ALA 186: Triple Issue
In a triple issue of A List Apart, for people who make websites:
A Better Image Rotator by Dan Benjamin: The first image rotator made it easy to generate a random image on a web page, even if you had never worked with PHP before. The new, more powerful (but still dead easy) version uses a simple configuration file to create custom links, alt tags, titles, and even CSS styles for each image. Plus it handles differently sized images without a hiccup. Enjoy!
Enhance Usability by Highlighting Search Terms by Brian Suda and Matt Riggott: Google’s cache offers users a copy of your website with their search terms highlighted. You can do the same thing and make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for — whether they're coming from an external search engine or your own site search — by making their search terms easy to spot.
Better Invoices for Better Business by Kevin Potts: Invoices that obfuscate information, incorrectly state terms or arrive incomplete can be a massive headache for all parties. Strategic timing and attractive presentation are also important, as they can help “soften the blow” by making your invoice seem less like a stale demand for money and more like a friendly letter.
Previously in The Daily Report...
- Safer than Kabul
- Citicorp Center is declared a terror target, and I’m on my way to a meeting a few blocks north of it.
- Only defenestrate...
- Douglas Bowman’s “Throwing Tables Out the Window” is a compelling crash course and proof of concept on the business benefits of designing with web standards.
- The New Samaritans
- Robert Andrews summarizes an emerging “good samaritan” phenomenon in which independent web designer/developers, frustrated by a hard-to-use or inaccessible site, voluntarily rework the site in question, “right under embarrassed proprietors’ noses.” The work, typically performed for free, most often focuses on front-end improvements to key top-level pages. Such makeovers form a roadmap for turning a confusing or inaccessible or bloated site into a more usable, accessible, and streamlined one. Yet rarely do potential corporate benefactors take advantage of the free work done on their behalf...
- Faces We Love: Heine’s Tribute
- This family of eight fonts, legible at even the smallest sizes, is perfect for designs requiring an aged or antique feeling.
- Architectural Digest vs. This Old House
- How vs. why in web design. (ALA No. 184 and drop-down menus.) When web designers discuss their craft, they almost always focus on how to do a thing, rather than what things should or should not be done. As an industry, we are more like “This Old House” than Architectural Digest.
- Production for Use
- To understand and evaluate any design, you must consider the use context for which it was created. A case study and lessons therein. The beginnings of a broader approach to understanding web and interface design (including the relative importance of web standards).
- Clarendon is the new Helvetica
- The quirky slab serif has been quietly undergoing a renaissance similar to that enjoyed by Helvetica in the 1990s.