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Advocacy Archiving Browsers Community Design glamorous HTML industry javascript launches links Off My Lawn! people Publications Responsive Web Design Standards State of the Web Stories The Profession W3C Web Design Web Design History Web Standards Websites

He Built This City: The Return of Glenn Davis

You may not know his name, but he played a huge part in creating the web you take for granted today. 

As the first person to realize, way back in 1994, that the emerging web could be a playground, he created Cool Site of the Day as a single-focused blog dedicated to surfacing interesting sites, thereby demonstrating the web’s potential while creating its first viral content. (As an example, traffic from his followers, or, as we called them back then, readers, brought NASA’s web server to its knees.)

He co-founded The Web Standards Project, which succeeded in bringing standards to our browsers at a time when browser makers saw the web as a software market to be dominated, and not a precious commons to be nurtured.

He anticipated responsive web design by more than 20 years with his formulation of Liquid, Ice, and Jello as the three possible ways a designer could negotiate the need for meaningful layout vis-a-vis the unknowns of the user’s browsing environment.

He taught the web DHTML through his educational Project Cool Site. 

And then, like a handful of other vital contributors to the early web (e.g. Todd Fahrner and Dean Allen), he vanished from the scene he’d played so large a role in creating.

He’s ba-ack

Glenn Davis wasn’t always missed. Like many other creators of culture, he is autistic and can be abrasive and socially unclueful without realizing it. Before he was diagnosed, some people said Glenn was an a**hole—and some no doubt still will say that. I think of him as too big for any room that would have him. And I’m talking about him here because he is talking about himself (and the history of the early web) on his new website, Verevolf.

If you go there, start with the introduction, and, if it speaks to you, read his stories and consider sharing your own. That’s how we did it in the early days, and it’s still a fine way to do it—maybe even the best way.

I knew Glenn, I worked with him and a lot of other talented people on The Web Standards Project (you’re welcome!), and it’s my opinion that—if you’re interested in how the web got to be the web, or if you were around at the time and are curious about a fellow survivor—you might enjoy yourself.

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"Digital Curation" art direction creativity Design Desktops editorial Fun interface Layout links Microblogging music Nonsense social media software The Mind User Experience Weird

Rediscovering music

Apropos of nothing in particular, I present my all-time listening (first 5.25 rows) and more recent listening:

Drag slider: at left, my all-time listening; at right, more recent listening.

Because I’m weird that way: Sometimes I’ll listen extensively to a particular artist from my collection whom I might not have played in a while, simply to bump them higher in the mosaic or reposition them for a more pleasing composition.

If Spotify exposes you to new music, Last.fm helps remind you of great music in your existing collection that may have slipped your mind. (Not an advertisement. I use last.fm and get great pleasure from how it helps me discover and fuss with my music, as I once spent hours in the old days stacking and rearranging my LPs and tapes.)

And that’s how I stay out of the pool halls.


Public Service P.S: If you do decide to try last.fm, please, by all means, pay the small monthly subscription fee if you can. Doing so supports the under-resourced team that keeps the service going. It also removes the ads, making the site usable (the ads are a nightmare), and gives you the option to view your music as a visual grid, like those shown in my screenshots. The grid-view makes the site. It gives you, not just a visual record collection, but a visual artist collection, if you’ll allow the conceit. I love it.

An earlier version of this post also appears on my Facebook stream.

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Designers Ideas industry Interviews links people podcasts User Experience UX Web Design work

Amplifying voices

Some of the interviewees of the Technically Speaking podcast.

New episodes of Harrison Wheeler’s Technically Speaking podcast are coming, and Technically Speaking will run live interviews at San Francisco Design Week June 7–13. 

The podcast amplifies voices of underrepresented leaders who want to inspire the next generation of black and brown designers through authentic, thought-provoking, and immersive storytelling. 

Learn more on the podcast’s homepage, listen to past episodes, and sign up for the newsletter to be notified about upcoming content. 

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Best practices Browsers Code Design development Future-Friendly HTML Ideas industry Internship IXD Layout links Multi-Device Responsive Web Design software Standards State of the Web User Experience UX Web Design Web Design History Web Standards Websites

Saving Your Web Workflows with Prototyping

Our static tools and linear workflows aren’t the right fit for the flexible, diverse reality of today’s Web. Making prototyping a central element of your workflows will radically change how you approach problem solution and save you a lot of headaches – and money. But most importantly, you will be creating the right products and features in a way that resonates with the true nature of the Web. A discourse on processes, flexibility, the Web as a material, and how we build things.

Saving Your Web Workflows with Prototyping – Matthias Ott
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Advertising Best practices Career creativity Design Designers glamorous links work Working

Never give up

This story is a bit long, but I promise it will be worth it, because it contains the two most important principles every designer must know and take to heart if you intend to do great work anywhere, under almost any circumstances, over the long, long haul of your career.

Sticking To It – fresh from JZ in Automattic.Design
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Design links type Typography

Adelle Mono & Adelle Mono Flex

Adelle and Adelle Sans have long been two of my favorite fonts—two great tastes that taste even better together! Now there are two more great flavors, with the release of Veronika Burian and José Scaglione’s twin-powered Adelle Mono family.

Adelle Mono is a true, monospaced version of the robust yet sensitively detailed font family. 

Adelle Mono Flex is a proportional version that’s suited for text, branding, UI, captions, and screens: “It feels monospaced but reads like a nice slab,” TypeTogether explains in the June, 2020 issue of their newsletter announcing the release.

Much more information, along with a try-it-yourself type tester and a 60% introductory discount, is available on TypeTogether’s Adelle Mono web page.


(Note: Veronika Burian and José Scaglione designed the original Adelle and Adelle Sans, along with the new Mono and Mono Flex versions. Additionally, Irene Vlachou assisted in the creation of Adelle Mono.)

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Advocacy art direction Design Designers Ideas industry interface IXD Jason Santa Maria links Off My Lawn! Redesigns Responsive Web Design State of the Web Tech The Profession User Experience UX Web Design Web Design History webfonts

The Web We Lost: Luke Dorny Redesign

Like 90s hip-hop, The Web We Lost™ retains a near-mystical hold on the hearts and minds of those who were lucky enough to be part of it. Luke Dorny’s recent, lovingly hand-carved redesign of his personal site encompasses several generations of that pioneering creative web. As such, it will repay your curiosity.

Details, details.

Check Luke’s article page for textural, typographic, and interactive hat tips to great old sites from the likes of k10k, Cameron Moll, Jason Santa Maria, and more. 

And don’t stop there; each section of the updated lukedorny.com offers its own little bonus delights. Like the floating titles (on first load) and touchable, complex thumbnail highlights on the “observer” (AKA home) page. 

And by home page, I don’t mean the home page that loads when you first hit the site: that’s a narrow, fixed-width design that’s both a tribute and a goof.

No, I mean the home page that replaces that narrow initial home page once the cookies kick in. Want to see the initial, fixed-width home page again? I’m not sure that you can. Weird detail. Cool detail. Who thinks of such things? Some of us used to.

And don’t miss the subtle thrills of the silken pull threads (complete with shadows) and winking logo pull tab in the site’s footer. I could play with that all day.

Multiply animated elements, paths, and shadows bring life to the footer of Luke Dorny’s newly redesigned website.

Now, no site exactly needs those loving details. But danged if they don’t encourage you to spend time on the site and actually peruse its content

There was a time when we thought about things like that. We knew people had a big choice in which websites they chose to visit. (Because people did have a big choice back in them days before social media consolidation.) And we worked to be worthy of their time and attention.

Days of future past

We can still strive to be worthy by sweating details and staying alive to the creative possibilities of the page. Not on every project, of course. But certainly on our personal sites. And we don’t have to limit our creative love and attention only to our personal sites. We pushed ourselves, back then; we can do it again.

In our products, we can remember to add delight as we subtract friction.

And just as an unexpected bouquet can brighten the day for someone we love, in the sites we design for partners, we can be on the lookout for opportunities to pleasantly surprise with unexpected, little, loving details.

Crafted with care doesn’t have to mean bespoke. But it’s remarkable what can happen when, in the early planning stage of a new project, we act as if we’re going to have to create each page from scratch.

In calling Luke Dorny’s site to your attention, I must disclaim a few things:

  • I haven’t run accessibility tests on lukedorny.com or even tried to navigate it with images off, or via the keyboard.
  • Using pixel fonts for body copy, headlines, labels, and so on—while entirely appropriate to the period Luke’s celebrating and conceptually necessary for the design to work as it should—isn’t the most readable choice and may cause difficulty for some readers.
  • I haven’t tested the site in every browser and on every known device. I haven’t checked its optimization. For all I know, the site may pass such tests with flying colors, but I tend to think all this beauty comes at a price in terms of assets and bandwidth. 

Nevertheless, I do commend this fine website to your loving attention. Maybe spend time on it instead of Twitter next time you take a break?

I’ll be back soon with more examples of sites trying harder.


Simulcast on Automattic Design

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links

Limo to my bed of nails, stat!

Unintentionally hilarious Style piece on Stoicism as misunderstood and ostentatiously practiced by trend-conforming Silicon Valley billionaires. (Ooh, billionaire walks five miles a day? So does everyone with two legs in New York.)

nytimes.com/2019/03/26/style/silicon-valley-stoics.html

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A Book Apart A List Apart An Event Apart Big Web Show Design links The Big Web Show

Friday Links

TEN great links to launch your weekend:

If you missed Gerry McGovern’s brilliant An Event Apart talk on “Top Task Management,” the video’s here for your pleasure.

If you missed Eric Meyer’s article “Practical CSS Grid: Adding Grid to an Existing Design” in A List Apart, drop what you’re doing and read!

If you missed my chat about design discovery with UX consultant Dan Brown on this week’s Big Web Show, have a listen.

Like it says: “How to Build a Simple and Powerful Lazyload JavaScript Plugin” by Alex Devero in A List Apart: Sidebar.

Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers” by Gina Trapani in Postlight’s “Track Changes.”

What sex is your font? Many people see typefaces as gendered. All this and much more in “The Font Purchasing Habits Survey Results” by Mary Catherine Pflug.

The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death” by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker.

Well, there goes *that* startup idea. Facebook starts warning U.S. users when they’re sharing fake news in Macworld.

The Three-Hour Brand Sprint” (“GV’s Simple Recipe For Getting Started On Your Brand”) by Jake Knapp.

Why Are Designers Still Expected To Work For Free?” asks Design Observer’s Jessica Helfand in Fast Company’s Co.Design.

Bonus (this one goes to 11): “Jeffrey Zeldman Presents a Math Problem” from Typethos.


Also published in Medium.

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links

Breakfast Links

Hope you’re hungry!

Web Design and Typography

This is freakin’ awesome: Styling Text With SVG Filters from the Code School blog.

John D. Jameson writes great mini-articles about web typography and front-end development on his personal site.

Here’s a look at twelve kinds of italic typeface, with some notes on their cultural contexts, historical backgrounds, and practical applications: Italics Examined, from Hoefler & Co.

So you’ve seen a typeface in use – on a poster, in a magazine, on a website … and you want to know what’s the name of that typeface. Here are five useful tips to identify it: The 5 best Tricks to Identify a Font – Video by Typography Guru. Hat tip: Typewolf.

In the Magazine

Write a better class of CSS: Tim Baxter shows how to make our CSS as semantic and meaningful as our markup in today’s A List Apart: Meaningful CSS: Style Like You Mean It.

JavaScript is more dynamic than you might think: Prototypal Object-Oriented Programming using JavaScript, by Mehdi Maujood.

Conversations

Rachel Andrew, Eric Meyer, Jen Simmons & I discuss radically new web layouts—for real this time—in Episode 115 of The Web Ahead, recorded live at An Event Apart: thewebahead.net/115.

Design For Real Life authors Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Eric Meyer chat with Jason Ogle on the User Defenders podcast: userdefenders.com/podcast/design-for-real-life/

Code

Speaking of radically new web layouts, the future of web layout needs your input and feedback. Read and respond: A Revised Subgrid Specification, by Rachel Andrew.

Better CSS Drop Caps with “initial-letter” (hat tip: Rachel Andrew)

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Authoring Best practices Compatibility Content First Content-First CSS CSS3 Design Ethan Marcotte HTML HTML5 Jeremy Keith links Standards State of the Web Told you so Web Design Web Design History Web Standards

Of Patterns and Power: Web Standards Then & Now

IN “CONTENT Display Patterns” (which all front-end folk should read), Dan Mall points to a truth not unlike the one Ethan Marcotte shared last month on 24 ways. It is a truth as old as standards-based design: Construct your markup to properly support your content (not your design).

Modular/atomic design doesn’t change this truth, it just reinforces its wisdom. Flexbox and grid layout don’t change this truth, they just make it easier to do it better. HTML5 doesn’t change this truth, it just reminds us that the separation of structure from style came into existence for a reason. A reason that hasn’t changed. A reason that cannot change, because it is the core truth of the web, and is inextricably bound up with the promise of this medium.

Separating structure from style and behavior was the web standards movement’s prime revelation, and each generation of web designers discovers it anew. This separation is what makes our content as backward-compatible as it is forward-compatible (or “future-friendly,” if you prefer). It’s the key to re-use. The key to accessibility. The key to the new kinds of CMS systems we’re just beginning to dream up. It’s what makes our content as accessible to an ancient device as it will be to an unimagined future one.

Every time a leader in our field discovers, as if for the first time, the genius of this separation between style, presentation, and behavior, she is validating the brilliance of web forbears like Tim Berners-Lee, Håkon Wium Lie, and Bert Bos.

Every time a Dan or an Ethan (or a Sara or a Lea) writes a beautiful and insightful article like the two cited above, they are telling new web designers, and reminding experienced ones, that this separation of powers matters.

And they are plunging a stake into the increasingly slippery ground beneath us.

Why is it slippery? Because too many developers and designers in our amnesiac community have begun to believe and share bad ideas—ideas, like CSS isn’t needed, HTML isn’t needed, progressive enhancement is old-fashioned and unnecessary, and so on. Ideas that, if followed, will turn the web back what it was becoming in the late 1990s: a wasteland of walled gardens that said no to more people than they welcomed. Let that never be so. We have the power.

As Maimonides, were he alive today, would tell us: he who excludes a single user destroys a universe. Web standards now and forever.

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links Publishing State of the Web

1,000 nerds

THE MODERN SOCIAL WEB is a miracle of progress but also a status-driven guilt-spewing shit volcano. Back in the 1990s—this will sound insane—we paid a lot of money for our tilde accounts, like $30 or $40 a month or sometimes much more. We paid to reach strangers with our weird ideas. Whereas now, as everyone understands, brands pay to know users.

via Tilde.Club: I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds — The Message — Medium.

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A List Apart links Products Publications Publishing Usability User Experience UX

Product Management for the Web; Beyond Usability Testing

IN ISSUE NO. 357 of A List Apart for people who make websites:

Beyond Usability Testing

by DEVAN GOLDSTEIN

To be sure we’re designing the right experience for the right audience, there’s no substitute for research conducted with actual users. Like any research method, though, usability testing has its drawbacks. Most importantly, it isn’t cheap. Fortunately, there are other usability research methods at our disposal. The standouts, expert review and heuristic evaluation, are easy to add to a design and development process almost regardless of budget or resource concerns. Explore these techniques, learn their advantages and disadvantages, and get the low-down on how to include them in your projects.

Product Management for the Web

by KRISTOFER LAYON

Whether we prototype, write, design, develop, or test as part of building the web, we’re creating something hundreds, thousands, or maybe even millions of people will use. But how do we know that we’re creating the right enhancements for the web, at the right time, and for the right customers? Because our client or boss asked us to? And how do they know? Enter product management for the web—bridging the gap between leadership and customers on one side, and the user experience, content strategy, design, and development team on the other. Learn to set priorities that gradually but steadily make your product (and the web) better.


SINCE 1998, A List Apart has explored the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart Magazine.

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links

Wednesday Links

For your pleasure:

Jason Grigsby: The Immobile Web

Jason Grigsby (@grigs) discusses the next frontier: web-enabled televisions. Key points from this important BDConf speech transcribed by Brad Frost. With Slideshare video.

Jeremy Keith: Secret Src

As usual, Jeremy Keith is the cluefullest person in the room when it comes to the sexual politics of HTML5.

Context Free Patent Art

Just like it says.

Creative Bloq: Ten Questions for Jeffrey Zeldman

“If you’re complaining about IE in 2012, the problem isn’t Internet Explorer … it’s your job. But you can fix that.” One of several nuggets that emerge from my interview with the new design magazine.

Lea Verou: The top 8 web standards myths debunked

Just like it says.

Double Vision – Global Trends in Tablet and Smartphone Use while Watching TV

“Whether to check email or to look up program or product information, using a tablet or smartphone while watching TV is more common than not according to a Q4 2011 Nielsen survey of connected device owners in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Italy. In the U.S., 88 percent of tablet owners and 86 percent of smartphone owners said they used their device while watching TV at least once during a 30-day period. For 45 percent of tablet-tapping Americans, using their device while watching TV was a daily event, with 26 percent noting simultaneous TV and tablet use several times a day. U.S. smartphone owners showed similar dual usage of TV with their phones, with 41 percent saying their use their phone at least once a day while tuned in.”

How we use feature based development to give better quotes

Just like it says.

The Egotistical Puppet King & I

The latest CSSquirrel comic takes a jaded view of recent goings-on amidst the framers of HTML5. Alas, it’s even worse than he thinks.

LingsCars.com Gets a Makeover

Well done, Adaptive Path.

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"Found Objects" Acclaim Appearances Hall of Fame links photography Publications SXSW Zeldman

The Impossible Year | Jeffrey Zeldman with Mini-Zeldman Doll Polaroid…

The Impossible Year | Jeffrey Zeldman with Mini-Zeldman Doll Polaroid...

JOHN MORRISON:

Jeffrey Zeldman with Mini-Zeldman Doll

Polaroid SLR 680SE / Impossible PX-680 Color Shade

Jeffrey became the first person inducted into the SXSW Interactive Hall of Fame. Afterwards there was a party with mini-Zeldman dolls.

The Impossible Year | Jeffrey Zeldman with Mini-Zeldman Doll Polaroid…

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