rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic 222,Golden Spirals,"As building blocks go, the rectangle is not one to overwhelm the designer with decisions. On the face of it, you have two options: you can set the width, and the height. But despite this apparent simplicity, there are combinations of width and height that can look unbalanced. If a rectangle is too tall and slim, it might appear precarious. If it is not tall enough, it may simply look flat. But like a guitar string that’s out of tune, you can tweak the proportions little by little until a rectangle feels, as Goldilocks said, just right. A golden rectangle has its height and width in the golden ratio, which is approximately 1:1.618. These proportions have long been recognised as being aesthetically harmonious. Whether through instruction or by intuition, artists have understood how to exploit these proportions over the centuries. Examples can be found in classical architecture, medieval book construction, and even in the recent #newtwitter redesign. A mathematical curiosity The golden rectangle is unique, in that if you remove a square section from it, what is left behind is itself a golden rectangle. The removal of a square can be repeated on the rectangle that is left behind, and then repeated again, as many times as you like. This means that the golden rectangle can be treated as a building block for recursive patterns. In this article, we will exploit this property to build a golden spiral, using only HTML and CSS. The markup The HTML we’ll use for this study is simply a series of nested
s.
The first of these has the class cycle, and so does every fourth ancestor thereafter. The spiral completes a cycle every four steps, so this class allows styles to be reused on
s that appear at the same position in each cycle. Golden proportions To create our spiral we are going to exploit the unique properties of the golden rectangle, so our first priority is to ensure that we have a golden rectangle to begin with. If we pick a length for the short edge – say, 288 pixels – we can then calculate the length of the long edge by multiplying this value by 1.618. In this case, 288 × 1.618 = 466, so our starting point will be a
with these properties: #container > div { width: 466px; height: 288px; } The greater than symbol is used here to single out the immediate child of the #container element, without affecting the grandchild or any of the more distant descendants. We could go on to specify the precise pixel dimensions of every child element, but that means doing a lot of sums. It would be much easier if we just specified the dimensions for each element as a percentage of the width and height of its parent. This also has the advantage that if you change the size of the outermost container, all nested elements would be resized automatically – something that we shall exploit later. The approximate value of 38.2% can be derived from (100 × 1 − phi) ÷ phi, where the Greek letter phi (ϕ) stands for the golden ratio. The value of phi can be expressed as phi = (1 + √5 ) ÷ 2, which is approximately 1.618. You don’t have to understand the derivation to use it. Just remember that if you start with a golden rectangle, you can slice 38.2% from it to create a new golden rectangle. This can be expressed in CSS quite simply: .cycle, .cycle > div > div { height: 38.2%; width: 100%; } .cycle > div, .cycle > div > div > div { width: 38.2%; height: 100%; } You can see the result so far by visiting Demo One. With no borders or shading, there is nothing to see yet, so let’s address that next. Shading with transparency We’ll need to apply some shading to distinguish each segment of the spiral from its neighbours. We could start with a white background, then progress through shades of grey: #eee, #ddd, #ccc and so on, but this means hard-coding the background-color for every element. A more elegant solution would be to use the same colour for every element, but to make each one slightly transparent. The nested
s that we are working with could be compared to layers in Photoshop. By applying a semi-transparent shade of grey, each successive layer can build on top of the darker layers beneath it. The effect accumulates, causing each successive layer to appear slightly darker than the last. In his 2009 article for 24 ways, Drew McLellan showed how to create a semi-transparent effect by working with RGBA colour. Here, we’ll use the colour black with an alpha value of 0.07. #container div { background-color: rgba(0,0,0,0.07) } Note that I haven’t used the immediate child selector here, which means that this rule will apply to all
elements inside the #container, no matter how deeply nested they are. You can view the result in Demo Two. As you can see, the golden rectangles alternate between landscape and portrait orientation. Demo Three). CSS3 specification indicates that a percentage can be used to set the border-radius property, but using percentages does not achieve consistent results in browsers today. Luckily, if you specify a border-radius in pixels using a value that is greater than the width and height of the element, then the resulting curve will use the shorter length side as its radius. This produces exactly the effect that we want, so we’ll use an arbitrarily high value of 10,000 pixels for each border-radius: .cycle { border-radius: 0px; border-bottom-left-radius: 10000px; } .cycle > div { border-radius: 0px; border-bottom-right-radius: 10000px; } .cycle > div > div { border-radius: 0px; border-top-right-radius: 10000px; } .cycle > div > div > div { border-radius: 0px; border-top-left-radius: 10000px; } Note that the specification for the border-radius property is still in flux, so it is advisable to use vendor-specific prefixes. I have omitted them from the example above for the sake of clarity, but if you view source on Demo Four then you’ll see that the actual styles are not quite as brief. Filling the available space We have created an approximation of the Golden Spiral using only HTML and CSS. Neat! It’s a shame that it occupies just a fraction of the available space. As a finishing touch, let’s make the golden spiral expand or contract to use the full space available to it. Ideally, the outermost container should use the full available width or height that could accomodate a rectangle of golden proportions. This behaviour is available for background images using the “ background-size: contain; property, but I know of no way to make block level HTML elements behave in this fashion (if I’m missing something, please enlighten me). Where CSS fails to deliver, JavaScript can usually provide a workaround. This snippet requires jQuery: $(document).ready(function() { var phi = (1 + Math.sqrt(5))/2; $(window).resize(function() { var goldenWidth = windowWidth = $(this).width(), goldenHeight = windowHeight = $(this).height(); if (windowWidth/windowHeight > phi) { // panoramic viewport – use full height goldenWidth = windowHeight * phi; } else { // portrait viewport – use full width goldenHeight = windowWidth / phi; }; $(""#container > div.cycle"") .width(goldenWidth) .height(goldenHeight); }).resize(); }); You can view the result by visiting Demo Five. Is it just me, or can you see an elephant in there? You can probably think of many ways to enhance this further, but for this study we’ll leave it there. It has been a good excuse to play with proportions, positioning and the immediate child selector, as well as new CSS3 features such as border-radius and RGBA colours. If you are not already designing with golden proportions, then perhaps this will inspire you to begin.",2010,Drew Neil,drewneil,2010-12-07T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/golden-spirals/,design 238,Everything You Wanted To Know About Gradients (And a Few Things You Didn’t),"Hello. I am here to discuss CSS3 gradients. Because, let’s face it, what the web really needed was more gradients. Still, despite their widespread use (or is it overuse?), the smartly applied gradient can be a valuable contributor to a designer’s vocabulary. There’s always been a tension between the inherently two-dimensional nature of our medium, and our desire for more intensity, more depth in our designs. And a gradient can evoke so much: the splay of light across your desk, the slow decrease in volume toward the end of your favorite song, the sunset after a long day. When properly applied, graded colors bring a much needed softness to our work. Of course, that whole ‘proper application’ thing is the tricky bit. But given their place in our toolkit and their prominence online, it really is heartening to see we can create gradients directly with CSS. They’re part of the draft images module, and implemented in two of the major rendering engines. Still, I’ve always found CSS gradients to be one of the more confusing aspects of CSS3. So if you’ll indulge me, let’s take a quick look at how to create CSS gradients—hopefully we can make them seem a bit more accessible, and bring a bit more art into the browser. Gradient theory 101 (I hope that’s not really a thing) Right. So before we dive into the code, let’s cover a few basics. Every gradient, no matter how complex, shares a few common characteristics. Here’s a straightforward one: I spent seconds hours designing this gradient. I hope you like it. At either end of our image, we have a final color value, or color stop: on the left, our stop is white; on the right, black. And more color-rich gradients are no different: (Don’t ever really do this. Please. I beg you.) It’s visually more intricate, sure. But at the heart of it, we have just seven color stops (red, orange, yellow, and so on), making for a fantastic gradient all the way. Now, color stops alone do not a gradient make. Between each is a transition point, the fail-over point between the two stops. Now, the transition point doesn’t need to fall exactly between stops: it can be brought closer to one stop or the other, influencing the overall shape of the gradient. A tale of two syntaxes Armed with our new vocabulary, let’s look at a CSS gradient in the wild. Behold, the simple input button: There’s a simple linear gradient applied vertically across the button, moving from a bright sunflowerish hue (#FAA51A, for you hex nuts in the audience) to a much richer orange (#F47A20). And here’s the CSS that makes it happen: input[type=submit] { background-color: #F47A20; background-image: -moz-linear-gradient( #FAA51A, #F47A20 ); background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%, color-stop(0, #FAA51A), color-stop(1, #F47A20) ); } I’ve borrowed David DeSandro’s most excellent formatting suggestions for gradients to make this snippet a bit more legible but, still, the code above might have turned your stomach a bit. And that’s perfectly understandable—heck, it sort of turned mine. But let’s step through the CSS slowly, and see if we can’t make it a little less terrifying. Verbose WebKit is verbose Here’s the syntax for our little gradient on WebKit: background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%, color-stop(0, #FAA51A), color-stop(1, #F47A20) ); Woof. Quite a mouthful, no? Well, here’s what we’re looking at: WebKit has a single -webkit-gradient property, which can be used to create either linear or radial gradients. The next two values are the starting and ending positions for our gradient (0 0 and 0 100%, respectively). Linear gradients are simply drawn along the path between those two points, which allows us to change the direction of our gradient simply by altering its start and end points. Afterward, we specify our color stops with the oh-so-aptly named color-stop parameter, which takes the stop’s position on the gradient (0 being the beginning, and 100% or 1 being the end) and the color itself. For a simple two-color gradient like this, -webkit-gradient has a bit of shorthand notation to offer us: background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%, from(#FAA51A), to(#FAA51A) ); from(#FAA51A) is equivalent to writing color-stop(0, #FAA51A), and to(#FAA51A) is the same as color-stop(1, #FAA51A) or color-stop(100%, #FAA51A)—in both cases, we’re simply declaring the first and last color stops in our gradient. Terse Gecko is terse WebKit proposed its syntax back in 2008, heavily inspired by the way gradients are drawn in the canvas specification. However, a different, leaner syntax came to the fore, eventually appearing in a draft module specification in CSS3. Naturally, because nothing on the web was meant to be easy, this is the one that Mozilla has implemented. Here’s how we get gradient-y in Gecko: background-image: -moz-linear-gradient( #FAA51A, #F47A20 ); Wait, what? Done already? That’s right. By default, -moz-linear-gradient assumes you’re trying to create a vertical gradient, starting from the top of your element and moving to the bottom. And, if that’s the case, then you simply need to specify your color stops, delimited with a few commas. I know: that was almost… painless. But the W3C/Mozilla syntax also affords us a fair amount of flexibility and control, by introducing features as we need them. We can specify an origin point for our gradient: background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(50% 100%, #FAA51A, #F47A20 ); As well as an angle, to give it a direction: background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(50% 100%, 45deg, #FAA51A, #F47A20 ); And we can specify multiple stops, simply by adding to our comma-delimited list: background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(50% 100%, 45deg, #FAA51A, #FCC, #F47A20 ); By adding a percentage after a given color value, we can determine its position along the gradient path: background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(50% 100%, 45deg, #FAA51A, #FCC 20%, #F47A20 ); So that’s some of the flexibility implicit in the W3C/Mozilla-style syntax. Now, I should note that both syntaxes have their respective fans. I will say that the W3C/Mozilla-style syntax makes much more sense to me, and lines up with how I think about creating gradients. But I can totally understand why some might prefer WebKit’s more verbose approach to the, well, looseness behind the -moz syntax. À chacun son gradient syntax. Still, as the language gets refined by the W3C, I really hope some consensus is reached by the browser vendors. And with Opera signaling that it will support the W3C syntax, I suppose it falls on WebKit to do the same. Reusing color stops for fun and profit But CSS gradients aren’t all simple colors and shapes and whatnot: by getting inventive with individual color stops, you can create some really complex, compelling effects. Tim Van Damme, whose brain, I believe, should be posthumously donated to science, has a particularly clever application of gradients on The Box, a site dedicated to his occasional podcast series. Now, there are a fair number of gradients applied throughout the UI, but it’s the feature image that really catches the eye. You see, there’s nothing that says you can’t reuse color stops. And Tim’s exploited that perfectly. He’s created a linear gradient, angled at forty-five degrees from the top left corner of the photo, starting with a fully transparent white (rgba(255, 255, 255, 0)). At the halfway mark, he’s established another color stop at an only slightly more opaque white (rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.1)), making for that incredibly gradual brightening toward the middle of the photo. But then he has set another color stop immediately on top of it, bringing it back down to rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) again. This creates that fantastically hard edge that diagonally bisects the photo, giving the image that subtle gloss. And his final color stop ends at the same fully transparent white, completing the effect. Hot? I do believe so. Rocking the radials We’ve been looking at linear gradients pretty exclusively. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention radial gradients as a viable option, including a modest one as a link accent on a navigation bar: And here’s the relevant CSS: background: -moz-radial-gradient(50% 100%, farthest-side, rgb(204, 255, 255) 1%, rgb(85, 85, 85) 15%, rgba(85, 85, 85, 0) ); background: -webkit-gradient(radial, 50% 100%, 0, 50% 100%, 15, from(rgb(204, 255, 255)), to(rgba(85, 85, 85, 0)) ); Now, the syntax builds on what we’ve already learned about linear gradients, so much of it might be familiar to you, picking out color stops and transition points, as well as the two syntaxes’ reliance on either a separate property (-moz-radial-gradient) or parameter (-webkit-gradient(radial, …)) to shift into circular mode. Mozilla introduces another stand-alone property (-moz-radial-gradient), and accepts a starting point (50% 100%) from which the circle radiates. There’s also a size constant defined (farthest-side), which determines the reach and shape of our gradient. WebKit is again the more verbose of the two syntaxes, requiring both starting and ending points (50% 100% in both cases). Each also accepts a radius in pixels, allowing you to control the skew and breadth of the circle. Again, this is a fairly modest little radial gradient. Time and article length (and, let’s be honest, your author’s completely inadequate grasp of geometry) prevent me from covering radial gradients in much more detail, because they are incredibly powerful. For those interested in learning more, I can’t recommend the references at Mozilla and Apple strongly enough. Leave no browser behind But no matter the kind of gradients you’re working with, there is a large swathe of browsers that simply don’t support gradients. Thankfully, it’s fairly easy to declare a sensible fallback—it just depends on the kind of fallback you’d like. Essentially, gradient-blind browsers will disregard any properties containing references to either -moz-linear-gradient, -moz-radial-gradient, or -webkit-gradient, so you simply need to keep your fallback isolated from those properties. For example: if you’d like to fall back to a flat color, simply declare a separate background-color: .nav { background-color: #000; background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0), rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45)); background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%, from(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)), to(rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45))); } Or perhaps just create three separate background properties. .nav { background: #000; background: #000 -moz-linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0), rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45)); background: #000 -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%, from(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)), to(rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45))); } We can even build on this to fall back to a non-gradient image: .nav { background: #000 url(""faux-gradient-lol.png"") repeat-x; background: #000 -moz-linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0), rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45)); background: #000 -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%, from(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)), to(rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45))); } No matter the approach you feel most appropriate to your design, it’s really just a matter of keeping your fallback design quarantined from its CSS3-ified siblings. (If you’re feeling especially masochistic, there’s even a way to get simple linear gradients working in IE via Microsoft’s proprietary filters. Of course, those come with considerable performance penalties that even Microsoft is quick to point out, so I’d recommend avoiding those. And don’t tell Andy Clarke I told you, or he’ll probably unload his Derringer at me. Or something.) Go forth and, um, gradientify! It’s entirely possible your head’s spinning. Heck, mine is, but that might be the effects of the ’nog. But maybe you’re wondering why you should care about CSS gradients. After all, images are here right now, and work just fine. Well, there are some quick benefits that spring to mind: fewer HTTP requests are needed; CSS3 gradients are easily made scalable, making them ideal for variable widths and heights; and finally, they’re easily modifiable by tweaking a few CSS properties. Because, let’s face it, less time spent yelling at Photoshop is a very, very good thing. Of course, CSS-generated gradients are not without their drawbacks. The syntax can be confusing, and it’s still under development at the W3C. As we’ve seen, browser support is still very much in flux. And it’s possible that gradients themselves have some real performance drawbacks—so test thoroughly, and gradient carefully. But still, as syntaxes converge, and support improves, I think generated gradients can make a compelling tool in our collective belts. The tasteful design is, of course, entirely up to you. So have fun, and get gradientin’.",2010,Ethan Marcotte,ethanmarcotte,2010-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-gradients/,code 226,Documentation-Driven Design for APIs,"Documentation is like gift wrapping. It seems like superfluous fluff, but your family tends to be rather disappointed when their presents arrive in supermarket carrier bags, so you have to feign some sort of attempt at making your gift look enticing. Documentation doesn’t have to be all hard work and sellotaping yourself to a table – you can make it useful and relevant. Documentation gets a pretty rough deal. It tends to get left until the end of a project, when some poor developer is assigned the ‘document project’ ticket and wades through each feature of Whizzy New API 3.0 and needs to recall exactly what each method is meant to do. That’s assuming any time is left for documentation at all. The more common outcome resembles last minute homework scribbled on a post-it note, where just the bare bones of what’s available are put out for your users, and you hope that you’ll spot the inconsistencies and mistakes before they do. Wouldn’t it be nicer for everyone if you could make documentation not only outstanding for your users, but also a valuable tool for your development team – so much so that you couldn’t imagine writing a line of code before you’d documented it? Documentation needs to have three main features: It should have total coverage and document all the features of your project. Private methods should be documented for your developers, and public features need to be available to your users. It should be consistent – a user should know what to expect from your documentation, and terminology should be accurate to your language. It should be current – and that means staying accurate as new versions of your code base are released. But you can also get these bonuses: Act as a suggested specification – a guide that will aid a developer in making something consistent and usable. It can test your API quality. It can enhance the communication skills within your development team. So how do we get our documentation to be rich and full of features, instead of a little worn out like Boxing Day leftovers? Write your documentation first When I say first, I mean first. Not after you’ve started writing the code. Not even after you’ve started writing your unit tests. First. You may or may not have been provided with a decent specification, but the first job should be to turn your requirements for a feature into documentation. It works best when it takes the form of in-code comments. It works even better when your in-code comments take a standard documentation format that you can later use to generate published documentation for your users. This has the benefit of immediately making your docs as version controlled as your code-base, and it saves having to rewrite, copy or otherwise harass your docs into something legible later on. Almost all languages have a self-documentation format these days. My choice of format for JavaScript is JSDocToolkit, and the sort of things I look for are the ability to specify private and public methods, full options object statements (opts as Opts only is a no-no), and the ability to include good examples. So, our example for today will be a new festive feature for a JavaScript API. We’ve been asked to specify a sled for Santa to get around the world to give out toys: Santa needs to be able to travel around the world in one night to deliver toys to children, and he’ll need some reindeer to pull his sled. As documentation, it would look like: /** @name Sled @extends Vehicle @constructor @description Create a new sled to send Santa around the world to deliver toys to good kids. @param {Object} [opts] Options @param {number} [opts.capacity='50'] Set the capacity of the sled @param {string} [opts.pilot='santa'] The pilot of the sled. @example // Create a sled and specify some reindeer. new Sled().reindeer(['Dasher', 'Dancer', 'Prancer', 'Vixen', 'Comet', 'Cupid']); */ By breaking it down as documentation, you can, for example, hand this over to another developer without the need to explain the feature in much depth, and they’ll develop something that has to match this piece of documentation. It specifies everything that is important to this feature – its default values and types, and where it inherits other features from. We know that we need to specify some way of setting reindeer to pull the sled and also some toys to give, and so we can quickly specify extra methods for the sled: /* @name vehicle.Sled#reindeer @function @description Set the reindeer that will pull Santa's sled. @param {string[]} reindeer A list of the reindeer. @example // specifying some reindeer Sled().reindeer(['Dasher', 'Dancer', 'Rudolph', 'Vixen']); */ /* @name vehicle.Sled#toys @function @description Add a list of toys and recipients to the Sled. @param {Object[]} toys A list of toys and who will receive them. @example // Adding toys to the sled Sled().toys([ {name:'Brian', toy:'Fire Engine'}, {name:'Drew', toy:'Roller-skates'}, {name:'Anna', toy:'Play-doh'}, ... ]); */ Job done! You’ve got a specification to share with your team and something useful for your users in the form of full examples, and you didn’t even have to open another text editor. Use your documentation to share knowledge Documentation isn’t just for users. It’s also used by internal developers to explain what they’ve written and how it works. This is especially valuable where the team is large or the code-base sprawling. So, returning to our example, the next step would be to share with the rest of the team (or at least a selection of the team if yours is large) what the documentation looks like. This is useful for two main reasons: They can see if they understand what the documentation says the feature will do. It’s best if they haven’t seen the requirement before. If your fellow developers can’t work out what ‘MagicMethodX’ is going to return from the docs, neither can your users. They can check that the feature accomplishes everything that they expect to, and that it’s consistent with the rest of the functionality. On previous projects, we’ve taken to referring to this stage of the development process as the ‘bun fight’. It’s a chance for everyone to have an honest say and throw a few pies without actually causing anyone to have to rewrite any code. If you can identify at this stage that a feature is over-complicated, lacking or just plain useless, you’ll all be much happier to throw out a few lines of documentation than you may have been to throw out a partial, or even complete, piece of functionality. Documentation has your back The final benefit to working in this way is that your documentation not only remains accurate, it’s always as accurate as your latest release. It can’t fall behind. You can increase the likelihood that your docs will remain up to date by unit testing your examples. Returning to the previous example, we can add a QUnit unit test to the expected output with ease during the build process – we know exactly how the code will look and, with the @example tag, we can identify easily where to find the bits that need testing. If it’s tested it’ll definitely work as you expect it to when a user copy and pastes it. You’re ensuring quality from idea to implementation. As an extra bauble, the best thing about a system like JSDocToolkit is that it’ll take your inline comments and turn them into beautiful sites, as good systems will allow for customised output templates. You’ll be producing full-featured sites for your projects and plugins with almost no extra effort, but all the benefits.",2010,Frances Berriman,francesberriman,2010-12-11T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/documentation-driven-design-for-apis/,process 236,Extreme Design,"Recently, I set out with twelve other designers and developers for a 19th century fortress on the Channel Island of Alderney. We were going to /dev/fort, a sort of band camp for geeks. Our cohort’s mission: to think up, build and finish something – without readily available internet access. Alderney runway, photo by Chris Govias Wait, no internet? Well, pretty much. As the creators of /dev/fort James Aylett and Mark Norman Francis put it: “Imagine a place with no distractions – no IM, no Twitter”. But also no way to quickly look up a design pattern, code sample or source material. Like packing for camping, /dev/fort means bringing everything you’ll need on your back or your hard drive: from long johns to your favourite icon set. We got to work the first night discussing ideas for what we wanted to build. By the time breakfast was cleared up the next morning, we’d settled on Russ’s idea to make the Apollo 13 (PDF) transcript accessible. Days two and three were spent collaboratively planning (KJ style) what features we wanted to build, and unravelling the larger UX challenges of the project. The next five days were spent building it. Within 36 hours of touchdown at Southampton Airport, we launched our creation: spacelog.org The weather was cold, the coal fire less than ideal, food and supplies a hike away, and the process lightning-fast. A week of designing under extreme circumstances called for an extreme process. Some of this was driven by James’s and Norm’s experience running these things, but a lot of it materialised while we were there – especially for our three-strong design team (myself, Gavin O’ Carroll and Chris Govias) who, though we knew each other, had never worked together as a group in this kind of scenario before. The outcome was a pretty spectacular process, with a some key takeaways useful for any small group trying to build something quickly. What it’s like inside the fort /dev/fort has the pressure and pace of a hack day without being a hack day – primarily, no workshops or interruptions‚ but also a different mentality. While hack days are typically developer-driven with a ‘hack first, design later (if at all)’ attitude, James was quick to tell the team to hold off from writing any code until we had a plan. This put a healthy pressure on the design and product folks to slash through the UX problems before we started building. While the fort had definitely more of a hack day feel, all of us were familiar with Agile methods, so we borrowed a few useful techniques such as morning stand-ups and an emphasis on teamwork. We cut some really good features to make our launch date, and chunked the work based on user goals, iterating as we went. What made this design process work? A golden ratio of teams My personal experience both professionally and in free-form situations like this, is a tendency to get/hire a designer. Leaders of businesses, founders of start-ups, organisers of events: one designer is not enough! Finding one ace-blooded designer who can ‘do everything’ will always result in bottleneck and burnout. Like the nuances between different development languages, design is a multifaceted discipline, and very few can claim to be equally strong in every aspect. Overlap in skill set will result in a stronger, more robust interface. More importantly, however, having lots of designers to go around meant that we all had the opportunity to pair with developers, polishing the details that don’t usually get polished. As soon as we launched, the public reception of the design and UX was overwhelmingly positive (proof!). But also, a lot of people asked us who the designer was, attributing it to one person. While it’s important to note that everyone in our team was multitalented (and could easily shift between roles, helping us all stay unblocked), the golden ratio James and Norm devised was two product/developer folks, three interaction designers and eight developers. photo by Ben Firshman Equality inside the fortress walls Something magical about the fort is how everyone leaves the outside world on the drawbridge. Job titles, professional status, Twitter followers, and so on. Like scout camp, a mutual respect and trust is expected of all the participants. Like extreme programming, extreme design requires us all to be equal partners in a collaborative team. I think this is especially worth noting for designers; our past is filled with the clear hierarchy of the traditional studio system which, however important for taste and style, seems less compatible with modern web/software development methods. Being equal doesn’t mean being the same, however. We established clear roles and teams for ourselves on the second day, deferring to that person when a decision needed to be made. As the interface coalesced, the designers and developers took ownership over certain parts to ensure the details got looked after, while staying open to ideas and revisions from the rest of the cohort. Create a space where everyone who enters is equal, but be sure to establish clear roles. Even if it’s just for a short while, the environment will be beneficial. photo by Ben Firshman Hang your heraldry from the rafters Forts and castles are full of lore: coats of arms; paintings of battles; suits of armour. It’s impossible not to be surrounded by these stories, words and ways of thinking. Like the whiteboards on the walls, putting organisational lore in your physical surroundings makes it impossible not to see. Ryan Alexander brought some of those static-cling whiteboard sheets which were quickly filled with use cases; IA; team roles; and, most importantly, a glossary. As soon as we started working on the project, we realised we needed to get clear on what certain words meant: what was a logline, a range, a phase, a key moment? Were the back-end people using these words in the same way design and product was? Quickly writing up a glossary of terms meant everyone was instantly speaking the same language. There was no “Ah, I misunderstood because in the data structure x means y” or, even worse, accidental seepage of technical language into the user interface copy. Put a glossary of your internal terminology somewhere big and fat on the wall. Stand around it and argue until you agree on what it says. Leave it up; don’t underestimate the power of ambient communication and physical reference. Plan more, download less While internet is forbidden inside the fort, we did go on downloading expeditions: NASA photography; code documentation; and so on. The project wouldn’t have been possible without a few trips to the web. We had two lists on the wall: groceries and supplies; internets – “loo roll; Tom Stafford photo“. This changed our usual design process, forcing us to plan carefully and think of what we needed ahead of time. Getting to the internet was a thirty-minute hike up a snow covered cliff to the town airport, so you really had to need it, too. The path to the internet For the visual design, especially, this resulted in more focus up front, and communication between the designers on what assets we required. It made us make decisions earlier and stick with them, creating less distraction and churn later in the process. Try it at home: unplug once you’ve got the things you need. As an artist, it’s easier to let your inner voice shine through if you’re not looking at other people’s work while creating. Social design Finally, our design team experimented with a collaborative approach to wireframing. Once we had collectively nailed down use cases, IA, user journeys and other critical artefacts, we tried a pairing approach. One person drew in Illustrator in real time as the other two articulated what to draw. (This would work equally well with two people, but with three it meant that one of us could jump up and consult the lore on the walls or clarify a technical detail.) The result: we ended up considering more alternatives and quickly rallying around one solution, and resolved difficult problems more quickly. At a certain stage we discovered it was more efficient for one person to take over – this happened around the time when the basic wireframes existed in Illustrator and we’d collectively run through the use cases, making sure that everything was accounted for in a broad sense. At this point, take a break, go have a beer, and give yourself a pat on the back. Put the files somewhere accessible so everyone can use them as their base, and divide up the more detailed UI problems, screens or journeys. At this level of detail it’s better to have your personal headspace. Gavin called this ‘social design’. Chatting and drawing in real time turned what was normally a rather solitary act into a very social process, with some really promising results. I’d tried something like this before with product or developer folks, and it can work – but there’s something really beautiful about switching places and everyone involved being equally quick at drawing. That’s not something you get with non-designers, and frequent swapping of the ‘driver’ and ‘observer’ roles is a key aspect to pairing. Tackle the forest collectively and the trees individually – it will make your framework more robust and your details more polished. Win/win. The return home Grateful to see a 3G signal on our phones again, our flight off the island was delayed, allowing for a flurry of domain name look-ups, Twitter catch-up, and e-mails to loved ones. A week in an isolated fort really made me appreciate continuous connectivity, but also just how unique some of these processes might be. You just never know what crazy place you might be designing from next.",2010,Hannah Donovan,hannahdonovan,2010-12-09T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/extreme-design/,process 240,My CSS Wish List,"I love Christmas. I love walking around the streets of London, looking at the beautifully decorated windows, seeing the shiny lights that hang above Oxford Street and listening to Christmas songs. I’m not going to lie though. Not only do I like buying presents, I love receiving them too. I remember making long lists that I would send to Father Christmas with all of the Lego sets I wanted to get. I knew I could only get one a year, but I would spend days writing the perfect list. The years have gone by, but I still enjoy making wish lists. And I’ll tell you a little secret: my mum still asks me to send her my Christmas list every year. This time I’ve made my CSS wish list. As before, I’d be happy with just one present. Before I begin… … this list includes: things that don’t exist in the CSS specification (if they do, please let me know in the comments – I may have missed them); others that are in the spec, but it’s incomplete or lacks use cases and examples (which usually means that properties haven’t been implemented by even the most recent browsers). Like with any other wish list, the further down I go, the more unrealistic my expectations – but that doesn’t mean I can’t wish. Some of the things we wouldn’t have thought possible a few years ago have been implemented and our wishes fulfilled (think multiple backgrounds, gradients and transformations, for example). The list Cross-browser implementation of font-size-adjust When one of the fall-back fonts from your font stack is used, rather than the preferred (first) one, you can retain the aspect ratio by using this very useful property. It is incredibly helpful when the fall-back fonts are smaller or larger than the initial one, which can make layouts look less polished. What font-size-adjust does is divide the original font-size of the fall-back fonts by the font-size-adjust value. This preserves the x-height of the preferred font in the fall-back fonts. Here’s a simple example: p { font-family: Calibri, ""Lucida Sans"", Verdana, sans-serif; font-size-adjust: 0.47; } In this case, if the user doesn’t have Calibri installed, both Lucida Sans and Verdana will keep Calibri’s aspect ratio, based on the font’s x-height. This property is a personal favourite and one I keep pointing to. Firefox supported this property from version three. So far, it’s the only browser that does. Fontdeck provides the font-size-adjust value along with its fonts, and has a handy tool for calculating it. More control over overflowing text The text-overflow property lets you control text that overflows its container. The most common use for it is to show an ellipsis to indicate that there is more text than what is shown. To be able to use it, the container should have overflow set to something other than visible, and white-space: nowrap: div { white-space: nowrap; width: 100%; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; } This, however, only works for blocks of text on a single line. In the wish list of many CSS authors (and in mine) is a way of defining text-overflow: ellipsis on a block of multiple text lines. Opera has taken the first step and added support for the -o-ellipsis-lastline property, which can be used instead of ellipsis. This property is not part of the CSS3 spec, but we could certainly make good use of it if it were… WebKit has -webkit-line-clamp to specify how many lines to show before cutting with an ellipsis, but support is patchy at best and there is no control over where the ellipsis shows in the text. Many people have spent time wrangling JavaScript to do this for us, but the methods used are very processor intensive, and introduce a JavaScript dependency. Indentation and hanging punctuation properties You might notice a trend here: almost half of the items in this list relate to typography. The lack of fine-grained control over typographical detail is a general concern among designers and CSS authors. Indentation and hanging punctuation fall into this category. The CSS3 specification introduces two new possible values for the text-indent property: each-line; and hanging. each-line would indent the first line of the block container and each line after a forced line break; hanging would invert which lines are affected by the indentation. The proposed hanging-punctuation property would allow us to specify whether opening and closing brackets and quotes should hang outside the edge of the first and last lines. The specification is still incomplete, though, and asks for more examples and use cases. Text alignment and hyphenation properties Following the typographic trend of this list, I’d like to add better control over text alignment and hyphenation properties. The CSS3 module on Generated Content for Paged Media already specifies five new hyphenation-related properties (namely: hyphenate-dictionary; hyphenate-before and hyphenate-after; hyphenate-lines; and hyphenate-character), but it is still being developed and lacks examples. In the text alignment realm, the new text-align-last property allows you to define how the last line of a block (or a line just before a forced break) is aligned, if your text is set to justify. Its value can be: start; end; left; right; center; and justify. The text-justify property should also allow you to have more control over text set to text-align: justify but, for now, only Internet Explorer supports this. calc() This is probably my favourite item in the list: the calc() function. This function is part of the CSS3 Values and Units module, but it has only been implemented by Firefox (4.0). To take advantage of it now you need to use the Mozilla vendor code, -moz-calc(). Imagine you have a fluid two-column layout where the sidebar column has a fixed width of 240 pixels, and the main content area fills the rest of the width available. This is how you could create that using -moz-calc(): #main { width: -moz-calc(100% - 240px); } Can you imagine how many hacks and headaches we could avoid were this function available in more browsers? Transitions and animations are really nice and lovely but, for me, it’s the ability to do the things that calc() allows you to that deserves the spotlight and to be pushed for implementation. Selector grouping with -moz-any() The -moz-any() selector grouping has been introduced by Mozilla but it’s not part of any CSS specification (yet?); it’s currently only available on Firefox 4. This would be especially useful with the way HTML5 outlines documents, where we can have any number of variations of several levels of headings within numerous types of containers (think sections within articles within sections…). Here is a quick example (copied from the Mozilla blog post about the article) of how -moz-any() works. Instead of writing: section section h1, section article h1, section aside h1, section nav h1, article section h1, article article h1, article aside h1, article nav h1, aside section h1, aside article h1, aside aside h1, aside nav h1, nav section h1, nav article h1, nav aside h1, nav nav h1, { font-size: 24px; } You could simply write: -moz-any(section, article, aside, nav) -moz-any(section, article, aside, nav) h1 { font-size: 24px; } Nice, huh? More control over styling form elements Some are of the opinion that form elements shouldn’t be styled at all, since a user might not recognise them as such if they don’t match the operating system’s controls. I partially agree: I’d rather put the choice in the hands of designers and expect them to be capable of deciding whether their particular design hampers or improves usability. I would say the same idea applies to font-face: while some fear designers might go crazy and litter their web pages with dozens of different fonts, most welcome the freedom to use something other than Arial or Verdana. There will always be someone who will take this freedom too far, but it would be useful if we could, for example, style the default Opera date picker: or Safari’s slider control (think star movie ratings, for example): Parent selector I don’t think there is one CSS author out there who has never come across a case where he or she wished there was a parent selector. There have been many suggestions as to how this could work, but a variation of the child selector is usually the most popular: article < h1 { … } One can dream… Flexible box layout The Flexible Box Layout Module sounds a bit like magic: it introduces a new box model to CSS, allowing you to distribute and order boxes inside other boxes, and determine how the available space is shared. Two of my favourite features of this new box model are: the ability to redistribute boxes in a different order from the markup the ability to create flexible layouts, where boxes shrink (or expand) to fill the available space Let’s take a quick look at the second case. Imagine you have a three-column layout, where the first column takes up twice as much horizontal space as the other two:
With the flexible box model, you could specify it like this: body { display: box; box-orient: horizontal; } #main { box-flex: 2; } #links { box-flex: 1; } aside { box-flex: 1; } If you decide to add a fourth column to this layout, there is no need to recalculate units or percentages, it’s as easy as that. Browser support for this property is still in its early stages (Firefox and WebKit need their vendor prefixes), but we should start to see it being gradually introduced as more attention is drawn to it (I’m looking at you…). You can read a more comprehensive write-up about this property on the Mozilla developer blog. It’s easy to understand why it’s harder to start playing with this module than with things like animations or other more decorative properties, which don’t really break your layouts when users don’t see them. But it’s important that we do, even if only in very experimental projects. Nested selectors Anyone who has never wished they could do something like the following in CSS, cast the first stone: article { h1 { font-size: 1.2em; } ul { margin-bottom: 1.2em; } } Even though it can easily turn into a specificity nightmare and promote redundancy in your style sheets (if you abuse it), it’s easy to see how nested selectors could be useful. CSS compilers such as Less or Sass let you do this already, but not everyone wants or can use these compilers in their projects. Every wish list has an item that could easily be dropped. In my case, I would say this is one that I would ditch first – it’s the least useful, and also the one that could cause more maintenance problems. But it could be nice. Implementation of the ::marker pseudo-element The CSS Lists module introduces the ::marker pseudo-element, that allows you to create custom list item markers. When an element’s display property is set to list-item, this pseudo-element is created. Using the ::marker pseudo-element you could create something like the following: Footnote 1: Both John Locke and his father, Anthony Cooper, are named after 17th- and 18th-century English philosophers; the real Anthony Cooper was educated as a boy by the real John Locke. Footnote 2: Parts of the plane were used as percussion instruments and can be heard in the soundtrack. where the footnote marker is generated by the following CSS: li::marker { content: ""Footnote "" counter(notes) "":""; text-align: left; width: 12em; } li { counter-increment: notes; } You can read more about how to use counters in CSS in my article from last year. Bear in mind that the CSS Lists module is still a Working Draft and is listed as “Low priority”. I did say this wish list would start to grow more unrealistic closer to the end… Variables The sight of the word ‘variables’ may make some web designers shy away, but when you think of them applied to things such as repeated colours in your stylesheets, it’s easy to see how having variables available in CSS could be useful. Think of a website where the main brand colour is applied to elements like the main text, headings, section backgrounds, borders, and so on. In a particularly large website, where the colour is repeated countless times in the CSS and where it’s important to keep the colour consistent, using variables would be ideal (some big websites are already doing this by using server-side technology). Again, Less and Sass allow you to use variables in your CSS but, again, not everyone can (or wants to) use these. If you are using Less, you could, for instance, set the font-family value in one variable, and simply call that variable later in the code, instead of repeating the complete font stack, like so: @fontFamily: Calibri, ""Lucida Grande"", ""Lucida Sans Unicode"", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; body { font-family: @fontFamily; } Other features of these CSS compilers might also be useful, like the ability to ‘call’ a property value from another selector (accessors): header { background: #000000; } footer { background: header['background']; } or the ability to define functions (with arguments), saving you from writing large blocks of code when you need to write something like, for example, a CSS gradient: .gradient (@start:"""", @end:"""") { background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(@start), to(@end)); background: -moz-linear-gradient(-90deg,@start,@end); } button { .gradient(#D0D0D0,#9F9F9F); } Standardised comments Each CSS author has his or her own style for commenting their style sheets. While this isn’t a massive problem on smaller projects, where maybe only one person will edit the CSS, in larger scale projects, where dozens of hands touch the code, it would be nice to start seeing a more standardised way of commenting. One attempt at creating a standard for CSS comments is CSSDOC, an adaptation of Javadoc (a documentation generator that extracts comments from Java source code into HTML). CSSDOC uses ‘DocBlocks’, a term borrowed from the phpDocumentor Project. A DocBlock is a human- and machine-readable block of data which has the following structure: /** * Short description * * Long description (this can have multiple lines and contain

tags * * @tags (optional) */ CSSDOC includes a standard for documenting bug fixes and hacks, colours, versioning and copyright information, amongst other important bits of data. I know this isn’t a CSS feature request per se; rather, it’s just me pointing you at something that is usually overlooked but that could contribute towards keeping style sheets easier to maintain and to hand over to new developers. Final notes I understand that if even some of these were implemented in browsers now, it would be a long time until all vendors were up to speed. But if we don’t talk about them and experiment with what’s available, then it will definitely never happen. Why haven’t I mentioned better browser support for existing CSS3 properties? Because that would be the same as adding chocolate to your Christmas wish list – you don’t need to ask, everyone knows you want it. The list could go on. There are dozens of other things I would love to see integrated in CSS or further developed. These are my personal favourites: some might be less useful than others, but I’ve wished for all of them at some point. Part of the research I did while writing this article was asking some friends what they would add to their lists; other than a couple of items I already had in mine, everything else was different. I’m sure your list would be different too. So tell me, what’s on your CSS wish list?",2010,Inayaili de León Persson,inayailideleon,2010-12-03T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/my-css-wish-list/,code 224,Go Forth and Make Awesomeness,"We’ve all dreamed of being a superhero: maybe that’s why we’ve ended up on the web—a place where we can do good deeds and celebrate them on a daily basis. Wear your dreams At age four, I wore my Wonder Woman Underoos around my house, my grandparents’ house, our neighbor’s house, and even around the yard. I wanted to be a superhero when I grew up. I was crushed to learn that there is no school for superheroes—no place to earn a degree in how to save the world from looming evil. Instead, I—like everyone else—was destined to go to ordinary school to focus on ABCs and 123s. Even still, I want to save the world. Intend your goodness Random acts of kindness make a difference. Books, films, and advertising campaigns tout random acts of kindness and the positive influence they can have on the world. But why do acts of kindness have to be so random? Why can’t we intend to be kind? A true superhero wakes each morning intending to perform selfless acts for the community. Why can’t we do the same thing? As a child, my mother taught me to plan to do at least three good deeds each day. And even now, years later, I put on my invisible cape looking for ways to do good. Here are some examples: slowing down to allow another driver in before me from the highway on-ramp bringing a co-worker their favorite kind of coffee or tea sharing my umbrella on a rainy day holding a door open for someone with full hands listening intently when someone shares a story complimenting someone on a job well done thanking someone for a job well done leaving a constructive, or even supportive comment on someone’s blog As you can see, these acts are simple. Doing good and being kind is partially about being aware—aware of the words we speak and the actions we take. Like superheroes, we create our own code of conduct to live by. Hopefully, we choose to put the community before ourselves (within reason) and to do our best not to damage it as we move through our lives. Take a bite out of the Apple With some thought, we can weave this type of thinking and action into our business choices. We can take the simple acts of kindness concept and amplify it a bit. With this amplification, we can be a new kind of superhero. In 1997, during a presentation, Steve Jobs stated Apple’s core value in a simple, yet powerful, sentence: We believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. Apple fan or not, those are powerful words. Define your core Every organization must define its core values. Core values help us to frame, recognize, and understand the principles our organization embodies and practices. It doesn’t matter if you’re starting a new organization or you want to define values within an existing organization. Even if you’re a freelancer, defining core values will help guide your decisions and actions. If you can, work as a team to define core values. Gather the people who are your support system—your business partners, your colleagues, and maybe even a trusted client—this is now your core value creation team. Have a brainstorming session with your team. Let ideas flow. Give equal weight to the things people say. You may not hear everything you thought you might hear—that’s OK. You want the session to be free-flowing and honest. Ask yourself and your team questions like: What do you think my/our/your core values are? What do you think my/our/your priorities are? What do you think my/our/your core values should be? What do you think my/our/your priorities should be? How do you think I/we should treat customers, clients, and each other? How do we want others to treat us? What are my/our/your success stories? What has defined these experiences as successful? From this brainstorming session, you will craft your superhero code of conduct. You will decide what you will and will not do. You will determine how you will and will not act. You’re setting the standards that you will live and work by—so don’t take this exercise lightly. Take your time. Use the exercise as a way to open a discussion about values. Find out what you and your team believe in. Set these values and keep them in place. Write them down and share these with your team and with the world. By sharing your core values, you hold yourself more accountable to them. You also send a strong message to the rest of the world about what type of organization you are and what you believe in. Other organizations and people may decide to align or not to align themselves with you because of your core values. This is good. Chances are, you’ll be happier and more profitable if you work with other organizations and people who share similar core values. Photo: Laura Winn During your brainstorming session, list keywords. Don’t edit. Allow things to take their course. Some examples of keywords might be: Ability · Achievement · Adventure · Ambition · Altruism · Awareness · Balance · Caring · Charity · Citizenship · Collaboration · Commitment · Community · Compassion · Consideration · Cooperation · Courage · Courtesy · Creativity · Democracy · Dignity · Diplomacy · Discipline · Diversity · Education · Efficiency · Energy · Equality · Excellence · Excitement · Fairness · Family · Freedom · Fun · Goodness · Gratefulness · Growth · Happiness · Harmony · Helping · Honor · Hope · Humility · Humor · Imagination · Individuality · Innovation · Integrity · Intelligence · Joy · Justice · Kindness · Knowledge · Leadership · Learning · Loyalty · Meaning · Mindfulness · Moderation · Modesty · Nurture · Openness · Organization · Passion · Patience · Peace · Planning · Principles · Productivity · Purpose · Quality · Reliability · Respectfulness · Responsibility · Security · Sensitivity · Service · Sharing · Simplicity · Stability · Tolerance · Transparency · Trust · Truthfulness · Understanding · Unity · Variety · Vision · Wisdom After you have a list of keywords, create your core values statement using the themes from your brainstorming session. There are no rules: while above, Steve Jobs summed up Apple’s core values in one sentence, Zappos has ten core values: Deliver WOW Through Service Embrace and Drive Change Create Fun and A Little Weirdness Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded Pursue Growth and Learning Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit Do More With Less Be Passionate and Determined Be Humble To see how Zappos’ employees embrace these core values, watch the video they created and posted on their website. Dog food is yummy Although I find merit in every keyword listed, I’ve distilled my core values to their simplest form: Make awesomeness. Do good. How do you make awesomeness and do good? You need ambition, balance, collaboration, commitment, fun, and you need every keyword listed to support these actions. Again, there are no rules: your core values can be one sentence or a bulleted list. What matters is being true to yourself and creating core values that others can understand. Before I start any project I ask myself: is there a way to make awesomeness and to do good? If the answer is “yes,” I embrace the endeavor because it aligns with my core values. If the answer is “no,” I move on to a project that supports my core values. Unleash your powers Although every organization will craft different core values, I imagine that you want to be a superhero and that you will define “doing good” (or something similar) as one of your core values. Whether you work by yourself or with a team, you can use the web as a tool to help do good. It can be as simple as giving a free hug, or something a little more complex to help others and help your organization meet the bottom line. Some interesting initiatives that use the web to do good are: Yahoo!: How Good Grows Desigual: Happy Hunters Edge Shave Gel: Anti-irritation campaign Knowing your underlying desire to return to your Underoos-and-cape-sporting childhood and knowing that you don’t always have the opportunity to develop an entire initiative to “do good,” remember that as writers, designers, and developers, we can perform superhero acts on a daily basis by making content, design, and development accessible to the greatest number of people. By considering other people’s needs, we are intentionally performing acts of kindness—we’re doing good. There are many ways to write, design, and develop websites—many of which will be discussed in other 24ways.org articles. As we make content, design, and development decisions—as we develop campaigns and initiatives—we need to keep our core values in mind. It’s easy to make a positive difference in the world. Just be the superhero you’ve always wanted to be. Go forth and make awesomeness. If you would like to do good today, support The United Nations Children’s Fund, an organization that works for children’s rights, their survival, development and protection, by purchasing this year’s 24 ways Annual 2010 created by Five Simple Steps. All proceeds go to UNICEF.",2010,Leslie Jensen-Inman,lesliejenseninman,2010-12-04T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/go-forth-and-make-awesomeness/,business 218,Put Yourself in a Corner,"Some backstory, and a shameful confession For the first couple years of high school I was one of those jerks who made only the minimal required effort in school. Strangely enough, how badly I behaved in a class was always in direct proportion to how skilled I was in the subject matter. In the subjects where I was confident that I could pass without trying too hard, I would give myself added freedom to goof off in class. Because I was a closeted lit-nerd, I was most skilled in English class. I’d devour and annotate required reading over the weekend, I knew my biblical and mythological allusions up and down, and I could give you a postmodern interpretation of a text like nobody’s business. But in class, I’d sit in the back and gossip with my friends, nap, or scribble patterns in the margins of my textbooks. I was nonchalant during discussion, I pretended not to listen during lectures. I secretly knew my stuff, so I did well enough on tests, quizzes, and essays. But I acted like an ass, and wasn’t getting the most I could out of my education. The day of humiliation, but also epiphany One day in Ms. Kaney’s AP English Lit class, I was sitting in the back doodling. An earbud was dangling under my sweater hood, attached to the CD player (remember those?) sitting in my desk. Because of this auditory distraction, the first time Ms. Kaney called my name, I barely noticed. I definitely heard her the second time, when she didn’t call my name so much as roar it. I can still remember her five feet frame stomping across the room and grabbing an empty desk. It screamed across the worn tile as she slammed it next to hers. She said, “This is where you sit now.” My face gets hot just thinking about it. I gathered my things, including the CD player (which was now impossible to conceal), and made my way up to the newly appointed Seat of Shame. There I sat, with my back to the class, eye-to-eye with Ms. Kaney. From my new vantage point I couldn’t see my friends, or the clock, or the window. All I saw were Ms. Kaney’s eyes, peering at me over her reading glasses while I worked. In addition to this punishment, I was told that from now on, not only would I participate in class discussions, but I would serve detention with her once a week until an undetermined point in the future. During these detentions, Ms. Kaney would give me new books to read, outside the curriculum, and added on to my normal homework. They ranged from classics to modern novels, and she read over my notes on each book. We’d discuss them at length after class, and I grew to value not only our private discussions, but the ones in class as well. After a few weeks, there wasn’t even a question of this being punishment. It was heaven, and I was more productive than ever. To the point Please excuse this sentimental story. It’s not just about honoring a teacher who cared enough to change my life, it’s really about sharing a lesson. The most valuable education Ms. Kaney gave me had nothing to do with literature. She taught me that I (and perhaps other people who share my special brand of crazy) need to be put in a corner to flourish. When we have physical and mental constraints applied, we accomplish our best work. For those of you still reading, now seems like a good time to insert a pre-emptive word of mediation. Many of you, maybe all of you, are self-disciplined enough that you don’t require the rigorous restrictions I use to maximize productivity. Also, I know many people who operate best in a stimulating and open environment. I would advise everyone to seek and execute techniques that work best for them. But, for those of you who share my inclination towards daydreams and digressions, perhaps you’ll find something useful in the advice to follow. In which I pretend to be Special Agent Olivia Dunham Now that I’m an adult, and no longer have Ms. Kaney to reign me in, I have to find ways to put myself in the corner. By rejecting distraction and shaping an environment designed for intense focus, I’m able to achieve improved productivity. Lately I’ve been obsessed with the TV show Fringe, a sci-fi series about an FBI agent and her team of genius scientists who save the world (no, YOU’RE a nerd). There’s a scene in the show where the primary character has to delve into her subconscious to do extraordinary things, and she accomplishes this by immersing herself in a sensory deprivation tank. The premise is this: when enclosed in a space devoid of sound, smell, or light, she will enter a new plane of consciousness wherein she can tap into new levels of perception. This might sound a little nuts, but to me this premise has some real-world application. When I am isolated from distraction, and limited to only the task at hand, I’m able to be productive on a whole new level. Since I can’t actually work in an airtight iron enclosure devoid of input, I find practical ways to create an interruption-free environment. Since I work from home, many of my methods for coping with distractions wouldn’t be necessary for my office-bound counterpart. However for some of you 9-to-5-ers, the principles will still apply. Consider your visual input First, I have to limit my scope to the world I can (and need to) affect. In the largest sense, this means closing my curtains to the chaotic scene of traffic, birds, the post office, a convenience store, and generally lovely weather that waits outside my window. When the curtains are drawn and I’m no longer surrounded by this view, my sphere is reduced to my desk, my TV, and my cat. Sometimes this step alone is enough to allow me to focus. But, my visual input can be whittled down further still. For example, the desk where I usually keep my laptop is littered with twelve owl figurines, a globe, four books, a three-pound weight, and various nerdy paraphernalia (hard drives, Wacom tablets, unnecessary bluetooth accessories, and so on). It’s not so much a desk as a dumping ground for wacky flea market finds and impulse technology buys. Therefore, in addition to this Official Desk, I have an adult version of Ms. Kaney’s Seat of Shame. It’s a rusty old student’s desk I picked up at the Salvation Army, almost an exact replica of the model Ms. Kaney dragged across the classroom all those years ago. This tiny reproduction Seat of Shame is literally in a corner, where my only view is a blank wall. When I truly need to focus, this is where I take refuge, with only a notebook and a pencil (and occasionally an iPad). Find out what works for your ears Even from my limited sample size of two people, I know there are lots of different ways to cope with auditory distraction. I prefer silence when focused on independent work, and usually employ some form of a white noise generator. I’ve yet to opt for the fancy ‘real’ white noise machines; instead, I use a desktop fan or our allergy filter machine. This is usually sufficient to block out the sounds of the dishwasher and the cat, which allows me to think only about the task of hand. My boyfriend, the other half of my extensive survey, swears by another method. He calls it The Wall of Sound, and it’s basically an intense blast of raucous music streamed directly into his head. The outcome of his technique is really the same as mine; he’s blocking out unexpected auditory input. If you can handle the grating sounds of noisy music while working, I suggest you give The Wall of Sound a try. Don’t count the minutes When I sat in the original Seat of Shame in lit class, I could no longer see the big classroom clock slowly ticking away the seconds until lunch. Without the marker of time, the class period often flew by. The same is true now when I work; the less aware of time I am, the less it feels like time is passing too quickly or slowly, and the more I can focus on the task (not how long it takes). Nowadays, to assist in my effort to forget the passing of time, I sometimes put a sticky note over the clock on my monitor. If I’m writing, I’ll use an app like WriteRoom, which blocks out everything but a simple text editor. There are situations when it’s not advisable to completely lose track of time. If I’m working on a project with an hourly rate and a tight scope, or if I need to be on time to a meeting or call, I don’t want to lose myself in the expanse of the day. In these cases, I’ll set an alarm that lets me know it’s time to reign myself back in (or on some days, take a shower). Put yourself in a mental corner, too When Ms. Kaney took action and forced me to step up my game, she had the insight to not just change things physically, but to challenge me mentally as well. She assigned me reading material outside the normal coursework, then upped the pressure by requiring detailed reports of the material. While this additional stress was sometimes uncomfortable, it pushed me to work harder than I would have had there been less of a demand. Just as there can be freedom in the limitations of a distraction-free environment, I’d argue there is liberty in added mental constraints as well. Deadlines as a constraint Much has been written about the role of deadlines in the creative process, and they seem to serve different functions in different cases. I find that deadlines usually act as an important constraint and, without them, it would be nearly impossible for me to ever consider a project finished. There are usually limitless ways to improve upon the work I do and, if there’s no imperative for me to be done at a certain point, I will revise ad infinitum. (Hence, the personal site redesign that will never end – Coming Soon, Forever!). But if I have a clear deadline in mind, there’s a point when the obsessive tweaking has to stop. I reach a stage where I have to gather up the nerve to launch the thing. Putting the pro in procrastination Sometimes I’ve found that my tendency to procrastinate can help my productivity. (Ducks, as half the internet throws things at her.) I understand the reasons why procrastination can be harmful, and why it’s usually a good idea to work diligently and evenly towards a goal. I try to divide my projects up in a practical way, and sometimes I even pull it off. But for those tasks where you work aimlessly and no focus comes, or you find that every other to-do item is more appealing, sometimes you’re forced to bring it together at the last moment. And sometimes, this environment of stress is a formula for magic. Often when I’m down to the wire and have no choice but to produce, my mind shifts towards a new level of clarity. There’s no time to endlessly browse for inspiration, or experiment with convoluted solutions that lead nowhere. Obviously a life lived perpetually on the edge of a deadline would be a rather stressful one, so it’s not a state of being I’d advocate for everyone, all the time. But every now and then, the work done when I’m down to the wire is my best. Keep one toe outside your comfort zone When I’m choosing new projects to take on, I often seek out work that involves an element of challenge. Whether it’s a design problem that will require some creative thinking, or a coding project that lends itself to using new technology like HTML5, I find a manageable level of difficulty to be an added bonus. The tension that comes from learning a new skill or rethinking an old standby is a useful constraint, as it keeps the work interesting, and ensures that I continue learning. There you have it Well, I think I’ve spilled most of my crazy secrets for forcing my easily distracted brain to focus. As with everything we web workers do, there are an infinite number of ways to encourage productivity. I hope you’ve found a few of these to be helpful, and please share your personal techniques in the comments. Have a happy and productive new year!",2010,Meagan Fisher,meaganfisher,2010-12-20T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/put-yourself-in-a-corner/,process 217,Beyond Web Mechanics – Creating Meaningful Web Design,"It was just over three years ago when I embarked on becoming a web designer, and the first opinion piece about the state of web design I came across was a conference talk by Elliot Jay Stocks called ‘Destroy the Web 2.0 Look’. Elliot’s presentation was a call to arms, a plea to web designers the world over to stop the endless reproductions of the so called ‘Web 2.0 look’. Three and a half years on from Elliot’s talk, what has changed? Well, from an aesthetic standpoint, not a whole lot. The Web 2.0 look has evolved, but it’s still with us and much of the web remains filled with cookie cutter websites that bear a striking resemblance to one another. This wouldn’t matter so much if these websites were selling comparable services or products, but they’re not. They look similar, they follow the same web design trends; their aesthetic style sends out a very similar message, yet they’re selling completely different services or products. How can you be communicating effectively with your users when your online book store is visually indistinguishable from an online cosmetic store? This just doesn’t make sense. I don’t want to belittle the current version of the Web 2.0 look for the sake of it. I want to talk about the opportunity we have as web designers to create more meaningful experiences for the people using our websites. Using design wisely gives us the ability to communicate messages, ideas and attitudes that our users will understand and connect with. Being human As human beings we respond emotionally to everything around us – people, objects, posters, packaging or websites. We also respond in different ways to different kinds of aesthetic design and style. We care about style and aesthetics deeply, whether we realise it or not. Aesthetic design has the power to attract or repel. We often make decisions based purely on aesthetics and style – and don’t retailers the world over know it! We connect attitudes and strongly held beliefs to style. Individuals will proudly associate themselves with a certain style or aesthetic because it’s an expression of who they are. You know that old phrase, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’? Well, the problem is that people do, so it’s important we get the cover right. Much is made of how to structure web pages, how to create a logical information hierarchy, how to use layout and typography to clearly communicate with your users. It’s important, however, not to mistake clarity of information or legibility with getting your message across. Few users actually read websites word by word: it’s far more likely they’ll just scan the page. If the page is copy-heavy and nothing grabs their attention, they may well just move on. This is why it’s so important to create a visual experience that actually means something to the user. Meaningful design When we view a poster or website, we make split-second assessments and judgements of what is in front of us. Our first impressions of what a website does or who it is aimed at are provoked by the style and aesthetic of the website. For example, with clever use of colour, typography, graphic design and imagery we can communicate to users that an organisation is friendly, edgy, compassionate, fun or environmentally conscious. Using a certain aesthetic we can convey the personality of that organisation, target age ranges, different sexes or cultural groups, communicate brand attributes, and more. We can make our users feel like they’re part of something and, perhaps even more importantly, we can make new users want to be a part of something. And we can achieve all this before the user has read a single word. By establishing a website’s aesthetic and creating a meaningful visual language, a design is no longer just a random collection of pretty gradients that have been plucked out of thin air. There can be a logic behind the design decisions we make. So, before you slap another generic piece of ribbon or an ultra shiny icon into the top-left corner of your website, think about why you are doing it. If you can’t come up with a reason better than “I saw it on another website”, it’s probably a poor application of style. Design and style There are a number of reasons why the web suffers from a lack meaningful design. Firstly, there are too many preconceptions of what a website should look like. It’s too easy for designers to borrow styles from other websites, thereby limiting the range of website designs we see on the web. Secondly, many web designers think of aesthetic design as of secondary importance, which shouldn’t be the case. Designing websites that are accessible and easy to use is, of course, very important but this is the very least a web designer should be delivering. Easy to use websites should come as standard – it’s equally important to create meaningful, compelling and beautiful experiences for everyone who uses our websites. The aesthetics of your site are part of the design, and to ignore this and play down the role of aesthetic design is just a wasted opportunity. No compromise necessary Easy to use, accessible websites and beautiful, meaningful aesthetics are not mutually exclusive. The key is to apply style and aesthetic design appropriately. We need to think about who and what we’re designing for and ask ourselves why we’re applying a certain kind of aesthetic style to our design. If you do this, there’s no reason why effective, functional design should come at the expense of jaw-dropping, meaningful aesthetics. Web designers need to understand the differences between functional design and aesthetic design but, even more importantly, they need to know how to make them work together. It’s combining these elements of design successfully that makes for the best web design in the world.",2010,Mike Kus,mikekus,2010-12-05T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/beyond-web-mechanics-creating-meaningful-web-design/,design 229,Sketching to Communicate,"As a web designer I’ve always felt that I’d somehow cheated the system, having been absent on the day God handed out the ability to draw. I didn’t study fine art, I don’t have a natural talent to effortlessly knock out a realistic bowl of fruit beside a water jug, and yet somehow I’ve still managed to blag my way this far. I’m sure many of you may feel the same. I had no intention of becoming an artist, but to have enough skill to convey an idea in a drawing would be useful. Instead, my inadequate instrument would doodle drunkenly across the page leaving a web of unintelligible paths instead of the refined illustration I’d seen in my mind’s eye. This – and the natural scrawl of my handwriting – is fine (if somewhat frustrating) when it’s for my eyes only but, when sketching to communicate a concept to a client, such amateur art would be offered with a sense of embarrassment. So when I had the opportunity to take part in some sketching classes whilst at Clearleft I jumped at the chance. Why sketch? In UX workshops early on in a project’s life, sketching is a useful and efficient way to convey and record ideas. It’s disposable and inexpensive, but needn’t look amateur. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a well executed sketch of how you’ll combine funny YouTube videos with elephants to make Lolephants.com could be worth millions in venture capital. Actually, that’s not bad… ;-) Although (as you will see) the basics of sketching are easy to master, the kudos you will receive from clients for being a ‘proper designer’ makes it worthwhile! Where to begin? Start by not buying yourself a sketch pad. If you were the type of child who ripped the first page out of a school exercise book and started again if you made even a tiny mistake (you’re not alone!), Wreck This Journal may offer a helping hand. Practicing on plain A4 paper instead of any ‘special’ notepad will make the process a whole lot easier, no matter how deliciously edible those Moleskines look. Do buy yourself a black fine-liner pen and a set of grey Pro Markers for shading. These pens are unlike any you will have used before, and look like blended watercolours once the ink is dry. Although multiple strokes won’t create unsightly blotches of heavy ink on the page, they will go right through your top sheet so always remember to keep a rough sheet in the second position as an ink blotter. photo by Tom Harrison Don’t buy pencils to sketch with, as they lack the confidence afforded by the heavy black ink strokes of marker pens and fine-liners. If you’re going to be sketching with clients then invest in some black markers and larger sheets of paper. At the risk of sounding like a stationery brand whore, Sharpies are ideal, and these comedy-sized Post-Its do the job far better than cheaper, less sticky alternatives. Although they’re thicker than most standard paper, be sure to double-layer them if you’re writing on them on a wall, unless you fancy a weekend redecorating your client’s swanky boardroom. The best way to build confidence and improve your sketching technique is, obviously, to practise. Reading this article will be of no help unless you repeat the following examples several times each. Go grab a pen and some paper now, and notice how you improve within even a short period of time. Sketching web UI Most elements of any website can be drawn as a combination of geometric shapes. photo by Nathanael Boehm Circles To draw a circle, get in position and start by resting your hand on the page and making the circular motion a few times without putting pen to paper. As you lower your pen whilst continuing the motion, you should notice the resulting shape is more regular than it otherwise would have been. Squares and rectangles Draw one pair of parallel lines first, followed by the others to complete the shapes. Slightly overlap the ends of the lines to make corners feel more solid than if you were to leave gaps. If you’re drawing a container, always draw the contents first, that way it won’t be a squash to fit them in. If you’re drawing a grid (of thumbnails, for instance), draw all parallel lines first as a series of long dashes to help keep line lengths and angles consistent. Shadows To lift elements from the page for emphasis, add a subtle shadow with a grey marker. For the most convincing look, assume the light source to be at the top left of the page – the shadow should simply be a thick grey line along the bottom and up the right edge of your shape. If the shape is irregular, the shadow should follow its outline. This is a good way to emphasise featured items, speech bubbles, form buttons, and so on. Sketching ideas Arrows Use arrows to show steps in a process or direction of movement. Giving shadows a 3-D feel, or adding a single colour, will help separate them from the rest of the sketch. Faces Start by drawing the circle. The direction of the nose (merely a point) indicates the direction of the person’s gaze. The eyes and mouth show emotion: more open and curvy for happy thoughts; more closed and jagged for angry thoughts. Try out a few shapes and see what emotions they convey. People Remember, we’re aiming for communication rather than realism here. A stick man would be fine. Give him a solid body, as shown in this example, and it becomes easier to pose him. I know you think hands are hard, but they’re quite important to convey some ideas, and for our purposes we don’t need to draw hands with any detail. An oval with a stick does the job of a pointing hand. Close-ups might need more fingers showing, but still don’t require any degree of realism. Signage Don’t be afraid to use words. We’re sketching to communicate, so if the easiest way to show an office block is a building with a big ‘office’ sign on the roof, that’s fine! Labels Likewise, feel free to label interactions. Use upper-case letters for legibility and slightly angle the horizontal bars upwards to create a more positive feel. Clichés Clichés are your friend! Someone’s having an idea? Light bulb above the head. Computer’s crashed? Cloud of smoke with “$£%*!” It’s good to practise regularly. Try applying these principles to still life, too. Look around you now and draw the cup on the table, or the books on the shelf. Think of it as a combination of shapes and aim for symbolism rather than realism, and it’s not as hard as you’d think. I hope this has given you the confidence to give it a shot, and the ability to at least not be mortified with the results! Tip: If you’re involving clients in design games like Leisa Reichelt’s ‘Design Consequences’ it may be wise to tone down the quality of your drawings at that point so they don’t feel intimidated. Remember, it’s important for them to feel at ease with the idea of wireframing in front of you and their colleagues, no matter how bad their line work. For more information see davegrayinfo.com – Dave Gray taught me everything I know :-)",2010,Paul Annett,paulannett,2010-12-19T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/sketching-to-communicate/,business 219,Speed Up Your Site with Delayed Content,"Speed remains one of the most important factors influencing the success of any website, and the first rule of performance (according to Yahoo!) is reducing the number of HTTP requests. Over the last few years we’ve seen techniques like sprites and combo CSS/JavaScript files used to reduce the number of HTTP requests. But there’s one area where large numbers of HTTP requests are still a fact of life: the small avatars attached to the comments on articles like this one. Avatars Many sites like 24 ways use a fantastic service called Gravatar to provide user images. As a user, you can sign up to Gravatar, give them your e-mail address, and upload an image to represent you. Sites can then include your image by generating a one way hash of your e-mail address and using that to build an image URL. For example, the markup for the comments on this page looks something like this:

Drew McLellan

This is a great article!

The Gravatar URL contains two parts. 100 is the size in pixels of the image we want. 13734b0cb20708f79e730809c29c3c48 is an MD5 digest of Drew’s e-mail address. Using MD5 means we can request an image for a user without sharing their e-mail address with anyone who views the source of the page. So what’s wrong with avatars? The problem is that a popular article can easily get hundreds of comments, and every one of them means another image has to be individually requested from Gravatar’s servers. Each request is small and the Gravatar servers are fast but, when you add them up, it can easily add seconds to the rendering time of a page. Worse, they can delay the loading of more important assets like the CSS required to render the main content of the page. These images aren’t critical to the page, and don’t need to be loaded up front. Let’s see if we can delay loading them until everything else is done. That way we can give the impression that our site has loaded quickly even if some requests are still happening in the background. Delaying image loading The first problem we find is that there’s no way to prevent Internet Explorer, Chrome or Safari from loading an image without removing it from the HTML itself. Tricks like removing the images on the fly with JavaScript don’t work, as the browser has usually started requesting the images before we get a chance to stop it. Removing the images from the HTML means that people without JavaScript enabled in their browser won’t see avatars. As Drew mentioned at the start of the month, this can affect a large number of people, and we can’t completely ignore them. But most sites already have a textual name attached to each comment and the avatars are just a visual enhancement. In most cases it’s OK if some of our users don’t see them, especially if it speeds up the experience for the other 98%. Removing the images from the source of our page also means we’ll need to put them back at some point, so we need to keep a record of which images need to be requested. All Gravatar images have the same URL format; the only thing that changes is the e-mail hash. Storing this is a great use of HTML5 data attributes. HTML5 data what? Data attributes are a new feature in HTML5. The latest version of the spec says: A custom data attribute is an attribute in no namespace whose name starts with the string “data-”, has at least one character after the hyphen, is XML-compatible, and contains no characters in the range U+0041 to U+005A (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A to LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z). […] Custom data attributes are intended to store custom data private to the page or application, for which there are no more appropriate attributes or elements. These attributes are not intended for use by software that is independent of the site that uses the attributes. In other words, they’re attributes of an HTML element that start with “data-” which you can use to share data with scripts running on your site. They’re great for adding small bits of metadata that don’t fit into an existing markup pattern the way microformats do. Let’s see this in action Take a look at the markup for comments again:

Drew McLellan

This is a great article!

Let’s replace the element with a data-gravatar-hash attribute on the element:

Drew McLellan

This is a great article!

Once we’ve done this, we’ll need a small bit of JavaScript to find all these attributes, and replace them with images after the page has loaded. Here’s an example using jQuery: $(window).load(function() { $('a[data-gravatar-hash]').prepend(function(index){ var hash = $(this).attr('data-gravatar-hash') return '' }) }) This code waits until everything on the page is loaded, then uses jQuery.prepend to insert an image into every link containing a data-gravatar-hash attribute. It’s short and relatively simple, but in tests it reduced the rendering time of a sample page from over three seconds to well under one. Finishing touches We still need to consider the appearance of the page before the avatars have loaded. When our script adds extra content to the page it will cause a browser reflow, which is visually annoying. We can avoid this by using CSS to reserve some space for each image before it’s inserted into the HTML: #comments div { padding-left: 110px; min-height: 100px; position: relative; } #comments div h4 img { display: block; position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; } In a real world example, we’ll also find that the HTML for a comment is more varied as many users don’t provide a web page link. We can make small changes to our JavaScript and CSS to handle this case. Put this all together and you get this example. Taking this idea further There’s no reason to limit this technique to sites using Gravatar; we can use similar code to delay loading any images that don’t need to be present immediately. For example, this year’s redesigned Flickr photo page uses a “data-defer-src” attribute to describe any image that doesn’t need to be loaded straight away, including avatars and map tiles. You also don’t have to limit yourself to loading the extra resources once the page loads. You can get further bandwidth savings by waiting until the user takes an action before downloading extra assets. Amazon has taken this tactic to the extreme on its product pages – extra content is loaded as you scroll down the page. So next time you’re building a page, take a few minutes to think about which elements are peripheral and could be delayed to allow more important content to appear as quickly as possible.",2010,Paul Hammond,paulhammond,2010-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/speed-up-your-site-with-delayed-content/,ux 227,A Contentmas Epiphany,"The twelve days of Christmas fall between 25 December, Christmas Day, and 6 January, the Epiphany of the Kings. Traditionally, these have been holidays and a lot of us still take a good proportion of these days off. Equally, a lot of us have a got a personal site kicking around somewhere that we sigh over and think, “One day I’ll sort you out!” Why not take this downtime to give it a big ol’ refresh? I know, good idea, huh? HEY WAIT! WOAH! NO-ONE’S TOUCHING PHOTOSHOP OR DOING ANY CSS FANCYWORK UNTIL I’M DONE WITH YOU! Be honest, did you immediately think of a sketch or mockup you have tucked away? Or some clever little piece of code you want to fiddle with? Now ask yourself, why would you start designing the container if you haven’t worked out what you need to put inside? Anyway, forget the content strategy lecture; I haven’t given you your gifts yet. I present The Twelve Days of Contentmas! This is a simple little plan to make sure that your personal site, blog or portfolio is not just looking good at the end of these twelve days, but is also a really useful repository of really useful content. WARNING KLAXON: There are twelve parts, one for each day of Christmas, so this is a lengthy article. I’m not expecting anyone to absorb this in one go. Add to Instapaper. There is no TL;DR for this because it’s a multipart process, m’kay? Even so, this plan of mine cuts corners on a proper applied strategy for content. You might find some aspects take longer than the arbitrary day I’ve assigned. And if you apply this to your company-wide intranet, I won’t be held responsible for the mess. That said, I encourage you to play along and sample some of the practical aspects of organising existing content and planning new content because it is, honestly, an inspiring and liberating process. For one thing, you get to review all the stuff you have put out for the world to look at and see what you could do next. This always leaves me full of ideas on how to plug the gaps I’ve found, so I hope you are similarly motivated come day twelve. Let’s get to it then, shall we? On the first day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me: 1. A (partial) content inventory I’m afraid being a site owner isn’t without its chores. With great power comes great responsibility and all that. There are the domain renewing, hosting helpline calls and, of course, keeping on top of all the content that you have published. If you just frowned a little and thought, “Well, there’s articles and images and… stuff”, then I’d like to introduce you to the idea of a content inventory. A content inventory is a list of all your content, in a simple spreadsheet, that allows you to see at a glance what is currently on your site: articles; about me page; contact form, and so on. You add the full URL so that you can click directly to any page listed. You add a brief description of what it is and what tags it has. In fact, I’ll show you. I’ve made a Google Docs template for you. Sorry, it isn’t wrapped. Does it seem like a mammoth task? Don’t feel you have to do this all in one day. But do do it. For one thing, looking back at all the stuff you’ve pushed out into the world gives you a warm fuzzy feeling which keeps the heating bill down. Grab a glass of mulled cider and try going month-by-month through your blog archives, or project-by-project through your portfolio. Do a little bit each day for the next twelve days and you’ll have done something awesome. The best bit is that this exploration of your current content helps you with the next day’s task. Bonus gift: for more on content auditing and inventory, check out Jeff Veen’s article on just this topic, which is also suitable for bigger business sites too. On the second day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me: 2. Website loves Remember when you were a kid, you’d write to Santa with a wish list that would make your parents squirm, because your biggest hope for your stocking would be either impossible or impossibly expensive. Do you ever get the same thing now as a grown-up where you think, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could make a video blog every week”, or “I could podcast once a month about this”, and then you push it to the back of your mind, assuming that you won’t have time or you wouldn’t know what to talk about anyway? True fact: content doesn’t just have to be produced when we are so incensed that we absolutely must blog about a topic. Neither does it have to be a drain to a demanding schedule. You can plan for it. In fact, you’re about to. So, today, get a pen and a notebook. Move away from your computer. My gift to you is to grab a quiet ten minutes between turkey sandwiches and relatives visiting and give your site some of the attention it deserves for 2011. What would you do with your site if you could? I don’t mean what would you do purely visually – although by all means note those things down too – but to your site as a whole. Here are some jumping off points: Would you like to individually illustrate and design some of your articles? What about a monthly exploration of your favourite topic through video or audio? Who would you like to collaborate with? What do you want your site to be like for a user? What tone of voice would you like to use? How could you use imagery and typography to support your content? What would you like to create content about in the new year? It’s okay if you can’t do these things yet. It’s okay to scrub out anything where you think, “Nah, never gonna happen.” But do give some thought to what you might want to do next. The best inspiration for this comes from what you’ve already done, so keep on with that inventory. Bonus gift: a Think Vitamin article on podcasting using Skype, so you can rope in a few friends to join in, too. On the third day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me: 3. Red pens Shock news, just in: the web is not print! One of the hardest things as a writer is to reach the point where you say, “Yeah, okay, that’s it. I’m done” and send off your beloved manuscript or article to print. I’m convinced that if deadlines didn’t exist, nothing would get finished. Why? Well, at the point you hand it over to the publishing presses, you can make no more changes. At best, you can print an erratum or produce an updated second edition at a later date. And writers love to – no, they live to – tweak their creations, so handing them over is quite a struggle. Just one more comma and… Online, we have no such constraints. We can edit, correct, test, tweak, twiddle until we’re blooming sick of it. Our red pens never run out of ink. It is time for you to run a more critical eye over your content, especially the stuff already published. Relish in the opportunity to change stuff on the fly. I am not so concerned by blog articles and such (although feel free to apply this concept to those, too), but mainly by your more concrete content: about pages; contact pages; home page navigation; portfolio pages; 404 pages. Now, don’t go running amok with the cut function yet. First, put all these evergreen pages into your inventory. In the notes section, write a quick analysis of how useful this copy is. Example questions: Is your contact page up-to-date? Does your about page link to the right places? Is your portfolio current? Does your 404 page give people a way to find what they were looking for? We’ll come back to this in a few days once we have a clearer idea of how to improve our content. Bonus gift: the audio and slides of a talk I gave on microcopy and 404 pages at @media WebDirections last year. On the fourth day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me: 4. Stalling nerds Actually, I guess more accurately this is something I get given a lot. Designers and developers particularly can find a million ways to extract themselves from the content of a site but, as the site owner, and this being your personal playground and all, you mustn’t. You actually can’t, sorry. But I do understand that at this point, ‘sorting out your site’ suddenly seems a lot less exciting, especially if you are a visually-minded person and words and lists aren’t really your thing. So far, there has been a lot of not-very-exciting exercises in planning, and there’s probably a nice pile of DVDs and video games that you got from Santa worth investigating. Stay strong my friend. By now, you have probably hit upon an idea of some sort you are itching to start on, so for every half-hour you spend doing inventory, gift yourself another thirty minutes to play with that idea. Bonus gift: the Pomodoro Technique. Take one kitchen timer and a to-do list and see how far you can go. On the fifth day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me: 5. Golden rules Here are some guidelines for writing online: Make headlines for tutorials and similar content useful and descriptive; use a subheading for any terrible pun you want to work in. Create a broad opening paragraph that addresses what your article is about. Part of the creative skill in writing is to do this in a way that both informs the reader and captures their attention. If you struggle with this, consider a boxout giving a summary of the article. Use headings to break up chunks of text and allow people to scan. Most people will have a scoot about an article before starting at the beginning to give it a proper read. These headings should be equal parts informative and enticing. Try them out as questions that might be posed by the reader too. Finish articles by asking your reader to take an affirmative action: subscribe to your RSS feed; leave a comment (if comments are your thing – more on that later); follow you on Twitter; link you to somewhere they have used your tutorial or code. The web is about getting excited, making things and sharing with others, so give your readers the chance to do that. For portfolio sites, this call to action is extra important as you want to pick up new business. Encourage people to e-mail you or call you – don’t just rely on a number in the footer or an e-mail link at the top. Think up some consistent calls-to-action you can use and test them out. So, my gift to you today is a simplified page table for planning out your content to make it as useful as possible. Feel free to write a new article or tutorial, or work on that great idea from yesterday and try out these guidelines for yourself. It’s a simple framework – good headline; broad opening; headings to break up volume; strong call to action – but it will help you recognise if what you’ve written is in good shape to face the world. It doesn’t tell you anything about how to create it – that’s your endeavour – but it does give you a start. No more staring at a blank page. Bonus gift: okay, you have to buy yourself this one, but it is the gift that keeps on giving: Ginny Reddish’s Letting Go of the Words – the hands down best guide to web writing there is, with a ton of illustrative examples. On the sixth day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me: 6. Foundation-a-laying Yesterday, we played with a page table for articles. Today, we are going to set the foundations for your new, spangly, spruced up, relaunched site (for when you’re ready, of course). We’ve checked out what we’ve got, we’ve thought about what we’d like, we have a wish list for the future. Now is the time for a small reality check. Be realistic with yourself. Can you really give your site some attention every day? Record a short snippet of audio once a week? A photo diary post once a month? Look back at the wish list you made. What can you do? What can you aim for? What just isn’t possible right now? As much as we’d all love to be producing a slick video podcast and screencast three times a week, it’s better to set realistic expectations and work your way up. Where does your site sit in your online world? Do you want it to be the hub of all your social interactions, a lifestream, a considered place of publication or a free for all? Do you want to have comments (do you have the personal resource to monitor comments?) or would you prefer conversation to happen via Twitter, Facebook or not at all? Does this apply to all pages, posts and content types or just some? Get these things straight in your head and it’s easier to know what sort of environment you want to create and what content you’ll need to sustain it. Get your notebook again and think about specific topics you’d like to cover, or aspects of a project you want to go into more, and how you can go ahead and do just that. A good motivator is to think what you’ll get out of doing it, even if that is “And I’ll finally show the poxy $whatever_community that my $chosen_format is better than their $other_format.” What topics have you really wanted to get off your chest? Look through your inventory again. What gaps are there in your content just begging to be filled? Today, you’re going to give everyone the gift of your opinion. Find one of those things where someone on the internet is wrong and create a short but snappy piece to set them straight. Doesn’t that feel good? Soon you’ll be able to do this in a timely manner every time someone is wrong on the internet! Bonus gift: we’re halfway through, so I think something fun is in order. How about a man sledding naked down a hill in Brighton on a tea tray? Sometimes, even with a whole ton of content planning, it’s the spontaneous stuff that is still the most fun to share. On the seventh day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me: 7. Styles-a-guiding Not colour style guides or brand style guides or code style guides. Content style guides. You could go completely to town and write yourself a full document defining every aspect of your site’s voice and personality, plus declaring your view on contracted phrases and the Oxford comma, but this does seem a tad excessive. Unless you’re writing an entire site as a fictional character, you probably know your own voice and vocabulary better than anyone. It’s in your head, after all. Instead, equip yourself with a good global style guide (I like the Chicago Manual of Style because I can access it fully online, but the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook has a nifty iPhone app and, if I’m entirely honest, I’ve found a copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves has set me right on all but the most technical aspects of punctuation). Next, pick a good dictionary and bookmark thesaurus.com. Then have a go at Kristina Halvorson’s ‘Voice and Tone’ exercise from her book Content Strategy for the Web, to nail down what you’d like your future content to be like: To introduce the voice and tone qualities you’re [looking to create], a good approach is to offer contrasting values. For example: Professional, not academic. Confident, not arrogant. Clever, not cutesy. Savvy, not hipster. Expert, not preachy. Take a look around some of your favourite sites and examine the writing and stylistic handling of content. What do you like? What do you want to emulate? What matches your values list? Today’s gift to you is an idea. Create a ‘swipe file’ through Evernote or Delicious and save all the stuff you come across that, regardless of topic, makes you think, “That’s really cool.” This isn’t the same as an Instapaper list you’d like to read. This is stuff you have read or have seen that is worth looking at in closer detail. Why is it so good? What is the language and style like? What impact does the typography have? How does the imagery work to enhance the message? This isn’t about creating a personal brand or any such piffle. It’s about learning to recognise how good content works and how to create something awesome yourself. Obviously, your ideas are brilliant, so take the time to understand how best to spring them on the unsuspecting public for easier world domination. Bonus gift: a nifty style guide is a must when you do have to share content creation duties with others. Here is Leeds University’s publicly available PDF version for you to take a gander at. I especially like the Rationale sections for chopping off dissenters at the knees. On the eighth day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me: 8. Times-a-making You have an actual, real plan for what you’d like to do with your site and how it is going to sound (and probably some ideas on how it’s going to look, too). I hope you are full of enthusiasm and Getting Excited To Make Things. Just before we get going and do exactly that, we are going to make sure we have made time for this creative outpouring. Have you tried to blog once a week before and found yourself losing traction after a month or two? Are there a couple of podcasts lurking neglected in your archives? Whereas half of the act of running is showing up for training, half of creating is making time rather than waiting for it to become urgent. It’s okay to write something and set a date to come back to it (which isn’t the same as leaving it to decompose in your drafts folder). Putting a date in your calendar to do something for your site means that you have a forewarning to think of a topic to write about, and space in your schedule to actually do it. Crucially, you’ve actually made some time for this content lark. To do this, you need to think about how long it takes to get something out of the door/shipped/published/whatever you want to call it. It might take you just thirty minutes to record a podcast, but also a further hour to research the topic beforehand and another hour to edit and upload the clips. Suddenly, doing a thirty minute podcast every day seems a bit unlikely. But, on the flipside, it is easy to see how you could schedule that in three chunks weekly. Put it in your calendar. Do it, publish it, book yourself in for the next week. Keep turning up. Today my gift to you is the gift of time. Set up your own small content calendar, using your favourite calendar system, and schedule time to play with new ways of creating content, time to get it finished and time to get it on your site. Don’t let good stuff go to your drafts folder to die of neglect. Bonus gift: lots of writers swear by the concept of ‘daily pages’. That is, churning out whatever is in your head to see if there is anything worth building upon, or just to lose the grocery list getting in the way. 750words.com is a site built around this concept. Go have a play. On the ninth day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me: 9. Copy enhancing An incredibly radical idea for day number nine. We are going to look at that list of permanent pages you made back on day three and rewrite the words first, before even looking at a colour palette or picking a font! Crazy as it sounds, doing it this way round could influence your design. It could shape the imagery you use. It could affect your choice of typography. IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES! Look at the page table from day five. Print out one for each of your homepage, about page, contact page, portfolio, archive, 404 page or whatever else you have. Use these as a place to brainstorm your ideas and what you’d like each page to do for your site. Doodle in the margin, choose words you think sound fun to say, daydream about pictures you’d like to use and colours you think would work, but absolutely, completely and utterly fill in those page tables to understand how much (or how little) content you’re playing with and what you need to do to get to ‘launch’. Then, use them for guidance as you start to write. Don’t skimp. Don’t think that a fancy icon of an envelope encourages people to e-mail you. Use your words. People get antsy at this bit. Writing can be hard work and it’s easy for me to say, “Go on and write it then!” I know this. I mean, you should see the faces I pull when I have to do anything related to coding. The closest equivalent would be when scientists have to stick their hands in big gloves attached to a glass box to do dangerous experiments. Here’s today’s gift, a little something about writing that I hope brings you comfort: To write something fantastic you almost always have to write a rubbish draft first. Now, you might get lucky and write a ‘good enough’ draft first time and that’s fab – you’ve cut some time getting to ‘fantastic’. If, however, you’ve always looked at your first attempt to write more than the bare minimum and sighed in despair, and resigned yourself to adding just a title, date and a screenshot, be cheered because you have taken the first step to being able to communicate with clarity, wit and panache. Keep going. Look at writing you admire and emulate it. Think about how you will lovingly design those words when they are done. Know that you can go back and change them. Check back with your page table to keep you on track. Do that first draft. Bonus gift: becoming a better writer helps you to explain design concepts to clients. On the tenth day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me: 10. Ideas for keeping Hurrah! You have something down on paper, ready to start evolving your site around it. Here’s where the words and visuals and interaction start to come together. Because you have a plan, you can think ahead and do things you wouldn’t be able to pull together otherwise. How about finding a fresh-faced stellar illustrator on Dribbble to create you something perfect to pep up your contact page or visualize your witty statement on statements of work. A List Apart has been doing it for years and it hasn’t worked out too badly for them, has it? What about spending this month creating a series of introductory tutorials on a topic, complete with screencasts and audio and give them a special home on your site? How about putting in some hours creating a glorious about me page, with a biography, nice picture, and where you spend your time online? You could even do the web equivalent of getting up in the attic and sorting out your site’s search to make it easier to find things in your archives. Maybe even do some manual recommendations for relevant content and add them as calls to action. How about writing a few awesome case studies with individual screenshots of your favourite work, and creating a portfolio that plays to your strengths? Don’t just rely on the pretty pictures; use your words. Otherwise no-one understands why things are the way they are on that screenshot and BAM! you’ll be judged on someone else’s tastes. (Elliot has a head start on you for this, so get to it!) Do you have a serious archive of content? What’s it like being a first-time visitor to your site? Could you write them a guide to introduce yourself and some of the most popular stuff on your site? Ali Edwards is a massively popular crafter and every day she gets new visitors who have found her multiple papercraft projects on Flickr, Vimeo and elsewhere, so she created a welcome guide just for them. What about your microcopy? Can you improve on your blogging platform’s defaults for search, comment submission and labels? I’ll bet you can. Maybe you could plan a collaboration with other like-minded souls. A week of posts about the more advanced wonders of HTML5 video. A month-long baton-passing exercise in extolling the virtues of IE (shut up, it could happen!). Just spare me any more online advent calendars. Watch David McCandless’s TED talk on his jawdropping infographic work and make something as awesome as the Billion Dollar O Gram. I dare you. Bonus gift: Grab a copy of Brian Suda’s Designing with Data, in print or PDF if Santa didn’t put one in your stocking, and make that awesome something with some expert guidance. On the eleventh day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me: 11. Pixels pushing Oh, go on then. Make a gorgeous bespoke velvet-lined container for all that lovely content. It’s proper informed design now, not just decoration. Mr. Zeldman says so. Bonus gift: I made you a movie! If books were designed like websites. On the twelfth day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me: 12. Delighters delighting The Epiphany is upon us; your site is now well on its way to being a beautiful, sustainable hub of content and you have a date in your calendar to help you keep that resolution of blogging more. What now? Keep on top of your inventory. One day it will save your butt, I promise. Keep making a little bit of time regularly to create something new: an article; an opinion piece; a small curation of related links; a photo diary; a new case study. That’s easier than an annual content bootcamp for sure. And today’s gift: look for ways to play with that content and make something a bit special. Stretch yourself a little. It’ll be worth it. Bonus gift: Paul Annett’s presentation on Ooh, that’s clever: Delighters in design from SxSW 09. All my favourite designers and developers have their own unique styles and touches. It’s what sets them apart. My very, very favourites have an eloquence and expression that they bring to their sites and to their projects. I absolutely love to explore a well-crafted, well-written site – don’t we all? I know the time it takes. I appreciate the time it takes. But the end results are delicious. Do please share your spangly, refreshed sites with me in the comments. Catch me on Twitter, I’m @RellyAB, and I’ve been your host for these Twelve Days of Contentmas.",2010,Relly Annett-Baker,rellyannettbaker,2010-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/a-contentmas-epiphany/,content 239,Using the WebFont Loader to Make Browsers Behave the Same,"Web fonts give us designers a whole new typographic palette with which to work. However, browsers handle the loading of web fonts in different ways, and this can lead to inconsistent user experiences. Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer leave a blank space in place of the styled text while the web font is loading. Opera and Firefox show text with the default font which switches over when the web font has loaded, resulting in the so-called Flash of Unstyled Text (aka FOUT). Some people prefer Safari’s approach as it eliminates FOUT, others think the Firefox way is more appropriate as content can be read whilst fonts download. Whatever your preference, the WebFont Loader can make all browsers behave the same way. The WebFont Loader is a JavaScript library that gives you extra control over font loading. It was co-developed by Google and Typekit, and released as open source. The WebFont Loader works with most web font services as well as with self-hosted fonts. The WebFont Loader tells you when the following events happen as a browser downloads web fonts (or loads them from cache): when fonts start to download (‘loading’) when fonts finish loading (‘active’) if fonts fail to load (‘inactive’) If your web page requires more than one font, the WebFont Loader will trigger events for individual fonts, and for all the fonts as a whole. This means you can find out when any single font has loaded, and when all the fonts have loaded (or failed to do so). The WebFont Loader notifies you of these events in two ways: by applying special CSS classes when each event happens; and by firing JavaScript events. For our purposes, we’ll be using just the CSS classes. Implementing the WebFont Loader As stated above, the WebFont Loader works with most web font services as well as with self-hosted fonts. Self-hosted fonts To use the WebFont Loader when you are hosting the font files on your own server, paste the following code into your web page: Replace Font Family Name and Another Font Family with a comma-separated list of the font families you want to check against, and replace http://yourwebsite.com/styles.css with the URL of the style sheet where your @font-face rules reside. Fontdeck Assuming you have added some fonts to a website project in Fontdeck, use the afore-mentioned code for self-hosted solutions and replace http://yourwebsite.com/styles.css with the URL of the tag in your Fontdeck website settings page. It will look something like http://f.fontdeck.com/s/css/xxxx/domain/nnnn.css. Typekit Typekit’s JavaScript-based implementation incorporates the WebFont Loader events by default, so you won’t need to include any WebFont Loader code. Making all browsers behave like Safari To make Firefox and Opera work in the same way as WebKit browsers (Safari, Chrome, etc.) and Internet Explorer, and thus minimise FOUT, you need to hide the text while the fonts are loading. While fonts are loading, the WebFont Loader adds a class of wf-loading to the element. Once the fonts have loaded, the wf-loading class is removed and replaced with a class of wf-active (or wf-inactive if all of the fonts failed to load). This means you can style elements on the page while the fonts are loading and then style them differently when the fonts have finished loading. So, let’s say the text you need to hide while fonts are loading is contained in all paragraphs and top-level headings. By writing the following style rule into your CSS, you can hide the text while the fonts are loading: .wf-loading h1, .wf-loading p { visibility:hidden; } Because the wf-loading class is removed once the the fonts have loaded, the visibility:hidden rule will stop being applied, and the text revealed. You can see this in action on this simple example page. That works nicely across the board, but the situation is slightly more complicated. WebKit doesn’t wait for all fonts to load before displaying text: it displays text elements as soon as the relevant font is loaded. To emulate WebKit more accurately, we need to know when individual fonts have loaded, and apply styles accordingly. Fortunately, as mentioned earlier, the WebFont Loader has events for individual fonts too. When a specific font is loading, a class of the form wf-fontfamilyname-n4-loading is applied. Assuming headings and paragraphs are styled in different fonts, we can make our CSS more specific as follows: .wf-fontfamilyname-n4-loading h1, .wf-anotherfontfamily-n4-loading p { visibility:hidden; } Note that the font family name is transformed to lower case, with all spaces removed. The n4 is a shorthand for the weight and style of the font family. In most circumstances you’ll use n4 but refer to the WebFont Loader documentation for exceptions. You can see it in action on this Safari example page (you’ll probably need to disable your cache to see any change occur). Making all browsers behave like Firefox To make WebKit browsers and Internet Explorer work like Firefox and Opera, you need to explicitly show text while the fonts are loading. In order to make this happen, you need to specify a font family which is not a web font while the fonts load, like this: .wf-fontfamilyname-n4-loading h1 { font-family: 'arial narrow', sans-serif; } .wf-anotherfontfamily-n4-loading p { font-family: arial, sans-serif; } You can see this in action on the Firefox example page (again you’ll probably need to disable your cache to see any change occur). And there’s more That’s just the start of what can be done with the WebFont Loader. More areas to explore would be tweaking font sizes to reduce the impact of reflowing text and to better cater for very narrow fonts. By using the JavaScript events much more can be achieved too, such as fading in text as the fonts load.",2010,Richard Rutter,richardrutter,2010-12-02T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/using-the-webfont-loader-to-make-browsers-behave-the-same/,code 231,Designing for iOS: Life Beyond Media Queries,"Although not a new phenomenon, media queries seem to be getting a lot attention online recently and for the right reasons too – it’s great to be able to adapt a design with just a few lines of CSS – but many people are relying only on them to create an iPhone-specific version of their website. I was pleased to hear at FOWD NYC a few weeks ago that both myself and Aral Balkan share the same views on why media queries aren’t always going to be the best solution for mobile. Both of us specialise in iPhone design ourselves and we opt for a different approach to media queries. The trouble is, regardless of what you have carefully selected to be display:none; in your CSS, the iPhone still loads everything in the background; all that large imagery for your full scale website also takes up valuable mobile bandwidth and time. You can greatly increase the speed of your website by creating a specific site tailored to mobile users with just a few handy pointers – media queries, in some instances, might be perfectly suitable but, in others, here’s what you can do. Redirect your iPhone/iPod Touch users To detect whether someone is viewing your site on an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can either use JavaScript or PHP. The JavaScript if((navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i)) || (navigator.userAgent.match(/iPod/i))) { if (document.cookie.indexOf(""iphone_redirect=false"") == -1) window.location = ""http://mobile.yoursitehere.com""; } The PHP if(strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'iPhone') || strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'iPod')) { header('Location: http://mobile.yoursitehere.com'); exit(); } Both of these methods redirect the user to a site that you have made specifically for the iPhone. At this point, be sure to provide a link to the full version of the website, in case the user wishes to view this and not be thrown into an experience they didn’t want, with no way back. Tailoring your site So, now you’ve got 320 × 480 pixels of screen to play with – and to create a style sheet for, just as you would for any other site you build. There are a few other bits and pieces that you can add to your code to create a site that feels more like a fully immersive iPhone app rather than a website. Retina display When building your website specifically tailored to the iPhone, you might like to go one step further and create a specific style sheet for iPhone 4’s Retina display. Because there are four times as many pixels on the iPhone 4 (640 × 960 pixels), you’ll find specifics such as text shadows and borders will have to be increased. (Credit to Thomas Maier) Prevent user scaling This declaration, added into the , stops the user being able to pinch-zoom in and out of your design, which is perfect if you are designing to the exact pixel measurements of the iPhone screen. Designing for orientation As iPhones aren’t static devices, you’ll also need to provide a style sheet for horizontal orientation. We can do this by inserting some JavaScript into the as follows: You can also specify orientation styles using media queries. This is absolutely fine, as by this point you’ll already be working with mobile-specific graphics and have little need to set a lot of things to display:none; Remove the address and status bars, top and bottom To give you more room on-screen and to make your site feel more like an immersive web app, you can place the following declaration into the of your document’s code to remove the address and status bars at the top and bottom of the screen. Making the most of inbuilt functions Similar to mailto: e-mail links, the iPhone also supports another two handy URI schemes which are great for enhancing contact details. When tapped, the following links will automatically bring up the appropriate call or text interface: Call us Text us iPhone-specific Web Clip icon Although I believe them to be fundamentally flawed, since they rely on the user bookmarking your site, iPhone Web Clip icons are still a nice touch. You need just two declarations, again in the of your document: For iPhone 4 you’ll need to create a 114 × 114 pixels icon; for a non-Retina display, a 57 × 57 pixels icon will do the trick. Precomposed Apple adds its standard gloss ‘moon’ over the top of any icon. If you feel this might be too much for your particular icon and would prefer a matte finish, you can add precomposed to the end of the apple-touch-icon declaration to remove the standard gloss. Wrapping up Media queries definitely have their uses. They make it easy to build a custom experience for your visitor, regardless of their browser’s size. For more complex sites, however, or where you have lots of imagery and other content that isn’t necessary on the mobile version, you can now use these other methods to help you out. Remember, they are purely for presentation and not optimisation; for busy people on the go, optimisation and faster-running mobile experiences can only be a good thing. Have a wonderful Christmas fellow Webbies!",2010,Sarah Parmenter,sarahparmenter,2010-12-17T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/life-beyond-media-queries/,code 221,"“Probably, Maybe, No”: The State of HTML5 Audio","With the hype around HTML5 and CSS3 exceeding levels not seen since 2005’s Ajax era, it’s worth noting that the excitement comes with good reason: the two specifications render many years of feature hacks redundant by replacing them with native features. For fun, consider how many CSS2-based rounded corners hacks you’ve probably glossed over, looking for a magic solution. These days, with CSS3, the magic is border-radius (and perhaps some vendor prefixes) followed by a coffee break. CSS3’s border-radius, box-shadow, text-shadow and gradients, and HTML5’s ,