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A Book Apart Accessibility Advocacy Authoring Best practices books Design

Immersive Content and Usability

So little time, so many wonderful, evergreen titles. The A Book Apart library for people who design, write, and code ... in coffee mug format.

As the lines between our physical and digital surroundings continue to blur, it’s more important than ever to design usable and accessible content for our ever-expanding array of contexts.

In 2021, A Book Apart and I were delighted to bring you Preston So’s Voice Content and Usability, the definitive book on voice content, and A Book Apart’s first voice title.

Now, in 2023, we’re thrilled to present Preston’s brilliant follow-up, Immersive Content and Usability, coming April 18.

Armed with this book, you’ll create incisive and inclusive user-centered experiences across augmented, extended, and virtual realities, transforming the physical world into an exciting new canvas for content.

Pre-order now! https://abookapart.com/products/immersive-content-and-usability

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An Event Apart Appearances art direction better-know-a-speaker books Career conferences Design Designers Education events Genius glamorous Illustration industry Interviews New York City NYC Off My Lawn! speaking Stories Surviving Teaching The Profession UX Web Design Web Design History work

My Night With Essl

Mike Essl and I discuss his portfolio.
Mike Essl and I discuss his portfolio on Night 2 of An Event Apart Online Together Fall Summit.

Herewith, a scene from last night’s interview with legendary web & book designer (and Dean of The Cooper Union School of Art) Mike Essl, who shared his portfolio, career highlights, early web design history, and more. Fun!

If you get a chance to meet, work with, or learn from Mike, take it. He’s brilliant, hilarious, warmly human, and one of the most creative people you’ll ever have the good fortune to know. 

Mike Essl

So ended Day 2 of An Event Apart Online Together Fall Summit 2021. Day 3 begins in less than two hours. You can still join us … or watch later On Demand.

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books Stories

The Young Man from Proviso and His Monkey Friends Meet the Hamburglar

There was a young man from Proviso, California. He was a kind young man, and a smart young man, and he had three monkey friends: Provo, Rebozo, and Lobo. 

Provo, Rebozo, and Lobo were magical monkeys who could shrink down so small you could barely see them, or grow to full size, or anything in-between. Provo was pink, Rebozo was blue, and Lobo was purple. They wore fancy three-piece custom-tailored suits in bold colors that complemented and contrasted with the color of their fur. Pink Provo, for example, wore a blue suit with bright yellow piping on the collar and shiny green buttons.

The three monkeys resided inside magical bubbles, which could grow very big or very small, just as each monkey desired. The three bubbles were generally to be found in the top pocket of the Young Man’s excellent tweed jacket. To keep the bubbles from flying away, and protect the monkeys from prying hands, the top pocket of the Young Man’s excellent tweed jacket closed with a zipper, plus a button, plus three snaps. Nobody could open the pocket except the Young Man himself, and the monkeys, of course.

Now, Proviso, California, where the Young Man and his three monkeys hailed from, is a lovely place. But this Young Man had a yearning for adventure. So he left California and set out for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which he had always been told was a magical city of hills, rivers, and bridges.

And so it was that on a fine Spring day, the Young Man found himself strolling delightedly across a big yellow bridge that spanned a river between the South Hills of Pittsburgh and the old downtown business district.

And so delighted was this Young Man with the conversation he and his monkeys were having—for the monkeys’ voices were magical voices that the Young Man could hear even when the monkeys were at their smallest, and inside their bubbles, and securely snapped away in his top pocket—

So enraptured in conversation were the four friends, that they failed to notice as a stranger approached them from the opposite side of the river.

The stranger wore a black mask over his eyes, and a black cape on his back, and his black-and-white, horizontally striped shirt proclaimed that he was a criminal.

He was, in fact, the Hamburglar, who had recently escaped from McDonald’s restaurant, and as he came up to meet the Young Man and his pocket friends, he pulled a large blue blunderbuss from the lining of his cloak, and jabbed it against the Young Man’s ribs.

Now, a blunderbuss is a big old-fashioned weapon, and that jab in the ribs informed the Young Man that the Hamburglar was not a well-meaning person.

“This is a stick-up! Give me all your money,” the Hamburglar shouted.

The Young Man fumbled to open his top pocket, and the robber, seeing this, relaxed and smiled. The robber thought the Young Man must keep a wallet in that pocket, and he imagined that he would soon grab that wallet and be off.

But instead of a wallet, three tiny bubbles floated out of the Young Man’s pocket and hovered in the air between the Young Man and the robber. As the Hamburglar watched in baffled amazement, the three bubbles grew larger and larger and settled down on the ground where they popped open, revealing the three colorful monkeys in their equally colorful suits.

“These are my friends, Provo, Rebozo, and Lobo,” said the Young Man.

“Never mind all that, give me your money,” cried the robber, who was beginning to become confused by the situation.

“Certainly, certainly,” said the Young Man, “but first, may I ask you a question? Why do you dress like a robber and carry a blunderbuss? Why do you try to take other people’s money?”

The robber thought a moment. “I have no other skills except waving a blunderbuss and acting scary,” he explained.

“Well, what if we could change that?” the Young Man asked. “What if we could help you get skills and be a magical scientist, like we are?”

“I would like that very much,” said the robber, and to demonstrate his sincerity, he tossed the blunderbuss over the side of the bridge, letting it sink to the bottom of the river where it would never hurt anyone and never be seen again.

And with that, the three monkeys and the Young Man smiled, pulled thin white wands from their pockets, and waved the wands in unison, creating four small circles in the air. 

The Hamburglar looked down and found that he was now wearing a clean white lab coat. In the top pocket of his lab coat there were some small medical and magical instruments whose use he did not know but would soon learn. And on the top of the pocket, his name had been stitched. It read “Professor Hamilton Burglar.”

Everyone smiled, and then they heard the wail of an approaching police siren. Professor Burglar looked afraid when he heard that sound! But his three new monkey friends smiled and waved their wands again, causing a magical bubble of privacy and safety to arise from the tips of their wands and cover the professor completely. The monkeys then waved their own bubbles back into existence, and stepped gently inside them.

Then all four bubbles shrank and rose, gliding through the air and shrinking, always shrinking, until the four bubbles had come to rest in the safety and secrecy of the Young Man’s top pocket.

The Young Man zipped, buttoned, and snapped the pocket, then continued on his walk across the bridge, enjoying the beautiful day. He smiled at the police car as it passed.

Next time, we’ll learn more about Provo, Rebozo, Lobo, and the Young Man, and their new friend Professor Burglar.

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A Book Apart books Mobile The Profession Touchscreen writing

Designing For Touch

Designing For Touch, by Josh Clark, new from A Book Apart

DESIGN’S future is in your hands. Designing For Touch by Josh Clark (foreword by Brad Frost) guides you through the new frontier in design.

I’ve been a fan of Josh Clark’s since before he was “Josh Clark”—back when he invented Couch to 5K, and gave it away with no strings (or copyrights or trademarks or patents, Lord help us) attached. And I’ve followed Josh’s career as an interaction design consultant, public speaker, and author. Guy’s got it all: intelligence, perspective, and the ability to not just communicate, but persuade. He’s a down-to-earth futurist with old-fashioned showmanship. And all that Josh Clark goodness has found its way into his new book.

Josh genuinely wants designers to not only keep up with the touchscreen but also to reimagine it. Designing For Touch will teach novice and seasoned designers alike about ergonomic demands (and rules of thumb), layout and sizing for all gadgets, an emerging gestural toolkit, and tactics to speed up interactions and keep gestures discoverable. You’ll get the know-how to design for interfaces that let your users touch—stretch, crumple, drag, flick—information itself. And the inspiration to take touch to the next level.

Our little publishing company proudly presents Designing For Touch by Mister Josh Clark. Go get your hands on it.

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books Publishing Responsive Web Design State of the Web Web Design Web Design History Web Standards

Evolving Responsive Web Design

In What We Mean When We Say “responsive” and Defining Responsiveness, Lyza Danger Gardner and Jason Grigsby cut to the heart of a disagreement I had three years ago with Ethan Marcotte, the creator of Responsive Web Design and author of Responsive Web Design, a book I published in 2011.

Ethan told the world that Responsive Web Design required, and was defined by, fluid layouts, flexible images, and media queries. All three elements had to be present. If they weren’t using all three, you might be doing something interesting, but you were most definitely not doing Responsive Web Design.

Ethan invented all of this. Without him, we would likely be arguing whether it was time to consider 1280 pixels the new default fixed width for all desktop websites, and sending anything that wasn’t a desktop browser to a function- and content-limited “mobile site” whose URL began with the letter m. Ethan is a brilliant, multi-talented innovator; I am but the shadow of a hack. And yet, before he began creating his book, midway through the writing, and even a year after I published it, I continued to urge Ethan to rethink #RWD as “a bigger idea”—a concept rather than a single set of techniques.

I’m no genius. What I meant by “bigger idea” was limited to the notion that we’d one day be able to create responsive layouts with different techniques—so let’s not restrict the concept to a particular execution. I wasn’t thinking about other meanings of responsive, wasn’t considering problems of responsive content, and so on. I’m not that forward-thinking and it was three freaking years ago, come on.

I lost my gentle argument with Ethan, so the industry is having it now. And that’s just as it should be. Everything worked out for the best. Here’s why:

If Ethan hadn’t included three simple executional requirements as part of his definition, the concept might have quickly fallen by the wayside, as previous insights into the fluid nature of the web have done. The simplicity, elegance, and completeness of the package—here’s why, and here’s how—sold the idea to thousands of designers and developers, whose work and advocacy in turn sold it to hundreds of thousands more. This wouldn’t have happened if Ethan had promoted a more amorphous notion. Our world wouldn’t have changed overnight if developers had had too much to think about. Cutting to the heart of things and keeping it simple was as powerful a creative act on Ethan’s part as the “discovery” of #RWD itself.

We’ve only become ready to think about things like “responsible” responsive design, adaptive content, and a standard approach to responsive images now that we have built our share of first-generation responsive sites, and encountered the problems that led to the additional pondering. Baby steps. Brilliant baby steps.

Some commenters want to use initial-capped Responsive Web Design to mean responsive design as Ethan first defined it, and lowercase responsive design to mean an amorphous matrix of exciting and evolving design thinking. Lyza says soon we’ll stop saying Responsive altogether, a conclusion Andy Clarke reached three years ago.

Me, I like that Ethan stuck to his guns, and that the classical definition will always be out there, regardless of how web design evolves thanks to it. Kind of like there’s HTML 5, a defined and scoped W3C specification, and HTML living standard, an evolving activity. Our industry needs roots and wings, and, lucky us, we’ve got ’em both.

Categories
Big Web Show books CSS CSS3 Design Designers The Big Web Show

Big Web Show ? 102: Sass for Web Designers with Dribbble’s Dan Cederholm

Dan Cederholm

DESIGNER, developer, banjoist, Dribbble co-founder, and all-around nice guy Dan Cederholm and I discuss fear of CSS pre-processors; the craft of code; growing the Dribbble design community; transitioning from a two-person part-time start-up to a full-time company with employees; and Dan’s new book Sass For Web Designers in Episode ? 102 of The Big Web Show on Mule Radio.

Tell Your Friends!


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A List Apart books business Career Code creativity CSS CSS3 Design Responsive Web Design The Profession

Build Books With CSS3; Design a Responsive Résumé

“WE ARE ALL PUBLISHERS,” claims Issue No. 353 of A List Apart for people who make websites. Design books with CSS3; craft a responsive web résumé.

Building Books with CSS3

by NELLIE MCKESSON

While historically, it’s been difficult at best to create print-quality PDF books from markup alone, CSS3 now brings us the Paged Media Module, which targets print book formatting. “Paged” media exists as finite pages, like books and magazines, rather than as long scrolling stretches of text, like most websites. With a single CSS stylesheet, publishers can take XHTML source content and turn it into a laid-out, print-ready PDF. You can take your XHTML source, bypass desktop page layout software like Adobe InDesign, and package it as an ePub file. It’s a lightweight and adaptable workflow, which gets you beautiful books faster. Nellie McKesson, eBook Operations Manager at O’Reilly Media, explains how to build books with CSS3.

A Case for Responsive Résumés

by ANDREW HOFFMAN

Grizzled job hunting veterans know too well that a sharp résumé and near-flawless interview may still leave you short of your dream job. Competition is fierce and never wanes. Finding new ways to distinguish yourself in today’s unforgiving economy is vital to a designer/developer’s survival. Happily, web standards whiz and mobile web developer Andrew Hoffman has come up with a dandy differentiator that is just perfect for A List Apart readers. Learn how to author a clean résumé in HTML5/CSS3 that scales well to different viewport sizes, is easy to update and maintain, and will never grow obsolete.


Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart.

Categories
Advocacy Best practices Blue Beanie Day books Brands DWWS Web Standards

5th annual Blue Beanie Day is November 30, 2011

New! Official Blue Beanie Day 2011 page, with banners and instructions.

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books creativity Culture facebook Ideas iphone social networking writing

This media life – and death

IN A GORGEOUSLY PACED ESSAY at n+1, “the magazine that believes history isn’t over just yet,” an amazing young (22?) writer named Alice Gregory reviews a novel by Gary Shteyngart while simultaneously describing her exhausted and shattered mental life as a Twitter- and Tumblr-following, iPhone-carrying, socializing-while-isolated Internet addict, i.e. modern young person:

This anxiety is about more than failing to keep up with a serialized source, though. It’s also about the primitive pleasure of constant and arbitrary stimulation. That’s why the Facebook newsfeed is no longer shown chronologically. Refresh Facebook ten times and the status updates rearrange themselves in nonsensical, anachronistic patterns. You don’t refresh Facebook to follow a narrative, you refresh to register a change—not to read but to see.

And it’s losing track of this distinction—between reading and seeing—that’s so shameful. It’s like being demoted from the category of thinking, caring human to a sort of rat that doesn’t know why he needs to tap that button, just that he does.

Sometimes I can almost visualize parts of myself, the ones I’m most proud of, atrophying. I wish I had an app to monitor it! I notice that my thoughts are homeopathic, that they mirror content I wish I weren’t reading. I catch myself performing hideous, futuristic gestures, like that “hilarious” moment three seconds into an intimate embrace in which I realize I’m literally rubbing my iPhone screen across his spine.

I urge you to read every word of n+1: Sad as Hell. Hat tip: New York designer Darren Hoyt.

Categories
Authoring Best practices books Compatibility CSS Design E-Books editorial The Essentials Usability User Experience UX W3C Web Design Websites

Progressive enhancement: all you need to know is here

Adaptive Web Design

ONE GLORIOUS AFTERNOON in March, 2006, as a friend and I hurried past Austin’s Downtown Hilton Hotel to catch the next session of the SXSW Interactive Festival, a young stranger arrested our progress. With no introduction or preliminaries, he announced that he was available to speak at An Event Apart, a conference for web designers that Eric Meyer and I had launched three months previously. Turning to my companion with my best impression (which is none too good) of Mr Burns of “The Simpsons,” I asked, “Who is this brash young upstart, Smithers?”

The brash young upstart quickly became an essential colleague. In the months and years that followed, Aaron Gustafson created dazzling front- and back-end code for some of my agency’s most demanding clients. Just as importantly, he brilliantly tech-edited the second and third editions of Designing With Web Standards. The job largely consists of alerting Ethan Marcotte and me to the stuff we don’t know about web standards. I’ll let you think about that one. For five years now, Aaron has also been a tough but fair technical editor for A List Apart magazine, where he helps authors succeed while ensuring that they are truly innovative, that their methods are accessible and semantic, and (thanks to his near-encyclopedic knowledge) that they give all prior art its due. Moreover, Aaron has written seminal pieces for the magazine, and, yes, he has lectured at An Event Apart.

Given my experiences with the man and my admiration for his knowledge and abilities, I was thrilled when Aaron told me the premise of this book and began letting me look at chapters. This isn’t just another web design book. It’s an essential and missing piece of the canon. Our industry has long needed a compendium of best practices in adaptive, standards-based design. And with the rise of mobile, the recent significant improvements in desktop and phone browsers, and the new capabilities that come with HTML5, CSS3, and gestural interfaces, it is even more vital that we who make websites have a reliable resource that tells us how to take advantage of these new capabilities while creating content that works in browsers and devices of all sizes and widely differing capabilities. This book is that resource.

The convergence of these new elements and opportunities is encouraging web professionals to finally design for the web as it always should have been done. Adaptive design is the way, and nobody has a wider command than Aaron of the thinking and techniques required to do it well. In these pages you will find all that thinking and those methods. Never again will you lose a day debating how to do great web design (and create great code) that works for everyone. I plan to give this book to all my students, and to everyone I work with. I encourage you to do likewise. And now, enough preliminaries. Dive in, and enjoy!

Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences with Progressive Enhancement
by Aaron Gustafson
Foreword by Jeffrey Zeldman

Categories
.Mac Apple Applications apps books business Design podcasts Publications Publishing

Episode 38: Macworld’s Jason Snell live on The Big Web Show

Macworld editorial director Jason Snell is our guest on The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) Episode #38, recording live Thursday, February 10, at 12:00 PM Eastern. Jason, co-host Dan Benjamin and I will discuss the future of publishing, Macworld’s evolving digital strategy, and of course our favorite computers, phones, apps, and tablets.

Jason Snell is editorial director of Macworld. He’s been covering Apple since 1994. He’s also the host of The Incomparable Podcast, at theincomparable.com.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) records live every Thursday at 12:00 PM Eastern. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!

The Big Web Show #38: Jason Snell – 5by5.

Categories
A Book Apart books Brands Browsers Code Collectibles Community content CSS CSS3 Design E-Books editorial eric meyer HTML HTML5 Small Business Standards State of the Web The Profession This never happens to Gruber Web Design Web Design History Web Standards work writing XHTML

Top Web Books of 2010

It’s been a great year for web design books; the best we can remember for a while, in fact!” So begins Goburo’s review of the Top Web Books of 2010. The list is extremely selective, containing only four books. But what books! They are: Andy Clarke’s Hardboiled Web Design (Five Simple Steps); Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers (A Book Apart); Dan Cederholm’s CSS3 For Web Designers (A Book Apart); and Eric Meyer’s Smashing CSS (Wiley and Sons).

I’m thrilled to have had a hand in three of the books, and to be a friend and business partner to the author of the fourth. It may also be worth noting that three of the four books were published by scrappy, indie startup publishing houses.

Congratulations, all. And to you, good reading (and holiday nerd gifting).

Categories
Blue Beanie Day books Browsers creativity CSS CSS3 Design Designers DOM DWWS E-Books editorial Happy Cog™ HTML HTML5 Ideas industry tweets twitter Voting W3C Web Design Web Design History Web Standards webtype XHTML Zeldman

Blue Beanie Day Haiku Contest – Win Prizes from Peachpit and A Book Apart

ATTENTION, web design geeks, contest fans, standards freaks, HTML5ophiles, CSSistas, grammarians, bookworms, UXers, designers, developers, and budding Haikuists. Can you do this?

Do not tell me I
Am source of your browser woes.
Template validates.

Write a web standards haiku (like that one), and post it on Twitter with the hashtag #bbd4 between now and November 30th—which happens to be the fourth international Blue Beanie Day in support of Web Standards.

Winning haikus will receive free books from Peachpit/New Riders (“Voices That Matter”) and A Book Apart.

Ethan Marcotte, co-author of Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition and I will determine the winners.

Enter as many haikus as you like. Sorry, only one winning entry per person. Now get out there and haiku your heart out!

See you on Blue Beanie Day.

P.S. An ePub version of Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition is coming soon to a virtual bookstore near you. Watch this space.

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Big Web Show books Brands business Career content Dan Benjamin New York City people Publishing Respect Self-Employment Small Business speaking The Big Web Show The Profession work writing

Gary Vaynerchuk on The Big Web Show Episode 26


The Big Web Show

GARY VAYNERCHUK is our guest on Episode #26 of The Big Web Show, taped live before an internet audience at 1:00 PM ET Thursday 4 November at live.5by5.tv. Gary is the creator of Wine Library TV, the author of the New York Times bestselling book Crush It!, and the co-founder with his brother AJ of VaynerMedia, a boutique agency that works with personal brands, consumer brands, and startups.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) is recorded live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!

Categories
Apple Applications apps Best practices Big Web Show books Code Culture Dan Benjamin Interviews ipad Journalism at its Finest Microauthoring Microblogging Publications Publishing Standards SVA The Big Web Show

Paul Ford on The Big Web Show

Paul Ford

Paul Ford is our guest on The Big Web Show, taped live before an internet audience at 1:00 PM ET tomorrow, 14 October 2010, on the 5by5 network at live.5by5.tv.

Paul is a freelance writer and computer programmer. He was an editor at Harper’s Magazine from 2005–2010, and brought Harper’s 159-year, 250,000-page archive to the web in 2007; the system now supports tens of thousands of registered subscribers. More recently he helped the media strategy firm Activate with the launch of Gourmet Live, a re-imagining of Gourmet Magazine for iPad, and co-founded Popsicle Weasel, a small company totally focused on microsites.

He has written for NPR, TheMorningNews.org, XML.com, and the National Information Standards Organization’s Information Standards Quarterly, and is the author of the novel Gary Benchley, Rock Star (Penguin/Plume). Paul programs in PHP, Java, and XSLT2.0, but lately is all about Python and Django. His writing has been anthologized in Best Software Writing I (2005) and Best Music Writing 2009. He enjoys both software and music.

He will teach Content Strategy at the School of Visual Arts in New York City starting in 2011. His personal website, started in 1997, is Ftrain.com. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife Mo and the obligatory cats.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) is recorded live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Join us!

Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!

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