ZingChart hopes to end the war between HTML5 and Flash in web-based charting:

Today we launched the first charting library that renders charts and graphs in both HTML5 <canvas> and Flash. Rather than join the Flash vs. <canvas> debate, we built a version that renders charts in both frameworks. With the recent launch of the iPad, we hope ZingChart Flash + HTML5 <canvas> helps the growing data visualization community focus on building great visualizations rather than worrying about compatibility.

For you visual learners and tinkerers, here’s the demo:

www.zingchart.com/flash-and-html5-canvas/

via ZingChart.

Next question: How accessible is it?

Filed under: Apple, Applications, apps, automattic, Compatibility, Design, Flash, HTML5

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Calling all ears! Calling all eyes! The Big Web Show is coming! The Big Web Show is coming!

Hosted by Dan Benjamin (creator of The Pipeline) and yours truly and produced by 5by5 Studios, The Big Web Show will be a lively panel discussion on all things web.

It will feature the kinds of topics we discuss here and at A List Apart: topics like the future of publishing and the future of advertising. Art direction online. Content strategy. Content curation. (By the way, whatever happened to editing?) Women and the web. Web fonts and web typography generally. CMS/platform shootouts. HTML5. CSS3. Client services. Product development. Online education. Web design education. Creating independent content. Building an audience. And much more.

With all the guests you hope we’ll get, and plenty you’d never think of.

The show begins within the next two weeks. More will be revealed soon. Keep watching the skies.

Filed under: Big Web Show, Design, hivelogic, Interviews, podcasts, The Profession, Web Design, Zeldman

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It’s only Wednesday but we already have our link of the week. Although they call it merely a “quick write-up” (and it is a fast read), iA’s mini-compendium of design insights before and after the appearance of the iPad at their office should be required reading for all web, app, and/or interaction designers.

In the equivalent of a breathlessly quick seminar presentation, iA discusses typographic resolution and feel; the effect of the device’s brilliant contrast on readability; the kitsch produced by rigorously adhering to Apple’s “make it 3D” guidelines; whether metaphors work; and more—all of it well worth far more than the little time it will take you to absorb.

In particular, I call your attention to the section entitled, “Interaction Design: So What Works?” Although intended as a guideline to producing well-tuned iPad apps, it also works splendidly as a mini-guide to creating better websites, much like Luke Wroblewski’s brilliant “Mobile First” presentation at last week’s An Event Apart, which carried a similar message:

1. The limited screen estate and the limited credit on the number of physical actions needed to complete one task (don’t make me swipe and touch too often), pushes the designer to create a dead simple information architecture and an elaborate an interaction design pattern with a minimal number of actions. This goes hand in hand with the economic rule of user interaction design: Minimize input, maximize output.
2. Since the smallest touch point for each operation is a circle of the size of a male index finger tip, we cannot cram thousands of features (or ads!) in the tight frame; we have to focus on the essential elements. Don’t waste screen estate and user attention on processing secondary functions.
3. We found that the iPad applications we designed, made it relatively easy to be translated back into websites. The iPad could prove to be a wonderful blue print to design web sites and applications. If it works on the iPad, with a few tweaks, it will work on a laptop.

Via iA » Designing for iPad: Reality Check.

Filed under: Apple, Applications, apps, architecture, Design, industry, Information architecture, ipad, Platforms, Usability, User Experience, UX, Web Design

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Around the world in ten layers with Coudal Partners: Ten designers in ten cities, fifteen minutes at a time. A single Photoshop file will circumnavigate the globe starting in Portland and ending in Tokyo with yours truly, Jeffrey Zeldman, providing the layer-by-layer commentary. Don’t miss this one, live Friday, starting at 2pm Chicago time.

Coudal Partners’ Layer Tennis presented by Adobe Creative Suite.

Filed under: Adobe, Community, creativity, Design, events, Fun, Ideas, Photoshop

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Apple has a typography desk. It is not exactly crowded with developers vying for every square centimetre, but it really exists. Have you ever heard of it? …

Then compare Microsoft, which has two divisions focussed on type and reading (Typography and Advanced Reading Technologies). Esteemed colleagues Simon Daniels and Kevin Larson are but two of many people with a high profile in the type business who work for Microsoft (in those departments respectively). MS Typo itself does a great deal of work. Apart from commissioning the confusable Microsoft C-fonts, the department does everything from creating box-drawing characters for teletext fonts to designing Liberian symbol systems….

As you’d expect, I urge Apple to get back into the business of type design. The chief lesson of the Web must be observed: Do what works and don’t do what doesn’t work.

Worth reading in its entirety, rereading, bookmarking, and sharing (especially with friends at Apple): Where Microsoft beats Apple on the Personal Weblog of Joe Clark, Toronto. Nobody does it better.

Filed under: Advocacy, Apple, Fonts, type

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Netdiver Magazine does a superb job of surfacing talent. Powagirrrls is their long-running series showcasing designing women. You could lose many hours here.

Meet women who rock the design industry.. with more than pink design!

See Netdiver Powagirrrls No. 20.

Filed under: Design

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And so do my iPhone and your iPad. All it took was a bit o’ the old Richard Fink syntax and a quick drive through the Font Squirrel @Font-Face Kit Generator (featuring Base 64 encoding and SVG generation) to bring the joy and wonder of fast, optimized, semi-bulletproof web fonts to Safari, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, iPhone, and Apple’s latest religious device.

Haven’t checked IE7, IE8, IE9, or iPad yet; photos welcome. (Post on Flickr and link here.)

What I learned:

☛ Even if manufacturer supplies “web font” versions with web license purchase, it’s better to roll your own web font files as long as this doesn’t violate the license.

Filed under: Accessibility, Advocacy, Apple, Applications, apps, art direction, Browsers, bugs, Code, Compatibility, CSS, Design, HTML, ipad, iphone, Layout, Real type on the web, Standards, State of the Web, The Essentials, Tools, W3C, Web Design, Web Standards, webfonts, webkit, webtype, zeldman.com

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Letterhead Love: The Chop Shop.

Little blue hat tip: I’m Just Creative, an identity design blog by Graham Smith.

Filed under: Design

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Our visually and behaviorally rich sites are about to lose precious Google juice, WebSiteOptimization.com reports in a new piece titled Page Speed Factored into Google Search Rankings:

Google’s addition of a page speed signal to its search rankings algorithm officially links performance with search engine marketing. The loading speed of a web page affects user psychology in a number of ways, and now it can effect its rankings as well.

This back-to-basics message catches us at a funny time in web design history.

“Make more of less” has long been the norm

Most of us who’ve designed sites for quite a while, and who consider ourselves user- and standards-focused, have traditionally designed sites that loaded faster than the competition. We did it by using caching technologies (CSS instead of table layouts, linked instead of inline JavaScript, and so on). For many, many years, we also did it by keeping images to a minimum, using system fonts instead of pictures of type, CSS colors instead of faux backgrounds, and so on.

As the web audience grew, heavily trafficked sites became even more restrictive in their decorative flourishes, whether they cared about web standards or not. Thus Google, while happily using bad CSS and markup, exerted monk-like discipline over its designers. Not only were images out, even such details as rounded corners were out, because the tiny images needed to facilitate rounded corners prior to CSS3 added a tenth of a kilobyte to page weight, and a tenth of a kilobyte multiplied by a billion users was too much.

Of late, we have grown fat

Yet in the past few years, as wideband became the norm, every mainstream site and its brother started acting as if bandwidth didn’t matter. Why use 1K of web form when you could use 100K of inline pseudo-Ajax? Why load a new page when you could load a lightbox instead?

Instead of medium-quality JPEGs with their unimportant details painstakingly blurred to shave KB, we started sticking high-quality PNG images on our sites.

As these bandwidth-luxuriant (and not always beautiful, needed, or useful) practices became commonplace on mainstream sites, many advanced, standards-focused web designers were experimenting with web fonts, CSS3 multiple backgrounds, full-page background images, and other devices to create semantic, structurally lean sites that were as rich (and heavy) as Flash sites.

So now we face a dilemma. As we continue to seduce viewers via large, multiple background images, image replacement, web fonts or sIFR, and so on, we may find our beautiful sites losing page rank.

Read the report and watch this space.

Filed under: CSS, Design, findability, Search, Site Optimization, The Essentials

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So I’ve wanted to use a condensed, bold Franklin typeface for my site’s headlines since, well, forever. So I bought Fontspring’s fine Franklin Gothic FS Demi Condensed and licensed it for @font-face use for a mere $2.99, an incomparable value.

It looks great in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, but not so nice in the latest version of Opera, where it resembles the inside-out test monkey in Cronenberg’s “The Fly.” (Okay, okay, it looks like a ransom note, but the monkey simile was more picturesque.)

And this, my friends, is why Typekit exists. Because even when you find a great font that’s optimized for screen display and can be licensed for CSS @font-face use, guess what? There is almost always some glitch or bug somewhere. And Typekit almost always seems to find and work around these bugs. It’s the kind of grueling task designers hate dealing with, and Typekit’s team loves solving.

If this were a client site, I’d switch to Typekit, or try licensing a different vendor’s Franklin, or (if neither of those options proved satisfactory) dump web fonts altogether and use Helvetica backed by Arial instead. But as this is zeldman.com, I’d rather nudge my friends at Opera to look into the problem and fix it. This will make browsing zeldman.com in Opera a somewhat weird experience, but hopefully it will help all Opera users in the long run.

Implementation Notes and Details

• I haven’t made an SVG version yet, so the web fonts don’t work in iPhone or iPad.
• iPhone and iPad see normal weight Helvetica instead of bold Helvetica, because if I leave “font-weight: bold” in the CSS declaration, Firefox double-bolds the font. This is not smart of Firefox. Fixed via technique below.
• In order to match the impact of the previous Helvetica/Arial bold, I boosted the font-size from 25px to 32px. (This also helps smooth the font. Web fonts need more help in this regard than system fonts.)
• Camino ignores @font-face and supports the first system font in the font stack, Helvetica Neue (correctly styled bold).

Update: Problem solved. See Opera Loves My Web Font.

Filed under: Browsers, bugs, State of the Web, The Essentials, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, webfonts, webkit, webtype

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