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Private Parts: unlikely advocate fights for online privacy, anonymity

MESMERIZED as we have been by the spectacle of the flaming garbage scow of U.S. election news, it would have been easy to miss this other narrative. But in the past few days, just as Google, AT&T, and Time-Warner were poised to turn the phrase “online privacy” into a George Carlin punchline, in marched an unlikely hero to stop them: the American Federal Government. Who have just…

approved broad new privacy rules on Thursday that prevent companies like AT&T and Comcast from collecting and giving out digital information about individuals — such as the websites they visited and the apps they used — in a move that creates landmark protections for internet users.

Broadband Providers Will Need Permission to Collect Private Data, by Cecilia Kang, The New York Times, Oct. 27, 2016

Given the increasingly deep bonds between corporate overlords and elected officials, this strong assertion of citizens’ right to privacy comes as something of a surprise. It’s especially startling given the way things had been going.

On Friday, Oct. 21, shortly before a massive DDOS attack took out most U.S. websites (but that’s another story), ProPublica reported that Google had quietly demolished its longstanding wall between anonymous online ad tracking and user’s names. I quote ProPublica’s reporting at length because the details matter:

When Google bought the advertising network DoubleClick in 2007, Google founder Sergey Brin said that privacy would be the company’s “number one priority when we contemplate new kinds of advertising products.”

And, for nearly a decade, Google did in fact keep DoubleClick’s massive database of web-browsing records separate by default from the names and other personally identifiable information Google has collected from Gmail and its other login accounts.

But this summer, Google quietly erased that last privacy line in the sand – literally crossing out the lines in its privacy policy that promised to keep the two pots of data separate by default. In its place, Google substituted new language that says browsing habits “may be” combined with what the company learns from the use Gmail and other tools.

The change is enabled by default for new Google accounts. Existing users were prompted to opt-in to the change this summer.

The practical result of the change is that the DoubleClick ads that follow people around on the web may now be customized to them based on your name and other information Google knows about you. It also means that Google could now, if it wished to, build a complete portrait of a user by name, based on everything they write in email, every website they visit and the searches they conduct.

The move is a sea change for Google and a further blow to the online ad industry’s longstanding contention that web tracking is mostly anonymous.

Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking, by Julia Angwin, ProPublica, Oct. 21, 2016

Et tu, Google

Google has long portrayed itself as one of the good guys, and in many ways it continues to be that. I can’t think of any other insanely powerful mega-corporation that works so hard to advocate web accessibility and performance—although one of its recipes for improved web performance, making up a whole new proprietary markup language and then using its search engine dominance to favor sites that use that language and, of necessity, host their content on Google servers over sites that use standard HTML and host their own content, is hardly a white hat move. But that, too, is another story.

On privacy, certainly, Google had shown ethics and restraint. Which is why their apparent decision to say, “f–– it, everyone else is doing it, let’s stop anonymizing the data we share” came as such an unpleasant shock. And that sense of shock does not even take into account how many hundreds of millions of humans were slated to lose their privacy thanks to Google’s decision. Or just how momentous this change of heart is, given Google’s control and knowledge of our searches, our browsing history, and the contents and correspondents of our email.

Minority Report

Scant days after ProPublica broke the Google story, as a highlight of the proposed merger of AT&T and Time-Warner, came the delightful scenario of TV commercials customized just for you, based on combined knowledge of your web using and TV viewing habits. And while some humans might see it as creepy or even dangerous that the TV they’re watching with their family knows what they were up to on the internet last night, from an advertiser’s point of view the idea made $en$e:

Advertisers want … to combine the data intensity of internet advertising with the clear value and ability to change peoples’ perceptions that you get with a television ad. If you believe in a future where the very, very fine targeting of households or individuals with specific messaging makes economic sense to do at scale, what this merger does is enable that by making more audience available to target in that way.

Individualized Ads on TV Could Be One Result of AT&T-Time Warner Merger by Sapna Maheshwari, The New York Times, Oct. 26

An unlikely privacy advocate

Into this impending privacy hellscape marched the U.S. Government:

Federal officials approved broad new privacy rules on Thursday that prevent companies like AT&T and Comcast from collecting and giving out digital information about individuals — such as the websites they visited and the apps they used — in a move that creates landmark protections for internet users. …

The new rules require broadband providers to obtain permission from subscribers to gather and give out data on their web browsing, app use, location and financial information. Currently, broadband providers can track users unless those individuals tell them to stop.

The passage of the rules deal a blow to telecommunications and cable companies like AT&T and Comcast, which rely on such user data to serve sophisticated targeted advertising. The fallout may affect AT&T’s $85.4 billion bid for Time Warner, which was announced last week, because one of the stated ambitions of the blockbuster deal was to combine resources to move more forcefully into targeted advertising.

Broadband Providers Will Need Permission to Collect Private Data, by Cecilia Kang, The New York Times, Oct. 27

What happens next

The consequences of these new rules—exactly how advertising will change and networks will comply, the effect on these businesses and those that depend on them (i.e. newspapers), how Google in particular will be effected, who will cheat, who will counter-sue the government, and so on—remain to be seen. But, for the moment, we’re about to have a bit more online privacy and anonymity, not less. At least, more online privacy from advertisers. The government, one assumes, will continue to monitor every little thing we do online.


Co-published in Medium.

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Ten Years Ago on the Web

2006 DOESN’T seem forever ago until I remember that we were tracking IE7 bugsworrying about the RSS feed validator, and viewing Drupal as an accessibility-and-web-standards-positive platform, at the time. Pundits were claiming bad design was good for the web (just as some still do). Joe Clark was critiquing WCAG 2. “An Inconvenient Truth” was playing in theaters, and many folks were surprised to learn that climate change was a thing.

I was writing the second edition of Designing With Web Standards. My daughter, who is about to turn twelve, was about to turn two. My dad suffered a heart attack. (Relax! Ten years later, he is still around and healthy.) A List Apart had just added a job board. “The revolution will be salaried,” we trumpeted.

Preparing for An Event Apart Atlanta, An Event Apart NYC, and An Event Apart Chicago (sponsored by Jewelboxing! RIP) consumed much of my time and energy. Attendees told us these were good shows, and they were, but you would not recognize them as AEA events today—they were much more homespun. “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” we used to joke. “My mom will sew the costumes and my dad will build the sets.” (It’s a quotation from a 1940s Andy Hardy movie, not a reflection of our personal views about gender roles.)

Jim Coudal, Jason Fried and I had just launched The Deck, an experiment in unobtrusive, discreet web advertising. Over the next ten years, the ad industry pointedly ignored our experiment, in favor of user tracking, popups, and other anti-patterns. Not entirely coincidentally, my studio had just redesigned the website of Advertising Age, the leading journal of the advertising profession.

Other sites we designed that year included Dictionary.com and Gnu Foods. We also worked on Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking tool with well-thought-out features like Saved Copies (so you never lost a web page, even if it moved or went offline), Bookmark Ratings, Bookmark Privacy, and Groups. We designed the product for our client and developed many of its features. Rest in peace.

I was reading Adam Greenfield’s Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, a delightfully written text that anticipated and suggested design rules and thinking for our present Internet of Things. It’s a fine book, and one I helped Adam bring to a good publisher. (Clearly, I was itching to break into publishing myself, which I would do with two partners a year or two afterwards.)

In short, it was a year like any other on this wonderful web of ours—full of sound and fury, true, but also rife with innovation and delight.


As part of An Event Apart’s A Decade Apart celebration—commemorating our first ten years as a design and development conference—we asked people we know and love what they were doing professionally ten years ago, in 2006. If you missed parts onetwothree, or four, have a look back.

 

 

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Advertising An Event Apart Design State of the Web Web Design Web Design History Web Standards Zeldman

Helvetica With Curves—And Other Updated Classics

Keynotesnaps001

Title card from ‘Designing With Web Standards in 2016,’ An Event Apart presentation by Jeffrey Zeldman. Text is set in Forma, an upcoming face from Font Bureau.


NOT UNLIKE what Mattel has done with Barbie, the typographic geniuses at The Font Bureau are working on a humanist geometric sans-serif that could almost be thought of as Helvetica with curves.

Forma is the name of the as-yet unreleased font family, and you can get a peek at one weight of it in the above image, which is taken from my slide deck for “Designing With Web Standards in 2016,” which is the presentation I’ll premiere next month at An Event Apart Nashville.

This new presentation examines the seemingly ever-deepening complexity of designing for our medium today—a complexity that has driven some longtime web designers I know to declare that web design has become “too hard,” or that “the fun has gone out of it”—and asks what our traditions of designing with web standards can teach us about crafting web experiences for a multi-device, mobile-first world.

Given that my original (unpublished) title for Designing With Web Standards was going to be Forward Compatibility—and given that Forward Compatibility is not so different in concept from today’s phrase, Future-Friendly—I’m guessing that structured, semantically marked-up content, progressive enhancement, and the separation of style from structure and behavior still have a huge role to play in today’s day-to-day web design work.

Oh, dear, I hope that wasn’t a spoiler.

I look forward to sharing these ideas with you in greater detail at An Event Apart. Now celebrating our tenth year of bringing great ideas to our community, and creating a space where the smartest folks in web design and development can meet, mingle, bond, network, and learn together. Follow @aneventapart for show announcements, links to useful web resources, and free giveaways on the 10th of every month in 2016. (This month’s giveaway, ten beautiful fleece comforters monogrammed with the A Decade Apart logo, went to ten lucky winners on February 10th. Keep watching the skies.)

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CSS Grid Layout with Rachel Andrew: Big Web Show

Rachel Andrew

RACHEL ANDREW—longtime web developer and web standards champion, co-founder of the Perch CMS, and author of Get Ready For CSS Grid Layout—is my guest on today’s Big Web Show. We discuss working with CSS Grid Layout, how Grid enables designers to “do something different” with web layout, why designers need to start experimenting with Grid Layout now, how front-end design has morphed into an engineering discipline, learning HTML and CSS versus learning frameworks, and the magic of David Bowie, RIP.

Enjoy Episode ? 141 of The Big Web Show.

Sponsored by A List Apart and An Event Apart.

URLs

rachelandrew.co.uk
Get Ready for CSS Grid Layout
Perch CMS
Writing by Rachel Andrew
Books by Rachel Andrew
@rachelandrew

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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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The Year in Design

  • Mobile is today’s first screen. So design responsively, focusing on content and structure first.
  • Websites and apps alike should remove distractions and let people interact as directly as possible with content.
  • 90 percent of design is typography. And the other 90 percent is whitespace.
  • Boost usability and pleasure with progressive disclosure: menus and functions that appear only when needed.
  • One illustration or original photo beats 100 stock images.
  • Design your system to serve your content, not the other way around.
  • Remove each detail from your design until it breaks.
  • Style is the servant of brand and content. Style without purpose is noise.
  • Nobody waits. Speed is to today’s design what ornament was to yesterday’s.
  • Don’t design to prove you’re clever. Design to make the user think she is.

Also published in Medium

Translated into German (also here) by Mark Sargent

Translated into French by Jean-Baptiste Sachsé

Translated into Turkish by omerbalyali.

Translated into Spanish by Tam Lopez Breit.

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Web Law & Disorder

The Perfect Storm in Digital Law by Heather Burns; illustration by Ping Zhu.

LEGISLATING THE WEB has long been murky ground. When glacial processes, uninformed committees, and international politics meet the individualized culture of the internet, friction ensues. Despite the resulting confusion, it’s our duty to work within the law—and to speak up for a better relationship between governing bodies and web professionals. In the current A List Apart, Heather Burns guides us through the current dilemmas in digital law, and offers a solution: professionalizing our industry to ensure a seat at the table.

? Enjoy The Perfect Storm in Digital Law by Heather Burns.

? And for more on Heather Burns and internet law, listen to The Law is an Ass: Digital Law & Web Design with Heather Burns. It’s Episode ? 137 of The Big Web Show—everything web that matters.


Illustration: Ping Zhu

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Ad Blocking Phase II

screenshot of Choice app from Been, Inc.

THE WORLD has finally caught up with Been, Inc. Three years ago, this tiny start-up company shared my studio space in New York. Their product idea was remarkably original: instead of passively accepting the data collection and loss of privacy that comes with most ad networks on the web, what if people had a choice—to either block ads and third-party trackers entirely, or earn rewards for letting ads through?

The initial web-based product, playfully designed by Monkey Do, took the scariness and complexity out of tracking issues, and returned the decision making power to the consumer. Unfortunately, the mainstream web wasn’t ready for ad blocking, and consumers en masse either weren’t ready to think about privacy, or simply didn’t know the company’s value proposition because of its nonexistent marketing budget. (The only thing that kills products faster than no marketing is poor execution—although a handful of products have survived both.)

To stay afloat in the face of mass indifference, the company temporarily pivoted, using a portion of their technology to facilitate sharing of web content between consumers, much like the late lamented Ma.gnolia or Pocket’s new Recommended section. But where Ma.gnolia and Pocket were/are text-powered, the pivoted Been app was primarily visual, which helped it gain traction in the eduation market. Grade-school teachers and kids loved using the app for research projects—and their support helped the company stay in business long enough for the internet to catch up with their ideas.

Version 2.0 of their Choice app for iOS is the product of years of work on user privacy, data ownership, and control. iOS fans can download it at www.been.mobi/getv2edu.

The company’s site explains the push-button mechanics through which you can choose to block ads and third-party trackers in your apps and Safari, or earn rewards by letting ads through and sharing (strictly non-personal) information with Been. (Earn Mode is limited to US users for now.)

When I foolhardily put down my deposit on a New York studio that was larger and more costly than what I needed, my hope was that it would attract a like-minded community of designers and tech companies from whom I would learn and be inspired. That was certainly the case with my friends at Been! I wish them great success at helping to bring the changes our web needs.

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Progressive Enhancement FTW with Aaron Gustafson

Book cover art - Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences With Progressive Enhancement, 2nd EditionLONGTIME developer, lecturer, and web standards evangelist Aaron Gustafson and I discuss the newly published update to Aaron’s best-selling industry classic “love letter to the web,” Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences With Progressive Enhancement, 2nd Edition (New Riders, 2015) in Episode ? 140 of The Big Web Show—everything web that matters.

Topics covered include: Aaron’s superhero origin story as a creator of progressively enhanced websites and applications; “we’re not building things we haven’t built on the web before;” “creating opportunities for people outside your comfort zone;” development in the world of Node.js; “every interface is a conversation;” “visual design is an enhancement;” “interaction is an enhancement;” nerding out over early web terminal interfaces; Microsoft, Opera, and more.

Sponsored by DreamHost, Braintree, and Thankful.

Deal

Save 35% off Aaron Gustafson’s Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences With Progressive Enhancement, 2nd Edition when you enter discount code AARON35 at checkout.

URLS

https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/about/ – About Aaron
http://adaptivewebdesign.info/2nd-edition/ – Adaptive Web Design Second Edition (“95% new material”)
[PDF] – Read the first chapter free (PDF)
http://adaptivewebdesign.info – First Edition, May 2011 (read the entire first edition free)
http://webstandardssherpa.com – Web Standards Sherpa
https://github.com/easy-designs/batch-ua-parser.php – UA Parser Script by Aaron – on Github
https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/ – Notebook: Aaron’s blog
https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/speaking-engagements/ – Engagements: Aaron’s speaking page, using Quantity Queries
http://alistapart.com/article/quantity-queries-for-css – “Quantity Queries for CSS” by Heydon Pickering in A List Apart
http://alistapart.com/author/agustafson – A List Apart: articles by Aaron Gustafson
http://alistapart.com/article/goingtoprint – Eric Meyer’s “CSS Design: Going to Print” in A List Apart
https://www.whatsapp.com – Whatsapp

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? 139: Every Time We Touch—Josh Clark, author of “Designing For Touch”

Author Josh Clark on The Big Web ShowTOUCH introduces physicality to designs that were once strictly virtual, and puts forth a new test: How does this design feel in the hand? Josh Clark’s new book, Designing For Touch, guides designers through this new touchscreen frontier, and is the launchpad for today’s Big Web Show conversation.

In a fast-paced, freewheeling conversation, Josh and I discuss why game designers are some of our most talented and inspiring interaction designers; the economy of motion; perceptions of value when viewing objects on touchscreen versus desktop computer; teaching digital designers to think like industrial designers (and vice-versa); long press versus force touch; how and when to make gestures discoverable; and much more.

Sponsored by DreamHost and BrainTree. Big Web Show listeners can save 15% when ordering Designing For Touch at abookapart.com with discount code DFTBIGWEB. Discount valid through the end of January 2016.

URLS

Big Web Show Episode ? 139
Big Medium
Designing For Touch

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Web Performance Today

WEB DESIGNERS have cared about web performance since the profession’s earliest days. When I started, we saved user bandwidth by employing GIF images that had the fewest possible colors—with no dithering, when possible, and by using actual web text instead of pictures of web text. (Kids, ask your parents about life before CSS enabled, type designers created formats for, browsers finally supported, and Typekit quickly popularized web fonts.)

Later, we learned to optimize JPEGs and blur their backgrounds: the blurrier large swathes of a JPEG image can be, the lower the bandwidth requirements for the image. We found the optimally performant size for repeating background tiles (32 x 32 and 64 x 64 were pretty good) and abandoned experiments like single-pixel-wide backgrounds, which seemed like a good idea but slowed browsers, servers, and computers to a crawl.

We developed other tricks, too. Like, when we discovered that GIF images optimized better if they possessed repeating patterns of diagonal lines, we worked diagonal background images into a design trend. It was the trend that preceded drop shadows, the wicked worn look, and skeuomorpic facades, which were themselves a retro recurrence of one of the earliest styles of commercial web design; that trend, which was always on the heavy side, performance-wise, eventually gave way to a far more performant grid-driven minimalism, which hearkened back to classic 1940s Swiss graphic design, but which our industry (sometimes with little knowledge of design history) called “flat design” and justified as being “born digital” despite its true origins going back to pixels, protractors, and a love of Greek mathematics.

All of this nostalgia is prelude to making the obvious comment that web design today is far more complex than it was in those golden years of experimentation; and because it is so much more complex, front-end performance is also far more complicated. You didn’t need an engineering degree to run DeBabelizer and remove needless elements from your markup, but, boy, does front-end design today feel more and more like serious coding.

All of which is to say, if you’re a front-end designer/developer, you should probably read and bookmark Nate Berkopec’s “Ludicrously Fast Page Loads – A Guide for Full-Stack Devs.” While you’re at it, save it to Pocket, and as a PDF you can read on your tablet.

I cannot verify every detail Nate provides, but it is all in line with recommendations I’ve heard over and over at top conferences, and read in articles and books by such performance mavens as Jake Archibald, Lara Hogan, Scott Jehl, and Yesenia Perez-Cruz.

You should also pick up these great books on performance:

(It’s not why I wrote this post, but if you order Scott’s book today, you can save 10% when you enter discount code ABAHARVEST at checkout.)

Even the most complex site should work in any device that reads HTML. It should work if stylesheets fail to load or the device doesn’t recognize CSS. It should work if JavaScript fails to load or the device doesn’t recognize JavaScript. The principles of standards-based design will never change, no matter how complex our web becomes. And as it becomes more complex (and, arguably, much richer), it behooves us to squeeze every byte of performance we can.

Websites can never be too rich or too thin.

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art direction Bandwidth Best practices Brands CSS CSS3 Design Designers development Fonts Real type on the web software State of the Web Typekit Typography Web Design Web Standards webfonts Websites

A Helvetica For Readers

A Helvetica for readers–introducing Acumin.

ACUMIN by Robert Slimbach is a new type family from Adobe that does for book (and ebook) designers what Helvetica has always done for graphic designers. Namely, it provides a robust yet water-neutral sans-serif, in a full suite of weights and widths. And unlike the classic pressing of Helvetica that comes on everyone’s computers—but like Helvetica Neue—Acumin contains real italics for every weight and width.

Reading about the design challenges Slimbach set himself (and met) helps you appreciate this new type system, whose virtues are initially all too easy to overlook, because Acumin so successfully avoids bringing a personality to the table. Enjoying Acumin is like developing a taste for exceptionally good water.

Nick Sherman designed the website for Adobe, and its subtly brilliant features are as easy to miss at first look as Acumin’s. For starters, the style grid on the intro page dynamically chooses words to fit the column based on the viewport size. Resize your browser and you’ll see how the words change to fill the space.

Heaps of behind-the-scenes calculation allow the page to load all 90 (!) fonts without breaking your pipes or the internet. Developer Bram Stein is the wizard behind the page’s performance.

Nick uses progressively enhanced CSS3 Columns to create his responsive multi-column layout, incorporating subtle tricks like switching to a condensed font when the multi-column layout shrinks below a certain size. (This is something A List Apart used to do as well; we stopped because of performance concerns.) In browsers like IE9 and earlier, which do not support CSS3 Multiple Column specification, the layout defaults to a quite readable single column. Nick adds:

It’s the first time I’ve used responsive CSS columns for a real-world project. This was both frustrating and fun because the CSS properties for controlling widows and orphans are very far behind what’s possible in InDesign, etc. It also required more thinking about vertical media queries to prevent a situation where the user would have to scroll up and down to get from the bottom of one column to the top of the next. If the viewport is too short to allow for easy reading across columns, it stays as a single column.

He describes the challenges of creating the site’s preview tool thusly:

We had to do some behind the scenes trickery in order to get the sliders to work for changing widths and weights. It’s a good way to allow people to type their own text and get a feeling for how the family can be used as a system for body text and headlines (unlike Helvetica, which is more limited to the middle range of sizes). Chris Lewis helped out a lot with getting this to work. It even works on a phone!

Book designers have long had access to great serif fonts dripping with character that were ideal for setting long passages of text. Now they have a well-made sans serif that’s as sturdy yet self-effacing as a waiter at a great restaurant. Congratulations to Robert Slimbach, Adobe, and the designers and developers mentioned or interviewed here. I look forward to seeing if Acumin makes it into new website designs (perhaps sharing some of Proxima Nova‘s lunch), especially among mature designers focused on creating readable experiences. And I pray Acumin makes its way into the next generation of ebook readers.

(Just me? In both iBooks and Kindle, I’m continually changing typefaces after reading any book for any period of time. All the current faces just call too much attention to themselves, making me aware that I am scanning text—which is rather like making filmgoers aware that they are watching projected images just when they should be losing themselves in the story.)

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Ad Blocking and the Future of the Web

YOUR site may soon be collateral damage in a war between Silicon Valley superpowers. By including ad blocking in iOS9, Apple isn’t trying to take down your site or mine—just like the drone program doesn’t deliberately target civilians and children. Apple is trying to hurt arch-rival Google while providing a more elegant (i.e. more Apple-like) web experience than user-hostile ad networks have previously allowed. This is a great example of acting in your own self-interest, yet smelling like a rose. Will independent sites that depend on advertising be hurt along with Google?

We have always been at war with Eastasia

We should be used to this war between digital super companies by now. iPhone and iPad users, consider your Amazon experience on the platform. Notice how you can’t buy books in your Kindle app in iOS? Apple supports Amazon to the extent of letting Amazon distribute Kindle software on the iOS platform. But if you want to buy a Kindle book for your phone, you have to go to a desktop browser (or open Safari on your phone and navigate to Amazon.com). Kind of encourages you to get your digital books in iBooks instead.

Same with Amazon’s video app on iOS. You can stream all the movies you want on your phone or iPad, but you can’t buy them in the Amazon Video app. You must use a desktop browser or navigate to amazon.com in the version of Safari that comes with iOS. Kind of encourages you to buy videos from iTunes instead.

You also can’t buy Kindle books or streaming Amazon videos in the Amazon shopping app for iOS, although you can use that app to shop for anything else.

See, Amazon doesn’t want to give Apple a cut of its media sales, so Apple won’t let Amazon sell products in its apps. In Apple’s reasoning, all other vendors pay Apple a cut; Amazon shouldn’t get a pass. And Amazon is serious about not sharing revenue, because Amazon is a ruthless competitor that has taken over nearly all online retail sales in the U.S. by innovating service and delivery, and giving consumers the lowest possible price—a price that leaves them no margin to share with Apple. It’s also a price that strangles the companies that provide the goods Amazon sells. Oh, well.

Because Amazon is serious about not sharing sales revenue with Apple, and Apple is serious about blocking sales by any vendor that refuses to share revenue, Apple denies Amazon the right to sell products via its iOS apps. Who suffers? You, the consumer, as you put down your phone and toddle over to a desktop—or just shrug and do without. (Not that it’s the worst suffering in this world. But it is anti-consumer, and makes both Amazon and Apple look bad.)

And, of course, you can’t stream Amazon video on your Apple TV, and likewise can’t watch video content you’ve purchased through Apple iTunes on Amazon Fire TV without jumping through (possibly illegal) hoops. Not since Microsoft dominated the desktop software world in the 1990s have tech and media companies viewed success as a last-man-standing affair, with the consumer as collateral damage.

Still, we’re used to all this and don’t think about it.

Ad blocking is a different beast.

Certainly, at first, ad blocking seems like a different beast. After all, consumers may want to buy books in their Kindle app, but no consumer is clamoring for more ads. And media and advertising have only themselves to blame for the horrendous experience online advertising has become. We hate advertising so much, we’ve trained ourselves not to look at the top or right sidebar on most sites. In fact, it’s become a designer’s trick that if the client forces you to put the CEO’s pet link on the home page, you hide it in plain sight at the top of the sidebar, where no one but the CEO will see it. Popups and screen takeovers and every other kind of anti-user nightmare have made advertising a hated and largely ignored thing on the web.

There are tasteful ad networks, to be sure. The Deck, which Jim Coudal created with Jason Fried and me, serves one single, small, tasteful, well targeted ad per page. When we launched The Deck, I hoped other networks would take inspiration from it, and figure out how to increase engagement while minimizing clutter. I even tried to sell my studio’s media clients on the notion of fewer, better priced, better targeted ads. But of course the ad networks have done the opposite—constantly interrupting content to force misleading, low-interest ads on you.

Hip web consumers have long used third-party ad blockers to unfug the web experience, and great applications like Readability explored alternate content revenue models while boosting type size and removing ad clutter from web content. I served on the Readability advisory board. And I used to go around the world warning designers that if we didn’t figure out a way to create readable, clutter-free layouts for our clients’ sites, apps like Readability would do it for us—putting us out of work, and removing advertising as a revenue stream for media companies. As it happens, in the intervening years, many smart sites have found a way to put content first and emphasize not just legibility but readability in their layouts. The best of those sites—I’m thinking of The New York Times here—have found a way to integrate advertising tastefully in those large-type, content-focused, readability-oriented modern layouts. (Medium.com, of course, does an amazing job with big type and readability, but it doesn’t need to integrate advertising—at least not yet—as it floats on a sea of VC bucks.)

But advertisers don’t want to be ignored, and they are drunk on our data, which is what Google and other large networks are really selling. The ads are almost a by-product; what companies really want to know is what antiperspirant a woman of 25-34 is most likely to purchase after watching House of Cards. Which gets us into issues of privacy and spying and government intrusion and don’t ask.

And in this environment of sites so cluttered with misleading ads they are almost unnavigable, Apple looks heroic, riding to the consumer’s rescue by providing all the content from newspapers without the ads, and by blocking ugly advertising on websites. But if they succeed, will media companies and independent sites survive?

Consumer good vs. consumer good

What Apple’s doing wouldn’t matter as much if consumers were still sitting down at a desktop to get their news and cat gifs. But they’re not. Everyone does everything on mobile. Including browse the web.

Thus in The Verge today, Nilay Patel argues there’s a real risk that, in attacking Google’s revenue stream, Apple may hurt the web itself:

The collateral damage of that war — of Apple going after Google’s revenue platform — is going to include the web, and in particular any small publisher on the web that can’t invest in proprietary platform distribution, native advertising, and the type of media wining-and-dining it takes to secure favorable distribution deals on proprietary platforms. It is going to be a bloodbath of independent media. … Taking money and attention away from the web means that the pace of web innovation will slow to a crawl. —Welcome to hell: Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook and the slow death of the web

John Gruber thinks otherwise, at least for small indie sites like his:

Perhaps I am being smug. But I see the fact that Daring Fireball’s revenue streams should remain unaffected by Safari content-blocking as affirmation that my choices over the last decade have been correct: that I should put my readers’ interests first, and only publish the sort of ads and sponsorships that I myself would want to be served, even if that means leaving (significant) amounts of money on the table along the way. But I take no joy in the fact that a terrific publication like The Awl might be facing hard times. They’re smart; they will adapt.—Because of Apple

In Publishing Versus Performance, I looked at the conflict between advertising and content through the filter of performance. For those who didn’t read it (or don’t remember), I pointed out that most consumer interaction with the web happens on mobile, which means it happens on mobile networks, which, at times at least, may be severely bandwidth-constrained; so performance counts as it hasn’t in years. And while good designers and developers are working like never before to create performant websites, the junk ad networks spew interferes with their good work and slows websites to a crawl. This threatens the future of the web, as consumers will blame the web for poor performance, and stick to apps. But removing those ad networks isn’t an option, I pointed out, since, abhorrent or not, advertising dollars are the engine that drives digital media: no bucks, no content.

Well, now, Apple has decided for us. Removing those ad networks may not be an option, but it’s happening anyway. How will it affect your site?


Also published in Medium.com.

Categories
content Content First Content-First creativity Design Ideas industry State of the Web

The independent content producer refuses to die!

2001 IS CALLING, and while it may not look fresh, its message still resonates:

We believe that the web is a remarkable medium for new forms of art, personal storytelling, and all manner of information and services whose rewards are not necessarily financial.

The independent content scene is alive and well, but is largely unknown by the general web-using public.

We seek to support each other as a community, and to increase, if possible, the general public’s awareness not only of existing independent sites, but of the fact that they can create their own.

INDEPENDENTS DAY is a wholly non-owned, non-commercial, non-subsidiary of nothing.

Independent content on the web: a declaration of principles from 2001, still relevant today, from Independents Day.

Categories
Design State of the Web stealing

All Websites Look The Same

All websites look the same.

When was the last time you saw a website that didn’t have a huge image fitting to the screen with some giant text overlaid on it? … Design agencies are guilty too. [They] don’t need to use WordPress themes to create their websites. They don’t need to worry about technical capabilities and they are their own client when it comes to building their own website. They should be the very ones pushing things and taking a chance on something new.

Source: All Websites Look The Same – NoVolume, Web Design Blog

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