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| 236 | 236 | Extreme Design | Recently, I set out with twelve other designers and developers for a 19th century fortress on the Channel Island of Alderney. We were going to /dev/fort, a sort of band camp for geeks. Our cohort’s mission: to think up, build and finish something – without readily available internet access. Alderney runway, photo by Chris Govias Wait, no internet? Well, pretty much. As the creators of /dev/fort James Aylett and Mark Norman Francis put it: “Imagine a place with no distractions – no IM, no Twitter”. But also no way to quickly look up a design pattern, code sample or source material. Like packing for camping, /dev/fort means bringing everything you’ll need on your back or your hard drive: from long johns to your favourite icon set. We got to work the first night discussing ideas for what we wanted to build. By the time breakfast was cleared up the next morning, we’d settled on Russ’s idea to make the Apollo 13 (PDF) transcript accessible. Days two and three were spent collaboratively planning (KJ style) what features we wanted to build, and unravelling the larger UX challenges of the project. The next five days were spent building it. Within 36 hours of touchdown at Southampton Airport, we launched our creation: spacelog.org The weather was cold, the coal fire less than ideal, food and supplies a hike away, and the process lightning-fast. A week of designing under extreme circumstances called for an extreme process. Some of this was driven by James’s and Norm’s experience running these things, but a lot of it materialised while we were there – especially for our three-strong design team (myself, Gavin O’ Carroll and Chris Govias) who, though we knew each other, had never worked together as a group in this kind of scenario before. The outcome was a pretty spectacular process, with a some key takeaways useful for any small group trying to build something quickly. What it’s like inside the fort /dev/fort has the pressure and pace of a hack day without being a hack day – primarily, no workshops or interruptio… | 2010 | Hannah Donovan | hannahdonovan | 2010-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/extreme-design/ | process |
| 235 | 235 | Real Animation Using JavaScript, CSS3, and HTML5 Video | When I was in school to be a 3-D animator, I read a book called Timing for Animation. Though only 152 pages long, it’s essentially the bible for anyone looking to be a great animator. In fact, Pixar chief creative officer John Lasseter used the first edition as a reference when he was an animator at Walt Disney Studios in the early 1980s. In the book, authors John Halas and Harold Whitaker advise: Timing is the part of animation which gives meaning to movement. Movement can easily be achieved by drawing the same thing in two different positions and inserting a number of other drawings between the two. The result on the screen will be movement; but it will not be animation. But that’s exactly what we’re doing with CSS3 and JavaScript: we’re moving elements, not animating them. We’re constantly specifying beginning and end states and allowing the technology to interpolate between the two. And yet, it’s the nuances within those middle frames that create the sense of life we’re looking for. As bandwidth increases and browser rendering grows more consistent, we can create interactions in different ways than we’ve been able to before. We’re encountering motion more and more on sites we’d generally label ‘static.’ However, this motion is mostly just movement, not animation. It’s the manipulation of an element’s properties, most commonly width, height, x- and y-coordinates, and opacity. So how do we create real animation? The metaphor In my experience, animation is most believable when it simulates, exaggerates, or defies the real world. A bowling ball falls differently than a racquetball. They each have different weights and sizes, which affect the way they land, bounce, and impact other objects. This is a major reason that JavaScript animation frequently feels mechanical; it doesn’t complete a metaphor. Expanding and collapsing a <div> feels very different than a opening a door or unfolding a piece of paper, but it often shouldn’t. The interaction itself should tie directly to the art direction of a page. P… | 2010 | Dan Mall | danmall | 2010-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/real-animation-using-javascript-css3-and-html5-video/ | code |
| 234 | 234 | An Introduction to CSS 3-D Transforms | Ladies and gentlemen, it is the second decade of the third millennium and we are still kicking around the same 2-D interface we got three decades ago. Sure, Apple debuted a few apps for OSX 10.7 that have a couple more 3-D flourishes, and Microsoft has had that Flip 3D for a while. But c’mon – 2011 is right around the corner. That’s Twenty Eleven, folks. Where is our 3-D virtual reality? By now, we should be zipping around the Metaverse on super-sonic motorbikes. Granted, the capability of rendering complex 3-D environments has been present for years. On the web, there are already several solutions: Flash; three.js in <canvas>; and, eventually, WebGL. Finally, we meagre front-end developers have our own three-dimensional jewel: CSS 3-D transforms! Rationale Like a beautiful jewel, 3-D transforms can be dazzling, a true spectacle to behold. But before we start tacking 3-D diamonds and rubies to our compositions like Liberace‘s tailor, we owe it to our users to ask how they can benefit from this awesome feature. An entire application should not take advantage of 3-D transforms. CSS was built to style documents, not generate explorable environments. I fail to find a benefit to completing a web form that can be accessed by swivelling my viewport to the Sign-Up Room (although there have been proposals to make the web just that). Nevertheless, there are plenty of opportunities to use 3-D transforms in between interactions with the interface, via transitions. Take, for instance, the Weather App on the iPhone. The application uses two views: a details view; and an options view. Switching between these two views is done with a 3-D flip transition. This informs the user that the interface has two – and only two – views, as they can exist only on either side of the same plane. Flipping from details view to options view via a 3-D transition Also, consider slide shows. When you’re looking at the last slide, what cues tip you off that advancing will restart the cycle at the first slide? A better paradigm might be achi… | 2010 | David DeSandro | daviddesandro | 2010-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/intro-to-css-3d-transforms/ | code |
| 233 | 233 | Wrapping Things Nicely with HTML5 Local Storage | HTML5 is here to turn the web from a web of hacks into a web of applications – and we are well on the way to this goal. The coming year will be totally and utterly awesome if you are excited about web technologies. This year the HTML5 revolution started and there is no stopping it. For the first time all the browser vendors are rallying together to make a technology work. The new browser war is fought over implementation of the HTML5 standard and not over random additions. We live in exciting times. Starting with a bang As with every revolution there is a lot of noise with bangs and explosions, and that’s the stage we’re at right now. HTML5 showcases are often CSS3 showcases, web font playgrounds, or video and canvas examples. This is great, as it gets people excited and it gives the media something to show. There is much more to HTML5, though. Let’s take a look at one of the less sexy, but amazingly useful features of HTML5 (it was in the HTML5 specs, but grew at such an alarming rate that it warranted its own spec): storing information on the client-side. Why store data on the client-side? Storing information in people’s browsers affords us a few options that every application should have: You can retain the state of an application – when the user comes back after closing the browser, everything will be as she left it. That’s how ‘real’ applications work and this is how the web ones should, too. You can cache data – if something doesn’t change then there is no point in loading it over the Internet if local access is so much faster You can store user preferences – without needing to keep that data on your server at all. In the past, storing local data wasn’t much fun. The pain of hacky browser solutions In the past, all we had were cookies. I don’t mean the yummy things you get with your coffee, endorsed by the blue, furry junkie in Sesame Street, but the other, digital ones. Cookies suck – it isn’t fun to have an unencrypted HTTP overhead on every server request for storing four kilobytes of data… | 2010 | Christian Heilmann | chrisheilmann | 2010-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/html5-local-storage/ | code |
| 232 | 232 | Optimize Your Web Design Workflow | I’m not sure about you, but I still favour using Photoshop to create my designs for the web. I agree that this application, even with its never-ending feature set, is not the perfect environment to design websites in. The ideal application doesn’t exist yet, however, so until it does it’s maybe not such a bad idea to investigate ways to optimize our workflow. Why use Photoshop? It will probably not come as a surprise if I say that Photoshop and Illustrator are the applications that I know best and feel most comfortable and creative in. Some people prefer Fireworks for web design. Even though I understand people’s motivations, I still prefer Photoshop personally. On the occasions that I gave Fireworks a try, I ended up just using the application to export my images as slices, or to prepare a dummy for the client. For some reason, I’ve never been able to find my way in that app. There were always certain things missing that could only be done in either Photoshop or Illustrator, which bothered me. Why not start in the browser? These days, with CSS3 styling emerging, there are people who find it more efficient to design in the browser. I agree that at a certain point, once the basic design is all set and defined, you can jump right into the code and go from there. But the actual creative part, at least for me, needs to be done in an application such as Photoshop. As a designer I need to be able to create and experiment with shapes on the fly, draw things, move them around, change colours, gradients, effects, and so on. I can’t see me doing this with code. I’m sure if I switch to markup too quickly, I might end up with a rather boxy and less interesting design. Once I start playing with markup, I leave my typical ‘design zone’. My brain starts thinking differently – more rational and practical, if you know what I mean; I start to structure and analyse how to mark up my design in the most efficient semantic way. When I design, I tend to let that go for a bit. I think more freely and not so much about the limitatio… | 2010 | Veerle Pieters | veerlepieters | 2010-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/optimize-your-web-design-workflow/ | process |
| 231 | 231 | Designing for iOS: Life Beyond Media Queries | Although not a new phenomenon, media queries seem to be getting a lot attention online recently and for the right reasons too – it’s great to be able to adapt a design with just a few lines of CSS – but many people are relying only on them to create an iPhone-specific version of their website. I was pleased to hear at FOWD NYC a few weeks ago that both myself and Aral Balkan share the same views on why media queries aren’t always going to be the best solution for mobile. Both of us specialise in iPhone design ourselves and we opt for a different approach to media queries. The trouble is, regardless of what you have carefully selected to be display:none; in your CSS, the iPhone still loads everything in the background; all that large imagery for your full scale website also takes up valuable mobile bandwidth and time. You can greatly increase the speed of your website by creating a specific site tailored to mobile users with just a few handy pointers – media queries, in some instances, might be perfectly suitable but, in others, here’s what you can do. Redirect your iPhone/iPod Touch users To detect whether someone is viewing your site on an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can either use JavaScript or PHP. The JavaScript if((navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i)) || (navigator.userAgent.match(/iPod/i))) { if (document.cookie.indexOf("iphone_redirect=false") == -1) window.location = "http://mobile.yoursitehere.com"; } The PHP if(strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'iPhone') || strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'iPod')) { header('Location: http://mobile.yoursitehere.com'); exit(); } Both of these methods redirect the user to a site that you have made specifically for the iPhone. At this point, be sure to provide a link to the full version of the website, in case the user wishes to view this and not be thrown into an experience they didn’t want, with no way back. Tailoring your site So, now you’ve got 320 × 480 pixels of screen to play with – and to create a style sheet for, just as you would fo… | 2010 | Sarah Parmenter | sarahparmenter | 2010-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/life-beyond-media-queries/ | code |
| 230 | 230 | The Articulate Web Designer of Tomorrow | You could say that we design to communicate, and that we seek emotive responses. It sounds straightforward, and it can be, but leaving it to chance isn’t wise. Many wander into web design without formal training, and whilst that certainly isn’t essential, we owe it to ourselves to draw on wider influences, learn from the past, and think smarter. What knowledge can we ourselves explore in order to become better designers? In addition, how can we take this knowledge, investigate it through our unique discipline, and in turn speak more eloquently about what we do on the web? Below, I outline a number of things that I personally believe all designers should be using and exploring collectively. Taking stock Where we’re at is good. Finding clarity through web standards, we’ve ended up quite modernist in our approach, pursuing function, elegance and reduction. However, we’re not great at articulating our own design processes and principles to outsiders. Equally, we rely heavily on our instincts when deciding if something is or isn’t good. That’s fine, but we can better understand why things are the way they are by looking a little deeper, thereby helping us articulate what goes on in our design brains to our peers, our clients and to normal humans. As designers we use ideas, concepts, text and images. We apply our ideas and experience, imposing order and structure to content, hoping to ease the communication of an idea to the largest possible audience or to a specific audience. We consciously manipulate most of what is available to us, but not all. There is something else we can use. I often think that brilliant work demands a keen understanding of the magical visual language that informs design. Embracing an established visual language This is a language whose alphabet is shapes, structures, colours, lines and rhythms. When effective, it is somewhat invisible, subliminally enforcing messages and evoking meaning, using methods solidly rooted in a grammar perceptible in virtually all extraordinary creative work. Th… | 2010 | Simon Collison | simoncollison | 2010-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/the-articulate-web-designer-of-tomorrow/ | process |
| 229 | 229 | Sketching to Communicate | As a web designer I’ve always felt that I’d somehow cheated the system, having been absent on the day God handed out the ability to draw. I didn’t study fine art, I don’t have a natural talent to effortlessly knock out a realistic bowl of fruit beside a water jug, and yet somehow I’ve still managed to blag my way this far. I’m sure many of you may feel the same. I had no intention of becoming an artist, but to have enough skill to convey an idea in a drawing would be useful. Instead, my inadequate instrument would doodle drunkenly across the page leaving a web of unintelligible paths instead of the refined illustration I’d seen in my mind’s eye. This – and the natural scrawl of my handwriting – is fine (if somewhat frustrating) when it’s for my eyes only but, when sketching to communicate a concept to a client, such amateur art would be offered with a sense of embarrassment. So when I had the opportunity to take part in some sketching classes whilst at Clearleft I jumped at the chance. Why sketch? In UX workshops early on in a project’s life, sketching is a useful and efficient way to convey and record ideas. It’s disposable and inexpensive, but needn’t look amateur. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a well executed sketch of how you’ll combine funny YouTube videos with elephants to make Lolephants.com could be worth millions in venture capital. Actually, that’s not bad… ;-) Although (as you will see) the basics of sketching are easy to master, the kudos you will receive from clients for being a ‘proper designer’ makes it worthwhile! Where to begin? Start by not buying yourself a sketch pad. If you were the type of child who ripped the first page out of a school exercise book and started again if you made even a tiny mistake (you’re not alone!), Wreck This Journal may offer a helping hand. Practicing on plain A4 paper instead of any ‘special’ notepad will make the process a whole lot easier, no matter how deliciously edible those Moleskines look. Do buy yourself a black fine-liner pen and a set … | 2010 | Paul Annett | paulannett | 2010-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/sketching-to-communicate/ | business |
| 228 | 228 | The Great Unveiling | The moment of unveiling our designs should be among our proudest, but it never seems to work out that way. Instead of a chance to show how we can bring our clients’ visions to life, critique can be a tense, worrying ordeal. And yes, the stakes are high: a superb design is only superb if it goes live. Mismanage the feedback process and your research, creativity and hard work can be wasted, and your client may wonder whether you’ve been worth the investment. The great unveiling is a pivotal part of the design process, but it needn’t be a negative one. Just as usability testing teaches us whether our designs meet user needs, presenting our work to clients tells us whether we’ve met important business goals. So how can we turn the tide to make presenting designs a constructive experience, and to give good designs a chance to shine through? Timing is everything First, consider when you should seek others’ opinions. Your personal style will influence whether you show early sketches or wait to demonstrate something more complete. Some designers thrive at low fidelity, sketching out ideas that, despite their rudimentary nature, easily spark debate. Other designers take time to create more fully-realised versions. Some even argue that the great unveiling should be eliminated altogether by working directly alongside the client throughout, collaborating on the design to reach its full potential. Whatever your individual preference, you’ll rarely have the chance to do it entirely your own way. Contracts, clients, and deadlines will affect how early and often you share your work. However, try to avoid the trap of presenting too late and at too high fidelity. My experience has taught me that skilled designers tend to present their work earlier and allow longer for iteration than novices do. More aware of the potential flaws in their solutions, these designers cling less tightly to their initial efforts. Working roughly and seeking early feedback gives you the flexibility to respond more fully to nuances you may have misse… | 2010 | Cennydd Bowles | cennyddbowles | 2010-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/the-great-unveiling/ | business |
| 227 | 227 | A Contentmas Epiphany | The twelve days of Christmas fall between 25 December, Christmas Day, and 6 January, the Epiphany of the Kings. Traditionally, these have been holidays and a lot of us still take a good proportion of these days off. Equally, a lot of us have a got a personal site kicking around somewhere that we sigh over and think, “One day I’ll sort you out!” Why not take this downtime to give it a big ol’ refresh? I know, good idea, huh? HEY WAIT! WOAH! NO-ONE’S TOUCHING PHOTOSHOP OR DOING ANY CSS FANCYWORK UNTIL I’M DONE WITH YOU! Be honest, did you immediately think of a sketch or mockup you have tucked away? Or some clever little piece of code you want to fiddle with? Now ask yourself, why would you start designing the container if you haven’t worked out what you need to put inside? Anyway, forget the content strategy lecture; I haven’t given you your gifts yet. I present The Twelve Days of Contentmas! This is a simple little plan to make sure that your personal site, blog or portfolio is not just looking good at the end of these twelve days, but is also a really useful repository of really useful content. WARNING KLAXON: There are twelve parts, one for each day of Christmas, so this is a lengthy article. I’m not expecting anyone to absorb this in one go. Add to Instapaper. There is no TL;DR for this because it’s a multipart process, m’kay? Even so, this plan of mine cuts corners on a proper applied strategy for content. You might find some aspects take longer than the arbitrary day I’ve assigned. And if you apply this to your company-wide intranet, I won’t be held responsible for the mess. That said, I encourage you to play along and sample some of the practical aspects of organising existing content and planning new content because it is, honestly, an inspiring and liberating process. For one thing, you get to review all the stuff you have put out for the world to look at and see what you could do next. This always leaves me full of ideas on how to plug the gaps I’ve found, so I hope you are similarly motivated come… | 2010 | Relly Annett-Baker | rellyannettbaker | 2010-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/a-contentmas-epiphany/ | content |
| 226 | 226 | Documentation-Driven Design for APIs | Documentation is like gift wrapping. It seems like superfluous fluff, but your family tends to be rather disappointed when their presents arrive in supermarket carrier bags, so you have to feign some sort of attempt at making your gift look enticing. Documentation doesn’t have to be all hard work and sellotaping yourself to a table – you can make it useful and relevant. Documentation gets a pretty rough deal. It tends to get left until the end of a project, when some poor developer is assigned the ‘document project’ ticket and wades through each feature of Whizzy New API 3.0 and needs to recall exactly what each method is meant to do. That’s assuming any time is left for documentation at all. The more common outcome resembles last minute homework scribbled on a post-it note, where just the bare bones of what’s available are put out for your users, and you hope that you’ll spot the inconsistencies and mistakes before they do. Wouldn’t it be nicer for everyone if you could make documentation not only outstanding for your users, but also a valuable tool for your development team – so much so that you couldn’t imagine writing a line of code before you’d documented it? Documentation needs to have three main features: It should have total coverage and document all the features of your project. Private methods should be documented for your developers, and public features need to be available to your users. It should be consistent – a user should know what to expect from your documentation, and terminology should be accurate to your language. It should be current – and that means staying accurate as new versions of your code base are released. But you can also get these bonuses: Act as a suggested specification – a guide that will aid a developer in making something consistent and usable. It can test your API quality. It can enhance the communication skills within your development team. So how do we get our documentation to be rich and full of features, instead of a little worn out like Boxing Day lef… | 2010 | Frances Berriman | francesberriman | 2010-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/documentation-driven-design-for-apis/ | process |
| 225 | 225 | Good Ideas Grow on Paper | Great designers have one thing in common: their design process is centred on ideas; ideas that are more often than not developed on paper. Though it’s often tempting to take the path of least resistance, turning to the computer in the headlong rush to complete a project (often in the face of formidable client pressure), resist the urge and – for a truly great idea – start first on paper. The path of least resistance is often characterised by cliché and overused techniques – one per cent noise, border-radius, text-shadow – the usual suspects – techniques that are ten-a-penny at the gallery sites. Whilst all are useful, and technique and craft are important, great design isn’t about technique alone – it’s about technique in the service of good ideas. But how do we generate those ideas? Inspiration can certainly come to you out of the blue. When working as a designer in a role which often consists of incubating good ideas, however, idly waiting for the time-honoured lightbulb to appear above your head just isn’t good enough. We need to establish an environment where we tip the odds of getting good ideas in our favour. So, when faced with the blank canvas, what do we do to unlock the proverbial tidal wave of creativity? Fear not. We’re about to share with you a couple of stalwart techniques that will stand you in good stead when you need that good idea, in the face of the pressure of yet another looming deadline. Get the process right Where do ideas come from? In many cases they come from anywhere but the screen. Hence, our first commandment is to close the lid of your computer and, for a change, work on paper. It might seem strange, it might also seem like a distraction, but – trust us – the time invested here will more than pay off. Idea generation should be a process of rapid iteration, sketching and thinking aloud, all processes best undertaken in more fast paced, analogue media. Our tool of choice is the Sharpie and Flip Chart Combo©, intentionally low resolution to encourage lo-fi idea generation. In sho… | 2010 | The Standardistas | thestandardistas | 2010-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/good-ideas-grow-on-paper/ | process |
| 224 | 224 | Go Forth and Make Awesomeness | We’ve all dreamed of being a superhero: maybe that’s why we’ve ended up on the web—a place where we can do good deeds and celebrate them on a daily basis. Wear your dreams At age four, I wore my Wonder Woman Underoos around my house, my grandparents’ house, our neighbor’s house, and even around the yard. I wanted to be a superhero when I grew up. I was crushed to learn that there is no school for superheroes—no place to earn a degree in how to save the world from looming evil. Instead, I—like everyone else—was destined to go to ordinary school to focus on ABCs and 123s. Even still, I want to save the world. Intend your goodness Random acts of kindness make a difference. Books, films, and advertising campaigns tout random acts of kindness and the positive influence they can have on the world. But why do acts of kindness have to be so random? Why can’t we intend to be kind? A true superhero wakes each morning intending to perform selfless acts for the community. Why can’t we do the same thing? As a child, my mother taught me to plan to do at least three good deeds each day. And even now, years later, I put on my invisible cape looking for ways to do good. Here are some examples: slowing down to allow another driver in before me from the highway on-ramp bringing a co-worker their favorite kind of coffee or tea sharing my umbrella on a rainy day holding a door open for someone with full hands listening intently when someone shares a story complimenting someone on a job well done thanking someone for a job well done leaving a constructive, or even supportive comment on someone’s blog As you can see, these acts are simple. Doing good and being kind is partially about being aware—aware of the words we speak and the actions we take. Like superheroes, we create our own code of conduct to live by. Hopefully, we choose to put the community before ourselves (within reason) and to do our best not to damage it as we move through our lives. Take a bite out of the Apple With some thought, we can weave this ty… | 2010 | Leslie Jensen-Inman | lesliejenseninman | 2010-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/go-forth-and-make-awesomeness/ | business |
| 223 | 223 | Calculating Color Contrast | Some websites and services allow you to customize your profile by uploading pictures, changing the background color or other aspects of the design. As a customer, this personalization turns a web app into your little nest where you store your data. As a designer, letting your customers have free rein over the layout and design is a scary prospect. So what happens to all the stock text and images that are designed to work on nice white backgrounds? Even the Mac only lets you choose between two colors for the OS, blue or graphite! Opening up the ability to customize your site’s color scheme can be a recipe for disaster unless you are flexible and understand how to find maximum color contrasts. In this article I will walk you through two simple equations to determine if you should be using white or black text depending on the color of the background. The equations are both easy to implement and produce similar results. It isn’t a matter of which is better, but more the fact that you are using one at all! That way, even with the craziest of Geocities color schemes that your customers choose, at least your text will still be readable. Let’s have a look at a range of various possible colors. Maybe these are pre-made color schemes, corporate colors, or plucked from an image. Now that we have these potential background colors and their hex values, we need to find out whether the corresponding text should be in white or black, based on which has a higher contrast, therefore affording the best readability. This can be done at runtime with JavaScript or in the back-end before the HTML is served up. There are two functions I want to compare. The first, I call ’50%’. It takes the hex value and compares it to the value halfway between pure black and pure white. If the hex value is less than half, meaning it is on the darker side of the spectrum, it returns white as the text color. If the result is greater than half, it’s on the lighter side of the spectrum and returns black as the text value. In PHP: function getContra… | 2010 | Brian Suda | briansuda | 2010-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/calculating-color-contrast/ | code |
| 222 | 222 | Golden Spirals | As building blocks go, the rectangle is not one to overwhelm the designer with decisions. On the face of it, you have two options: you can set the width, and the height. But despite this apparent simplicity, there are combinations of width and height that can look unbalanced. If a rectangle is too tall and slim, it might appear precarious. If it is not tall enough, it may simply look flat. But like a guitar string that’s out of tune, you can tweak the proportions little by little until a rectangle feels, as Goldilocks said, just right. A golden rectangle has its height and width in the golden ratio, which is approximately 1:1.618. These proportions have long been recognised as being aesthetically harmonious. Whether through instruction or by intuition, artists have understood how to exploit these proportions over the centuries. Examples can be found in classical architecture, medieval book construction, and even in the recent #newtwitter redesign. A mathematical curiosity The golden rectangle is unique, in that if you remove a square section from it, what is left behind is itself a golden rectangle. The removal of a square can be repeated on the rectangle that is left behind, and then repeated again, as many times as you like. This means that the golden rectangle can be treated as a building block for recursive patterns. In this article, we will exploit this property to build a golden spiral, using only HTML and CSS. The markup The HTML we’ll use for this study is simply a series of nested <div>s. <body> <div id="container"> <div class="cycle"> <div> <div> <div> <div class="cycle"> <div> <div> <div> <div class="cycle"> <div> <div> <div> <div class="cycle"></div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </body> The first of these has the class cycle, and so do… | 2010 | Drew Neil | drewneil | 2010-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/golden-spirals/ | design |
| 221 | 221 | “Probably, Maybe, No”: The State of HTML5 Audio | With the hype around HTML5 and CSS3 exceeding levels not seen since 2005’s Ajax era, it’s worth noting that the excitement comes with good reason: the two specifications render many years of feature hacks redundant by replacing them with native features. For fun, consider how many CSS2-based rounded corners hacks you’ve probably glossed over, looking for a magic solution. These days, with CSS3, the magic is border-radius (and perhaps some vendor prefixes) followed by a coffee break. CSS3’s border-radius, box-shadow, text-shadow and gradients, and HTML5’s <canvas>, <audio> and <video> are some of the most anticipated features we’ll see put to creative (ab)use as adoption of the ‘new shiny’ grows. Developers jumping on the cutting edge are using subsets of these features to little detriment, in most cases. The more popular CSS features are design flourishes that can degrade nicely, but the current audio and video implementations in particular suffer from a number of annoyances. The new shiny: how we got here Sound involves one of the five senses, a key part of daily life for most – and yet it has been strangely absent from HTML and much of the web by default. From a simplistic perspective, it seems odd that HTML did not include support for the full multimedia experience earlier, despite the CD-ROM-based craze of the early 1990s. In truth, standards like HTML can take much longer to bake, but eventually deliver the promise of a lowered barrier to entry, consistent implementations and shiny new features now possible ‘for free’ just about everywhere. <img> was introduced early and naturally to HTML, despite having some opponents at the time. Perhaps <audio> and <video> were avoided, given the added technical complexity of decoding various multi-frame formats, plus the hardware and bandwidth limitations of the era. Perhaps there were quarrels about choosing a standard format or – more simply – maybe these elements just weren’t considered to be applicable to the HTML-based web at the time. In any event, browser plug… | 2010 | Scott Schiller | scottschiller | 2010-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/the-state-of-html5-audio/ | code |
| 220 | 220 | Finding Your Way with Static Maps | Since the introduction of the Google Maps service in 2005, online maps have taken off in a way not really possible before the invention of slippy map interaction. Although quickly followed by a plethora of similar services from both commercial and non-commercial parties, Google’s first-mover advantage, and easy-to-use developer API saw Google Maps become pretty much the de facto mapping service. It’s now so easy to add a map to a web page, there’s no reason not to. Dropping an iframe map into your page is as simple as embedding a YouTube video. But there’s one crucial drawback to both the solution Google provides for you to drop into your page and the code developers typically implement themselves – they don’t work without JavaScript. A bit about JavaScript Back in October of this year, The Yahoo! Developer Network blog ran some tests to measure how many visitors to the Yahoo! home page didn’t have JavaScript available or enabled in their browser. It’s an interesting test when you consider that the audience for the Yahoo! home page (one of the most visited pages on the web) represents about as mainstream a sample as you’ll find. If there’s any such thing as an ‘average Web user’ then this is them. The results surprised me. It varied from region to region, but at most just two per cent of visitors didn’t have JavaScript running. To be honest, I was expecting it to be higher, but this quote from the article caught my attention: While the percentage of visitors with JavaScript disabled seems like a low number, keep in mind that small percentages of big numbers are also big numbers. That’s right, of course, and it got me thinking about what that two per cent means. For many sites, two per cent is the number of visitors using the Opera web browser, using IE6, or using Mobile Safari. So, although a small percentage of the total, users without JavaScript can’t just be forgotten about, and catering for them is at the very heart of how the web is supposed to work. Starting with content in HTML, we layer on … | 2010 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2010-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/finding-your-way-with-static-maps/ | code |
| 219 | 219 | Speed Up Your Site with Delayed Content | Speed remains one of the most important factors influencing the success of any website, and the first rule of performance (according to Yahoo!) is reducing the number of HTTP requests. Over the last few years we’ve seen techniques like sprites and combo CSS/JavaScript files used to reduce the number of HTTP requests. But there’s one area where large numbers of HTTP requests are still a fact of life: the small avatars attached to the comments on articles like this one. Avatars Many sites like 24 ways use a fantastic service called Gravatar to provide user images. As a user, you can sign up to Gravatar, give them your e-mail address, and upload an image to represent you. Sites can then include your image by generating a one way hash of your e-mail address and using that to build an image URL. For example, the markup for the comments on this page looks something like this: <div> <h4><a href="http://allinthehead.com/"> <img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=13734b0cb20708f79e730809c29c3c48&size=100" class="gravatar" alt="" height="100" width="100" /> Drew McLellan </a></h4> <p>This is a great article!</p> </div> The Gravatar URL contains two parts. 100 is the size in pixels of the image we want. 13734b0cb20708f79e730809c29c3c48 is an MD5 digest of Drew’s e-mail address. Using MD5 means we can request an image for a user without sharing their e-mail address with anyone who views the source of the page. So what’s wrong with avatars? The problem is that a popular article can easily get hundreds of comments, and every one of them means another image has to be individually requested from Gravatar’s servers. Each request is small and the Gravatar servers are fast but, when you add them up, it can easily add seconds to the rendering time of a page. Worse, they can delay the loading of more important assets like the CSS required to render the main content of the page. These images aren’t critical to the page, and don’t need to be loaded up front. Let’s see if we can delay loading them until… | 2010 | Paul Hammond | paulhammond | 2010-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/speed-up-your-site-with-delayed-content/ | ux |
| 218 | 218 | Put Yourself in a Corner | Some backstory, and a shameful confession For the first couple years of high school I was one of those jerks who made only the minimal required effort in school. Strangely enough, how badly I behaved in a class was always in direct proportion to how skilled I was in the subject matter. In the subjects where I was confident that I could pass without trying too hard, I would give myself added freedom to goof off in class. Because I was a closeted lit-nerd, I was most skilled in English class. I’d devour and annotate required reading over the weekend, I knew my biblical and mythological allusions up and down, and I could give you a postmodern interpretation of a text like nobody’s business. But in class, I’d sit in the back and gossip with my friends, nap, or scribble patterns in the margins of my textbooks. I was nonchalant during discussion, I pretended not to listen during lectures. I secretly knew my stuff, so I did well enough on tests, quizzes, and essays. But I acted like an ass, and wasn’t getting the most I could out of my education. The day of humiliation, but also epiphany One day in Ms. Kaney’s AP English Lit class, I was sitting in the back doodling. An earbud was dangling under my sweater hood, attached to the CD player (remember those?) sitting in my desk. Because of this auditory distraction, the first time Ms. Kaney called my name, I barely noticed. I definitely heard her the second time, when she didn’t call my name so much as roar it. I can still remember her five feet frame stomping across the room and grabbing an empty desk. It screamed across the worn tile as she slammed it next to hers. She said, “This is where you sit now.” My face gets hot just thinking about it. I gathered my things, including the CD player (which was now impossible to conceal), and made my way up to the newly appointed Seat of Shame. There I sat, with my back to the class, eye-to-eye with Ms. Kaney. From my new vantage point I couldn’t see my friends, or the clock, or the window. All I saw were Ms. Kaney’s eyes, peeri… | 2010 | Meagan Fisher | meaganfisher | 2010-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/put-yourself-in-a-corner/ | process |
| 217 | 217 | Beyond Web Mechanics – Creating Meaningful Web Design | It was just over three years ago when I embarked on becoming a web designer, and the first opinion piece about the state of web design I came across was a conference talk by Elliot Jay Stocks called ‘Destroy the Web 2.0 Look’. Elliot’s presentation was a call to arms, a plea to web designers the world over to stop the endless reproductions of the so called ‘Web 2.0 look’. Three and a half years on from Elliot’s talk, what has changed? Well, from an aesthetic standpoint, not a whole lot. The Web 2.0 look has evolved, but it’s still with us and much of the web remains filled with cookie cutter websites that bear a striking resemblance to one another. This wouldn’t matter so much if these websites were selling comparable services or products, but they’re not. They look similar, they follow the same web design trends; their aesthetic style sends out a very similar message, yet they’re selling completely different services or products. How can you be communicating effectively with your users when your online book store is visually indistinguishable from an online cosmetic store? This just doesn’t make sense. I don’t want to belittle the current version of the Web 2.0 look for the sake of it. I want to talk about the opportunity we have as web designers to create more meaningful experiences for the people using our websites. Using design wisely gives us the ability to communicate messages, ideas and attitudes that our users will understand and connect with. Being human As human beings we respond emotionally to everything around us – people, objects, posters, packaging or websites. We also respond in different ways to different kinds of aesthetic design and style. We care about style and aesthetics deeply, whether we realise it or not. Aesthetic design has the power to attract or repel. We often make decisions based purely on aesthetics and style – and don’t retailers the world over know it! We connect attitudes and strongly held beliefs to style. Individuals will proudly associate themselves with a certain style o… | 2010 | Mike Kus | mikekus | 2010-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2010/beyond-web-mechanics-creating-meaningful-web-design/ | design |
| 216 | 216 | Styling Components - Typed CSS With Stylable | There’s been a lot of debate recently about how best to style components for web apps so that styles don’t accidentally ‘leak’ out of the component they’re meant for, or clash with other styles on the page. Elaborate CSS conventions have sprung up, such as OOCSS, SMACSS, BEM, ITCSS, and ECSS. These work well, but they are methodologies, and require everyone in the team to know them and follow them, which can be a difficult undertaking across large or distributed teams. Others just give up on CSS and put all their styles in JavaScript. Now, I’m not bashing JS, especially so close to its 22nd birthday, but CSS-in-JS has problems of its own. Browsers have 20 years experience in optimising their CSS engines, so JavaScript won’t be as fast as using real CSS, and in any case, this requires waiting for JS to download, parse, execute then render the styles. There’s another problem with CSS-in-JS, too. Since Responsive Web Design hit the streets, most designers no longer make comps in Photoshop or its equivalents; instead, they write CSS. Why hire an expensive design professional and require them to learn a new way of doing their job? A recent thread on Twitter asked “What’s your biggest gripe with CSS-in-JS?”, and the replies were illuminating: “Always having to remember to camelCase properties then spending 10min pulling hair out when you do forget”, “the cryptic domain-specific languages that each of the frameworks do just ever so slightly differently”, “When I test look and feel in browser, then I copy paste from inspector, only to have to re-write it as a JSON object”, “Lack of linting, autocomplete, and css plug-ins for colors/ incrementing/ etc”. If you’re a developer, and you’re still unconvinced, I challenge you to let designers change the font in your IDE to Zapf Chancery and choose a new colour scheme, simply because they like it better. Does that sound like fun? Will that boost your productivity? Thought not. Some chums at Wix Engineering and I wanted to see if we could square this circle. Wix-hosted sites h… | 2017 | Bruce Lawson | brucelawson | 2017-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/styling-components-typed-css-with-stylable/ | code |
| 215 | 215 | Teach the CLI to Talk Back | The CLI is a daunting tool. It’s quick, powerful, but it’s also incredibly easy to screw things up in – either with a mistyped command, or a correctly typed command used at the wrong moment. This puts a lot of people off using it, but it doesn’t have to be this way. If you’ve ever interacted with Slack’s Slackbot to set a reminder or ask a question, you’re basically using a command line interface, but it feels more like having a conversation. (My favourite Slack app is Lunch Train which helps with the thankless task of herding colleagues to a particular lunch venue on time.) Same goes with voice-operated assistants like Alexa, Siri and Google Home. There are even games, like Lifeline, where you interact with a stranded astronaut via pseudo SMS, and KOMRAD where you chat with a Soviet AI. I’m not aiming to build an AI here – my aspirations are a little more down to earth. What I’d like is to make the CLI a friendlier, more forgiving, and more intuitive tool for new or reluctant users. I want to teach it to talk back. Interactive command lines in the wild If you’ve used dev tools in the command line, you’ve probably already used an interactive prompt – something that asks you questions and responds based on your answers. Here are some examples: Yeoman If you have Yeoman globally installed, running yo will start a command prompt. The prompt asks you what you’d like to do, and gives you options with how to proceed. Seasoned users will run specific commands for these options rather than go through this prompt, but it’s a nice way to start someone off with using the tool. npm If you’re a Node.js developer, you’re probably familiar with typing npm init to initialise a project. This brings up prompts that will populate a package.json manifest file for that project. The alternative would be to expect the user to craft their own package.json, which is more error-prone since it’s in JSON format, so something as trivial as an extraneous comma can throw an error. Snyk Snyk is a dev tool that checks for known vulnerabilities… | 2017 | Anna Debenham | annadebenham | 2017-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/teach-the-cli-to-talk-back/ | code |
| 214 | 214 | Christmas Gifts for Your Future Self: Testing the Web Platform | In the last year I became a CSS specification editor, on a mission to revitalise CSS Multi-column layout. This has involved learning about many things, one of which has been the Web Platform Tests project. In this article, I’m going to share what I’ve learned about testing the web platform. I’m also going to explain why I think you might want to get involved too. Why test? At one time or another it is likely that you have been frustrated by an issue where you wrote some valid CSS, and one browser did one thing with it and another something else entirely. Experiences like this make many web developers feel that browser vendors don’t work together, or they are actively doing things in a different way to one another to the detriment of those of us who use the platform. You’ll be glad to know that isn’t the case, and that the people who work on browsers want things to be consistent just as much as we do. It turns out however that interoperability, which is the official term for “works in all browsers”, is hard. Thanks to web-platform-tests, a test from another browser vendor just found genuine bug in our code before we shipped 😻— Brian Birtles (@brianskold) February 10, 2017 In order for W3C Specifications to move on to become W3C Recommendations we need to have interoperable implementations. 6.2.4 Implementation Experience Implementation experience is required to show that a specification is sufficiently clear, complete, and relevant to market needs, to ensure that independent interoperable implementations of each feature of the specification will be realized. While no exhaustive list of requirements is provided here, when assessing that there is adequate implementation experience the Director will consider (though not be limited to): is each feature of the current specification implemented, and how is this demonstrated? are there independent interoperable implementations of the current specification? are there implementations created by people other than the authors of the specification? are implementations publi… | 2017 | Rachel Andrew | rachelandrew | 2017-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/testing-the-web-platform/ | code |
| 213 | 213 | Accessibility Through Semantic HTML | Working on Better, a tracker blocker, I spend an awful lot of my time with my nose in other people’s page sources. I’m mostly there looking for harmful tracking scripts, but often notice the HTML on some of the world’s most popular sites is in a sad state of neglect. What does neglected HTML look like? Here’s an example of the markup I found on a news site just yesterday. There’s a bit of text, a few links, and a few images. But mostly it’s div elements. <div class="block_wrapper"> <div class="block_content"> <div class="box"> <div id="block1242235"> <div class="column"> <div class="column_content"> <a class="close" href="#"><i class="fa"></i></a> </div> <div class="btn account_login"></div> Some text <span>more text</span> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> divs and spans, why do we use them so much? While I find tracking scripts completely inexcusable, I do understand why people write HTML like the above. As developers, we like to use divs and spans as they’re generic elements. They come with no associated default browser styles or behaviour except that div displays as a block, and span displays inline. If we make our page up out of divs and spans, we know we’ll have absolute control over styles and behaviour cross-browser, and we won’t need a CSS reset. Absolute control may seem like an advantage, but there’s a greater benefit to less generic, more semantic elements. Browsers render semantic elements with their own distinct styles and behaviours. For example, button looks and behaves differently from a. And ul is different from ol. These defaults are shortcuts to a more usable and accessible web. They provide consistent and well-tested components for common interactions. Semantic elements aid usability A good example of how browser defaults can benefit the usability of an element is in the <select> option menu. In Safari on the desktop, the browser renders <select> as a popover-style menu. On a touchscreen, Safari overl… | 2017 | Laura Kalbag | laurakalbag | 2017-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/accessibility-through-semantic-html/ | code |
| 212 | 212 | Refactoring Your Way to a Design System | I love refactoring code. Absolutely love it. There’s something about taking a piece of UI or a bit of code and reworking it in a way that is simpler, modular, and reusable that makes me incredibly happy. I also love design systems work. It gives hybrids like me a home. It seems like everyone is talking about design systems right now. Design systems teams are perfect for those who enjoy doing architectural work and who straddle the line between designer and developer. Una Kravets recently identified some of the reasons that design systems fail, and chief among them are lack of buy-in, underlying architecture, and communication. While it’s definitely easier to establish these before project work begins, that doesn’t mean it is the only path to success. It’s a privilege to work on a greenfield project, and one that is not afforded to many. Companies with complex and/or legacy codebases may not be able to support a full rewrite of their product. In addition, many people feel overwhelmed at the thought of creating a complete system and are at a loss of how or where to even begin the process. This is where refactoring comes into play. According to Martin Fowler, “refactoring is the process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code yet improves its internal structure.” It’s largely invisible work, and if you do it right, the end user will never know the difference. What it will do is provide a decent foundation to begin more systematic work. Build a solid foundation When I was first asked to create Pantsuit, the design system for Hillary for America, I was tasked with changing our codebase to be more modular and scalable, without changing the behavior or visual design of the UI. We needed a system in place that would allow for the rapid creation of new projects while maintaining a consistent visual language. In essence, I was asked to refactor our code into a design system. During that refactor, I focused the majority of my efforts on creating a scalable arch… | 2017 | Mina Markham | minamarkham | 2017-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/refactoring-your-way-to-a-design-system/ | code |
| 211 | 211 | Automating Your Accessibility Tests | Accessibility is one of those things we all wish we were better at. It can lead to a bunch of questions like: how do we make our site better? How do we test what we have done? Should we spend time each day going through our site to check everything by hand? Or just hope that everyone on our team has remembered to check their changes are accessible? This is where automated accessibility tests can come in. We can set up automated tests and have them run whenever someone makes a pull request, and even alongside end-to-end tests, too. Automated tests can’t cover everything however; only 20 to 50% of accessibility issues can be detected automatically. For example, we can’t yet automate the comparison of an alt attribute with an image’s content, and there are some screen reader tests that need to be carried out by hand too. To ensure our site is as accessible as possible, we will still need to carry out manual tests, and I will cover these later. First, I’m going to explain how I implemented automated accessibility tests on Elsevier’s ecommerce pages, and share some of the lessons I learnt along the way. Picking the right tool One of the hardest, but most important parts of creating our automated accessibility tests was choosing the right tool. We began by investigating aXe CLI, but soon realised it wouldn’t fit our requirements. It couldn’t check pages that required a visitor to log in, so while we could test our product pages, we couldn’t test any customer account pages. Instead we moved over to Pa11y. Its beforeScript step meant we could log into the site and test pages such as the order history. The example below shows the how the beforeScript step completes a login form and then waits for the login to complete before testing the page: beforeScript: function(page, options, next) { // An example function that can be used to make sure changes have been confirmed before continuing to run Pa11y function waitUntil(condition, retries, waitOver) { page.evaluate(condition, function(err, result) { if (result … | 2017 | Seren Davies | serendavies | 2017-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/automating-your-accessibility-tests/ | code |
| 210 | 210 | Stop Leaving Animation to the Last Minute | Our design process relies heavily on static mockups as deliverables and this makes it harder than it needs to be to incorporate UI animation in our designs. Talking through animation ideas and dancing out the details of those ideas can be fun; but it’s not always enough to really evaluate or invest in animated design solutions. By including deliverables that encourage discussing animation throughout your design process, you can set yourself (and your team) up for creating meaningful UI animations that feel just as much a part of the design as your colour palette and typeface. You can get out of that “running out of time to add in the animation” trap by deliberately including animation in the early phases of your design process. This will give you both the space to treat animation as a design tool, and the room to iterate on UI animation ideas to come up with higher quality solutions. Two deliverables that can be especially useful for this are motion comps and animated interactive prototypes. Motion comps - an animation deliverable Motion comps (also called animatics or motion mock-ups) are usually video representation of UI animations. They are used to explore the details of how a particular animation might play out. And they’re most often made with timeline-based tools like Adobe After Effects, Adobe Animate, or Tumult Hype. The most useful things about motion comps is how they allow designers and developers to share the work of creating animations. (Instead of pushing all the responsibility of animation on one group or the other.) For example, imagine you’re working on a design that has a content panel that can either be open or closed. You might create a mockup like the one below including the two different views: the closed state and the open state. If you’re working with only static deliverables, these two artboards might be exactly what you handoff to developers along with the instruction to animate between the two. On the surface that seems pretty straight forward, but even with this relatively simple… | 2017 | Val Head | valhead | 2017-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/stop-leaving-animation-to-the-last-minute/ | design |
| 209 | 209 | Feeding the Audio Graph | In 2004, I was given an iPod. I count this as one of the most intuitive pieces of technology I’ve ever owned. It wasn’t because of the the snazzy (colour!) menus or circular touchpad. I loved how smoothly it fitted into my life. I could plug in my headphones and listen to music while I was walking around town. Then when I got home, I could plug it into an amplifier and carry on listening there. There was no faff. It didn’t matter if I could find my favourite mix tape, or if my WiFi was flakey - it was all just there. Nowadays, when I’m trying to pair my phone with some Bluetooth speakers, or can’t find my USB-to-headphone jack, or even access any music because I don’t have cellular reception; I really miss this simplicity. The Web Audio API I think the Web Audio API feels kind of like my iPod did. It’s different from most browser APIs - rather than throwing around data, or updating DOM elements - you plug together a graph of audio nodes, which the browser uses to generate, process, and play sounds. The thing I like about it is that you can totally plug it into whatever you want, and it’ll mostly just work. So, let’s get started. First of all we want an audio source. <audio src="night-owl.mp3" controls /> (Song - Night Owl by Broke For Free) This totally works. However, it’s not using the Web Audio API, so we can’t access or modify the sound it makes. To hook this up to our audio graph, we can use an AudioSourceNode. This captures the sound from the element, and lets us connect to other nodes in a graph. const audioCtx = new AudioContext() const audio = document.querySelector('audio') const input = audioCtx.createAudioSourceNode(audio) input.connect(audioCtx.destination) Great. We’ve made something that looks and sounds exactly the same as it did before. Go us. Gain Let’s plug in a GainNode - this allows you to alter the amplitude (volume) of an an audio stream. We can hook this node up to an <input> element by setting the gain property of the node. (The syntax for this is kind of weird because it’s an Au… | 2017 | Ben Foxall | benfoxall | 2017-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/feeding-the-audio-graph/ | code |
| 208 | 208 | All That Glisters | Tradition has it that at this time of year, families gather together, sit, eat and share stories. It’s an opportunity for the wisdom of the elders to be passed down to the younger members of the tribe. Tradition also has it that we should chase cheese downhill and dunk the nice lady to prove she’s a witch, so maybe let’s not put too much stock in that. I’ve been building things on the web professionally for about twenty years, and although the web has changed immeasurably, it’s probably not changed as much as I have. While I can happily say I’m not the young (always right, always arrogant) developer that I once was, unfortunately I’m now an approaching-middle-age developer who thinks he’s always right and on top of it is extremely pompous. What can you do? Nature has devised this system with the distinct advantage of allowing us to always be right, and only ever wrong in the future or in the past. So let’s roll with it. Increasingly, there seems to be a sense of fatigue within our industry. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on whatever the latest tool or technology is, something new comes out to replace it. Suddenly you find that you’ve invested precious time learning something new and it’s already old hat. The pace of change is so rapid, that new developers don’t know where to start, and experienced developers don’t know where it ends. With that in mind, here’s some fireside thoughts from a pompous old developer, that I hope might bring some Christmas comfort. Reliable and boring beats shiny and new There are so many new tools, frameworks, techniques, styles and libraries to learn. You know what? You don’t have to use them. You’re not a bad developer if you use Grunt even though others have switched to Gulp or Brunch or Webpack or Banana Sandwich. It’s probably misguided to spend lots of project time messing around with build tool fashions when your so last year build tool is already doing what you need. Just a little reminder that it’s about 100 times more important what you build than how you build it.— … | 2017 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2017-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/all-that-glisters/ | business |
| 207 | 207 | Want to Break Out of Comparison Syndrome? Do a Media Detox | “Comparison is the thief of joy.” —Theodore Roosevelt I grew up in an environment of perpetual creativity and inventiveness. My father Dennis built and flew experimental aircraft as a hobby. During my entire childhood, there was an airplane fuselage in the garage instead of a car. My mother Deloria was a self-taught master artisan who could quickly acquire any skills that it took to work with fabric and weaving. She could sew any garment she desired, and was able to weave intricate wall hangings just by looking at a black and white photos in magazines. My older sister Diane blossomed into a consummate fine artist who drew portraits with uncanny likeness, painted murals, and studied art and architecture. In addition, she loved good food and had a genius for cooking and baking, which converged in her creating remarkable art pieces out of cake that were incredibly delicious to boot. Yes. This was the household in which I grew up. While there were countless positives to being surrounded by people who were compelled to create, there was also a downside to it. I incessantly compared myself to my parents and older sister and always found myself lacking. It wasn’t a fair comparison, but tell that to a sensitive kid who wanted to fit in to her family by being creative as well. From my early years throughout my teens, I convinced myself that I would never understand how to build an airplane or at least be as proficient with tools as my father, the aeronautical engineer. Even though my sister was six years older than I was, I lamented that I would never be as good a visual artist as she was. And I marveled at my mother’s seemingly magical ability to make and tailor clothes and was certain that I would never attain her level of mastery. This habit of comparing myself to others grew over the years, continuing to subtly and effectively undermine my sense of self. I had almost reached an uneasy truce with my comparison habit when social media happened. As an early adopter of Twitter, I loved staying connected to people I met a… | 2017 | Denise Jacobs | denisejacobs | 2017-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/do-a-media-detox/ | process |
| 206 | 206 | Getting Hardboiled with CSS Custom Properties | Custom Properties are a fabulous new feature of CSS and have widespread support in contemporary browsers. But how do we handle browsers without support for CSS Custom Properties? Do we wait until those browsers are lying dead in a ditch before we use them? Do we tool up and prop up our CSS using a post-processor? Or do we get tough? Do we get hardboiled? Previously only pre-processing tools like LESS and Sass enabled developers to use variables in their stylesheets, but now Custom Properties have brought variables natively to CSS. How do you write a custom property? It’s hardly a mystery. Simply add two dashes to the start of a style rule. Like this: --color-text-default : black; If you’re more the underscore type, try this: --color_text_default : black; Hyphens or underscores are allowed in property names, but don’t be a chump and try to use spaces. Custom property names are also case-sensitive, so --color-text-default and --Color_Text_Default are two distinct properties. To use a custom property in your style rules, var() tells a browser to retrieve the value of a property. In the next example, the browser retrieves the black colour from the color-text-default variable and applies it to the body element: body { color : var(--color-text-default); } Like variables in LESS or Sass, CSS Custom Properties mean you don’t have to be a dumb mug and repeat colour, font, or size values multiple times in your stylesheets. Unlike a preprocessor variable though, CSS Custom Properties use the cascade, can be modified by media queries and other state changes, and can also be manipulated by Javascript. (Serg Hospodarets wrote a fabulous primer on CSS Custom Properties where he dives deeper into the code and possible applications.) Browser support Now it’s about this time that people normally mention browser support. So what about support for CSS Custom Properties? Current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari are all good. Internet Explorer 11 and before? Opera Mini? Nasty. Sound familiar? Can I Use css… | 2017 | Andy Clarke | andyclarke | 2017-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/getting-hardboiled-with-css-custom-properties/ | code |
| 205 | 205 | Why Design Systems Fail | Design systems are so hot right now, and for good reason. They promote a modular approach to building a product, and ensure organizational unity and stability via reusable code snippets and utility styles. They make prototyping a breeze, and provide a common language for both designers and developers. A design system is a culmination of several individual components, which can include any or all of the following (and more): Style guide or visual pattern library Design tooling (e.g. Sketch Library) Component library (where the components live in code) Code usage guidelines and documentation Design usage documentation Voice and tone guideline Animation language guideline Design systems are standalone (internal or external) products, and have proven to be very effective means of design-driven development. However, in order for a design system to succeed, everyone needs to get on board. I’d like to go over a few considerations to ensure design system success and what could hinder that success. Organizational Support Put simply, any product, including internal products, needs support. Something as cross-functional as a design system, which spans every vertical project team, needs support from the top and bottom levels of your organization. What I mean by that is that there needs to be top-level support from project managers up through VP’s to see the value of a design system, to provide resources for its implementation, and advocate for its use company-wide. This is especially important in companies where such systems are being put in place on top of existing, crufty codebases, because it may mean there needs to be some time and effort put in the calendar for refactoring work. Support from the bottom-up means that designers and engineers of all levels also need to support this system and feel responsibility for it. A design system is an organization’s product, and everyone should feel confident contributing to it. If your design system supports external clients as well (such as contractors), they too can become val… | 2017 | Una Kravets | unakravets | 2017-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2017/why-design-systems-fail/ | process |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 192 | 192 | Cleaner Code with CSS3 Selectors | The parts of CSS3 that seem to grab the most column inches on blogs and in articles are the shiny bits. Rounded corners, text shadow and new ways to achieve CSS layouts are all exciting and bring with them all kinds of possibilities for web design. However what really gets me, as a developer, excited is a bit more mundane. In this article I’m going to take a look at some of the ways our front and back-end code will be simplified by CSS3, by looking at the ways we achieve certain visual effects now in comparison to how we will achieve them in a glorious, CSS3-supported future. I’m also going to demonstrate how we can use these selectors now with a little help from JavaScript – which can work out very useful if you find yourself in a situation where you can’t change markup that is being output by some server-side code. The wonder of nth-child So why does nth-child get me so excited? Here is a really common situation, the designer would like the tables in the application to look like this: Setting every other table row to a different colour is a common way to enhance readability of long rows. The tried and tested way to implement this is by adding a class to every other row. If you are writing the markup for your table by hand this is a bit of a nuisance, and if you stick a row in the middle you have to change the rows the class is applied to. If your markup is generated by your content management system then you need to get the server-side code to add that class – if you have access to that code. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Striping every other row - using classes</title> <style type="text/css"> body { padding: 40px; margin: 0; font: 0.9em Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } table { border-collapse: collapse; border: 1px solid #124412; width: 600px; } th { border: 1px solid #124412; background-color: #334f33; color: #fff; padding: 0.4em; text-… | 2009 | Rachel Andrew | rachelandrew | 2009-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/cleaner-code-with-css3-selectors/ | code |
| 191 | 191 | CSS Animations | Friend: You should learn how to write CSS! Me: … Friend: CSS; Cascading Style Sheets. If you’re serious about web design, that’s the next thing you should learn. Me: What’s wrong with <font> tags? That was 8 years ago. Thanks to the hard work of Jeffrey, Andy, Andy, Cameron, Colly, Dan and many others, learning how to decently markup a website and write lightweight stylesheets was surprisingly easy. They made it so easy even a complete idiot (OH HAI) was able to quickly master it. And then… nothing. For a long time, it seemed like there wasn’t happening anything in the land of CSS, time stood still. Once you knew the basics, there wasn’t anything new to keep up with. It looked like a great band split, but people just kept re-releasing their music in various “Best Of!” or “Remastered!” albums. Fast forward a couple of years to late 2006. On the official WebKit blog Surfin’ Safari, there’s an article about something called CSS animations. Great new stuff to play with, but only supported by nightly builds (read: very, very beta) of WebKit. In the following months, they release other goodies, like CSS gradients, CSS reflections, CSS masks, and even more CSS animation sexiness. Whoa, looks like the band got back together, found their second youth, and went into overdrive! The problem was that if you wanted to listen to their new albums, you had to own some kind of new high-tech player no one on earth (besides some early adopters) owned. Back in the time machine. It is now late 2009, close to Christmas. Things have changed. Browsers supporting these new toys are widely available left and right. Even non-techies are using these advanced browsers to surf the web on a daily basis! Epic win? Almost, but at least this gives us enough reason to start learning how we could use all this new CSS voodoo. On Monday, Natalie Downe showed you a good tutorial on Going Nuts with CSS Transitions. Today, I’m taking it one step further… Howto: A basic spinner No matter how fast internet tubes or servers are, we’ll always need spi… | 2009 | Tim Van Damme | timvandamme | 2009-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/css-animations/ | code |
| 190 | 190 | Self-Testing Pages with JavaScript | Working at an agency I am involved more and more on projects in which client side code is developed internally then sent out to a separate team for implementation. You provide static HTML, CSS and JavaScript which then get placed into the CMS and brought to life as an actual website. As you can imagine this can sometimes lead to frustrations. However many safeguards you include, handing over your code to someone else is always a difficult thing to do effectively. In this article I will show you how you can create a JavaScript implementation checker and that will give you more time for drink based activity as your web site and apps are launched quicker and with less unwanted drama! An all too frequent occurrence You’ve been working on a project for weeks, fixed all your bugs and send it to be implemented. You hear nothing and assume all is going well then a few days before it’s meant to launch you get an email from the implementation team informing you of bugs in your code that you need to urgently fix. The 24ways website with a misspelt ID for the years menu Being paranoid you trawl through the preview URL, check they have the latest files, check your code for errors then notice that a required HTML attribute has been omitted from the build and therefore CSS or JavaScript you’ve hooked onto that particular attribute isn’t being applied and that’s what is causing the “bug”. It takes you seconds drafting an email informing them of this, it takes then seconds putting the required attribute in and low and behold the bug is fixed, everyone is happy but you’ve lost a good few hours of your life – this time could have been better spent in the pub. I’m going to show you a way that these kind of errors can be alerted immediately during implementation of your code and ensure that when you are contacted you know that there actually is a bug to fix. You probably already know the things that could be omitted from a build and look like bugs so you’ll soon be creating tests to look for these and alert when they are not … | 2009 | Ross Bruniges | rossbruniges | 2009-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/self-testing-pages-with-javascript/ | process |
| 189 | 189 | Ignorance Is Bliss | This is a true story. Meet Mike Mike’s a smart guy. He knows a great browser when he sees one. He uses Firefox on his Windows PC at work and Safari on his Mac at home. Mike asked us to design a Web site for his business. So we did. We wanted to make the best Web site for Mike that we could, so we used all of the CSS tools that are available today. That meant using RGBa colour to layer elements, border-radius to add subtle rounded corners and (possibly most experimental of all new CSS), generated gradients. The home page Mike sees in Safari on his Mac Mike loves what he sees. Meet Sam Sam works with Mike. She uses Internet Explorer 7 because it came on the Windows laptop that the company bought her when she joined. The home page Sam sees in Internet Explorer 7 on her PC Sam loves the new Web site too. How could both of them be happy when they experienced the Web site differently? The new WYSIWYG When I first presented my designs to Mike and Sam, I showed them a Web page made with HTML and CSS in their respective browsers and not a picture of a Web page. By showing neither a static image of my design, I set none of the false expectations that, by definition, a static Photoshop or Fireworks visual would have established. Mike saw rounded corners and subtle shadows in Firefox and Safari. Sam saw something equally as nice, just a little different, in Internet Explorer. Both were very happy because they saw something that they liked. Neither knew, or needed to know, about the subtle differences between browsers. Their users don’t need to know either. That’s because in the real world, people using the Web don’t find a Web site that they like, then open up another browser to check that it looks they same. They simply buy what they came to buy, read what what they came to read, do what they came to do, then get on with their lives in blissful ignorance of what they might be seeing in another browser. Often when I talk or write about using progressive CSS, people ask me, “How do you convince clients to … | 2009 | Andy Clarke | andyclarke | 2009-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/ignorance-is-bliss/ | business |
| 188 | 188 | Don't Lose Your :focus | For many web designers, accessibility conjures up images of blind users with screenreaders, and the difficulties in making sites accessible to this particular audience. Of course, accessibility covers a wide range of situations that go beyond the extreme example of screenreader users. And while it’s true that making a complex site accessible can often be a daunting prospect, there are also many small things that don’t take anything more than a bit of judicious planning, are very easy to test (without having to buy expensive assistive technology), and can make all the difference to certain user groups. In this short article we’ll focus on keyboard accessibility and how careless use of CSS can potentially make your sites completely unusable. Keyboard Access Users who for whatever reason can’t use a mouse will employ a keyboard (or keyboard-like custom interface) to navigate around web pages. By default, they will use TAB and SHIFT + TAB to move from one focusable element (links, form controls and area) of a page to the next. Note: in OS X, you’ll first need to turn on full keyboard access under System Preferences > Keyboard and Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts. Safari under Windows needs to have the option Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage in Preferences > Advanced enabled. Opera is the odd one out, as it has a variety of keyboard navigation options – the most relevant here being spatial navigation via Shift+Down, Shift+Up, Shift+Left, and Shift+Right). But I Don’t Like Your Dotted Lines… To show users where they are within a page, browsers place an outline around the element that currently has focus. The “problem” with these default outlines is that some browsers (Internet Explorer and Firefox) also display them when a user clicks on a focusable element with the mouse. Particularly on sites that make extensive use of image replacement on links with “off left” techniques this can create very unsightly outlines that stretch from the replaced element all the way to the left edge of the browser. Outline … | 2009 | Patrick Lauke | patricklauke | 2009-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/dont-lose-your-focus/ | code |
| 187 | 187 | A New Year's Resolution | The end of 2009 is fast approaching. Yet another year has passed in a split second. Our Web Designing careers are one year older and it’s time to reflect on the highs and lows of 2009. What was your greatest achievement and what could you have done better? Perhaps, even more importantly, what are your goals for 2010? Something that I noticed in 2009 is that being a web designer 24/7; it’s easy to get consumed by the web. It’s easy to get caught up in the blog posts, CSS galleries, web trends and Twitter! Living in this bubble can lead to one’s work becoming stale, boring and basically like everyone else’s work on the web. No designer wants this. So, I say on 1st January 2010 let’s make it our New Year’s resolution to create something different, something special or even ground-breaking! Make it your goal to break the mold of current web design trends and light the way for your fellow web designer comrades! Of course I wouldn’t let you embark on the New Year empty handed. To help you on your way I’ve compiled a few thoughts and ideas to get your brains ticking! Don’t design for the web, just design A key factor in creating something original and fresh for the web is to stop thinking in terms of web design. The first thing we need to do is forget the notion of headers, footers, side bars etc. A website doesn’t necessarily need any of these, so even before we’ve started we’ve already limited our design possibilities by thinking in these very conventional and generally accepted web terms. The browser window is a 2D canvas like any other and we can do with it what we like. With this in mind we can approach web design from a fresh perspective. We can take inspiration for web design from editorial design, packaging design, comics, poster design, album artwork, motion design, street signage and anything else you can think of. Web design is way more than the just the web and by taking this more wide angled view of what web design is and can be you’ll find there are a thousand more exiting design possibilities. N… | 2009 | Mike Kus | mikekus | 2009-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/a-new-years-resolution/ | business |
| 186 | 186 | The Web Is Your CMS | It is amazing what you can do these days with the services offered on the web. Flickr stores terabytes of photos for us and converts them automatically to all kind of sizes, finds people in them and even allows us to edit them online. YouTube does almost the same complete job with videos, LinkedIn allows us to maintain our CV, Delicious our bookmarks and so on. We don’t have to do these tasks ourselves any more, as all of these systems also come with ways to use the data in the form of Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs for short. APIs give us raw data when we send requests telling the system what we want to get back. The problem is that every API has a different idea of what is a simple way of accessing this data and in which format to give it back. Making it easier to access APIs What we need is a way to abstract the pains of different data formats and authentication formats away from the developer — and this is the purpose of the Yahoo Query Language, or YQL for short. Libraries like jQuery and YUI make it easy and reliable to use JavaScript in browsers (yes, even IE6) and YQL allows us to access web services and even the data embedded in web documents in a simple fashion – SQL style. Select * from the web and filter it the way I want YQL is a web service that takes a few inputs itself: A query that tells it what to get, update or access An output format – XML, JSON, JSON-P or JSON-P-X A callback function (if you defined JSON-P or JSON-P-X) You can try it out yourself – check out this link to get back Flickr photos for the search term ‘santa’*%20from%20flickr.photos.search%20where%20text%3D%22santa%22&format=xml in XML format. The YQL query for this is select * from flickr.photos.search where text="santa" The easiest way to take your first steps with YQL is to look at the console. There you get sample queries, access to all the data sources available to you and you can easily put together complex queries. In this article, however, let’s use PHP to put together a web page that pulls i… | 2009 | Christian Heilmann | chrisheilmann | 2009-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/the-web-is-your-cms/ | code |
| 185 | 185 | Make Your Mockup in Markup | We aren’t designing copies of web pages, we’re designing web pages. Andy Clarke, via Quotes on Design The old way I used to think the best place to design a website was in an image editor. I’d create a pixel-perfect PSD filled with generic content, send it off to the client, go through several rounds of revisions, and eventually create the markup. Does this process sound familiar? You’re not alone. In a very scientific and official survey I conducted, close to 90% of respondents said they design in Photoshop before the browser. That process is whack, yo! Recently, thanks in large part to the influence of design hero Dan Cederholm, I’ve come to the conclusion that a website’s design should begin where it’s going to live: in the browser. Die Photoshop, die Some of you may be wondering, “what’s so bad about using Photoshop for the bulk of my design?” Well, any seasoned designer will tell you that working in Photoshop is akin to working in a minefield: you never know when it’s going to blow up in your face. The application Adobe Photoshop CS4 has unexpectedly ruined your day. Photoshop’s propensity to crash at crucial moments is a running joke in the industry, as is its barely usable interface. And don’t even get me started on the hot, steaming pile of crap that is text rendering. Text rendered in Photoshop (left) versus Safari (right). Crashing and text rendering issues suck, but we’ve learned to live with them. The real issue with using Photoshop for mockups is the expectations you’re setting for a client. When you send the client a static image of the design, you’re not giving them the whole picture — they can’t see how a fluid grid would function, how the design will look in a variety of browsers, basic interactions like :hover effects, or JavaScript behaviors. For more on the disadvantages to showing clients designs as images rather than websites, check out Andy Clarke’s Time to stop showing clients static design visuals. A necessary evil? In the past we’ve put up with Photoshop because it … | 2009 | Meagan Fisher | meaganfisher | 2009-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/make-your-mockup-in-markup/ | process |
| 184 | 184 | Spruce It Up | The landscape of web typography is changing quickly these days. We’ve gone from the wild west days of sIFR to Cufón to finally seeing font embedding seeing wide spread adoption by browser developers (and soon web designers) with @font-face. For those who’ve felt limited by the typographic possibilities before, this has been a good year. As Mark Boulton has so eloquently elucidated, @font-face embedding doesn’t come without its drawbacks. Font files can be quite large and FOUT—that nasty flash of unstyled text—can be a distraction for users. Data URIs We can battle FOUT by using Data URIs. A Data URI allows the font to be encoded right into the CSS file. When the font comes with the CSS, the flash of unstyled text is mitigated. No extra HTTP requests are required. Don’t be a grinch, though. Sending hundreds of kilobytes down the pipe still isn’t great. Sometimes, all we want to do is spruce up our site with a little typographic sugar. Be Selective Dan Cederholm’s SimpleBits is an attractive site. Take a look at the ampersand within the header of his site. It’s the lovely (and free) Goudy Bookletter 1911 available from The League of Movable Type. The Opentype format is a respectable 28KB. Nothing too crazy but hold on here. Mr. Cederholm is only using the ampersand! Ouch. That’s a lot of bandwidth just for one character. Can we optimize a font like we can an image? Yes. Image optimization essentially works by removing unnecessary image data such as colour data, hidden comments or using compression algorithms. How do you remove unnecessary information from a font? Subsetting. If you’re the adventurous type, grab a copy of FontForge, which is an open source font editing tool. You can open the font, view and edit any of the glyphs and then re-generate the font. The interface is a little clunky but you’ll be able to select any character you don’t want and then cut the glyphs. Re-generate your font and you’ve now got a smaller file. There are certainly more optimizations that can also be made such as … | 2009 | Jonathan Snook | jonathansnook | 2009-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/spruce-it-up/ | code |
| 183 | 183 | Designing For The Switch | For a long time on the web, we’ve been typographically spoilt. Yes, you heard me correctly. Think about it: our computers come with web fonts already installed; fonts that have been designed specifically to work well online and at small size; and fonts that we can be sure other people have too. Yes, we’ve been spoilt. We don’t need to think about using Verdana, Arial, Georgia or Cambria. Yet, for a long time now, designers have felt we needed more. We want to choose whatever typeface we feel necessary for our designs. We did bad things along the way in pursuit of this goal such as images for text. Smart people dreamt up tools to help us such as sIFR, or Cufón. Only fairly recently, @font-face is supported in most browsers. The floodgates are opening. It really is the dawn of a new typographic era on the web. And we must tread carefully. The New Typesetters Many years ago, before the advent of desktop publishing, if you wanted words set in a particular typeface, you had to go to a Typesetter. A Typesetter, or Compositor, as they were sometimes called, was a person whose job it was to take the written word (in the form of a document or manuscript) and ‘set’ the type in the desired typeface. The designer would chose what typeface they wanted – and all the ligatures, underlines, italics and whatnot – and then scribble all over the manuscript so the typesetter could set the correct type. Then along came Desktop Publishing and every Tom, Dick and Harry could choose type on their computer and an entire link in the typographic chain was removed within just a few years. Well, that’s progress I guess. That was until six months ago when Typesetting was reborn on the web in the guise of a font service: Typekit. Typekit – and services like Typekit such as Typotheque, Kernest and the upcoming Fontdeck – are typesetting services for the web. You supply them with your content, in the form of a webpage, and they provide you with some JavaScript to render that webpage in the typeface you’ve specified simply by adding … | 2009 | Mark Boulton | markboulton | 2009-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/designing-for-the-switch/ | design |
| 182 | 182 | Breaking Out The Edges of The Browser | HTML5 contains more than just the new entities for a more meaningful document, it also contains an arsenal of JavaScript APIs. So many in fact, that some APIs have outgrown the HTML5 spec’s backyard and have been sent away to grow up all on their own and been given the prestigious honour of being specs in their own right. So when I refer to (bendy finger quote) “HTML5”, I mean the HTML5 specification and a handful of other specifications that help us authors build web applications. Examples of those specs I would include in the umbrella term would be: geolocation, web storage, web databases, web sockets and web workers, to name a few. For all you guys and gals, on this special 2009 series of 24 ways, I’m just going to focus on data storage and offline applications: boldly taking your browser where no browser has gone before! Web Storage The Web Storage API is basically cookies on steroids, a unhealthy dosage of steroids. Cookies are always a pain to work with. First of all you have the problem of setting, changing and deleting them. Typically solved by Googling and blindly relying on PPK’s solution. If that wasn’t enough, there’s the 4Kb limit that some of you have hit when you really don’t want to. The Web Storage API gets around all of the hoops you have to jump through with cookies. Storage supports around 5Mb of data per domain (the spec’s recommendation, but it’s open to the browsers to implement anything they like) and splits in to two types of storage objects: sessionStorage – available to all pages on that domain while the window remains open localStorage – available on the domain until manually removed Support Ignoring beta browsers for our support list, below is a list of the major browsers and their support for the Web Storage API: Latest: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari (desktop & mobile/iPhone) Partial: Google Chrome (only supports localStorage) Not supported: Opera (as of 10.10) Usage Both sessionStorage and localStorage support the same interface for accessing their co… | 2009 | Remy Sharp | remysharp | 2009-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/breaking-out-the-edges-of-the-browser/ | code |
| 181 | 181 | Working With RGBA Colour | When Tim and I were discussing the redesign of this site last year, one of the clear goals was to have a graphical style without making the pages heavy with a lot of images. When we launched, a lot of people were surprised that the design wasn’t built with PNGs. Instead we’d used RGBA colour values, which is part of the CSS3 specification. What is RGBA Colour? We’re all familiar with specifying colours in CSS using by defining the mix of red, green and blue light required to achieve our tone. This is fine and dandy, but whatever values we specify have one thing in common — the colours are all solid, flat, and well, a bit boring. Flat RGB colours CSS3 introduces a couple of new ways to specify colours, and one of those is RGBA. The A stands for Alpha, which refers to the level of opacity of the colour, or to put it another way, the amount of transparency. This means that we can set not only the red, green and blue values, but also control how much of what’s behind the colour shows through. Like with layers in Photoshop. Don’t We Have Opacity Already? The ability to set the opacity on a colour differs subtly from setting the opacity on an element using the CSS opacity property. Let’s look at an example. Here we have an H1 with foreground and background colours set against a page with a patterned background. Heading with no transparency applied h1 { color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); } By setting the CSS opacity property, we can adjust the transparency of the entire element and its contents: Heading with 50% opacity on the element h1 { color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); opacity: 0.5; } RGBA colour gives us something different – the ability to control the opacity of the individual colours rather than the entire element. So we can set the opacity on just the background: 50% opacity on just the background colour h1 { color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.5); } Or leave the background solid and change the opacity on just th… | 2009 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2009-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/working-with-rgba-colour/ | code |
| 180 | 180 | Going Nuts with CSS Transitions | I’m going to show you how CSS 3 transforms and WebKit transitions can add zing to the way you present images on your site. Laying the foundations First we are going to make our images look like mini polaroids with captions. Here’s the markup: <div class="polaroid pull-right"> <img src="../img/seal.jpg" alt=""> <p class="caption">Found this little cutie on a walk in New Zealand!</p> </div> You’ll notice we’re using a somewhat presentational class of pull-right here. This means the logic is kept separate from the code that applies the polaroid effect. The polaroid class has no positioning, which allows it to be used generically anywhere that the effect is required. The pull classes set a float and add appropriate margins—they can be used for things like blockquotes as well. .polaroid { width: 150px; padding: 10px 10px 20px 10px; border: 1px solid #BFBFBF; background-color: white; -webkit-box-shadow: 2px 2px 3px rgba(135, 139, 144, 0.4); -moz-box-shadow: 2px 2px 3px rgba(135, 139, 144, 0.4); box-shadow: 2px 2px 3px rgba(135, 139, 144, 0.4); } The actual polaroid effect itself is simply applied using padding, a border and a background colour. We also apply a nice subtle box shadow, using a property that is supported by modern WebKit browsers and Firefox 3.5+. We include the box-shadow property last to ensure that future browsers that support the eventual CSS3 specified version natively will use that implementation over the legacy browser specific version. The box-shadow property takes four values: three lengths and a colour. The first is the horizontal offset of the shadow—positive values place the shadow on the right, while negative values place it to the left. The second is the vertical offset, positive meaning below. If both of these are set to 0, the shadow is positioned equally on all four sides. The last length value sets the blur radius—the larger the number, the blurrier the shadow (therefore the darker you need to make the colour to have an effect). The colour value can be given in any forma… | 2009 | Natalie Downe | nataliedowne | 2009-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/going-nuts-with-css-transitions/ | code |
| 179 | 179 | Have a Field Day with HTML5 Forms | Forms are usually seen as that obnoxious thing we have to markup and style. I respectfully disagree: forms (on a par with tables) are the most exciting thing we have to work with. Here we’re going to take a look at how to style a beautiful HTML5 form using some advanced CSS and latest CSS3 techniques. I promise you will want to style your own forms after you’ve read this article. Here’s what we’ll be creating: The form. (Icons from Chalkwork Payments) Meaningful markup We’re going to style a simple payment form. There are three main sections on this form: The person’s details The address details The credit card details We are also going to use some of HTML5’s new input types and attributes to create more meaningful fields and use less unnecessary classes and ids: email, for the email field tel, for the telephone field number, for the credit card number and security code required, for required fields placeholder, for the hints within some of the fields autofocus, to put focus on the first input field when the page loads There are a million more new input types and form attributes on HTML5, and you should definitely take a look at what’s new on the W3C website. Hopefully this will give you a good idea of how much more fun form markup can be. A good foundation Each section of the form will be contained within its own fieldset. In the case of the radio buttons for choosing the card type, we will enclose those options in another nested fieldset. We will also be using an ordered list to group each label / input pair. This will provide us with a (kind of) semantic styling hook and it will also make the form easier to read when viewing with no CSS applied: The unstyled form So here’s the markup we are going to be working with: <form id=payment> <fieldset> <legend>Your details</legend> <ol> <li> <label for=name>Name</label> <input id=name name=name type=text placeholder="First and last name" required autofocus> </li> <li> <label for=email>Email</label> <input id=… | 2009 | Inayaili de León Persson | inayailideleon | 2009-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/have-a-field-day-with-html5-forms/ | code |
| 178 | 178 | Make Out Like a Bandit | If you are anything like me, you are a professional juggler. No, we don’t juggle bowling pins or anything like that (or do you? Hey, that’s pretty rad!). I’m talking about the work that we juggle daily. In my case, I’m a full-time designer, a half-time graduate student, a sometimes author and conference speaker, and an all-the-time social networker. Only two of these “positions” have actually put any money in my pocket (and, well, the second one takes a lot of money out). Still, this is all part of the work that I do. Your work situation is probably similar. We are workaholics. So if we work so much in our daily lives, shouldn’t we be making out like bandits? Umm, honestly, I’m not hitting on you, silly. I’m talking about our success. We work and work and work. Shouldn’t we be filthy, stinking rich? Well… okay, that’s not quite what I mean either. I’m not necessarily talking about money (though that could potentially be a part of it). I’m talking about success — as in feeling a true sense of accomplishment and feeling happy about what we do and why we do it. It’s important to feel accomplished and a general happiness in our work. To make out like a bandit (or have an incredible amount of success), you can either get lucky or work hard for it. And if you’re going to work hard for it, you might as well make it all meaningful and worthwhile. This is what I strive for in my own work and my life, and the following points I’m sharing with you are the steps I am taking to work toward this. I know the price of success: dedication, hard work & an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen. — Frank Lloyd Wright Learn. Participate. Do. The best way to get good at something is to keep doing whatever it is you’re doing that you want to be good at. For example, a sushi-enthusiast might take a sushi-making class because she wants to learn to make sushi for herself. It totally makes sense while the teacher demonstrates all the procedures, materials, and methods needed to make good, beautiful sushi. Later, … | 2009 | Jina Anne | jina | 2009-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/make-out-like-a-bandit/ | business |
| 177 | 177 | HTML5: Tool of Satan, or Yule of Santa? | It would lead to unseasonal arguments to discuss the title of this piece here, and the arguments are as indigestible as the fourth turkey curry of the season, so we’ll restrict our article to the practical rather than the philosophical: what HTML5 can you reasonably expect to be able to use reliably cross-browser in the early months of 2010? The answer is that you can use more than you might think, due to the seasonal tinsel of feature-detection and using the sparkly pixie-dust of IE-only VML (but used in a way that won’t damage your Elf). Canvas canvas is a 2D drawing API that defines a blank area of the screen of arbitrary size, and allows you to draw on it using JavaScript. The pictures can be animated, such as in this canvas mashup of Wolfenstein 3D and Flickr. (The difference between canvas and SVG is that SVG uses vector graphics, so is infinitely scalable. It also keeps a DOM, whereas canvas is just pixels so you have to do all your own book-keeping yourself in JavaScript if you want to know where aliens are on screen, or do collision detection.) Previously, you needed to do this using Adobe Flash or Java applets, requiring plugins and potentially compromising keyboard accessibility. Canvas drawing is supported now in Opera, Safari, Chrome and Firefox. The reindeer in the corner is, of course, Internet Explorer, which currently has zero support for canvas (or SVG, come to that). Now, don’t pull a face like all you’ve found in your Yuletide stocking is a mouldy satsuma and a couple of nuts—that’s not the end of the story. Canvas was originally an Apple proprietary technology, and Internet Explorer had a similar one called Vector Markup Language which was submitted to the W3C for standardisation in 1998 but which, unlike canvas, was not blessed with retrospective standardisation. What you need, then, is some way for Internet Explorer to translate canvas to VML on-the-fly, while leaving the other, more standards-compliant browsers to use the HTML5. And such a way exists—it’s a JavaScript library called … | 2009 | Bruce Lawson | brucelawson | 2009-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/html5-tool-of-satan-or-yule-of-santa/ | code |
| 176 | 176 | What makes a website successful? It might not be what you expect! | What makes some sites succeed and others fail? Put another way, when you are asked to redesign an existing website, what problems are you looking out for and where do you concentrate your efforts? I would argue that as web designers we spend too much time looking at the wrong kind of problem. I recently ran a free open door consultancy clinic to celebrate the launch of my new book (yes I know, two shameless plugs in one sentence). This involved various website owners volunteering their sites for review. Both myself and the audience then provided feedback. What quickly became apparent is that the feedback being given by the audience was biased towards design and development. Although their comments were excellent it focused almost exclusively on the quality of code, site aesthetics and usability. To address these issues in isolation is similar to treating symptoms and ignoring the underlying illness. Cure the illness not the symptoms Poor design, bad usability and terribly written code are symptoms of bigger problems. Often when we endeavour to address these symptoms, we meet resistance from our clients and become frustrated. This is because our clients are still struggling with fundamental concepts we take for granted. Before we can address issues of aesthetics, usability and code, we need to tackle business objectives, calls to action and user tasks. Without dealing with these fundamental principles our clients’ website will fail. Let me address each in turn: Understand the business objectives Do you ask your clients why they have a website? It feels like an obvious question. However, it is surprising how many clients do not have an answer. Without having a clear idea of the siteʼs business objectives, the client has no way to know whether it is succeeding. This means they have no justification for further investment and that leads to quibbling over every penny. However most importantly, without clearly defined business aims they have no standard against which to base their decisions. Everything beco… | 2009 | Paul Boag | paulboag | 2009-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/what-makes-a-website-successful/ | business |
| 175 | 175 | Front-End Code Reusability with CSS and JavaScript | Most web standards-based developers are more than familiar with creating their sites with semantic HTML with lots and lots of CSS. With each new page in a design, the CSS tends to grow and grow and more elements and styles are added. But CSS can be used to better effect. The idea of object-oriented CSS isn’t new. Nicole Sullivan has written a presentation on the subject and outlines two main concepts: separate structure and visual design; and separate container and content. Jeff Croft talks about Applying OOP Concepts to CSS: I can make a class of .box that defines some basic layout structure, and another class of .rounded that provides rounded corners, and classes of .wide and .narrow that define some widths, and then easily create boxes of varying widths and styles by assigning multiple classes to an element, without having to duplicate code in my CSS. This concept helps reduce CSS file size, allows for great flexibility, rapid building of similar content areas and means greater consistency throughout the entire design. You can also take this concept one step further and apply it to site behaviour with JavaScript. Build a versatile slideshow I will show you how to build multiple slideshows using jQuery, allowing varying levels of functionality which you may find on one site design. The code will be flexible enough to allow you to add previous/next links, image pagination and the ability to change the animation type. More importantly, it will allow you to apply any combination of these features. Image galleries are simply a list of images, so the obvious choice of marking the content up is to use a <ul>. Many designs, however, do not cater to non-JavaScript versions of the website, and thus don’t take in to account large multiple images. You could also simply hide all the other images in the list, apart from the first image. This method can waste bandwidth because the other images might be downloaded when they are never going to be seen. Taking this second concept — only showing one image — the only co… | 2009 | Trevor Morris | trevormorris | 2009-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/front-end-code-reusability-with-css-and-javascript/ | code |
| 174 | 174 | Type-Inspired Interfaces | One of the things that terrifies me most about a new project is the starting point. How is the content laid out? What colors do I pick? Once things like that are decided, it becomes significantly easier to continue design, but it’s the blank page where I spend the most time. To that end, I often start by choosing type. I don’t need to worry about colors or layout or anything else… just the right typefaces that support the art direction. (This article won’t focus on how to choose a typeface, but there are some really great resources if you interested in that sort of thing.) And just like that, all your work is done. “Hold it just a second,” you might say. “All I’ve done is pick type. I still have to do the rest!” To which I would reply, “Silly rabbit. You already have!” You see, picking the right typeface gets you farther than you might think. Here are a few tips on taking cues from type to design interfaces and interface elements. Perfecting Web 2.0 If you’re going for that beloved rounded corner look, you might class it up a bit by choosing the wonderful Omnes Pro by Joshua Darden. As the typeface already has a rounded aesthetic, making buttons that fit the style should be pretty easy. I’ve found that using multiples helps to keep your interfaces looking balanced and proportional. Noticing that the top left edge of the letter “P” has about an 12px corner radius, let’s choose a 24px radius for our button (a multiple of 2), so that we get proper rounded corners. By taking mathematical measurements from the typeface, our button looks more thought out than just “place arbitrary text on arbitrarily-sized button.” Pretty easy, eh? What’s in a name(plate)? Rounded buttons are pretty popular buttons nowadays, so let’s try something a bit more stylized. Have a gander at Brothers, a sturdy face from Emigre. The chiseled edges give us a perfect cue for a stylized button. Using the same slope, you can make plated-looking buttons that fit a different kind of style. Headlining You might even take some cues from… | 2009 | Dan Mall | danmall | 2009-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/type-inspired-interfaces/ | design |
| 173 | 173 | Real Fonts and Rendering: The New Elephant in the Room | My friend, the content strategist Kristina Halvorson, likes to call content “the elephant in the room” of web design. She means it’s the huge problem that no one on the web development team or client side is willing to acknowledge, face squarely, and plan for. A typical web project will pass through many helpful phases of research, and numerous beneficial user experience design iterations, while the content—which in most cases is supposed to be the site’s primary focus—gets handled haphazardly at the end. Hence, elephant in the room, and hence also artist Kevin Cornell’s recent use of elephantine imagery to illustrate A List Apart articles on the subject. But I digress. Without discounting the primacy of the content problem, we web design folk have now birthed ourselves a second lumbering mammoth, thanks to our interest in “real fonts on the web“ (the unfortunate name we’ve chosen for the recent practice of serving web-licensed fonts via CSS’s decade-old @font-face declaration—as if Georgia, Verdana, and Times were somehow unreal). For the fact is, even bulletproof and mo’ bulletproofer @font-face CSS syntax aren’t really bulletproof if we care about looks and legibility across browsers and platforms. Hyenas in the Breakfast Nook The problem isn’t just that foundries have yet to agree on a standard font format that protects their intellectual property. And that, even when they do, it will be a while before all browsers support that standard—leaving aside the inevitable politics that impede all standardization efforts. Those are problems, but they’re not the elephant. Call them the coyotes in the room, and they’re slowly being tamed. Nor is the problem that workable, scalable business models (of which Typekit‘s is the most visible and, so far, the most successful) are still being shaken out and tested. The quality and ease of use of such services, their stability on heavily visited sites (via massively backed-up server clusters), and the fairness and sustainability of their pricing will determine how lice… | 2009 | Jeffrey Zeldman | jeffreyzeldman | 2009-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/real-fonts-and-rendering/ | design |
| 172 | 172 | The Construction of Instruction | If the world were made to my specifications, all your clients would be happy to pay for a web writer to craft every sentence into something as elegant as it was functional, and the client would have planned the content so that you had it just when you asked, but we both know that won’t happen every time. Sometimes you just know they are going to write the About page, two company blog pages and a Facebook fan page before resigning their position as chief content writer and you are going to end up filling in all the details that will otherwise just be Lorem Ipsum. Welcome to the big world of microcopy: A man walks into a bar. The bartender nods a greeting and watches as the man scans the bottles behind the bar. “Er, you have a lot of gin here. Is there one you would recommend?” “Yes sir.” Long pause. “… Never mind, I’ll have the one in the green bottle.” “Certainly, sir. But you can’t buy it from this part of the bar. You need to go through the double doors there.” “But they look like they lead into the kitchen.” “Really, sir? Well, no, that’s where we allow customers to purchase gin.” The man walks through the doors. On the other side he is greeted by the same bartender. “Y-you!” he stammers but the reticent bartender is now all but silent. Unnerved, the man points to a green bottle, “Er, I’d like to buy a shot of that please. With ice and tonic water.” The bartender mixes the drink and puts it on the bar just out of the reach of the man and looks up. “Um, do you take cards?” the man asks, ready to present his credit card. The bartender goes to take the card to put it through the machine. “Wait! How much was it – with sales tax and everything? Do you take a gratuity?” The bartender simply shrugs. The man eyes him for a moment and decides to try his luck at the bar next door. In the Choose Your Own Adventure version of this story there are plenty of ways to stop the man giving up. You could let him buy the gin right where he was; you could make the price more obvious; you could signpost the pla… | 2009 | Relly Annett-Baker | rellyannettbaker | 2009-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/the-construction-of-instruction/ | content |
| 171 | 171 | Rock Solid HTML Emails | At some stage in your career, it’s likely you’ll be asked by a client to design a HTML email. Before you rush to explain that all the cool kids are using social media, keep in mind that when done correctly, email is still one of the best ways to promote you and your clients online. In fact, a recent survey showed that every dollar spent on email marketing this year generated more than $40 in return. That’s more than any other marketing channel, including the cool ones. There are a whole host of ingredients that contribute to a good email marketing campaign. Permission, relevance, timeliness and engaging content are all important. Even so, the biggest challenge for designers still remains building an email that renders well across all the popular email clients. Same same, but different Before getting into the details, there are some uncomfortable facts that those new to HTML email should be aware of. Building an email is not like building for the web. While web browsers continue their onward march towards standards, many email clients have stubbornly stayed put. Some have even gone backwards. In 2007, Microsoft switched the Outlook rendering engine from Internet Explorer to Word. Yes, as in the word processor. Add to this the quirks of the major web-based email clients like Gmail and Hotmail, sprinkle in a little Lotus Notes and you’ll soon realize how different the email game is. While it’s not without its challenges, rest assured it can be done. In my experience the key is to focus on three things. First, you should keep it simple. The more complex your email design, the more likely is it to choke on one of the popular clients with poor standards support. Second, you need to take your coding skills back a good decade. That often means nesting tables, bringing CSS inline and following the coding guidelines I’ll outline below. Finally, you need to test your designs regularly. Just because a template looks nice in Hotmail now, doesn’t mean it will next week. Setting your lowest common denominator To maintain … | 2009 | David Greiner | davidgreiner | 2009-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/rock-solid-html-emails/ | code |
| 170 | 170 | A Pet Project is For Life, Not Just for Christmas | I’m excited: as December rolls on, I’m winding down from client work and indulging in a big pet project I’ve been dreaming up for quite some time, with the aim of releasing it early next year. I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for pet projects and currently have a few in the works: the big one, two collaborations with friends, and my continuing (and completely un-web-related) attempt at music. But when I think about the other designers and developers out there whose work I admire, one thing becomes obvious: they’ve all got pet projects! Look around the web and you’ll see that anyone worth their salt has some sort of side project on the go. If you don’t have yours yet, now’s the time! Have a pet project to collaborate with your friends It’s not uncommon to find me staring at my screen, looking at beautiful websites my friends have made, grinning inanely because I feel so honoured to know such talented individuals. But one thing really frustrates me: I hardly ever get to work with these people! Sure, there are times when it’s possible to do so, but due to various project situations, it’s a rarity. So, in order to work with my friends, I’ve found the best way is to instigate the collaboration outside of client work; in other words, have a pet project together! Free from the hard realities of budgets, time restraints, and client demands, you and your friends can come up with something purely for your own pleasures. If you’ve been looking for an excuse to work with other designers or developers whose work you love, the pet project is that excuse. They don’t necessarily have to be friends, either: if the respect is mutual, it can be a great way of breaking the ice and getting to know someone. Figure 1: A forthcoming secret love-child from myself and Tim Van Damme Have a pet project to escape from your day job We all like to moan about our clients and bosses, don’t we? But if leaving your job or firing your evil client just isn’t an option, why not escape from all that and pour your creative energies into somet… | 2009 | Elliot Jay Stocks | elliotjaystocks | 2009-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/a-pet-project-is-for-life-not-just-for-christmas/ | business |
| 169 | 169 | Incite A Riot | Given its relatively limited scope, HTML can be remarkably expressive. With a bit of lateral thinking, we can mark up content such as tag clouds and progress meters, even when we don’t have explicit HTML elements for those patterns. Suppose we want to mark up a short conversation: Alice: I think Eve is watching. Bob: This isn’t a cryptography tutorial …we’re in the wrong example! A note in the the HTML 4.01 spec says it’s okay to use a definition list: Another application of DL, for example, is for marking up dialogues, with each DT naming a speaker, and each DD containing his or her words. That would give us: <dl> <dt>Alice</dt>: <dd>I think Eve is watching.</dd> <dt>Bob</dt>: <dd>This isn't a cryptography tutorial ...we're in the wrong example!</dd> </dl> This usage of a definition list is proof that writing W3C specifications and smoking crack are not mutually exclusive activities. “I think Eve is watching” is not a definition of “Alice.” If you (ab)use a definition list in this way, Norm will hunt you down. The conversation problem was revisited in HTML5. What if dt and dd didn’t always mean “definition title” and “definition description”? A new element was forged: dialog. Now the the “d” in dt and dd doesn’t stand for “definition”, it stands for “dialog” (or “dialogue” if you can spell): <dialog> <dt>Alice</dt>: <dd>I think Eve is watching.</dd> <dt>Bob</dt>: <dd>This isn't a cryptography tutorial ...we're in the wrong example!</dd> </dialog> Problem solved …except that dialog is no longer in the HTML5 spec. Hixie further expanded the meaning of dt and dd so that they could be used inside details (which makes sense—it starts with a “d”) and figure (…um). At the same time as the content model of details and figure were being updated, the completely-unrelated dialog element was dropped. Back to the drawing board, or in this case, the HTML 4.01 specification. The spec defines the cite element thusly: Contains a citation or a reference to other sources. Perfect! There’s even an … | 2009 | Jeremy Keith | jeremykeith | 2009-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2009/incite-a-riot/ | code |
| 168 | 168 | Unobtrusively Mapping Microformats with jQuery | Microformats are everywhere. You can’t shake an electronic stick these days without accidentally poking a microformat-enabled site, and many developers use microformats as a matter of course. And why not? After all, why invent your own class names when you can re-use pre-defined ones that give your site extra functionality for free? Nevertheless, while it’s good to know that users of tools such as Tails and Operator will derive added value from your shiny semantics, it’s nice to be able to reuse that effort in your own code. We’re going to build a map of some of my favourite restaurants in Brighton. Fitting with the principles of unobtrusive JavaScript, we’ll start with a semantically marked up list of restaurants, then use JavaScript to add the map, look up the restaurant locations and plot them as markers. We’ll be using a couple of powerful tools. The first is jQuery, a JavaScript library that is ideally suited for unobtrusive scripting. jQuery allows us to manipulate elements on the page based on their CSS selector, which makes it easy to extract information from microformats. The second is Mapstraction, introduced here by Andrew Turner a few days ago. We’ll be using Google Maps in the background, but Mapstraction makes it easy to change to a different provider if we want to later. Getting Started We’ll start off with a simple collection of microformatted restaurant details, representing my seven favourite restaurants in Brighton. The full, unstyled list can be seen in restaurants-plain.html. Each restaurant listing looks like this: <li class="vcard"> <h3><a class="fn org url" href="http://www.riddleandfinns.co.uk/">Riddle & Finns</a></h3> <div class="adr"> <p class="street-address">12b Meeting House Lane</p> <p><span class="locality">Brighton</span>, <abbr class="country-name" title="United Kingdom">UK</abbr></p> <p class="postal-code">BN1 1HB</p> </div> <p>Telephone: <span class="tel">+44 (0)1273 323 008</span></p> <p>E-mail: <a href="mailto:info@riddleandfinns.co.uk" class="email">info@ri… | 2007 | Simon Willison | simonwillison | 2007-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/unobtrusively-mapping-microformats-with-jquery/ | code |
| 167 | 167 | Back To The Future of Print | By now we have weathered the storm that was the early days of web development, a dangerous time when we used tables, inline CSS and separate pages for print only versions. We can reflect in a haggard old sea-dog manner (“yarrr… I remember back in the browser wars…”) on the bad practices of the time. We no longer need convincing that print stylesheets are the way to go1, though some of the documentation for them is a little outdated now. I am going to briefly cover 8 tips and 4 main gotchas when creating print stylesheets in our more enlightened era. Getting started As with regular stylesheets, print CSS can be included in a number of ways2, for our purposes we are going to be using the link element. <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="print.css"> This is still my favourite way of linking to CSS files, its easy to see what files are being included and to what media they are being applied to. Without the media attribute specified the link element defaults to the media type ‘all’ which means that the styles within then apply to print and screen alike. The media type ‘screen’ only applies to the screen and wont be picked up by print, this is the best way of hiding styles from print. Make sure you include your print styles after all your other CSS, because you will need to override certain rules and this is a lot easier if you are flowing with the cascade than against it! Another thing you should be thinking is ‘does it need to be printed’. Consider the context3, if it is not a page that is likely to be printed, such as a landing page or a section index then the print styles should resemble the way the page looks on the screen. Context is really important for the design of your print stylesheet, all the tips and tricks that follow should be taken in the context of the page. If for example you are designing a print stylesheet for an item in a shopping cart, it is irrelevant for the user to know the exact url of the link that takes them to your checkout. Tips and tricks During these tip’… | 2007 | Natalie Downe | nataliedowne | 2007-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/back-to-the-future-of-print/ | design |
| 166 | 166 | Performance On A Shoe String | Back in the summer, I happened to notice the official Wimbledon All England Tennis Club site had jumped to the top of Alexa’s Movers & Shakers list — a list that tracks sites that have had the biggest upturn or downturn in traffic. The lawn tennis championships were underway, and so traffic had leapt from almost nothing to crazy-busy in a no time at all. Many sites have similar peaks in traffic, especially when they’re based around scheduled events. No one cares about the site for most of the year, and then all of a sudden – wham! – things start getting warm in the data centre. Whilst the thought of chestnuts roasting on an open server has a certain appeal, it’s less attractive if you care about your site being available to visitors. Take a look at this Alexa traffic graph showing traffic patterns for superbowl.com at the beginning of each year, and wimbledon.org in the month of July. Traffic graph from Alexa.com Whilst not on the same scale or with such dramatic peaks, we have a similar pattern of traffic here at 24ways.org. Over the last three years we’ve seen a dramatic pick up in traffic over the month of December (as would be expected) and then a much lower, although steady load throughout the year. What we do have, however, is the luxury of knowing when the peaks will be. For a normal site, be that a blog, small scale web app, or even a small corporate site, you often just cannot predict when you might get slashdotted, end up on the front page of Digg or linked to from a similarly high-profile site. You just don’t know when the peaks will be. If you’re a big commercial enterprise like the Super Bowl, scaling up for that traffic is simply a cost of doing business. But for most of us, we can’t afford to have massive capacity sat there unused for 90% of the year. What you have to do instead is work out how to deal with as much traffic as possible with the modest resources you have. In this article I’m going to talk about some of the things we’ve learned about keeping 24 ways running throughout December,… | 2007 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2007-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/performance-on-a-shoe-string/ | ux |
| 165 | 165 | Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6 | Newer breeds of browser such as Firefox and Safari have offered support for PNG images with full alpha channel transparency for a few years. With the use of hacks, support has been available in Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6, but the hacks are non-ideal and have been tricky to use. With IE7 winning masses of users from earlier versions over the last year, full PNG alpha-channel transparency is becoming more of a reality for day-to-day use. However, there are still numbers of IE6 users out there who we can’t leave out in the cold this Christmas, so in this article I’m going to look what we can do to support IE6 users whilst taking full advantage of transparency for the majority of a site’s visitors. So what’s alpha channel transparency? Cast your minds back to the Ghost of Christmas Past, the humble GIF. Images in GIF format offer transparency, but that transparency is either on or off for any given pixel. Each pixel’s either fully transparent, or a solid colour. In GIF, transparency is effectively just a special colour you can chose for a pixel. The PNG format tackles the problem rather differently. As well as having any colour you chose, each pixel also carries a separate channel of information detailing how transparent it is. This alpha channel enables a pixel to be fully transparent, fully opaque, or critically, any step in between. This enables designers to produce images that can have, for example, soft edges without any of the ‘halo effect’ traditionally associated with GIF transparency. If you’ve ever worked on a site that has different colour schemes and therefore requires multiple versions of each graphic against a different colour, you’ll immediately see the benefit. What’s perhaps more interesting than that, however, is the extra creative freedom this gives designers in creating beautiful sites that can remain web-like in their ability to adjust, scale and reflow. The Internet Explorer problem Up until IE7, there has been no fully native support for PNG alpha channel transparency in Internet Expl… | 2007 | Drew McLellan | drewmclellan | 2007-12-01T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/supersleight-transparent-png-in-ie6/ | code |
| 164 | 164 | My Other Christmas Present Is a Definition List | A note from the editors: readers should note that the HTML5 redefinition of definition lists has come to pass and is now à la mode. Last year, I looked at how the markup for tag clouds was generally terrible. I thought this year I would look not at a method of marking up a common module, but instead just at a simple part of HTML and how it generally gets abused. No, not tables. Definition lists. Ah, definition lists. Often used but rarely understood. Examining the definition of definitions To start with, let’s see what the HTML spec has to say about them. Definition lists vary only slightly from other types of lists in that list items consist of two parts: a term and a description. The canonical example of a definition list is a dictionary. Words can have multiple descriptions (even the word definition has at least five). Also, many terms can share a single definition (for example, the word colour can also be spelt color, but they have the same definition). Excellent, we can all grasp that. But it very quickly starts to fall apart. Even in the HTML specification the definition list is mis-used. Another application of DL, for example, is for marking up dialogues, with each DT naming a speaker, and each DD containing his or her words. Wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. This is the biggest flaw in the HTML spec, along with dropping support for the start attribute on ordered lists. “Why?”, you may ask. Let me give you an example from Romeo and Juliet, act 2, scene 2. <dt>Juliet</dt> <dd>Romeo!</dd> <dt>Romeo</dt> <dd>My niesse?</dd> <dt>Juliet</dt> <dd>At what o'clock tomorrow shall I send to thee?</dd> <dt>Romeo</dt> <dd>At the hour of nine.</dd> Now, the problem here is that a given definition can have multiple descriptions (the DD). Really the dialog “descriptions” should be rolled up under the terms, like so: <dt>Juliet</dt> <dd>Romeo!</dd> <dd>At what o'clock tomorrow shall I send to thee?</dd> <dt>Romeo</dt> <dd>… | 2007 | Mark Norman Francis | marknormanfrancis | 2007-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/my-other-christmas-present-is-a-definition-list/ | code |
| 163 | 163 | Get To Grips with Slippy Maps | Online mapping has definitely hit mainstream. Google Maps made ‘slippy maps’ popular and made it easy for any developer to quickly add a dynamic map to his or her website. You can now find maps for store locations, friends nearby, upcoming events, and embedded in blogs. In this tutorial we’ll show you how to easily add a map to your site using the Mapstraction mapping library. There are many map providers available to choose from, each with slightly different functionality, design, and terms of service. Mapstraction makes deciding which provider to use easy by allowing you to write your mapping code once, and then easily switch providers. Assemble the pieces Utilizing any of the mapping library typically consists of similar overall steps: Create an HTML div to hold the map Include the Javascript libraries Create the Javascript Map element Set the initial map center and zoom level Add markers, lines, overlays and more Create the Map Div The HTML div is where the map will actually show up on your page. It needs to have a unique id, because we’ll refer to that later to actually put the map here. This also lets you have multiple maps on a page, by creating individual divs and Javascript map elements. The size of the div also sets the height and width of the map. You set the size using CSS, either inline with the element, or via a CSS reference to the element id or class. For this example, we’ll use inline styling. <div id="map" style="width: 400px; height: 400px;"></div> Include Javascript libraries A mapping library is like any Javascript library. You need to include the library in your page before you use the methods of that library. For our tutorial, we’ll need to include at least two libraries: Mapstraction, and the mapping API(s) we want to display. Our first example we’ll use the ubiquitous Google Maps library. However, you can just as easily include Yahoo, MapQuest, or any of the other supported libraries. Another important aspect of the mapping libraries is that many of them require an API k… | 2007 | Andrew Turner | andrewturner | 2007-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/get-to-grips-with-slippy-maps/ | code |
| 162 | 162 | Conditional Love | “Browser.” The four-letter word of web design. I mean, let’s face it: on the good days, when things just work in your target browsers, it’s marvelous. The air smells sweeter, birds’ songs sound more melodious, and both your design and your code are looking sharp. But on the less-than-good days (which is, frankly, most of them), you’re compelled to tie up all your browsers in a sack, heave them into the nearest river, and start designing all-imagemap websites. We all play favorites, after all: some will swear by Firefox, Opera fans are allegedly legion, and others still will frown upon anything less than the latest WebKit nightly. Thankfully, we do have an out for those little inconsistencies that crop up when dealing with cross-browser testing: CSS patches. Spare the Rod, Hack the Browser Before committing browsercide over some rendering bug, a designer will typically reach for a snippet of CSS fix the faulty browser. Historically referred to as “hacks,” I prefer Dan Cederholm’s more client-friendly alternative, “patches”. But whatever you call them, CSS patches all work along the same principle: supply the proper property value to the good browsers, while giving higher maintenance other browsers an incorrect value that their frustrating idiosyncratic rendering engine can understand. Traditionally, this has been done either by exploiting incomplete CSS support: #content { height: 1%; // Let's force hasLayout for old versions of IE. line-height: 1.6; padding: 1em; } html>body #content { height: auto; // Modern browsers get a proper height value. } or by exploiting bugs in their rendering engine to deliver alternate style rules: #content p { font-size: .8em; /* Hide from Mac IE5 \*/ font-size: .9em; /* End hiding from Mac IE5 */ } We’ve even used these exploits to serve up whole stylesheets altogether: @import url("core.css"); @media tty { i{content:"\";/*" "*/}} @import 'windows-ie5.css'; /*";} }/* */ The list goes on, and on, and on. For every browser, for every bug, there’s a patch availab… | 2007 | Ethan Marcotte | ethanmarcotte | 2007-12-15T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/conditional-love/ | code |
| 161 | 161 | Keeping JavaScript Dependencies At Bay | As we are writing more and more complex JavaScript applications we run into issues that have hitherto (god I love that word) not been an issue. The first decision we have to make is what to do when planning our app: one big massive JS file or a lot of smaller, specialised files separated by task. Personally, I tend to favour the latter, mainly because it allows you to work on components in parallel with other developers without lots of clashes in your version control. It also means that your application will be more lightweight as you only include components on demand. Starting with a global object This is why it is a good plan to start your app with one single object that also becomes the namespace for the whole application, say for example myAwesomeApp: var myAwesomeApp = {}; You can nest any necessary components into this one and also make sure that you check for dependencies like DOM support right up front. Adding the components The other thing to add to this main object is a components object, which defines all the components that are there and their file names. var myAwesomeApp = { components :{ formcheck:{ url:'formcheck.js', loaded:false }, dynamicnav:{ url:'dynamicnav.js', loaded:false }, gallery:{ url:'gallery.js', loaded:false }, lightbox:{ url:'lightbox.js', loaded:false } } }; Technically you can also omit the loaded properties, but it is cleaner this way. The next thing to add is an addComponent function that can load your components on demand by adding new SCRIPT elements to the head of the documents when they are needed. var myAwesomeApp = { components :{ formcheck:{ url:'formcheck.js', loaded:false }, dynamicnav:{ url:'dynamicnav.js', loaded:false }, gallery:{ url:'gallery.js', loaded:false }, lightbox:{ url:'lightbox.js', loaded:false } }, addComponent:function(component){ var c = this.components[component]; if(c && c.loaded === false){ var s = document.createElement('script'); s.setAttribut… | 2007 | Christian Heilmann | chrisheilmann | 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/keeping-javascript-dependencies-at-bay/ | code |
| 160 | 160 | Tracking Christmas Cheer with Google Charts | A note from the editors: Since this article was written Google has retired the Charts API. Let’s get something out in the open: I love statistics. As an informatician I can’t get enough graphs, charts, and numbers. So you can imagine when Google released their Charts API I thought Christmas had come early. I immediately began to draw up graphs for the holiday season using the new API; and using my new found chart-making skills I’ll show you what you can and can’t do with Google Charts. Mummy, it’s my first chart The Google Charts API allows you to send data to Google; in return they give you back a nicely-rendered graph. All the hard work is done on Google’s servers — you need only reference an image in your HTML. You pass along the data — the numbers for the charts, axis labels, and so on — in the query string of the image’s URL. If you want to add charts to your blog or web site, there’s probably no quicker way to get started. Here’s a simple example: if we add the following line to an HTML page: <img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=lc&chs=200x125&chd=s:ZreelPuevfgznf2008" /> Then we’ll see the line graph in Figure 1 appear in our page. That graph is hosted on Google’s own server1: http://chart.apis.google.com/. Figure 1: A simple example of a line graph created with Google Charts. If you look at the URL used in the example you’ll notice we’re passing some parameters along in the query string (the bit after the question mark). The query string looks like this: cht=lc&chs=200x125&chd=s:ZreelPuevfgznf2008 It’s contains everything Google Charts needs to draw the graph. There are three parameters in the query string: cht; this specifies the type of chart Google Charts will generate (in this case, lc is a line chart). chs, the value of which is 200x125; this defines the chart’s size (200 pixels wide by 125 pixels high). chd, the value of which is s:ZreelPuevfgznf2008; this is the actual chart data, which we’ll discus… | 2007 | Brian Suda | briansuda | 2007-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/tracking-christmas-cheer-with-google-charts/ | ux |
| 159 | 159 | How Media Studies Can Massage Your Message | A young web designer once told his teacher ‘just get to the meat already.’ He was frustrated with what he called the ‘history lessons and name-dropping’ aspects of his formal college course. He just wanted to learn how to build Web sites, not examine the reasons why. Technique and theory are both integrated and necessary portions of a strong education. The student’s perspective has direct value, but also holds a distinct sorrow: Knowing the how without the why creates a serious problem. Without these surrounding insights we cannot tap into the influence of the history and evolved knowledge that came before. We cannot properly analyze, criticize, evaluate and innovate beyond the scope of technique. History holds the key to transcending former mistakes. Philosophy encourages us to look at different points of view. Studying media and social history empowers us as Web workers by bringing together myriad aspects of humanity in direct relation to the environment of society and technology. Having an understanding of media, communities, communication arts as well as logic, language and computer savvy are all core skills of the best of web designers in today’s medium. Controlling the Message ‘The computer can’t tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what’s missing is the eyebrows.’ – Frank Zappa Media is meant to express an idea. The great media theorist Marshall McLuhan suggests that not only is media interesting because it’s about the expression of ideas, but that the media itself actually shapes the way a given idea is perceived. This is what McLuhan meant when he uttered those famous words: ‘The medium is the message.’ If instead of actually serving a steak to a vegetarian friend, what might a painting of the steak mean instead? Or a sculpture of a cow? Depending upon the form of media in question, the message is altered. Figure 1 Must we know the history of cows to appreciate the steak on our plate? Perhaps not, but if we begin to examine how that meat came to be … | 2007 | Molly Holzschlag | mollyholzschlag | 2007-12-22T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/how-media-studies-can-massage-your-message/ | ux |
| 158 | 158 | 10 Ways To Get Design Approval | One of the most challenging parts of the web design process is getting design sign off. It can prove time consuming, demoralizing and if you are not careful can lead to a dissatisfied client. What is more you can end up with a design that you are ashamed to include in your portfolio. How then can you ensure that the design you produce is the one that gets built? How can you get the client to sign off on your design? Below are 10 tips learnt from years of bitter experience. 1. Define the role of the client and designer Many of the clients you work with will not have been involved in a web project before. Even if they have they may have worked in a very different way to what you would expect. Take the time at the beginning of the project to explain their role in the design of the site. The best approach is to emphasis that their job is to focus on the needs of their users and business. They should concentrate on the broad issues, while you worry about the details of layout, typography and colour scheme. By clarifying what you expect from the client, you help them to provide the right kind of input throughout the process. 2. Understand the business Before you open up Photoshop or put pen to paper, take the time to make sure you properly understand not only the brief but the organization behind the site. By understanding their business objectives, organizational structure and marketing strategy your design decisions will be better informed. You cannot rely upon the brief to provide all of the information you need. It is important to dig deeper and get as good an understanding of their business as possible. This information will prove invaluable when justifying your design decisions. 3. Understand the users We all like to think of ourselves as user centric designers, but exactly how much effort do you put into knowing your users before beginning the design process? Take the time to really understand them the best you can. Try to meet with some real prospective users and get to know their needs. Failing that… | 2007 | Paul Boag | paulboag | 2007-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/10-ways-to-get-design-approval/ | business |
| 157 | 157 | Capturing Caps Lock | One of the more annoying aspects of having to remember passwords (along with having to remember loads of them) is that if you’ve got Caps Lock turned on accidentally when you type one in, it won’t work, and you won’t know why. Most desktop computers alert you in some way if you’re trying to enter your password to log on and you’ve enabled Caps Lock; there’s no reason why the web can’t do the same. What we want is a warning – maybe the user wants Caps Lock on, because maybe their password is in capitals – rather than something that interrupts what they’re doing. Something subtle. But that doesn’t answer the question of how to do it. Sadly, there’s no way of actually detecting whether Caps Lock is on directly. However, there’s a simple work-around; if the user presses a key, and it’s a capital letter, and they don’t have the Shift key depressed, why then they must have Caps Lock on! Simple. DOM scripting allows your code to be notified when a key is pressed in an element; when the key is pressed, you get the ASCII code for that key. Capital letters, A to Z, have ASCII codes 65 to 90. So, the code would look something like: on a key press if the ASCII code for the key is between 65 and 90 *and* if shift is pressed warn the user that they have Caps Lock on, but let them carry on end if end keypress The actual JavaScript for this is more complicated, because both event handling and keypress information differ across browsers. Your event handling functions are passed an event object, except in Internet Explorer where you use the global event object; the event object has a which parameter containing the ASCII code for the key pressed, except in Internet Explorer where the event object has a keyCode parameter; some browsers store whether the shift key is pressed in a shiftKey parameter and some in a modifiers parameter. All this boils down to code that looks something like this: keypress: function(e) { var ev = e ? e : window.event; if (!ev) { return; } var targ = ev.target ? ev.target : ev.srcElement; /… | 2007 | Stuart Langridge | stuartlangridge | 2007-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/capturing-caps-lock/ | code |
| 156 | 156 | Mobile 2.0 | Thinking 2.0 As web geeks, we have a thick skin towards jargon. We all know that “Web 2.0” has been done to death. At Blue Flavor we even have a jargon bucket to penalize those who utter such painfully overused jargon with a cash deposit. But Web 2.0 is a term that has lodged itself into the conscience of the masses. This is actually a good thing. The 2.0 suffix was able to succinctly summarize all that was wrong with the Web during the dot-com era as well as the next evolution of an evolving media. While the core technologies actually stayed basically the same, the principles, concepts, interactions and contexts were radically different. With that in mind, this Christmas I want to introduce to you the concept of Mobile 2.0. While not exactly a new concept in the mobile community, it is relatively unknown in the web community. And since the foundation of Mobile 2.0 is the web, I figured it was about time for you to get to know each other. It’s the Carriers’ world. We just live in it. Before getting into Mobile 2.0, I thought first I should introduce you to its older brother. You know the kind, the kid with emotional problems that likes to beat up on you and your friends for absolutely no reason. That is the mobile of today. The mobile ecosystem is a very complicated space often and incorrectly compared to the Web. If the Web was a freewheeling hippie — believing in freedom of information and the unity of man through communities — then Mobile is the cutthroat capitalist — out to pillage and plunder for the sake of the almighty dollar. Where the Web is relatively easy to publish to and ultimately make a buck, Mobile is wrought with layers of complexity, politics and obstacles. I can think of no better way to summarize these challenges than the testimony of Jason Devitt to the United States Congress in what is now being referred to as the “iPhone Hearing.” Jason is the co-founder and CEO of SkyDeck a new wireless startup and former CEO of Vindigo an early pioneer in mobile content. As Jason points out, th… | 2007 | Brian Fling | brianfling | 2007-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/mobile-2-0/ | business |
| 155 | 155 | Minification: A Christmas Diet | The festive season is generally more about gorging ourselves than staying thin but we’re going to change all that with a quick introduction to minification. Performance has been a hot topic this last year. We’re building more complex sites and applications but at the same time trying to make then load faster and behave more responsively. What is a discerning web developer to do? Minification is the process of make something smaller, in the case of web site performance we’re talking about reducing the size of files we send to the browser. The primary front-end components of any website are HTML, CSS, Javascript and a sprinkling of images. Let’s find some tools to trim the fat and speed up our sites. For those that want to play along at home you can download the various utilities for Mac or Windows. You’ll want to be familiar with running apps on the command line too. HTMLTidy HTMLTidy optimises and strips white space from HTML documents. It also has a pretty good go at correcting any invalid markup while it’s at it. tidy -m page.html CSSTidy CSSTidy takes your CSS file, optimises individual rules (for instance transforming padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; to padding: 10px 0;) and strips unneeded white space. csstidy style.css style-min.css JSMin JSMin takes your javascript and makes it more compact. With more and more websites using javascript to power (progressive) enhancements this can be a real bandwidth hog. Look out for pre-minified versions of libraries and frameworks too. jsmin <script.js >script-min.js Remember to run JSLint before you run JSMin to catch some common problems. OptiPNG Images can be a real bandwidth hog and making all of them smaller with OptiPNG should speed up your site. optipng image.png All of these tools have an often bewildering array of options and generally good documentation included as part of the package. A little experimentation will get you even more bang for your buck. For larger projects you likely won’t want to be manually minifying all your files. T… | 2007 | Gareth Rushgrove | garethrushgrove | 2007-12-06T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/minification-a-christmas-diet/ | process |
| 154 | 154 | Diagnostic Styling | We’re all used to using CSS to make our designs live and breathe, but there’s another way to use CSS: to find out where our markup might be choking on missing accessibility features, targetless links, and just plain missing content. Note: the techniques discussed here mostly work in Firefox, Safari, and Opera, but not Internet Explorer. I’ll explain why that’s not really a problem near the end of the article — and no, the reason is not “everyone should just ignore IE anyway”. Basic Diagnostics To pick a simple example, suppose you want to call out all holdover font and center elements in a site. Simple: you just add the following to your styles. font, center {outline: 5px solid red;} You could take it further and add in a nice lime background or some such, but big thick red outlines should suffice. Now you’ll be able to see the offenders wherever as you move through the site. (Of course, if you do this on your public server, everyone else will see the outlines too. So this is probably best done on a development server or local copy of the site.) Not everyone may be familiar with outlines, which were introduced in CSS2, so a word on those before we move on. Outlines are much like borders, except outlines don’t affect layout. Eh? Here’s a comparison. On the left, you have a border. On the right, an outline. The border takes up layout space, pushing other content around and generally being a nuisance. The outline, on the other hand, just draws into quietly into place. In most current browsers, it will overdraw any content already onscreen, and will be overdrawn by any content placed later — which is why it overlaps the images above it, and is overlapped by those below it. Okay, so we can outline deprecated elements like font and center. Is that all? Oh no. Attribution Let’s suppose you also want to find any instances of inline style — that is, use of the style attribute on elements in the markup. This is generally discouraged (outside of HTML e-mails, which I’m not going to get anywhere … | 2007 | Eric Meyer | ericmeyer | 2007-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/diagnostic-styling/ | process |
| 153 | 153 | JavaScript Internationalisation | or: Why Rudolph Is More Than Just a Shiny Nose Dunder sat, glumly staring at the computer screen. “What’s up, Dunder?” asked Rudolph, entering the stable and shaking off the snow from his antlers. “Well,” Dunder replied, “I’ve just finished coding the new reindeer intranet Santa Claus asked me to do. You know how he likes to appear to be at the cutting edge, talking incessantly about Web 2.0, AJAX, rounded corners; he even spooked Comet recently by talking about him as if he were some pushy web server. “I’ve managed to keep him happy, whilst also keeping it usable, accessible, and gleaming — and I’m still on the back row of the sleigh! But anyway, given the elves will be the ones using the site, and they come from all over the world, the site is in multiple languages. Which is great, except when it comes to the preview JavaScript I’ve written for the reindeer order form. Here, have a look…” As he said that, he brought up the textileRef:8234272265470b85d91702:linkStartMarker:“order form in French”:/examples/javascript-internationalisation/initial.fr.html on the screen. (Same in English). “Looks good,” said Rudolph. “But if I add some items,” said Dunder, “the preview appears in English, as it’s hard-coded in the JavaScript. I don’t want separate code for each language, as that’s just silly — I thought about just having if statements, but that doesn’t scale at all…” “And there’s more, you aren’t displaying large numbers in French properly, either,” added Rudolph, who had been playing and looking at part of the source code: function update_text() { var hay = getValue('hay'); var carrots = getValue('carrots'); var bells = getValue('bells'); var total = 50 * bells + 30 * hay + 10 * carrots; var out = 'You are ordering ' + pretty_num(hay) + ' bushel' + pluralise(hay) + ' of hay, ' + pretty_num(carrots) + ' carrot' + pluralise(carrots) + ', and ' + pretty_num(bells) + ' shiny bell' + pluralise(bells) + ', at a total cost of <strong>' + pretty_num(total) + '</strong> gold pieces. Thank you.';… | 2007 | Matthew Somerville | matthewsomerville | 2007-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/javascript-internationalisation/ | code |
| 152 | 152 | CSS for Accessibility | CSS is magical stuff. In the right hands, it can transform the plainest of (well-structured) documents into a visual feast. But it’s not all fur coat and nae knickers (as my granny used to say). Here are some simple ways you can use CSS to improve the usability and accessibility of your site. Even better, no sexy visuals will be harmed by the use of these techniques. Promise. Nae knickers This is less of an accessibility tip, and more of a reminder to check that you’ve got your body background colour specified. If you’re sitting there wondering why I’m mentioning this, because it’s a really basic thing, then you might be as surprised as I was to discover that from a sample of over 200 sites checked last year, 35% of UK local authority websites were missing their body background colour. Forgetting to specify your body background colour can lead to embarrassing gaps in coverage, which are not only unsightly, but can prevent your users reading the text on your site if they use a different operating system colour scheme. All it needs is the following line to be added to your CSS file: body {background-color: #fff;} If you pair it with color: #000; … you’ll be assured of maintaining contrast for any areas you inadvertently forget to specify, no matter what colour scheme your user needs or prefers. Even better, if you’ve got standard reset CSS you use, make sure that default colours for background and text are specified in it, so you’ll never be caught with your pants down. At the very least, you’ll have a white background and black text that’ll prompt you to change them to your chosen colours. Elbow room Paying attention to your typography is important, but it’s not just about making it look nice. Careful use of the line-height property can make your text more readable, which helps everyone, but is particularly helpful for those with dyslexia, who use screen magnification or simply find it uncomfortable to read lots of text online. When lines of text are too close together, it can cause the eye to s… | 2007 | Ann McMeekin | annmcmeekin | 2007-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/css-for-accessibility/ | design |
| 151 | 151 | Get In Shape | Pop quiz: what’s wrong with the following navigation? Maybe nothing. But then again, maybe there’s something bugging you about the way it comes together, something you can’t quite put your finger on. It seems well-designed, but it also seems a little… off. The design decisions that led to this eventual form were no doubt well-considered: Client: The top level needs to have a “current page” status indicator of some sort. Designer: How about a white tab? Client: Great! The second level needs to show up underneath the first level though… Designer: Okay, but that white tab I just added makes it hard to visually connect the bottom nav to the top. Client: Too late, we’ve seen the white tab and we love it. Try and make it work. Designer: Right. So I placed the second level in its own box. Client: Hmm. They seem too separated. I can’t tell that the yellow nav is the second level of the first. Designer: How about an indicator arrow? Client: Brilliant! The problem is that the end result feels awkward and forced. During the design process, little decisions were made that ultimately affect the overall shape of the navigation. What started out as a neatly contained rounded rectangle ended up as an ambiguous double shape that looks funny, though it’s often hard to pinpoint precisely why. The Shape of Things Well the why in this case is because seemingly unrelated elements in a design still end up visually interacting. Adding a new item to a page impacts everything surrounding it. In this navigation example, we’re looking at two individual objects that are close enough to each other that they form a relationship; if we reduce them to strictly their outlines, it’s a little easier to see that this particular combination registers oddly. The two shapes float with nothing really grounding them. If they were connected, perhaps it would be a different story. The white tab divides the top shape in half, leaving a gap in the middle of it. There’s very little balance in this pairing because the overall shape of the… | 2007 | Dave Shea | daveshea | 2007-12-16T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/get-in-shape/ | design |
| 150 | 150 | A Gift Idea For Your Users: Respect, Yo | If, indeed, it is the thought that counts, maybe we should pledge to make more thoughtful design decisions. In addition to wowing people who use the Web sites we build with novel features, nuanced aesthetics and the new new thing, maybe we should also thread some subtle things throughout our work that let folks know: hey, I’m feeling ya. We’re simpatico. I hear you loud and clear. It’s not just holiday spirit that moves me to talk this way. As good as people are, we need more than the horizon of karma to overcome that invisible demon, inertia. Makers of the Web, respectful design practices aren’t just the right thing, they are good for business. Even if your site is the one and only place to get experience x, y or zed, you don’t rub someone’s face in it. You keep it free flowing, you honor the possible back and forth of a healthy transaction, you are Johnny Appleseed with the humane design cues. You make it clear that you are in it for the long haul. A peek back: Think back to what search (and strategy) was like before Google launched a super clean page with “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Aggregation was the order of the day (just go back and review all the ‘strategic alliances’ that were announced daily.) Yet the GOOG comes along with this zen layout (nope, we’re not going to try to make you look at one of our media properties) and a bold, brash, teleport-me-straight-to-the-first-search-result button. It could have been titled “We’re Feeling Cocky”. These were radical design decisions that reset how people thought about search services. Oh, you mean I can just find what I want and get on with it? It’s maybe even more impressive today, after the GOOG has figured out how to monetize attention better than anyone. “I’m Feeling Lucky” is still there. No doubt, it costs the company millions. But by leaving a little money on the table, they keep the basic bargain they started to strike in 1997. We’re going to get you where you want to go as quickly as possible. Where are the places we might make … | 2007 | Brian Oberkirch | brianoberkirch | 2007-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/a-gift-idea-for-your-users-respect-yo/ | ux |
| 149 | 149 | Underpants Over My Trousers | With Christmas approaching faster than a speeding bullet, this is the perfect time for you to think about that last minute present to buy for the web geek in your life. If you’re stuck for ideas for that special someone, forget about that svelte iPhone case carved from solid mahogany and head instead to your nearest comic-book shop and pick up a selection of comics or graphic novels. (I’ll be using some of my personal favourite comic books as examples throughout). Trust me, whether your nearest and dearest has been reading comics for a while or has never peered inside this four-colour world, they’ll thank-you for it. Aside from indulging their superhero fantasies, comic books can provide web designers with a rich vein of inspiring ideas and material to help them create shirt button popping, trouser bursting work for the web. I know from my own personal experience, that looking at aspects of comic book design, layout and conventions and thinking about the ways that they can inform web design has taken my design work in often-unexpected directions. There are far too many fascinating facets of comic book design that provide web designers with inspiration to cover in the time that it takes to pull your underpants over your trousers. So I’m going to concentrate on one muscle bound aspect of comic design, one that will make you think differently about how you lay out the content of your pages in panels. A suitcase full of Kryptonite Now, to the uninitiated onlooker, the panels of a comic book may appear to perform a similar function to still frames from a movie. But inside the pages of a comic, panels must work harder to help the reader understand the timing of a story. It is this method for conveying narrative timing to a reader that I believe can be highly useful to designers who work on the web as timing, drama and suspense are as important in the web world as they are in worlds occupied by costumed crime fighters and superheroes. I’d like you to start by closing your eyes and thinking about your own proces… | 2007 | Andy Clarke | andyclarke | 2007-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/underpants-over-my-trousers/ | design |
| 148 | 148 | Typesetting Tables | Tables have suffered in recent years on the web. They were used for laying out web pages. Then, following the Web Standards movement, they’ve been renamed by the populous as `data tables’ to ensure that we all know what they’re for. There have been some great tutorials for the designing tables using CSS for presentation and focussing on the semantics in the displaying of data in the correct way. However, typesetting tables is a subtle craft that has hardly had a mention. Table design can often end up being a technical exercise. What data do we need to display? Where is the data coming from and what form will it take? When was the last time your heard someone talk about lining numerals? Or designing to the reading direction? Tables are not read like sentences When a reader looks at, and tries to understand, tabular data, they’re doing a bunch of things at the same time. Generally, they’re task based; they’re looking for something. They are reading horizontally AND vertically Reading a table is not like reading a paragraph in a novel, and therefore shouldn’t be typeset in the same way. Designing tables is information design, it’s functional typography—it’s not a time for eye candy. Typesetting tables Typesetting great looking tables is largely an exercise in restraint. Minimal interference with the legibility of the table should be in the forefront of any designers mind. When I’m designing tables I apply some simple rules: Plenty of negative space Use the right typeface Go easy on the background tones, unless you’re giving reading direction visual emphasis Design to the reading direction By way of explanation, here are those rules as applied to the following badly typeset table. Your default table This table is a mess. There is no consideration for the person trying to read it. Everything is too tight. The typeface is wrong. It’s flat. A grim table indeed. Let’s see what we can do about that. Plenty of negative space The badly typeset table has been set with default padding. There has bee… | 2007 | Mark Boulton | markboulton | 2007-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/typesetting-tables/ | design |
| 147 | 147 | Christmas Is In The AIR | That’s right, Christmas is coming up fast and there’s plenty of things to do. Get the tree and lights up, get the turkey, buy presents and who know what else. And what about Santa? He’s got a list. I’m pretty sure he’s checking it twice. Sure, we could use an existing list making web site or even a desktop widget. But we’re geeks! What’s the fun in that? Let’s build our own to-do list application and do it with Adobe AIR! What’s Adobe AIR? Adobe AIR, formerly codenamed Apollo, is a runtime environment that runs on both Windows and OSX (with Linux support to follow). This runtime environment lets you build desktop applications using Adobe technologies like Flash and Flex. Oh, and HTML. That’s right, you web standards lovin’ maniac. You can build desktop applications that can run cross-platform using the trio of technologies, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. If you’ve tried developing with AIR before, you’ll need to get re-familiarized with the latest beta release as many things have changed since the last one (such as the API and restrictions within the sandbox.) To get started To get started in building an AIR application, you’ll need two basic things: The AIR runtime. The runtime is needed to run any AIR-based application. The SDK. The software development kit gives you all the pieces to test your application. Unzip the SDK into any folder you wish. You’ll also want to get your hands on the JavaScript API documentation which you’ll no doubt find yourself getting into before too long. (You can download it, too.) Also of interest, some development environments have support for AIR built right in. Aptana doesn’t have support for beta 3 yet but I suspect it’ll be available shortly. Within the SDK, there are two main tools that we’ll use: one to test the application (ADL) and another to build a distributable package of our application (ADT). I’ll get into this some more when we get to that stage of development. Building our To-do list application The first step to building an application within AIR is to cre… | 2007 | Jonathan Snook | jonathansnook | 2007-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/christmas-is-in-the-air/ | code |
| 146 | 146 | Increase Your Font Stacks With Font Matrix | Web pages built in plain old HTML and CSS are displayed using only the fonts installed on users’ computers (@font-face implementations excepted). To enable this, CSS provides the font-family property for specifying fonts in order of preference (often known as a font stack). For example: h1 {font-family: 'Egyptienne F', Cambria, Georgia, serif} So in the above rule, headings will be displayed in Egyptienne F. If Egyptienne F is not available then Cambria will be used, failing that Georgia or the final fallback default serif font. This everyday bit of CSS will be common knowledge among all 24 ways readers. It is also a commonly held belief that the only fonts we can rely on being installed on users’ computers are the core web fonts of Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, Georgia and friends. But is that really true? If you look in the fonts folder of your computer, or even your Mum’s computer, then you are likely to find a whole load of fonts besides the core ones. This is because many software packages automatically install extra typefaces. For example, Office 2003 installs over 100 additional fonts. Admittedly not all of these fonts are particularly refined, and not all are suitable for the Web. However they still do increase your options. The Matrix I have put together a matrix of (western) fonts showing which are installed with Mac and Windows operating systems, which are installed with various versions of Microsoft Office, and which are installed with Adobe Creative Suite. The matrix is available for download as an Excel file and as a CSV. There are no readily available statistics regarding the penetration of Office or Creative Suite, but you can probably take an educated guess based on your knowledge of your readers. The idea of the matrix is that use can use it to help construct your font stack. First of all pick the font you’d really like for your text – this doesn’t have to be in the matrix. Then pick the generic family (serif, sans-serif, cursive, fantasy or monospace) and a font from each of the … | 2007 | Richard Rutter | richardrutter | 2007-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/increase-your-font-stacks-with-font-matrix/ | design |
| 145 | 145 | The Neverending (Background Image) Story | Everyone likes candy for Christmas, and there’s none better than eye candy. Well, that, and just more of the stuff. Today we’re going to combine both of those good points and look at how to create a beautiful background image that goes on and on… forever! Of course, each background image is different, so instead of agonising over each and every pixel, I’m going to concentrate on five key steps that you can apply to any of your own repeating background images. In this example, we’ll look at the Miami Beach background image used on the new FOWA site, which I’m afraid is about as un-festive as you can get. 1. Choose your image wisely I find there are three main criteria when judging photos you’re considering for repetition manipulation (or ‘repetulation’, as I like to say)… simplicity (beware of complex patterns) angle and perspective (watch out for shadows and obvious vanishing points) consistent elements (for easy cloning) You might want to check out this annotated version of the image, where I’ve highlighted elements of the photo that led me to choose it as the right one. The original image purchased from iStockPhoto. The Photoshopped version used on the FOWA site. 2. The power of horizontal lines With the image chosen and your cursor poised for some Photoshop magic, the most useful thing you can do is drag out the edge pixels from one side of the image to create a kind of rough colour ‘template’ on which to work over. It doesn’t matter which side you choose, although you might find it beneficial to use the one with the simplest spread of colour and complex elements. Click and hold on the marquee tool in the toolbar and select the ‘single column marquee tool’, which will span the full height of your document but will only be one pixel wide. Make the selection right at the edge of your document, press ctrl-c / cmd-c to copy the selection you made, create a new layer, and hit ctrl-v / cmd-v to paste the selection onto your new layer. using free transform (ctrl-t / cmd-t), drag out your selection so t… | 2007 | Elliot Jay Stocks | elliotjaystocks | 2007-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2007/the-neverending-background-image-story/ | code |
| 144 | 144 | The Mobile Web, Simplified | A note from the editors: although eye-opening in 2006, this article is no longer relevant to today’s mobile web. Considering a foray into mobile web development? Following are four things you need to know before making the leap. 1. 4 billion mobile subscribers expected by 2010 Fancy that. Coupled with the UN prediction of 6.8 billion humans by 2010, 4 billion mobile subscribers (source) is an astounding 59% of the planet. Just how many of those subscribers will have data plans and web-enabled phones is still in question, but inevitably this all means one thing for you and me: A ton of potential eyes to view our web content on a mobile device. 2. Context is king Your content is of little value to users if it ignores the context in which it is viewed. Consider how you access data on your mobile device. You might be holding a bottle of water or gripping a handle on the subway/tube. You’re probably seeking specific data such as directions or show times, rather than the plethora of data at your disposal via a desktop PC. The mobile web, a phrase often used to indicate “accessing the web on a mobile device”, is very much a context-, content-, and component-specific environment. Expressed in terms of your potential target audience, access to web content on a mobile device is largely influenced by surrounding circumstances and conditions, information relevant to being mobile, and the feature set of the device being used. Ask yourself, What is relevant to my users and the tasks, problems, and needs they may encounter while being mobile? Answer that question and you’ll be off to a great start. 3. WAP 2.0 is an XHTML environment In a nutshell, here are a few fundamental tenets of mobile internet technology: Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is the protocol for enabling mobile access to internet content. Wireless Markup Language (WML) was the language of choice for WAP 1.0. Nearly all devices sold today are WAP 2.0 devices. With the in… | 2006 | Cameron Moll | cameronmoll | 2006-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/the-mobile-web-simplified/ | ux |
| 143 | 143 | Marking Up a Tag Cloud | Everyone’s doing it. The problem is, everyone’s doing it wrong. Harsh words, you might think. But the crimes against decent markup are legion in this area. You see, I’m something of a markup and semantics junkie. So I’m going to analyse some of the more well-known tag clouds on the internet, explain what’s wrong, and then show you one way to do it better. del.icio.us I think the first ever tag cloud I saw was on del.icio.us. Here’s how they mark it up. <div class="alphacloud"> <a href="/tag/.net" class="lb s2">.net</a> <a href="/tag/advertising" class=" s3">advertising</a> <a href="/tag/ajax" class=" s5">ajax</a> ... </div> Unfortunately, that is one of the worst examples of tag cloud markup I have ever seen. The page states that a tag cloud is a list of tags where size reflects popularity. However, despite describing it in this way to the human readers, the page’s author hasn’t described it that way in the markup. It isn’t a list of tags, just a bunch of anchors in a <div>. This is also inaccessible because a screenreader will not pause between adjacent links, and in some configurations will not announce the individual links, but rather all of the tags will be read as just one link containing a whole bunch of words. Markup crime number one. Flickr Ah, Flickr. The darling photo sharing site of the internet, and the biggest blind spot in every standardista’s vision. Forgive it for having atrocious markup and sometimes confusing UI because it’s just so much damn fun to use. Let’s see what they do. <p id="TagCloud"> <a href="/photos/tags/06/" style="font-size: 14px;">06</a> <a href="/photos/tags/africa/" style="font-size: 12px;">africa</a> <a href="/photos/tags/amsterdam/" style="font-size: 14px;">amsterdam</a> ... </p> Again we have a simple collection of anchors like del.icio.us, only this time in a paragraph. But rather than using a class to represent the size of the tag they use an inline style. An inline style using a pixel-based font size. That’s so far away from the goal of sep… | 2006 | Mark Norman Francis | marknormanfrancis | 2006-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/marking-up-a-tag-cloud/ | code |
| 142 | 142 | Revealing Relationships Can Be Good Form | A few days ago, a colleague of mine – someone I have known for several years, who has been doing web design for several years and harks back from the early days of ZDNet – was running through a prototype I had put together for some user testing. As with a lot of prototypes, there was an element of ‘smoke and mirrors’ to make things look like they were working. One part of the form included a yes/no radio button, and selecting the Yes option would, in the real and final version of the form, reveal some extra content. Rather than put too much JavaScript in the prototype, I took a preverbial shortcut and created a link which I wrapped around the text next to the radio button – clicking on that link would cause the form to mimic a change event on the radio button. But it wasn’t working for him. Why was that? Because whereas I created the form using a <label> tag for each <input> and naturally went to click on the text rather than the form control itself, he was going straight for the control (and missing the sneaky little <a href> I’d placed around the text). Bah! There goes my time-saver. So, what did I learn? That a web professional who has used the Internet for years had neither heard of the <label> tag, nor had he ever tried clicking on the text. It just goes to show that despite its obvious uses, the label element is not as well known as it rightfully deserves to be. So, what’s a web-standards-loving guy to do? Make a bit more bleedin’ obvious, that’s what! The Mouse Pointer Trick OK, this is the kind of thing that causes some people outrage. A dead simple way of indicating that the label does something is to use a snippet of CSS to change the default mouse cursor to a hand. It’s derided because the hand icon is usually used for links, and some would argue that using this technique is misleading: label { cursor: pointer; } This is not a new idea, though, and you didn’t come here for this. The point is that with something very simple, you’ve made the label element discoverable. But there are other ways… | 2006 | Ian Lloyd | ianlloyd | 2006-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/revealing-relationships-can-be-good-form/ | ux |
| 141 | 141 | Compose to a Vertical Rhythm | “Space in typography is like time in music. It is infinitely divisible, but a few proportional intervals can be much more useful than a limitless choice of arbitrary quantities.” So says the typographer Robert Bringhurst, and just as regular use of time provides rhythm in music, so regular use of space provides rhythm in typography, and without rhythm the listener, or the reader, becomes disorientated and lost. On the Web, vertical rhythm – the spacing and arrangement of text as the reader descends the page – is contributed to by three factors: font size, line height and margin or padding. All of these factors must calculated with care in order that the rhythm is maintained. The basic unit of vertical space is line height. Establishing a suitable line height that can be applied to all text on the page, be it heading, body copy or sidenote, is the key to a solid dependable vertical rhythm, which will engage and guide the reader down the page. To see this in action, I’ve created an example with headings, footnotes and sidenotes. Establishing a suitable line height The easiest place to begin determining a basic line height unit is with the font size of the body copy. For the example I’ve chosen 12px. To ensure readability the body text will almost certainly need some leading, that is to say spacing between the lines. A line-height of 1.5em would give 6px spacing between the lines of body copy. This will create a total line height of 18px, which becomes our basic unit. Here’s the CSS to get us to this point: body { font-size: 75%; } html>body { font-size: 12px; } p { line-height 1.5em; } There are many ways to size text in CSS and the above approach provides and accessible method of achieving the pixel-precision solid typography requires. By way of explanation, the first font-size reduces the body text from the 16px default (common to most browsers and OS set-ups) down to the 12px we require. This rule is primarily there for Internet Explorer 6 and below on Windows: the percentage value means that the t… | 2006 | Richard Rutter | richardrutter | 2006-12-12T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/compose-to-a-vertical-rhythm/ | design |
| 140 | 140 | Styling hCards with CSS | There are plenty of places online where you can learn about using the hCard microformat to mark up contact details at your site (there are some resources at the end of the article). But there’s not yet been a lot of focus on using microformats with CSS. So in this installment of 24 ways, we’re going to look at just that – how microformats help make CSS based styling simpler and more logical. Being rich, quite complex structures, hCards provide designers with a sophisticated scaffolding for styling them. A recent example of styling hCards I saw, playing on the business card metaphor, was by Andy Hume, at http://thedredge.org/2005/06/using-hcards-in-your-blog/. While his approach uses fixed width cards, let’s take a look at how we might style a variable width business card style for our hCards. Let’s take a common hCard, which includes address, telephone and email details <div class="vcard"> <p class="fn org">Web Directions North <a href="http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/get-vcard.php?uri=http://north.webdirections.org/contact/"> <img src="images/vcard-add.png" alt="download vcard icon"></a> </p> 1485 Laperrière Avenue Ottawa ON K1Z 7S8 Canada Phone/Fax: Work: 61 2 9365 5007 Email: info@webdirections.org We’ll be using a variation on the now well established “sliding doors” technique (if you create a CSS technique, remember it’s very important to give it a memorable name or acronym, and bonus points if you get your name in there!) by Douglas Bowman, enhanced by Scott Schiller (see http://www.schillmania.com/projects/dialog/,) which will give us a design which looks like this The technique, in a nutshell, uses background images on four elements, two at the top, and two at the bottom, to add each rounded corner. We are going to make this design “fluid” in the sense that it grows and shrinks in proportion with the size of the font that the text of the element is displayed with. This is sometimes referred to as an “em driven design” (we’ll see why in a moment). To see how this w… | 2006 | John Allsopp | johnallsopp | 2006-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/styling-hcards-with-css/ | design |
| 139 | 139 | Flickr Photos On Demand with getFlickr | In case you don’t know it yet, Flickr is great. It is a lot of fun to upload, tag and caption photos and it is really handy to get a vast network of contacts through it. Using Flickr photos outside of it is a bit of a problem though. There is a Flickr API, and you can get almost every page as an RSS feed, but in general it is a bit tricky to use Flickr photos inside your blog posts or web sites. You might not want to get into the whole API game or use a server side proxy script as you cannot retrieve RSS with Ajax because of the cross-domain security settings. However, Flickr also provides an undocumented JSON output, that can be used to hack your own solutions in JavaScript without having to use a server side script. If you enter the URL http://flickr.com/photos/tags/panda you get to the flickr page with photos tagged “panda”. If you enter the URL http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=panda&format=rss_200 you get the same page as an RSS feed. If you enter the URL http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=panda&format=json you get a JavaScript function called jsonFlickrFeed with a parameter that contains the same data in JSON format You can use this to easily hack together your own output by just providing a function with the same name. I wanted to make it easier for you, which is why I created the helper getFlickr for you to download and use. getFlickr for Non-Scripters Simply include the javascript file getflickr.js and the style getflickr.css in the head of your document: <script type="text/javascript" src="getflickr.js"></script> <link rel="stylesheet" href="getflickr.css" type="text/css"> Once this is done you can add links to Flickr pages anywhere in your document, and when you give them the CSS class getflickrphotos they get turned into gallery links. When a visitor clicks these links they turn into loading messages and show a “popup” gallery with the connected photos once they were loaded. As the JSON returned is very small it won’t take long. You can… | 2006 | Christian Heilmann | chrisheilmann | 2006-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/flickr-photos-on-demand/ | code |
| 138 | 138 | Rounded Corner Boxes the CSS3 Way | If you’ve been doing CSS for a while you’ll know that there are approximately 3,762 ways to create a rounded corner box. The simplest techniques rely on the addition of extra mark-up directly to your page, while the more complicated ones add the mark-up though DOM manipulation. While these techniques are all very interesting, they do seem somewhat of a kludge. The goal of CSS is to separate structure from presentation, yet here we are adding superfluous mark-up to our code in order to create a visual effect. The reason we are doing this is simple. CSS2.1 only allows a single background image per element. Thankfully this looks set to change with the addition of multiple background images into the CSS3 specification. With CSS3 you’ll be able to add not one, not four, but eight background images to a single element. This means you’ll be able to create all kinds of interesting effects without the need of those additional elements. While the CSS working group still seem to be arguing over the exact syntax, Dave Hyatt went ahead and implemented the currently suggested mechanism into Safari. The technique is fiendishly simple, and I think we’ll all be a lot better off once the W3C stop arguing over the details and allow browser vendors to get on and provide the tools we need to build better websites. To create a CSS3 rounded corner box, simply start with your box element and apply your 4 corner images, separated by commas. .box { background-image: url(top-left.gif), url(top-right.gif), url(bottom-left.gif), url(bottom-right.gif); } We don’t want these background images to repeat, which is the normal behaviour, so lets set all their background-repeat properties to no-repeat. .box { background-image: url(top-left.gif), url(top-right.gif), url(bottom-left.gif), url(bottom-right.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat, no-repeat, no-repeat, no-repeat; } Lastly, we need to define the positioning of each corner image. .box { background-image: url(top-left.gif), url(top-right.gif), url(bottom-left.gif), url(bottom-right… | 2006 | Andy Budd | andybudd | 2006-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/rounded-corner-boxes-the-css3-way/ | code |
| 137 | 137 | Cheating Color | Have you ever been strapped to use specific colors outlined in a branding guide? Felt restricted because those colors ended up being too light or dark for the way you want to use them? Here’s the solution: throw out your brand guide. gasp! OK, don’t throw it out. Just put it in a drawer for a few minutes. Branding Guides be Damned When dealing with color on screen, it’s easy to get caught up in literal values from hex colors, you can cheat colors ever so slightly to achieve the right optical value. This is especially prevalent when trying to bring a company’s identity colors to a screen design. Because the most important idea behind a brand guide is to help a company maintain the visual integrity of their business, consider hex numbers to be guidelines rather than law. Once you are familiar enough with the colors your company uses, you can start to flex them a bit, and take a few liberties. This is a quick method for cheating to get the color you really want. With a little sleight of design, we can swap a color that might be part of your identity guidelines, with one that works better optically, and no one will be the wiser! Color is a Wily Beast This might be hard: You might have to break out of the idea that a color can only be made using one method. Color is fluid. It interacts and changes based on its surroundings. Some colors can appear lighter or darker based on what color they appear on or next to. The RGB gamut is additive color, and as such, has a tendency to push contrast in the direction that objects may already be leaning—increasing the contrast of light colors on dark colors and decreasing the contrast of light on light. Obviously, because we are talking about monitors here, these aren’t hard and fast rules. Cheat and Feel Good About It On a light background, when you have a large element of a light color, a small element of the same color will appear lighter. Enter our fake company: Double Dagger. They manufacture footnotes. Take a look at Fig. 1 below. The logo (Double Dagger), rule, and… | 2006 | Jason Santa Maria | jasonsantamaria | 2006-12-23T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/cheating-color/ | design |
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