rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic 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 234,An Introduction to CSS 3-D Transforms,"Ladies and gentlemen, it is the second decade of the third millennium and we are still kicking around the same 2-D interface we got three decades ago. Sure, Apple debuted a few apps for OSX 10.7 that have a couple more 3-D flourishes, and Microsoft has had that Flip 3D for a while. But c’mon – 2011 is right around the corner. That’s Twenty Eleven, folks. Where is our 3-D virtual reality? By now, we should be zipping around the Metaverse on super-sonic motorbikes. Granted, the capability of rendering complex 3-D environments has been present for years. On the web, there are already several solutions: Flash; three.js in ; and, eventually, WebGL. Finally, we meagre front-end developers have our own three-dimensional jewel: CSS 3-D transforms! Rationale Like a beautiful jewel, 3-D transforms can be dazzling, a true spectacle to behold. But before we start tacking 3-D diamonds and rubies to our compositions like Liberace‘s tailor, we owe it to our users to ask how they can benefit from this awesome feature. An entire application should not take advantage of 3-D transforms. CSS was built to style documents, not generate explorable environments. I fail to find a benefit to completing a web form that can be accessed by swivelling my viewport to the Sign-Up Room (although there have been proposals to make the web just that). Nevertheless, there are plenty of opportunities to use 3-D transforms in between interactions with the interface, via transitions. Take, for instance, the Weather App on the iPhone. The application uses two views: a details view; and an options view. Switching between these two views is done with a 3-D flip transition. This informs the user that the interface has two – and only two – views, as they can exist only on either side of the same plane. Flipping from details view to options view via a 3-D transition Also, consider slide shows. When you’re looking at the last slide, what cues tip you off that advancing will restart the cycle at the first slide? A better paradigm might be achieved with a 3-D transform, placing the slides side-by-side in a circle (carousel) in three-dimensional space; in that arrangement, the last slide obviously comes before the first. 3-D transforms are more than just eye candy. We can also use them to solve dilemmas and make our applications more intuitive. Current support The CSS 3D Transforms module has been out in the wild for over a year now. Currently, only Safari supports the specification – which includes Safari on Mac OS X and Mobile Safari on iOS. The support roadmap for other browsers varies. The Mozilla team has taken some initial steps towards implementing the module. Mike Taylor tells me that the Opera team is keeping a close eye on CSS transforms, and is waiting until the specification is fleshed out. And our best friend Internet Explorer still needs to catch up to 2-D transforms before we can talk about the 3-D variety. To make matters more perplexing, Safari’s WebKit cousin Chrome currently accepts 3-D transform declarations, but renders them in 2-D space. Chrome team member Paul Irish, says that 3-D transforms are on the horizon, perhaps in one of the next 8.0 releases. This all adds up to a bit of a challenge for those of us excited by 3-D transforms. I’ll give it to you straight: missing the dimension of depth can make degradation a bit ungraceful. Unless the transform is relatively simple and holds up in non-3D-supporting browsers, you’ll most likely have to design another solution. But what’s another hurdle in a steeplechase? We web folk have had our mettle tested for years. We’re prepared to devise multiple solutions. Here’s the part of the article where I mention Modernizr, and you brush over it because you’ve read this part of an article hundreds of times before. But seriously, it’s the best way to test for CSS 3-D transform support. Use it. Even with these difficulties mounting up, trying out 3-D transforms today is the right move. The CSS 3-D transforms module was developed by the same team at Apple that produced the CSS 2D Transforms and Animation modules. Both specifications have since been adopted by Mozilla and Opera. Transforming in three-dimensions now will guarantee you’ll be ahead of the game when the other browsers catch up. The choice is yours. You can make excuses and pooh-pooh 3-D transforms because they’re too hard and only snobby Apple fans will see them today. Or, with a tip of the fedora to Mr Andy Clarke, you can get hard-boiled and start designing with the best features out there right this instant. So, I bid you, in the words of the eternal Optimus Prime… Transform and roll out. Let’s get coding. Perspective To activate 3-D space, an element needs perspective. This can be applied in two ways: using the transform property, with the perspective as a functional notation: -webkit-transform: perspective(600); or using the perspective property: -webkit-perspective: 600; See example: Perspective 1. The red element on the left uses transform: perspective() functional notation; the blue element on the right uses the perspective property These two formats both trigger a 3-D space, but there is a difference. The first, functional notation is convenient for directly applying a 3-D transform on a single element (in the previous example, I use it in conjunction with a rotateY transform). But when used on multiple elements, the transformed elements don’t line up as expected. If you use the same transform across elements with different positions, each element will have its own vanishing point. To remedy this, use the perspective property on a parent element, so each child shares the same 3-D space. See Example: Perspective 2. Each red box on the left has its own vanishing point within the parent container; the blue boxes on the right share the vanishing point of the parent container The value of perspective determines the intensity of the 3-D effect. Think of it as a distance from the viewer to the object. The greater the value, the further the distance, so the less intense the visual effect. perspective: 2000; yields a subtle 3-D effect, as if we were viewing an object from far away. perspective: 100; produces a tremendous 3-D effect, like a tiny insect viewing a massive object. By default, the vanishing point for a 3-D space is positioned at its centre. You can change the position of the vanishing point with perspective-origin property. -webkit-perspective-origin: 25% 75%; See Example: Perspective 3. 3-D transform functions As a web designer, you’re probably well acquainted with working in two dimensions, X and Y, positioning items horizontally and vertically. With a 3-D space initialised with perspective, we can now transform elements in all three glorious spatial dimensions, including the third Z dimension, depth. 3-D transforms use the same transform property used for 2-D transforms. If you’re familiar with 2-D transforms, you’ll find the basic 3D transform functions fairly similar. rotateX(angle) rotateY(angle) rotateZ(angle) translateZ(tz) scaleZ(sz) Whereas translateX() positions an element along the horizontal X-axis, translateZ() positions it along the Z-axis, which runs front to back in 3-D space. Positive values position the element closer to the viewer, negative values further away. The rotate functions rotate the element around the corresponding axis. This is somewhat counter-intuitive at first, as you might imagine that rotateX will spin an object left to right. Instead, using rotateX(45deg) rotates an element around the horizontal X-axis, so the top of the element angles back and away, and the bottom gets closer to the viewer. See Example: Transforms 1. 3-D rotate() and translate() functions around each axis There are also several shorthand transform functions that require values for all three dimensions: translate3d(tx,ty,tz) scale3d(sx,sy,sz) rotate3d(rx,ry,rz,angle) Pro-tip: These foo3d() transform functions also have the benefit of triggering hardware acceleration in Safari. Dean Jackson, CSS 3-D transform spec author and main WebKit dude, writes (to Thomas Fuchs): In essence, any transform that has a 3D operation as one of its functions will trigger hardware compositing, even when the actual transform is 2D, or not doing anything at all (such as translate3d(0,0,0)). Note this is just current behaviour, and could change in the future (which is why we don’t document or encourage it). But it is very helpful in some situations and can significantly improve redraw performance. For the sake of simplicity, my demos will use the basic transform functions, but if you’re writing production-ready CSS for iOS or Safari-only, make sure to use the foo3d() functions to get the best rendering performance. Card flip We now have all the tools to start making 3-D objects. Let’s get started with something simple: flipping a card. Here’s the basic markup we’ll need:
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The .container will house the 3-D space. The #card acts as a wrapper for the 3-D object. Each face of the card has a separate element: .front; and .back. Even for such a simple object, I recommend using this same pattern for any 3-D transform. Keeping the 3-D space element and the object element(s) separate establishes a pattern that is simple to understand and easier to style. We’re ready for some 3-D stylin’. First, apply the necessary perspective to the parent 3-D space, along with any size or positioning styles. .container { width: 200px; height: 260px; position: relative; -webkit-perspective: 800; } Now the #card element can be transformed in its parent’s 3-D space. We’re combining absolute and relative positioning so the 3-D object is removed from the flow of the document. We’ll also add width: 100%; and height: 100%;. This ensures the object’s transform-origin will occur in the centre of .container. More on transform-origin later. Let’s add a CSS3 transition so users can see the transform take effect. #card { width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute; -webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d; -webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 1s; } The .container’s perspective only applies to direct descendant children, in this case #card. In order for subsequent children to inherit a parent’s perspective, and live in the same 3-D space, the parent can pass along its perspective with transform-style: preserve-3d. Without 3-D transform-style, the faces of the card would be flattened with its parents and the back face’s rotation would be nullified. To position the faces in 3-D space, we’ll need to reset their positions in 2-D with position: absolute. In order to hide the reverse sides of the faces when they are faced away from the viewer, we use backface-visibility: hidden. #card figure { display: block; position: absolute; width: 100%; height: 100%; -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden; } To flip the .back face, we add a basic 3-D transform of rotateY(180deg). #card .front { background: red; } #card .back { background: blue; -webkit-transform: rotateY(180deg); } With the faces in place, the #card requires a corresponding style for when it is flipped. #card.flipped { -webkit-transform: rotateY(180deg); } Now we have a working 3-D object. To flip the card, we can toggle the flipped class. When .flipped, the #card will rotate 180 degrees, thus exposing the .back face. See Example: Card 1. Flipping a card in three dimensions Slide-flip Take another look at the Weather App 3-D transition. You’ll notice that it’s not quite the same effect as our previous demo. If you follow the right edge of the card, you’ll find that its corners stay within the container. Instead of pivoting from the horizontal centre, it pivots on that right edge. But the transition is not just a rotation – the edge moves horizontally from right to left. We can reproduce this transition just by modifying a couple of lines of CSS from our original card flip demo. The pivot point for the rotation occurs at the right side of the card. By default, the transform-origin of an element is at its horizontal and vertical centre (50% 50% or center center). Let’s change it to the right side: #card { -webkit-transform-origin: right center; } That flip now needs some horizontal movement with translateX. We’ll set the rotation to -180deg so it flips right side out. #card.flipped { -webkit-transform: translateX(-100%) rotateY(-180deg); } See Example: Card 2. Creating a slide-flip from the right edge of the card Cube Creating 3-D card objects is a good way to get started with 3-D transforms. But once you’ve mastered them, you’ll be hungry to push it further and create some true 3-D objects: prisms. We’ll start out by making a cube. The markup for the cube is similar to the card. This time, however, we need six child elements for all six faces of the cube:
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Basic position and size styles set the six faces on top of one another in the container. .container { width: 200px; height: 200px; position: relative; -webkit-perspective: 1000; } #cube { width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute; -webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d; } #cube figure { width: 196px; height: 196px; display: block; position: absolute; border: 2px solid black; } With the card, we only had to rotate its back face. The cube, however, requires that five of the six faces to be rotated. Faces 1 and 2 will be the front and back. Faces 3 and 4 will be the sides. Faces 5 and 6 will be the top and bottom. #cube .front { -webkit-transform: rotateY(0deg); } #cube .back { -webkit-transform: rotateX(180deg); } #cube .right { -webkit-transform: rotateY(90deg); } #cube .left { -webkit-transform: rotateY(-90deg); } #cube .top { -webkit-transform: rotateX(90deg); } #cube .bottom { -webkit-transform: rotateX(-90deg); } We could remove the first #cube .front style declaration, as this transform has no effect, but let’s leave it in to keep our code consistent. Now each face is rotated, and only the front face is visible. The four side faces are all perpendicular to the viewer, so they appear invisible. To push them out to their appropriate sides, they need to be translated out from the centre of their positions. Each side of the cube is 200 pixels wide. From the cube’s centre they’ll need to be translated out half that distance, 100px. #cube .front { -webkit-transform: rotateY(0deg) translateZ(100px); } #cube .back { -webkit-transform: rotateX(180deg) translateZ(100px); } #cube .right { -webkit-transform: rotateY(90deg) translateZ(100px); } #cube .left { -webkit-transform: rotateY(-90deg) translateZ(100px); } #cube .top { -webkit-transform: rotateX(90deg) translateZ(100px); } #cube .bottom { -webkit-transform: rotateX(-90deg) translateZ(100px); } Note here that the translateZ function comes after the rotate. The order of transform functions is important. Take a moment and soak this up. Each face is first rotated towards its position, then translated outward in a separate vector. We have a working cube, but we’re not done yet. Returning to the Z-axis origin For the sake of our users, our 3-D transforms should not distort the interface when the active panel is at its resting position. But once we start pushing elements off their Z-axis origin, distortion is inevitable. In order to keep 3-D transforms snappy, Safari composites the element, then applies the transform. Consequently, anti-aliasing on text will remain whatever it was before the transform was applied. When transformed forward in 3-D space, significant pixelation can occur. See Example: Transforms 2. Looking back at the Perspective 3 demo, note that no matter how small the perspective value is, or wherever the transform-origin may be, the panel number 1 always returns to its original position, as if all those funky 3-D transforms didn’t even matter. To resolve the distortion and restore pixel perfection to our #cube, we can push the 3-D object back, so that the front face will be positioned back to the Z-axis origin. #cube { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px); } See Example: Cube 1. Restoring the front face to the original position on the Z-axis Rotating the cube To expose any face of the cube, we’ll need a style that rotates the cube to expose any face. The transform values are the opposite of those for the corresponding face. We toggle the necessary class on the #box to apply the appropriate transform. #cube.show-front { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateY(0deg); } #cube.show-back { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateX(-180deg); } #cube.show-right { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateY(-90deg); } #cube.show-left { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateY(90deg); } #cube.show-top { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateX(-90deg); } #cube.show-bottom { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateX(90deg); } Notice how the order of the transform functions has reversed. First, we push the object back with translateZ, then we rotate it. Finishing up, we can add a transition to animate the rotation between states. #cube { -webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 1s; } See Example: Cube 2. Rotating the cube with a CSS transition Rectangular prism Cubes are easy enough to generate, as we only have to worry about one measurement. But how would we handle a non-regular rectangular prism? Let’s try to make one that’s 300 pixels wide, 200 pixels high, and 100 pixels deep. The markup remains the same as the #cube, but we’ll switch the cube id for #box. The container styles remain mostly the same: .container { width: 300px; height: 200px; position: relative; -webkit-perspective: 1000; } #box { width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute; -webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d; } Now to position the faces. Each set of faces will need their own sizes. The smaller faces (left, right, top and bottom) need to be positioned in the centre of the container, where they can be easily rotated and then shifted outward. The thinner left and right faces get positioned left: 100px ((300 − 100) ÷ 2), The stouter top and bottom faces get positioned top: 50px ((200 − 100) ÷ 2). #box figure { display: block; position: absolute; border: 2px solid black; } #box .front, #box .back { width: 296px; height: 196px; } #box .right, #box .left { width: 96px; height: 196px; left: 100px; } #box .top, #box .bottom { width: 296px; height: 96px; top: 50px; } The rotate values can all remain the same as the cube example, but for this rectangular prism, the translate values do differ. The front and back faces are each shifted out 50 pixels since the #box is 100 pixels deep. The translate value for the left and right faces is 150 pixels for their 300 pixels width. Top and bottom panels take 100 pixels for their 200 pixels height: #box .front { -webkit-transform: rotateY(0deg) translateZ(50px); } #box .back { -webkit-transform: rotateX(180deg) translateZ(50px); } #box .right { -webkit-transform: rotateY(90deg) translateZ(150px); } #box .left { -webkit-transform: rotateY(-90deg) translateZ(150px); } #box .top { -webkit-transform: rotateX(90deg) translateZ(100px); } #box .bottom { -webkit-transform: rotateX(-90deg) translateZ(100px); } See Example: Box 1. Just like the cube example, to expose a face, the #box needs to have a style to reverse that face’s transform. Both the translateZ and rotate values are the opposites of the corresponding face. #box.show-front { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-50px) rotateY(0deg); } #box.show-back { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-50px) rotateX(-180deg); } #box.show-right { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-150px) rotateY(-90deg); } #box.show-left { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-150px) rotateY(90deg); } #box.show-top { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateX(-90deg); } #box.show-bottom { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateX(90deg); } See Example: Box 2. Rotating the rectangular box with a CSS transition Carousel Front-end developers have a myriad of choices when it comes to content carousels. Now that we have 3-D capabilities in our browsers, why not take a shot at creating an actual 3-D carousel? The markup for this demo takes the same form as the box, cube and card. Let’s make it interesting and have a carousel with nine panels.
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Now, apply basic layout styles. Let’s give each panel of the #carousel 20 pixel gaps between one another, done here with left: 10px; and top: 10px;. The effective width of each panel is 210 pixels. .container { width: 210px; height: 140px; position: relative; -webkit-perspective: 1000; } #carousel { width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute; -webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d; } #carousel figure { display: block; position: absolute; width: 186px; height: 116px; left: 10px; top: 10px; border: 2px solid black; } Next up: rotating the faces. This #carousel has nine panels. If each panel gets an equal distribution on the carousel, each panel would be rotated forty degrees from its neighbour (360 ÷ 9). #carousel figure:nth-child(1) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(0deg); } #carousel figure:nth-child(2) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(40deg); } #carousel figure:nth-child(3) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(80deg); } #carousel figure:nth-child(4) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(120deg); } #carousel figure:nth-child(5) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(160deg); } #carousel figure:nth-child(6) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(200deg); } #carousel figure:nth-child(7) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(240deg); } #carousel figure:nth-child(8) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(280deg); } #carousel figure:nth-child(9) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(320deg); } Now, the outward shift. Back when we were creating the cube and box, the translate value was simple to calculate, as it was equal to one half the width, height or depth of the object. With this carousel, there is no size we can automatically use as a reference. We’ll have to calculate the distance of the shift by other means. Drawing a diagram of the carousel, we can see that we know only two things: the width of each panel is 210 pixels; and the each panel is rotated forty degrees from the next. If we split one of these segments down its centre, we get a right-angled triangle, perfect for some trigonometry. We can determine the length of r in this diagram with a basic tangent equation: There you have it: the panels need to be translated 288 pixels in 3-D space. #carousel figure:nth-child(1) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(0deg) translateZ(288px); } #carousel figure:nth-child(2) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(40deg) translateZ(288px); } #carousel figure:nth-child(3) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(80deg) translateZ(288px); } #carousel figure:nth-child(4) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(120deg) translateZ(288px); } #carousel figure:nth-child(5) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(160deg) translateZ(288px); } #carousel figure:nth-child(6) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(200deg) translateZ(288px); } #carousel figure:nth-child(7) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(240deg) translateZ(288px); } #carousel figure:nth-child(8) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(280deg) translateZ(288px); } #carousel figure:nth-child(9) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(320deg) translateZ(288px); } If we decide to change the width of the panel or the number of panels, we only need to plug in those two variables into our equation to get the appropriate translateZ value. In JavaScript terms, that equation would be: var tz = Math.round( ( panelSize / 2 ) / Math.tan( ( ( Math.PI * 2 ) / numberOfPanels ) / 2 ) ); // or simplified to var tz = Math.round( ( panelSize / 2 ) / Math.tan( Math.PI / numberOfPanels ) ); Just like our previous 3-D objects, to show any one panel we need only apply the reverse transform on the carousel. Here’s the style to show the fifth panel: -webkit-transform: translateZ(-288px) rotateY(-160deg); See Example: Carousel 1. By now, you probably have two thoughts: Rewriting transform styles for each panel looks tedious. Why bother doing high school maths? Aren’t robots supposed to be doing all this work for us? And you’re absolutely right. The repetitive nature of 3-D objects lends itself to scripting. We can offload all the monotonous transform styles to our dynamic script, which, if done correctly, will be more flexible than the hard-coded version. See Example: Carousel 2. Conclusion 3-D transforms change the way we think about the blank canvas of web design. Better yet, they change the canvas itself, trading in the flat surface for voluminous depth. My hope is that you took at least one peak at a demo and were intrigued. We web designers, who have rejoiced for border-radius, box-shadow and background gradients, now have an incredible tool at our disposal in 3-D transforms. They deserve just the same enthusiasm, research and experimentation we have seen on other CSS3 features. Now is the perfect time to take the plunge and start thinking about how to use three dimensions to elevate our craft. I’m breathless waiting for what’s to come. See you on the flip side.",2010,David DeSandro,daviddesandro,2010-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/intro-to-css-3d-transforms/,code 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 223,Calculating Color Contrast,"Some websites and services allow you to customize your profile by uploading pictures, changing the background color or other aspects of the design. As a customer, this personalization turns a web app into your little nest where you store your data. As a designer, letting your customers have free rein over the layout and design is a scary prospect. So what happens to all the stock text and images that are designed to work on nice white backgrounds? Even the Mac only lets you choose between two colors for the OS, blue or graphite! Opening up the ability to customize your site’s color scheme can be a recipe for disaster unless you are flexible and understand how to find maximum color contrasts. In this article I will walk you through two simple equations to determine if you should be using white or black text depending on the color of the background. The equations are both easy to implement and produce similar results. It isn’t a matter of which is better, but more the fact that you are using one at all! That way, even with the craziest of Geocities color schemes that your customers choose, at least your text will still be readable. Let’s have a look at a range of various possible colors. Maybe these are pre-made color schemes, corporate colors, or plucked from an image. Now that we have these potential background colors and their hex values, we need to find out whether the corresponding text should be in white or black, based on which has a higher contrast, therefore affording the best readability. This can be done at runtime with JavaScript or in the back-end before the HTML is served up. There are two functions I want to compare. The first, I call ’50%’. It takes the hex value and compares it to the value halfway between pure black and pure white. If the hex value is less than half, meaning it is on the darker side of the spectrum, it returns white as the text color. If the result is greater than half, it’s on the lighter side of the spectrum and returns black as the text value. In PHP: function getContrast50($hexcolor){ return (hexdec($hexcolor) > 0xffffff/2) ? 'black':'white'; } In JavaScript: function getContrast50(hexcolor){ return (parseInt(hexcolor, 16) > 0xffffff/2) ? 'black':'white'; } It doesn’t get much simpler than that! The function converts the six-character hex color into an integer and compares that to one half the integer value of pure white. The function is easy to remember, but is naive when it comes to understanding how we perceive parts of the spectrum. Different wavelengths have greater or lesser impact on the contrast. The second equation is called ‘YIQ’ because it converts the RGB color space into YIQ, which takes into account the different impacts of its constituent parts. Again, the equation returns white or black and it’s also very easy to implement. In PHP: function getContrastYIQ($hexcolor){ $r = hexdec(substr($hexcolor,0,2)); $g = hexdec(substr($hexcolor,2,2)); $b = hexdec(substr($hexcolor,4,2)); $yiq = (($r*299)+($g*587)+($b*114))/1000; return ($yiq >= 128) ? 'black' : 'white'; } In JavaScript: function getContrastYIQ(hexcolor){ var r = parseInt(hexcolor.substr(0,2),16); var g = parseInt(hexcolor.substr(2,2),16); var b = parseInt(hexcolor.substr(4,2),16); var yiq = ((r*299)+(g*587)+(b*114))/1000; return (yiq >= 128) ? 'black' : 'white'; } You’ll notice first that we have broken down the hex value into separate RGB values. This is important because each of these channels is scaled in accordance to its visual impact. Once everything is scaled and normalized, it will be in a range between zero and 255. Much like the previous ’50%’ function, we now need to check if the input is above or below halfway. Depending on where that value is, we’ll return the corresponding highest contrasting color. That’s it: two simple contrast equations which work really well to determine the best readability. If you are interested in learning more, the W3C has a few documents about color contrast and how to determine if there is enough contrast between any two colors. This is important for accessibility to make sure there is enough contrast between your text and link colors and the background. There is also a great article by Kevin Hale on Particletree about his experience with choosing light or dark themes. To round it out, Jonathan Snook created a color contrast picker which allows you to play with RGB sliders to get values for YIQ, contrast and others. That way you can quickly fiddle with the knobs to find the right balance. Comparing results Let’s revisit our color schemes and see which text color is recommended for maximum contrast based on these two equations. If we use the simple ’50%’ contrast function, we can see that it recommends black against all the colors except the dark green and purple on the second row. In general, the equation feels the colors are light and that black is a better choice for the text. The more complex ‘YIQ’ function, with its weighted colors, has slightly different suggestions. White text is still recommended for the very dark colors, but there are some surprises. The red and pink values show white text rather than black. This equation takes into account the weight of the red value and determines that the hue is dark enough for white text to show the most contrast. As you can see, the two contrast algorithms agree most of the time. There are some instances where they conflict, but overall you can use the equation that you prefer. I don’t think it is a major issue if some edge-case colors get one contrast over another, they are still very readable. Now let’s look at some common colors and then see how the two functions compare. You can quickly see that they do pretty well across the whole spectrum. In the first few shades of grey, the white and black contrasts make sense, but as we test other colors in the spectrum, we do get some unexpected deviation. Pure red #FF0000 has a flip-flop. This is due to how the ‘YIQ’ function weights the RGB parts. While you might have a personal preference for one style over another, both are justifiable. In this second round of colors, we go deeper into the spectrum, off the beaten track. Again, most of the time the contrasting algorithms are in sync, but every once in a while they disagree. You can select which you prefer, neither of which is unreadable. Conclusion Contrast in color is important, especially if you cede all control and take a hands-off approach to the design. It is important to select smart defaults by making the contrast between colors as high as possible. This makes it easier for your customers to read, increases accessibility and is generally just easier on the eyes. Sure, there are plenty of other equations out there to determine contrast; what is most important is that you pick one and implement it into your system. So, go ahead and experiment with color in your design. You now know how easy it is to guarantee that your text will be the most readable in any circumstance.",2010,Brian Suda,briansuda,2010-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/calculating-color-contrast/,code 237,Circles of Confusion,"Long before I worked on the web, I specialised in training photographers how to use large format, 5×4″ and 10×8″ view cameras – film cameras with swing and tilt movements, bellows and upside down, back to front images viewed on dim, ground glass screens. It’s been fifteen years since I clicked a shutter on a view camera, but some things have stayed with me from those years. In photography, even the best lenses don’t focus light onto a point (infinitely small in size) but onto ‘spots’ or circles in the ‘film/image plane’. These circles of light have dimensions, despite being microscopically small. They’re known as ‘circles of confusion’. As circles of light become larger, the more unsharp parts of a photograph appear. On the flip side, when circles are smaller, an image looks sharper and more in focus. This is the basis for photographic depth of field and with that comes the knowledge that no photograph can be perfectly focused, never truly sharp. Instead, photographs can only be ‘acceptably unsharp’. Acceptable unsharpness is now a concept that’s relevant to the work we make for the web, because often – unless we compromise – websites cannot look or be experienced exactly the same across browsers, devices or platforms. Accepting that fact, and learning to look upon these natural differences as creative opportunities instead of imperfections, can be tough. Deciding which aspects of a design must remain consistent and, therefore, possibly require more time, effort or compromises can be tougher. Circles of confusion can help us, our bosses and our customers make better, more informed decisions. Acceptable unsharpness Many clients still demand that every aspect of a design should be ‘sharp’ – that every user must see rounded boxes, gradients and shadows – without regard for the implications. I believe that this stems largely from the fact that they have previously been shown designs – and asked for sign-off – using static images. It’s also true that in the past, organisations have invested heavily in style guides which, while maybe still useful in offline media, have a strictness that often fails to allow for the flexibility that we need to create experiences that are appropriate to a user’s browser or device capabilities. We live in an era where web browsers and devices have wide-ranging capabilities, and websites can rarely look or be experienced exactly the same across them. Is a particular typeface vital to a user’s experience of a brand? How important are gradients or shadows? Are rounded corners really that necessary? These decisions determine how ‘sharp’ an element should be across browsers with different capabilities and, therefore, how much time, effort or extra code and images we devote to achieving consistency between them. To help our clients make those decisions, we can use circles of confusion. Circles of confusion Using circles of confusion involves plotting aspects of a visual design into a series of concentric circles, starting at the centre with elements that demand the most consistency. Then, work outwards, placing elements in order of their priority so that they become progressively ‘softer’, more defocused as they’re plotted into outer rings. If layout and typography must remain consistent, place them in the centre circle as they’re aspects of a design that must remain ‘sharp’. When gradients are important – but not vital – to a user’s experience of a brand, plot them close to, but not in the centre. This makes everyone aware that to achieve consistency, you’ll need to carve out extra images for browsers that don’t support CSS gradients. If achieving rounded corners or shadows in all browsers isn’t important, place them into outer circles, allowing you to save time by not creating images or employing JavaScript workarounds. I’ve found plotting aspects of a visual design into circles of confusion is a useful technique when explaining the natural differences between browsers to clients. It sets more realistic expectations and creates an environment for more meaningful discussions about progressive and emerging technologies. Best of all, it enables everyone to make better and more informed decisions about design implementation priorities. Involving clients allows the implications of the decisions they make more transparent. For me, this has sometimes meant shifting deadlines or it has allowed me to more easily justify an increase in fees. Most important of all, circles of confusion have helped the people that I work with move beyond yesterday’s one-size-fits-all thinking about visual design, towards accepting the rich diversity of today’s web.",2010,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2010-12-23T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/circles-of-confusion/,process 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 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 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 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 220,Finding Your Way with Static Maps,"Since the introduction of the Google Maps service in 2005, online maps have taken off in a way not really possible before the invention of slippy map interaction. Although quickly followed by a plethora of similar services from both commercial and non-commercial parties, Google’s first-mover advantage, and easy-to-use developer API saw Google Maps become pretty much the de facto mapping service. It’s now so easy to add a map to a web page, there’s no reason not to. Dropping an iframe map into your page is as simple as embedding a YouTube video. But there’s one crucial drawback to both the solution Google provides for you to drop into your page and the code developers typically implement themselves – they don’t work without JavaScript. A bit about JavaScript Back in October of this year, The Yahoo! Developer Network blog ran some tests to measure how many visitors to the Yahoo! home page didn’t have JavaScript available or enabled in their browser. It’s an interesting test when you consider that the audience for the Yahoo! home page (one of the most visited pages on the web) represents about as mainstream a sample as you’ll find. If there’s any such thing as an ‘average Web user’ then this is them. The results surprised me. It varied from region to region, but at most just two per cent of visitors didn’t have JavaScript running. To be honest, I was expecting it to be higher, but this quote from the article caught my attention: While the percentage of visitors with JavaScript disabled seems like a low number, keep in mind that small percentages of big numbers are also big numbers. That’s right, of course, and it got me thinking about what that two per cent means. For many sites, two per cent is the number of visitors using the Opera web browser, using IE6, or using Mobile Safari. So, although a small percentage of the total, users without JavaScript can’t just be forgotten about, and catering for them is at the very heart of how the web is supposed to work. Starting with content in HTML, we layer on presentation with CSS and then enhance interactivity with JavaScript. If anything fails along the way or the network craps out, or a browser just doesn’t support one of the technologies, the user still gets something they can work with. It’s progressive enhancement – also known as doing our jobs properly. Sorry, wasn’t this about maps? As I was saying, the default code Google provides, and the example code it gives to developers (which typically just gets followed ‘as is’) doesn’t account for users without JavaScript. No JavaScript, no content. When adding the ability to publish maps to our small content management system Perch, I didn’t want to provide a solution that only worked with JavaScript. I had to go looking for a way to provide maps without JavaScript, too. There’s a simple solution, fortunately, in the form of static map tiles. All the various slippy map services use a JavaScript interface on top of what are basically rendered map image tiles. Dragging the map loads in more image tiles in the direction you want to view. If you’ve used a slippy map on a slow connection, you’ll be familiar with seeing these tiles load in one by one. The Static Map API The good news is that these tiles (or tiles just like them) can be used as regular images on your site. Google has a Static Map API which not only gives you a handy interface to retrieve a tile for the exact area you need, but also allows you to place pins, and zoom and centre the tile so that the image looks just so. This means that you can create a static, non-JavaScript version of your slippy map’s initial (or ideal) state to load into your page as a regular image, and then have the JavaScript map hijack the image and make it slippy. Clearly, that’s not going to be a perfect solution for every map’s requirements. It doesn’t allow for panning, zooming or interrogation without JavaScript. However, for the majority of straightforward map uses online, a static map makes a great alternative for those visitors without JavaScript. Here’s the how Retrieving a static map tile is staggeringly easy – it’s just a case of forming a URL with the correct arguments and then using that as the src of an image tag. As you can see, there are a few key options that we pass along to the base URL. All of these should be familiar to anyone who’s worked with the JavaScript API. center determines the point on which the map is centred. This can be latitude and longitude values, or simply an address which is then geocoded. zoom sets the zoom level. size is the pixel dimensions of the image you require. maptype can be roadmap, satellite, terrain or hybrid. markers sets one or more pin locations. Markers can be labelled, have different colours, and so on – there’s quite a lot of control available. sensor states whether you are using a sensor to determine the user’s location. When just embedding a map in a web page, set this to false. There are many options, including plotting paths and setting the image format, which can all be found in the straightforward documentation. Adding to your page If you’ve worked with the JavaScript API, you’ll know that it needs a container element which you inject the map into:
All you need to do is put your static image inside that container:
And then, in your JavaScript, find the image and remove it. For example, with jQuery you’d simply use: $('#map img').remove(); Why not use a