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.)
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Category: links
Outside reading. Visual and textual fun for boys and girls.
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.
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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)
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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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.
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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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.
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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Mobile Web Resources
ONE of the most frequent questions we get asked about the mobile web is ‘Where do I go to learn about all this stuff?’ So here’s an extensive list of helpful tools and resources that can help you create great mobile web experiences.”
GOOD MORNING! I’ve added some nifty external links to my About page. Enjoy.
I WISH I had written Adactio: Journal—Sea change. I advise every web designer who hasn’t yet done so to read it.
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2010: The Year in Web Standards
WHAT A YEAR 2010 has been. It was the year HTML5 and CSS3 broke wide; the year the iPad, iPhone, and Android led designers down the contradictory paths of proprietary application design and standards-based mobile web application design—in both cases focused on user needs, simplicity, and new ways of interacting thanks to small screens and touch-sensitive surfaces.
It was the third year in a row that everyone was talking about content strategy and designers refused to “just comp something up” without first conducting research and developing a user experience strategy.
CSS3 media queries plus fluid grids and flexible images gave birth to responsive web design (thanks, Beep!). Internet Explorer 9 (that’s right, the browser by Microsoft we’ve spent years grousing about) kicked ass on web standards, inspiring a 10K Apart contest that celebrated what designers and developers could achieve with just 10K of standards-compliant HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. IE9 also kicked ass on type rendering, stimulating debates as to which platform offers the best reading experience for the first time since Macintosh System 7.
Even outside the newest, best browsers, things were better than ever. Modernizr and eCSStender brought advanced selectors and @font-face to archaic browsers (not to mention HTML5 and SVG, in the case of Modernizr). Tim Murtaugh and Mike Pick’s HTML5 Reset and Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate gave us clean starting points for HTML5- and CSS3-powered sites.
Web fonts were everywhere—from the W3C to small personal and large commercial websites—thanks to pioneering syntax constructions by Paul Irish and Richard Fink, fine open-source products like the Font Squirrel @Font-Face Generator, open-source liberal font licensing like FontSpring’s, and terrific service platforms led by Typekit and including Fontdeck, Webtype, Typotheque, and Kernest.
Print continued its move to networked screens. iPhone found a worthy adversary in Android. Webkit was ubiquitous.
Insights into the new spirit of web design, from a wide variety of extremely smart people, can be seen and heard on The Big Web Show, which Dan Benjamin and I started this year (and which won Video Podcast of the Year in the 2010 .net Awards), on Dan’s other shows on the 5by5 network, on the Workers of the Web podcast by Alan Houser and Eric Anderson, and of course in A List Apart for people who make websites.
Zeldman.com: The Year in Review
A few things I wrote here at zeldman.com this year (some related to web standards and design, some not) may be worth reviewing:
- iPad as the New Flash 17 October 2010
- Masturbatory novelty is not a business strategy.
- Flash, iPad, and Standards 1 February 2010
- Lack of Flash in the iPad (and before that, in the iPhone) is a win for accessible, standards-based design. Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don’t support Flash is going to force recalcitrant web developers to build the semantic HTML layer first.
- An InDesign for HTML and CSS? 5 July 2010
- while our current tools can certainly stand improvement, no company will ever create “the modern day equivalent of Illustrator and PageMaker for CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript.” The assumption that a such thing is possible suggests a lack of understanding.
- Stop Chasing Followers 21 April 2010
- The web is not a game of “eyeballs.” Never has been, never will be. Influence matters, numbers don’t.
- Crowdsourcing Dickens 23 March 2010
- Like it says.
- My Love/Hate Affair with Typekit 22 March 2010
- Like it says.
- You Cannot Copyright A Tweet 25 February 2010
- Like it says.
- Free Advice: Show Up Early 5 February 2010
- Love means never having to say you’re sorry, but client services means apologizing every five minutes. Give yourself one less thing to be sorry for. Take some free advice. Show up often, and show up early.
Outside Reading
A few things I wrote elsewhere might repay your interest as well:
- The Future of Web Standards 26 September, for .net Magazine
- Cheap, complex devices such as the iPhone and the Droid have come along at precisely the moment when HTML5, CSS3 and web fonts are ready for action; when standards-based web development is no longer relegated to the fringe; and when web designers, no longer content to merely decorate screens, are crafting provocative, multi-platform experiences. Is this the dawn of a new web?
- Style vs. Design written in 1999 and slightly revised in 2005, for Adobe
- When Style is a fetish, sites confuse visitors, hurting users and the companies that paid for the sites. When designers don’t start by asking who will use the site, and what they will use it for, we get meaningless eye candy that gives beauty a bad name.
Happy New Year, all!
If you’re intrigued, as I am, by the trailer for David Fincher’s upcoming The Social Network, and if part of what compels you about the trailer is the musical score—a choral version of Radiohead’s “Creep”—you’ll be happy to know you can purchase said song via emusic.com: On The Rocks is the album, “Creep” is the track, and Scala, a Belgian all-teenage-girl choir, are the artists. Highly recommended.
P.S. If emusic.com had an affiliate program, I’d have free music for life.
Free for use in all web projects, professional or personal, HTML5 Reset by Monkey Do! is a set of HTML5 and CSS templates that jumpstart web development by removing the styling native to each browser, establishing basic HTML structures (title, header, footer, etc.), clearing floats, correcting for IE problems, and more.
Most of us who design websites begin every project with bits and pieces of this kind of code, but developer Tim Murtaugh, who created these files and who modestly thanks everyone in the universe, has struck a near-ideal balance. In these lean, simple files, without fuss or clutter, he manages to give us the best-practices equivalent of everything but the kitchen sink.
Tim Murtaugh sits beside me at Happy Cog, so I’ve seen him use these very files (and earlier versions of them) to quickly code advanced websites. If you’re up to speed on all the new hotness, these files will help you stay that way and work faster. If you’re still learning (and who isn’t?) about HTML5, CSS3, and browser workarounds, studying these files and Tim’s notes about them will help you become a more knowledgeable web designer slash developer. (We need a better name for what we do.)
My daughter calls Mr Murtaugh “Tim the giant.” With the release of this little package, he earns the moniker. Highly recommended.
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Thursday Links
- HTML5 audio and video WordPress plugin lets you embed media for native playback in supported browsers; content degrades gracefully in unsupported browsers.
- 10 Tips for Designing Mobile Websites. Great stuff.
- The downside of free fonts.
- Flipboard, superhot new “social iPad magazine,” will be powered by semantic data.
- Nick Usborne: “Why I don’t much like the phrase, ‘content marketing.'”
- JK Rowling may allow digital Harry Potter books.
- We all have movie star issues now. Reputation and privacy in the digital age.
- Ready Media: Roger Black and friends offer professionally designed magazine and web templates “at a fraction of the cost.” Pushback ensues.
- With beautiful type comes great responsibility.
- Veerle: Gradient rings in Illustrator
- Douglas Bowman: A Browsable, Searchable Archive of Tweets
- A Feed Apart is live! Share your experiences of An Event Apart Minneapolis or enjoy the conference vicariously.