TODAY, TWO invaluable contributors to A List Apart move on, and a new member joins our ranks:

Aaron Gustafson (@aarongustafson), author of Adaptive Web Design (the clearest, most beautiful explanation of progressive enhancement I’ve ever read) and nearly a dozen brilliant A List Apart articles, has been a technical editor at A List Apart for six exciting and formative years.

Daniel Mall (@danielmall) has written three great ALA articles and served as A List Apart technical editor almost as long as Aaron.

Both gentlemen have had a profound and lasting impact on the nature and quality of A List Apart’s content. With the publication of today’s ALA issue, both gentlemen move on.

Aaron is the founder of Web Standards Sherpa (“journeying towards best web practices”) and Easy Designs LLC; co-founder of Retreats 4 Geeks; and manager of The Web Standards Project.

Dan is a former interactive designer for Happy Cog’s Philadelphia studio, former design director at Big Spaceship in Brooklyn, co-founder of Typedia and swfIR, and singer/keyboard player for contemporary-Christian band Four24. I can’t tell you what he is doing next — he has sworn me to secrecy — but trust me, it will be awesome.

Over a long career marked by extraordinary collaborators, Aaron and Dan are two of the smartest, and most talented people I’ve had the pleasure to work with. They are also friends. This isn’t goodbye, fellas.

JOINING US today as technical editor is Mat Marquis (@wilto). He marks his entrance into A List Apart’s world via this morning’s stunning article, Responsive Images: How They Almost Worked and What We Need.

Mat is a designer-slash-developer working at Filament Group in Boston. Mat is a member of the jQuery Mobile team, an active member of the open source community, and enjoys a complicated relationship with the now-defunct HTML5 “dialog” tag.

Welcome, Wilto!

Filed under: A List Apart, Acclaim, Design, people

FREELANCERS AND STUDIO HEADS, learn what your rates say about your brand, and discover how to make more money by raising your rate strategically.

A List Apart: Pricing Strategy for Creatives by JASON BLUMER.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart Magazine.

Filed under: A List Apart, business, Design

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RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGNERS, don’t miss Mat Marquis’ essential article in today’s A LIST APART, for people who make websites: Responsive Images: How they Almost Worked and What We Need. Mat shows why responsive images as we currently use them don’t quite cut it – and shares a way forward that involves the creation of a shiny new HTML element.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart Magazine.

Filed under: A List Apart, Design, Layout, Responsibility, Responsive Web Design

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In a triple issue of A List Apart for people who make websites, it’s time for designers to seize the day! Transcend mobile platform differences, harness the power of an open-source front-end toolkit, and band together to change the world:

An Important Time for Design

by CAMERON KOCZON

Cameron Koczon says designers have now been given a blank check—one that lets us band together as a community to change the way design is perceived; change the way products are built; and quite possibly change the world.

Building Twitter Bootstrap

by MARK OTTO

Mark Otto, the co-creator of Bootstrap, sheds light on how and why Bootstrap was made, the processes used to create it, and how it has grown as a design system.

A Pixel Identity Crisis

by SCOTT KELLUM

The pixel has long been the atomic particle of screen based design: a knowable, concrete unit of measurement. But layouts based on the hardware pixel are fast becoming an endangered species. Scott Kellum shows how math and media queries can keep you sane and help you design consistently across platforms.

Thanks

This is Mandy Brown‘s last issue as an editor. Mandy has brought a lot of great thinking to ALA; she will be missed. Mandy will continue as editor of A Book Apart.

Illustrations by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart

Filed under: A List Apart

CSS’ simplicity has always been one of its most welcome features. But as our sites and apps get bigger and become more complex, and target a wider range of devices and screen sizes, this simplicity—so welcome as we first started to move away from font tags and table-based layouts—has become a liability.

Fortunately, a few years ago developers Hampton Catlin and Nathan Weizenbaum created a new style sheet syntax with features to help make our increasingly complex CSS easier to write and manage—and then used a preprocessor to translate the new smart syntax into the old, dumb CSS that browsers understand.

Learn how Sass (“syntactically awesome style sheets”) can help simplify the creation, updating, and maintenance of powerful sites and apps.

A List Apart: Articles: Getting Started with Sass.

Illustration: Kevin Cornell

Filed under: A List Apart, Browsers, Code, CSS, Design

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THIS WEEK some friends launched Contents Magazine. Last night other friends threw a party to announce the new (free) Readability. Every day, around the world, hundreds of thousands of web people make magic, working in a digital medium that sometimes perplexes my brilliant engineer father and would have seemed like witchcraft to my grandmother, may she rest in peace.

The web is the most disruptive, empowering invention since, well, I don’t know. It helps ordinary people topple dictators or just comparison shop. We, the people who make websites, are responsible for this shamanistic creation, and we’ve been doing this work for two decades. Yet in all this time, nobody in the mainstream world seems to have noticed. Oh, they notice when Google challenges Facebook for world supremacy. And they noticed when Twitter helped bring about the glorious Arab Spring. But they don’t know jack about us, the people who do this work, and they don’t care.

If anyone is going to compile data about us and sift meaningful analysis from that data, it’s going to be we ourselves. The boot-strappers, the self-taught HTML wonder kids. You and me.

And that is why, as I have every year since 2007, I once more ask you to take ten minutes and complete the survey for people who make websites. Do it now.

I thank you, and you’ll thank yourself later.

For the curious, here are the ALA survey findings from 2007–2010:

• A List Apart Survey Findings 2007
• A List Apart Survey Findings 2008
• A List Apart Survey Findings 2009
• A List Apart Survey Findings 2010

Filed under: A List Apart, Survey

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BANISH THE INNER CRITIC that blocks your creativity and tear down the wall between you and your client that design buzzwords create. It’s easy with help from Issue No. 335 of A List Apart for people who make websites:

Banishing Your Inner Critic

by Denise Jacobs

Everybody has one: the inner critic that tells you you’re just faking it, that others have more talent, that you’ll never achieve the success you seek. The inner critic is an unconscious deterrent that stands between the seeds of great ideas and the fruits of achievement, making you hate your designs, giving you “writer’s block” as your deadline looms, keeping you stuck in a project’s initial thinking stage because something isn’t quite right. Denise Jacobs anatomizes and shows how to quash your inner critic, giving you the mental space and energy to let your talent emerge.

Demystifying Design

by Jeff Gothelf

Mystifying design with jargon only we understand makes us feel like heroes and creates a sense of job security. But it also creates an “us and them” atmosphere which excludes non-designers, obscures the true value of design, and generates antagonism when only cooperation will yield the best product. By revealing our process and inviting others into our world, we can create a team that is invested in the success of our work, and deliver better design. Jeff Gothelf discusses the steps we can take to increase the value of our practice and of ourselves as practitioners.

Online since 1998, Happy Cog’s A List Apart Magazine explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices. Illustration by Kevin Cornell.

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AS EVERY WEB DESIGNER not living under a rock hopefully already knows, The Boston Globe has had a responsive redesign at the hands of some of today’s best designers and developers:

The spare Globe website has a responsive design that adapts to different window sizes, browsers and devices, and it has a built-in Instapaper-type feature that saves articles for reading off various devices on the subway. The overhaul has incorporated the talents of Boston design firms Filament Group, and Upstatement, as well as a large internal team, and pre-empts the need to build separate apps for each device.—New York Observer

As the first responsive redesign of a “real” website (i.e. a large, corporately financed, widely read newspaper site rather than some designer’s blog), the site has the potential to raise public awareness of this flexible, standards-based, multi-platform and user-focused web design approach, and deepen perceptions of its legitimacy, much as Mike Davidson’s standards-based redesign of ESPN.com in 2003 helped convince nonbelievers to take a second look at designing with web standards:

In a major step in the evolution of website design, the Boston Globe relaunched their site today using a Responsive Design approach. For a consistent experience across mobile and desktop browsers, they redesigned the site to add and remove columns to the layout based on the width of your browser window.

This marks the first major, high-traffic, content-heavy website to adopt a responsive design. The lead consultant behind the project is none other than Ethan Marcotte, the designer who wrote the book on responsive design. Much as ESPN changed the way we worked by being one of the first to launch a fully CSS driven site a decade ago, the Boston Globe’s redesign has the potential to completely alter the way we approach web design.—Beaconfire Wire

More work remains to be done. Some sections of the paper have not yet converted, and some site architecture has yet to be refreshed, so it is too early to call the overhaul a complete success. But it is clear that Ethan Marcotte, author of Responsive Web Design and creator of responsive design, together with the geniuses at Filament Group, Upstatement, and the Globe’s internal design/development team have managed to work beautifully together and to solve design problems some of us don’t even know exist.

Congratulations to the Globe for its vision and these designers and developers for their brilliant work.

Filed under: A Book Apart, A List Apart, Design, Ethan Marcotte, Layout, Responsive Web Design, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards

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IN ISSUE NO. 334 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:

Marry Your Clients: Learn to keep the client/agency relationship warm and passionate over time.

Being Human is Good Business: Turn word of mouth into your strongest brand asset through genuine, personalized, compassionate customer service.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart Magazine.

Filed under: A List Apart, business, Design

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DATA IS AN invaluable tool for web designers making decisions about the user experience. A/B tests, or split tests, are one of the easiest ways to measure the effect of different design, content, or functionality, helping you create high-performing user experience elements to implement across your site. Lara Swanson shows how to make sure you avoid red herrings and reach statistically significant results in Issue No. 333 of A List Apart for people who make websites.

A List Apart: Articles: A Primer on A/B Testing.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart Magazine.

Filed under: A List Apart

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