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| 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 |
| 27 | 27 | Putting Design on the Map | The web can leave us feeling quite detached from the real world. Every site we make is really just a set of abstract concepts manifested as tools for communication and expression. At any minute, websites can disappear, overwritten by a newfangled version or simply gone. I think this is why so many of us have desires to create a product, write a book, or play with the internet of things. We need to keep in touch with the physical world and to prove (if only to ourselves) that we do make real things. I could go on and on about preserving the web, the challenges of writing a book, or thoughts about how we can deal with the need to make real things. Instead, I’m going to explore something that gives us a direct relationship between a website and the physical world – maps. A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected. Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet The simplest form of map on a website tends to be used for showing where a place is and often directions on how to get to it. That’s an incredibly powerful tool. So why is it, then, that so many sites just plonk in a default Google Map and leave it as that? You wouldn’t just use dark grey Helvetica on every site, would you? Where’s the personality? Where’s the tailored experience? Where is the design? Jumping into design Let’s keep this simple – we all want to be better web folk, not cartographers. We don’t need to go into the history, mathematics or technology of map making (although all of those areas are really interesting to research). For the sake of our sanity, I’m going to gloss over some of the technical areas and focus on the practical concepts. Tiles If you’ve ever noticed a map loading in sections, it’s because it uses tiles that are downloaded individually instead of requiring the user to download everything that they might need. These tiles come in many styles and can be used for anything that covers large ar… | 2014 | Shane Hudson | shanehudson | 2014-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/putting-design-on-the-map/ | design |
| 298 | 298 | First Steps in VR | The web is all around us. As web folk, it is our responsibility to consider the impact our work can have. Part of this includes thinking about the future; the web changes lives and if we are building the web then we are the ones making decisions that affect people in every corner of the world. I find myself often torn between wanting to make the right decisions, and just wanting to have fun. To fiddle and play. We all know how important it is to sometimes just try ideas, whether they will amount to much or not. I think of these two mindsets as production and prototyping, though of course there are lots of overlap and phases in between. I mention this because virtual reality is currently seen as a toy for rich people, and in some ways at the moment it is. But with WebVR we are able to create interesting experiences with a relatively low entry point. I want us to have open minds, play around with things, and then see how we can use the tools we have at our disposal to make things that will help people. Every year we see articles saying it will be the “year of virtual reality”, that was especially prevalent this year. 2016 has been a year of progress, VR isn’t quite mainstream but with efforts like Playstation VR and Google Cardboard, we are definitely seeing much more of it. This year also saw the consumer editions of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. So it does seem to be a good time for an overview of how to get involved with creating virtual reality on the web. WebVR is an API for connecting to devices and retrieving continuous data such as the position and orientation. Unlike the Web Audio API and some other APIs, WebVR does not feel like a framework. You use it however you want, taking the data and using it as you wish. To make it easier, there are plenty of resources such as Three.js, A-Frame and ReactVR that help to make the heavy lifting a bit easier. Getting Started with A-Frame I like taking the opportunity to learn new things whenever I can. So while planning this article I thought that instead of trying to… | 2016 | Shane Hudson | shanehudson | 2016-12-11T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/first-steps-in-vr/ | code |
| 129 | 129 | Knockout Type - Thin Is Always In | OS X has gorgeous native anti-aliasing (although I will admit to missing 10px aliased Geneva — *sigh*). This is especially true for dark text on a light background. However, things can go awry when you start using light text on a dark background. Strokes thicken. Counters constrict. Letterforms fill out like seasonal snackers. So how do we combat the fat? In Safari and other Webkit-based browsers we can use the CSS ‘text-shadow’ property. While trying to add a touch more contrast to the navigation on haveamint.com I noticed an interesting side-effect on the weight of the type. The second line in the example image above has the following style applied to it: This creates an invisible drop-shadow. (Why is it invisible? The shadow is positioned directly behind the type (the first two zeros) and has no spread (the third zero). So the color, black, is completely eclipsed by the type it is supposed to be shadowing.) Why applying an invisible drop-shadow effectively lightens the weight of the type is unclear. What is clear is that our light-on-dark text is now of a comparable weight to its dark-on-light counterpart. You can see this trick in effect all over ShaunInman.com and in the navigation on haveamint.com and Subtraction.com. The HTML and CSS source code used to create the example images used in this article can be found here. | 2006 | Shaun Inman | shauninman | 2006-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/knockout-type/ | code |
| 316 | 316 | Have Your DOM and Script It Too | When working with the XMLHttpRequest object it appears you can only go one of three ways: You can stay true to the colorful moniker du jour and stick strictly to the responseXML property You can play with proprietary – yet widely supported – fire and inject the value of responseText property into the innerHTML of an element of your choosing Or you can be eval() and parse JSON or arbitrary JavaScript delivered via responseText But did you know that there’s a fourth option giving you the best of the latter two worlds? Mint uses this unmentioned approach to grab fresh HTML and run arbitrary JavaScript simultaneously. Without relying on eval(). “But wait-”, you might say, “when would I need to do this?” Besides the example below this technique is handy for things like tab groups that need initialization onload but miss the main onload event handler by a mile thanks to asynchronous scripting. Consider the problem Originally Mint used option 2 to refresh or load new tabs into individual Pepper panes without requiring a full roundtrip to the server. This was all well and good until I introduced the new Client Mode which when enabled allows anyone to view a Mint installation without being logged in. If voyeurs are afoot as Client Mode is disabled, the next time they refresh a pane the entire login page is inserted into the current document. That’s not very helpful so I needed a way to redirect the current document to the login page. Enter the solution Wouldn’t it be cool if browsers interpreted the contents of script tags crammed into innerHTML? Sure, but unfortunately, that just wasn’t meant to be. However like the body element, image elements have an onload event handler. When the image has fully loaded the handler runs the code applied to it. See where I’m going with this? By tacking a tiny image (think single pixel, transparent spacer gif – shudder) onto the end of the HTML returned by our Ajax call, we can smuggle our arbitrary JavaScript into the existing document. The image is added to the DOM, and … | 2005 | Shaun Inman | shauninman | 2005-12-24T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/have-your-dom-and-script-it-too/ | code |
| 34 | 34 | Collaborative Responsive Design Workflows | Much has been written about workflow and designer-developer collaboration in web design, but many teams still struggle with this issue; either with how to adapt their internal workflow, or how to communicate the need for best practices like mobile first and progressive enhancement to their teams and clients. Christmas seems like a good time to have another look at what doesn’t work between us and how we can improve matters. Why is it so difficult? We’re still beginning to understand responsive design workflows, acknowledging the need to move away from static design tools and towards best practices in development. It’s not that we don’t want to change – so why is it so difficult? Changing the way we do something that has become routine is always problematic, even with small things, and the changes today’s web environment requires from web design and development teams are anything but small. Although developers also have a host of new skills to learn and things to consider, designers are probably the ones pushed furthest out of their comfort zones: as well as graphic design, a web designer today also needs an understanding of interaction design and ergonomics, because more and more websites are becoming tools rather than pages meant to be read like a book or magazine. In addition to that there are thousands of different devices and screen sizes on the market today that layout and interactions need to work on. These aspects make it impossible to design in a static design tool, so beyond having to learn about new aspects of design, the designer has to either learn how to code or learn to work with a responsive design tool. Why do it That alone is enough to leave anyone overwhelmed, as learning a new skill takes time and slows you down in a project – and on most projects time is in short supply. Yet we have to make time or fall behind in the industry as others pitch better, interactive designs. For an efficient workflow, both designers and developers must familiarise themselves with new tools and techniques. A… | 2014 | Sibylle Weber | sibylleweber | 2014-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/collaborative-responsive-design-workflows/ | process |
| 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 |
| 267 | 267 | Taming Complexity | I’m going to step into my UX trousers for this one. I wouldn’t usually wear them in public, but it’s Christmas, so there’s nothing wrong with looking silly. Anyway, to business. Wherever I roam, I hear the familiar call for simplicity and the denouncement of complexity. I read often that the simpler something is, the more usable it will be. We understand that simple is hard to achieve, but we push for it nonetheless, convinced it will make what we build easier to use. Simple is better, right? Well, I’ll try to explore that. Much of what follows will not be revelatory to some but, like all good lessons, I think this serves as a welcome reminder that as we live in a complex world it’s OK to sometimes reflect that complexity in the products we build. Myths and legends Less is more, we’ve been told, ever since master of poetic verse Robert Browning used the phrase in 1855. Well, I’ve conducted some research, and it appears he knew nothing of web design. Neither did modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a later pedlar of this worthy yet contradictory notion. Broad is narrow. Tall is short. Eggs are chips. See: anyone can come up with this stuff. To paraphrase Einstein, simple doesn’t have to be simpler. In other words, simple doesn’t dictate that we remove the complexity. Complex doesn’t have to be confusing; it can be beautiful and elegant. On the web, complex can be necessary and powerful. A website that simplifies the lives of its users by offering them everything they need in one site or screen is powerful. For some, the greater the density of information, the more useful the site. In our decision-making process, principles such as Occam’s razor’s_razor (in a nutshell: simple is better than complex) are useful, but simple is for the user to determine through their initial impression and subsequent engagement. What appears simple to me or you might appear very complex to someone else, based on their own mental model or needs. We can aim to deliver simple, but they’ll be the judge. As a designer, deve… | 2011 | Simon Collison | simoncollison | 2011-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2011/taming-complexity/ | ux |
| 328 | 328 | Swooshy Curly Quotes Without Images | The problem Take a quote and render it within blockquote tags, applying big, funky and stylish curly quotes both at the beginning and the end without using any images – at all. The traditional way Feint background images under the text, or an image in the markup housed in a little float. Often designers only use the opening curly quote as it’s just too difficult to float a closing one. Why is the traditional way bad? Well, for a start there are no actual curly quotes in the text (unless you’re doing some nifty image replacement). Thus with CSS disabled you’ll only have default blockquote styling to fall back on. Secondly, images don’t resize, so scaling text will have no affect on your graphic curlies. The solution Use really big text. Then it can be resized by the browser, resized using CSS, and even be restyled with a new font style if you fancy it. It’ll also make sense when CSS is unavailable. The problem Creating “Drop Caps” with CSS has been around for a while (Big Dan Cederholm discusses a neat solution in that first book of his), but drop caps are normal characters – the A to Z or 1 to 10 – and these can all be pulled into a set space and do not serve up a ton of whitespace, unlike punctuation characters. Curly quotes aren’t like traditional characters. Like full stops, commas and hashes they float within the character space and leave lots of dead white space, making it bloody difficult to manipulate them with CSS. Styles generally fit around text, so cutting into that character is tricky indeed. Also, all that extra white space is going to push into the quote text and make it look pretty uneven. This grab highlights the actual character space: See how this is emphasized when we add a normal alphabetical character within the span. This is what we’re dealing with here: Then, there’s size. Call in a curly quote at less than 300% font-size and it ain’t gonna look very big. The white space it creates will be big enough, but the curlies will be way too small. We need more like 700% (as in this … | 2005 | Simon Collison | simoncollison | 2005-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/swooshy-curly-quotes-without-images/ | business |
| 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 |
| 249 | 249 | Fast Autocomplete Search for Your Website | Every website deserves a great search engine - but building a search engine can be a lot of work, and hosting it can quickly get expensive. I’m going to build a search engine for 24 ways that’s fast enough to support autocomplete (a.k.a. typeahead) search queries and can be hosted for free. I’ll be using wget, Python, SQLite, Jupyter, sqlite-utils and my open source Datasette tool to build the API backend, and a few dozen lines of modern vanilla JavaScript to build the interface. Try it out here, then read on to see how I built it. First step: crawling the data The first step in building a search engine is to grab a copy of the data that you plan to make searchable. There are plenty of potential ways to do this: you might be able to pull it directly from a database, or extract it using an API. If you don’t have access to the raw data, you can imitate Google and write a crawler to extract the data that you need. I’m going to do exactly that against 24 ways: I’ll build a simple crawler using wget, a command-line tool that features a powerful “recursive” mode that’s ideal for scraping websites. We’ll start at the https://24ways.org/archives/ page, which links to an archived index for every year that 24 ways has been running. Then we’ll tell wget to recursively crawl the website, using the --recursive flag. We don’t want to fetch every single page on the site - we’re only interested in the actual articles. Luckily, 24 ways has nicely designed URLs, so we can tell wget that we only care about pages that start with one of the years it has been running, using the -I argument like this: -I /2005,/2006,/2007,/2008,/2009,/2010,/2011,/2012,/2013,/2014,/2015,/2016,/2017 We want to be polite, so let’s wait for 2 seconds between each request rather than hammering the site as fast as we can: --wait 2 The first time I ran this, I accidentally downloaded the comments pages as well. We don’t want those, so let’s exclude them from the crawl using -X "/*/*/comments". Finally, it’s useful to be able to run the command multiple times… | 2018 | Simon Willison | simonwillison | 2018-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2018/fast-autocomplete-search-for-your-website/ | code |
| 326 | 326 | Don't be eval() | JavaScript is an interpreted language, and like so many of its peers it includes the all powerful eval() function. eval() takes a string and executes it as if it were regular JavaScript code. It’s incredibly powerful and incredibly easy to abuse in ways that make your code slower and harder to maintain. As a general rule, if you’re using eval() there’s probably something wrong with your design. Common mistakes Here’s the classic misuse of eval(). You have a JavaScript object, foo, and you want to access a property on it – but you don’t know the name of the property until runtime. Here’s how NOT to do it: var property = 'bar'; var value = eval('foo.' + property); Yes it will work, but every time that piece of code runs JavaScript will have to kick back in to interpreter mode, slowing down your app. It’s also dirt ugly. Here’s the right way of doing the above: var property = 'bar'; var value = foo[property]; In JavaScript, square brackets act as an alternative to lookups using a dot. The only difference is that square bracket syntax expects a string. Security issues In any programming language you should be extremely cautious of executing code from an untrusted source. The same is true for JavaScript – you should be extremely cautious of running eval() against any code that may have been tampered with – for example, strings taken from the page query string. Executing untrusted code can leave you vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks. What’s it good for? Some programmers say that eval() is B.A.D. – Broken As Designed – and should be removed from the language. However, there are some places in which it can dramatically simplify your code. A great example is for use with XMLHttpRequest, a component of the set of tools more popularly known as Ajax. XMLHttpRequest lets you make a call back to the server from JavaScript without refreshing the whole page. A simple way of using this is to have the server return JavaScript code which is then passed to eval(). Here is a simple function for doing exactly that … | 2005 | Simon Willison | simonwillison | 2005-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2005/dont-be-eval/ | code |
| 43 | 43 | Content Production Planning | While everyone agrees that getting the content of a website right is vital to its success, unless you’re lucky enough to have an experienced editor or content strategist on board, planning content production often seems to fall through the cracks. One reason is that, for most of the team, it feels like someone else’s problem. Not necessarily a specific person’s problem. Just someone else’s. It’s only when everyone starts urgently asking when the content is going to be ready, that it becomes clear the answer is, “Not as soon as we’d like it”. The good news is that there are some quick and simple things you can do, even if you’re not the official content person on a project, to get everyone on the same content planning page. Content production planning boils down to answering three deceptively simple questions: What content do you need? How much of it do you need? Who’s going to make it? Even if it’s not your job to come up with the answers, by asking these questions early enough and agreeing who is going to come up with the answers, you’ll be a long way towards avoiding the last-minute content problems which so often plague projects. How much content do we need? People tend to underestimate two crucial things about content: how much content they need, and how long that content takes to produce. When I ask someone how big their website is – how many pages it contains – I usually double or triple the answer I get. That’s because almost everyone’s mental model of their website greatly underestimates its true size. You can see the problem for yourself if you look at a site map. Site maps are great at representing a mental model of a website. But because they’re a deliberate simplification they naturally lead us to underestimate how much content is involved in populating them. Several years ago I was asked to help a client create a new microsite (their word) which they wanted ready in two weeks for a conference they were attending. Here’s the site map they had in mind. At first glance it looks like a pret… | 2014 | Sophie Dennis | sophiedennis | 2014-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2014/content-production-planning/ | content |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 88 | 88 | Think First, Code Later | This is a story that’s best told from the end, and it’s probably one you’re all familiar with. You, or someone just like you, have been building a website, probably as part of a skilled and capable team. You’re a front-end developer, focusing on JavaScript – it’s either your sole responsibility or shared around. It’s quite a big job, been going on for months, and at last it feels like you’re reaching the end of it. But, in a brief moment of downtime, you step back and take a look at the code as a whole. You notice that the folder called “jQuery plugins” suddenly looks rather full, and maybe there’s evidence of several methods of doing the same thing; there are loads of little niggly fixes in the bug tracker; and every place you use Ajax the structure of the data is slightly different. You sigh, and your shoulders droop slightly, and you think “Yeah, we’ll do that more cleanly next time.” The thing is, you probably already know how to rewrite the start of this story to make the ending work better. This situation is not really anyone’s fault – it’s just an accumulation of all the things you decided along the way, all the things you agreed you’d fix later that have disappeared into the black hole of technical debt, and accomodating all the “can we just…?” requests from around the team and the client. So, the solution to this is easy, right? More interminable planning meetings, more tightly controlled and documented specifications, less freedom to innovate, to try out new ideas and enjoy what you’re doing. Wait, that sounds even less fun than the old way. Minimum viable planning Actually, planning and specifications are exactly what you need, but the way you go about them can make a real difference, both to the quality of your code, and the quality of your life as a developer. It can be as simple as being a little more thoughtful before starting on any new piece of functionality. Involve your whole team if possible, or at least those working on what you’re doing. Canvass opinions and work out what the solution… | 2012 | Stephen Fulljames | stephenfulljames | 2012-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/think-first-code-later/ | process |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 84 | 84 | Responsive Responsive Design | Now more than ever, we’re designing work meant to be viewed along a gradient of different experiences. Responsive web design offers us a way forward, finally allowing us to “design for the ebb and flow of things.” With those two sentences, Ethan closed the article that introduced the web to responsive design. Since then, responsive design has taken the web by storm. Seemingly every day, some company is touting their new responsive redesign. Large brands such as Microsoft, Time and Disney are getting in on the action, blowing away the once common criticism that responsive design was a technique only fit for small blogs. Certainly, this is a good thing. As Ethan and John Allsopp before him, were right to point out, the inherent flexibility of the web is a feature, not a bug. The web’s unique ability to be consumed and interacted with on any number of devices, with any number of input methods is something to be embraced. But there’s one part of the web’s inherent flexibility that seems to be increasingly overlooked: the ability for the web to be interacted with on any number of networks, with a gradient of bandwidth constraints and latency costs, on devices with varying degrees of hardware power. A few months back, Stephanie Rieger tweeted “Shoot me now…responsive design has seemingly become confused with an opportunity to reduce performance rather than improve it.” I would love to disagree, but unfortunately the evidence is damning. Consider the size and number of requests for four highly touted responsive sites that were launched this year: 74 requests, 1,511kb 114 requests, 1,200kb 99 requests, 1,298kb 105 requests, 5,942kb And those numbers were for the small screen versions of each site! These sites were praised for their visual design and responsive nature, and rightfully so. They’re very easy on the eyes and a lot of thought went into their appearance. But the numbers above tell an inconvenient truth: for all the time spent ensuring the visual design was airtight, seemingly very little (if… | 2012 | Tim Kadlec | timkadlec | 2012-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/responsive-responsive-design/ | design |
| 119 | 119 | Rocking Restrictions | I love my job. I live my job. For every project I do, I try to make it look special. I’ll be honest: I have a fetish for comments like “I never saw anything like that!” or, “I wish I thought of that!”. I know, I have an ego-problem. (Eleven I’s already) But sometimes, you run out of inspiration. Happens to everybody, and everybody hates it. “I’m the worst designer in the world.” “Everything I designed before this was just pure luck!” No it wasn’t. Countless articles about finding inspiration have already been written. Great, but they’re not the magic potion you’d expect them to be when you need it. Here’s a list of small tips that can have immediate effect when applying them/using them. Main theme: Liberate yourself from the designers’ block by restricting yourself. Do’s Grids If you aren’t already using grids, you’re doing something wrong. Not only are they a great help for aligning your design, they also restrict you to certain widths and heights. (For more information about grids, I suggest you read Mark Boulton’s series on designing grid systems. Oh, he’s also publishing a book I think.) So what’s the link between grids and restrictions? Instead of having the option to style a piece of layout with a width of 1 to 960 pixels, you have to choose from values like 60 pixels, 140, 220, 300, … Start small Having a hard time finding a style for the layout, why don’t you start with one small object? No, not that small object, I meant a piece of a form, or a link, or try styling your headers (h1 – h6). Let’s take a submit button of a form: it’s small, but needs much attention. People will click it. People will hover it. Maybe sometimes it’s disabled? Also: a button needs to look like a button, so typically it requires more styling then a regular link. Once you’ve got the button, move on, following the button’s style. Color palettes There are lots of resources on the web for finding inspiration for color palettes. Some of the most famous are COLOURlovers, wear palettes and Adobe’s Kuler. Browse through them … | 2008 | Tim Van Damme | timvandamme | 2008-12-14T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2008/rocking-restrictions/ | process |
| 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 |
| 11 | 11 | JavaScript: Taking Off the Training Wheels | JavaScript is the third pillar of front-end web development. Of those pillars, it is both the most powerful and the most complex, so it’s understandable that when 24 ways asked, “What one thing do you wish you had more time to learn about?”, a number of you answered “JavaScript!” This article aims to help you feel happy writing JavaScript, and maybe even without libraries like jQuery. I can’t comprehensively explain JavaScript itself without writing a book, but I hope this serves as a springboard from which you can jump to other great resources. Why learn JavaScript? So what’s in it for you? Why take the next step and learn the fundamentals? Confidence with jQuery If nothing else, learning JavaScript will improve your jQuery code; you’ll be comfortable writing jQuery from scratch and feel happy bending others’ code to your own purposes. Writing efficient, fast and bug-free jQuery is also made much easier when you have a good appreciation of JavaScript, because you can look at what jQuery is really doing. Understanding how JavaScript works lets you write better jQuery because you know what it’s doing behind the scenes. When you need to leave the beaten track, you can do so with confidence. In fact, you could say that jQuery’s ultimate goal is not to exist: it was invented at a time when web APIs were very inconsistent and hard to work with. That’s slowly changing as new APIs are introduced, and hopefully there will come a time when jQuery isn’t needed. An example of one such change is the introduction of the very useful document.querySelectorAll. Like jQuery, it converts a CSS selector into a list of matching elements. Here’s a comparison of some jQuery code and the equivalent without. $('.counter').each(function (index) { $(this).text(index + 1); }); var counters = document.querySelectorAll('.counter'); [].slice.call(counters).forEach(function (elem, index) { elem.textContent = index + 1; }); Solving problems no one else has! When you have to go to the internet to solve a problem, you’re forever st… | 2013 | Tom Ashworth | tomashworth | 2013-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2013/javascript-taking-off-the-training-wheels/ | code |
| 294 | 294 | New Tricks for an Old Dog | Much of my year has been spent helping new team members find their way around the expansive and complex codebase that is the TweetDeck front-end, trying to build a happy and productive group of people around a substantial codebase with many layers of legacy. I’ve loved doing this. Everything from writing new documentation, drawing diagrams, and holding technical architecture sessions teaches you something you didn’t know or exposes an area of uncertainty that you can go work on. In this article, I hope to share some experiences and techniques that will prove useful in your own situation and that you can impress your friends in some new and exciting ways! How do you do, fellow kids? To start with I’d like to introduce you to our JavaScript framework, Flight. Right now it’s used by twitter.com and TweetDeck although, as a company, Twitter is largely moving to React. Over time, as we used Flight for more complex interfaces, we found it wasn’t scaling with us. Composing components into trees was fiddly and often only applied for a specific parent-child pairing. It seems like an obvious feature with hindsight, but it didn’t come built-in to Flight, and it made reusing components a real challenge. There was no standard way to manage the state of a component; they all did it slightly differently, and the technique often varied by who was writing the code. This cost us in maintainability as you just couldn’t predict how a component would be built until you opened it. Making matters worse, Flight relied on events to move data around the application. Unfortunately, events aren’t good for giving structure to complex logic. They jump around in a way that’s hard to understand and debug, and force you to search your code for a specific string — the event name‚ to figure out what’s going on. To find fixes for these problems, we looked around at other frameworks. We like React for it’s simple, predictable state management and reactive re-render flow, and Elm for bringing strict functional programming to everyone. But when you ha… | 2016 | Tom Ashworth | tomashworth | 2016-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/new-tricks-for-an-old-dog/ | code |
| 82 | 82 | Being Prepared To Contribute | “You’ll figure it out.” The advice my dad gives has always been the same, whether addressing my grade school homework or paying bills after college. If I was looking for a shortcut, my dad wasn’t going to be the one to provide it. When I was a kid it infuriated the hell out of me, but what I then perceived to be a lack of understanding turned out to be a keystone in my upbringing. As an adult, I realize the value in not receiving outright solutions, but being forced to figure things out. Even today, when presented with a roadblock while building for the web, I am temped to get by with the help of the latest grid system, framework, polyfill, or plugin. In and of themselves these resources are harmless, but before I can drop them in, those damn words still echo in the back of my mind: “You’ll figure it out.” I know that if I blindly implement these tools as drag and drop solutions I fail to understand the intricacies behind how and why they were built; repeatedly using them as shortcuts handicaps my skill set. When I solely rely on the tools of others, my work is at their mercy, leaving me less creative and resourceful, and, thus, less able to contribute to the advancement of our industry and community. One of my favorite things about this community is how generous and collaborative it can be. I’ve loved seeing FitVids used all over the web and regularly improved upon at Github. I bet we can all think of a time where implementing a shared resource has benefitted our own work and sanity. Because these resources are so valuable, it’s important that we continue to be a part of the conversation in order to further develop solutions and ideas. It’s easy to assume there’s someone smarter or more up-to-date in any one area, but with a degree of understanding and perspective, we can all participate. This open form of collaboration is in our web DNA. After all, its primary purpose was to promote the exchange and development of new ideas. Tim Berners-Lee proposed a global hypertext project, to be known as the Worl… | 2012 | Trent Walton | trentwalton | 2012-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/being-prepared-to-contribute/ | process |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 61 | 61 | Animation in Responsive Design | Animation and responsive design can sometimes feel like they’re at odds with each other. Animation often needs space to do its thing, but RWD tells us that the amount of space we’ll have available is going to change a lot. Balancing that can lead to some tricky animation situations. Embracing the squishiness of responsive design doesn’t have to mean giving up on your creative animation ideas. There are three general techniques that can help you balance your web animation creativity with your responsive design needs. One or all of these approaches might help you sneak in something just a little extra into your next project. Focused art direction Smaller viewports mean a smaller stage for your motion to play out on, and this tends to amplify any motion in your animation. Suddenly 100 pixels is really far and multiple moving parts can start looking like they’re battling for space. An effect that looked great on big viewports can become muddled and confusing when it’s reframed in a smaller space. Making animated movements smaller will do the trick for simple motion like a basic move across the screen. But for more complex animation on smaller viewports, you’ll need to simplify and reduce the number of moving parts. The key to this is determining what the vital parts of the animation are, to zone in on the parts that are most important to its message. Then remove the less necessary bits to distill the motion’s message down to the essentials. For example, Rally Interactive’s navigation folds down into place with two triangle shapes unfolding each corner on larger viewports. If this exact motion was just scaled down for narrower spaces the two corners would overlap as they unfolded. It would look unnatural and wouldn’t make much sense. Open video The main purpose of this animation is to show an unfolding action. To simplify the animation, Rally unfolds only one side for narrower viewports, with a slightly different animation. The action is still easily interpreted as unfolding and it’s done in a way that is a better… | 2015 | Val Head | valhead | 2015-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2015/animation-in-responsive-design/ | design |
| 76 | 76 | Giving CSS Animations and Transitions Their Place | CSS animations and transitions may not sit squarely in the realm of the behaviour layer, but they’re stepping up into this area that used to be pure JavaScript territory. Heck, CSS might even perform better than its JavaScript equivalents in some cases. That’s pretty serious! With CSS’s new tricks blurring the lines between presentation and behaviour, it can start to feel bloated and messy in our CSS files. It’s an uncomfortable feeling. Here are a pair of methods I’ve found to be pretty helpful in keeping the potential bloat and wire-crossing under control when CSS has its hands in both presentation and behaviour. Same eggs, more baskets Structuring your CSS to have separate files for layout, typography, grids, and so on is a fairly common approach these days. But which one do you put your transitions and animations in? The initial answer, as always, is “it depends”. Small effects here and there will likely sit just fine with your other styles. When you move into more involved effects that require multiple animations and some logic support from JavaScript, it’s probably time to choose none of the above, and create a separate CSS file just for them. Putting all your animations in one file is a huge help for code organization. Even if you opt for a name less literal than animations.css, you’ll know exactly where to go for anything CSS animation related. That saves time and effort when it comes to editing and maintenance. Keeping track of which animations are still currently used is easier when they’re all grouped together as well. And as an added bonus, you won’t have to look at all those horribly unattractive and repetitive prefixed @-keyframe rules unless you actually need to. An animations.css file might look something like the snippet below. It defines each animation’s keyframes and defines a class for each variation of that animation you’ll be using. Depending on the situation, you may also want to include transitions here in a similar way. (I’ve found defining transitions as their own class, or mixin, … | 2012 | Val Head | valhead | 2012-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2012/giving-css-animations-and-transitions-their-place/ | 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 |
| 111 | 111 | Geometric Background Patterns | When the design is finished and you’re about to start the coding process, you have to prepare your graphics. If you’re working with a pattern background you need to export only the repeating fragment. It can be a bit tricky to isolate a fragment to achieve a seamless pattern background. For geometric patterns there is a method I always follow and that I want to share with you. Take for example a perfect 45° diagonal line pattern. How do you define this pattern fragment so it will be rendered seamlessly? Here is the method I usually follow to avoid a mismatch. First, zoom in so you see enough detail and you can distinguish the pixels. Select the Rectangular Marquee Selection tool and start your selection at the intersection of 2 different colors of a diagonal line. Hold down the Shift key while dragging so you drag a perfect square. Release the mouse when you reach the exact same intesection (as your starting) point at the top right. Copy this fragment (using Copy Merged: Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + C) and paste the fragment in a new layer. Give this layer the name ‘pattern’. Now hold down the Command Key (Control Key on Windows) and click on the ‘pattern’ layer in the Layers Palette to select the fragment. Now go to Edit > Define Pattern, enter a name for your pattern and click OK. Test your pattern in a new document. Create a new document of 600 px by 400px, hit Cmd/Ctrl + A and go to Edit > Fill… and choose your pattern. If the result is OK, you have created a perfect pattern fragment. Below you see this pattern enlarged. The guides show the boundaries of the pattern fragment and the red pixels are the reference points. The red pixels at the top right, bottom right and bottom left should match the red pixel at the top left. This technique should work for every geometric pattern. Some patterns are easier than others, but this, and the Photoshop pattern fill test, has always been my guideline. Other geometric pattern examples Example 1 Not all geometric pattern fragments are squares. Some patterns … | 2008 | Veerle Pieters | veerlepieters | 2008-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2008/geometric-background-patterns/ | design |
| 131 | 131 | Random Lines Made With Mesh | I know that Adobe Illustrator can be a bit daunting for people who aren’t really advanced users of the program, but you would be amazed by how easy you can create cool effects or backgrounds. In this short tutorial I show you how to create a cool looking background only in 5 steps. Step 1 – Create Lines Create lines using random widths and harmonious suitable colors. If you get stuck on finding the right colors, check out Adobe’s Kuler and start experimenting. Step 2 – Convert Strokes to Fills Select all lines and convert them to fills. Go to the Object menu, select Path > Outline Stroke. Select the Rectangle tool and draw 1 big rectangle on top the lines. Give the rectangle a suitable color. With the rectangle still selected, go to the Object menu, select Arrange > Send to Back. Step 3 – Convert to Mesh Select all objects by pressing the command key (for Mac users), control key (for Windows users) + the “a” key. Go to the Object menu and select the Envelope Distort > Make with Mesh option. Enter 2 rows and 2 columns. Check the preview box to see what happens and click the OK button. Step 4 – Play Around with The Mesh Points Play around with the points of the mesh using the Direct Selection tool (the white arrow in the Toolbox). Click on the top right point of the mesh. Once you’re starting to drag hold down the shift key and move the point upwards. Now start dragging the bezier handles on the mesh to achieve the effect as shown in the above picture. Of course you can try out all kind of different effects here. The Final Result This is an example of how the final result can look. You can try out all kinds of different shapes dragging the handles of the mesh points. This is just one of the many results you can get. So next time you haven’t got inspiration for a background of a header, a banner or whatever, just experiment with a few basic shapes such as lines and try out the ‘Envelope Distort’ options in Illustrator or the ‘Make with Mesh’ option and experiment, you’ll be amazed by the u… | 2006 | Veerle Pieters | veerlepieters | 2006-12-08T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2006/random-lines-made-with-mesh/ | design |
| 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 |
| 290 | 290 | Creating a Weekly Research Cadence | Working on a product team, it’s easy to get hyper-focused on building features and lose sight of your users and their daily challenges. User research can be time-consuming to set up, so it often becomes ad-hoc and irregular, only performed in response to a particular question or concern. But without frequent touch points and opportunities for discovery, your product will stagnate and become less and less relevant. Setting up an efficient cadence of weekly research conversations will re-focus your team on user problems and provide a steady stream of insights for product development. As my team transitioned into a Lean process earlier this year, we needed a way to get more feedback from users in a short amount of time. Our users are internet marketers—always busy and often difficult to reach. Scheduling research took days of emailing back and forth to find mutually agreeable times, and juggling one-off conversations made it difficult to connect with more than one or two people per week. The slow pace of research was allowing additional risk to creep into our product development. I wanted to find a way for our team to test ideas and validate assumptions sooner and more often—but without increasing the administrative burden of scheduling. The solution: creating a regular cadence of research and testing that required a minimum of effort to coordinate. Setting up a weekly user research cadence accelerated our learning and built momentum behind strategic experiments. By dedicating time every week to talk to a few users, we made ongoing research a painless part of every weekly sprint. But increasing the frequency of our research had other benefits as well. With only five working days between sessions, a weekly cadence forced us to keep our work small and iterative. Committing to testing something every week meant showing work earlier and more often than we might have preferred—pushing us out of your comfort zone into a process of more rapid experimentation. Best of all, frequent conversations with users helped us become… | 2016 | Wren Lanier | wrenlanier | 2016-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 | https://24ways.org/2016/creating-a-weekly-research-cadence/ | ux |
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