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| 9 | 9 | How to Write a Book | Were you recently inspired to write a book after reading Owen Gregory’s compendium of author insights? Maybe so inspired to strike out on your own and self-publish? Based on personal experience, writing a book is hard. It requires a great deal of research, experience, and patience. To be able to consolidate your thoughts and what you’ve learned into a sensible and readable tome is an admirable feat. To decide to self-publish and take on yourself all of the design, printing, distribution, and so much more is tantamount to insanity. Again, based on personal experience. So, why might you want to self-publish? If you’ve spent many a late night doing cross-browser testing just to know that your site works flawlessly in twenty-four different browsers — including Mosaic, of course — then maybe you’ll understand the fun that comes from doing it all. Working with a publisher, you’re left to focus on one core thing: writing. That’s a good thing. A good publisher has the right resources to help you get your idea polished and the distribution network to get your book on store shelves around the world. It’s a very proud moment to be able to walk into a book store and see your book sitting there on the shelf. Self-publishing can also be a wonderful process as you get to own it from beginning to end. Every decision is yours and if you’re a control freak like me, this can be a very rewarding experience. While there are many aspects to self-publishing, I’m going to speak to just one of them: creating an ebook. Formats In creating an ebook, you first need to decide what formats you wish to support. There are three main formats, each with their own pros and cons: PDF EPUB MOBI PDFs are supported on almost every device (Windows, Mac, Kindle, iPad, Android, etc.) and can even be a stepping stone to creating a print version of your book. PDFs allow for full typographic and design control, but at the cost of needing to fit things into a predefined page layout. Is it US Letter or A4? Or is it a format that isn’t easily… | 2013 | Jonathan Snook | jonathansnook | 2013-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/how-to-write-a-book/ | content |
| 10 | 10 | Home Kanban for Domestic Bliss | My wife is an architect. I’m a leader of big technical teams these days, but for many years after I was a dev I was a project/program manager. Our friends and family used to watch Grand Designs and think that we would make the ideal team — she could design, I could manage the project of building or converting whatever dream home we wanted. Then we bought a house. A Victorian terrace in the north-east of England that needed, well, a fair bit of work. The big decisions were actually pretty easy: yes, we should knock through a double doorway from the dining room to the lounge; yes, we should strip out everything from the utility room and redo it; yes, we should roll back the hideous carpet in the bedrooms upstairs and see if we could restore the original wood flooring. Those could be managed like a project. What couldn’t be was all the other stuff. Incremental improvements are harder to schedule, and in a house that’s over a hundred years old you never know what you’re going to find when you clear away some tiles, or pull up the carpets, or even just spring-clean the kitchen (“Erm, hon? The paint seems to be coming off. Actually, so does the plaster…”). A bit like going in to fix bugs in code or upgrade a machine — sometimes you end up quite far down the rabbit hole. And so, as we tried to fit in those improvements in our evenings and weekends, we found ourselves disagreeing. Arguing, even. We were both trying to do the right thing (make the house better) but since we were fitting it in where we could, we often didn’t get to talk and agree in detail what was needed (exactly how to make the house better). And it’s really frustrating when you stay up late doing something, just to find that your other half didn’t mean that they meant this instead, and so your effort was wasted. Then I saw this tweet from my friend and colleague Jamie Arnold, who was using the same kanban board approach at home as we had instituted at the UK Government Digital Service to manage our portfolio. Mrs Arnold embraces Kanban wall at ho… | 2013 | Meri Williams | meriwilliams | 2013-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/home-kanban-for-domestic-bliss/ | process |
| 11 | 11 | JavaScript: Taking Off the Training Wheels | JavaScript is the third pillar of front-end web development. Of those pillars, it is both the most powerful and the most complex, so it’s understandable that when 24 ways asked, “What one thing do you wish you had more time to learn about?”, a number of you answered “JavaScript!” This article aims to help you feel happy writing JavaScript, and maybe even without libraries like jQuery. I can’t comprehensively explain JavaScript itself without writing a book, but I hope this serves as a springboard from which you can jump to other great resources. Why learn JavaScript? So what’s in it for you? Why take the next step and learn the fundamentals? Confidence with jQuery If nothing else, learning JavaScript will improve your jQuery code; you’ll be comfortable writing jQuery from scratch and feel happy bending others’ code to your own purposes. Writing efficient, fast and bug-free jQuery is also made much easier when you have a good appreciation of JavaScript, because you can look at what jQuery is really doing. Understanding how JavaScript works lets you write better jQuery because you know what it’s doing behind the scenes. When you need to leave the beaten track, you can do so with confidence. In fact, you could say that jQuery’s ultimate goal is not to exist: it was invented at a time when web APIs were very inconsistent and hard to work with. That’s slowly changing as new APIs are introduced, and hopefully there will come a time when jQuery isn’t needed. An example of one such change is the introduction of the very useful document.querySelectorAll. Like jQuery, it converts a CSS selector into a list of matching elements. Here’s a comparison of some jQuery code and the equivalent without. $('.counter').each(function (index) { $(this).text(index + 1); }); var counters = document.querySelectorAll('.counter'); [].slice.call(counters).forEach(function (elem, index) { elem.textContent = index + 1; }); Solving problems no one else has! When you have to go to the internet to solve a problem, you’re forever st… | 2013 | Tom Ashworth | tomashworth | 2013-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/javascript-taking-off-the-training-wheels/ | code |
| 12 | 12 | Untangling Web Typography | When I was a carpenter, I noticed how homeowners often had this deer-in-the-headlights look when the contractor I worked for would ask them to make tons of decisions, seemingly all at once. Square or subway tile? Glass or ceramic? Traditional or modern trim details? Flat face or picture frame cabinets? Real wood or laminate flooring? Every day the decisions piled up and were usually made in the context of that room, or that part of that room. Rarely did the homeowner have the benefit of taking that particular decision in full view of the larger context of the project. And architectural plans? Sure, they lay out the broad strokes, but there is still so much to decide. Typography is similar. Designers try to make sites that are easy to use and understand visually. They labour over the details of line height, font size, line length, and font weights. They consider the relative merits of different typographical scales for applications versus content-driven sites. Frequently, designers consider all of this in the context of one page, feature, or view of an application. They are asked to make a million tiny decisions. Sometimes designers just bump up the font size until it looks right. I don’t see anything wrong with that. Instincts are important. Designing in context is easier. It’s OK to leave the big picture until later. Design a bunch of things, and then look for the patterns. You can’t always know everything up front. How does the current feature relate to all the other features on the site? For a large site, just like for a substantial remodel, the number of decisions you would need to internalize to make that knowable would be prohibitively large. When typography goes awry I should be honest. I know very little about typography. I struggle to understand vertical rhythm and the math in Tim Ahrens’s talks about the interaction between type design and rendering technology kind of melted my brain. I have an unusual perspective because I’m not the one making the design decisions, but I am the one implementing t… | 2013 | Nicole Sullivan | nicolesullivan | 2013-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/untangling-web-typography/ | design |
| 13 | 13 | Data-driven Design with an Annual Survey | Too often, we base designs on assumptions that don’t match customer perspectives. Why? Because the data we need to make informed decisions isn’t available. Imagine starting off the year with a treasure trove of user data that can be filtered, sliced, and diced to inform new UI designs, help you discover where users struggle the most, and expose emerging trends in your customers’ needs that could lead to new features. Why, that would be useful indeed. And it’s easy to obtain by conducting an annual survey. Annual surveys may seem as exciting as receiving socks and undies for Christmas, but they’re the gift that keeps on giving all year long (just like fresh socks and undies). I’m not ashamed to admit it: I love surveys! Each time my design research team runs a survey, we learn so much about customer motivations, interests, and behaviors. Surveys provide an aggregate snapshot of your users that can’t easily be obtained by other research methods, and they can be conducted quickly too. You can build a survey in a few hours, run a pilot test in a day, and have real results streaming in the following day. Speed is essential if design research is going to keep pace with a busy product release schedule. Surveys are also an invaluable springboard for customer interviews, which provide deep perspectives on user behavior. If you play your cards right as you construct your survey, you can capture a user ID and an email address for each respondent, making it easy to get in touch with customers whose feedback is particularly intriguing. No more recruiting customers for your research via Twitter or through a recruiting company charging a small fortune. You can filter survey responses and isolate the exact customers to talk with in moments, not months. I love this connected process of sending targeted surveys, filtering the results, and then — with surgical precision — selecting just the right customers to interview. Not only is it fast and cheap, but it lets design researchers do quantitative and qualitative research in … | 2013 | Aarron Walter | aarronwalter | 2013-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/data-driven-design-with-an-annual-survey/ | design |
| 14 | 14 | The Command Position Principle | Living where I do, in a small village in rural North Wales, getting anywhere means driving along narrow country roads. Most of these are just about passable when two cars meet. If you’re driving too close to the centre of the road, when two drivers meet you stop, glare at each other and no one goes anywhere. Drive too close to your nearside and in summer you’ll probably scratch your paintwork on the hedgerows, or in winter you’ll sink your wheels into mud. Driving these lanes requires a balance between caring for your own vehicle and consideration for someone else’s, but all too often, I’ve seen drivers pushed towards the hedgerows and mud when someone who’s inconsiderate drives too wide because they don’t want to risk scratching their own paintwork or getting their wheels dirty. If you learn to ride a motorcycle, you’ll be taught about the command position: Approximate central position, or any position from which the rider can exert control over invitation space either side. The command position helps motorcyclists stay safe, because when they ride in the centre of their lane it prevents other people, usually car drivers, from driving alongside, either forcing them into the curb or potentially dangerously close to oncoming traffic. Taking the command position isn’t about motorcyclists being aggressive, it’s about them being confident. It’s them knowing their rightful place on the road and communicating that through how they ride. I’ve recently been trying to take that command position when driving my car on our lanes. When I see someone coming in the opposite direction, instead of instinctively moving closer to my nearside — and in so doing subconsciously invite them into my space on the road — I hold both my nerve and a central position in my lane. Since I done this I’ve noticed that other drivers more often than not stay in their lane or pull closer to their nearside so we occupy equal space on the road. Although we both still need to watch our wing mirrors, neither of us gets our paint scratched … | 2013 | Andy Clarke | andyclarke | 2013-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/the-command-position-principle/ | business |
| 15 | 15 | Git for Grown-ups | You are a clever and talented person. You create beautiful designs, or perhaps you have architected a system that even my cat could use. Your peers adore you. Your clients love you. But, until now, you haven’t *&^#^! been able to make Git work. It makes you angry inside that you have to ask your co-worker, again, for that *&^#^! command to upload your work. It’s not you. It’s Git. Promise. Yes, this is an article about the popular version control system, Git. But unlike just about every other article written about Git, I’m not going to give you the top five commands that you need to memorize; and I’m not going to tell you all your problems would be solved if only you were using this GUI wrapper or that particular workflow. You see, I’ve come to a grand realization: when we teach Git, we’re doing it wrong. Let me back up for a second and tell you a little bit about the field of adult education. (Bear with me, it gets good and will leave you feeling both empowered and righteous.) Andragogy, unlike pedagogy, is a learner-driven educational experience. There are six main tenets to adult education: Adults prefer to know why they are learning something. The foundation of the learning activities should include experience. Adults prefer to be able to plan and evaluate their own instruction. Adults are more interested in learning things which directly impact their daily activities. Adults prefer learning to be oriented not towards content, but towards problems. Adults relate more to their own motivators than to external ones. Nowhere in this list does it include “memorize the five most popular Git commands”. And yet this is how we teach version control: init, add, commit, branch, push. You’re an expert! Sound familiar? In the hierarchy of learning, memorizing commands is the lowest, or most basic, form of learning. At the peak of learning you are able to not just analyze and evaluate a problem space, but create your own understanding in relation to your existing body of knowledge. “Fine,” I can hear you say… | 2013 | Emma Jane Westby | emmajanewestby | 2013-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/git-for-grownups/ | code |
| 16 | 16 | URL Rewriting for the Fearful | I think it was Marilyn Monroe who said, “If you can’t handle me at my worst, please just fix these rewrite rules, I’m getting an internal server error.” Even the blonde bombshell hated configuring URL rewrites on her website, and I think most of us know where she was coming from. The majority of website projects I work on require some amount of URL rewriting, and I find it mildly enjoyable — I quite like a good rewrite rule. I suspect you may not share my glee, so in this article we’re going to go back to basics to try to make the whole rigmarole more understandable. When we think about URL rewriting, usually that means adding some rules to an .htaccess file for an Apache web server. As that’s the most common case, that’s what I’ll be sticking to here. If you work with a different server, there’s often documentation specifically for translating from Apache’s mod_rewrite rules. I even found an automatic converter for nginx. This isn’t going to be a comprehensive guide to every URL rewriting problem you might ever have. That would take us until Christmas. If you consider yourself a trial-and-error dabbler in the HTTP 500-infested waters of URL rewriting, then hopefully this will provide a little bit more of a basis to help you figure out what you’re doing. If you’ve ever found yourself staring at the white screen of death after screwing up your .htaccess file, don’t worry. As Michael Jackson once insipidly whined, you are not alone. The basics Rewrite rules form part of the Apache web server’s configuration for a website, and can be placed in a number of different locations as part of your virtual host configuration. By far the simplest and most portable option is to use an .htaccess file in your website root. Provided your server has mod_rewrite available, all you need to do to kick things off in your .htaccess file is: RewriteEngine on The general formula for a rewrite rule is: RewriteRule URL/to/match URL/to/use/if/it/matches [options] When we talk about URL rewriting, we’re normally talking about one o… | 2013 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2013-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/url-rewriting-for-the-fearful/ | code |
| 17 | 17 | Bringing Design and Research Closer Together | The ‘should designers be able to code’ debate has raged for some time, but I’m interested in another debate: should designers be able to research? Are you a designer who can do research? Good research and the insights you uncover inspire fresh ways of thinking and get your creative juices flowing. Good research brings clarity to a woolly brief. Audience insight helps sharpen your focus on what’s really important. Experimentation through research and design brings a sense of playfulness and curiosity to your work. Good research helps you do good design. Being a web designer today is pretty tough, particularly if you’re a freelancer and work on your own. There are so many new ideas, approaches to workflow and trends and tools to keep up with. How do you decide which things to do and which to ignore? A modern web designer needs to be able to consider the needs of the audience, design appropriate IAs and layouts, choose colour palettes, pick appropriate typefaces and type layouts, wrangle with content, style, code, dabble in SEO, and the list goes on and on. Not only that, but today’s web designer also has to keep up with the latest talking points in the industry: responsive design, Agile, accessibility, Sass, Git, lean UX, content first, mobile first, blah blah blah. Any good web designer doesn’t need to be persuaded about the merits of including research in their toolkit, but do you really have time to include research too? Who is responsible for research? Generally, research in the web industry forms part of other disciplines and isn’t so much a discipline in its own right. It’s very often thought of as part of UX, or activities that make up a process such as IA or content strategy. Research is often undertaken by UX designers, information architects or content strategists and isn’t something designers or developers get that involved in. Some people lump all of these activities together and label it design research and have design researchers to do it. Some companies, such as the one I run with my husband Ma… | 2013 | Emma Boulton | emmaboulton | 2013-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/bringing-design-and-research-closer-together/ | ux |
| 18 | 18 | Grunt for People Who Think Things Like Grunt are Weird and Hard | Front-end developers are often told to do certain things: Work in as small chunks of CSS and JavaScript as makes sense to you, then concatenate them together for the production website. Compress your CSS and minify your JavaScript to make their file sizes as small as possible for your production website. Optimize your images to reduce their file size without affecting quality. Use Sass for CSS authoring because of all the useful abstraction it allows. That’s not a comprehensive list of course, but those are the kind of things we need to do. You might call them tasks. I bet you’ve heard of Grunt. Well, Grunt is a task runner. Grunt can do all of those things for you. Once you’ve got it set up, which isn’t particularly difficult, those things can happen automatically without you having to think about them again. But let’s face it: Grunt is one of those fancy newfangled things that all the cool kids seem to be using but at first glance feels strange and intimidating. I hear you. This article is for you. Let’s nip some misconceptions in the bud right away Perhaps you’ve heard of Grunt, but haven’t done anything with it. I’m sure that applies to many of you. Maybe one of the following hang-ups applies to you. I don’t need the things Grunt does You probably do, actually. Check out that list up top. Those things aren’t nice-to-haves. They are pretty vital parts of website development these days. If you already do all of them, that’s awesome. Perhaps you use a variety of different tools to accomplish them. Grunt can help bring them under one roof, so to speak. If you don’t already do all of them, you probably should and Grunt can help. Then, once you are doing those, you can keep using Grunt to do more for you, which will basically make you better at doing your job. Grunt runs on Node.js — I don’t know Node You don’t have to know Node. Just like you don’t have to know Ruby to use Sass. Or PHP to use WordPress. Or C++ to use Microsoft Word. I have other ways to do the things Grunt could do for me Are the… | 2013 | Chris Coyier | chriscoyier | 2013-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/grunt-is-not-weird-and-hard/ | code |
| 19 | 19 | In Their Own Write: Web Books and their Authors | The currency of written communication — words on the page, words on the screen — comprises many denominations. To further our ends in web design and development, we freely spend and receive several: tweets aphoristic and trenchant, banal and perfunctory; blog posts and articles that call us to action or reflection; anecdotes, asides, comments, essays, guides, how-tos, manuals, musings, notes, opinions, stories, thoughts, tips pro and not-so-pro. So many, many words. Our industry (so much more than this, but what on earth are we, collectively?), our community thrives on writing and sharing knowledge and experience. 24 ways is a case in point. Everyone can learn and contribute through reading and writing — it’s what we’ve always done. To web authors and readers seeking greater returns, though, broader culture has vouchsafed an enduring and singular artefact: the book. Last month I asked a small sample of web book authors if they would be prepared to answer a few questions; most of them kindly agreed. In spirit, the survey was informal: I had neither hypothesis nor unground axe. I work closely with writers — and yes, I’ve edited or copy-edited books by several of the authors I surveyed — and wanted to share their thoughts about what it was like to write a book (“…it was challenging to find a coherent narrative”), why they did it (“Who wouldn’t want to?”) and what they learned from the experience (“That I could!”). Reasons for writing a book In web development the connection between authors and readers is unusually close and immediate. Working in our medium precipitates a unity that’s rare elsewhere. Yet writing and publishing a book, even during the current books revolution, is something only a few of us attempt and it remains daunting and a little remote. What spurs an author to try it? For some, it’s a deeply held resistance to prevailing trends: I felt that designers and developers needed to be shaken out of what seemed to me had been years of stagnation. —Andrew Clarke Or even a desire to protect us from… | 2013 | Owen Gregory | owengregory | 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/web-books/ | content |
| 20 | 20 | Make Your Browser Dance | It was a crisp winter’s evening when I pulled up alongside the pier. I stepped out of my car and the bitterly cold sea air hit my face. I walked around to the boot, opened it and heaved out a heavy flight case. I slammed the boot shut, locked the car and started walking towards the venue. This was it. My first gig. I thought about all those weeks of preparation: editing video clips, creating 3-D objects, making coloured patterns, then importing them all into software and configuring effects to change as the music did; targeting frequency, beat, velocity, modifying size, colour, starting point; creating playlists of these… and working out ways to mix them as the music played. This was it. This was me VJing. This was all a lifetime (well a decade!) ago. When I started web designing, VJing took a back seat. I was more interested in interactive layouts, semantic accessible HTML, learning all the IE bugs and mastering the quirks that CSS has to offer. More recently, I have been excited by background gradients, 3-D transforms, the @keyframe directive, as well as new APIs such as getUserMedia, indexedDB, the Web Audio API But wait, have I just come full circle? Could it be possible, with these wonderful new things in technologies I am already familiar with, that I could VJ again, right here, in a browser? Well, there’s only one thing to do: let’s try it! Let’s take to the dance floor Over the past couple of years working in The Lab I have learned to take a much more iterative approach to projects than before. One of my new favourite methods of working is to create a proof of concept to make sure my theory is feasible, before going on to create a full-blown product. So let’s take the same approach here. The main VJing functionality I want to recreate is manipulating visuals in relation to sound. So for my POC I need to create a visual, with parameters that can be changed, then get some sound and see if I can analyse that sound to detect some data, which I can then use to manipulate the visual parameters. Easy, … | 2013 | Ruth John | ruthjohn | 2013-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/make-your-browser-dance/ | code |
| 21 | 21 | Keeping Parts of Your Codebase Private on GitHub | Open source is brilliant, there’s no denying that, and GitHub has been instrumental in open source’s recent success. I’m a keen open-sourcerer myself, and I have a number of projects on GitHub. However, as great as sharing code is, we often want to keep some projects to ourselves. To this end, GitHub created private repositories which act like any other Git repository, only, well, private! A slightly less common issue, and one I’ve come up against myself, is the desire to only keep certain parts of a codebase private. A great example would be my site, CSS Wizardry; I want the code to be open source so that people can poke through and learn from it, but I want to keep any draft blog posts private until they are ready to go live. Thankfully, there is a very simple solution to this particular problem: using multiple remotes. Before we begin, it’s worth noting that you can actually build a GitHub Pages site from a private repo. You can keep the entire source private, but still have GitHub build and display a full Pages/Jekyll site. I do this with csswizardry.net. This post will deal with the more specific problem of keeping only certain parts of the codebase (branches) private, and expose parts of it as either an open source project, or a built GitHub Pages site. N.B. This post requires some basic Git knowledge. Adding your public remote Let’s assume you’re starting from scratch and you currently have no repos set up for your project. (If you do already have your public repo set up, skip to the “Adding your private remote” section.) So, we have a clean slate: nothing has been set up yet, we’re doing all of that now. On GitHub, create two repositories. For the sake of this article we shall call them site.com and private.site.com. Make the site.com repo public, and the private.site.com repo private (you will need a paid GitHub account). On your machine, create the site.com directory, in which your project will live. Do your initial work in there, commit some stuff — whatever you need to do. Now we need to link… | 2013 | Harry Roberts | harryroberts | 2013-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/keeping-parts-of-your-codebase-private-on-github/ | code |
| 22 | 22 | The Responsive Hover Paradigm | CSS transitions and animations provide web designers with a whole slew of tools to spruce up our designs. Move over ActionScript tweens! The techniques we can now implement with CSS are reminiscent of Flash-based adventures from the pages of web history. Pairing CSS enhancements with our :hover pseudo-class allows us to add interesting events to our websites. We have a ton of power at our fingertips. However, with this power, we each have to ask ourselves: just because I can do something, should I? Why bother? We hear a lot of mantras in the web community. Some proclaim the importance of content; some encourage methods like mobile first to support content; and others warn of the overhead and speed impact of decorative flourishes and visual images. I agree, one hundred percent. At the same time, I believe that content can reign king and still provide a beautiful design with compelling interactions and acceptable performance impacts. Maybe, just maybe, we can even have a little bit of fun when crafting these systems! Yes, a site with pure HTML content and no CSS will load very fast on your mobile phone, but it leaves a lot to be desired. If you went to your local library and every book looked the same, how would you know which one to borrow? Imagine if every book was printed on the same paper stock with the same cover page in the same type size set at a legible point value… how would you know if you were going to purchase a cookbook about wild game or a young adult story about teens fighting to the death? For certain audiences, seeing a site with hip, lively hovers sure beats a stale website concept. I’ve worked on many higher education sites, and setting the interactive options is often a very important factor in engaging potential students, alumni, and donors. The same can go for e-commerce sites: enticing your audience with surprise and delight factors can be the difference between a successful and a lost sale. Knowing your content and audience can help you decide if an intriguing experience is appropria… | 2013 | Jenn Lukas | jennlukas | 2013-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/the-responsive-hover-paradigm/ | |
| 23 | 23 | Animating Vectors with SVG | It is almost 2014 and fifteen years ago the W3C started to develop a web-based scalable vector graphics (SVG) format. As web technologies go, this one is pretty old and well entrenched. See the Pen yJflC by Drew McLellan (@drewm) on CodePen Embed not working on your device? Try direct. Unlike rasterized images, SVG files will stay crisp and sharp at any resolution. With high-DPI phones, tablets and monitors, all those rasterized icons are starting to look a bit old and blocky. There are several options to get simpler, decorative pieces to render smoothly and respond to various device widths, shapes and sizes. Symbol fonts are one option; the other is SVG. I’m a big fan of SVG. SVG is an XML format, which means it is possible to write by hand or to script. The most common way to create an SVG file is through the use of various drawing applications like Illustrator, Inkscape or Sketch. All of them open and save the SVG format. But, if SVG is so great, why doesn’t it get more attention? The simple answer is that for a long time it wasn’t well supported, so no one touched the technology. SVG’s adoption has always been hampered by browser support, but that’s not the case any more. Every modern browser (at least three versions back) supports SVG. Even IE9. Although the browsers support SVG, it is implemented in many different ways. SVG in HTML Some browsers allow you to embed SVG right in the HTML: the <svg> element. Treating SVG as a first-class citizen works — sometimes. Another way to embed SVG is via the <img> element; using the src attribute, you can refer to an SVG file. Again, this only works sometimes and leaves you in a tight space if you need to have a fallback for older browsers. The most common solution is to use the <object> element, with the data attribute referencing the SVG file. When a browser does not support this, it falls back to the content inside the <object>. This could be a rasterized fallback <img>. This method gets you the best of both worlds: a nice vector image with an alternati… | 2013 | Brian Suda | briansuda | 2013-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/animating-vectors-with-svg/ | |
| 24 | 24 | Kill It With Fire! What To Do With Those Dreaded FAQs | In the mid-1640s, a man named Matthew Hopkins attempted to rid England of the devil’s influence, primarily by demanding payment for the service of tying women to chairs and tossing them into lakes. Unsurprisingly, his methods garnered criticism. Hopkins defended himself in The Discovery of Witches in 1647, subtitled “Certaine Queries answered, which have been and are likely to be objected against MATTHEW HOPKINS, in his way of finding out Witches.” Each “querie” was written in the voice of an imagined detractor, and answered in the voice of an imagined defender (always referring to himself as “the discoverer,” or “him”): Quer. 14. All that the witch-finder doth is to fleece the country of their money, and therefore rides and goes to townes to have imployment, and promiseth them faire promises, and it may be doth nothing for it, and possesseth many men that they have so many wizzards and so many witches in their towne, and so hartens them on to entertaine him. Ans. You doe him a great deale of wrong in every of these particulars. Hopkins’ self-defense was an early modern English FAQ. Digital beginnings Question and answer formatting certainly isn’t new, and stretches back much further than witch-hunt days. But its most modern, most notorious, most reviled incarnation is the internet’s frequently asked questions page. FAQs began showing up on pre-internet mailing lists as a way for list members to answer and pre-empt newcomers’ repetitive questions: The presumption was that new users would download archived past messages through ftp. In practice, this rarely happened and the users tended to post questions to the mailing list instead of searching its archives. Repeating the “right” answers becomes tedious… When all the users of a system can hear all the other users, FAQs make a lot of sense: the conversation needs to be managed and manageable. FAQs were a stopgap for the technological limitations of the time. But the internet moved past mailing lists. Online information can be stored, searched,… | 2013 | Lisa Maria Martin | lisamariamartin | 2013-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/what-to-do-with-faqs/ | content |
| 25 | 25 | The Introvert Owner’s Manual | Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. Albert Camus “Whatever you plan, just make sure there are lots of people there,” said my husband in the run-up to his birthday last year. A few months later, before my own birthday, I uttered, “Whatever you plan, just make sure it is only me and you.” I am an introvert. It is very likely some of you are too, or that you live, work or fraternise with one. Despite there being quite a few of us out there – some say as many as one third of the population, others as little as ten per cent – I think our professional and social lives are biased towards a definition of normality that is more accepting of the extrovert. I hope that by reading this article you will gain some insight to what goes on inside the head of the introvert(s) that you know and understand how to relate to them in a way that respects their disposition. Before we go any further, I should define what exactly being an introvert means, and, equally important, what it does not. Only once this is established will you be able to handle your introvert correctly. What defines an introvert The simplest and most accurate way of describing an introvert is that she uses up energy in social situations and needs to be in solitude to recharge. To explain what I mean, let us take the example of the The Sims: when you create a Sim, you can choose (among other characteristics) whether it will be outgoing or not. If the Sim is outgoing, when you play the game you need to make sure it interacts as much as possible with other Sims or its mood indicator (the plumbob) will become red and that is a bad thing. Conversely, if your Sim is not outgoing, when you put it in too many social situations its plumbob will become red too. So your (real life) introvert might think you are great (you might even be her best friend, her spouse or her child), but if her plumbob is red, or nearly, she might just need a little time and space to recharge before she is ready to interact. This is not the same … | 2014 | Inayaili de León Persson | inayailideleon | 2014-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/the-introvert-owners-manual/ | process |
| 26 | 26 | Integrating Contrast Checks in Your Web Workflow | It’s nearly Christmas, which means you’ll be sure to find an overload of festive red and green decorating everything in sight—often in the ugliest ways possible. While I’m not here to battle holiday tackiness in today’s 24 ways, it might just be the perfect reminder to step back and consider how we can implement colour schemes in our websites and apps that are not only attractive, but also legible and accessible for folks with various types of visual disabilities. This simulated photo demonstrates how red and green Christmas baubles could appear to a person affected by protanopia-type colour blindness—not as festive as you might think. Source: Derek Bruff I’ve been fortunate to work with Simply Accessible to redesign not just their website, but their entire brand. Although the new site won’t be launching until the new year, we’re excited to let you peek under the tree and share a few treats as a case study into how we tackled colour accessibility in our project workflow. Don’t worry—we won’t tell Santa! Create a colour game plan A common misconception about accessibility is that meeting compliance requirements hinders creativity and beautiful design—but we beg to differ. Unfortunately, like many company websites and internal projects, Simply Accessible has spent so much time helping others that they had not spent enough time helping themselves to show the world who they really are. This was the perfect opportunity for them to practise what they preached. After plenty of research and brainstorming, we decided to evolve the existing Simply Accessible brand. Or, rather, salvage what we could. There was no established logo to carry into the new design (it was a stretch to even call it a wordmark), and the Helvetica typography across the site lacked any character. The only recognizable feature left to work with was colour. It was a challenge, for sure: the oranges looked murky and brown, and the blues looked way too corporate for a company like Simply Accessible. We knew we needed to inject a lot of personalit… | 2014 | Geri Coady | gericoady | 2014-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/integrating-contrast-checks-in-your-web-workflow/ | design |
| 27 | 27 | Putting Design on the Map | The web can leave us feeling quite detached from the real world. Every site we make is really just a set of abstract concepts manifested as tools for communication and expression. At any minute, websites can disappear, overwritten by a newfangled version or simply gone. I think this is why so many of us have desires to create a product, write a book, or play with the internet of things. We need to keep in touch with the physical world and to prove (if only to ourselves) that we do make real things. I could go on and on about preserving the web, the challenges of writing a book, or thoughts about how we can deal with the need to make real things. Instead, I’m going to explore something that gives us a direct relationship between a website and the physical world – maps. A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected. Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet The simplest form of map on a website tends to be used for showing where a place is and often directions on how to get to it. That’s an incredibly powerful tool. So why is it, then, that so many sites just plonk in a default Google Map and leave it as that? You wouldn’t just use dark grey Helvetica on every site, would you? Where’s the personality? Where’s the tailored experience? Where is the design? Jumping into design Let’s keep this simple – we all want to be better web folk, not cartographers. We don’t need to go into the history, mathematics or technology of map making (although all of those areas are really interesting to research). For the sake of our sanity, I’m going to gloss over some of the technical areas and focus on the practical concepts. Tiles If you’ve ever noticed a map loading in sections, it’s because it uses tiles that are downloaded individually instead of requiring the user to download everything that they might need. These tiles come in many styles and can be used for anything that covers large ar… | 2014 | Shane Hudson | shanehudson | 2014-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/putting-design-on-the-map/ | design |
| 28 | 28 | Why You Should Design for Open Source | Let’s be honest. Most designers don’t like working for nothing. We rally against spec work and make a stand for contracts and getting paid. That’s totally what you should do as a professional designer in the industry. It’s your job. It’s your hard-working skill. It’s your bread and butter. Get paid. However, I’m going to make a case for why you could also consider designing for open source. First, I should mention that not all open source work is free work. Some companies hire open source contributors to work on their projects full-time, usually because that project is used by said company. There are other companies that encourage open source contribution and even offer 20%-time for these projects (where you can spend one day a week contributing to open source). These are super rad situations to be in. However, whether you’re able to land a gig doing this type of work, or you’ve decided to volunteer your time and energy, designing for open source can be rewarding in many other ways. Portfolio building New designers often find themselves in a catch-22 situation: they don’t have enough work experience showcased in their portfolio, which leads to them not getting much work because their portfolio is bare. These new designers often turn to unsolicited redesigns to fill their portfolio. An unsolicited redesign is a proof of concept in which a designer attempts to redesign a popular website. You can see many of these concepts on sites like Dribbble and Behance and there are even websites dedicated to showcasing these designs, such as Uninvited Designs. There’s even a subreddit for them. There are quite a few negative opinions on unsolicited redesigns, though some people see things from both sides. If you feel like doing one or two of these to fill your portfolio, that’s of course up to you. But here’s a better suggestion. Why not contribute design for an open source project instead? You can easily find many projects in great need of design work, from branding to information design, documentation, and website or ap… | 2014 | Jina Anne | jina | 2014-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/why-you-should-design-for-open-source/ | design |
| 29 | 29 | What It Takes to Build a Website | In 1994 we lost Kurt Cobain and got the world wide web as a weird consolation prize. In the years that followed, if you’d asked me if I knew how to build a website I’d have said yes, I know HTML, so I know how to build a website. If you’d then asked me what it takes to build a website, I’d have had to admit that HTML would hardly feature. Among the design nerdery and dev geekery it’s easy to think that the nuts and bolts of building a page just need to be multiplied up and Ta-da! There’s your website. That can certainly be true with weekend projects and hackery for fun. It works for throwing something together on GitHub or experimenting with ideas on your personal site. But what about working professionally on client projects? The web is important, so we need to build it right. It’s 2015 – your job involves people paying you money for building websites. What does it take to build a website and to do it right? What practices should we adopt to make really great, successful and professional web projects in 2015? I put that question to some friends and 24 ways authors to see what they thought. Getting the tech right Inevitably, it all starts with the technology. We work in a technical medium, after all. From Notepad and WinFTP through to continuous integration and deployment – how do you build sites? Create a stable development environment There’s little more likely to send a web developer into a wild panic and a client into a wild rage than making a new site live and things just not working. That’s why it’s important to have realistic development and staging environments that mimic the live server as closely as possible. Are you in the habit of developing new sites right on the client’s server? Or maybe in a subfolder on your local machine? It’s time to reconsider. Charlie Perrins writes: Don’t work on a live server – this feels like one of those gear-changing moments for a developer’s growth. Build something that works just as well locally on your own machine as it does on a live server, and capture th… | 2014 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2014-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/what-it-takes-to-build-a-website/ | business |
| 30 | 30 | Making Sites More Responsive, Responsibly | With digital projects we’re used to shifting our thinking to align with our target audience. We may undertake research, create personas, identify key tasks, or observe usage patterns, with our findings helping to refine our ongoing creations. A product’s overall experience can make or break its success, and when it comes to defining these experiences our development choices play a huge role alongside more traditional user-focused activities. The popularisation of responsive web design is a great example of how we are able to shape the web’s direction through using technology to provide better experiences. If we think back to the move from table-based layouts to CSS, initially our clients often didn’t know or care about the difference in these approaches, but we did. Responsive design was similar in this respect – momentum grew through the web industry choosing to use an approach that we felt would give a better experience, and which was more future-friendly. We tend to think of responsive design as a means of displaying content appropriately across a range of devices, but the technology and our implementation of it can facilitate much more. A responsive layout not only helps your content work when the newest smartphone comes out, but it also ensures your layout suitably adapts if a visually impaired user drastically changes the size of the text. The 24 ways site at 400% on a Retina MacBook Pro displays a layout more typically used for small screens. When we think more broadly, we realise that our technical choices and approaches to implementation can have knock-on effects for the greater good, and beyond our initial target audiences. We can make our experiences more responsive to people’s needs, enhancing their usability and accessibility along the way. Being responsibly responsive Of course, when we think about being more responsive, there’s a fine line between creating useful functionality and becoming intrusive and overly complex. In the excellent Responsible Responsive Design, Scott Jehl states that: … | 2014 | Sally Jenkinson | sallyjenkinson | 2014-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/making-sites-more-responsive-responsibly/ | code |
| 31 | 31 | Dealing with Emergencies in Git | The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that version control soon would be there. This summer I moved to the UK with my partner, and the onslaught of the Christmas holiday season began around the end of October (October!). It does mean that I’ve had more than a fair amount of time to come up with horrible Git analogies for this article. Analogies, metaphors, and comparisons help the learner hook into existing mental models about how a system works. They only help, however, if the learner has enough familiarity with the topic at hand to make the connection between the old and new information. Let’s start by painting an updated version of Clement Clarke Moore’s Christmas living room. Empty stockings are hung up next to the fireplace, waiting for Saint Nicholas to come down the chimney and fill them with small treats. Holiday treats are scattered about. A bowl of mixed nuts, the holiday nutcracker, and a few clementines. A string of coloured lights winds its way up an evergreen. Perhaps a few of these images are familiar, or maybe they’re just settings you’ve seen in a movie. It doesn’t really matter what the living room looks like though. The important thing is to ground yourself in your own experiences before tackling a new subject. Instead of trying to brute-force your way into new information, as an adult learner constantly ask yourself: ‘What is this like? What does this remind me of? What do I already know that I can use to map out this new territory?’ It’s okay if the map isn’t perfect. As you refine your understanding of a new topic, you’ll outgrow the initial metaphors, analogies, and comparisons. With apologies to Mr. Moore, let’s give it a try. Getting Interrupted in Git When on the roof there arose such a clatter! You’re happily working on your software project when all of a sudden there are freaking reindeer on the roof! Whatever you’ve been working on is going to need to wait while you investigate the commotion. If you’ve got even a little bit of experience working with Git, … | 2014 | Emma Jane Westby | emmajanewestby | 2014-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/dealing-with-emergencies-in-git/ | code |
| 32 | 32 | Cohesive UX | With Yosemite, Apple users can answer iPhone calls on their MacBooks. This is weird. And yet it’s representative of a greater trend toward cohesion. Shortly after upgrading to Yosemite, a call came in on my iPhone and my MacBook “rang” in parallel. And I was all, like, “Wut?” This was a new feature in Yosemite, and honestly it was a little bizarre at first. Apple promotional image showing a phone call ringing simultaneously on multiple devices. However, I had just spoken at a conference on the very topic you’re reading about now, and therefore I appreciated the underlying concept: the cohesion of user experience, the cohesion of screens. This is just one of many examples I’ve encountered since beginning to speak about this topic months ago. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s look back at the past few years, specifically the role of responsive web design. RWD != cohesive experience I needn’t expound on the virtues of responsive web design (RWD). You’ve likely already encountered more than a career’s worth on the topic. This is a good thing. Count me in as one of its biggest fans. However, if we are to sing the praises of RWD, we must also acknowledge its shortcomings. One of these is that RWD ends where the browser ends. For all its goodness, RWD really has no bearing on native apps or any other experiences that take place outside the browser. This makes it challenging, therefore, to create cohesion for multi-screen users if RWD is the only response to “let’s make it work everywhere.” We need something that incorporates the spirit of RWD while unifying all touchpoints for the entire user experience—single device or several devices, in browser or sans browser, native app or otherwise. I call this cohesive UX, and I believe it’s the next era of successful user experiences. Toward a unified whole Simply put, the goal of cohesive UX is to deliver a consistent, unified user experience regardless of where the experience begins, continues, and ends. Two facets are vital to cohesive UX: Function a… | 2014 | Cameron Moll | cameronmoll | 2014-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/cohesive-ux/ | ux |
| 33 | 33 | Five Ways to Animate Responsibly | It’s been two years since I wrote about “Flashless Animation” on this very site. Since then, animation has steadily begun popping up on websites, from sleek app-like user interfaces to interactive magazine-like spreads. It’s an exciting time for web animation wonks, interaction developers, UXers, UI designers and a host of other acronyms! But in our rush to experiment with animation it seems that we’re having fewer conversations about whether or not we should use it, and more discussions about what we can do with it. We spend more time fretting over how to animate all the things at 60fps than we do devising ways to avoid incapacitating users with vestibular disorders. I love web animation. I live it. And I make adorably silly things with it that have no place on a self-respecting production website. I know it can be abused. We’ve all made fun of Flash-turbation. But how quickly we forget the lessons we learned from that period of web design. Parallax scrolling effects may be the skip intro of this generation. Surely we have learned better in the sobering up period between Flash and the web animation API. So here are five bits of advice we can use to pull back from the edge of animation abuse. With these thoughts in mind, we can make 2015 the year web animation came into its own. Animate deliberately Sadly, animation is considered decorative by the bulk of the web development community. UI designers and interaction developers know better, of course. But when I’m teaching a workshop on animation for interaction, I know that my students face an uphill battle against decision makers who consider it nice to have, and tack it on at the end of a project, if at all. This stigma is hard to shake. But it starts with us using animation deliberately or not at all. Poorly considered, tacked-on animation will often cause more harm than good. Users may complain that it’s too slow or too fast, or that they have no idea what just happened. When I was at Chrome Dev Summit this year, I had the privilege to speak with Roma… | 2014 | Rachel Nabors | rachelnabors | 2014-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/five-ways-to-animate-responsibly/ | ux |
| 34 | 34 | Collaborative Responsive Design Workflows | Much has been written about workflow and designer-developer collaboration in web design, but many teams still struggle with this issue; either with how to adapt their internal workflow, or how to communicate the need for best practices like mobile first and progressive enhancement to their teams and clients. Christmas seems like a good time to have another look at what doesn’t work between us and how we can improve matters. Why is it so difficult? We’re still beginning to understand responsive design workflows, acknowledging the need to move away from static design tools and towards best practices in development. It’s not that we don’t want to change – so why is it so difficult? Changing the way we do something that has become routine is always problematic, even with small things, and the changes today’s web environment requires from web design and development teams are anything but small. Although developers also have a host of new skills to learn and things to consider, designers are probably the ones pushed furthest out of their comfort zones: as well as graphic design, a web designer today also needs an understanding of interaction design and ergonomics, because more and more websites are becoming tools rather than pages meant to be read like a book or magazine. In addition to that there are thousands of different devices and screen sizes on the market today that layout and interactions need to work on. These aspects make it impossible to design in a static design tool, so beyond having to learn about new aspects of design, the designer has to either learn how to code or learn to work with a responsive design tool. Why do it That alone is enough to leave anyone overwhelmed, as learning a new skill takes time and slows you down in a project – and on most projects time is in short supply. Yet we have to make time or fall behind in the industry as others pitch better, interactive designs. For an efficient workflow, both designers and developers must familiarise themselves with new tools and techniques. A… | 2014 | Sibylle Weber | sibylleweber | 2014-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/collaborative-responsive-design-workflows/ | process |
| 35 | 35 | SEO in 2015 (and Why You Should Care) | If your business is healthy, you can always find plenty of reasons to leave SEO on your to-do list in perpetuity. After all, SEO is technical, complicated, time-consuming and potentially dangerous. The SEO industry is full of self-proclaimed gurus whose lack of knowledge can be deadly. There’s the terrifying fact that even if you dabble in SEO in the most gentle and innocent way, you might actually end up in a worse state than you were to begin with. To make matters worse, Google keeps changing the rules. There have been a bewildering number of major updates, which despite their cuddly names have had a horrific impact on website owners worldwide. Fear aside, there’s also the issue of time. It’s probably tricky enough to find the time to read this article. Setting up, planning and executing an SEO campaign might well seem like an insurmountable obstacle. So why should you care enough about SEO to do it anyway? The main reason is that you probably already see between 30% and 60% of your website traffic come from the search engines. That might make you think that you don’t need to bother, because you’re already doing so well. But you’re almost certainly wrong. If you have a look through the keyword data in your Google Webmaster Tools account, you’ll probably see that around 30–50% of the keywords used to find your website are brand names – the names of your products or companies. These are searches carried out by people who already know about you. But the people who don’t know who you are but are searching for what you sell aren’t finding you right now. This is your opportunity. If a person goes looking for a company or product by name, Google will steer them towards what they’re looking for. Their intelligence does have limits, however, and even though they know your name they won’t be completely clear about what you sell. That’s where SEO would come in. Still need more convincing? How about the fact that the seeming complexities of SEO mean that your competition are almost certainly neglecting it too. They … | 2014 | Dave Collins | davecollins | 2014-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/seo-in-2015-and-why-you-should-care/ | business |
| 36 | 36 | Naming Things | There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things. Phil Karlton Being a professional web developer means taking responsibility for the code you write and ensuring it is comprehensible to others. Having a documented code style is one means of achieving this, although the size and type of project you’re working on will dictate the conventions used and how rigorously they are enforced. Working in-house may mean working with multiple developers, perhaps in distributed teams, who are all committing changes – possibly to a significant codebase – at the same time. Left unchecked, this codebase can become unwieldy. Coding conventions ensure everyone can contribute, and help build a product that works as a coherent whole. Even on smaller projects, perhaps working within an agency or by yourself, at some point the resulting product will need to be handed over to a third party. It’s sensible, therefore, to ensure that your code can be understood by those who’ll eventually take ownership of it. Put simply, code is read more often than it is written or changed. A consistent and predictable naming scheme can make code easier for other developers to understand, improve and maintain, presumably leaving them free to worry about cache invalidation. Let’s talk about semantics Names not only allow us to identify objects, but they can also help us describe the objects being identified. Semantics (the meaning or interpretation of words) is the cornerstone of standards-based web development. Using appropriate HTML elements allows us to create documents and applications that have implicit structural meaning. Thanks to HTML5, the vocabulary we can choose from has grown even larger. HTML elements provide one level of meaning: a widely accepted description of a document’s underlying structure. It’s only with the mutual agreement of browser vendors and developers that <p> indicates a paragraph. Yet (with the exception of widely accepted microdata and microformat schemas) only HTML elements co… | 2014 | Paul Lloyd | paulrobertlloyd | 2014-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/naming-things/ | code |
| 37 | 37 | JavaScript Modules the ES6 Way | JavaScript admittedly has plenty of flaws, but one of the largest and most prominent is the lack of a module system: a way to split up your application into a series of smaller files that can depend on each other to function correctly. This is something nearly all other languages come with out of the box, whether it be Ruby’s require, Python’s import, or any other language you’re familiar with. Even CSS has @import! JavaScript has nothing of that sort, and this has caused problems for application developers as they go from working with small websites to full client-side applications. Let’s be clear: it doesn’t mean the new module system in the upcoming version of JavaScript won’t be useful to you if you’re building smaller websites rather than the next Instagram. Thankfully, the lack of a module system will soon be a problem of the past. The next version of JavaScript, ECMAScript 6, will bring with it a full-featured module and dependency management solution for JavaScript. The bad news is that it won’t be landing in browsers for a while yet – but the good news is that the specification for the module system and how it will look has been finalised. The even better news is that there are tools available to get it all working in browsers today without too much hassle. In this post I’d like to give you the gift of JS modules and show you the syntax, and how to use them in browsers today. It’s much simpler than you might think. What is ES6? ECMAScript is a scripting language that is standardised by a company called Ecma International. JavaScript is an implementation of ECMAScript. ECMAScript 6 is simply the next version of the ECMAScript standard and, hence, the next version of JavaScript. The spec aims to be fully comfirmed and complete by the end of 2014, with a target initial release date of June 2015. It’s impossible to know when we will have full feature support across the most popular browsers, but already some ES6 features are landing in the latest builds of Chrome and Firefox. You shouldn’t expect to be… | 2014 | Jack Franklin | jackfranklin | 2014-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/javascript-modules-the-es6-way/ | code |
| 38 | 38 | Websites of Christmas Past, Present and Future | The websites of Christmas past The first website was created at CERN. It was launched on 20 December 1990 (just in time for Christmas!), and it still works today, after twenty-four years. Isn’t that incredible?! Why does this website still work after all this time? I can think of a few reasons. First, the authors of this document chose HTML. Of course they couldn’t have known back then the extent to which we would be creating documents in HTML, but HTML always had a lot going for it. It’s built on top of plain text, which means it can be opened in any text editor, and it’s pretty readable, even without any parsing. Despite the fact that HTML has changed quite a lot over the past twenty-four years, extensions to the specification have always been implemented in a backwards-compatible manner. Reading through the 1992 W3C document HTML Tags, you’ll see just how it has evolved. We still have h1 – h6 elements, but I’d not heard of the <plaintext> element before. Despite being deprecated since HTML2, it still works in several browsers. You can see it in action on my website. As well as being written in HTML, there is no run-time compilation of code; the first website simply consists of HTML files transmitted over the web. Due to its lack of complexity, it stood a good chance of surviving in the turbulent World Wide Web. That’s all well and good for a simple, static website. But websites created today are increasingly interactive. Many require a login and provide experiences that are tailored to the individual user. This type of dynamic website requires code to be executed somewhere. Traditionally, dynamic websites would execute such code on the server, and transmit a simple HTML file to the user. As far as the browser was concerned, this wasn’t much different from the first website, as the additional complexity all happened before the document was sent to the browser. Doing it all in the browser In 2003, the first single page interface was created at slashdotslash.com. A single page interface or single page ap… | 2014 | Josh Emerson | joshemerson | 2014-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/websites-of-christmas-past-present-and-future/ | code |
| 39 | 39 | Meet for Learning | “I’ve never worked in a place like this,” said one of my direct reports during our daily stand-up meeting. And with that statement, my mind raced to the most important thing about lawyering that I’ve learned from decades of watching lawyers lawyer on TV: don’t ask a question you don’t know the answer to. But I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to learn more. The thought developed in my mind. The words formed in my mouth. And the vocalization occurred: “A place like this?” “I’ve never worked where people are so honest and transparent about things.” Designing a learning-centered culture Before we started Center Centre, Jared Spool and I discussed both the larger goals and the smaller details of this new UX design school. We talked about things like user experience, curriculum, and structure. We discussed the pattern we saw in our research. Hiring managers told us time and again that great designers have excellent technical and interpersonal skills. But, more importantly, the best designers are lifelong learners—they are willing and able to learn how to do new things. Learning this led us to ask a critical question: how would we intentionally design a learning-centered experience? To craft the experience we were aiming for, we knew we had to create a learning-centered culture for our students and our employees. We knew that our staff would need to model the behaviors our students needed to learn. We knew the best way to shape the culture was to work with our direct reports—our directs—to develop the behaviors we wanted them to exemplify. To craft the experience we were aiming for, we knew we had to create a learning-centered culture for our students and our employees. We knew that our staff would need to model the behaviors our students needed to learn. Building a learning team Our learning-centered culture starts with our staff. We believe in transparency. Transparency builds trust. Effective organizations have effective teams who trust each other as individuals. One huge way we build that trust and provide… | 2014 | Leslie Jensen-Inman | lesliejenseninman | 2014-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/meet-for-learning/ | process |
| 40 | 40 | Don’t Push Through the Pain | In 2004, I lost my web career. In a single day, it was gone. I was in too much pain to use a keyboard, a Wacom tablet (I couldn’t even click the pen), or a trackball. Switching my mouse to use my left (non-dominant) hand only helped a bit; then that hand went, too. I tried all the easy-to-find equipment out there, except for expensive gizmos with foot pedals. I had tingling in my fingers—which, when I was away from the computer, would rhythmically move as if some other being controlled them. I worried about Parkinson’s because the movements were so dramatic. Pen on paper was painful. Finally, I discovered one day that I couldn’t even turn a doorknob. The only highlight was that I couldn’t dust, scrub, or vacuum. We were forced to hire someone to come in once a week for an hour to whip through the house. You can imagine my disappointment. My injuries had gradually slithered into my life without notice. I’d occasionally have sore elbows, or my wrist might ache for a day, or my shoulders feel tight. But nothing to keyboard home about. That’s the critical bit of news. One day, you’re pretty fine. The next day, you don’t have your job—or any job that requires the use of your hands and wrists. I had to walk away from the computer for over four months—and partially for several months more. That’s right: no income. If I hadn’t found a gifted massage therapist, the right book of stretches, the equipment I should have been using all along, and learned how to pay attention to my body—even just a little bit more—I quite possibly wouldn’t be writing this article today. I wouldn’t be writing anything, anywhere. Most of us have heard of (and even claimed to have read all of) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, who describes the state of flow—the place our minds go when we are fully engaged and in our element. This lovely state of highly focused activity is deeply satisfying, often creative, and quite familiar to many of us on the web who just can’t quit until the copy sings or t… | 2014 | Carolyn Wood | carolynwood | 2014-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/dont-push-through-the-pain/ | business |
| 41 | 41 | What Is Vagrant and Why Should I Care? | If you run a web server, a database server and your scripting language(s) of choice on your main machine and you have not yet switched to using virtualisation in your workflow then this essay may be of some value to you. I know you exist because I bump into you daily: freelancers coming in to work on our projects; internet friends complaining about reinstalling a development environment because of an operating system upgrade; fellow agency owners who struggle to brief external help when getting a particular project up and running; or even hardcore back-end developers who “don’t do ops” and prefer to run their development stack of choice locally. There are many perfectly reasonable arguments as to why you may not have already made the switch, from being simply too busy, all the way through to a distrust of the new. I’ll admit that there are many new technologies or workflows that I hear of daily and instantly disregard because I have tool overload, that feeling I get when I hear about a new shiny thing and think “Well, what I do now works – I’ll leave it for others to play with.” If that’s you when it comes to Vagrant then I hope you’ll hear me out. The business case is compelling enough for you to make that switch; as a bonus it’s also really easy to get going. In this article we’ll start off by going through the high level, the tools available and how it all fits together. Then we’ll touch on the justification for making the switch, providing a few use cases that might resonate with you. Finally, I’ll provide a very simple example that you can follow to get yourself up and running. What? You already know what virtualisation is. You use the ability to run an operating system within another operating system every day. Whether that’s Parallels or VMware on your laptop or similar server-based tools that drive the ‘cloud’, squeezing lots of machines on to physical hardware and making it really easy to copy servers and even clusters of servers from one place to another. It’s an amazing technology which has change… | 2014 | Darren Beale | darrenbeale | 2014-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/what-is-vagrant-and-why-should-i-care/ | process |
| 42 | 42 | An Overview of SVG Sprite Creation Techniques | SVG can be used as an icon system to replace icon fonts. The reasons why SVG makes for a superior icon system are numerous, but we won’t be going over them in this article. If you don’t use SVG icons and are interested in knowing why you may want to use them, I recommend you check out “Inline SVG vs Icon Fonts” by Chris Coyier – it covers the most important aspects of both systems and compares them with each other to help you make a better decision about which system to choose. Once you’ve made the decision to use SVG instead of icon fonts, you’ll need to think of the best way to optimise the delivery of your icons, and ways to make the creation and use of icons faster. Just like bitmaps, we can create image sprites with SVG – they don’t look or work exactly alike, but the basic concept is pretty much the same. There are several ways to create SVG sprites, and this article will give you an overview of three of them. While we’re at it, we’re going to take a look at some of the available tools used to automate sprite creation and fallback for us. Prerequisites The content of this article assumes you are familiar with SVG. If you’ve never worked with SVG before, you may want to look at some of the introductory tutorials covering SVG syntax, structure and embedding techniques. I recommend the following: SVG basics: Using SVG. Structure: Structuring, Grouping, and Referencing in SVG — The <g>, <use>, <defs> and <symbol> Elements. We’ll mention <use> and <symbol> quite a bit in this article. Embedding techniques: Styling and Animating SVGs with CSS. The article covers several topics, but the section linked focuses on embedding techniques. A compendium of SVG resources compiled by Chris Coyier — contains resources to almost every aspect of SVG you might be interested in. And if you’re completely new to the concept of spriting, Chris Coyier’s CSS Sprites explains all about them. Another important SVG feature is the viewBox attribute. For some of the techniques, knowing your way around this attribute is … | 2014 | Sara Soueidan | sarasoueidan | 2014-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/an-overview-of-svg-sprite-creation-techniques/ | code |
| 43 | 43 | Content Production Planning | While everyone agrees that getting the content of a website right is vital to its success, unless you’re lucky enough to have an experienced editor or content strategist on board, planning content production often seems to fall through the cracks. One reason is that, for most of the team, it feels like someone else’s problem. Not necessarily a specific person’s problem. Just someone else’s. It’s only when everyone starts urgently asking when the content is going to be ready, that it becomes clear the answer is, “Not as soon as we’d like it”. The good news is that there are some quick and simple things you can do, even if you’re not the official content person on a project, to get everyone on the same content planning page. Content production planning boils down to answering three deceptively simple questions: What content do you need? How much of it do you need? Who’s going to make it? Even if it’s not your job to come up with the answers, by asking these questions early enough and agreeing who is going to come up with the answers, you’ll be a long way towards avoiding the last-minute content problems which so often plague projects. How much content do we need? People tend to underestimate two crucial things about content: how much content they need, and how long that content takes to produce. When I ask someone how big their website is – how many pages it contains – I usually double or triple the answer I get. That’s because almost everyone’s mental model of their website greatly underestimates its true size. You can see the problem for yourself if you look at a site map. Site maps are great at representing a mental model of a website. But because they’re a deliberate simplification they naturally lead us to underestimate how much content is involved in populating them. Several years ago I was asked to help a client create a new microsite (their word) which they wanted ready in two weeks for a conference they were attending. Here’s the site map they had in mind. At first glance it looks like a pret… | 2014 | Sophie Dennis | sophiedennis | 2014-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/content-production-planning/ | content |
| 44 | 44 | Taglines and Truisms | To bring her good luck, “white rabbits” was the first thing that my grandmother said out loud on the first day of every month. We all need a little luck, but we shouldn’t rely on it, especially when it comes to attracting new clients. The first thing we say to a prospective client when they visit our website for the first time helps them to understand not only what we do but why we do it. We can also help them understand why they should choose to work with us over one of our competitors. Take a minute or two to look at your competitors’ websites. What’s the first thing that they say about themselves? Do they say that they “design delightful digital experiences,” “craft beautiful experiences” or “create remarkable digital experiences?” It’s easy to find companies who introduce themselves with what they do, their proposition, but what a company does is only part of their story. Their beliefs and values, what they stand for why they do what they do are also important. When someone visits our websites for the first time, we have only a brief moment to help them understand us. To help us we can learn from the advertising industry, where the job of a tagline is to communicate a concept, deliver a message and sell a product, often using only a few words. When an advertising campaign is effective, its tagline stays with you, sometimes long after that campaign is over. For example, can you remember which company or brand these taglines help to sell? (Answers at the bottom of the article:) The Ultimate Driving Machine Just Do It Don’t Leave Home Without It A clever tagline isn’t just a play on words, although it can include one. A tagline does far more than help make your company memorable. Used well, it brings together notions of what makes your company and what you offer special. Then it expresses those notions in a few words or possibly a short sentence. I’m sure that everyone can find examples of company slogans written in the type of language that should stay within the walls of a marketing department. We … | 2014 | Andy Clarke | andyclarke | 2014-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/taglines-and-truisms/ | business |
| 45 | 45 | Is Agile Harder for Agencies? | I once sat in a pitch meeting and watched a new business exec tell a potential client that his agency followed an agile workflow process at all times. The potential client nodded wisely, and they both agreed that agile was indeed the way to go. The meeting progressed and they signed off on a contract for a massive project, to be delivered in a standard waterfall fashion, with all manner of phases and key deliverables. Of course both of them left the meeting perfectly happy, because neither of them knew nor cared what an agile workflow process might be. That was about five years ago. As 2015 heaves into view I think it’s fair to say that attitudes have changed. Perhaps the same number of people claim to do Agile™ now as in 2010, but I think more of them are telling the truth. As a developer in an agency that works primarily with larger organisations, this year I have started to see a shift from agencies pushing agile methodologies with their clients, to clients requesting and even demanding agile practices from their agencies. Only a couple of years ago this would have been unusual behaviour. So what’s the problem? We should be happy then, no? Those of us in agencies will get to spend more time delivering great products, and less time arguing over out-of-date functional specs or battling through an adversarial change management procedure because somebody had a good idea during development rather than planning. We get to be a little bit more like our brothers and sisters in vaunted teams like the Government Digital Service, which is using agile approaches to great effect on projects that have a real benefit to their users. Almost. Unfortunately, it seems to be the case that adhering to an agile framework such as scrum is more difficult within an agency/client structure than it is for an in-house development team. This is no surprise. The Agile Manifesto was written in 2001 by a group of software developers for their own use. Many of the underlying principles of a framework like Scrum assume the existence of… | 2014 | Charlie Perrins | charlieperrins | 2014-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/is-agile-harder-for-agencies/ | process |
| 46 | 46 | Responsive Enhancement | 24 ways has been going strong for ten years. That’s an aeon in internet timescales. Just think of all the changes we’ve seen in that time: the rise of Ajax, the explosion of mobile devices, the unrecognisably changed landscape of front-end tooling. Tools and technologies come and go, but one thing has remained constant for me over the past decade: progressive enhancement. Progressive enhancement isn’t a technology. It’s more like a way of thinking. Instead of thinking about the specifics of how a finished website might look, progressive enhancement encourages you to think about the fundamental meaning of what the website is providing. So instead of thinking of a website in terms of its ideal state in a modern browser on a nice widescreen device, progressive enhancement allows you to think about the core functionality in a more abstract way. Once you’ve figured out what the core functionality is – adding an item to a shopping cart, posting a message, sharing a photo – then you can enable that functionality in the simplest possible way. That usually means starting with good old-fashioned HTML. Links and forms are often all you need. Then, once you have the core functionality working in a basic way, you can start to enhance to make a progressively better experience for more modern browsers. The advantage of working this way isn’t just that your site will work in older browsers (albeit in a rudimentary way). It also ensures that if anything goes wrong in a modern browser, it won’t be catastrophic. There’s a common misconception that progressive enhancement means that you’ll spend your time dealing with older browsers, but in fact the opposite is true. Putting the basic functionality into place doesn’t take very long at all. And once you’ve done that, you’re free to spend all your time experimenting with the latest and greatest browser technologies, secure in the knowledge that even if they aren’t universally supported yet, that’s OK: you’ve already got your fallback in place. The key to thinking about web devel… | 2014 | Jeremy Keith | jeremykeith | 2014-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/responsive-enhancement/ | code |
| 47 | 47 | Developing Robust Deployment Procedures | Once you have developed your site, how do you make it live on your web hosting? For many years the answer was to log on to your server and upload the files via FTP. Over time most hosts and FTP clients began to support SFTP, ensuring your files were transmitted over a secure connection. The process of deploying a site however remained the same. There are issues with deploying a site in this way. You are essentially transferring files one by one to the server without any real management of that transfer. If the transfer fails for some reason, you may end up with a site that is only half updated. It can then be really difficult to work out what hasn’t been replaced or added, especially where you are updating an existing site. If you are updating some third-party software your update may include files that should be removed, but that may not be obvious to you and you risk leaving outdated files littering your file system. Updating using (S)FTP is a fragile process that leaves you open to problems caused by both connectivity and human error. Is there a better way to do this? You’ll be glad to know that there is. A modern professional deployment workflow should have you moving away from fragile manual file transfers to deployments linked to code committed into source control. The benefits of good practice You may never have experienced any major issues while uploading files over FTP, and good FTP clients can help. However, there are other benefits to moving to modern deployment practices. No surprises when you launch If you are deploying in the way I suggest in this article you should have no surprises when you launch because the code you committed from your local environment should be the same code you deploy – and to staging if you have a staging server. A missing vital file won’t cause things to start throwing errors on updating the live site. Being able to work collaboratively Source control and good deployment practice makes working with your clients and other developers easy. Deploying first to a staging… | 2014 | Rachel Andrew | rachelandrew | 2014-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/developing-robust-deployment-procedures/ | process |
| 48 | 48 | A Holiday Wish | A friend and I were talking the other day about why clients spend more on toilet cleaning than design, and how the industry has changed since the mid-1990s, when we got our starts. Early in his career, my friend wrote a fine CSS book, but for years he has called himself a UX designer. And our conversation got me thinking about how I reacted to that title back when I first started hearing it. “Just what this business needs,” I said to myself, “another phony expert.” Okay, so I was wrong about UX, but my touchiness was not altogether unfounded. In the beginning, our industry was divided between freelance jack-of-all-trade punks, who designed and built and coded and hosted and Photoshopped and even wrote the copy when the client couldn’t come up with any, and snot-slick dot-com mega-agencies that blew up like Alice and handed out titles like impoverished nobles in the years between the world wars. I was the former kind of designer, a guy who, having failed or just coasted along at a cluster of other careers, had suddenly, out of nowhere, blossomed into a web designer—an immensely curious designer slash coder slash writer with a near-insatiable lust to shave just one more byte from every image. We had modems back then, and I dreamed in sixteen colors. My source code was as pretty as my layouts (arguably prettier) and I hoovered up facts and opinions from newsgroups and bulletin boards as fast as any loudmouth geek could throw them. It was a beautiful life. But soon, too soon, the professional digital agencies arose, buying loft buildings downtown, jacking in at T1 speeds, charging a hundred times what I did, and communicating with their clients in person, in large artfully bedecked rooms, wearing hand-tailored Barney’s suits and bringing back the big city bullshit I thought I’d left behind when I quit advertising to become a web designer. Just like the big bad ad agencies of my early career, the new digital agencies stocked every meeting with a totem pole worth of ranks and titles. If the client brought five u… | 2014 | Jeffrey Zeldman | jeffreyzeldman | 2014-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/a-holiday-wish/ | ux |
| 49 | 49 | Universal React | One of the libraries to receive a huge amount of focus in 2015 has been ReactJS, a library created by Facebook for building user interfaces and web applications. More generally we’ve seen an even greater rise in the number of applications built primarily on the client side with most of the logic implemented in JavaScript. One of the main issues with building an app in this way is that you immediately forgo any customers who might browse with JavaScript turned off, and you can also miss out on any robots that might visit your site to crawl it (such as Google’s search bots). Additionally, we gain a performance improvement by being able to render from the server rather than having to wait for all the JavaScript to be loaded and executed. The good news is that this problem has been recognised and it is possible to build a fully featured client-side application that can be rendered on the server. The way in which these apps work is as follows: The user visits www.yoursite.com and the server executes your JavaScript to generate the HTML it needs to render the page. In the background, the client-side JavaScript is executed and takes over the duty of rendering the page. The next time a user clicks, rather than being sent to the server, the client-side app is in control. If the user doesn’t have JavaScript enabled, each click on a link goes to the server and they get the server-rendered content again. This means you can still provide a very quick and snappy experience for JavaScript users without having to abandon your non-JS users. We achieve this by writing JavaScript that can be executed on the server or on the client (you might have heard this referred to as isomorphic) and using a JavaScript framework that’s clever enough handle server- or client-side execution. Currently, ReactJS is leading the way here, although Ember and Angular are both working on solutions to this problem. It’s worth noting that this tutorial assumes some familiarity with React in general, its syntax and concepts. If you’d like a refresher, th… | 2015 | Jack Franklin | jackfranklin | 2015-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/universal-react/ | code |
| 50 | 50 | Make a Comic | For something slightly different over Christmas, why not step away from your computer and make a comic? Definitely not the author working on a comic in the studio, with the desk displaying some of the things you need to make a comic on paper. Why make a comic? First of all, it’s truly fun and it’s not that difficult. If you’re a designer, you can use skills you already have, so why not take some time to indulge your aesthetic whims and make something for yourself, rather than for a client or your company. And you can use a computer – or not. If you’re an interaction designer, it’s likely you’ve already made a storyboard or flow, or designed some characters for personas. This is a wee jump away from that, to the realm of storytelling and navigating human emotions through characters who may or may not be human. Similar medium and skills, different content. It’s not a client deliverable but something that stands by itself, and you’ve nobody’s criteria to meet except those that exist in your imagination! Thanks to your brain and the alchemy of comics, you can put nearly anything in a sequence and your brain will find a way to make sense of it. Scott McCloud wrote about the non sequitur in comics: “There is a kind of alchemy at work in the space between panels which can help us find meaning or resonance in even the most jarring of combinations.” Here’s an example of a non sequitur from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics – the images bear no relation to one another, but since they’re in a sequence our brains do their best to understand it: Once you know this it takes the pressure off somewhat. It’s a fun thing to keep in mind and experiment with in your comics! Materials needed A4 copy/printing paper HB pencil for light drawing Dip pen and waterproof Indian ink Bristol board (or any good quality card with a smooth, durable surface) Step 1: Get ideas You’d be surprised where you can take a small grain of an idea and develop it into an interesting comic. Think about a funny conversation you had, or any i… | 2015 | Rebecca Cottrell | rebeccacottrell | 2015-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/make-a-comic/ | design |
| 51 | 51 | Blow Your Own Trumpet | Even if your own trumpet’s tiny and fell out of a Christmas cracker, blowing it isn’t something that everyone’s good at. Some people find selling themselves and what they do difficult. But, you know what? Boo hoo hoo. If you want people to buy something, the reality is you’d better get good at selling, especially if that something is you. For web professionals, the best place to tell potential business customers or possible employers about what you do is on your own website. You can write what you want and how you want, but that doesn’t make knowing what to write any easier. As a matter of fact, writing for yourself often proves harder than writing for someone else. I spent this autumn thinking about what I wanted to say about Stuff & Nonsense on the website we relaunched recently. While I did that, I spoke to other designers about how they struggled to write about their businesses. If you struggle to write well, don’t worry. You’re not on your own. Here are five ways to hit the right notes when writing about yourself and your work. Be genuine about who you are I’ve known plenty of talented people who run a successful business pretty much single-handed. Somehow they still feel awkward presenting themselves as individuals. They wonder whether describing themselves as a company will give them extra credibility. They especially agonise over using “we” rather than “I” when describing what they do. These choices get harder when you’re a one-man band trading as a limited company or LLC business entity. If you mainly work alone, don’t describe yourself as anything other than “I”. You might think that saying “we” makes you appear larger and will give you a better chance of landing bigger and better work, but the moment a prospective client asks, “How many people are you?” you’ll have some uncomfortable explaining to do. This will distract them from talking about your work and derail your sales process. There’s no need to be anything other than genuine about how you describe yourself. You should be proud to say “I” becau… | 2015 | Andy Clarke | andyclarke | 2015-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/blow-your-own-trumpet/ | business |
| 52 | 52 | Git Rebasing: An Elfin Workshop Workflow | This year Santa’s helpers have been tasked with making a garland. It’s a pretty simple task: string beads onto yarn in a specific order. When the garland reaches a specific length, add it to the main workshop garland. Each elf has a specific sequence they’re supposed to chain, which is given to them via a work order. (This is starting to sound like one of those horrible calculus problems. I promise it isn’t. It’s worse; it’s about Git.) For the most part, the system works really well. The elves are able to quickly build up a shared chain because each elf specialises on their own bit of garland, and then links the garland together. Because of this they’re able to work independently, but towards the common goal of making a beautiful garland. At first the elves are really careful with each bead they put onto the garland. They check with one another before merging their work, and review each new link carefully. As time crunches on, the elves pour a little more cheer into the eggnog cooler, and the quality of work starts to degrade. Tensions rise as mistakes are made and unkind words are said. The elves quickly realise they’re going to need a system to change the beads out when mistakes are made in the chain. The first common mistake is not looking to see what the latest chain is that’s been added to the main garland. The garland is huge, and it sits on a roll in one of the corners of the workshop. It’s a big workshop, so it is incredibly impractical to walk all the way to the roll to check what the last link is on the chain. The elves, being magical, have set up a monitoring system that allows them to keep a local copy of the main garland at their workstation. It’s an imperfect system though, so the elves have to request a manual refresh to see the latest copy. They can request a new copy by running the command git pull --rebase=preserve (They found that if they ran git pull on its own, they ended up with weird loops of extra beads off the main garland, so they’ve opted to use this method.) This keeps the shared garl… | 2015 | Emma Jane Westby | emmajanewestby | 2015-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/git-rebasing/ | code |
| 53 | 53 | Get Expressive with Your Typography | In 1955 Beatrice Warde, an American communicator on typography, published a series of essays entitled The Crystal Goblet in which she wrote, “People who love ideas must have a love of words. They will take a vivid interest in the clothes that words wear.” And with that proposition Warde introduced the idea that just as we judge someone based on the clothes they are wearing, so we make judgements about text based on the typefaces in which it is set. Beatrice Warde. ©1970 Monotype Imaging Inc. Choosing the same typeface as everyone else, especially if you’re trying to make a statement, is like turning up to a party in the same dress; to a meeting in the same suit, shirt and tie; or to a craft ale dispensary in the same plaid shirt and turned-up skinny jeans. But there’s more to your choice of typeface than simply making an impression. In 2012 Jon Tan wrote on 24 ways about a scientific study called “The Aesthetics of Reading” which concluded that “good quality typography is responsible for greater engagement during reading and thus induces a good mood.” Furthermore, at this year’s Ampersand conference Sarah Hyndman, an expert in multisensory typography, discussed how typefaces can communicate with our subconscious. Sarah showed that different fonts could have an effect on how food tasted. A rounded font placed near a bowl of jellybeans would make them taste sweeter, and a jagged angular font would make them taste more sour. The quality of your typography can therefore affect the mood of your reader, and your font choice directly affect the senses. This means you can manipulate the way people feel. You can change their emotional state through type alone. Now that’s a real superpower! The effects of your body text design choices are measurable but subtle. If you really want to have an impact you need to think big. Literally. Display text and headings are your attention grabbers. They are your chance to interrupt, introduce and seduce. Display text and headings set the scene and draw people in. Text set large creates… | 2015 | Richard Rutter | richardrutter | 2015-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/get-expressive-with-your-typography/ | design |
| 54 | 54 | Putting My Patterns through Their Paces | Over the last few years, the conversation around responsive design has shifted subtly, focusing not on designing pages, but on patterns: understanding the small, reusable elements that comprise a larger design system. And given that many of those patterns are themselves responsive, learning to manage these small layout systems has become a big part of my work. The thing is, the more pattern-driven work I do, the more I realize my design process has changed in a number of subtle, important ways. I suppose you might even say that pattern-driven design has, in a few ways, redesigned me. Meet the Teaser Here’s a recent example. A few months ago, some friends and I redesigned The Toast. (It was a really, really fun project, and we learned a lot.) Each page of the site is, as you might guess, stitched together from a host of tiny, reusable patterns. Some of them, like the search form and footer, are fairly unique, and used once per page; others are used more liberally, and built for reuse. The most prevalent example of these more generic patterns is the teaser, which is classed as, uh, .teaser. (Look, I never said I was especially clever.) In its simplest form, a teaser contains a headline, which links to an article: Fairly straightforward, sure. But it’s just the foundation: from there, teasers can have a byline, a description, a thumbnail, and a comment count. In other words, we have a basic building block (.teaser) that contains a few discrete content types – some required, some not. In fact, very few of those pieces need to be present; to qualify as a teaser, all we really need is a link and a headline. But by adding more elements, we can build slight variations of our teaser, and make it much, much more versatile. Nearly every element visible on this page is built out of our generic “teaser” pattern. But the teaser variation I’d like to call out is the one that appears on The Toast’s homepage, on search results or on section fronts. In the main content area, each teaser in the list features larger i… | 2015 | Ethan Marcotte | ethanmarcotte | 2015-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/putting-my-patterns-through-their-paces/ | code |
| 55 | 55 | How Tabs Should Work | Tabs in browsers (not browser tabs) are one of the oldest custom UI elements in a browser that I can think of. They’ve been done to death. But, sadly, most of the time I come across them, the tabs have been badly, or rather partially, implemented. So this post is my definition of how a tabbing system should work, and one approach of implementing that. But… tabs are easy, right? I’ve been writing code for tabbing systems in JavaScript for coming up on a decade, and at one point I was pretty proud of how small I could make the JavaScript for the tabbing system: var tabs = $('.tab').click(function () { tabs.hide().filter(this.hash).show(); }).map(function () { return $(this.hash)[0]; }); $('.tab:first').click(); Simple, right? Nearly fits in a tweet (ignoring the whole jQuery library…). Still, it’s riddled with problems that make it a far from perfect solution. Requirements: what makes the perfect tab? All content is navigable and available without JavaScript (crawler-compatible and low JS-compatible). ARIA roles. The tabs are anchor links that: are clickable have block layout have their href pointing to the id of the panel element use the correct cursor (i.e. cursor: pointer). Since tabs are clickable, the user can open in a new tab/window and the page correctly loads with the correct tab open. Right-clicking (and Shift-clicking) doesn’t cause the tab to be selected. Native browser Back/Forward button correctly changes the state of the selected tab (think about it working exactly as if there were no JavaScript in place). The first three points are all to do with the semantics of the markup and how the markup has been styled. I think it’s easy to do a good job by thinking of tabs as links, and not as some part of an application. Links are navigable, and they should work the same way other links on the page work. The last three points are JavaScript problems. Let’s investigate that. The shitmus test Like a litmus test, here’s a couple of quick ways you can tell if a tabbing system is poorly implemented: Cha… | 2015 | Remy Sharp | remysharp | 2015-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/how-tabs-should-work/ | code |
| 56 | 56 | Helping VIPs Care About Performance | Making a site feel super fast is the easy part of performance work. Getting people around you to care about site speed is a much bigger challenge. How do we keep the site fast beyond the initial performance work? Keeping very important people like your upper management or clients invested in performance work is critical to keeping a site fast and empowering other designers and developers to contribute. The work to get others to care is so meaty that I dedicated a whole chapter to the topic in my book Designing for Performance. When I speak at conferences, the majority of questions during Q&A are on this topic. When I speak to developers and designers who care about performance, getting other people at one’s organization or agency to care becomes the most pressing question. My primary response to folks who raise this issue is the question: “What metric(s) do your VIPs care about?” This is often met with blank stares and raised eyebrows. But it’s also our biggest clue to what we need to do to help empower others to care about performance and work on it. Every organization and executive is different. This means that three major things vary: the primary metrics VIPs care about; the language they use about measuring success; and how change is enacted. By clueing in to these nuances within your organization, you can get a huge leg up on crafting a successful pitch about performance work. Let’s start with the metric that we should measure. Sure, (most) everybody cares about money - but is that really the metric that your VIPs are looking at each day to measure the success or efficacy of your site? More likely, dollars are the end game, but the metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) people focus on might be: rate of new accounts created/signups cost of acquiring or retaining a customer visitor return rate visitor bounce rate favoriting or another interaction rate These are just a few examples, but they illustrate how wide-ranging the options are that people care about. I find that developers and designers haven’t… | 2015 | Lara Hogan | larahogan | 2015-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/helping-vips-care-about-performance/ | business |
| 57 | 57 | Cooking Up Effective Technical Writing | Merry Christmas! May your preparations for this festive season of gluttony be shaping up beautifully. By the time you read this I hope you will have ordered your turkey, eaten twice your weight in Roses/Quality Street (let’s not get into that argument), and your Christmas cake has been baked and is now quietly absorbing regular doses of alcohol. Some of you may be reading this and scoffing Of course! I’ve also made three batches of mince pies, a seasonal chutney and enough gingerbread men to feed the whole street! while others may be laughing Bake? Oh no, I can’t cook to save my life. For beginners, recipes are the step-by-step instructions that hand-hold us through the cooking process, but even as a seasoned expert you’re likely to refer to a recipe at some point. Recipes tell us what we need, what to do with it, in what order, and what the outcome will be. It’s the documentation behind our ideas, and allows us to take the blueprint for a tasty morsel and to share it with others so they can recreate it. In fact, this is a little like the open source documentation and tutorials that we put out there, similarly aiming to guide other developers through our creations. The ‘just’ification of documentation Lately it feels like we’re starting to consider the importance of our words, and the impact they can have on others. Brad Frost warned us of the dangers of “Just” when it comes to offering up solutions to queries: “Just use this software/platform/toolkit/methodology…” “Just” makes me feel like an idiot. “Just” presumes I come from a specific background, studied certain courses in university, am fluent in certain technologies, and have read all the right books, articles, and resources. “Just” is a dangerous word. “Just” by Brad Frost I can really empathise with these sentiments. My relationship with code started out as many good web tales do, with good old HTML, CSS and JavaScript. University years involved some time with Perl, PHP, Java and C. In my first job I worked primarily with ColdFusion, a bit of ActionScri… | 2015 | Sally Jenkinson | sallyjenkinson | 2015-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/cooking-up-effective-technical-writing/ | content |
| 58 | 58 | Beyond the Style Guide | Much like baking a Christmas cake, designing for the web involves creating an experience in layers. Starting with a solid base that provides the core experience (the fruit cake), we can add further layers, each adding refinement (the marzipan) and delight (the icing). Don’t worry, this isn’t a misplaced cake recipe, but an evaluation of modular design and the role style guides can play in acknowledging these different concerns, be they presentational or programmatic. The auteur’s style guide Although trained as a graphic designer, it was only when I encountered the immediacy of the web that I felt truly empowered as a designer. Given a desire to control every aspect of the resulting experience, I slowly adopted the role of an auteur, exploring every part of the web stack: front-end to back-end, and everything in between. A few years ago, I dreaded using the command line. Today, the terminal is a permanent feature in my Dock. In straddling the realms of graphic design and programming, it’s the point at which they meet that I find most fascinating, with each dicipline valuing the creation of effective systems, be they for communication or code efficiency. Front-end style guides live at this intersection, demonstrating both the modularity of code and the application of visual design. Painting by numbers In our rush to build modular systems, design frameworks have grown in popularity. While enabling quick assembly, these come at the cost of originality and creative expression – perhaps one reason why we’re seeing the homogenisation of web design. In editorial design, layouts should accentuate content and present it in an engaging manner. Yet on the web we see a practice that seeks templated predictability. In ‘Design Machines’ Travis Gertz argued that (emphasis added): Design systems still feel like a novelty in screen-based design. We nerd out over grid systems and modular scales and obsess over style guides and pattern libraries. We’re pretty good at using them to build repeatable components and site-wide standard… | 2015 | Paul Lloyd | paulrobertlloyd | 2015-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/beyond-the-style-guide/ | design |
| 59 | 59 | Animating Your Brand | Let’s talk about how we add animation to our designs, in a way that’s consistent with other aspects of our brand, such as fonts, colours, layouts and everything else. Animating is fun. Adding animation to our designs can bring them to life and make our designs stand out. Animations can show how the pieces of our designs fit together. They provide context and help people use our products. All too often animation is something we tack on at the end. We put a transition on a modal window or sliding menu and we often don’t think about whether that animation is consistent with our overall design. Style guides to the rescue A style guide is a document that establishes and enforces style to improve communication. It can cover anything from typography and writing style to ethics and other, broader goals. It might be a static visual document showing every kind of UI, like in the Codecademy.com redesign shown below. UI toolkit from “Reimagining Codecademy.com” by @mslima It might be a technical reference with code examples. CodePen’s new design patterns and style guide is a great example of this, showing all the components used throughout the website as live code. CodePen’s design patterns and style guide A style guide gives a wide view of your project, it maintains consistency when adding new content, and we can use our style guide to present animations. Living documents Style guides don’t need to be static. We can use them to show movement. We can share CSS keyframe animations or transitions that can then go into production. We can also explain why animation is there in the first place. Just as a style guide might explain why we chose a certain font or layout, we can use style guides to explain the intent behind animation. This means that if someone else wants to create a new component, they will know why animation applies. If you haven’t yet set up a style guide, you might want to take a look at Pattern Lab. It’s a great tool for setting up your own style guide and includes loads of design patterns to get started. There … | 2015 | Donovan Hutchinson | donovanhutchinson | 2015-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/animating-your-brand/ | design |
| 60 | 60 | What’s Ahead for Your Data in 2016? | Who owns your data? Who decides what can you do with it? Where can you store it? What guarantee do you have over your data’s privacy? Where can you publish your work? Can you adapt software to accommodate your disability? Is your tiny agency subject to corporate regulation? Does another country have rights over your intellectual property? If you aren’t the kind of person who is interested in international politics, I hate to break it to you: in 2016 the legal foundations which underpin our work on the web are being revisited in not one but three major international political agreements, and every single one of those questions is up for grabs. These agreements – the draft EU Data Protection Regulation (EUDPR), the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the draft Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – stand poised to have a major impact on your data, your workflows, and your digital rights. While some proposed changes could protect the open web for the future, other provisions would set the internet back several decades. In this article we will review the issues you need to be aware of as a digital professional. While each of these agreements covers dozens of topics ranging from climate change to food safety, we will focus solely on the aspects which pertain to the work we do on the web. The Trans-Pacific Partnership The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a free trade agreement between the US, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Peru – a bloc comprising 40% of the world’s economy. The agreement is expected to be signed by all parties, and thereby to come into effect, in 2016. This agreement is ostensibly about the bloc and its members working together for their common interests. However, the latest draft text of the TPP, which was formulated entirely in secret, has only been made publicly available on a Medium blog published by the U.S. Trade Representative which features a patriotic banner at the top proclaiming “TPP: Made in America.” The m… | 2015 | Heather Burns | heatherburns | 2015-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/whats-ahead-for-your-data-in-2016/ | business |
| 61 | 61 | Animation in Responsive Design | Animation and responsive design can sometimes feel like they’re at odds with each other. Animation often needs space to do its thing, but RWD tells us that the amount of space we’ll have available is going to change a lot. Balancing that can lead to some tricky animation situations. Embracing the squishiness of responsive design doesn’t have to mean giving up on your creative animation ideas. There are three general techniques that can help you balance your web animation creativity with your responsive design needs. One or all of these approaches might help you sneak in something just a little extra into your next project. Focused art direction Smaller viewports mean a smaller stage for your motion to play out on, and this tends to amplify any motion in your animation. Suddenly 100 pixels is really far and multiple moving parts can start looking like they’re battling for space. An effect that looked great on big viewports can become muddled and confusing when it’s reframed in a smaller space. Making animated movements smaller will do the trick for simple motion like a basic move across the screen. But for more complex animation on smaller viewports, you’ll need to simplify and reduce the number of moving parts. The key to this is determining what the vital parts of the animation are, to zone in on the parts that are most important to its message. Then remove the less necessary bits to distill the motion’s message down to the essentials. For example, Rally Interactive’s navigation folds down into place with two triangle shapes unfolding each corner on larger viewports. If this exact motion was just scaled down for narrower spaces the two corners would overlap as they unfolded. It would look unnatural and wouldn’t make much sense. Open video The main purpose of this animation is to show an unfolding action. To simplify the animation, Rally unfolds only one side for narrower viewports, with a slightly different animation. The action is still easily interpreted as unfolding and it’s done in a way that is a better… | 2015 | Val Head | valhead | 2015-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/animation-in-responsive-design/ | design |
| 62 | 62 | Being Customer Supportive | Every day in customer support is an inbox, a Twitter feed, or a software forum full of new questions. Each is brimming with your customers looking for advice, reassurance, or fixes for their software problems. Each one is an opportunity to take a break from wrestling with your own troublesome tasks and assist someone else in solving theirs. Sometimes the questions are straightforward and can be answered in a few minutes with a short greeting, a link to a help page, or a prewritten bit of text you use regularly: how to print a receipt, reset a password, or even, sadly, close your account. More often, a support email requires you to spend some time unpacking the question, asking for more information, and writing a detailed personal response, tailored to help that particular user on this particular day. Here I offer a few of my own guidelines on how to make today’s email the best support experience for both me and my customer. And even if you don’t consider what you do to be customer support, you might still find the suggestions useful for the next time you need to communicate with a client, to solve a software problem with teammates, or even reach out and ask for help yourself. (All the examples appearing in this article are fictional. Any resemblance to quotes from real, software-using persons is entirely coincidental. Except for the bit about Star Wars. That happened.) Who’s TAHT girl I’ll be honest: I briefly tried making these recommendations into a clever mnemonic like FAST (facial drooping, arm weakness, speech difficulties, time) or PAD (pressure, antiseptic, dressing). But instead, you get TAHT: tone, ask, help, thank. Ah, well. As I work through each message in my support queue, I listen to the tone of the email ask clarifying questions bring in extra help as needed and thank the customer when the problem is solved. Let’s open an email and get started! Leave your message at the sound of the tone With our enthusiasm for emoji, it can be very hard to infer someone’s tone from plain text. How much time have… | 2015 | Elizabeth Galle | elizabethgalle | 2015-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/being-customer-supportive/ | process |
| 63 | 63 | Be Fluid with Your Design Skills: Build Your Own Sites | Just five years ago in 2010, when we were all busy trying to surprise and delight, learning CSS3 and trying to get whole websites onto one page, we had a poster on our studio wall. It was entitled ‘Designers Vs Developers’, an infographic that showed us the differences between the men(!) who created websites. Designers wore skinny jeans and used Macs and developers wore cargo pants and brought their own keyboards to work. We began to learn that designers and developers were not only doing completely different jobs but were completely different people in every way. This opinion was backed up by hundreds of memes, millions of tweets and pages of articles which used words like void and battle and versus. Thankfully, things move quickly in this industry; the wide world of web design has moved on in the last five years. There are new devices, technologies, tools – and even a few women. Designers have been helped along by great apps, software, open source projects, conferences, and a community of people who, to my unending pride, love to share their knowledge and their work. So the world has moved on, and if Miley Cyrus, Ruby Rose and Eliot Sumner are identifying as gender fluid (an identity which refers to a gender which varies over time or is a combination of identities), then I would like to come out as discipline fluid! OK, I will probably never identify as a developer, but I will identify as fluid! How can we be anything else in an industry that moves so quickly? That’s how we should think of our skills, our interests and even our job titles. After all, Steve Jobs told us that “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Sorry skinny-jean-wearing designers – this means we’re all designing something together. And it’s not just about knowing the right words to use: you have to know how it feels. How it feels when you make something work, when you fix that bug, when you make it work on IE. Like anything in life, things run smoothly when you make the effort to share experiences, em… | 2015 | Ros Horner | roshorner | 2015-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/be-fluid-with-your-design-skills-build-your-own-sites/ | code |
| 64 | 64 | Being Responsive to the Small Things | It’s that time of the year again to trim the tree with decorations. Or maybe a DOM tree? Any web page is made of HTML elements that lay themselves out in a tree structure. We start at the top and then have multiple branches with branches that branch out from there. To decorate our tree, we use CSS to specify which branches should receive the tinsel we wish to adorn upon it. It’s all so lovely. In years past, this was rather straightforward. But these days, our trees need to be versatile. They need to be responsive! Responsive web design is pretty wonderful, isn’t it? Based on our viewport, we can decide how elements on the page should change their appearance to accommodate various constraints using media queries. Clearleft have a delightfully clean and responsive site Alas, it’s not all sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows. With complex layouts, we may have design chunks — let’s call them components — that appear in different contexts. Each context may end up providing its own constraints on the design, both in its default state and in its possibly various responsive states. Media queries, however, limit us to the context of the entire viewport, not individual containers on the page. For every container our component lives in, we need to specify how to rearrange things in that context. The more complex the system, the more contexts we need to write code for. @media (min-width: 800px) { .features > .component { } .sidebar > .component {} .grid > .component {} } Each new component and each new breakpoint just makes the entire system that much more difficult to maintain. @media (min-width: 600px) { .features > .component { } .grid > .component {} } @media (min-width: 800px) { .features > .component { } .sidebar > .component {} .grid > .component {} } @media (min-width: 1024px) { .features > .component { } } Enter container queries Container queries, also known as element queries, allow you to specify conditional CSS based on the width (or maybe height) of the container that an element lives in.… | 2015 | Jonathan Snook | jonathansnook | 2015-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/being-responsive-to-the-small-things/ | code |
| 65 | 65 | The Accessibility Mindset | Accessibility is often characterized as additional work, hard to learn and only affecting a small number of people. Those myths have no logical foundation and often stem from outdated information or misconceptions. Indeed, it is an additional skill set to acquire, quite like learning new JavaScript frameworks, CSS layout techniques or new HTML elements. But it isn’t particularly harder to learn than those other skills. A World Health Organization (WHO) report on disabilities states that, [i]ncluding children, over a billion people (or about 15% of the world’s population) were estimated to be living with disability. Being disabled is not as unusual as one might think. Due to chronic health conditions and older people having a higher risk of disability, we are also currently paving the cowpath to an internet that we can still use in the future. Accessibility has a very close relationship with usability, and advancements in accessibility often yield improvements in the usability of a website. Websites are also more adaptable to users’ needs when they are built in an accessible fashion. Beyond the bare minimum In the time of table layouts, web developers could create code that passed validation rules but didn’t adhere to the underlying semantic HTML model. We later developed best practices, like using lists for navigation, and with HTML5 we started to wrap those lists in nav elements. Working with accessibility standards is similar. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 can inform your decision to make websites accessible and can be used to test that you met the success criteria. What it can’t do is measure how well you met them. W3C developed a long list of techniques that can be used to make your website accessible, but you might find yourself in a situation where you need to adapt those techniques to be the most usable solution for your particular problem. The checkbox below is implemented in an accessible way: The input element has an id and the label associated with the checkbox refers to the in… | 2015 | Eric Eggert | ericeggert | 2015-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/the-accessibility-mindset/ | code |
| 66 | 66 | Solve the Hard Problems | So, here we find ourselves on the cusp of 2016. We’ve had a good year – the web is still alive, no one has switched it off yet. Clients still have websites, teenagers still have phone apps, and there continue to be plenty of online brands to meaningfully engage with each day. Good job team, high fives all round. As it’s the time to make resolutions, I wanted to share three small ideas to take into the new year. Get good at what you do “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” the old joke goes. “Practise, practise, practise.” We work in an industry where there is an awful lot to learn. There’s a lot to learn to get started and then once you do, there’s a lot more to learn to keep your skills current. Just when you think you’ve mastered something, it changes. This is true of many industries, of course, but the sheer pace of change for us makes learning not an annual activity, but daily. Learning takes time, and while I’m not convinced that every skill takes the fabled ten thousand hours to master, there is certainly no escaping that to remain current we must reinvest time in keeping our skills up to date. Picking where to spend your time One of the hardest aspects of this thing of ours is just choosing what to learn. If you, like me, invested any time in learning the Less CSS preprocessor over the last few years, you’ll probably now be spending your time relearning Sass instead. If you spent time learning Grunt, chances are you’ll now be thinking about whether you should switch to Gulp. It’s not just that there are new types of tools, there are new tools and frameworks to do the things you’re already doing, but, well, differently. Deciding what to learn is hard and the costs of backing the wrong horse can seriously mount up; so much so that by the time you’ve learned and then relearned the tools everyone says you need for your job, there’s rarely enough time to spend really getting to know how best to use them. Practise, practise, practise Do you know how you don’t get to Carnegie Hall? By learning a new instrument eac… | 2015 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2015-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/solve-the-hard-problems/ | process |
| 67 | 67 | What I Learned about Product Design This Year | 2015 was a humbling year for me. In September of 2014, I joined a tiny but established startup called SproutVideo as their third employee and first designer. The role interests me because it affords the opportunity to see how design can grow a solid product with a loyal user-base into something even better. The work I do now could also have a real impact on the brand and user experience of our product for years to come, which is a thrilling prospect in an industry where much of what I do feels small and temporary. I got in on the ground floor of something special: a small, dedicated, useful company that cares deeply about making video hosting effortless and rewarding for our users. I had (and still have) grand ideas for what thoughtful design can do for a product, and the smaller-scale product design work I’ve done or helped manage over the past few years gave me enough eager confidence to dive in head first. Readers who have experience redesigning complex existing products probably have a knowing smirk on their face right now. As I said, it’s been humbling. A year of focused product design, especially on the scale we are trying to achieve with our small team at SproutVideo, has taught me more than any projects in recent memory. I’d like to share a few of those lessons. Product design is very different from marketing design The majority of my recent work leading up to SproutVideo has been in marketing design. These projects are so fun because their aim is to communicate the value of the product in a compelling and memorable way. In order to achieve this goal, I spent a lot of time thinking about content strategy, responsive design, and how to create striking visuals that tell a story. These are all pursuits I love. Product design is a different beast. When designing a homepage, I can employ powerful imagery, wild gradients, and somewhat-quirky fonts. When I began redesigning the SproutVideo product, I wanted to draw on all the beautiful assets I’ve created for our marketing materials, but big gradients, textures… | 2015 | Meagan Fisher | meaganfisher | 2015-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/what-i-learned-about-product-design-this-year/ | design |
| 68 | 68 | Grid, Flexbox, Box Alignment: Our New System for Layout | Three years ago for 24 ways 2012, I wrote an article about a new CSS layout method I was excited about. A specification had emerged, developed by people from the Internet Explorer team, bringing us a proper grid system for the web. In 2015, that Internet Explorer implementation is still the only public implementation of CSS grid layout. However, in 2016 we should be seeing it in a new improved form ready for our use in browsers. Grid layout has developed hidden behind a flag in Blink, and in nightly builds of WebKit and, latterly, Firefox. By being developed in this way, breaking changes could be safely made to the specification as no one was relying on the experimental implementations in production work. Another new layout method has emerged over the past few years in a more public and perhaps more painful way. Shipped prefixed in browsers, The flexible box layout module (flexbox) was far too tempting for developers not to use on production sites. Therefore, as changes were made to the specification, we found ourselves with three different flexboxes, and browser implementations that did not match one another in completeness or in the version of specified features they supported. Owing to the different ways these modules have come into being, when I present on grid layout it is often the very first time someone has heard of the specification. A question I keep being asked is whether CSS grid layout and flexbox are competing layout systems, as though it might be possible to back the loser in a CSS layout competition. The reality, however, is that these two methods will sit together as one system for doing layout on the web, each method playing to certain strengths and serving particular layout tasks. If there is to be a loser in the battle of the layouts, my hope is that it will be the layout frameworks that tie our design to our markup. They have been a necessary placeholder while we waited for a true web layout system, but I believe that in a few years time we’ll be easily able to date a website to circa 2015 … | 2015 | Rachel Andrew | rachelandrew | 2015-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/grid-flexbox-box-alignment-our-new-system-for-layout/ | code |
| 69 | 69 | How to Do a UX Review | A UX review is where an expert goes through a website looking for usability and experience problems and makes recommendations on how to fix them. I’ve completed a number of UX reviews over my twelve years working as a user experience consultant and I thought I’d share my approach. I’ll be talking about reviewing websites here; you can adapt the approach for web apps, or mobile or desktop apps. Why conduct a review Typically, a client asks for a review to be undertaken by a trusted and, ideally, detached third party who either works for an agency or is a freelancer. Often they may ask a new member of the UX team to complete one, or even set it as a task for a job interview. This indicates the client is looking for an objective view, seen from the outside as a user would see the website. I always suggest conducting some user research rather than a review. Users know their goals and watching them make (what you might think of as) mistakes on the website is invaluable. Conducting research with six users can give you six hours’ worth of review material from six viewpoints. In short, user research can identify more problems and show how common those problems might be. There are three reasons, though, why a review might better suit client needs than user research: Quick results: user research and analysis takes at least three weeks. Limited budget: the £6–10,000 cost to run user research is about twice the cost of a UX review. Users are hard to reach: in the business-to-business world, reaching users is difficult, especially if your users hold senior positions in their organisations. Working with consumers is much easier as there are often more of them. There is some debate about the benefits of user research over UX review. In my experience you learn far more from research, but opinions differ. Be objective The number one mistake many UX reviewers make is reporting back the issues they identify as their opinion. This can cause credibility problems because you have to keep justifying why your opinion is corr… | 2015 | Joe Leech | joeleech | 2015-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/how-to-do-a-ux-review/ | ux |
| 70 | 70 | Bringing Your Code to the Streets | — or How to Be a Street VJ Our amazing world of web code is escaping out of the browser at an alarming rate and appearing in every aspect of the environment around us. Over the past few years we’ve already seen JavaScript used server-side, hardware coded with JavaScript, a rise of native style and desktop apps created with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and even virtual reality (VR) is getting its fair share of front-end goodness. You can go ahead and play with JavaScript-powered hardware such as the Tessel or the Espruino to name a couple. Just check out the Tessel project page to see JavaScript in the world of coffee roasting or sleep tracking your pet. With the rise of the internet of things, JavaScript can be seen collecting information on flooding among other things. And if that’s not enough ‘outside the browser’ implementations, Node.js servers can even be found in aircraft! I previously mentioned VR and with three.js’s extra StereoEffect.js module it’s relatively simple to get browser 3D goodness to be Google Cardboard-ready, and thus set the stage for all things JavaScript and VR. It’s been pretty popular in the art world too, with interactive works such as Seb Lee-Delisle’s Lunar Trails installation, featuring the old arcade game Lunar Lander, which you can now play in your browser while others watch (it is the web after all). The Science Museum in London held Chrome Web Lab, an interactive exhibition featuring five experiments, showcasing the magic of the web. And it’s not even the connectivity of the web that’s being showcased; we can even take things offline and use web code for amazing things, such as fighting Ebola. One thing is for sure, JavaScript is awesome. Hell, if you believe those telly programs (as we all do), JavaScript can even take down the stock market, purely through the witchcraft of canvas! Go JavaScript! Now it’s our turn So I wanted to create a little project influenced by this theme, and as it’s Christmas, take it to the streets for a little bit of party fun! Something that could take c… | 2015 | Ruth John | ruthjohn | 2015-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/bringing-your-code-to-the-streets/ | code |
| 71 | 71 | Upping Your Web Security Game | When I started working in web security fifteen years ago, web development looked very different. The few non-static web applications were built using a waterfall process and shipped quarterly at best, making it possible to add security audits before every release; applications were deployed exclusively on in-house servers, allowing Info Sec to inspect their configuration and setup; and the few third-party components used came from a small set of well-known and trusted providers. And yet, even with these favourable conditions, security teams were quickly overwhelmed and called for developers to build security in. If the web security game was hard to win before, it’s doomed to fail now. In today’s web development, every other page is an application, accepting inputs and private data from users; software is built continuously, designed to eliminate manual gates, including security gates; infrastructure is code, with servers spawned with little effort and even less security scrutiny; and most of the code in a typical application is third-party code, pulled in through open source repositories with rarely a glance at who provided them. Security teams, when they exist at all, cannot solve this problem. They are vastly outnumbered by developers, and cannot keep up with the application’s pace of change. For us to have a shot at making the web secure, we must bring security into the core. We need to give it no less attention than that we give browser compatibility, mobile design or web page load times. More broadly, we should see security as an aspect of quality, expecting both ourselves and our peers to address it, and taking pride when we do it well. Where To Start? Embracing security isn’t something you do overnight. A good place to start is by reviewing things you’re already doing – and trying to make them more secure. Here are three concrete steps you can take to get going. HTTPS Threats begin when your system interacts with the outside world, which often means HTTP. As is, HTTP is painfully insecure, allowing attacke… | 2015 | Guy Podjarny | guypodjarny | 2015-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/upping-your-web-security-game/ | code |
| 72 | 72 | Designing with Contrast | When an appetite for aesthetics over usability becomes the bellwether of user interface design, it’s time to reconsider who we’re designing for. Over the last few years, we have questioned the signifiers that gave obvious meaning to the function of interface elements. Strong textures, deep shadows, gradients — imitations of physical objects — were discarded. And many, rightfully so. Our audiences are now more comfortable with an experience that feels native to the technology, so we should respond in kind. Yet not all of the changes have benefitted users. Our efforts to simplify brought with them a trend of ultra-minimalism where aesthetics have taken priority over legibility, accessibility and discoverability. The trend shows no sign of losing popularity — and it is harming our experience of digital content. A thin veneer We are in a race to create the most subdued, understated interface. Visual contrast is out. In its place: the thinnest weights of a typeface and white text on bright color backgrounds. Headlines, text, borders, backgrounds, icons, form controls and inputs: all grey. While we can look back over the last decade and see minimalist trends emerging on the web, I think we can place a fair share of the responsibility for the recent shift in priorities on Apple. The release of iOS 7 ushered in a radical change to its user interface. It paired mobile interaction design to the simplicity and eloquence of Apple’s marketing and product design. It was a catalyst. We took what we saw, copied and consumed the aesthetics like pick-and-mix. New technology compounds this trend. Computer monitors and mobile devices are available with screens of unprecedented resolutions. Ultra-light type and subtle hues, difficult to view on older screens, are more legible on these devices. It would be disingenuous to say that designers have always worked on machines representative of their audience’s circumstances, but the gap has never been as large as it is now. We are running the risk of designing VIP lounges where the cost o… | 2015 | Mark Mitchell | markmitchell | 2015-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/designing-with-contrast/ | design |
| 289 | 289 | Front-End Developers Are Information Architects Too | The theme of this year’s World IA Day was “Information Everywhere, Architects Everywhere”. This article isn’t about what you may consider an information architect to be: someone in the user-experience field, who maybe studied library science, and who talks about taxonomies. This is about a realisation I had a couple of years ago when I started to run an increasing amount of usability-testing sessions with people who have disabilities: that the structure, labelling, and connections that can be made in front-end code is information architecture. People’s ability to be successful online is unequivocally connected to the quality of the code that is written. Places made of information In information architecture we talk about creating places made of information. These places are made of ones and zeros, but we talk about them as physical structures. We talk about going onto a social media platform, posting in blogs, getting locked out of an environment, and building applications. In 2002, Andrew Hinton stated: People live and work in these structures, just as they live and work in their homes, offices, factories and malls. These places are not virtual: they are as real as our own minds. 25 Theses We’re creating structures which people rely on for significant parts of their lives, so it’s critical that we carry out our work responsibly. This means we must use our construction materials correctly. Luckily, our most important material, HTML, has a well-documented specification which tells us how to build robust and accessible places. What is most important, I believe, is to understand the semantics of HTML. Semantics The word “semantic” has its origin in Greek words meaning “significant”, “signify”, and “sign”. In the physical world, a structure can have semantic qualities that tell us something about it. For example, the stunning Westminster Abbey inspires awe and signifies much about the intent and purpose of the structure. The building’s size; the quality of the stone work; the massive, detailed stained glass: these … | 2016 | Francis Storr | francisstorr | 2016-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/front-end-developers-are-information-architects-too/ | code |
| 290 | 290 | Creating a Weekly Research Cadence | Working on a product team, it’s easy to get hyper-focused on building features and lose sight of your users and their daily challenges. User research can be time-consuming to set up, so it often becomes ad-hoc and irregular, only performed in response to a particular question or concern. But without frequent touch points and opportunities for discovery, your product will stagnate and become less and less relevant. Setting up an efficient cadence of weekly research conversations will re-focus your team on user problems and provide a steady stream of insights for product development. As my team transitioned into a Lean process earlier this year, we needed a way to get more feedback from users in a short amount of time. Our users are internet marketers—always busy and often difficult to reach. Scheduling research took days of emailing back and forth to find mutually agreeable times, and juggling one-off conversations made it difficult to connect with more than one or two people per week. The slow pace of research was allowing additional risk to creep into our product development. I wanted to find a way for our team to test ideas and validate assumptions sooner and more often—but without increasing the administrative burden of scheduling. The solution: creating a regular cadence of research and testing that required a minimum of effort to coordinate. Setting up a weekly user research cadence accelerated our learning and built momentum behind strategic experiments. By dedicating time every week to talk to a few users, we made ongoing research a painless part of every weekly sprint. But increasing the frequency of our research had other benefits as well. With only five working days between sessions, a weekly cadence forced us to keep our work small and iterative. Committing to testing something every week meant showing work earlier and more often than we might have preferred—pushing us out of your comfort zone into a process of more rapid experimentation. Best of all, frequent conversations with users helped us become… | 2016 | Wren Lanier | wrenlanier | 2016-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/creating-a-weekly-research-cadence/ | ux |
| 291 | 291 | Information Literacy Is a Design Problem | Information literacy, wrote Dr. Carol Kulthau in her 1987 paper “Information Skills for an Information Society,” is “the ability to read and to use information essential for everyday life”—that is, to effectively navigate a world built on “complex masses of information generated by computers and mass media.” Nearly thirty years later, those “complex masses of information” have only grown wilder, thornier, and more constant. We call the internet a firehose, yet we’re loathe to turn it off (or even down). The amount of information we consume daily is staggering—and yet our ability to fully understand it all remains frustratingly insufficient. This should hit a very particular chord for those of us working on the web. We may be developers, designers, or strategists—we may not always be responsible for the words themselves—but we all know that communication is much more than just words. From fonts to form fields, every design decision that we make changes the way information is perceived—for better or for worse. What’s more, the design decisions that we make feed into larger patterns. They don’t just affect the perception of a single piece of information on a single site; they start to shape reader expectations of information anywhere. Users develop cumulative mental models of how websites should be: where to find a search bar, where to look at contact information, how to filter a product list. And yet: our models fail us. Fundamentally, we’re not good at parsing information, and that’s troubling. Our experience of an “information society” may have evolved, but the skills Dr. Kuhlthau spoke of are even more critical now: our lives depend on information literacy. Patterns from words Let’s start at the beginning: with the words. Our choice of words can drastically alter a message, from its emotional resonance to its context to its literal meaning. Sometimes we can use word choice for good, to reinvigorate old, forgotten, or unfairly besmirched ideas. One time at a wedding bbq we labeled the coleslaw BRASSICA MIXTA so… | 2016 | Lisa Maria Martin | lisamariamartin | 2016-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/information-literacy-is-a-design-problem/ | content |
| 292 | 292 | Watch Your Language! | I’m bilingual. My first language is French. I learned English in my early 20s. Learning a new language later in life meant that I was able to observe my thought processes changing over time. It made me realize that some concepts can’t be expressed in some languages, while other languages express these concepts with ease. It also helped me understand the way we label languages. English: business. French: romance. Here’s an example of how words, or the absence thereof, can affect the way we think: In French we love everything. There’s no straightforward way to say we like something, so we just end up loving everything. I love my sisters, I love broccoli, I love programming, I love my partner, I love doing laundry (this is a lie), I love my mom (this is not a lie). I love, I love, I love. It’s no wonder French is considered romantic. When I first learned English I used the word love rather than like because I hadn’t grasped the difference. Needless to say, I’ve scared away plenty of first dates! Learning another language made me realize the limitations of my native language and revealed concepts I didn’t know existed. Without the nuances a given language provides, we fail to express what we really think. The absence of words in our vocabulary gets in the way of effectively communicating and considering ideas. When I lived in Montréal, most people in my circle spoke both French and English. I could switch between them when I could more easily express an idea in one language or the other. I liked (or should I say loved?) those conversations. They were meaningful. They were efficient. I’m quadrilingual. I code in Ruby, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Python. In the past couple of years I have been lucky enough to write code in these languages at a massive scale. In learning Ruby, much like learning English, I discovered the strengths and limitations of not only the languages I knew but the language I was learning. It taught me to choose the right tool for the job. When I started working at Shopify, making a change to a view inv… | 2016 | Annie-Claude Côté | annieclaudecote | 2016-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/watch-your-language/ | code |
| 293 | 293 | A Favor for Your Future Self | We tend to think about the future when we build things. What might we want to be able to add later? How can we refactor this down the road? Will this be easy to maintain in six months, a year, two years? As best we can, we try to think about the what-ifs, and build our websites, systems, and applications with this lens. We comment our code to explain what we knew at the time and how that impacted how we built something. We add to-dos to the things we want to change. These are all great things! Whether or not we come back to those to-dos, refactor that one thing, or add new features, we put in a bit of effort up front just in case to give us a bit of safety later. I want to talk about a situation that Past Alicia and Team couldn’t even foresee or plan for. Recently, the startup I was a part of had to remove large sections of our website. Not just content, but entire pages and functionality. It wasn’t a very pleasant experience, not only for the reason why we had to remove so much of what we had built, but also because it’s the ultimate “I really hope this doesn’t break something else” situation. It was a stressful and tedious effort of triple checking that the things we were removing weren’t dependencies elsewhere. To be honest, we wouldn’t have been able to do this with any amount of success or confidence without our test suite. Writing tests for code is one of those things that developers really, really don’t want to do. It’s one of the easiest things to cut in the development process, and there’s often a struggle to have developers start writing tests in the first place. One of the best lessons the web has taught us is that we can’t, in good faith, trust the happy path. We must make sure ourselves, and our users, aren’t in a tough spot later on because we only thought of the best case scenarios. JavaScript Regardless of your opinion on whether or not everything needs to be built primarily with JavaScript, if you’re choosing to build a JavaScript heavy app, you absolutely should be writing some combination of u… | 2016 | Alicia Sedlock | aliciasedlock | 2016-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/a-favor-for-your-future-self/ | code |
| 294 | 294 | New Tricks for an Old Dog | Much of my year has been spent helping new team members find their way around the expansive and complex codebase that is the TweetDeck front-end, trying to build a happy and productive group of people around a substantial codebase with many layers of legacy. I’ve loved doing this. Everything from writing new documentation, drawing diagrams, and holding technical architecture sessions teaches you something you didn’t know or exposes an area of uncertainty that you can go work on. In this article, I hope to share some experiences and techniques that will prove useful in your own situation and that you can impress your friends in some new and exciting ways! How do you do, fellow kids? To start with I’d like to introduce you to our JavaScript framework, Flight. Right now it’s used by twitter.com and TweetDeck although, as a company, Twitter is largely moving to React. Over time, as we used Flight for more complex interfaces, we found it wasn’t scaling with us. Composing components into trees was fiddly and often only applied for a specific parent-child pairing. It seems like an obvious feature with hindsight, but it didn’t come built-in to Flight, and it made reusing components a real challenge. There was no standard way to manage the state of a component; they all did it slightly differently, and the technique often varied by who was writing the code. This cost us in maintainability as you just couldn’t predict how a component would be built until you opened it. Making matters worse, Flight relied on events to move data around the application. Unfortunately, events aren’t good for giving structure to complex logic. They jump around in a way that’s hard to understand and debug, and force you to search your code for a specific string — the event name‚ to figure out what’s going on. To find fixes for these problems, we looked around at other frameworks. We like React for it’s simple, predictable state management and reactive re-render flow, and Elm for bringing strict functional programming to everyone. But when you ha… | 2016 | Tom Ashworth | tomashworth | 2016-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/new-tricks-for-an-old-dog/ | code |
| 295 | 295 | Internet of Stranger Things | This year I’ve been running a workshop about using JavaScript and Node.js to work with all different kinds of electronics on the Raspberry Pi. So especially for 24 ways I’m going to show you how I made a very special Raspberry Pi based internet connected project! And nothing says Christmas quite like a set of fairy lights connected to another dimension1. What you’ll see You can rig up the fairy lights in your home, with the scrawly letters written under each one. The people from the other side (i.e. the internet) will be able to write messages to you from their browser in real time. In fact why not try it now; check this web page. When you click the lights in your browser, my lights (and yours) will turn on and off in real life! (There may be a queue if there are lots of people accessing it, hit the “Send a message” button and wait your turn.) It’s all done with JavaScript, using Node.js running on both the Raspberry Pi and on the server. I’m using WebSockets to communicate in real time between the browser, server and Raspberry Pi. What you’ll need Raspberry Pi any of the following models: Zero (will need straight male header pins soldered2 and Micro USB OTG adaptor), A+, B+, 2, or 3 Micro SD card at least 4Gb Class 10 speed3 Micro USB power supply at least 2A USB Wifi dongle (unless you have a Pi 3 - that has wifi built in). Addressable fairy lights Logic level shifter (with pins soldered unless you want to do it!) Breadboard Jumper wires (3x male to male and 4x female to male) Optional but recommended Base board to hold the Pi and Breadboard (often comes with a breadboard!) Find links for where to buy all of these items that goes along with this tutorial. The total price should be around $1004. Setting up the Raspberry Pi You’ll need to install the SD card for the Raspberry Pi. You’ll find a link to download a disk image on the support document, ready-made with the Raspbian version of Linux, along with Node.js and all the files you need. Download it and write it to the SD card using the fantastic free … | 2016 | Seb Lee-Delisle | sebleedelisle | 2016-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/internet-of-stranger-things/ | code |
| 296 | 296 | Animation in Design Systems | Our modern front-end workflow has matured over time to include design systems and component libraries that help us stay organized, improve workflows, and simplify maintenance. These systems, when executed well, ensure proper documentation of the code available and enable our systems to scale with reduced communication conflicts. But while most of these systems take a critical stance on fonts, colors, and general building blocks, their treatment of animation remains disorganized and ad-hoc. Let’s leverage existing structures and workflows to reduce friction when it comes to animation and create cohesive and performant user experiences. Understand the importance of animation Part of the reason we treat animation like a second-class citizen is that we don’t really consider its power. When users are scanning a website (or any environment or photo), they are attempting to build a spatial map of their surroundings. During this process, nothing quite commands attention like something in motion. We are biologically trained to notice motion: evolutionarily speaking, our survival depends on it. For this reason, animation when done well can guide your users. It can aid and reinforce these maps, and give us a sense that we understand the UX more deeply. We retrieve information and put it back where it came from instead of something popping in and out of place. “Where did that menu go? Oh it’s in there.” For a deeper dive into how animation can connect disparate states, I wrote about the Importance of Context-Shifting in UX Patterns for CSS-Tricks. An animation flow on mobile. Animation also aids in perceived performance. Viget conducted a study where they measured user engagement with a standard loading GIF versus a custom animation. Customers were willing to wait almost twice as long for the custom loader, even though it wasn’t anything very fancy or crazy. Just by showing their users that they cared about them, they stuck around, and the bounce rates dropped. 14 second generic loading screen.22 second custom loadin… | 2016 | Sarah Drasner | sarahdrasner | 2016-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/animation-in-design-systems/ | code |
| 297 | 297 | Public Speaking with a Buddy | My book Demystifying Public Speaking focuses on the variety of fears we each have about giving a talk. From presenting to a client, to leading a team standup, to standing on a conference stage, there are lots of things we can do to prepare ourselves for the spotlight and reduce those fears. Though it didn’t make it into the final draft, I wanted to highlight how helpful it can be to share that public speaking spotlight with another person, or a few more people. If you have fears about not knowing the answer to a question, fumbling your words, or making a mistake in the spotlight, then buddying up may be for you! To some, adding more people to a presentation sounds like a recipe for on-stage disaster. To others, having a friendly face nearby—a partner who can step in if you fumble—is incredibly reassuring. As design director Yesenia Perez-Cruz writes, “While public speaking is a deeply personal activity, you don’t have to go it alone. Nothing has helped my speaking career more than turning it into a group effort.” Co-presenting can level up a talk in two ways: an additional brain and presentation skill set can improve the content of the talk itself, and you may feel safer with the on-stage safety net of your buddy. For example, when I started giving lengthy workshops about building mobile device labs with my co-worker Destiny Montague, we brought different experience to the table. I was able to talk about the user experience of our lab, and the importance of testing across different screen sizes. Destiny spoke about the hardware aspects of the lab, like power consumption and networking. Our audience benefitted from the spectrum of insight we included in the talk. Moreover, Destiny and I kept each other energized and engaging while teaching our audience, having way more fun onstage. Partnering up alleviated the risk (and fear!) of fumbling; where one person makes a mistake, the other person is right there to help. Buddy presentations can be helpful if you fear saying “I don’t know” to a question, as there are oth… | 2016 | Lara Hogan | larahogan | 2016-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/public-speaking-with-a-buddy/ | process |
| 298 | 298 | First Steps in VR | The web is all around us. As web folk, it is our responsibility to consider the impact our work can have. Part of this includes thinking about the future; the web changes lives and if we are building the web then we are the ones making decisions that affect people in every corner of the world. I find myself often torn between wanting to make the right decisions, and just wanting to have fun. To fiddle and play. We all know how important it is to sometimes just try ideas, whether they will amount to much or not. I think of these two mindsets as production and prototyping, though of course there are lots of overlap and phases in between. I mention this because virtual reality is currently seen as a toy for rich people, and in some ways at the moment it is. But with WebVR we are able to create interesting experiences with a relatively low entry point. I want us to have open minds, play around with things, and then see how we can use the tools we have at our disposal to make things that will help people. Every year we see articles saying it will be the “year of virtual reality”, that was especially prevalent this year. 2016 has been a year of progress, VR isn’t quite mainstream but with efforts like Playstation VR and Google Cardboard, we are definitely seeing much more of it. This year also saw the consumer editions of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. So it does seem to be a good time for an overview of how to get involved with creating virtual reality on the web. WebVR is an API for connecting to devices and retrieving continuous data such as the position and orientation. Unlike the Web Audio API and some other APIs, WebVR does not feel like a framework. You use it however you want, taking the data and using it as you wish. To make it easier, there are plenty of resources such as Three.js, A-Frame and ReactVR that help to make the heavy lifting a bit easier. Getting Started with A-Frame I like taking the opportunity to learn new things whenever I can. So while planning this article I thought that instead of trying to… | 2016 | Shane Hudson | shanehudson | 2016-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/first-steps-in-vr/ | code |
| 299 | 299 | What the Heck Is Inclusive Design? | Naming things is hard. And I don’t just mean CSS class names and JSON properties. Finding the right term for what we do with the time we spend awake and out of bed turns out to be really hard too. I’ve variously gone by “front-end developer”, “user experience designer”, and “accessibility engineer”, all clumsy and incomplete terms for labeling what I do as an… erm… see, there’s the problem again. It’s tempting to give up entirely on trying to find the right words for things, but this risks summarily dispensing with thousands of years spent trying to qualify the world around us. So here we are again. Recently, I’ve been using the term “inclusive design” and calling myself an “inclusive designer” a lot. I’m not sure where I first heard it or who came up with it, but the terminology feels like a good fit for the kind of stuff I care to do when I’m not at a pub or asleep. This article is about what I think “inclusive design” means and why I think you might like it as an idea. Isn’t ‘inclusive design’ just ‘accessibility’ by another name? No, I don’t think so. But that’s not to say the two concepts aren’t related. Note the ‘design’ part in ‘inclusive design’ — that’s not just there by accident. Inclusive design describes a design activity; a way of designing things. This sets it apart from accessibility — or at least our expectations of what ‘accessibility’ entails. Despite every single accessibility expert I know (and I know a lot) recommending that accessibility should be integrated into design process, it is rarely ever done. Instead, it is relegated to an afterthought, limiting its effect. The term ‘accessibility’ therefore lacks the power to connote design process. It’s not that we haven’t tried to salvage the term, but it’s beginning to look like a lost cause. So maybe let’s use a new term, because new things take new names. People get that. The ‘access’ part of accessibility is also problematic. Before we get ahead of ourselves, I don’t mean access is a problem — access is good, and the more accessible somethin… | 2016 | Heydon Pickering | heydonpickering | 2016-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/what-the-heck-is-inclusive-design/ | process |
| 300 | 300 | Taking Device Orientation for a Spin | When The Police sang “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” they weren’t talking about using a smartphone to view a panoramic image on Facebook, but they could have been. For years, technology has driven relentlessly towards devices we can carry around in our pockets, and now that we’re there, we’re expected to take the thing out of our pocket and wave it around in front of our faces like a psychotic donkey in search of its own dangly carrot. But if you can’t beat them, join them. A brave new world A couple of years back all sorts of specs for new HTML5 APIs sprang up much to our collective glee. Emboldened, we ran a few tests and found they basically didn’t work in anything and went off disheartened into the corner for a bit of a sob. Turns out, while we were all busy boohooing, those browser boffins have actually being doing some work, and lo and behold, some of these APIs are even half usable. Mostly literally half usable—we’re still talking about browsers, after all. Now, of course they’re all a bit JavaScripty and are going to involve complex methods and maths and science and probably about a thousand dependancies from Github that will fall out of fashion while we’re still trying to locate the documentation, right? Well, no! So what if we actually wanted to use one of these APIs, say to impress our friends with our ability to make them wave their phones in front of their faces (because no one enjoys looking hapless more than the easily-technologically-impressed), how could we do something like that? Let’s find out. The Device Orientation API The phone-wavy API is more formally known as the DeviceOrientation Event Specification. It does a bunch of stuff that basically doesn’t work, but also gives us three values that represent orientation of a device (a phone, a tablet, probably not a desktop computer) around its x, y and z axes. You might think of it as pitch, roll and yaw if you like to spend your weekends wearing goggles and a leather hat. The main way we access these values is through an event listener, which can … | 2016 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2016-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/taking-device-orientation-for-a-spin/ | code |
| 301 | 301 | Stretching Time | Time is valuable. It’s a precious commodity that, if we’re not too careful, can slip effortlessly through our fingers. When we think about the resources at our disposal we’re often guilty of forgetting the most valuable resource we have to hand: time. We are all given an allocation of time from the time bank. 86,400 seconds a day to be precise, not a second more, not a second less. It doesn’t matter if we’re rich or we’re poor, no one can buy more time (and no one can save it). We are all, in this regard, equals. We all have the same opportunity to spend our time and use it to maximum effect. As such, we need to use our time wisely. I believe we can ‘stretch’ time, ensuring we make the most of every second and maximising the opportunities that time affords us. Through a combination of ‘Structured Procrastination’ and ‘Focused Finishing’ we can open our eyes to all of the opportunities in the world around us, whilst ensuring that we deliver our best work precisely when it’s required. A win win, I’m sure you’ll agree. Structured Procrastination I’m a terrible procrastinator. I used to think that was a curse – “Why didn’t I just get started earlier?” – over time, however, I’ve started to see procrastination as a valuable tool if it is used in a structured manner. Don Norman refers to procrastination as ‘late binding’ (a term I’ve happily hijacked). As he argues, in Why Procrastination Is Good, late binding (delay, or procrastination) offers many benefits: Delaying decisions until the time for action is beneficial… it provides the maximum amount of time to think, plan, and determine alternatives. We live in a world that is constantly changing and evolving, as such the best time to execute is often ‘just in time’. By delaying decisions until the last possible moment we can arrive at solutions that address the current reality more effectively, resulting in better outcomes. Procrastination isn’t just useful from a project management perspective, however. It can also be useful for allowing your mind the space to wande… | 2016 | Christopher Murphy | christophermurphy | 2016-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/stretching-time/ | process |
| 302 | 302 | Flexible Project Management in Inflexible Environments | Handling unforeseen circumstances is an inevitable part of any project. It’s also often the most uncomfortable, and there is no amount of skill or planning that will fully eradicate the need to adapt to change. The ability to be flexible, responsive, and unafraid of facing not only problems, but also potentially positive scope changes and new ideas, isn’t an easy one to master. I am by no means saying that I have, but what I have learned is that there is often the temptation to shut out anything that might derail your plan, even sometimes at the cost of the quality you’re committed to. The reality is that as someone leading a project you know there will be challenges, but, in general, it’s a hassle to try keep the landscape open. Problems are bridges we should cross when we come to them, but intentional changes to the plan, and adapting for the sake of improving your first idea, is harder. There are tight schedules, resource is planned miles ahead, and you’re already juggling twenty other things. If you’re passionate about the quality of work you deliver and are working somewhere that considers itself expert within the field of digital, then having an attitude of flexibility is extremely important. It’s important when you’re overcoming a challenge or problem, but it’s also important for allowing ideas to evolve and be refined as much as they can be throughout the course of a project. Where theory falls short The premise of any Agile methodology, Scrum for example, is based around being able to work efficiently, react quickly and deliver relevant chunks of a product in manageable increments. It’s often hailed as king of flexible management and it can work really well, especially for in-house software products developed over a long or even an indefinite period of time. It holds off defining scope too far ahead and lets teams focus on smaller amounts of work, and allows them to regularly reprioritise. Unfortunately though, not all environments lend themselves as easily to a fully Agile setup. Even the ones that do m… | 2016 | Gillian Sibthorpe | gilliansibthorpe | 2016-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/flexible-project-management/ | process |
| 303 | 303 | We Need to Talk About Technical Debt | In my work with clients, a lot of time is spent assessing old, legacy, sprawling systems and identifying good code, bad code, and technical debt. One thing that constantly strikes me is the frequency with which bad code and technical debt are conflated, so let me start by saying this: Not all technical debt is bad code, and not all bad code is technical debt. Sometimes your bad code is just that: bad code. Calling it technical debt often feels like a more forgiving and friendly way of referring to what may have just been a poor implementation or a substandard piece of work. It is an oft-misunderstood phrase, and when mistaken for meaning ‘anything legacy or old hacky or nasty or bad’, technical debt is swept under the carpet along with all of the other parts of the codebase we’d rather not talk about, and therein lies the problem. We need to talk about technical debt. What We Talk About When We Talk About Technical Debt The thing that separates technical debt from the rest of the hacky code in our project is the fact that technical debt, by definition, is something that we knowingly and strategically entered into. Debt doesn’t happen by accident: debt happens when we choose to gain something otherwise-unattainable immediately in return for paying it back (with interest) later on. An Example You’re a front-end developer working on a SaaS product, and your sales team is courting a large customer – a customer so large that you can’t really afford to lose them. The customer tells you that as long as you can allow them to theme your SaaS application according to their branding, they are willing to sign on the dotted line… the problem being that your CSS architecture was never designed to incorporate theming at all, and there isn’t currently a nice, clean way to incorporate a theme into the codebase. You and the business make the decision that you will hack a theme into the product in two days. It’s going to be messy, it’s going to be ugly, but you can’t afford to lose a huge customer just because your CSS isn’t quite … | 2016 | Harry Roberts | harryroberts | 2016-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/we-need-to-talk-about-technical-debt/ | code |
| 304 | 304 | Five Lessons From My First 18 Months as a Dev | I recently moved from Sydney to London to start a dream job with Twitter as a software engineer. A software engineer! Who would have thought. Having started my career as a journalist, the title ‘engineer’ is very strange to me. The notion of writing in first person is also very strange. Journalists are taught to be objective, invisible, to keep yourself out of the story. And here I am writing about myself on a public platform. Cringe. Since I started learning to code I’ve often felt compelled to write about my experience. I want to share my excitement and struggles with the world! But as a junior I’ve been held back by thoughts like ‘whatever you have to say won’t be technical enough’, ‘any time spent writing a blog would be better spent writing code’, ‘blogging is narcissistic’, etc. Well, I’ve been told that your thirties are the years where you stop caring so much about what other people think. And I’m almost 30. So here goes! These are five key lessons from my first year and a half in tech: Deployments should delight, not dread Lesson #1: Making your deployment process as simple as possible is worth the investment. In my first dev job, I dreaded deployments. We would deploy every Sunday night at 8pm. Preparation would begin the Friday before. A nominated deployment manager would spend half a day tagging master, generating scripts, writing documentation and raising JIRAs. The only fun part was choosing a train gif to post in HipChat: ‘All aboard! The deployment train leaves in 3, 2, 1…” When Sunday night came around, at least one person from every squad would need to be online to conduct smoke tests. Most times, the deployments would succeed. Other times they would fail. Regardless, deployments ate into people’s weekend time — and they were intense. Devs would rush to have their code approved before the Friday cutoff. Deployment managers who were new to the process would fear making a mistake. The team knew deployments were a problem. They were constantly striving to improve them. And what I’ve learnt fr… | 2016 | Amy Simmons | amysimmons | 2016-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/my-first-18-months-as-a-dev/ | process |
| 305 | 305 | CSS Writing Modes | Since you may not have a lot of time, I’m going to start at the end, with the dessert. You can use a little-known, yet important and powerful CSS property to make text run vertically. Like this. Or instead of running text vertically, you can layout a set of icons or interface buttons in this way. Or, of course, with anything on your page. The CSS I’ve applied makes the browser rethink the orientation of the world, and flow the layout of this element at a 90° angle to “normal”. Check out the live demo, highlight the headline, and see how the cursor is now sideways. See the Pen Writing Mode Demo — Headline by Jen Simmons (@jensimmons) on CodePen. The code for accomplishing this is pretty simple. h1 { writing-mode: vertical-rl; } That’s all it takes to switch the writing mode from the web’s default horizontal top-to-bottom mode to a vertical right-to-left mode. If you apply such code to the html element, the entire page is switched, affecting the scroll direction, too. In my example above, I’m telling the browser that only the h1 will be in this vertical-rl mode, while the rest of my page stays in the default of horizontal-tb. So now the dessert course is over. Let me serve up this whole meal, and explain the the CSS Writing Mode Specification. Why learn about writing modes? There are three reasons I’m teaching writing modes to everyone—including western audiences—and explaining the whole system, instead of quickly showing you a simple trick. We live in a big, diverse world, and learning about other languages is fascinating. Many of you lay out pages in languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Or you might be inspired to in the future. Using writing-mode to turn bits sideways is cool. This CSS can be used in all kinds of creative ways, even if you are working only in English. Most importantly, I’ve found understanding Writing Modes incredibly helpful when understanding Flexbox and CSS Grid. Before I learned Writing Mode, I felt like there was still a big hole in my knowledge, something I just didn’… | 2016 | Jen Simmons | jensimmons | 2016-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/css-writing-modes/ | code |
| 306 | 306 | What next for CSS Grid Layout? | In 2012 I wrote an article for 24 ways detailing a new CSS Specification that had caught my eye, at the time with an implementation only in Internet Explorer. What I didn’t realise at the time was that CSS Grid Layout was to become a theme on which I would base the next four years of research, experimentation, writing and speaking. As I write this article in December 2016, we are looking forward to CSS Grid Layout being shipped in Chrome and Firefox. What will ship early next year in those browsers is expanded and improved from the early implementation I explored in 2012. Over the last four years the spec has been developed as part of the CSS Working Group process, and has had input from browser engineers, specification writers and web developers. Use cases have been discussed, and features added. The CSS Grid Layout specification is now a Candidate Recommendation. This status means the spec is to all intents and purposes, finished. The discussions now happening are on fine implementation details, and not new feature ideas. It makes sense to draw a line under a specification in order that browser vendors can ship complete, interoperable implementations. That approach is good for all of us, it makes development far easier if we know that a browser supports all of the features of a specification, rather than working out which bits are supported. However it doesn’t mean that works stops here, and that new use cases and features can’t be proposed for future levels of Grid Layout. Therefore, in this article I’m going to take a look at some of the things I think grid layout could do in the future. I would love for these thoughts to prompt you to think about how Grid - or any CSS specification - could better suit the use cases you have. Subgrid - the missing feature of Level 1 The implementation of CSS Grid Layout in Chrome, Firefox and Webkit is comparable and very feature complete. There is however one standout feature that has not been implemented in any browser as yet - subgrid. Once you set the value of the displa… | 2016 | Rachel Andrew | rachelandrew | 2016-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/what-next-for-css-grid-layout/ | code |
| 307 | 307 | Get the Balance Right: Responsive Display Text | Last year in 24 ways I urged you to Get Expressive with Your Typography. I made the case for grabbing your readers’ attention by setting text at display sizes, that is to say big. You should consider very large text in the same way you might a hero image: a picture that creates an atmosphere and anchors your layout. When setting text to be read, it is best practice to choose body and subheading sizes from a pre-defined scale appropriate to the viewport dimensions. We set those sizes using rems, locking the text sizes together so they all scale according to the page default and your reader’s preferences. You can take the same approach with display text by choosing larger sizes from the same scale. However, display text, as defined by its purpose and relative size, is text to be seen first, and read second. In other words a picture of text. When it comes to pictures, you are likely to scale all scene-setting imagery - cover photos, hero images, and so on - relative to the viewport. Take the same approach with display text: lock the size and shape of the text to the screen or browser window. Introducing viewport units With CSS3 came a new set of units which are locked to the viewport. You can use these viewport units wherever you might otherwise use any other unit of length such as pixels, ems or percentage. There are four viewport units, and in each case a value of 1 is equal to 1% of either the viewport width or height as reported in reference1 pixels: vw - viewport width, vh - viewport height, vmin - viewport height or width, whichever is smaller vmax - viewport height or width, whichever is larger In one fell swoop you can set the size of a display heading to be proportional to the screen or browser width, rather than choosing from a scale in a series of media queries. The following makes the heading font size 13% of the viewport width: h1 { font-size: 13 vw; } So for a selection of widths, the rendered font size would be: Rendered font size (px) Viewport width 13 vw 320 42 768 100 1024 133 1280 166 1920 … | 2016 | Richard Rutter | richardrutter | 2016-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/responsive-display-text/ | code |
| 308 | 308 | How to Make a Chrome Extension to Delight (or Troll) Your Friends | If you’re like me, you grew up drawing mustaches on celebrities. Every photograph was subject to your doodling wrath, and your brilliance was taken to a whole new level with computer programs like Microsoft Paint. The advent of digital cameras meant that no one was safe from your handiwork, especially not your friends. And when you finally got your hands on Photoshop, you spent hours maniacally giggling at your artistic genius. But today is different. You’re a serious adult with important things to do and a reputation to uphold. You keep up with modern web techniques and trends, and have little time for fun other than a random Giphy on Slack… right? Nope. If there’s one thing 2016 has taught me, it’s that we—the self-serious, world-changing tech movers and shakers of the universe—haven’t changed one bit from our younger, more delightable selves. How do I know? This year I created a Chrome extension called Tabby Cat and watched hundreds of thousands of people ditch productivity for randomly generated cats. Tabby Cat replaces your new tab page with an SVG cat featuring a silly name like “Stinky Dinosaur” or “Tiny Potato”. Over time, the cats collect goodies that vary in absurdity from fishbones to lawn flamingos to Raybans. Kids and adults alike use this extension, and analytics show the majority of use happens Monday through Friday from 9-5. The popularity of Tabby Cat has convinced me there’s still plenty of room in our big, grown-up hearts for fun. Today, we’re going to combine the formula behind Tabby Cat with your intrinsic desire to delight (or troll) your friends, and create a web app that generates your friends with random objects and environments of your choosing. You can publish it as a Chrome extension to replace your new tab, or simply host it as a website and point to it with the New Tab Redirect extension. Here’s a sneak peek at my final result featuring my partner, my cat, and I in cheerfully weird accessories. Your result will look however you want it to. Along the way, we’ll cover how to bui… | 2016 | Leslie Zacharkow | lesliezacharkow | 2016-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/how-to-make-a-chrome-extension/ | code |
| 309 | 309 | HTTP/2 Server Push and Service Workers: The Perfect Partnership | Being a web developer today is exciting! The web has come a long way since its early days and there are so many great technologies that enable us to build faster, better experiences for our users. One of these technologies is HTTP/2 which has a killer feature known as HTTP/2 Server Push. During this year’s Chrome Developer Summit, I watched a really informative talk by Sam Saccone, a Software Engineer on the Google Chrome team. He gave a talk entitled Planning for Performance, and one of the topics that he covered immediately piqued my interest; the idea that HTTP/2 Server Push and Service Workers were the perfect web performance combination. If you’ve never heard of HTTP/2 Server Push before, fear not - it’s not as scary as it sounds. HTTP/2 Server Push simply allows the server to send data to the browser without having to wait for the browser to explicitly request it first. In this article, I am going to run through the basics of HTTP/2 Server Push and show you how, when combined with Service Workers, you can deliver the ultimate in web performance to your users. What is HTTP/2 Server Push? When a user navigates to a URL, a browser will make an HTTP request for the underlying web page. The browser will then scan the contents of the HTML document for any assets that it may need to retrieve such as CSS, JavaScript or images. Once it finds any assets that it needs, it will then make multiple HTTP requests for each resource that it needs and begin downloading one by one. While this approach works well, the problem is that each HTTP request means more round trips to the server before any data arrives at the browser. These extra round trips take time and can make your web pages load slower. Before we go any further, let’s see what this might look like when your browser makes a request for a web page. If you were to view this in the developer tools of your browser, it might look a little something like this: As you can see from the image above, once the HTML file has been downloaded and parsed, the browser then mak… | 2016 | Dean Hume | deanhume | 2016-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/http2-server-push-and-service-workers/ | code |
| 310 | 310 | Fairytale of new Promise | There are only four good Christmas songs. I know, yeah, JavaScript or whatever. We’ll get to that in a minute, I promise. First—and I cannot stress this enough— there are four good Christmas songs. You’re free to disagree with me here, of course, but please try to understand that you will be wrong. They don’t all have the most safe-for-work titles; I can’t list all of them here, but if you choose to let your fingers do the walkin’ to your nearest search engine, I will say that one was released by the band FEAR way back in 1982 and one was on Run the Jewels’ self-titled debut album. The lyrics are a hell of a lot worse than the titles, so maybe wait until you get home from work before you queue them up. Wear headphones, if you’ve got thin walls. For my money, though, the two I can reference by name are the top of that small heap: Tom Waits’ Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis, and The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York. The former once held the honor of being the only good Christmas song—about which which I was also unequivocally correct, right up until I changed my mind. It’s not the song up for discussion today, but feel free to familiarize yourself just the same—I’ll wait. Fairytale of New York—the top of the list—starts out by hinting at some pretty standard holiday fare; dreams and cheer and whatnot. Typical seasonal stuff, so long as you ignore that the story seems to be recounted as a drunken flashback in a jail cell. You can probably make a few guesses at the underlying spirit of the song based on that framing: following a lucky break, our bright-eyed protagonists move to New York in search of fame and fortune, only to quickly descend into bad decisions, name-calling, and vaguely festive chaos. This song speaks to me on a couple of levels, not the least of which is as a retelling of my day-to-day interactions with JavaScript. Each day’s melody might vary a little bit, granted, but the lyrics almost always follow a pretty clear arc toward “PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT CONTENT.” You might have heard a simi… | 2016 | Mat Marquis | matmarquis | 2016-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/fairytale-of-new-promise/ | code |
| 311 | 311 | Designing Imaginative Style Guides | (Living) style guides and (atomic) patterns libraries are “all the rage,” as my dear old Nana would’ve said. If articles and conference talks are to be believed, making and using them has become incredibly popular. I think there are plenty of ways we can improve how style guides look and make them better at communicating design information to creatives without it getting in the way of information that technical people need. Guides to libraries of patterns Most of my consulting work and a good deal of my creative projects now involve designing style guides. I’ve amassed a huge collection of brand guidelines and identity manuals as well as, more recently, guides to libraries of patterns intended to help designers and developers make digital products and websites. Two pages from one of my Purposeful style guide packs. Designs © Stuff & Nonsense. “Style guide” is an umbrella term for several types of design documentation. Sometimes we’re referring to static style or visual identity guides, other times voice and tone. We might mean front-end code guidelines or component/pattern libraries. These all offer something different but more often than not they have something in common. They look ugly enough to have been designed by someone who enjoys configuring a router. OK, that was mean, not everyone’s going to think an unimaginative style guide design is a problem. After all, as long as a style guide contains information people need, how it looks shouldn’t matter, should it? Inspiring not encyclopaedic Well here’s the thing. Not everyone needs to take the same information away from a style guide. If you’re looking for markup and styles to code a ‘media’ component, you’re probably going to be the technical type, whereas if you need to understand the balance of sizes across a typographic hierarchy, you’re more likely to be a creative. What you need from a style guide is different. Sure, some people1 need rules: “Do this (responsive pattern)” or “don’t do that (auto-playing video.)” Those people probably also want facts: … | 2016 | Andy Clarke | andyclarke | 2016-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/designing-imaginative-style-guides/ | design |
| 312 | 312 | Preparing to Be Badass Next Year | Once we’ve eaten our way through the holiday season, people will start to think about new year’s resolutions. We tend to focus on things that we want to change… and often things that we don’t like about ourselves to “fix”. We set rules for ourselves, or try to start new habits or stop bad ones. We focus in on things we will or won’t do. For many of us the list of things we “ought” to be spending time on is just plain overwhelming – family, charity/community, career, money, health, relationships, personal development. It’s kinda scary even just listing it out, isn’t it? I want to encourage you to think differently about next year. The ever-brilliant Kathy Sierra articulates a better approach really well when talking about the attitude we should have to building great products. She tells us to think not about what the user will do with our product, but about what they are trying to achieve in the real world and how our product helps them to be badass1. When we help the user be badass, then we are really making a difference. I suppose this is one way of saying: focus not on what you will do, focus on what it will help you achieve. How will it help you be awesome? In what ways do you want to be more badass next year? A professional lens Though of course you might want to focus in on health or family or charity or community or another area next year, many people will want to become more badass in their chosen career. So let’s talk about a scaffold to help you figure out your professional / career development next year. First up, an assumption: everyone wants to be awesome. Nobody gets up in the morning aiming to be crap at their job. Nobody thinks to themselves “Today I am aiming for just south of mediocre, and if I can mess up everybody else’s ability to do good work then that will be just perfect2”. Ergo, you want to be awesome. So what does awesome look like? Danger! The big trap that people fall into when think about their professional development is to immediately focus on the things that they aren’t good … | 2016 | Meri Williams | meriwilliams | 2016-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/preparing-to-be-badass-next-year/ | business |
| 193 | 193 | Web Content Accessibility Guidelines—for People Who Haven't Read Them | I’ve been a huge fan of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 since the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published them, nine years ago. I’ve found them practical and future-proof, and I’ve found that they can save a huge amount of time for designers and developers. You can apply them to anything that you can open in a browser. My favourite part is when I use the guidelines to make a website accessible, and then attend user-testing and see someone with a disability easily using that website. Today, the United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities, seems like a good time to re-read Laura Kalbag’s explanation of why we should bother with accessibility. That should motivate you to devour this article. If you haven’t read the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, you might find them a bit off-putting at first. The editors needed to create a single standard that countries around the world could refer to in legislation, and so some of the language in the guidelines reads like legalese. The editors also needed to future-proof the guidelines, and so some terminology—such as “time-based media” and “programmatically determined”—can sound ambiguous. The guidelines can seem lengthy, too: printing the guidelines, the Understanding WCAG 2.0 document, and the Techniques for WCAG 2.0 document would take 1,200 printed pages. This festive season, let’s rip off that legalese and ambiguous terminology like wrapping paper, and see—in a single article—what gifts the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 editors have bestowed upon us. Can your users perceive the information on your website? The first guideline has criteria that help you prevent your users from asking “What the **** is this thing here supposed to be?” 1.1.1 Text is the most accessible format for information. Screen readers—such as the “VoiceOver” setting on your iPhone or the “TalkBack” app on your Android phone—understand text better than any other format. The same applies for other assistive technology, such as translation apps and Braill… | 2017 | Alan Dalton | alandalton | 2017-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/wcag-for-people-who-havent-read-them/ | code |
| 194 | 194 | Design Systems and Hybrids | The other day on Twitter, I saw a thread started by Dorian Taylor about why design systems are so hot right now. In the thread, he made the case that they’ve been around for ages and some folks were just slow to catch up. It was an interesting thread, and not the first time I’ve seen folks discuss this. “Design systems are so hot right now” was even used recently in this very publication. And yes it’s true that they’ve been around for ages. Design artefact collectors’ obsession with reprints of old graphic standards manuals of the past are a reminder. Sometimes old things become new again, either through a rediscovery or awakening (wow, that sounds really deep). But I think that’s definitely what happened here. Some very opinionated answers that come to mind for me are: The need for them has increased with the needs of software development. With the increasing number of devices (phones, tablets, watches, etc.), scaling design has required the need to double down on systems thinking and processes. Investments with huge cost-saving returns. The time investment it takes to onboard new people as you staff up large teams (and the time it takes to fix bugs and inconsistencies) could be better spent building up a system that lets you ship at a faster pace. It also gives you more time to focus on the bigger picture instead of what color a button border is. If you do have to onboard new designers, the design system is a great educational resource to get up to speed quickly on your organization’s design principles, materials/tools, and methods. “Here’s the simple truth: you can’t innovate on products without first innovating the way you build them.” — Alex Schleifer, The Way We Build These are just some of the reasons. But there is another answer, and a personal conclusion that I’ve reached. It relates to the way I work and what I love working on, but I don’t see it talked about much. Hybrids Have a Home I’m a hybrid designer. I code in HTML & CSS (with a preference for Sass). But I don’t call myself a frontend develop… | 2017 | Jina Anne | jina | 2017-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/design-systems-and-hybrids/ | process |
| 195 | 195 | Levelling Up for Junior Developers | If you are a junior developer starting out in the web industry, things can often seem a little daunting. There are so many things to learn, and as soon as you’ve learnt one framework or tool, there seems to be something new out there. I am lucky enough to lead a team of developers building applications for the web. During a recent One to One meeting with one of our junior developers, he asked me about a learning path and the basic fundamentals that every developer should know. After a bit of digging around, I managed to come up with a (not so exhaustive) list of principles that was shared with him. In this article, I will share the list with you, and hopefully help you level up from junior developer and become a better developer all round. This list doesn’t focus on an particular programming language, but rather coding concepts as a whole. The idea behind this list is that whether you are a front-end developer, back-end developer, full stack developer or just a curious one, these principles apply to everyone that writes code. I have tried to be technology agnostic, so that you can use these tips to guide you, whatever your tech stack might be. Without any further ado and in no particular order, let’s get started. Refactoring code like a boss The Boy Scouts have a rule that goes “always leave the campground cleaner than you found it.” This rule can be applied to code too and ensures that you leave code cleaner than you found it. As a junior developer, it’s almost certain that you will either create or come across older code that could be improved. The resources below are a guide that will help point you in the right direction. My favourite book on this subject has to be Clean Code by Robert C. Martin. It’s a must read for anyone writing code as it helps you identify bad code and shows you techniques that you can use to improve existing code. If you find that in your day to day work you deal with a lot of legacy code, Improving Existing Technology through Refactoring is another useful read. Design Patterns are a… | 2017 | Dean Hume | deanhume | 2017-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/levelling-up-for-junior-developers/ | code |
| 196 | 196 | Designing a Remote Project | I came across an article recently, which I have to admit made my blood boil a little. Yes, I know it’s the season of goodwill and all that, and I’m going to risk sounding a little Scrooge-like, but I couldn’t help it. It was written by someone who’d tried out ‘telecommuting’ (big sigh) a.k.a. remote or distributed working. They’d tested it in their company and decided it didn’t work. Why did it enrage me so much? Well, this person sounded like they’d almost set it up to fail. To them, it was the latest buzzword, and they wanted to offer their employees a ‘perk’. But it was going to be risky, because, well, they just couldn’t trust their employees not to be lazy and sit around in their pyjamas at home, watching TV, occasionally flicking their mousepad to ‘appear online’. Sounds about right, doesn’t it? Well, no. This attitude towards remote working is baked in the past, where working from one office and people all sitting around together in a cosy circle singing kum-by-yah* was a necessity not an option. We all know the reasons remote working and flexibility can happen more easily now: fast internet, numerous communication channels, and so on. But why are companies like Yahoo! and IBM backtracking on this? Why is there still such a negative perception of this way of working when it has so much real potential for the future? *this might not have ever really happened in an office. So what is remote working? It can come in various formats. It’s actually not just the typical office worker, working from home on a specific day. The nature of digital projects has been changing over a number of years. In this era where organisations are squeezing budgets and trying to find the best value wherever they can, it seems that the days of whole projects being tackled by one team, in the same place, is fast becoming the past. What I’ve noticed more recently is a much more fragmented way of putting together a project – a mixture of in-house and agency, or multiple agencies or organisations, or working with an offshore team. In th… | 2017 | Suzanna Haworth | suzannahaworth | 2017-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/designing-a-remote-project/ | business |
| 197 | 197 | Designing for Mobile Performance | Last year, some colleagues at Google ran a research study titled “The Need for Mobile Speed” to find out what the impact of performance and perception of speed had on the way people use the web on their mobile devices. That’s not a trivial distinction; when considering performance, how fast something feels is often more important than how fast it actually is. When dealing with sometimes underpowered mobile devices and slow mobile networks, designing experiences that feel fast is exceptionally important. One of the most startling numbers we found in the study was that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load. We wanted to find out more, so following on from this study, we conducted research to define what the crucial elements of speed are. We took into consideration the user experience (UX), overall perception of speed, and how differing contexts the user finds themselves in can alter how fast a user thinks something loaded. To understand speed and load times first we must understand that user mobile web behaviour is broken down into three buckets; Intention Location State of mind Let’s look at each of those in turn. Intention Users browse sites on a mobile device for many different reasons. To be able to effectively design a performant user experience for them, it’s important to understand what those reasons might be. When asked to describe their reason for visiting a site, approximately 30% of people asked by the study claimed that they were simply browsing without a particular purpose in mind. Looking deeper, we found that this number increased slightly (34%) for retail sites. 30% said they were just there to find out some information for a future task or action, such as booking a flight. Interestingly, the research shows that users are actually window shopping using their mobile browser. Only 29% actually said they had a specific goal or intent in mind, and this number increases significantly for financial services like banking sites (57%). This goes against a trad… | 2017 | Mustafa Kurtuldu | mustafakurtuldu | 2017-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/designing-for-mobile-performance/ | ux |
| 198 | 198 | Is Your Website Accidentally Sexist? | Women make up 51% of the world’s population. More importantly, women make 85% of all purchasing decisions about consumer goods, 75% of the decisions about buying new homes, and 81% of decisions about groceries. The chances are, you want your website to be as attractive to women as it is to men. But we are all steeped in a male-dominated culture that subtly influences the design and content decisions we make, and some of those decisions can result in a website that isn’t as welcoming to women as it could be. Typography tells a story Studies show that we make consistent judgements about whether a typeface is masculine or feminine: Masculine typography has a square or geometric form with hard corners and edges, and is emphatically either blunt or spiky. Serif fonts are also considered masculine, as is bold type and capitals. Feminine typography favours slim lines, curling or flowing shapes with a lot of ornamentation and embellishment, and slanted letters. Sans-serif, cursive and script fonts are seen as feminine, as are lower case letters. The effect can be so subtle that even choosing between bold and regular styles within a single font family can be enough to indicate masculinity or femininity. If you want to appeal to both men and women, search for fonts that are gender neutral, or at least not too masculine. When you’re choosing groups of fonts that need to work harmoniously together, consider which fonts you are prioritising in your design. Is the biggest word on the page in a masculine or feminine font? What about the smallest words? Is there an imbalance between the prominence of masculine and feminine fonts, and what does this imply? Typography is a language in and of itself, so be careful what you say with it. Colour me unsurprised Colour also has an obvious gender bias. We associate pinks and purples, especially in combination, with girls and women, and a soft pink has become especially strongly related to breast cancer awareness campaigns. On the other hand, pale blue is strongly associated with boy… | 2017 | Suw Charman-Anderson | suwcharmananderson | 2017-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/is-your-website-accidentally-sexist/ | content |
| 199 | 199 | Knowing the Future - Tips for a Happy Launch Day | You’ve chosen your frameworks and libraries. You’ve learned how to write code which satisfies the buzzword and performance gods. Now you need to serve it to a global audience, and make things easy to preview, to test, to sign-off, and to evolve. But infrastructure design is difficult and boring for most of us. We just want to get our work out into the wild. If only we had tools which would let us go, “Oh yeah! It all deploys perfectly every time” and shout, “You need another release? BAM! What’s next?” A truth that can be hard to admit is that very often, the production environment and its associated deployment processes are poorly defined until late into a project. This can be a problem. It makes my palms sweaty just thinking about it. If like me, you have spent time building things for clients, you’ll probably have found yourself working with a variety of technical partners and customers who bring different constraints and opportunities to your projects. Knowing and proving the environments and the deployment processes is often very difficult, but can be a factor which profoundly impacts our ability to deliver what we promised. To say nothing of our ability to sleep at night or leave our fingernails un-chewed. Let’s look at this a little, and see if we can’t set you up for a good night’s sleep, with dry palms and tidy fingernails. A familiar problem You’ve been here too, right? The project development was tough, but you’re pleased with what you are running in your local development environments. Now you need to get the client to see and approve your build, and hopefully indicate with a cheery thumbs up that it can “go live”. Chances are that we have a staging environment where the client can see the build. But be honest, is this exactly the same as the production environment? It should be, but often it’s not. Often the staging environment is nothing more than a visible server with none of the optimisations, security, load balancing, caching, and other vital bits of machinery that we’ll need (and need to test) … | 2017 | Phil Hawksworth | philhawksworth | 2017-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/knowing-the-future/ | process |
| 200 | 200 | Care and Feeding of Burnout | You’ve been doing too much for too long. And it’s broken you. You’re burned out. You’re done. Illustration by Kate Holden Occupational burnout is a long-documented effect of stretching yourself further than the limits of your mental and physical health can carry you. And when it finally catches up with you, it can feel like the end of the world. But things can get better. With focused self care, reworking your priorities and lots of time, you can slog through burnout. What is burnout? The Tl;dr linkdump tour In this article, we’ll be looking at what you can do when you’re burned out. We’ll be skipping past a lot of information on what burnout is, what causes it and how it impacts the tech industry. We’re able to skip past this because many technologists have already created valuable content targeted to our industry. The videos and writing below may be helpful for readers who are less familiar with burnout. A Wikipedia article may be a great starting point for learning about occupational burnout. Understanding burnout: Brandon West This conference talk by Brandon West covers a lot of burnout 101, from the perspective of a developer relations/community professional. April Wensel writes about the need for the tech industry to move from the Valley’s burnout culture to a more sustainable model. Catching Burnout [as] early [as possible] One of the most challenging things about burnout is that it develops slowly and gradually. Many impacted don’t notice the water warming around them until it’s been brought to a boil, causing a crisis that can’t be overlooked. Catching burnout and taking steps to deal with it as early as possible can help limit the length and severity of your burnout. Getting in the habit of checking in with yourself regularly about your stress and energy levels can be an effective habit for assessing burnout and for general wellness. The Mayo Clinic recommends asking yourself the following questions to determine if you might be suffering from burnout. Have you become cynical or critical at work? D… | 2017 | Jessica Rose | jessicarose | 2017-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/care-and-feeding-of-burnout/ | process |
| 201 | 201 | Lint the Web Forward With Sonarwhal | Years ago, when I was in a senior in college, much of my web development courses focused on two things: the basics like HTML and CSS (and boy, do I mean basic), and Adobe Flash. I spent many nights writing ActionScript 3.0 to build interactions for the websites that I would add to my portfolio. A few months after graduating, I built one website in Flash for a client, then never again. Flash was dying, and it became obsolete in my résumé and portfolio. That was my first lesson in the speed at which things change in technology, and what a daunting realization that was as a new graduate looking to enter the professional world. Now, seven years later, I work on the Microsoft Edge team where I help design and build a tool that would have lessened my early career anxieties: sonarwhal. Sonarwhal is a linting tool, built by and for the web community. The code is open source and lives under the JS Foundation. It helps web developers and designers like me keep up with the constant change in technology while simultaneously teaching how to code better websites. Introducing sonarwhal’s mascot Nellie Good web development is hard. It is more than HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: developers are expected to have a grasp of accessibility, performance, security, emerging standards, and more, all while refreshing this knowledge every few months as the web evolves. It’s a lot to keep track of. Web development is hard Staying up-to-date on all this knowledge is one of the driving forces for developing this scanning tool. Whether you are just starting out, are a student, or you have over a decade of experience, the sonarwhal team wants to help you build better websites for all browsers. Currently sonarwhal checks for best practices in five categories: Accessibility, Interoperability, Performance, PWAs, and Security. Each check is called a “rule”. You can configure them and even create your own rules if you need to follow some specific guidelines for your project (e.g. validate analytics attributes, title format of pages, etc.). You c… | 2017 | Stephanie Drescher | stephaniedrescher | 2017-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/lint-the-web-forward-with-sonarwhal/ | code |
| 202 | 202 | Design Systems and CSS Grid | Recently, my client has been looking at creating a few new marketing pages for their website. They currently have a design system in place but they’re looking to push this forward into 2018 with some small and possibly some larger changes. To start with we are creating a couple of new marketing pages. As well as making use of existing components within the design systems component library there are a couple of new components. Looking at the first couple of sketch files I felt this would be a great opportunity to use CSS Grid, to me the newer components need to be laid out on that page and grid would help with this perfectly. As well as this layout of the new components and the text within it, imagery would be used that breaks out of the grid and pushes itself into the spaces where the text is aligned. The existing grid system When the site was rebuilt in 2015 the team decided to make use of Sass and Susy, a “lightweight grid-layout engine using Sass”. It was built separating the grid system from the components that would be laid out on the page with a container, a row, an optional column, and a block. To make use of the grid system on a page for a component that would take the full width of the row you would have to write something like this: <div class="grid-container"> <div class="grid-row"> <div class="grid-column-4"> <div class="grid-block"> <!-- component code here --> </div> </div> </div> </div> Using a grid system similar to this can easily create quite the tag soup. It could fill the HTML full of divs that may become complex to understand and difficult to edit. Although there is this reliance on several <div>s to lay out the components on a page it does allow a tidy way to place the component code within that page. It abstracts the layout of the page to its own code, its own system, so the components can ‘fit’ where needed. The requirements of the new grid system Moving forward I set myself some goals for what I’d like to have achieved in this new grid system: It needs to… | 2017 | Stuart Robson | stuartrobson | 2017-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/design-systems-and-css-grid/ | code |
| 203 | 203 | Jobs-to-Be-Done in Your UX Toolbox | Part 1: What is JTBD? The concept of a “job” in “Jobs-To-Be-Done” is neatly encapsulated by a oft-quoted line from Theodore Levitt: “People want a quarter-inch hole, not a quarter inch drill”. Even so, Don Norman pointed out that perhaps Levitt “stopped too soon” at what the real customer goal might be. In the “The Design of Everyday Things”, he wrote: “Levitt’s example of the drill implying that the goal is really a hole is only partially correct, however. When people go to a store to buy a drill, that is not their real goal. But why would anyone want a quarter-inch hole? Clearly that is an intermediate goal. Perhaps they wanted to hang shelves on the wall. Levitt stopped too soon. Once you realize that they don’t really want the drill, you realize that perhaps they don’t really want the hole, either: they want to install their bookshelves. Why not develop methods that don’t require holes? Or perhaps books that don’t require bookshelves.” In other words, a “job” in JTBD lingo is a way to express a user need or provide a customer-centric problem frame that’s independent of a solution. As Tony Ulwick says: “A job is stable, it doesn’t change over time.” An example of a job is “tiding you over from breakfast to lunch.” You could hire a donut, a flapjack or a banana for that mid-morning snack—whatever does the job. If you can arrive at a clearly identified primary job (and likely some secondary ones too), you can be more creative in how you come up with an effective solution while keeping the customer problem in focus. The team at Intercom wrote a book on their application of JTBD. In it, Des Traynor cleverly characterised how JTBD provides a different way to think about solutions that compete for the same job: “Economy travel and business travel are both capable candidates applying for [the job: Get me face-to-face with my colleague in San Francisco], though they’re looking for significantly different salaries. Video conferencing isn’t as capable, but is willing to work for a … | 2017 | Steph Troeth | stephtroeth | 2017-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/jobs-to-be-done-in-your-ux-toolbox/ | ux |
| 204 | 204 | Cascading Web Design with Feature Queries | Feature queries, also known as the @supports rule, were introduced as an extension to the CSS2 as part of the CSS Conditional Rules Module Level 3, which was first published as a working draft in 2011. It is a conditional group rule that tests if the browser’s user agent supports CSS property:value pairs, and arbitrary conjunctions (and), disjunctions (or), and negations (not) of them. The motivation behind this feature was to allow authors to write styles using new features when they were supported but degrade gracefully in browsers where they are not. Even though the nature of CSS already allows for graceful degradation, for example, by ignoring unsupported properties or values without disrupting other styles in the stylesheet, sometimes we need a bit more than that. CSS is ultimately a holistic technology, in that, even though you can use properties in isolation, the full power of CSS shines through when used in combination. This is especially evident when it comes to building web layouts. Having native feature detection in CSS makes it much more convenient to build with cutting-edge CSS for the latest browsers while supporting older browsers at the same time. Browser support Opera first implemented feature queries in November 2012, both Chrome and Firefox had it since May 2013. There have been several articles about feature queries written over the years, however, it seems that awareness of its broad support isn’t that well-known. Much of the earlier coverage on feature queries was not written in English, and perhaps that was a limiting factor. @supports ― CSSのFeature Queries by Masataka Yakura, August 8 2012 Native CSS Feature Detection via the @supports Rule by Chris Mills, December 21 2012 CSS @supports by David Walsh, April 3 2013 Responsive typography with CSS Feature Queries by Aral Balkan, April 9 2013 How to use the @supports rule in your CSS by Lea Verou, January 31 2014 CSS Feature Queries by Amit Tal, June 2 2014 Coming Soon: CSS Feature Queries by Adobe Web Platform Team, August 21 2014 CSS featu… | 2017 | Chen Hui Jing | chenhuijing | 2017-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/cascading-web-design/ | code |
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