for its author, or so they say.

Then read Part Two: Paying For It, where Kissane considers each of these methods of subsidizing content “and how they relate to our work as content and editorial strategists.”

(Of course there will always be web content that is purely a labor of love. That is why we love the web. And it’s kind of sad, quite frankly, that you almost can’t write “Shit My Dad Says” or create a LOLcats page purely out of love any more; that even stuff tossed off as a laugh ends up being “monetized.” By the way, whoever came up with that word should be deathetized by beatingization. But I digress.)

Filed under: content, content strategy, Marketing, Publications, Publishing

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TypographyShop presents the first design in its new series, the Ten Commandments of George Lois, created with the approval and cooperation of the hall of fame art director himself.

The new shirt reads: “Great ideas can’t be tested. Only mediocre ideas can be tested.” Sport it at your next client meeting. Wear it, live it.

Younger readers may ask, “Who is George Lois?” Typography Shop supplies a mini-bio:

From his groundbreaking work at Doyle Dane Bernbach to his controversial Esquire covers to “I want my MTV,” George Lois has carved a career sans equal in the advertising industry. … George chose this design from among our treatments. Set in Franklin Gothic No. 2, designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1902 and News Gothic, a related 1908 Benton creation.

Look for more George Lois shirts coming soon from Typography Shop.

Full disclosure: there will be Zeldman shirts coming as well.

Filed under: art direction, Ideas, Products

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Presumably in order to avoid having to pay the child model and secure a release, Google deliberately blurred the Gap Kid model’s face on the giant outdoor Gap Kids poster before uploading this photo (and hundreds of seamlessly interwoven related photos) to Google Maps Street View.

It’s hard to say if the human beings on the street have had their features blurred as well.

Does Google go to this kind of trouble with every poster on every block of every city in the world? They must.

I bet their arms get tired.

Related: Recently, some friends and I have noticed news photos, and TV news video, where people’s faces are perfectly clear, but corporate logos have been deliberately blurred or pixelated. This is the world we live in.

Google Maps Street View blurs model’s face in poster

Filed under: Advertising, Google, privacy

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Continuing with our “data, and what we can learn from it” theme, here are A List Apart‘s four most popular individual pages this week (excluding the home page, with 178,270 page views). Pay particular attention to the publication dates:

What do these stats tell us?

For one thing, they tell us that for every reader who viewed A List Apart as a topical periodical publication—that is, for each person who read one of its latest articles—there were two readers who used the magazine as a source of evergreen web design and development content.

Put another way, for every person who uses A List Apart like a magazine or blog, there are two who use it as an encyclopedia of best practices in coding and design.

We’re looking at only seven days worth of statistics, here, but the pattern is consistent from week to week. What it tells the editors is that we’re not in the quick-hit eyeballs and ad sales business (but we knew that), we’re in the professional education business. It reminds us, if we needed reminding, that the mission stated on our Contribute page is still true:

We want to change the way our readers work, whether that means introducing a revolutionary CSS technique with dozens of potential applications, challenging the design community to ditch bad practices, or refuting common wisdom about, say, screen readers.

As we go about soliciting and reviewing potential ALA content, we must keep uppermost in our minds how people use our site, because its value lies in the hardiness of our best articles. Web professionals trust us to have the information they need to do their jobs better and deliver the best possible experience to their clients’ customers (and thus the best value to their clients). These stats reinforce what we already know, and help us stay true to our core purpose and values.

This emphasis on the evergreen over the topical also helps us as we strategize means of deepening our relationship with the web design community and add or change features to do so.

I’m barely scratching the surface of what the data tells us, but the little I have teased out so far is already very useful—and that’s the point. The more you look, the more you can learn. What’s in your logs?

Filed under: A List Apart, content strategy, data, Publications, Publishing, Stats

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Those who say web users don’t spend time reading web pages haven’t met readers like you folks. According to Google Analytics, zeldman.com fans spent five minutes, fifty-five seconds reading the relatively short post, “My Love/Hate Affair With Typekit.” If Jakob Nielsen is right, and readers take in no more than 20% of the words on a page, y’all took a hella long time to read 190 words.

But generalized findings like Jakob’s are merely one data point in a universe of possibilities. Every site is a special snowflake, with stats and usage patterns all its own. Faced with an unfamiliar shopping site, we may indeed give it little more than a cursory scan before closing the window and returning to Google to fine-tune the search that led us there. But when we visit a familiar site to read, then read we do—as anyone with a good blog and a decent set of analytics tools can tell you.

Here are a few recent average times readers spent poring over various zeldman.com posts:

Morals of the story:

1. Don’t use Peter’s stats to paint Paul.
2. If you want people to spend time reading your site, give them better content.

Filed under: Community, content, content strategy, data, Design, Stats, Zeldman, zeldman.com

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When the young Bobby Womack told Sam Cooke he didn’t understand [Bob] Dylan’s vocal style, Cooke explained that: “from now on, it’s not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It’s going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth.”

via Bob Dylan – Wikipedia

Filed under: Culture, Design

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I dreamed about you again last night.

I guess it will pass.

Filed under: dreams, glamorous

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