WE ARE PLEASED to present an excerpt from Sass For Web Designers by Dan Cederholm, available now from A Book Apart.
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Category: A List Apart
From pixels to prose, coding to content.
Flat UI and Forms
by JESSICA ENDERS
Though some decry flat user interfaces as pure fashion, or as the obvious response to skeuomorphic trends, many designers have embraced the flat approach because the reduction in visual styling (such as gradients, drop shadows, and borders) creates interfaces that feel simpler and cleaner. Trouble is, most flat UIs are built with a focus on the provision of content, with transactional components (i.e., forms) receiving very little attention. So what happens when flat UIs and forms collide? User experiences can, and often do, suffer. Keep your flat forms from failing by using controlled redundancy to communicate difference.
Mastering Digital Project Momentum
by PERRY HEWITT
Digital projects begin in high spirits and tip quickly into miscommunication and crisis. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Extend your early kickoff meeting harmony throughout the life of your projects. By understanding your client’s organizational drivers and key players before the sticky note sessions even begin, you can establish the momentum needed to keep the extended team focused on goals. And by managing stakeholder communications throughout the job, you can avoid land mines, save time and effort in the long run, and deliver a project that satisfies stakeholders, agency, and users alike.
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Research Engine Optimization
IN ISSUE No. 381 of A List Apart for people who make websites:
Connected UX
by AARRON WALTER
Your inbox overflows with customer emails suggesting features and improvements. Instead of benefiting, you feel overwhelmed by an unmanageable deluge. You conduct usability tests, user interviews, and competitive analyses, creating and sharing key insights. Yet within months, what you learned has been lost, forgotten, or ignored by someone in a different department. What if you could sift, store, and share all your customer learning in a way that breaks down silos, preserves and amplifies insights, and turns everyone in your organization into a researcher? MailChimp’s user experience director Aarron Walter tells how his team did it. You can, too.
Seeing the Elephant: Defragmenting User Research
by LOU ROSENFELD
Silos: good for grain, awful for understanding customer behavior. Just as we favor the research tools that we find familiar and comfortable, large organizations often use research methods that reflect their own internal selection biases. As a result, they miss out on detecting (and confirming) interesting patterns that emerge concurrently from different research silos. And they likely won’t learn something new and important. IA thought leader Lou Rosenfeld explains how balance, cadence, conversation, and perspective provide a framework enabling your research teams to think across silos and achieve powerful insights even senior leadership can understand.
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ALA Summer Reading
AS PUBLISHER of A List Apart for people who make websites, I’m delighted to present our second annual ALA Summer Reading Issue—a deep pool of editor’s picks from the recent archives of A List Apart, sprinkled with some of our favorite outside links.
If you’re designing, developing, strategizing, or creating content for today’s multi-device web, these are the articles you need to read.
Same as last year, this issue is also available as a Readlist, suitable for beach reading on Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Readmill, or other ebook reader. So what are you waiting for? Dive in!
Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart
IN TODAY’S A List Apart for people who make websites, we are pleased to present…
Designing for Services Beyond the Screen
by ANDY POLAINE
You redesign the website for an airline, but who is designing the check-in machines, the CRM systems used by call center staff, the print materials, or the policies the cabin crew must adhere to? Like it or not, these channels are part of the overall user experience. Your website or mobile app might be great on its own, but customers experience services in totality, and base their judgments on how well everything works together. Learn to design beyond the screen. By creating visual and tangible artifacts that can be experienced and tested, you can build a bridge between business and design.
Don’t Poke the Bear: Creating Content for Sensitive Situations
by KATE KIEFER LEE
Delivering bad news is hard, but it’s part of life and business. We notify customers when we’re out of a product they want to buy, and we send warnings when people violate our companies’ terms of service. God forbid we have to send a system alert because our database was hacked, affecting every one of our users. But these things happen to the best of us. Can you be the bearer of bad news in a way that respects your customers? Learn how to create empathetic content for tricky situations, and shape your internal culture to foster human values of support, respect, and empathy.
Illustration: Kevin Cornell
WE INTRODUCE new web design skills and share design business growth strategies in Issue No. 373 of A List Apart for people who make websites:
Hack Your Maps
by YOUNG HAHN
Ever taken apart a digital map? Worked with a map as a critical part of your design? Developed tricks, hacks, workarounds, or progressive enhancements for maps? Walk through a design process to implement a modern-day web map. Let’s make maps part of the collective conversation we have as designers.
Growing Your Design Business
by JASON BLUMER
If you want to grow in a sustainable, satisfying way, then you need to pay attention to how you’re growing, not just how much. After all, a bigger company isn’t necessarily a better one. Let’s look at four common pitfalls of growth in the design industry, and how to avoid them.
Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart.
IN EPISODE No. 86 of The Big Web Show, I interview Monkey Do studio’s Michael Pick and Tim Murtaugh.
Mike, Tim, and I discuss the A List Apart redesign, responsive images and type, CSS Zen Garden, organic design processes, the future of CMS systems, designing a food truck app, and more.
TIM MURTAUGH has been building web sites since 1997 and specializes in delivering standards-based HTML5/CSS templates. His eye for design and serious affinity for clean code allow him to painlessly integrate his templates into larger systems without sacrificing user experience or aesthetics. Tim started in the non-profit world, moved on to start-ups, shifted to an agency, upgraded to publishing, and from thence: Monkey Do. Tim can be found on Twitter at @murtaugh.
MICHAEL PICK approaches web design from the perspective of both art director and front-end developer. He primarily creates clean and concise design systems for websites, but is also known to get his hands dirty with Flash, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript development. Over the years he has worked as a cog in a large agency, an in-house art director, and a humble freelancer, and has picked up a few awards along the way. He holds a BD in Communication Design from NSCAD in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Mike tweets as @mikepick.
This episode of The Big Web Show is sponsored by Shutterstock.com. Get 30% off any package with discount code “BIGWEBSHOW3.”
IN ISSUE No. 72 of A List Apart for people who make websites:
“Like”-able Content: Spread Your Message with Third-Party Metadata
by CLINTON FORRY
Spread your content and control its appearance on Facebook and Twitter. Use third-party metadata tools (Facebook OG, Twitter Cards) without feeling dirty.
Material Honesty on the Web
by KEVIN GOLDMAN
Kevin Goldman forecasts increased longevity for our work and our careers if we apply the principles of material honesty to our digital world.
Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart
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ALA 371: Performance is All
IMPROVE UX through front-end performance, and front-end performance through symbol fonts, in Issue No. 371 of A List Apart:
Improving UX Through Front-End Performance
by LARA SWANSON
Adding half a second to a search results page can decrease traffic and ad revenues by 20 percent, says a Google study. For every additional 100 milliseconds of load time, sales decrease by 1 percent, Amazon finds. Users expect pages to load in two seconds—and after three seconds, up to 40 percent will simply leave. The message is clear: we must make performance optimization a fundamental part of how we design, build, and test every site we create—for every device. Design for performance; measure the results.
The Era of Symbol Fonts
by BRIAN SUDA
Welcome to the third epoch in web performance optimization: symbol fonts. Everything from bullets and arrows to feed and social media icons can now be bundled into a single, tiny font file that can be cached and rendered at various sizes without needing multiple images or colors. This has the same caching and file size benefits as a CSS sprite, plus additional benefits we’re only now realizing with high-resolution displays. Discover the advantages and explore the challenges you’ll encounter when using a symbol font.
More From A List Apart
- Better Navigation Through Proprioception – CENNYDD BOWLES on UX & DESIGN
- W3C is Getting Some Work Done – THE W3C on WEB STANDARDS
- Give a crap. Don’t give a fuck. – KAREN MCGRANE on CONTENT
- Font Hinting and the Future of Responsive Typography – NICK SHERMAN on TYPOGRAPHY
- The Flirty Medium – FERTILE MEDIUM by DEREK POWAZEK
- W3C in the Wild – THE W3C on WEB STANDARDS
- The Future is Unevenly Superdistributed – DAVID SLEIGHT on NEW-SCHOOL PUBLISHING
- Looking Beyond User-Centered Design – CENNYDD BOWLES on UX & DESIGN
- …and of course A BLOG APART
As Always…
ON JANUARY 25, for the fifth time since 1998, we overhauled A List Apart, the periodical for people who make websites. In addition to its traditional well-vetted articles, the new 5.0 model sports fresh streams of content in a responsive format designed by Mike Pick and Tim Murtaugh. If you are just joining us, here are some of the highlights from the first ten days:
Issue No. 368
- A List Apart 5.0 – an A List Apart article by JZ. A tour of strategic highlights, a glimpse into the design process, and a promise of things to come.
- What We Learned in 2012, shared by some of A List Apart’s authors and readers.
- More Articles – hundreds of illuminating insights into the design, development, and content arts.
Columns
We’ve introduced opinion columns by some of the smartest people we know in this industry. They’ll appear between issues at the rate of one or two per week.
- Looking Beyond User-Centered Design – an A List Apart column by Cennydd Bowles: “To treat design as a science is to retreat to the illusory safety of numbers, where designers are mostly seen as agents of skewing the odds in your favor. This can start a race to the bottom…”
- Picture Yourself in a Boat on a River – an A List Apart column by Derek Powazek: “Welcome to Fertile Medium, an advice column for people who live online. Each edition, I’ll take a question from you about living and building social spaces online, and do my best to answer.”
- Windows on the Web – an A List Apart column by Karen McGrane: “It’s time to stop imagining that smartphones, tablets, and desktops are containers that each hold their own content, optimized for a particular browsing or reading experience. Users don’t think of it that way. Instead, users imagine that each device is its own window onto the web.”
Blog
- On Alt Text – an A List Apart blog post by JZ. A few sentences that generated a great deal of controversy in the accessibility community.
- More Thoughts About Blockquotes than are Strictly Required – an A List Apart blog post by Tim Murtaugh. Markup geeks, here is your meat.
- Why Are Links Blue? – an A List Apart blog post by JZ on the eternal question.
Thanks and Praise
Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart
In A List Apart Issue No. 367, Peter-Paul Koch, Lyza Danger Gardner, Luke Wroblewski, and Stephanie Rieger explain why Apple’s new iPad Mini creates a vexing situation for designers and developers who create flexible, multi-device experiences.
Each week, new devices appear with varying screen sizes, pixel densities, input types, and more. As developers and designers, we agree to use standards to mark up, style, and program what we create. Browser makers in turn agree to support those standards and set defaults appropriately, so we can hold up our end of the deal. This agreement has never been more important.
That’s why it hurts when a device or browser maker does something that goes against our agreement—especially when they’re a visible and trusted friend of the web like Apple. Read Vexing Viewports and contribute to the discussion.
This issue of the magazine also marks the departure of Jason Santa Maria as creative director after seven years of brilliant design and support.
Jason’s elegant redesign of A List Apart and its brand in 2005, together with the master stroke of bringing in Kevin Cornell as illustrator, brought the magazine new fame, new readers, and new respect. Over seven great years, his attention to detail, lack of pretension, and cheerful, can-do attitude has made working on ALA a pleasure. Jason was also a key member of the strategic team that envisioned ALA’s upcoming content expansion—about which, more will be revealed when the site relaunches in January.
Jason will continue at ALA as a contributing writer and as designer of A Book Apart (“brief books for people who make websites”), of which he is also a co-founder.
IN ISSUE No. 366 of A List Apart for people who make websites:
Designing Contracts for the XXI Century
by VERONICA PICCIAFUOCO
What’s the ugliest part of client/designer relations? Why, the contract, of course. Redesign yours to reach better, faster, more amiable and more equitable business agreements.
Translation is UX
by ANTOINE LEFEUVRE
While good localization boosts conversion rates, bad or partial translation may ruin a user experience, giving people an uneasy feeling about the whole company. If we care equally about all our users, it’s time we learn what it takes to get it right.
Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart
IT’S A Karen McGrane world! Today, as A Book Apart unveils Karen McGrane’s amazing new Content Strategy for Mobile, the entirety of A List Apart Issue No. 364 is dedicated to Karen and her vision for future-friendly web content:
Uncle Sam Wants You (to Optimize Your Content for Mobile)
Thirty-one percent of Americans who access the internet from a mobile device say that’s the way they always or mostly go online. For this group, if your content doesn’t exist on mobile, it doesn’t exist at all. The U.S. government has responded with a broad initiative to make federal website content mobile-friendly. Karen McGrane explains why this matters—and what you can learn from it.
Your Content, Now Mobile
Making your content mobile-ready isn’t easy, but if you take the time now to examine your content and structure it for maximum flexibility and reuse, you’ll have stripped away all the bad, irrelevant bits, and be better prepared the next time a new gadget rolls around. This excerpt from Karen McGrane’s new book, Content Strategy for Mobile, will help you get started.
Help Hurricane Sandy relief efforts
Fifteen percent of sales of Karen McGrane’s Content Strategy for Mobile and other A Book Apart books sold today will go to the Red Cross in its effort to aid victims of Hurricane Sandy.
IN A VERY special issue of A List Apart for people who make websites, Paul Robert Lloyd asks us to put the “design” back in “responsive design” and seek out a genuine web aesthetic. And Dave Rupert shares ways to be thoughtful, not knee-jerk, about high-pixel-density displays, in Mo’ Pixels Mo’ Problems.
Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart
IN ISSUE No. 361 of A List Apart for people who make websites: Envision better business models for digital newspapers and magazines in What Ate the Periodical? A Primer for Web Geeks by David Sleight. Then test your site in game console browsers and prepare for devices that haven’t been invented yet in Anna Debenham’s aptly titled Testing Websites in Game Console Browsers. Happy testing, designing, and strategizing!