rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic
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 spinners to indicate something’s happening behind the scenes. Up until now, people would go to some site, pick one of the available templates, customize their foreground and background colors, and download a beautiful GIF image.

There are some downsides to this though:


	It’s only _semi_-transparent: If you change your mind and pick a slightly different background color, you need to go back to the site, set all the parameters again, and replace your current image. There isn’t even a way to pick an image or gradient as background.
	Limited number of frames, probable to keep the file-size as small as possible (don’t forget this thing needs to be loaded before whatever process is finished in the background), and you don’t have that 24 frames per second smoothness.
	This is just too fucking easy. As a front-end code geek, there must be a “cooler” way to do this!


What do we need to make a spinner with CSS animations? One image, and one element on our webpage we can hook on to. Yes, that’s it. I created a simple transparent PNG that looks it might be a spinner, and for the element on the page, I wrote this piece of genius HTML:

<p id=""spinner"">Please wait while we do what we do best.</p>

Looks semantic enough to me! Here’s the basic HTML I’m using to position the element in the center of the screen, and make the text inside it disappear:

#spinner {
	position: absolute;
	top: 50%;
	left: 50%;
	margin: -100px 0 0 -100px;
	height: 200px;
	width: 200px;
	text-indent: 250px;
	white-space: nowrap;
	overflow: hidden;
}

Cool, but now we don’t see anything. Let’s pull rabbit number one out of the hat: -webkit-mask-image (accompanied by the previously mentioned transparent PNG image):

#spinner {
	...
	-webkit-mask-image: url(../img/spinner.png);
}

By now you should be feeling like a magician already. Oh, wait, we still have a blank screen, looks like we left something in the hat (tip: not rabbit droppings):

#spinner {
	...
	-webkit-mask-image: url(../img/spinner.png);
	background-color: #000;
}

Nice! What we’ve done right here is telling the element to clip onto the PNG. It’s a lot like clipping layers in Photoshop. So, spinners, they move, right? Into the hat again, and look what we pull out this time: CSS animations!

#spinner {
	...
	-webkit-mask-image: url(../img/spinner.png);
	background-color: #000;
	-webkit-animation-name: spinnerRotate;
	-webkit-animation-duration: 2s;
	-webkit-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
	-webkit-animation-timing-function: linear;
}

Some explanation:


	-webkit-animation-name: Name of the animation we’ll be defining later.
	-webkit-animation-duration: The timespan of the animation.
	-webkit-animation-iteration-count: Repeat once, a defined number of times or infinitely?
	-webkit-animation-timing-function: Linear is the one you’ll be using mostly. Other options are ease-in, ease-out, ease-in-out…


Let’s define spinnerRotate:

@-webkit-keyframes spinnerRotate {
	from {
		-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);
	}
	to {
		-webkit-transform:rotate(360deg);
	}
}

En Anglais: Rotate #spinner starting at 0 degrees, ending at 360 degrees, over a timespan of 2 seconds, at a constant speed, and keep repeating this animation forever.

That’s it! See it in action on the demo page.

Note: these examples only work when you’re using a WebKit-based browser like Safari, Mobile Safari or Google Chrome. I’m confident though that Mozilla and Opera will try their very best catching up with all this new CSS goodness soon.

When looking at this example, you see the possibilities are endless. Another advantage is you can change the look of it entirely by only changing a couple of lines of CSS, instead of re-creating and re-downloading the image from some website smelling like web 2.0 gone bad. I made another demo that shows how great it is to be able to change background and foreground colors (even on the fly!).

So there you have it, a smoothly animated, fully transparent and completely customizable spinner. Cool? I think so. (Ladies?)

But you can do a lot more with CSS animations than just create pretty spinners. Since I was fooling around with it anyway, I decided to test how far you can push this, space is the final limit, right?

Conclusion

CSS has never been more exciting than it is right now. I’m even prepared to say CSS is “cool” again, both for the more experienced front-end developers as for the new designers discovering CSS every day now.

But…

Remember when Javascript became popular? Remember when Flash became popular? Every time we’re been given new toys, some people aren’t ashamed to use it in a way you can barely call constructive. I’m thinking of Geocities websites, loaded with glowing blocks of text, moving images, bad color usage… In the wise words of Stan Lee: With great power there must also come great responsibility! A sprinkle of CSS animations is better than a bucket load. Apply with care.",2009,Tim Van Damme,timvandamme,2009-12-15T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/css-animations/,code
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 the font name in your CSS file. 

Thanks to services like these, font foundries are now talking to create licensing structures to allow us to embed fonts into our web pages legally – which has always been a sticking point in the past. So, finally, us designers can get what we want: whatever typeface we want on the web. 

Yes, but… there are hurdles. One of which is the subject of this article. 

The differences between Web Fonts and other fonts 

Web fonts are different to normal fonts. They differ in a whole bunch of ways, from loose letter spacing to larger x-heights. But perhaps the most notable practical difference is file size. Let’s take a look at one of Typekit’s latest additions from the FontFont library, Meta. 

Meta Roman weighs in at 42 KB. This is a fairly typical file size for a single weight of a good font. Now, let’s have a look at Verdana. Verdana is 186 KB. For one weight. The four weight family for Verdana weighs in at 686 KB. Four weights for half a megabyte!? Why so huge? 

Well, Verdana has a lot of information packed into its 186 KB. It has the largest hinting data table of any typeface (the information carried by a font that tells it how to align itself to the pixels on your screen). As it has been shipped with Microsoft products since 1996, it has had time to grow to support many, many languages. Along with its cousin, Georgia (283 KB), Verdana was a new breed of typeface. And it’s grown fat.  

If really serious web typography takes off – and by that I mean typefaces specifically designed for the screen – then we’re going to see more fonts increase in file size as the font files include more data. So, if you’re embedding a font weighing in at 100 KB, what happens? 

The Flash of Unstyled Text 

We all remember the Flash of Unstyled Content bug on Internet Explorer, right? That annoying bug that caused a momentary flash of unstyled HTML page. Well, the same thing can happen with embedding fonts using @font-face. An effect called The Flash of Unstyled Text (FOUT), first coined by Paul Irish. Personally, I prefer to call it the Flash of UnTypeset Text (still FOUT), as the text is styled, just not with what you want. 

If you embed a typeface in your CSS, then the browser will download that typeface. Typically, browsers differ in the way they handle this procedure. 

Firefox and Opera will render the text using the next font in your font stack until the first (embedded) font is loaded. It will then switch to the embedded font. 

Webkit takes the approach that you asked for that font so it will wait until it’s completely loaded before showing it you. 

In Opera and Firefox, you get a FOUT. In Webkit, you don’t. You wait. 

Hang on there. Didn’t I say that good web fonts weigh in considerably more than ‘normal’ fonts?   And whilst the browser is downloading the font, the user gets what to look at? Some pictures, background colours and whatever else isn’t HTML? I believe Webkit’s handling of font embedding – as deliberate as it is – is damaging to the practice of font embedding. Why? Well, we can design to a switch in typeface (as jarring as that is for the user), but we can’t design to blank space. 

Let’s have a closer look at how we can design to FOUT. 

More considered font stacks 

We all know that font stacks in CSS are there for when a user doesn’t have a font; the browser will jump to the next one in the stack. Adding embedded fonts into the font stack means that because of FOUT (in gecko and Opera), the user can see a switch, and depending on their connection that switch could happen well into any reading that the user may be doing. 

The practicalities of this are that a user could be reading and be towards the end of a line when the paragraph they are reading changes shape. The word they were digesting suddenly changes to three lines down. It’s the online equivalent of someone turning the page for you when you least expect it. So, how can we think about our font stacks slightly differently so we can minimise the switch? 

Two years ago, Richard Rutter wrote on this very site about increasing our font stacks. By increasing the font stacks (by using his handy matrix) we can begin to experiment with different typefaces. However, when we embed a typeface, we must look very carefully at the typefaces in the font stack and the relationship between them. Because, previously, the user would not see a switch from one typeface to another, they’d just get either one or the other. Not both. With FOUT, the user sees two typefaces. 

By carefully looking at the characteristics of the typefaces you choose, you can minimise the typographic ‘distance’ between the type down the stack. In doing so, you minimise the jarring effect of the switch. 

Let’s take a look at an example of how to go about this.  

Micro Typography to build better font stacks 

Let’s say I want to use a recent edition to Typekit – Meta Serif Book – as my embedded font. My font stack would start like this: 

font-family: 'Meta Serif Bold'; 

Where do you go from here? Well, first, familiarise yourself with Richard’s Font Matrix so you get an idea of what fonts are available for different people. Then start by looking closely at the characters of the embedded font and then compare them to different fonts from the matrix. 

When I do this, I’m looking to match type characteristics such as x-height, contrast (the thickness and thinness of strokes), the stress (the angle of contrast) and the shape of the serifs (if the typeface has any). 



Using just these simple comparative metrics means you can get to a ‘best fit’ reasonably quickly. And remember, you’re not after an ideal match. You’re after a match that means the switch is less painful for the reader, but also a typeface that carries similar characteristics so your design doesn’t change too much. 

Building upon my choice of embedded font, I can quickly build up a stack by comparing letters. 



This then creates my ‘best fit’ stack. 



This translates to the CSS as: 

font-family: 'Meta Serif Bold', 'Lucida Bright', Cambria, Georgia, serif 

Following this process, and ending up with considered font stacks, means that we can design to the Flash of UnTypeset Content and ensure that our readers don’t get a diminished experience.",2009,Mark Boulton,markboulton,2009-12-16T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/designing-for-the-switch/,design
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 bleeding off to the left (image-replacement example from carsonified.com)

There is a trivial workaround to prevent outlines from “spilling over” by adding a simple overflow:hidden, which keeps the outline in check around the clickable portion of the image-replaced element itself.

 Outline tamed with overflow:hidden

But for many designers, even this is not enough. As a final solution, many actively suppress outlines altogether in their stylesheets. Controversially, even Eric Meyer’s popular reset.css – an otherwise excellent set of styles that levels the playing field of varying browser defaults – suppresses outlines.

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe ... {
	...
	outline: 0;
	...
}
/* remember to define focus styles! */
:focus {
	outline: 0;
}

Yes, in his explanation (and in the CSS itself) Eric does remind designers to define relevant styles for :focus… but judging by the number of sites that seem to ignore this (and often remove the related comment from the stylesheet altogether), the message doesn’t seem to have sunk in.

Anyway… hurrah! No more unsightly dotted lines on our lovely design. But what about keyboard users? Although technically they can still TAB from one element to the next, they now get no default cue as to where they are within the page (one notable exception here is Opera, where the outline is displayed regardless of stylesheets)… and if they’re Safari users, they won’t even get an indication of a link’s target in the status bar, like they would if they hovered over it with the mouse.

Only Suppress outline For Mouse Users

Is there a way to allow users navigating with the keyboard to retain the standard outline behaviour they’ve come to expect from their browser, while also ensuring that it doesn’t show display for mouse users?

 Testing some convoluted style combinations

After playing with various approaches (see Better CSS outline suppression for more details), the most elegant solution also seemed to be the simplest: don’t remove the outline on :focus, do it on :active instead – after all, :active is the dynamic pseudo-class that deals explicitly with the styles that should be applied when a focusable element is clicked or otherwise activated.

a:active { outline: none; }

The only minor issues with this method: if a user activates a link and then uses the browser’s back button, the outline becomes visible. Oh, and old versions of Internet Explorer notoriously get confused by the exact meaning of :focus, :hover and :active, so this method fails in IE6 and below. Personally, I can live with both of these.

Note: at the last minute before submitting this article, I discovered a fatal flaw in my test. It appears that outline still manages to appear in the time between activating a link and the link target loading (which in hindsight is logical – after activation, the link does indeed receive focus). As my test page only used in-page links, this issue never came up before. The slightly less elegant solution is to also suppress the outline on :hover.

a:hover, a:active { outline: none; }

In Conclusion

Of course, many web designers may argue that they know what’s best, even for their keyboard-using audience. Maybe they’ve removed the default outline and are instead providing some carefully designed :focus styles. If they know for sure that these custom styles are indeed a reliable alternative for their users, more power to them… but, at the risk of sounding like Jakob “blue underlined links” Nielsen, I’d still argue that sometimes the default browser behaviours are best left alone. Complemented, yes (and if you’re already defining some fancy styles for :hover, by all means feel free to also make them display on :focus)… but not suppressed.",2009,Patrick Lauke,patricklauke,2009-12-09T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/dont-lose-your-focus/,code
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 code you need to start your slideshow is an <img> tag. The other images can be loaded dynamically via either a per-page JavaScript array or via AJAX.

The slideshow concept is built upon the very versatile Cycle jQuery Plugin and is structured in to another reusable jQuery plugin. Below is the HTML and JavaScript snippet needed to run every different type of slideshow I have mentioned above.

<img src=""path/to/image.jpg"" alt=""About the image"" title="""" height=""250"" width=""400"" class=""slideshow"">
<script type=""text/javascript"">
	jQuery().ready(function($) {
		$('img.slideshow').slideShow({
			images: ['1.jpg', '2.jpg', '3.jpg']
		});
	});
</script>

Slideshow plugin

If you’re not familiar with jQuery or how to write and author your own plugin there are plenty of articles to help you out.

jQuery has a chainable interface and this is something your plugin must implement. This is easy to achieve, so your plugin simply returns the collection it is using:

return this.each(
	function () {}
};

Local Variables

To keep the JavaScript clean and avoid any conflicts, you must set up any variables which are local to the plugin and should be used on each collection item. Defining all your variables at the top under one statement makes adding more and finding which variables are used easier. For other tips, conventions and improvements check out JSLint, the “JavaScript Code Quality Tool”.

var $$, $div, $images, $arrows, $pager,
	id, selector, path, o, options,
	height, width,
	list = [], li = 0,
	parts = [], pi = 0,
	arrows = ['Previous', 'Next'];

Cache jQuery Objects

It is good practice to cache any calls made to jQuery. This reduces wasted DOM calls, can improve the speed of your JavaScript code and makes code more reusable.

The following code snippet caches the current selected DOM element as a jQuery object using the variable name $$. Secondly, the plugin makes its settings available to the Metadata plugin‡ which is best practice within jQuery plugins.

For each slideshow the plugin generates a <div> with a class of slideshow and a unique id. This is used to wrap the slideshow images, pagination and controls.

The base path which is used for all the images in the slideshow is calculated based on the existing image which appears on the page. For example, if the path to the image on the page was /img/flowers/1.jpg the plugin would use the path /img/flowers/ to load the other images.

$$ = $(this);
o = $.metadata ? $.extend({}, settings, $$.metadata()) : settings;
id = 'slideshow-' + (i++ + 1);
$div = $('<div />').addClass('slideshow').attr('id', id);
selector = '#' + id + ' ';
path = $$.attr('src').replace(/[0-9]\.jpg/g, '');
options = {};
height = $$.height();
width = $$.width();

Note: the plugin uses conventions such as folder structure and numeric filenames. These conventions help with the reusable aspect of plugins and best practices.

Build the Images

The cycle plugin uses a list of images to create the slideshow. Because we chose to start with one image we must now build the list programmatically. This is a case of looping through the images which were added via the plugin options, building the appropriate HTML and appending the resulting <ul> to the DOM.

$.each(o.images, function () {
	list[li++] = '<li>';
	list[li++] = '<img src=""' + path + this + '"" height=""' + height + '"" width=""' + width + '"">';
	list[li++] = '</li>';
});
$images = $('<ul />').addClass('cycle-images');
$images.append(list.join('')).appendTo($div);

Although jQuery provides the append method it is much faster to create one really long string and append it to the DOM at the end.

Update the Options

Here are some of the options we’re making available by simply adding classes to the <img>. You can change the slideshow effect from the default fade to the sliding effect. By adding the class of stopped the slideshow will not auto-play and must be controlled via pagination or previous and next links.

// different effect
if ($$.is('.slide')) {
	options.fx = 'scrollHorz';
}
// don't move by default
if ($$.is('.stopped')) {
	options.timeout = 0;
}

If you are using the same set of images throughout a website you may wish to start on a different image on each page or section. This can be easily achieved by simply adding the appropriate starting class to the <img>.

// based on the class name on the image
if ($$.is('[class*=start-]')) {
	options.startingSlide = parseInt($$.attr('class').replace(/.*start-([0-9]+).*/g, ""$1""), 10) - 1;
}

For example:

<img src=""/img/slideshow/3.jpg"" alt=""About the image"" title="""" height=""250"" width=""400"" class=""slideshow start-3"">

By default, and without JavaScript, the third image in this slideshow is shown. When the JavaScript is applied to the page the slideshow must know to start from the correct place, this is why the start class is required.

You could capture the default image name and parse it to get the position, but only the default image needs to be numeric to work with this plugin (and could easily be changed in future). Therefore, this extra specifically defined option means the plugin is more tolerant.

Previous/Next Links

A common feature of slideshows is previous and next links enabling the user to manually progress the images. The Cycle plugin supports this functionality, but you must generate the markup yourself. Most people add these directly in the HTML but normally only support their behaviour when JavaScript is enabled. This goes against progressive enhancement. To keep with the best practice progress enhancement method the previous/next links should be generated with JavaScript.

The follow snippet checks whether the slideshow requires the previous/next links, via the arrows class. It restricts the Cycle plugin to the specific slideshow using the selector we created at the top of the plugin. This means multiple slideshows can run on one page without conflicting each other.

The code creates a <ul> using the arrows array we defined at the top of the plugin. It also adds a class to the slideshow container, meaning you can style different combinations of options in your CSS.

// create the arrows
if ($$.is('.arrows') && list.length > 1) {
	options.next = selector + '.next';
	options.prev = selector + '.previous';
	$arrows = $('<ul />').addClass('cycle-arrows');
	$.each(arrows, function (i, val) {
		parts[pi++] = '<li class=""' + val.toLowerCase() + '"">';
		parts[pi++] = '<a href=""#' + val.toLowerCase() + '"">';
		parts[pi++] = '<span>' + val + '</span>';
		parts[pi++] = '</a>';
		parts[pi++] = '</li>';
	});
	$arrows.append(parts.join('')).appendTo($div);
	$div.addClass('has-cycle-arrows');
}

The arrow array could be placed inside the plugin settings to allow for localisation.

Pagination

The Cycle plugin creates its own HTML for the pagination of the slideshow. All our plugin needs to do is create the list and selector to use. This snippet creates the pagination container and appends it to our specific slideshow container. It sets the Cycle plugin pager option, restricting it to the specific slideshow using the selector we created at the top of the plugin. Like the previous/next links, a class is added to the slideshow container allowing you to style the slideshow itself differently.

// create the clickable pagination
if ($$.is('.pagination') && list.length > 1) {
	options.pager = selector + '.cycle-pagination';
	$pager = $('<ul />').addClass('cycle-pagination');
	$pager.appendTo($div);
	$div.addClass('has-cycle-pagination');
}

Note: the Cycle plugin creates a <ul> with anchors listed directly inside without the surrounding <li>. Unfortunately this is invalid markup but the code still works.

Demos

Well, that describes all the ins-and-outs of the plugin, but demos make it easier to understand! Viewing the source on the demo page shows some of the combinations you can create with a simple <img>, a few classes and some thought-out JavaScript.

View the demos →

Decide on defaults

The slideshow plugin uses the exact same settings as the Cycle plugin, but some are explicitly set within the slideshow plugin when using the classes you have set.

When deciding on what functionality is going to be controlled via this class method, be careful to choose your defaults wisely. If all slideshows should auto-play, don’t make this an option — make the option to stop the auto-play. Similarly, if every slideshow should have previous/next functionality make this the default and expose the ability to remove them with a class such as “no-pagination”.

In the examples presented on this article I have used a class on each <img>. You can easily change this to anything you want and simply apply the plugin based on the jQuery selector required.

Grab your images

If you are using AJAX to load in your images, you can speed up development by deciding on and keeping to a folder structure and naming convention. There are two methods: basing the image path based on the current URL; or based on the src of the image. The first allows a different slideshow on each page, but in many instances a site will have a couple of sets of images and therefore the second method is probably preferred.

Metadata ‡

A method which allows you to directly modify settings in certain plugins, which also uses the classes from your HTML already exists. This is a jQuery plugin called Metadata. This method allows for finer control over the plugin settings themselves. Some people, however, may dislike the syntax and prefer using normal classes, like above which when sprinkled with a bit more JavaScript allows you to control what you need to control.

The takeaway

Hopefully you have understood not only what goes in to a basic jQuery plugin but also learnt a new and powerful idea which you can apply to other areas of your website.

The idea can also be applied to other common interfaces such as lightboxes or mapping services such as Google Maps — for example creating markers based on a list of places, each with different pin icons based the anchor class.",2009,Trevor Morris,trevormorris,2009-12-06T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/front-end-code-reusability-with-css-and-javascript/,code
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 format recognised by CSS. Here, we’re using rgba as explained by Drew behind the first door of this year’s calendar.

Rotation

For browsers that understand it (currently our old favourites WebKit and FF3.5+) we can add some visual flair by rotating the image, using the transform CSS 3 property.

-webkit-transform: rotate(9deg);
-moz-transform: rotate(9deg);
transform: rotate(9deg);

Rotations can be specified in degrees, radians (rads) or grads. WebKit also supports turns unfortunately Firefox doesn’t just yet.

For our example, we want any polaroid images on the left hand side to be rotated in the opposite direction, using a negative degree value:

.pull-left.polaroid {
	-webkit-transform: rotate(-9deg);
	-moz-transform: rotate(-9deg);
	transform: rotate(-9deg);
}

Multiple class selectors don’t work in IE6 but as luck would have it, the transform property doesn’t work in any current IE version either. The above code is a good example of progressive enrichment: browsers that don’t support box-shadow or transform will still see the image and basic polaroid effect.



Animation

WebKit is unique amongst browser rendering engines in that it allows animation to be specified in pure CSS. Although this may never actually make it in to the CSS 3 specification, it degrades nicely and more importantly is an awful lot of fun!

Let’s go nuts.

In the next demo, the image is contained within a link and mousing over that link causes the polaroid to animate from being angled to being straight.

Here’s our new markup:

<a href=""http://www.flickr.com/photos/nataliedowne/2340993237/"" class=""polaroid"">
	<img src=""../img/raft.jpg"" alt="""">
	White water rafting in Queenstown
</a>

And here are the relevant lines of CSS:

a.polaroid {
	/* ... */
   -webkit-transform: rotate(10deg);
   -webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 0.5s ease-in;
}
a.polaroid:hover,
a.polaroid:focus,
a.polaroid:active {
	/* ... */
	-webkit-transform: rotate(0deg);
}

The @-webkit-transition@ property is the magic wand that sets up the animation. It takes three values: the property to be animated, the duration of the animation and a ‘timing function’ (which affects the animation’s acceleration, for a smoother effect).

-webkit-transition only takes affect when the specified property changes. In pure CSS, this is done using dynamic pseudo-classes. You can also change the properties using JavaScript, but that’s a story for another time.

Throwing polaroids at a table

Imagine there are lots of differently sized polaroid photos scattered on a table. That’s the effect we are aiming for with our next demo.



As an aside: we are using absolute positioning to arrange the images inside a flexible width container (with a minimum and maximum width specified in pixels). As some are positioned from the left and some from the right when you resize the browser they shuffle underneath each other. This is an effect used on the UX London site.

This demo uses a darker colour shadow with more transparency than before. The grey shadow in the previous example worked fine, but it was against a solid background. Since the images are now overlapping each other, the more opaque shadow looked fake.

-webkit-box-shadow: 2px 2px 4px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.3);
-moz-box-shadow: 2px 2px 4px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.3);
box-shadow: 2px 2px 4px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.3);

On hover, as well as our previous trick of animating the image rotation back to straight, we are also making the shadow darker and setting the z-index to be higher than the other images so that it appears on top.

And Finally…

Finally, for a bit more fun, we’re going to simulate the images coming towards you and lifting off the page. We’ll achieve this by making them grow larger and by offsetting the shadow & making it longer.




Screenshot 1 shows the default state, while 2 shows our previous hover effect. Screenshot 3 is the effect we are aiming for, illustrated by demo 4.

a.polaroid {
	/* ... */
	z-index: 2;
	-webkit-box-shadow: 2px 2px 4px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.3);
	-moz-box-shadow: 2px 2px 4px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.3);
	box-shadow: 2px 2px 4px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.3);
	-webkit-transform: rotate(10deg);
	-moz-transform: rotate(10deg);
	transform: rotate(10deg);
	-webkit-transition: all 0.5s ease-in;
}
a.polaroid:hover,
a.polaroid:focus,
a.polaroid:active {
	z-index: 999;
	border-color: #6A6A6A;
	-webkit-box-shadow: 15px 15px 20px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.4);
	-moz-box-shadow: 15px 15px 20px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.4);
	box-shadow: 15px 15px 20px rgba(0,0, 0, 0.4);
	-webkit-transform: rotate(0deg) scale(1.05);
	-moz-transform: rotate(0deg) scale(1.05);
	transform: rotate(0deg) scale(1.05);
}

You’ll notice we are now giving the transform property another transform function: scale, which takes increases the size by the specified factor. Other things you can do with transform include skewing, translating or you can go mad creating your own transforms with a matrix.

The box-shadow has both its offset and blur radius increased dramatically, and is darkened using the alpha channel of the rgba colour.

And because we want the effects to all animate smoothly, we pass a value of all to the -webkit-transition property, ensuring that any changed property on that link will be animated.

Demo 5 is the finished example, bringing everything nicely together.

CSS transitions and transforms are a great example of progressive enrichment, which means improving the experience for a portion of the audience without negatively affecting other users. They are also a lot of fun to play with!

Further reading


	-moz-transform – the mozilla developer center has a comprehensive explanation of transform that also applies to -webkit-transform and transform.
	CSS: Animation Using CSS Transforms – this is a good, more indepth tutorial on animations.
	CSS Animation – the Safari blog explains the usage of -webkit-transform.
	Dinky pocketbooks with transform – another use for transforms, create your own printable pocketbook.
	A while back, Simon wrote a little bookmarklet to spin the entire page… warning: this will spin the entire page.",2009,Natalie Downe,nataliedowne,2009-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/going-nuts-with-css-transitions/,code
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=email name=email type=email placeholder=""example@domain.com"" required>
			</li>
			<li>
				<label for=phone>Phone</label>
				<input id=phone name=phone type=tel placeholder=""Eg. +447500000000"" required>
			</li>
		</ol>
	</fieldset>
	<fieldset>
		<legend>Delivery address</legend>
		<ol>
			<li>
				<label for=address>Address</label>
				<textarea id=address name=address rows=5 required></textarea>
			</li>
			<li>
				<label for=postcode>Post code</label>
				<input id=postcode name=postcode type=text required>
			</li>
			<li>
				<label for=country>Country</label>
				<input id=country name=country type=text required>
			</li>
		</ol>
	</fieldset>
	<fieldset>
		<legend>Card details</legend>
		<ol>		
			<li>
				<fieldset>
					<legend>Card type</legend>
					<ol>
						<li>
							<input id=visa name=cardtype type=radio>
							<label for=visa>VISA</label>
						</li>
						<li>
							<input id=amex name=cardtype type=radio>
							<label for=amex>AmEx</label>
						</li>
						<li>
							<input id=mastercard name=cardtype type=radio>
							<label for=mastercard>Mastercard</label>
						</li>
					</ol>
				</fieldset>
			</li>
			<li>
				<label for=cardnumber>Card number</label>
				<input id=cardnumber name=cardnumber type=number required>
			</li>
			<li>
				<label for=secure>Security code</label>
				<input id=secure name=secure type=number required>
			</li>
			<li>
				<label for=namecard>Name on card</label>
				<input id=namecard name=namecard type=text placeholder=""Exact name as on the card"" required>
			</li>
		</ol>
	</fieldset>
	<fieldset>
		<button type=submit>Buy it!</button>
	</fieldset>
</form>

Making things look nice

First things first, so let’s start by adding some defaults to our form by resetting the margins and paddings of the elements and adding a default font to the page:

html, body, h1, form, fieldset, legend, ol, li {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
}
body {
	background: #ffffff;
	color: #111111;
	font-family: Georgia, ""Times New Roman"", Times, serif;
	padding: 20px;
}

Next we are going to style the form element that is wrapping our fields:

form#payment {
	background: #9cbc2c;
	-moz-border-radius: 5px;
	-webkit-border-radius: 5px;
	border-radius: 5px;
	padding: 20px;
	width: 400px;
}

We will also remove the border from the fieldset and apply some bottom margin to it. Using the :last-of-type pseudo-class, we remove the bottom margin of the last fieldset — there is no need for it:

form#payment fieldset {
	border: none;
	margin-bottom: 10px;
}
form#payment fieldset:last-of-type {
	margin-bottom: 0;
}

Next we’ll make the legends big and bold, and we will also apply a light-green text-shadow, to add that little extra special detail:

form#payment legend {
	color: #384313;
	font-size: 16px;
	font-weight: bold;
	padding-bottom: 10px;
	text-shadow: 0 1px 1px #c0d576;
}

Our legends are looking great, but how about adding a clear indication of how many steps our form has? Instead of adding that manually to every legend, we can use automatically generated counters.

To add a counter to an element, we have to use either the :before or :after pseudo-elements to add content via CSS. We will follow these steps:


	create a counter using the counter-reset property on the form element
	call the counter with the content property (using the same name we’ve created before)
	with the counter-incremet property, indicate that for each element that matches our selector, that counter will be increased by 1


form#payment > fieldset > legend:before {
	content: ""Step "" counter(fieldsets) "": "";
	counter-increment: fieldsets;
}

Finally, we need to change the style of the legend that is part of the radio buttons group, to make it look like a label:

form#payment fieldset fieldset legend {
	color: #111111;
	font-size: 13px;
	font-weight: normal;
	padding-bottom: 0;
}

Styling the lists

For our list elements, we’ll just add some nice rounded corners and semi-transparent border and background. Because we are using RGBa colors, we should provide a fallback for browsers that don’t support them (that comes before the RBGa color). For the nested lists, we will remove these properties because they would be overlapping:

form#payment ol li {
	background: #b9cf6a;
	background: rgba(255,255,255,.3);
	border-color: #e3ebc3;
	border-color: rgba(255,255,255,.6);
	border-style: solid;
	border-width: 2px;
	-moz-border-radius: 5px;
	-webkit-border-radius: 5px;
	border-radius: 5px;
	line-height: 30px;
	list-style: none;
	padding: 5px 10px;
	margin-bottom: 2px;
}
form#payment ol ol li {
	background: none;
	border: none;
	float: left;
}

Form controls

Now we only need to style our labels, inputs and the button element.

All our labels will look the same, with the exception of the one for the radio elements. We will float them to the left and give them a width.

For the credit card type labels, we will add an icon as the background, and override some of the properties that aren’t necessary. We will be using the attribute selector to specify the background image for each label — in this case, we use the for attribute of each label.

To add an extra user-friendly detail, we’ll add a cursor: pointer to the radio button labels on the :hover state, so the user knows that he can simply click them to select that option.

form#payment label {
	float: left;
	font-size: 13px;
	width: 110px;
}
form#payment fieldset fieldset label {
	background:none no-repeat left 50%;
	line-height: 20px;
	padding: 0 0 0 30px;
	width: auto;
}
form#payment label[for=visa] {
	background-image: url(visa.gif);
}
form#payment label[for=amex] {
	background-image: url(amex.gif);
}
form#payment label[for=mastercard] {
	background-image: url(mastercard.gif);
}
form#payment fieldset fieldset label:hover {
	cursor: pointer;
}

Almost there! Now onto the input elements. Here we want to match all inputs, except for the radio ones, and the textarea. For that we will use the negation pseudo-class (:not()). With it we can target all input elements except for the ones with type of radio.

We will also make sure to add some :focus styles and add the appropriate styling for the radio inputs:

form#payment input:not([type=radio]),
form#payment textarea {
	background: #ffffff;
	border: none;
	-moz-border-radius: 3px;
	-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
	-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
	border-radius: 3px;
	font: italic 13px Georgia, ""Times New Roman"", Times, serif;
	outline: none;
	padding: 5px;
	width: 200px;
}
form#payment input:not([type=submit]):focus,
form#payment textarea:focus {
	background: #eaeaea;
}
form#payment input[type=radio] {
	float: left;
	margin-right: 5px;
}

And finally we come to our submit button. To it, we will just add some nice typography and text-shadow, align it to the center of the form and give it some background colors for its different states:

form#payment button {
	background: #384313;
	border: none;
	-moz-border-radius: 20px;
	-webkit-border-radius: 20px;
	-khtml-border-radius: 20px;
	border-radius: 20px;
	color: #ffffff;
	display: block;
	font: 18px Georgia, ""Times New Roman"", Times, serif;
	letter-spacing: 1px;
	margin: auto;
	padding: 7px 25px;
	text-shadow: 0 1px 1px #000000;
	text-transform: uppercase;
}
form#payment button:hover {
	background: #1e2506;
	cursor: pointer;
}

And that’s it! See the completed form.

This form will not look the same on every browser. Internet Explorer and Opera don’t support border-radius (at least not for now); the new input types are rendered as just normal inputs on some browsers; and some of the most advanced CSS, like the counter, :last-of-type or text-shadow are not supported on some browsers. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use them right now, and simplify your development process. My gift to you!",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
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 excanvas. It’s downloadable from http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/ and it’s simple to include it via a conditional comment in the head for IE:

<!--[if IE]>
<script src=""excanvas.js""></script>
<![endif]-->

Simply include this, and your canvas will be natively supported in the modern browsers (and the library won’t even be downloaded) whereas IE will suddenly render your canvas using its own VML engine. Be sure, however, to check it carefully, as the IE JavaScript engine isn’t so fast and you’ll need to be sure that performance isn’t too degraded to use.

Forms

Since the beginning of the Web, developers have been coding forms, and then writing JavaScript to check whether an input is a correctly formed email address, URL, credit card number or conforms to some other pattern. The cumulative labour of the world’s developers over the last 15 years makes whizzing round in a sleigh and delivering presents seem like popping to the corner shop in comparison.

With HTML5, that’s all about to change. As Yaili began to explore on Day 3, a host of new attributes to the input element provide built-in validation for email address formats (input type=email), URLs (input type=url), any pattern that can be expressed with a JavaScript-syntax regex (pattern=""[0-9][A-Z]{3}"") and the like. New attributes such as required, autofocus, input type=number min=3 max=50 remove much of the tedious JavaScript from form validation.

Other, really exciting input types are available (see all input types). The datalist is reminiscent of a select box, but allows the user to enter their own text if they don’t want to choose one of the pre-defined options. input type=range is rendered as a slider, while input type=date pops up a date picker, all natively in the browser with no JavaScript required at all.

Currently, support is most complete in an experimental implementation in Opera and a number of the new attributes in Webkit-based browsers. But don’t let that stop you! The clever thing about the specification of the new Web Forms is that all the new input types are attributes (rather than elements). input defaults to input type=text, so if a browser doesn’t understand a new HTML5 type, it gracefully degrades to a plain text input.

So where does that leave validation in those browsers that don’t support Web Forms? The answer is that you don’t retire your pre-existing JavaScript validation just yet, but you leave it as a fallback after doing some feature detection. To detect whether (say) input type=email is supported, you make a new input type=email with JavaScript but don’t add it to the page. Then, you interrogate your new element to find out what its type attribute is. If it’s reported back as “email”, then the browser supports the new feature, so let it do its work and don’t bring in any JavaScript validation. If it’s reported back as “text”, it’s fallen back to the default, indicating that it’s not supported, so your code should branch to your old validation routines. Alternatively, use the small (7K) Modernizr library which will do this work for you and give you JavaScript booleans like Modernizr.inputtypes[email] set to true or false.

So what does this buy you? Well, first and foremost, you’re future-proofing your code for that time when all browsers support these hugely useful additions to forms. Secondly, you buy a usability and accessibility win. Although it’s tempting to style the stuffing out of your form fields (which can, incidentally, lead to madness), whatever your branding people say, it’s better to leave forms as close to the browser defaults as possible. A browser’s slider and date pickers will be the same across different sites, making it much more comprehensible to users. And, by using native controls rather than faking sliders and date pickers with JavaScript, your forms are much more likely to be accessible to users of assistive technology.

HTML5 DOCTYPE

You can use the new DOCTYPE !doctype html now and – hey presto – you’re writing HTML5, as it’s pretty much a superset of HTML4. There are some useful advantages to doing this. The first is that the HTML5 validator (I use http://html5.validator.nu) also validates ARIA information, whereas the HTML4 validator doesn’t, as ARIA is a new spec developed after HTML4. (Actually, it’s more accurate to say that it doesn’t validate your ARIA attributes, but it doesn’t automatically report them as an error.)

Another advantage is that HTML5 allows tabindex as a global attribute (that is, on any element). Although originally designed as an accessibility bolt-on, I ordinarily advise you don’t use it; a well-structured page should provide a logical tab order through links and form fields already.

However, tabindex=""-1"" is a legal value in HTML5 as it allows for the element to be programmatically focussable by JavaScript. It’s also very useful for correcting a bug in Internet Explorer when used with a keyboard; in-page links go nowhere if the destination doesn’t have a proprietary property called hasLayout set or a tabindex of -1.

So, whether it is the tool of Satan or yule of Santa, HTML5 is just around the corner. Some you can use now, and by the end of 2010 I predict you’ll be able to use a whole lot more as new browser versions are released.",2009,Bruce Lawson,brucelawson,2009-12-05T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/html5-tool-of-satan-or-yule-of-santa/,code
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 let you work that way? What’s your secret?” Secret? I tell them what they need to know, on a need-to-know basis.

Epilogue

Sam has a new iPhone that Mike bought for her as a reward for achieving her sales targets. She loves her iPhone and was surprised at just how fast and good-looking the company Web site appears on that. So she asked,


	“Andy, I didn’t know you optimised our site for mobile. I don’t remember seeing an invoice for that.”


I smiled.


	“That one was on the house.”",2009,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2009-12-23T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/ignorance-is-bliss/,business
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 example showing how this can applied when attributing quotes to people:

As <CITE>Harry S. Truman</CITE> said,
<Q lang=""en-us"">The buck stops here.</Q>

For longer quotes, the blockquote element might be more appropriate. In a conversation, where the order matters, I think an ordered list would make a good containing element for this pattern:

<ol>
	<li><cite>Alice</cite>: <q>I think Eve is watching.</q></li>
	<li><cite>Bob</cite>: <q>This isn't a cryptography tutorial ...we're in the wrong example!</q></li>
</ol>

Problem solved …except that the cite element has been redefined in the HTML5 spec:


	The cite element represents the title of a work … A person’s name is not the title of a work … and the element must therefore not be used to mark up people’s names.


HTML5 is supposed to be backwards compatible with previous versions of HTML, yet here we have a semantic pattern already defined in HTML 4.01 that is now non-conforming in HTML5. The entire justification for the change boils down to this line of reasoning:


	Given that: titles of works are often italicised and
	given that: people’s names are not often italicised and
	given that: most browsers italicise the contents of the cite element,
	therefore: the cite element should not be used to mark up people’s names.


In other words, the default browser styling is now dictating semantic meaning. The tail is wagging the dog.

Not to worry, the HTML5 spec tells us how we can mark up names in conversations without using the cite element:


	In some cases, the b element might be appropriate for names


I believe the colloquial response to this is a combination of the letters W, T and F, followed by a question mark.

The non-normative note continues:


	In other cases, if an element is really needed, the span element can be used.


This is not a joke. We are seriously being told to use semantically meaningless elements to mark up content that is semantically meaningful.

We don’t have to take it.

Firstly, any conformance checker—that’s the new politically correct term for “validator”—cannot possibly check every instance of the cite element to see if it’s really the title of a work and not the name of a person. So we can disobey the specification without fear of invalidating our documents.

Secondly, Hixie has repeatedly stated that browser makers have a powerful voice in deciding what goes into the HTML5 spec; if a browser maker refuses to implement a feature, then that feature should come out of the spec because otherwise, the spec is fiction. Well, one of the design principles of HTML5 is the Priority of Constituencies:


	In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity.


That places us—authors—above browser makers. If we resolutely refuse to implement part of the HTML5 spec, then the spec becomes fiction.

Join me in a campaign of civil disobedience against the unnecessarily restrictive, backwards-incompatible change to the cite element. Start using HTML5 but start using it sensibly. Let’s ensure that bad advice remains fictitious.

Tantek has set up a page on the WHATWG wiki to document usage of the cite element for conversations. Please contribute to it.",2009,Jeremy Keith,jeremykeith,2009-12-11T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/incite-a-riot/,code
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, the student goes home and tries to make sushi on her own, she gets totally confused and lost. Okay, I’m not even going to hide it, I’m talking about myself (this happened to me). As much as I love sushi, I couldn’t even begin to make good sushi because I’ve never really practiced.

Take advantage of learning opportunities where possible. Whether you’re learning CSS, Actionscript, or visual design, the best way to grasp how to do things is to participate, practice, do. Apply what you learn in your work. Participation is so vital to your success. If you have problems, let people know, and ask. But definitely practice on your own. And as cliché as it may sound, believe in yourself because if you don’t think you can do it, no one else will think you can either.

Maintain momentum

With whatever it is you’re doing, if you find yourself “on a roll”, you should take advantage of that momentum and keep moving. Sure, you’ll definitely want to take breaks here or there, but remember that momentum can be very difficult to obtain again once you’ve lost it. Get it done!

Deal with people

Whether you love or hate people, the fact is, you gotta deal with them — even the difficult ones. If you’re in a management position, then you know pretty well that most people don’t like being told what to do (even if that’s their job). Find ways to get people excited about what they’re doing. Make people feel that they (and what they do) are needed — people respond better if they’re valued, not commanded. Even if you’re not in a management position, this still applies to the way you work with your coworkers, clients, vendors, etc.

Resolve any conflicts right away. Conflicts will inevitably happen. Move on to how you can improve the situation, and do it as quickly as possible. Don’t spend too much time focusing on whose screw up it is — nobody feels good in this situation. Also, try to keep people informed on whatever it is you need or what it is you’re doing. If you’re waiting on something from someone, and it’s been a while, don’t be afraid to say something (tactfully). Sometimes people are forgetful — or just slacking. Hey, it happens!

Help yourself by helping others

What are some of the small, simple things you can do when you’re working that will help the people you work with (and in most cases, will end up helping yourself)? For example: if you’re a designer, perhaps taking a couple minutes now to organize and name your Photoshop layers will end up saving time later (since it will be easier to find things). This is going to help both you and your team. Or, developers: taking some time to write some documentation (even if it’s as simple as a comment in the code, or a well-written commit message) could potentially save valuable time for both you and your team later. Maybe you have to take a little time to sit down with a coworker and explain why something works the way it does. This helps them out tremendously — and will most likely lead to them respecting you a little more. This is a benefit.

If you make little things like this a habit, people will notice. People will enjoy working with you. People will trust you and rely on you. Sure, it might seem beneficial at any given moment to be “in it for yourself” (and therefore only helping yourself), but that won’t last very long. Helping others (whether it be a small or large feat) will cause a positive impact in the long run — and that is what will be more valuable to you and your career.

Do work that is meaningful

One of the best ways to feel successful about what you do is to feel good and happy about it. And a great way to feel good and happy about what you’re doing is to actually do good. This could be purpose-driven work that focuses on sustainability and environmentalism, or work that helps support causes and charity. Perhaps the work simply inspires people. Or maybe the work is just something you are very passionate about. Whatever the work may be, try working on projects that are meaningful to you. You’ll do well simply by being more motivated and interested. And it’s a double-win if the project is meaningful to others as well.

I feel very fortunate to work at a place like Crush + Lovely, where we have found quite frequently that the projects that inspire people, focus on global and social good, and create some sort of positive impact are the very projects that bring us more paid projects. But more importantly, we are happy and excited to do it. You might not work at a company that takes on those types of projects. But perhaps you have your own personal endeavors that create this excitement for you. Elliot Jay Stocks wrote about having pet projects. Do you take on side projects? What are those projects?

Over the last couple years, I’ve seen some really fantastic side projects come out that are great examples of meaningful work. These projects reflect the passions and goals of the respective designers and developers involved, and therefore become quite successful (because the people involved simply love what they are doing while they’re doing it). Some of these projects include:


	Typedia is a shared encyclopedia of typefaces which serves as a resource to classify, categorize, and connect typefaces. It was founded by Jason Santa Maria, a graphic designer with a love and passion for typography. He created it as a solution to a problem he faced as a designer: finding the right typeface.
	Huffduffer was created by Jeremy Keith, a web developer who wanted to create a podcast of inspirational talks — but after he found that this could be tedious, he decided to create a tool to automate this.
	Level & Tap was created by passionate photographer and web developer, Tom Watson. It began as a photography print store for Tom’s best personal photography. Over time, more photographers were added to the site and the site has grown to become quite a great collection of beautiful photography.
	Heat Eat Review is a review blog created by information architect and user experience designer, Abi Jones. As a foodie, she is able to use this passion for this blog, as it focuses on reviewing TV Dinners, Frozen Meals, and Microwavable Foods.
	Art in My Coffee, a favorite personal project of my own, is a photo blog of coffee art I created, after I found that my friends and I were frequently posting coffee art photos to Flickr, Twitter, and other websites. After the blog became more popular, I teamed up with Meagan Fisher on the project, who has just as much a passion for coffee art, if not more.


So, what’s important to you?

This is the very, very important question here. What really matters to you most? Beyond just working on meaningful projects you are passionate about, is the work you’re doing the right work for you, so that you can live a good lifestyle? Scott Boms wrote an excellent article, Burnout, in which he shares his own experience in battling stress and exhaustion, and what he learned from it. You should definitely read the article in its entirety, but a couple of his points that are particularly excellent are:


	Make time for numero uno, in which you make time for the things in life that make you happy
	Examine your values, goals, and measures of success, in which you work toward the things you are passionate about, your own personal development, and focusing on the things that matter.


A solid work-life balance can be a challenging struggle to obtain. Of course, you can cheat this by finding ways to combine the things you love with the things you do (so then it doesn’t even feel like you’re working — oh, you sneaky little bandit!). However, there are other factors to consider beyond your general love for the work you’re doing. Take proper care of yourself physically, mentally, and socially.

So, are you making out like a bandit?

Do you feel accomplished and generally happy with your work? If not, perhaps that is something to focus on for the next year. Consider your work (both in your job as well as any side projects you may take on) and how it benefits you — present and future. Take any steps necessary to get you to where you need to be. If you are miserable, fix it!

Finally, it’s important to be thankful for the things that matter to you and make you happy. Pass it along everyday. Thank people. It’s a simple thing, really. Saying “thank you” can and will have enormous impact on the people around you. Oh. And, I apologize if the title of this article led you to thinking it would teach you how to be an amazing kisser. That’s a different article entirely for 24 ways to impress your friends!",2009,Jina Anne,jina,2009-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/make-out-like-a-bandit/,business
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 was vital to achieving our beloved rounded corners, drop shadows, outer glows, and gradients. However, with the recent adaptation of CSS3 in major browsers, and the slow, joyous death of IE6, browsers can render mockups that are just as beautiful as those created in an image editor. With the power of RGBA, text-shadow, box-shadow, border-radius, transparent PNGs, and @font-face combined, you can create a prototype that radiates shiny awesomeness right in the browser. If you can see this epic article through to the end, I’ll show you step by step how to create a gorgeous mockup using mostly markup.

Get started by getting naked 


	Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.

	 Jeffrey Zeldman


In the beginning, don’t even think about style. Instead, start with the foundation: the content. Lay the groundwork for your markup order, and ensure that your design will be useable with styles and images turned off. This is great for prioritizing the content, and puts you on the right path for accessibility and search engine optimization. Not a bad place to start, amirite?

 An example of unstyled content, in all its naked glory. View it large.

Flush out the layout 

The next step is to structure the content in a usable way. With CSS, making basic layout changes is as easy as switching up a float, so experiment to see what structure suits the content best.

 The mockup with basic layout work done.

Got your grids covered

There are a variety of tools that allow you to layer a grid over your browser window. For Mac users I recommend using Slammer, and PC users can check out one of the bookmarklets that are available, such as 960 Gridder.

 The mockup with a grid applied using Slammer.

Once you’ve found a layout that works well for the content, pass it along to the client for review. This keeps them involved in the design process, and gives them an idea of how the site will be structured when it’s live.

Start your styling

Now for the fun part: begin applying the presentation layer. Let usability considerations drive your decisions about color and typography; use highlighted colors and contrasting typefaces on elements you wish to emphasize.

RGBA? More like RGByay!

Introducing color is easy with RGBA. I like to start with the page’s main color, then use white at varying opacities to empasize content sections.

 In the example mockup the body background is set to rgba(203,111,21), the content containers are set to rgba(255,255,255,0.7), and a few elements are highlighted with rgba(255,255,255,0.1) If you’re not sure how RGBA works, check out Drew McLellan’s super helpful 24ways article.

Laying down type

Just like with color, you can use typography to evoke a feeling and direct a user’s attention. Have contrasting typefaces (like serif headlines and sans-serif body text) to group the content into meaningful sections.

In a recent A List Apart article, the Master of Web Typography™ Jason Santa Maria offers excellent advice on how to choose your typefaces:


	Write down a general description of the qualities of the message you are trying to convey, and then look for typefaces that embody those qualities.


Sounds pretty straightforward. I wanted to give my design a classic feel with a hint of nostalgia, so I used Georgia for the headlines, and incorporated the ornate ampersand from Baskerville into the header.

 A closeup on the site’s header.

Let’s get sexy

The design doesn’t look too bad as it is, but it’s still pretty flat. We can do better, and after mixing in some CSS3 and a couple of PNGs, it’s going to get downright steamy in here.

Give it some glow

Objects in the natural world reflect light, so to make your design feel tangible and organic, give it some glow. In the example design I achieved this by creating two white to transparent gradients of varying opacities. Both have a solid white border across their top, which gives edges a double border effect and makes them look sharper. Using CSS3’s text-shadow on headlines and box-shadow on content modules is another quick way to add depth.

 A wide and closeup view of the design with gradients, text-shadow and box-shadow added. For information on how to implement text-shadow and box-shadow using RGBA, check out the article I wrote on it last week.


37 pieces of flair

Okay, maybe you don’t need that much flair, but it couldn’t hurt to add a little; it’s the details that will set your design apart. Work in imagery and texture, using PNGs with an alpha channel so you can layer images and still tweak the color later on.

 The design with grungy textures, a noisy diagonal stripe pattern, and some old transportation images layered behind the text. Because the colors are rendered using RGBA, these images bleed through the content, giving the design a layered feel. Best viewed large.


Send it off

Hey, look at that. You’ve got a detailed, well structured mockup for the client to review. Best of all, your markup is complete too. If the client approves the design at this stage, your template is practically finished. Bust out the party hats!

Not so fast, Buster!

So I don’t know about you, but I’ve never gotten a design past the client’s keen eye for criticism on the first go. Let’s review some hypothetical feedback (none of which is too outlandish, in my experience), and see how we’d make the requested changes in the browser. 

Updating the typography


	My ex-girlfriend loved Georgia, so I never want to see it again. Can we get rid of it? I want to use a font that’s chunky and loud, just like my stupid ex-girlfriend.

	 Fakey McClient


Yikes! Thankfully with CSS, removing Georgia is as easy as running a find and replace on the stylesheet. In my revised mockup, I used @font-face and League Gothic on the headlines to give the typography the, um, unique feel the client is looking for.

 The same mockup, using @font-face on the headlines. If you’re unfamiliar with implementing @font-face, check out Nice Web Type‘s helpful article.

Adding rounded corners


	I’m not sure if I’ll like it, but I want to see what it’d look like with rounded corners. My cousin, a Web 2.0 marketing guru, says they’re trendy right now.

	 Fakey McClient


Switching to rounded corners is a nightmare if you’re doing your mockup in Photoshop, since it means recreating most of the shapes and UI elements in the design. Thankfully, with CSS border-radius comes to our rescue! By applying this gem of a style to a handful of classes, you’ll be rounded out in no time.

 The mockup with rounded corners, created using border-radius. If you’re not sure how to implement border-radius, check out CSS3.info‘s quick how-to.

Making changes to the color


	The design is too dark, it’s depressing! They call it ‘the blues’ for a reason, dummy. Can you try using a brighter color? I want orange, like Zeldman uses.

	 Fakey McClient


Making color changes is another groan-inducing task when working in Photoshop. Finding and updating every background layer, every drop shadow, and every link can take forever in a complex PSD. However, if you’ve done your mockup in markup with RGBA and semi-transparent PNGs, making changes to your color is as easy as updating the body background and a few font colors.

 The mockup with an orange color scheme. Best viewed large.

Ahem, what about Internet Explorer?

Gee, thanks for reminding me, buzzkill. Several of the CSS features I’ve suggested you use, such as RGBA, text-shadow and box-shadow, and border-radius, are not supported in Internet Explorer. I know, it makes me sad too. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t try these techniques out in your markup based mockups.  The point here is to get your mockups done as efficiently as possible, and to keep the emphasis on markup from the very beginning.

Once the design is approved, you and the client have to decide if you can live with the design looking different in different browsers. Is it so bad if some users get to see drop shadows and some don’t? Or if the rounded corners are missing for a portion of your audience? The design won’t be broken for IE people, they’re just missing out on a few visual treats that other users will see.

The idea of rewarding users who choose modern browsers is not a new concept; Dan covers it thoroughly in Handcrafted CSS, and it’s been written about in the past by Aaron Gustafson and Andy Clarke on several occasions. I believe we shouldn’t have to design for the lowest common denominator (cough, IE6 users, cough); instead we should create designs that are beautiful in modern browsers, but still degrade nicely for the other guy. However, some clients just aren’t that progressive, and in that case you can always use background images for drop shadows and rounded corners, as you have in the past. 

Closing thoughts

With the advent of CSS3, browsers are just as capable of giving us beautiful, detailed mockups as Photoshop, and in half the time. I’m not the only one to make an argument for this revised process; in his article Time to stop showing clients static design visuals, and in his presentation Walls Come Tumbling Down, Andy Clarke makes a fantastic case for creating your mockups in markup.

So I guess my challenge to you for 2010 is to get out of Photoshop and into the code. Even if the arguments for designing in the browser aren’t enough to make you change your process permanently, it’s worthwhile to give it a try. Look at the New Year as a time to experiment; applying constraints and evaluating old processes can do wonders for improving your efficiency and creativity.",2009,Meagan Fisher,meaganfisher,2009-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/make-your-mockup-in-markup/,process
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 licensing and serving “real fonts” works in the short and long term for the majority of designer/developers.

Nor is our primary problem that developers with no design background may serve ugly or illegible fonts that take forever to load, or fonts that take a long time to download and then display as ordinary system fonts (as happens on, say, about.validator.nu). Ugliness and poor optimization on the web are nothing new. That support for @font-face in Webkit and Mozilla browsers (and for TrueType fonts converted to Embedded OpenType in Internet Explorer) adds deadly weapons to the non-designer’s toolkit is not the technology’s fault. JavaScript and other essential web technologies are equally susceptible to abuse. 

Beauty is in the Eye of the Rendering Engine

No, the real elephant in the room—the thing few web developers and no “web font” enthusiasts are talking about—has to do with legibility (or lack thereof) and aesthetics (or lack thereof) across browsers and platforms. Put simply, even fonts optimized for web use (which is a whole thing: ask a type designer) will not look good in every browser and OS. That’s because every browser treats hinting differently, as does every OS, and every OS version. 

Firefox does its own thing in both Windows and Mac OS, and Microsoft is all over the place because of its need to support multiple generations of Windows and Cleartype and all kinds of hardware simultaneously. Thus “real type” on a single web page can look markedly different, and sometimes very bad, on different computers at the same company. If that web page is your company’s, your opinion of “web fonts” may suffer, and rightfully. (The advantage of Apple’s closed model, which not everyone likes, is that it allows the company to guarantee the quality and consistency of user experience.)  

As near as my font designer friends and I can make out, Apple’s Webkit in Safari and iPhone ignores hinting and creates its own, which Apple thinks is better, and which many web designers think of as “what real type looks like.” The forked version of Webkit in Chrome, Android, and Palm Pre also creates its own hinting, which is close to iPhone’s—close enough that Apple, Palm, and Google could propose it as a standard for use in all browsers and platforms. Whether Firefox would embrace a theoretical Apple and Google standard is open to conjecture, and I somehow have difficulty imagining Microsoft buying in—even though they know the web is more and more mobile, and that means more and more of their customers are viewing web content in some version of Webkit.

The End of Simple

There are ways around this ugly type ugliness, but they involve complicated scripting and sniffing—the very nightmares from which web standards and the simplicity of @font-face were supposed to save us. I don’t know that even mighty Typekit has figured out every needed variation yet (although, working with foundries, they probably will). 

For type foundries, the complexity and expense of rethinking classic typefaces to survive in these hostile environments may further delay widespread adoption of web fonts and the resolution of licensing and formatting issues. The complexity may also force designers (even those who prefer to own) to rely on a hosted rental model simply to outsource and stay current with the detection and programming required.

Forgive my tears. I stand in a potter’s field of ideas like “Keep it simple,” by a grave whose headstone reads “Write once, publish everywhere.”",2009,Jeffrey Zeldman,jeffreyzeldman,2009-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/real-fonts-and-rendering/,design
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 your sanity, it’s a good idea to decide exactly which email clients you plan on supporting when building a HTML email. While general research is helpful, the email clients your subscribers are using can vary significantly from list to list. If you have the time there are a number of tools that can tell you specifically which email clients your subscribers are using. Trust me, if the testing shows almost none of them are using a client like Lotus Notes, save yourself some frustration and ignore it altogether. 

Knowing which email clients you’re targeting not only makes the building process easier, it can save you lots of time in the testing phase too. For the purpose of this article, I’ll be sharing techniques that give the best results across all of the popular clients, including the notorious ones like Gmail, Lotus Notes 6 and Outlook 2007. Just remember that pixel perfection in all email clients is a pipe dream.

Let’s get started.

Use tables for layout

Because clients like Gmail and Outlook 2007 have poor support for float, margin and padding, you’ll need to use tables as the framework of your email. While nested tables are widely supported, consistent treatment of width, margin and padding within table cells is not. For the best results, keep the following in mind when coding your table structure.

Set the width in each cell, not the table

When you combine table widths, td widths, td padding and CSS padding into an email, the final result is different in almost every email client. The most reliable way to set the width of your table is to set a width for each cell, not for the table itself.

<table cellspacing=""0"" cellpadding=""10"" border=""0"">
	<tr>
		<td width=""80""></td>
		<td width=""280""></td>
	</tr>
</table>

Never assume that if you don’t specify a cell width the email client will figure it out. It won’t.  Also avoid using percentage based widths. Clients like Outlook 2007 don’t respect them, especially for nested tables. Stick to pixels. If you want to add padding to each cell, use either the cellpadding attribute of the table or CSS padding for each cell, but never combine the two.

Err toward nesting

Table nesting is far more reliable than setting left and right margins or padding for table cells. If you can achieve the same effect by table nesting, that will always give you the best result across the buggier email clients.

Use a container table for body background colors

Many email clients ignore background colors specified in your CSS or the <body> tag. To work around this, wrap your entire email with a 100% width table and give that a background color.

<table cellspacing=""0"" cellpadding=""0"" border=""0"" width=""100%"">
	<tr>
		<td bgcolor=”#000000”>
			Your email code goes here.
		</td>
	</tr>
</table>

You can use the same approach for background images too. Just remember that some email clients don’t support them, so always provide a fallback color.

Avoid unnecessary whitespace in table cells

Where possible, avoid whitespace between your <td> tags. Some email clients (ahem, Yahoo! and Hotmail) can add additional padding above or below the cell contents in some scenarios, breaking your design for no apparent reason.

CSS and general font formatting

While some email designers do their best to avoid CSS altogether and rely on the dreaded <font> tag, the truth is many CSS properties are well supported by most email clients. See this comprehensive list of CSS support across the major clients for a good idea of the safe properties and those that should be avoided. 

Always move your CSS inline

Gmail is the culprit for this one. By stripping the CSS from the <head> and <body> of any email, we’re left with no choice but to move all CSS inline. The good news is this is something you can almost completely automate. Free services like Premailer will move all CSS inline with the click of a button. I recommend leaving this step to the end of your build process so you can utilize all the benefits of CSS.

Avoid shorthand for fonts and hex notation

A number of email clients reject CSS shorthand for the font property. For example, never set your font styles like this.

p {
	font:bold 1em/1.2em georgia,times,serif;
}

Instead, declare the properties individually like this.

p {
	font-weight: bold;
	font-size: 1em;
	line-height: 1.2em;
	font-family: georgia,times,serif;
}

While we’re on the topic of fonts, I recently tested every conceivable variation of @font-face across the major email clients. The results were dismal, so unfortunately it’s web-safe fonts in email for the foreseeable future.

When declaring the color property in your CSS, some email clients don’t support shorthand hexadecimal colors like color:#f60; instead of color:#ff6600;. Stick to the longhand approach for the best results.

Paragraphs

Just like table cell spacing, paragraph spacing can be tricky to get a consistent result across the board. I’ve seen many designers revert to using double <br /> or DIVs with inline CSS margins to work around these shortfalls, but recent testing showed that paragraph support is now reliable enough to use in most cases (there was a time when Yahoo! didn’t support the paragraph tag at all).

The best approach is to set the margin inline via CSS for every paragraph in your email, like so:

p {
	margin: 0 0 1.6em 0;
}

Again, do this via CSS in the head when building your email, then use Premailer to bring it inline for each paragraph later.

If part of your design is height-sensitive and calls for pixel perfection, I recommend avoiding paragraphs altogether and setting the text formatting inline in the table cell. You might need to use table nesting or cellpadding / CSS to get the desired result. Here’s an example:

<td width=""200"" style=""font-weight:bold; font-size:1em; line-height:1.2em; font-family:georgia,'times',serif;"">your height sensitive text</td>

Links

Some email clients will overwrite your link colors with their defaults, and you can avoid this by taking two steps. First, set a default color for each link inline like so:

<a href=""http://somesite.com/"" style=""color:#ff00ff"">this is a link</a>

Next, add a redundant span inside the a tag.

<a href=""http://somesite.com/"" style=""color:#ff00ff""><span style=""color:#ff00ff"">this is a link</span></a>

To some this may be overkill, but if link color is important to your design then a superfluous span is the best way to achieve consistency.

Images in HTML emails

The most important thing to remember about images in email is that they won’t be visible by default for many subscribers. If you start your design with that assumption, it forces you to keep things simple and ensure no important content is suppressed by image blocking.

With this in mind, here are the essentials to remember when using images in HTML email:

Avoid spacer images

While the combination of spacer images and nested tables was popular on the web ten years ago, image blocking in many email clients has ruled it out as a reliable technique today. Most clients replace images with an empty placeholder in the same dimensions, others strip the image altogether. Given image blocking is on by default in most email clients, this can lead to a poor first impression for many of your subscribers. Stick to fixed cell widths to keep your formatting in place with or without images.

Always include the dimensions of your image

If you forget to set the dimensions for each image, a number of clients will invent their own sizes when images are blocked and break your layout. Also, ensure that any images are correctly sized before adding them to your email. Some email clients will ignore the dimensions specified in code and rely on the true dimensions of your image. 

Avoid PNGs

Lotus Notes 6 and 7 don’t support 8-bit or 24-bit PNG images, so stick with the GIF or JPG formats for all images, even if it means some additional file size.

Provide fallback colors for background images

Outlook 2007 has no support for background images (aside from this hack to get full page background images working). If you want to use a background image in your design, always provide a background color the email client can fall back on. This solves both the image blocking and Outlook 2007 problem simultaneously.

Don’t forget alt text

Lack of standards support means email clients have long destroyed the chances of a semantic and accessible HTML email. Even still, providing alt text is important from an image blocking perspective. Even with images suppressed by default, many email clients will display the provided alt text instead. Just remember that some email clients like Outlook 2007, Hotmail and Apple Mail don’t support alt text at all when images are blocked.

Use the display hack for Hotmail

For some inexplicable reason, Windows Live Hotmail adds a few pixels of additional padding below images. A workaround is to set the display property like so.

img {display:block;}

This removes the padding in Hotmail and still gives you the predicable result in other email clients.

Don’t use floats

Both Outlook 2007 and earlier versions of Notes offer no support for the float property. Instead, use the align attribute of the img tag to float images in your email.

<img src=""image.jpg"" align=""right"">

If you’re seeing strange image behavior in Yahoo! Mail, adding align=“top” to your images can often solve this problem.

Video in email

With no support for JavaScript or the object tag, video in email (if you can call it that) has long been limited to animated gifs. However, some recent research I did into the HTML5 video tag in email showed some promising results.

Turns out HTML5 video does work in many email clients right now, including Apple Mail, Entourage 2008, MobileMe and the iPhone. The real benefit of this approach is that if the video isn’t supported, you can provide reliable fallback content such as an animated GIF or a clickable image linking to the video in the browser.

Of course, the question of whether you should add video to email is another issue altogether. If you lean toward the “yes” side check out the technique with code samples.

What about mobile email?

The mobile email landscape was a huge mess until recently. With the advent of the iPhone, Android and big improvements from Palm and RIM, it’s becoming less important to think of mobile as a different email platform altogether.

That said, there are a few key pointers to keep in mind when coding your emails to get a decent result for your more mobile subscribers.

Keep the width less than 600 pixels

Because of email client preview panes, this rule was important long before mobile email clients came of age. In truth, the iPhone and Pre have a viewport of 320 pixels, the Droid 480 pixels and the Blackberry models hover around 360 pixels. Sticking to a maximum of 600 pixels wide ensures your design should still be readable when scaled down for each device. This width also gives good results in desktop and web-based preview panes.

Be aware of automatic text resizing

In what is almost always a good feature, email clients using webkit (such as the iPhone, Pre and Android) can automatically adjust font sizes to increase readability. If testing shows this feature is doing more harm than good to your design, you can always disable it with the following CSS rule:

-webkit-text-size-adjust: none;

Don’t forget to test

While standards support in email clients hasn’t made much progress in the last few years, there has been continual change (for better or worse) in some email clients. Web-based providers like Yahoo!, Hotmail and Gmail are notorious for this. On countless occasions I’ve seen a proven design suddenly stop working without explanation.

For this reason alone it’s important to retest your email designs on a regular basis. I find a quick test every month or so does the trick, especially in the web-based clients. The good news is that after designing and testing a few HTML email campaigns, you will find that order will emerge from the chaos. Many of these pitfalls will become quite predictable and your inbox-friendly designs will take shape with them in mind.

Looking ahead

Designing HTML email can be a tough pill for new designers and standardistas to swallow, especially given the fickle and retrospective nature of email clients today. With HTML5 just around the corner we are entering a new, uncertain phase. Will email client developers take the opportunity to repent on past mistakes and bring email clients into the present? The aim of groups such as the Email Standards Project is to make much of the above advice as redundant as the long-forgotten <blink> and <marquee> tags, however, only time will tell if this is to become a reality.

Although not the most compliant (or fashionable) medium, the results speak for themselves – email is, and will continue to be one of the most successful and targeted marketing channels available to you. As a designer with HTML email design skills in your arsenal, you have the opportunity to not only broaden your service offering, but gain a unique appreciation of how vital standards are.

Next steps

Ready to get started? There are a number of HTML email design galleries to provide ideas and inspiration for your own designs. 


	http://www.campaignmonitor.com/gallery/
	http://htmlemailgallery.com/
	http://inboxaward.com/


Enjoy!",2009,David Greiner,davidgreiner,2009-12-13T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/rock-solid-html-emails/,code
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 found on the rendered page. The error is reported directly to those who need to know about it and fix it. Less errant bug reports and less frantic emails ahoy!

 A page with an implementation issue and instant feedback on the problem

JavaScript selector engines to the rescue

Whether you’re using a library or indeed tapping into the loveliness of the new JavaScript Selector APIs looking for particular HTML elements in JavaScript is fairly trivial now. 

For instance this is how you look for a div element with the id attribute of year (the missing attribute from top image) using jQuery (the library I’ll be coding my examples in): 

if ($(‘div#year’).length) {
	alert(‘win’);
}

Using this logic you can probably imagine how you can write up a quick method to check for the existence of a particular element and alert when it’s not present — but assuming you have a complex page you’re going to be repeating yourself a fair bit and we don’t want to be doing that.

Test scripts

If you’ve got a lot of complex HTML patterns that need testing across a number of different pages it makes sense to keep your tests out of production code. Chances are you’ve already got a load of heavy JavaScript assets, and when it comes to file size saving every little helps.

I don’t think that tests should contain code inside of them so keep mine externally as JSON. This also means that you can use the one set of tests in multiple places. We already know that it’s a good idea to keep our CSS and JavaScript separate so lets continue along those lines here.

The test script for this example looks like this:

{
	""title"": ""JS tabs implementation test"",
	""description"": ""Check that the correct HTML patterns has been used"",
	""author"": ""Ross Bruniges"",
	""created"": ""20th July 2009"",
	""tests"": [
		{
			""name"": ""JS tabs elements"",
			""description"": ""Checking that correct HTML elements including class/IDs are used on the page for the JS to progressively enhance"",
			""selector"": ""div.tabbed_content"",
			""message"": ""We couldn't find VAR on the page - it's required for our JavaScript to function correctly"",
			""check_for"": {
				""contains"": {
					""elements"": [
						""div.tab_content"", ""h2"" 
					],
					""message"": ""We've noticed some missing HTML:</p><ul><li>VAR</li></ul><p>please refer to the examples sent for reference"" 
				} 
			} 
		} 
	]
}

The first four lines are just a little bit of meta data so we remember what this test was all about when we look at it again in the future, or indeed if it ever breaks. The tests are the really cool parts and firstly you’ll notice that it’s an array – we’re only going to show one example test here but there is no reason why you can’t place in as many as you want. I’ll explain what each of the lines in the example test means:


	name – short test name, I use this in pass/fail messaging later
	description – meta data for future reference
	selector – the root HTML element from which your HTML will be searched
	message – what the app will alert if the initial selector isn’t found
	check_for – a wrapper to hold inner tests – those run if the initial selector does match
	
		contains – the type of check, we’re checking that the selector contains specified elements
		
			elements – the HTML elements we are searching for
			message – a message for when these don’t match (VAR is substituted when it’s appended to the page with the name of any elements that don’t exist)
		
		
		

It’s very important to pass the function valid JSON (JSONLint is a great tool for this) otherwise you might get a console showing no tests have even been run. 

The JavaScript that makes this helpful

Again, this code should never hit a production server so I’ve kept it external. This also means that the only thing that’s needed to be done by the implementation team when they are ready to build is that they delete this code.

<script src=""sleuth.js"" type=""text/javascript""></script>
<script type=""text/javascript"">
	$(document).ready(function() {
	  sleuth.test_page.init(‘js_tabs_test.js');
	}); 
</script>

“View the full JavaScript:/examples/self-testing-pages-with-javascript/js/tests/test_suite.js

The init function appends the test console to the page and inserts the CSS file required to style it (you don’t need to use pictures of me when tests pass and fail though I see no reason why you shouldn’t), goes and grabs the JSON file referenced and parses it. The methods to pass (tests_pass) and fail (haz_fail) the test I hope are pretty self-explanatory as is the one which creates the test summary once everything has been run (create_summary).

The two interesting functions are init_tests and confirm_html.

init_tests

init_tests:function(i,obj) {
	var $master_elm = $(obj.selector);
	sleuth.test_page.$logger.append(""<div id='test_"" + i + ""' class='message'><p><em>"" + obj.name + ""</em></p></div>"");
	var $container = $('#test_' + i);
	if (!$master_elm.length) {
		var err_sum = obj.message.replace(/VAR/gi, obj.selector);
		sleuth.test_page.haz_failed(err_sum, $container);
		return;
	}
	if (obj.check_for) {
		$.each(obj.check_for,function(key, value){
			sleuth.test_page.assign_checks($master_elm, $container, key, value);
		});
	} else {
		sleuth.test_page.tests_passed($container);
		return;
	}
}

The function gets sent the number of the current iteration (used to create a unique id for its test summary) and the current object that contains the data we’re testing against as parameters.

We grab a reference to the root element and this is used (pretty much in the example shown right at the start of this article) and its length is checked. If the length is positive we know we can continue to the inner tests (if they exist) but if not we fail the test and don’t go any further. We append the error to the test console for everyone to see.

If we pass the initial check we send the reference to the root element, message contains and the inner object to a function that in this example sends us on to confirm_html (if we had a more complex test suite it would do a lot more). 

confirm_html

confirm_html:function(target_selector, error_elm, obj) {
	var missing_elms = [];
	$.each(obj.elements, function(i, val) {
		if (!target_selector.find(val).length) {
			missing_elms.push(val);
		}	
	});
	if (missing_elms.length) {
		var file_list = missing_elms.join('</li><li>');
		var err_sum = obj.message.replace(/VAR/gi, file_list);
		sleuth.test_page.haz_failed(err_sum, error_elm);
		return;
	}
	sleuth.test_page.tests_passed(error_elm);
	return;
}

We’re again using an array to check for a passed or failed test and checking its length but this time we push in a reference to each missing element we find.

If the test does fail we’re providing even more useful feedback by informing what elements have been missed out. All the implementation team need do is look for them in the files we’ve sent and include them as expected.

No more silly implementation bugs!

Here is an example of a successful implementation.

Here are some examples of failed implementations – one which fails at finding the root node and one that has the correct root node but none of the inner HTML tests pass.

Is this all we can check for?

Certainly not!

JavaScript provides pretty easy ways to check for attributes, included files (if the files being checked for are being referenced correctly and not 404ing) and even applied CSS.

Want to check that those ARIA attributes are being implemented correctly or that all images contain an alt attribute well this simple test suite can be extended to include tests for this – the sky is pretty much up to your imagination.",2009,Ross Bruniges,rossbruniges,2009-12-12T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/self-testing-pages-with-javascript/,process
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 removing hinting and kerning information. Keep in mind that removing this information may affect how well the type renders.

At this time of year, though, I’m sure you’re quite busy. Save yourself some time and head on over to the Font Squirrel Font Generator.



The Font Generator is extremely handy and allows for a number of optimizations and cross-platform options to be generated instantly. Select the font from your local system—make sure that you are only using properly licensed fonts! 

In this particular case, we only want the ampersand. Click on Subset Fonts which will open up a new menu. Unselect any preselected sets and enter the ampersand into the Single Characters text box. 

Generate your font and what are you left with? 3KB. 



The Font Generator even generates a base64 encoded data URI stylesheet to be imported easily into your project.

Check out the Demo page. (This demo won’t work in Internet Explorer as we’re only demonstrating the Data URI font embedding and not using the EOT file format that IE requires.) 

No Unnecessary Additives

If you peeked under the hood of that demo, did you notice something interesting? There’s no <span> around the ampersand. The great thing about this is that we can take advantage of the font stack’s natural ability to switch to a fallback font when a character isn’t available.

Just like that, we’ve managed to spruce up our page with a little typographic sugar without having to put on too much weight.",2009,Jonathan Snook,jonathansnook,2009-12-19T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/spruce-it-up/,code
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 place to buy gin. The mistakes made by the bar and bartender are painfully obvious. And yet, there are websites losing users everyday due to the same lack of clear instruction.

A smidgen of well written copy goes a long way to reassure the nervous prospect. Just imagine if our man walked into the bar and the bartender explained that although the bar was here, sales were conducted in the next room because people were not then able to overhear the man’s card details. Instead, he is left to fend for himself. Online, we kick customers through the anonymous double doors with a merry ‘Paypal will handle your transaction!’.

Recently I worked on a site where the default error message, to account for anything happening that the developers hadn’t accounted for, was ‘SOMETHING HAS GONE WRONG!’. It might have been technically accurate but this is not how to inspire confidence in your customers that they can make a successful purchase through you. As everyone knows they can shop just fine, thank you very much, it is your site they will blame. Card declined? It’s the site. Didn’t know my email address has changed? It’s the site. Can’t log in? It’s the site.

Yes, yes. I know. None of these things are related to your site, or you the developer, but drop outs will be high and you’ll get imploring emails from your client asking you to wade knee deep into the site analytics to find a solution by testing 41 shades of blue because if it worked for Google…? Before you try a visual fix involving the Dulux paint chart breeding with a Pantone swatch, take an objective look at the information you are giving customers. How much are you assuming they know? How much are you relying on age-old labels and prompts without clarification?

Here’s a fun example for non-North Americans: ask your Granny to write out her billing address. If she looks at you blankly, tell her it is the address where the bank sends her statements. Imagine how many fewer instances of the wrong address there would be if we routinely added that information when people purchased from the UK? Instead, we rely on a language convention that hasn’t much common usage without explanation because, well, because we always have since the banks told us how we could take payments online.

So. Your client is busying themselves with writing the ultimate Facebook fan page about themselves and here you are left with creating a cohesive signup process or basket or purchase instructions. Here are five simple rules for bending puny humans to your will creating instructive instructions and constructive error messages that ultimately mean less hassle for you.

Plan what you want to say and plan it out as early as possible 

This goes for all content. Walk a virtual mile in the shoes of your users. What specific help can you offer customers to actively encourage continuation and ensure a minimal amount of dropouts? Make space for that information. One of the most common web content mistakes is jamming too much into a space that has been defined by physical boundaries rather than planned out. If you manage it, the best you can hope for is that no-one notices it was a last-minute job. Mostly it reads like a bad game of Tetris with content sticking out all over the place.

Use your words

Microcopy often says a lot in a few words but without those words you could leave room for doubt. When doubt creeps in a customer wants reassurance just like Alice:


	This time (Alice) found a little bottle… with the words ‘DRINK ME’ beautifully printed on it in large letters. It was all very well to say ‘Drink me,’ but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. ‘No, I’ll look first,’ she said, ‘and see whether it’s marked “poison” or not’


Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll.

Value clarity over brevity. Or a little more prosaically, “If in doubt, spell it out.” Thanks, Jeremy!

Be prepared to help


	‘Login failed: email/password combination is incorrect.’


Oh.


	‘Login failed: email/password combination is incorrect. 
Are you typing in all capitals? Caps Lock may be on. 
Have you changed your email address recently and not updated your account with us? Try your old email address first. 
Can’t remember your password? We can help you reset it.’ 


Ah!

Be direct and be informative

There is rarely a site that doesn’t suffer from some degree of jargon. Squash it early by setting a few guidelines about what language and tone of voice you will use to converse with your users. Be consistent. Equally, try to be as specific as possible when giving error messages or instructions and allay fears upfront.

Card payments are handled by paypal but you do not need a paypal account to pay.

We will not display your email address but we might need it to contact you.

Sign up for our free trial (no credit card required).

Combine copy and visual cues, learn from others and test new combinations

While visual design and copy can work independently, they work best together. New phrases and designs are being tested all the time so take a peek at abtests.com for more ideas, then test some new ideas and add your own results. Have a look at the microcopy pool on Flickr for some wonderful examples of little words and pictures working together. And yes, you absolutely should join the group and post more examples.


	A man walks into a bar. The bartender greets him in a friendly manner and asks him what he would like to drink. 
“Gin and Tonic, please.” 
“Yes sir, we have our house gin on offer but we also have a particularly good import here too.”
“The import, please.” 
“How would you like it? With a slice of lemon? Over ice?” 
“Both” 
“That’s £3.80. We accept cash, cards or you could open a tab.” 
“Card please.” 
“Certainly sir. Move just over here so that you can’t be observed. Now, please enter your pin number.” 
“Thank you.” 
“And here is your drink. Do let me know if there is a problem with it. I shall just be here at the bar. Enjoy.”


Cheers!",2009,Relly Annett-Baker,rellyannettbaker,2009-12-08T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/the-construction-of-instruction/,content
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 in Flickr photos, blog posts, Videos from YouTube and latest bookmarks from Delicious.

Check out the demo and get the source code on GitHub.

<?php
  /* YouTube RSS */
  $query = 'select description from rss(5) where url=""http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/chrisheilmann/uploads?alt=rss&v=2&orderby=published&client=ytapi-youtube-profile"";';
  /* Flickr search by user id */
  $query .= 'select farm,id,owner,secret,server,title from flickr.photos.search where user_id=""11414938@N00"";';
  /* Delicious RSS */
  $query .= 'select title,link from rss where url=""http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/codepo8?count=10"";';
  /* Blog RSS */
  $query .= 'select title,link from rss where url=""http://feeds.feedburner.com/wait-till-i/gwZf""';
  /* The YQL web service root with JSON as the output */
  $root = 'http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?format=json&env=store%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys';
  /* Assemble the query */
  $query = ""select * from query.multi where queries='"".$query.""'"";
  $url = $root . '&q=' . urlencode($query);
  /* Do the curl call (access the data just like a browser would) */
  $ch = curl_init(); 
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); 
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
  $output = curl_exec($ch); 
  curl_close($ch);
  $data = json_decode($output);
  $results = $data->query->results->results;
  /* YouTube output */
  $youtube = '<ul id=""youtube"">';
  foreach($results[0]->item as $r){
	$cleanHTML = undoYouTubeMarkupCrimes($r->description);
	$youtube .= '<li>'.$cleanHTML.'</li>';
  }
  $youtube .= '</ul>';
  /* Flickr output */
  $flickr = '<ul id=""flickr"">';
  foreach($results[1]->photo as $r){
	$flickr .= '<li>'.
			   '<a href=""http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/'.$r->id.'/"">'.
			   '<img src=""http://farm' .$r->farm . '.static.flickr.com/'.
			   $r->server . '/' . $r->id . '_' . $r->secret . 
			   '_s.jpg"" alt=""'.$r->title.'""></a></li>';
  }
  $flickr .= '</ul>';
  /* Delicious output */
  $delicious = '<ul id=""delicious"">';
  foreach($results[2]->item as $r){
	$delicious .= '<li><a href=""'.$r->link.'"">'.$r->title.'</a></li>';
  }
  $delicious .= '</ul>';
  /* Blog output */
  $blog = '<ul id=""blog"">';
  foreach($results[3]->item as $r){
	$blog .= '<li><a href=""'.$r->link.'"">'.$r->title.'</a></li>';
  }
  $blog .= '</ul>';
  function undoYouTubeMarkupCrimes($str){
	$cleaner = preg_replace('/555px/','100%',$str);
	$cleaner = preg_replace('/width=""[^""]+""/','',$cleaner);
	$cleaner = preg_replace('/<tbody>/','<colgroup><col width=""20%""><col width=""50%""><col width=""30%""></colgroup><tbody>',$cleaner);
	return $cleaner;
  }
?>

What we are doing here is create a few different YQL statements and queue them together with the query.multi table. Each of these can be run inside YQL itself. Check out the YouTube, Flickr, Delicious and Blog example in the console if you don’t believe me. The benefit of using this table is that we don’t make individual requests for each query but we get all the data in one single request – which means a much better performing solution as the YQL server farm is faster on the web than our servers.

We point the query to the YQL web service end point and get the resulting data using cURL. All that we need to do then is to convert the returned data to HTML lists that can be printed out inside an HTML template.

Mixing, matching and using HTML as a data source

This was a simple example of what YQL can do for you. Where it gets really powerful however is by mixing and matching different APIs. YQL is also a good tool to get information from HTML documents. By using the html table you can load the content of an HTML document (which gets fixed automatically by HTMLTidy) and use XPATH to filter down results to what you need. Take the following example which takes headlines from the news.bbc.co.uk homepage and runs the results through Yahoo’s Term Extractor API to give you a list of currently hot topics.

select * from search.termextract where context in (
  select content from html where url=""http://news.bbc.co.uk"" and xpath=""//table[@width=800]//a""
)

Try it out in the console or see the results here. In English, this means:


	Go to http://news.bbc.co.uk and get me the HTML
	Run it through HTML Tidy to clean it up.
	Get me only the links inside the table with an attribute of width and the value 800
	Get only the content of the link and for each of the links
	
		Take the content and send it as context to the Yahoo Term Extractor API
	
	

If we choose JSON-P as the output format we can use the outcome directly in JavaScript (see this demo or see its source):

<ul id=""hottopics""></ul>
<script type=""text/javascript"">
function hottopics(o){
  var res = o.query.results.Result,
	  all = res.length,
	  topics = {},
	  out = [],
	  html = '',
	  i=0;
  /* create hash from topics to prevent repetition */	 
  for(i=0;i<all;i++){
	topics[res[i]] = res[i];
  };
  for(i in topics){
	out.push(i);
  };
  html = '<li>' + out.join('</li><li>') + '</li>';
  document.getElementById('hottopics').innerHTML = html;
};
</script>
<script type=""text/javascript"" src=""http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20content%20from%20search.termextract%20where %20context%20in%20(select%20content%20from%20html%20where%20url%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fnews.bbc.co.uk%22%20and%20xpath%3D%22%2F%2Ftable%5B%40width%3D800%5D%2F%2Fa%22)&format=json&callback=hottopics""></script>

Using JSON, we can also use PHP which means the demo works for everybody – not only those with JavaScript enabled (see this demo or see its source):

<ul id=""hottopics""><li>
<?php
$url = 'http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20content'.
	   '%20from%20search.termextract%20where%20context%20in'.
	   '%20(select%20content%20from%20html%20where%20url%3D%22'.
	   'http%3A%2F%2Fnews.bbc.co.uk%22%20and%20xpath%3D%22%2F%2F'.
	   'table%5B%40width%3D800%5D%2F%2Fa%22)&format=json';
$ch = curl_init(); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
$output = curl_exec($ch); 
curl_close($ch);
$data = json_decode($output);
$topics = array_unique($data->query->results->Result);
echo join('</li><li>',$topics);
?>
</li></ul>

Summary

This article could only scratch the surface of YQL. You have not only read access to the web but you can also write to web services. For example you can update Twitter, post to your WordPress blog or shorten a URL with bit.ly. Using Open Tables you can add any web service to the YQL interface and you can even run server-side JavaScript which is for example useful to return Flickr photos as HTML or get the HTML content from a document that needs POST data.

The web of data is already here, and using YQL you don’t have to be a web services expert to use it and be part of it.",2009,Christian Heilmann,chrisheilmann,2009-12-17T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/the-web-is-your-cms/,code
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 the style of the typeface itself. Didone serifs are known for their lack of bracketsーthat is, a gradual transition from the stem to the serif. Instead, they typically connect at a right angle. Another common characteristic is the high contrast in the strokes: very thick stems, very thin serifs.

So, when using a high contrast typeface, you can use it to your advantage to enhance hierarchy. Following our “multiples” guideline, a 12px measurement from the stems helps us create a top rule with a height of 24px (a multiple of 2). We can take the exact 1px measurement from the serif—a multiple of 1—to create the bottom rule. Voilà! I use this technique a lot.



Swashbucklers

And don’t forget the importance of visual “speed bumps” to break up long passages of text. A beautiful face like Alejandro Paul’s Ministry Script has over a thousand characters that can be manipulated or even combined to create elegant interface elements. Altering the partial differential character (∂) creates a delightful ornament that can help to guide the eye through content.



Stagger & Swagger

What about layout? How can we use typography to inform how our content is displayed?

Let’s take a typeface like Assembler. We might use this for a design that needs to feel uneasy or uncomfortable. In design terms, that might translate into using irregular shapes and asymmetry. Using the proportional distances and degrees from the perpendiculars, we could easily create a multi-column layout that jives with the general tone. And for all you skeptics that don’t think a layout like this is doable on the web, stranger things have happened.

 Background texture generously offered by Bittbox.

Overall Design Direction

Finally, your typography could impact the entire look of the site, from the navigation to the interaction and everything in between. Check out how the (now-defunct) Nike Free site’s typography echoes the product itself, and in turn influences the navigation.



Find Your Type

With thousands of fonts to choose from, the possibilities are ridiculously open. From angles to radii to color to weight, you’ve got endless fodder before you. Great type designers spent countless hours slaving over these detailed letterforms; take advantage of it! Don’t feel like you have to limit yourself to the same old Helvetica and wet floors… unless your design calls for it. 

Happy hunting!",2009,Dan Mall,danmall,2009-12-07T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/type-inspired-interfaces/,design
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 becomes subjective and that will inevitably lead to problems.

Before we start discussing design, usability and development, we need to focus our clients on establishing concrete business objectives. This will provide a framework for decision making during the development phase.

This will not only help the client make decisions, it will also focus them on the business and away from micro managing the design.

Establish clear calls to action

Once business objectives have been set this opens up the possibility to establish clear calls to action.

I am amazed at how few website owners can name their calls to action. However, I am even more staggered at how few web designers ask about them.

Calls to action are not just limited to ecommerce sites. Whether you are asking people to sign up for a newsletter or complete a contact us form, every site should have a desired objective for users.

What is more, each page of a site should have micro calls to action that always draw users on and never leave them at a dead end.

Without clearly defined calls to action you cannot successfully design a site, structure the user experience or measure its success. They bring focus to the site and encourage the client to concentrate their efforts on helping people reach those goals.

Of course in order to know if a call to action is going to work, it is necessary to do some user testing.

Test against the right tasks

As web designers we all like to boast about being ʻuser centricʼ whatever that means! However, in reality I think many of us are paying lip service to the subject.

Sure, we ask our clients about who their users are and maybe even do some usability testing. However, usability testing is no good if we are not asking the right questions.

Again we find ourselves working on a superficial level rather than tackling the deeper issues.

Clients find it relatively easy to tell you who their target audience is. Admittedly the list they come back with is often overly long and contains a lot of edge cases. However, where they begin to struggle is articulating what these users will want to achieve on the website. They know who they want to reach. However, they cannot always tell you why those people would be interested in the site.

These user tasks are another fundamental building block for any successful website. Although it is important for a website owner to understand what their objectives are and what they want users to do, it is even more important that they understand the users objectives as well.

Again, this provides context for the decisions they are making about design, usability and functionality. Without it the site will become self serving, largely ignoring the needs of users.

User tasks help to focus the clientʼs mind on the needs of their user, rather than what they can get out of them.

So am I claiming that design, usability and code do not matter? Well the shocking truth is that to some extent I am!

The shocking truth

Whether we like it or not there is significant evidence that you can create a successful website with bad design, terrible code and without ever running a usability test session.

You only need to look at the design of Craigslist or the code of Amazon to see that this is true.

However, I do not believe it is possible to build a successful website without business objectives, calls to action and a clear idea of user tasks.

Do not misunderstand me. I do believe design, usability and code matters. I just believe that they only matter if the fundamentals are already in place. These things improve a solid foundation but are no use in their own right.

As web designers it is our responsibility to ensure fundamental questions are being asked, before we start exploring other issues. If we do not, our websites will look great, be well coded and have gone through endless usability tests, however it will not be truly successful.",2009,Paul Boag,paulboag,2009-12-04T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/what-makes-a-website-successful/,business
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 the text:

 50% opacity on just the foreground colour

h1 {
	color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);
	background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);
}

The How-To

You’ll notice that above I’ve been using the rgb() syntax for specifying colours. This is a bit less common than the usual hex codes (like #FFF) but it makes sense when starting to use RGBA. As there’s no way to specify opacity with hex codes, we use rgba() like so:

color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.5);

Just like rgb() the first three values are red, green and blue. You can specify these 0-255 or 0%-100%. The fourth value is the opacity level from 0 (completely transparent) to 1 (completely opaque).

You can use this anywhere you’d normally set a colour in CSS — so it’s good for foregrounds and background, borders, outlines and so on. All the transparency effects on this site’s current design are achieved this way.

Supporting All Browsers

Like a lot of the features we’ll be looking at in this year’s 24 ways, RGBA colour is supported by a lot of the newest browsers, but not the rest. Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera browsers all support RGBA, but Internet Explorer does not.

Fortunately, due to the robust design of CSS as a language, we can specify RGBA colours for browsers that support it and an alternative for browsers that do not.

Falling back to solid colour

The simplest technique is to allow the browser to fall back to using a solid colour when opacity isn’t available. The CSS parsing rules specify that any unrecognised value should be ignored. We can make use of this because a browser without RGBA support will treat a colour value specified with rgba() as unrecognised and discard it.

So if we specify the colour first using rgb() for all browsers, we can then overwrite it with an rgba() colour for browsers that understand RGBA.

h1 {
	color: rgb(127, 127, 127);
	color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);
}

Falling back to a PNG

In cases where you’re using transparency on a background-color (although not on borders or text) it’s possible to fall back to using a PNG with alpha channel to get the same effect. This is less flexible than using CSS as you’ll need to create a new PNG for each level of transparency required, but it can be a useful solution.

Using the same principal as before, we can specify the background in a style that all browsers will understand, and then overwrite it in a way that browsers without RGBA support will ignore.

h1 {
	background: transparent url(black50.png);
	background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) none;
}

It’s important to note that this works because we’re using the background shorthand property, enabling us to set both the background colour and background image in a single declaration. It’s this that enables us to rely on the browser ignoring the second declaration when it encounters the unknown rgba() value.

Next Steps

The really great thing about RGBA colour is that it gives us the ability to create far more graphically rich designs without the need to use images. Not only does that make for faster and lighter pages, but sites which are easier and quicker to build and maintain. CSS values can also be changed in response to user interaction or even manipulated with JavaScript in a way that’s just not so easy using images.

 Opacity can be changed on :hover or manipulated with JavaScript

div {
	color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.8);
	background-color: rgba(142, 213, 87, 0.3);
}
div:hover {
	color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 1);
	background-color: rgba(142, 213, 87, 0.6);
}

Clever use of transparency in border colours can help ease the transition between overlay items and the page behind.

 Borders can receive the RGBA treatment, too

div {
	color: rgb(0, 0, 0);
	background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);
	border: 10px solid rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.3);
}

In Conclusion


That’s a brief insight into RGBA colour, what it’s good for and how it can be used whilst providing support for older browsers. With the current lack of support in Internet Explorer, it’s probably not a technique that commercial designs will want to heavily rely on right away – simply because of the overhead of needing to think about fallback all the time. 

It is, however, a useful tool to have for those smaller, less critical touches that can really help to finesse a design. As browser support becomes more mainstream, you’ll already be familiar and practised with RGBA and ready to go.",2009,Drew McLellan,drewmclellan,2009-12-01T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/working-with-rgba-colour/,code
227,A Contentmas Epiphany,"The twelve days of Christmas fall between 25 December, Christmas Day, and 6 January, the Epiphany of the Kings. Traditionally, these have been holidays and a lot of us still take a good proportion of these days off. Equally, a lot of us have a got a personal site kicking around somewhere that we sigh over and think, “One day I’ll sort you out!” Why not take this downtime to give it a big ol’ refresh? I know, good idea, huh?

HEY WAIT! WOAH! NO-ONE’S TOUCHING PHOTOSHOP OR DOING ANY CSS FANCYWORK UNTIL I’M DONE WITH YOU!

Be honest, did you immediately think of a sketch or mockup you have tucked away? Or some clever little piece of code you want to fiddle with? Now ask yourself, why would you start designing the container if you haven’t worked out what you need to put inside?

Anyway, forget the content strategy lecture; I haven’t given you your gifts yet.
I present The Twelve Days of Contentmas!

This is a simple little plan to make sure that your personal site, blog or portfolio is not just looking good at the end of these twelve days, but is also a really useful repository of really useful content.

WARNING KLAXON: There are twelve parts, one for each day of Christmas, so this is a lengthy article. I’m not expecting anyone to absorb this in one go. Add to Instapaper. There is no TL;DR for this because it’s a multipart process, m’kay? Even so, this plan of mine cuts corners on a proper applied strategy for content. You might find some aspects take longer than the arbitrary day I’ve assigned. And if you apply this to your company-wide intranet, I won’t be held responsible for the mess.

That said, I encourage you to play along and sample some of the practical aspects of organising existing content and planning new content because it is, honestly, an inspiring and liberating process. For one thing, you get to review all the stuff you have put out for the world to look at and see what you could do next. This always leaves me full of ideas on how to plug the gaps I’ve found, so I hope you are similarly motivated come day twelve.

Let’s get to it then, shall we?

On the first day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me:

1. A (partial) content inventory

I’m afraid being a site owner isn’t without its chores. With great power comes great responsibility and all that. There are the domain renewing, hosting helpline calls and, of course, keeping on top of all the content that you have published.

If you just frowned a little and thought, “Well, there’s articles and images and… stuff”, then I’d like to introduce you to the idea of a content inventory. 

A content inventory is a list of all your content, in a simple spreadsheet, that allows you to see at a glance what is currently on your site: articles; about me page; contact form, and so on.

You add the full URL so that you can click directly to any page listed. You add a brief description of what it is and what tags it has. In fact, I’ll show you. I’ve made a Google Docs template for you. Sorry, it isn’t wrapped.

Does it seem like a mammoth task? Don’t feel you have to do this all in one day. But do do it. For one thing, looking back at all the stuff you’ve pushed out into the world gives you a warm fuzzy feeling which keeps the heating bill down.

Grab a glass of mulled cider and try going month-by-month through your blog archives, or project-by-project through your portfolio. Do a little bit each day for the next twelve days and you’ll have done something awesome. The best bit is that this exploration of your current content helps you with the next day’s task.

Bonus gift: for more on content auditing and inventory, check out Jeff Veen’s article on just this topic, which is also suitable for bigger business sites too.

On the second day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me:

2. Website loves

Remember when you were a kid, you’d write to Santa with a wish list that would make your parents squirm, because your biggest hope for your stocking would be either impossible or impossibly expensive. Do you ever get the same thing now as a grown-up where you think, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could make a video blog every week”, or “I could podcast once a month about this”, and then you push it to the back of your mind, assuming that you won’t have time or you wouldn’t know what to talk about anyway?

True fact: content doesn’t just have to be produced when we are so incensed that we absolutely must blog about a topic. Neither does it have to be a drain to a demanding schedule. You can plan for it. In fact, you’re about to.

So, today, get a pen and a notebook. Move away from your computer. My gift to you is to grab a quiet ten minutes between turkey sandwiches and relatives visiting and give your site some of the attention it deserves for 2011.

What would you do with your site if you could? I don’t mean what would you do purely visually – although by all means note those things down too – but to your site as a whole. Here are some jumping off points:


	Would you like to individually illustrate and design some of your articles?
	What about a monthly exploration of your favourite topic through video or audio?
	Who would you like to collaborate with?
	What do you want your site to be like for a user?
	What tone of voice would you like to use?
	How could you use imagery and typography to support your content?
	What would you like to create content about in the new year?


It’s okay if you can’t do these things yet. It’s okay to scrub out anything where you think, “Nah, never gonna happen.” But do give some thought to what you might want to do next. The best inspiration for this comes from what you’ve already done, so keep on with that inventory.

Bonus gift: a Think Vitamin article on podcasting using Skype, so you can rope in a few friends to join in, too.

On the third day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me:

3. Red pens

Shock news, just in: the web is not print!

One of the hardest things as a writer is to reach the point where you say, “Yeah, okay, that’s it. I’m done” and send off your beloved manuscript or article to print. I’m convinced that if deadlines didn’t exist, nothing would get finished. Why? Well, at the point you hand it over to the publishing presses, you can make no more changes. At best, you can print an erratum or produce an updated second edition at a later date. And writers love to – no, they live to – tweak their creations, so handing them over is quite a struggle. Just one more comma and…

Online, we have no such constraints. We can edit, correct, test, tweak, twiddle until we’re blooming sick of it. Our red pens never run out of ink. It is time for you to run a more critical eye over your content, especially the stuff already published. Relish in the opportunity to change stuff on the fly. I am not so concerned by blog articles and such (although feel free to apply this concept to those, too), but mainly by your more concrete content: about pages; contact pages; home page navigation; portfolio pages; 404 pages.

Now, don’t go running amok with the cut function yet. First, put all these evergreen pages into your inventory. In the notes section, write a quick analysis of how useful this copy is. Example questions:


	Is your contact page up-to-date?
	Does your about page link to the right places?
	Is your portfolio current?
	Does your 404 page give people a way to find what they were looking for?


We’ll come back to this in a few days once we have a clearer idea of how to improve our content.

Bonus gift: the audio and slides of a talk I gave on microcopy and 404 pages at @media WebDirections last year.

On the fourth day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me:

4. Stalling nerds

Actually, I guess more accurately this is something I get given a lot. Designers and developers particularly can find a million ways to extract themselves from the content of a site but, as the site owner,  and this being your personal playground and all, you mustn’t. You actually can’t, sorry. 

But I do understand that at this point, ‘sorting out your site’ suddenly seems a lot less exciting, especially if you are a visually-minded person and words and lists aren’t really your thing. So far, there has been a lot of not-very-exciting exercises in planning, and there’s probably a nice pile of DVDs and video games that you got from Santa worth investigating. 

Stay strong my friend. By now, you have probably hit upon an idea of some sort you are itching to start on, so for every half-hour you spend doing inventory, gift yourself another thirty minutes to play with that idea.

Bonus gift: the Pomodoro Technique. Take one kitchen timer and a to-do list and see how far you can go.

On the fifth day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me:

5. Golden rules

Here are some guidelines for writing online:


	Make headlines for tutorials and similar content useful and descriptive; use a subheading for any terrible pun you want to work in.



	Create a broad opening paragraph that addresses what your article is about. Part of the creative skill in writing is to do this in a way that both informs the reader and captures their attention. If you struggle with this, consider a boxout giving a summary of the article.



	Use headings to break up chunks of text and allow people to scan. Most people will have a scoot about an article before starting at the beginning to give it a proper read. These headings should be equal parts informative and enticing. Try them out as questions that might be posed by the reader too.



	Finish articles by asking your reader to take an affirmative action: subscribe to your RSS feed; leave a comment (if comments are your thing – more on that later); follow you on Twitter; link you to somewhere they have used your tutorial or code. The web is about getting excited, making things and sharing with others, so give your readers the chance to do that.



	For portfolio sites, this call to action is extra important as you want to pick up new business. Encourage people to e-mail you or call you – don’t just rely on a number in the footer or an e-mail link at the top. Think up some consistent calls-to-action you can use and test them out.


So, my gift to you today is a simplified page table for planning out your content to make it as useful as possible.

Feel free to write a new article or tutorial, or work on that great idea from yesterday and try out these guidelines for yourself. 

It’s a simple framework – good headline; broad opening; headings to break up volume; strong call to action – but it will help you recognise if what you’ve written is in good shape to face the world. It doesn’t tell you anything about how to create it – that’s your endeavour – but it does give you a start. No more staring at a blank page.

Bonus gift: okay, you have to buy yourself this one, but it is the gift that keeps on giving: Ginny Reddish’s Letting Go of the Words – the hands down best guide to web writing there is, with a ton of illustrative examples.

On the sixth day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me:

6. Foundation-a-laying

Yesterday, we played with a page table for articles. Today, we are going to set the foundations for your new, spangly, spruced up, relaunched site (for when you’re ready, of course). We’ve checked out what we’ve got, we’ve thought about what we’d like, we have a wish list for the future. Now is the time for a small reality check. 

Be realistic with yourself. Can you really give your site some attention every day? Record a short snippet of audio once a week? A photo diary post once a month? Look back at the wish list you made.


	What can you do?
	What can you aim for?
	What just isn’t possible right now?


As much as we’d all love to be producing a slick video podcast and screencast three times a week, it’s better to set realistic expectations and work your way up.

Where does your site sit in your online world?


	Do you want it to be the hub of all your social interactions, a lifestream, a considered place of publication or a free for all?
	Do you want to have comments (do you have the personal resource to monitor comments?) or would you prefer conversation to happen via Twitter, Facebook or not at all?
	Does this apply to all pages, posts and content types or just some?
	Get these things straight in your head and it’s easier to know what sort of environment you want to create and what content you’ll need to sustain it.


Get your notebook again and think about specific topics you’d like to cover, or aspects of a project you want to go into more, and how you can go ahead and do just that. A good motivator is to think what you’ll get out of doing it, even if that is “And I’ll finally show the poxy $whatever_community that my $chosen_format is better than their $other_format.”

What topics have you really wanted to get off your chest? Look through your inventory again. What gaps are there in your content just begging to be filled?

Today, you’re going to give everyone the gift of your opinion. Find one of those things where someone on the internet is wrong and create a short but snappy piece to set them straight. Doesn’t that feel good? Soon you’ll be able to do this in a timely manner every time someone is wrong on the internet!

Bonus gift: we’re halfway through, so I think something fun is in order. How about a man sledding naked down a hill in Brighton on a tea tray? Sometimes, even with a whole ton of content planning, it’s the spontaneous stuff that is still the most fun to share.

On the seventh day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me:

7. Styles-a-guiding

Not colour style guides or brand style guides or code style guides. Content style guides. You could go completely to town and write yourself a full document defining every aspect of your site’s voice and personality, plus declaring your view on contracted phrases and the Oxford comma, but this does seem a tad excessive. Unless you’re writing an entire site as a fictional character, you probably know your own voice and vocabulary better than anyone. It’s in your head, after all.

Instead, equip yourself with a good global style guide (I like the Chicago Manual of Style because I can access it fully online, but the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook has a nifty iPhone app and, if I’m entirely honest, I’ve found a copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves has set me right on all but the most technical aspects of punctuation). Next, pick a good dictionary and bookmark thesaurus.com. Then have a go at Kristina Halvorson’s ‘Voice and Tone’ exercise from her book Content Strategy for the Web, to nail down what you’d like your future content to be like:

To introduce the voice and tone qualities you’re [looking to create], a good approach is to offer contrasting values. For example:


	Professional, not academic.
	Confident, not arrogant.
	Clever, not cutesy.
	Savvy, not hipster.
	Expert, not preachy.



Take a look around some of your favourite sites and examine the writing and stylistic handling of content. What do you like? What do you want to emulate? What matches your values list?

Today’s gift to you is an idea. Create a ‘swipe file’ through Evernote or Delicious and save all the stuff you come across that, regardless of topic, makes you think, “That’s really cool.” This isn’t the same as an Instapaper list you’d like to read. This is stuff you have read or have seen that is worth looking at in closer detail.


	Why is it so good?
	What is the language and style like?
	What impact does the typography have?
	How does the imagery work to enhance the message?


This isn’t about creating a personal brand or any such piffle. It’s about learning to recognise how good content works and how to create something awesome yourself. Obviously, your ideas are brilliant, so take the time to understand how best to spring them on the unsuspecting public for easier world domination.

Bonus gift: a nifty style guide is a must when you do have to share content creation duties with others. Here is Leeds University’s publicly available PDF version for you to take a gander at. I especially like the Rationale sections for chopping off dissenters at the knees. 

On the eighth day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me:

8. Times-a-making

You have an actual, real plan for what you’d like to do with your site and how it is going to sound (and probably some ideas on how it’s going to look, too). I hope you are full of enthusiasm and Getting Excited To Make Things. Just before we get going and do exactly that, we are going to make sure we have made time for this creative outpouring.

Have you tried to blog once a week before and found yourself losing traction after a month or two? Are there a couple of podcasts lurking neglected in your archives? Whereas half of the act of running is showing up for training, half of creating is making time rather than waiting for it to become urgent. It’s okay to write something and set a date to come back to it (which isn’t the same as leaving it to decompose in your drafts folder).

Putting a date in your calendar to do something for your site means that you have a forewarning to think of a topic to write about, and space in your schedule to actually do it. Crucially, you’ve actually made some time for this content lark.

To do this, you need to think about how long it takes to get something out of the door/shipped/published/whatever you want to call it. It might take you just thirty minutes to record a podcast, but also a further hour to research the topic beforehand and another hour to edit and upload the clips. Suddenly, doing a thirty minute podcast every day seems a bit unlikely. But, on the flipside, it is easy to see how you could schedule that in three chunks weekly. 

Put it in your calendar. Do it, publish it, book yourself in for the next week. Keep turning up.

Today my gift to you is the gift of time. Set up your own small content calendar, using your favourite calendar system, and schedule time to play with new ways of creating content, time to get it finished and time to get it on your site. Don’t let good stuff go to your drafts folder to die of neglect.

Bonus gift: lots of writers swear by the concept of ‘daily pages’. That is, churning out whatever is in your head to see if there is anything worth building upon, or just to lose the grocery list getting in the way. 750words.com is a site built around this concept. Go have a play.

On the ninth day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me:

9. Copy enhancing

An incredibly radical idea for day number nine. We are going to look at that list of permanent pages you made back on day three and rewrite the words first, before even looking at a colour palette or picking a font! Crazy as it sounds, doing it this way round could influence your design. It could shape the imagery you use. It could affect your choice of typography. IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES!

Look at the page table from day five. Print out one for each of your homepage, about page, contact page, portfolio, archive, 404 page or whatever else you have. Use these as a place to brainstorm your ideas and what you’d like each page to do for your site. Doodle in the margin, choose words you think sound fun to say, daydream about pictures you’d like to use and colours you think would work, but absolutely, completely and utterly fill in those page tables to understand how much (or how little) content you’re playing with and what you need to do to get to ‘launch’.

Then, use them for guidance as you start to write. Don’t skimp. Don’t think that a fancy icon of an envelope encourages people to e-mail you. Use your words.

People get antsy at this bit. Writing can be hard work and it’s easy for me to say, “Go on and write it then!” I know this. I mean, you should see the faces I pull when I have to do anything related to coding. The closest equivalent would be when scientists have to stick their hands in big gloves attached to a glass box to do dangerous experiments.

Here’s today’s gift, a little something about writing that I hope brings you comfort: 


	To write something fantastic you almost always have to write a rubbish draft first.


Now, you might get lucky and write a ‘good enough’ draft first time and that’s fab – you’ve cut some time getting to ‘fantastic’. If, however, you’ve always looked at your first attempt to write more than the bare minimum and sighed in despair, and resigned yourself to adding just a title, date and a screenshot, be cheered because you have taken the first step to being able to communicate with clarity, wit and panache.

Keep going. Look at writing you admire and emulate it. Think about how you will lovingly design those words when they are done. Know that you can go back and change them. Check back with your page table to keep you on track. Do that first draft.

Bonus gift: becoming a better writer helps you to explain design concepts to clients.

On the tenth day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me:

10. Ideas for keeping

Hurrah! You have something down on paper, ready to start evolving your site around it. Here’s where the words and visuals and interaction start to come together. Because you have a plan, you can think ahead and do things you wouldn’t be able to pull together otherwise.


	How about finding a fresh-faced stellar illustrator on Dribbble to create you something perfect to pep up your contact page or visualize your witty statement on statements of work. A List Apart has been doing it for years and it hasn’t worked out too badly for them, has it?



	What about spending this month creating a series of introductory tutorials on a topic, complete with screencasts and audio and give them a special home on your site?



	How about putting in some hours creating a glorious about me page, with a biography, nice picture, and where you spend your time online?



	You could even do the web equivalent of getting up in the attic and sorting out your site’s search to make it easier to find things in your archives. Maybe even do some manual recommendations for relevant content and add them as calls to action.



	How about writing a few awesome case studies with individual screenshots of your favourite work, and creating a portfolio that plays to your strengths? Don’t just rely on the pretty pictures; use your words. Otherwise no-one understands why things are the way they are on that screenshot and BAM! you’ll be judged on someone else’s tastes. (Elliot has a head start on you for this, so get to it!)



	Do you have a serious archive of content? What’s it like being a first-time visitor to your site? Could you write them a guide to introduce yourself and some of the most popular stuff on your site? Ali Edwards is a massively popular crafter and every day she gets new visitors who have found her multiple papercraft projects on Flickr, Vimeo and elsewhere, so she created a welcome guide just for them.



	What about your microcopy? Can you improve on your blogging platform’s defaults for search, comment submission and labels? I’ll bet you can.



	Maybe you could plan a collaboration with other like-minded souls. A week of posts about the more advanced wonders of HTML5 video. A month-long baton-passing exercise in extolling the virtues of IE (shut up, it could happen!). Just spare me any more online advent calendars.



	Watch David McCandless’s TED talk on his jawdropping infographic work and make something as awesome as the Billion Dollar O Gram. I dare you.


Bonus gift: Grab a copy of Brian Suda’s Designing with Data, in print or PDF if Santa didn’t put one in your stocking, and make that awesome something with some expert guidance.

On the eleventh day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me:

11. Pixels pushing

Oh, go on then. Make a gorgeous bespoke velvet-lined container for all that lovely content. It’s proper informed design now, not just decoration. Mr. Zeldman says so.

Bonus gift: I made you a movie! If books were designed like websites.

On the twelfth day of Contentmas, Relly gave to me:

12. Delighters delighting

The Epiphany is upon us; your site is now well on its way to being a beautiful, sustainable hub of content and you have a date in your calendar to help you keep that resolution of blogging more. What now?


	Keep on top of your inventory. One day it will save your butt, I promise.
	Keep making a little bit of time regularly to create something new: an article; an opinion piece; a small curation of related links; a photo diary; a new case study. That’s easier than an annual content bootcamp for sure.
	And today’s gift: look for ways to play with that content and make something a bit special. Stretch yourself a little. It’ll be worth it.


Bonus gift: Paul Annett’s presentation on Ooh, that’s clever: Delighters in design from SxSW 09.

All my favourite designers and developers have their own unique styles and touches. It’s what sets them apart. My very, very favourites have an eloquence and expression that they bring to their sites and to their projects. I absolutely love to explore a well-crafted, well-written site – don’t we all? I know the time it takes. I appreciate the time it takes. But the end results are delicious. Do please share your spangly, refreshed sites with me in the comments.

Catch me on Twitter, I’m @RellyAB, and I’ve been your host for these Twelve Days of Contentmas.",2010,Relly Annett-Baker,rellyannettbaker,2010-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/a-contentmas-epiphany/,content
217,Beyond Web Mechanics – Creating Meaningful Web Design,"It was just over three years ago when I embarked on becoming a web designer, and the first opinion piece about the state of web design I came across was a conference talk by Elliot Jay Stocks called ‘Destroy the Web 2.0 Look’. Elliot’s presentation was a call to arms, a plea to web designers the world over to stop the endless reproductions of the so called ‘Web 2.0 look’.

Three and a half years on from Elliot’s talk, what has changed? Well, from an aesthetic standpoint, not a whole lot. The Web 2.0 look has evolved, but it’s still with us and much of the web remains filled with cookie cutter websites that bear a striking resemblance to one another. This wouldn’t matter so much if these websites were selling comparable services or products, but they’re not. They look similar, they follow the same web design trends; their aesthetic style sends out a very similar message, yet they’re selling completely different services or products. How can you be communicating effectively with your users when your online book store is visually indistinguishable from an online cosmetic store? This just doesn’t make sense. 

I don’t want to belittle the current version of the Web 2.0 look for the sake of it. I want to talk about the opportunity we have as web designers to create more meaningful experiences for the people using our websites. Using design wisely gives us the ability to communicate messages, ideas and attitudes that our users will understand and connect with.

Being human

As human beings we respond emotionally to everything around us – people, objects, posters, packaging or websites. We also respond in different ways to different kinds of aesthetic design and style. We care about style and aesthetics deeply, whether we realise it or not. Aesthetic design has the power to attract or repel. We often make decisions based purely on aesthetics and style – and don’t retailers the world over know it! We connect attitudes and strongly held beliefs to style. Individuals will proudly associate themselves with a certain style or aesthetic because it’s an expression of who they are. You know that old phrase, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’?  Well, the problem is that people do, so it’s important we get the cover right.

Much is made of how to structure web pages, how to create a logical information hierarchy, how to use layout and typography to clearly communicate with your users. It’s important, however, not to mistake clarity of information or legibility with getting your message across. Few users actually read websites word by word: it’s far more likely they’ll just scan the page. If the page is copy-heavy and nothing grabs their attention, they may well just move on. This is why it’s so important to create a visual experience that actually means something to the user. 

Meaningful design

When we view a poster or website, we make split-second assessments and judgements of what is in front of us. Our first impressions of what a website does or who it is aimed at are provoked by the style and aesthetic of the website. For example, with clever use of colour, typography, graphic design and imagery we can communicate to users that an organisation is friendly, edgy, compassionate, fun or environmentally conscious.

Using a certain aesthetic we can convey the personality of that organisation, target age ranges, different sexes or cultural groups, communicate brand attributes, and more. We can make our users feel like they’re part of something and, perhaps even more importantly, we can make new users want to be a part of something. And we can achieve all this before the user has read a single word. 

By establishing a website’s aesthetic and creating a meaningful visual language, a design is no longer just a random collection of pretty gradients that have been plucked out of thin air. There can be a logic behind the design decisions we make. So, before you slap another generic piece of ribbon or an ultra shiny icon into the top-left corner of your website, think about why you are doing it. If you can’t come up with a reason better than “I saw it on another website”, it’s probably a poor application of style.

Design and style

There are a number of reasons why the web suffers from a lack meaningful design. Firstly, there are too many preconceptions of what a website should look like. It’s too easy for designers to borrow styles from other websites, thereby limiting the range of website designs we see on the web. Secondly, many web designers think of aesthetic design as of secondary importance, which shouldn’t be the case. Designing websites that are accessible and easy to use is, of course, very important but this is the very least a web designer should be delivering. Easy to use websites should come as standard – it’s equally important to create meaningful, compelling and beautiful experiences for everyone who uses our websites. The aesthetics of your site are part of the design, and to ignore this and play down the role of aesthetic design is just a wasted opportunity. 

No compromise necessary

Easy to use, accessible websites and beautiful, meaningful aesthetics are not mutually exclusive. The key is to apply style and aesthetic design appropriately. We need to think about who and what we’re designing for and ask ourselves why we’re applying a certain kind of aesthetic style to our design. If you do this, there’s no reason why effective, functional design should come at the expense of jaw-dropping, meaningful aesthetics.

Web designers need to understand the differences between functional design and aesthetic design but, even more importantly, they need to know how to make them work together.  It’s combining these elements of design successfully that makes for the best web design in the world.",2010,Mike Kus,mikekus,2010-12-05T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/beyond-web-mechanics-creating-meaningful-web-design/,design
223,Calculating Color Contrast,"Some websites and services allow you to customize your profile by uploading pictures, changing the background color or other aspects of the design. As a customer, this personalization turns a web app into your little nest where you store your data. As a designer, letting your customers have free rein over the layout and design is a scary prospect. So what happens to all the stock text and images that are designed to work on nice white backgrounds? Even the Mac only lets you choose between two colors for the OS, blue or graphite! Opening up the ability to customize your site’s color scheme can be a recipe for disaster unless you are flexible and understand how to find maximum color contrasts.

In this article I will walk you through two simple equations to determine if you should be using white or black text depending on the color of the background. The equations are both easy to implement and produce similar results. It isn’t a matter of which is better, but more the fact that you are using one at all! That way, even with the craziest of Geocities color schemes that your customers choose, at least your text will still be readable.

Let’s have a look at a range of various possible colors. Maybe these are pre-made color schemes, corporate colors, or plucked from an image.



Now that we have these potential background colors and their hex values, we need to find out whether the corresponding text should be in white or black, based on which has a higher contrast, therefore affording the best readability. This can be done at runtime with JavaScript or in the back-end before the HTML is served up.

There are two functions I want to compare. The first, I call ’50%’. It takes the hex value and compares it to the value halfway between pure black and pure white. If the hex value is less than half, meaning it is on the darker side of the spectrum, it returns white as the text color. If the result is greater than half, it’s on the lighter side of the spectrum and returns black as the text value.

In PHP:

function getContrast50($hexcolor){
    return (hexdec($hexcolor) > 0xffffff/2) ? 'black':'white';
}

In JavaScript:

function getContrast50(hexcolor){
    return (parseInt(hexcolor, 16) > 0xffffff/2) ? 'black':'white';
}

It doesn’t get much simpler than that! The function converts the six-character hex color into an integer and compares that to one half the integer value of pure white. The function is easy to remember, but is naive when it comes to understanding how we perceive parts of the spectrum. Different wavelengths have greater or lesser impact on the contrast.

The second equation is called ‘YIQ’ because it converts the RGB color space into YIQ, which takes into account the different impacts of its constituent parts. Again, the equation returns white or black and it’s also very easy to implement.

In PHP:

function getContrastYIQ($hexcolor){
	$r = hexdec(substr($hexcolor,0,2));
	$g = hexdec(substr($hexcolor,2,2));
	$b = hexdec(substr($hexcolor,4,2));
	$yiq = (($r*299)+($g*587)+($b*114))/1000;
	return ($yiq >= 128) ? 'black' : 'white';
}

In JavaScript:

function getContrastYIQ(hexcolor){
	var r = parseInt(hexcolor.substr(0,2),16);
	var g = parseInt(hexcolor.substr(2,2),16);
	var b = parseInt(hexcolor.substr(4,2),16);
	var yiq = ((r*299)+(g*587)+(b*114))/1000;
	return (yiq >= 128) ? 'black' : 'white';
}

You’ll notice first that we have broken down the hex value into separate RGB values. This is important because each of these channels is scaled in accordance to its visual impact. Once everything is scaled and normalized, it will be in a range between zero and 255. Much like the previous ’50%’ function, we now need to check if the input is above or below halfway. Depending on where that value is, we’ll return the corresponding highest contrasting color.

That’s it: two simple contrast equations which work really well to determine the best readability.

If you are interested in learning more, the W3C has a few documents about color contrast and how to determine if there is enough contrast between any two colors. This is important for accessibility to make sure there is enough contrast between your text and link colors and the background.

There is also a great article by Kevin Hale on Particletree about his experience with choosing light or dark themes. To round it out, Jonathan Snook created a color contrast picker which allows you to play with RGB sliders to get values for YIQ, contrast and others. That way you can quickly fiddle with the knobs to find the right balance.

Comparing results

Let’s revisit our color schemes and see which text color is recommended for maximum contrast based on these two equations.



If we use the simple ’50%’ contrast function, we can see that it recommends black against all the colors except the dark green and purple on the second row. In general, the equation feels the colors are light and that black is a better choice for the text.



The more complex ‘YIQ’ function, with its weighted colors, has slightly different suggestions. White text is still recommended for the very dark colors, but there are some surprises. The red and pink values show white text rather than black. This equation takes into account the weight of the red value and determines that the hue is dark enough for white text to show the most contrast.

As you can see, the two contrast algorithms agree most of the time. There are some instances where they conflict, but overall you can use the equation that you prefer. I don’t think it is a major issue if some edge-case colors get one contrast over another, they are still very readable.

Now let’s look at some common colors and then see how the two functions compare. You can quickly see that they do pretty well across the whole spectrum.



In the first few shades of grey, the white and black contrasts make sense, but as we test other colors in the spectrum, we do get some unexpected deviation. Pure red #FF0000 has a flip-flop. This is due to how the ‘YIQ’ function weights the RGB parts. While you might have a personal preference for one style over another, both are justifiable.



In this second round of colors, we go deeper into the spectrum, off the beaten track. Again, most of the time the contrasting algorithms are in sync, but every once in a while they disagree. You can select which you prefer, neither of which is unreadable.

Conclusion

Contrast in color is important, especially if you cede all control and take a hands-off approach to the design. It is important to select smart defaults by making the contrast between colors as high as possible. This makes it easier for your customers to read, increases accessibility and is generally just easier on the eyes. 

Sure, there are plenty of other equations out there to determine contrast; what is most important is that you pick one and implement it into your system.

So, go ahead and experiment with color in your design. You now know how easy it is to guarantee that your text will be the most readable in any circumstance.",2010,Brian Suda,briansuda,2010-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/calculating-color-contrast/,code
237,Circles of Confusion,"Long before I worked on the web, I specialised in training photographers how to use large format,  5×4″ and 10×8″ view cameras – film cameras with swing and tilt movements, bellows and upside down, back to front images viewed on dim, ground glass screens. It’s been fifteen years since I clicked a shutter on a view camera, but some things have stayed with me from those years.

In photography, even the best lenses don’t focus light onto a point (infinitely small in size) but onto ‘spots’ or circles in the ‘film/image plane’. These circles of light have dimensions, despite being microscopically small. They’re known as ‘circles of confusion’.

As circles of light become larger, the more unsharp parts of a photograph appear. On the flip side, when circles are smaller, an image looks sharper and more in focus. This is the basis for photographic depth of field and with that comes the knowledge that no photograph can be perfectly focused, never truly sharp. Instead, photographs can only be ‘acceptably unsharp’. 

Acceptable unsharpness is now a concept that’s relevant to the work we make for the web, because often – unless we compromise – websites cannot look or be experienced exactly the same across browsers, devices or platforms. Accepting that fact, and learning to look upon these natural differences as creative opportunities instead of imperfections, can be tough. Deciding which aspects of a design must remain consistent and, therefore, possibly require more time, effort or compromises can be tougher. Circles of confusion can help us, our bosses and our customers make better, more informed decisions.

Acceptable unsharpness

Many clients still demand that every aspect of a design should be ‘sharp’ – that every user must see rounded boxes, gradients and shadows – without regard for the implications. I believe that this stems largely from the fact that they have previously been shown designs – and asked for sign-off – using static images.

It’s also true that in the past, organisations have invested heavily in style guides which, while maybe still useful in offline media, have a strictness that often fails to allow for the flexibility that we need to create experiences that are appropriate to a user’s browser or device capabilities.

We live in an era where web browsers and devices have wide-ranging capabilities, and websites can rarely look or be experienced exactly the same across them. Is a particular typeface vital to a user’s experience of a brand? How important are gradients or shadows? Are rounded corners really that necessary? These decisions determine how ‘sharp’ an element should be across browsers with different capabilities and, therefore, how much time, effort or extra code and images we devote to achieving consistency between them. To help our clients make those decisions, we can use circles of confusion.

Circles of confusion

Using circles of confusion involves plotting aspects of a visual design into a series of concentric circles, starting at the centre with elements that demand the most consistency. Then, work outwards, placing elements in order of their priority so that they become progressively ‘softer’, more defocused as they’re plotted into outer rings.

If layout and typography must remain consistent, place them in the centre circle as they’re aspects of a design that must remain ‘sharp’.

When gradients are important – but not vital – to a user’s experience of a brand, plot them close to, but not in the centre. This makes everyone aware that to achieve consistency, you’ll need to carve out extra images for browsers that don’t support CSS gradients.

If achieving rounded corners or shadows in all browsers isn’t important, place them into outer circles, allowing you to save time by not creating images or employing JavaScript workarounds.

I’ve found plotting aspects of a visual design into circles of confusion is a useful technique when explaining the natural differences between browsers to clients. It sets more realistic expectations and creates an environment for more meaningful discussions about progressive and emerging technologies. Best of all, it enables everyone to make better and more informed decisions about design implementation priorities.

Involving clients allows the implications of the decisions they make more transparent. For me, this has sometimes meant shifting deadlines or it has allowed me to more easily justify an increase in fees. Most important of all, circles of confusion have helped the people that I work with move beyond yesterday’s one-size-fits-all thinking about visual design, towards accepting the rich diversity of today’s web.",2010,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2010-12-23T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/circles-of-confusion/,process
226,Documentation-Driven Design for APIs,"Documentation is like gift wrapping.  It seems like superfluous fluff, but your family tends to be rather disappointed when their presents arrive in supermarket carrier bags, so you have to feign some sort of attempt at making your gift look enticing.  Documentation doesn’t have to be all hard work and sellotaping yourself to a table – you can make it useful and relevant.

Documentation gets a pretty rough deal. It tends to get left until the end of a project, when some poor developer is assigned the ‘document project’ ticket and wades through each feature of Whizzy New API 3.0 and needs to recall exactly what each method is meant to do. That’s assuming any time is left for documentation at all. The more common outcome resembles last minute homework scribbled on a post-it note, where just the bare bones of what’s available are put out for your users, and you hope that you’ll spot the inconsistencies and mistakes before they do.

Wouldn’t it be nicer for everyone if you could make documentation not only outstanding for your users, but also a valuable tool for your development team – so much so that you couldn’t imagine writing a line of code before you’d documented it?

Documentation needs to have three main features:


	It should have total coverage and document all the features of your project.  Private methods should be documented for your developers, and public features need to be available to your users.
	It should be consistent – a user should know what to expect from your documentation, and terminology should be accurate to your language.
	It should be current – and that means staying accurate as new versions of your code base are released.


But you can also get these bonuses:


	Act as a suggested specification – a guide that will aid a developer in making something consistent and usable.
	It can test your API quality.
	It can enhance the communication skills within your development team.


So how do we get our documentation to be rich and full of features, instead of a little worn out like Boxing Day leftovers?

Write your documentation first

When I say first, I mean first. Not after you’ve started writing the code. Not even after you’ve started writing your unit tests. First. You may or may not have been provided with a decent specification, but the first job should be to turn your requirements for a feature into documentation.  

It works best when it takes the form of in-code comments. It works even better when your in-code comments take a standard documentation format that you can later use to generate published documentation for your users. This has the benefit of immediately making your docs as version controlled as your code-base, and it saves having to rewrite, copy or otherwise harass your docs into something legible later on. 

Almost all languages have a self-documentation format these days. My choice of format for JavaScript is JSDocToolkit, and the sort of things I look for are the ability to specify private and public methods, full options object statements (opts as Opts only is a no-no), and the ability to include good examples.

So, our example for today will be a new festive feature for a JavaScript API. We’ve been asked to specify a sled for Santa to get around the world to give out toys:


	Santa needs to be able to travel around the world in one night to deliver toys to children, and he’ll need some reindeer to pull his sled.


As documentation, it would look like:

/**
@name Sled
@extends Vehicle
@constructor
@description Create a new sled to send Santa around the world to deliver toys to good kids.
	@param {Object} [opts] Options
	@param {number} [opts.capacity='50'] Set the capacity of the sled
	@param {string} [opts.pilot='santa'] The pilot of the sled.
@example
	// Create a sled and specify some reindeer.
	new Sled().reindeer(['Dasher', 'Dancer', 'Prancer', 'Vixen', 'Comet', 'Cupid']);
*/

By breaking it down as documentation, you can, for example, hand this over to another developer without the need to explain the feature in much depth, and they’ll develop something that has to match this piece of documentation. It specifies everything that is important to this feature – its default values and types, and where it inherits other features from.  

We know that we need to specify some way of setting reindeer to pull the sled and also some toys to give, and so we can quickly specify extra methods for the sled:

/*
@name vehicle.Sled#reindeer
@function
@description Set the reindeer that will pull Santa's sled.
	@param {string[]} reindeer A list of the reindeer.
@example
	// specifying some reindeer
	Sled().reindeer(['Dasher', 'Dancer', 'Rudolph', 'Vixen']);
*/
/*
@name vehicle.Sled#toys
@function
@description Add a list of toys and recipients to the Sled.
	@param {Object[]} toys A list of toys and who will receive them.
@example
	// Adding toys to the sled
	Sled().toys([
		{name:'Brian', toy:'Fire Engine'},
		{name:'Drew', toy:'Roller-skates'},
		{name:'Anna', toy:'Play-doh'},
		...
		]);
*/

Job done! You’ve got a specification to share with your team and something useful for your users in the form of full examples, and you didn’t even have to open another text editor.

Use your documentation to share knowledge

Documentation isn’t just for users. It’s also used by internal developers to explain what they’ve written and how it works. This is especially valuable where the team is large or the code-base sprawling.

So, returning to our example, the next step would be to share with the rest of the team (or at least a selection of the team if yours is large) what the documentation looks like. This is useful for two main reasons:


	They can see if they understand what the documentation says the feature will do. It’s best if they haven’t seen the requirement before. If your fellow developers can’t work out what ‘MagicMethodX’ is going to return from the docs, neither can your users.
	They can check that the feature accomplishes everything that they expect to, and that it’s consistent with the rest of the functionality.


On previous projects, we’ve taken to referring to this stage of the development process as the ‘bun fight’.  It’s a chance for everyone to have an honest say and throw a few pies without actually causing anyone to have to rewrite any code. If you can identify at this stage that a feature is over-complicated, lacking or just plain useless, you’ll all be much happier to throw out a few lines of documentation than you may have been to throw out a partial, or even complete, piece of functionality.

Documentation has your back

The final benefit to working in this way is that your documentation not only remains accurate, it’s always as accurate as your latest release. It can’t fall behind. You can increase the likelihood that your docs will remain up to date by unit testing your examples.

Returning to the previous example, we can add a QUnit unit test to the expected output with ease during the build process – we know exactly how the code will look and, with the @example tag, we can identify easily where to find the bits that need testing. If it’s tested it’ll definitely work as you expect it to when a user copy and pastes it. You’re ensuring quality from idea to implementation.

As an extra bauble, the best thing about a system like JSDocToolkit is that it’ll take your inline comments and turn them into beautiful sites, as good systems will allow for customised output templates. You’ll be producing full-featured sites for your projects and plugins with almost no extra effort, but all the benefits.",2010,Frances Berriman,francesberriman,2010-12-11T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/documentation-driven-design-for-apis/,process
238,Everything You Wanted To Know About Gradients (And a Few Things You Didn’t),"Hello. I am here to discuss CSS3 gradients. Because, let’s face it, what the web really needed was more gradients.

Still, despite their widespread use (or is it overuse?), the smartly applied gradient can be a valuable contributor to a designer’s vocabulary. There’s always been a tension between the inherently two-dimensional nature of our medium, and our desire for more intensity, more depth in our designs. And a gradient can evoke so much: the splay of light across your desk, the slow decrease in volume toward the end of your favorite song, the sunset after a long day. When properly applied, graded colors bring a much needed softness to our work.

Of course, that whole ‘proper application’ thing is the tricky bit.

But given their place in our toolkit and their prominence online, it really is heartening to see we can create gradients directly with CSS. They’re part of the draft images module, and implemented in two of the major rendering engines.

Still, I’ve always found CSS gradients to be one of the more confusing aspects of CSS3. So if you’ll indulge me, let’s take a quick look at how to create CSS gradients—hopefully we can make them seem a bit more accessible, and bring a bit more art into the browser.

Gradient theory 101 (I hope that’s not really a thing)

Right. So before we dive into the code, let’s cover a few basics. Every gradient, no matter how complex, shares a few common characteristics. Here’s a straightforward one:

 I spent seconds hours designing this gradient. I hope you like it.

At either end of our image, we have a final color value, or color stop: on the left, our stop is white; on the right, black. And more color-rich gradients are no different:

 (Don’t ever really do this. Please. I beg you.)

It’s visually more intricate, sure. But at the heart of it, we have just seven color stops (red, orange, yellow, and so on), making for a fantastic gradient all the way.

Now, color stops alone do not a gradient make. Between each is a transition point, the fail-over point between the two stops. Now, the transition point doesn’t need to fall exactly between stops: it can be brought closer to one stop or the other, influencing the overall shape of the gradient.

A tale of two syntaxes

Armed with our new vocabulary, let’s look at a CSS gradient in the wild. Behold, the simple input button:



There’s a simple linear gradient applied vertically across the button, moving from a bright sunflowerish hue (#FAA51A, for you hex nuts in the audience) to a much richer orange (#F47A20). And here’s the CSS that makes it happen:

input[type=submit] {
	background-color: #F47A20;
	background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(
		#FAA51A,
		#F47A20
		);
	background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%,
		color-stop(0, #FAA51A),
		color-stop(1, #F47A20)
		);
}

I’ve borrowed David DeSandro’s most excellent formatting suggestions for gradients to make this snippet a bit more legible but, still, the code above might have turned your stomach a bit. And that’s perfectly understandable—heck, it sort of turned mine. But let’s step through the CSS slowly, and see if we can’t make it a little less terrifying.

Verbose WebKit is verbose

Here’s the syntax for our little gradient on WebKit:

background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%,
	color-stop(0, #FAA51A),
	color-stop(1, #F47A20)
	);

Woof. Quite a mouthful, no? Well, here’s what we’re looking at:


	WebKit has a single -webkit-gradient property, which can be used to create either linear or radial gradients.
	The next two values are the starting and ending positions for our gradient (0 0 and 0 100%, respectively). Linear gradients are simply drawn along the path between those two points, which allows us to change the direction of our gradient simply by altering its start and end points.
	Afterward, we specify our color stops with the oh-so-aptly named color-stop parameter, which takes the stop’s position on the gradient (0 being the beginning, and 100% or 1 being the end) and the color itself.


For a simple two-color gradient like this, -webkit-gradient has a bit of shorthand notation to offer us:

background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%,
	from(#FAA51A),
	to(#FAA51A)
	);

from(#FAA51A) is equivalent to writing color-stop(0, #FAA51A), and to(#FAA51A) is the same as color-stop(1, #FAA51A) or color-stop(100%, #FAA51A)—in both cases, we’re simply declaring the first and last color stops in our gradient.

Terse Gecko is terse

WebKit proposed its syntax back in 2008, heavily inspired by the way gradients are drawn in the canvas specification. However, a different, leaner syntax came to the fore, eventually appearing in a draft module specification in CSS3.

Naturally, because nothing on the web was meant to be easy, this is the one that Mozilla has implemented.

Here’s how we get gradient-y in Gecko:

background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(
	#FAA51A,
	#F47A20
	);

Wait, what? Done already? That’s right. By default, -moz-linear-gradient assumes you’re trying to create a vertical gradient, starting from the top of your element and moving to the bottom. And, if that’s the case, then you simply need to specify your color stops, delimited with a few commas.

I know: that was almost… painless. But the W3C/Mozilla syntax also affords us a fair amount of flexibility and control, by introducing features as we need them.

We can specify an origin point for our gradient:

background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(50% 100%,
	#FAA51A,
	#F47A20
	);

As well as an angle, to give it a direction:

background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(50% 100%, 45deg,
	#FAA51A,
	#F47A20
	);

And we can specify multiple stops, simply by adding to our comma-delimited list:

background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(50% 100%, 45deg,
	#FAA51A,
	#FCC,
	#F47A20
	);

By adding a percentage after a given color value, we can determine its position along the gradient path:

background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(50% 100%, 45deg,
	#FAA51A,
	#FCC 20%,
	#F47A20
	);

So that’s some of the flexibility implicit in the W3C/Mozilla-style syntax.

Now, I should note that both syntaxes have their respective fans. I will say that the W3C/Mozilla-style syntax makes much more sense to me, and lines up with how I think about creating gradients. But I can totally understand why some might prefer WebKit’s more verbose approach to the, well, looseness behind the -moz syntax. À chacun son gradient syntax.

Still, as the language gets refined by the W3C, I really hope some consensus is reached by the browser vendors. And with Opera signaling that it will support the W3C syntax, I suppose it falls on WebKit to do the same.

Reusing color stops for fun and profit

But CSS gradients aren’t all simple colors and shapes and whatnot: by getting inventive with individual color stops, you can create some really complex, compelling effects.

Tim Van Damme, whose brain, I believe, should be posthumously donated to science, has a particularly clever application of gradients on The Box, a site dedicated to his occasional podcast series. Now, there are a fair number of gradients applied throughout the UI, but it’s the feature image that really catches the eye.

You see, there’s nothing that says you can’t reuse color stops. And Tim’s exploited that perfectly.

He’s created a linear gradient, angled at forty-five degrees from the top left corner of the photo, starting with a fully transparent white (rgba(255, 255, 255, 0)). At the halfway mark, he’s established another color stop at an only slightly more opaque white (rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.1)), making for that incredibly gradual brightening toward the middle of the photo.



But then he has set another color stop immediately on top of it, bringing it back down to rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) again. This creates that fantastically hard edge that diagonally bisects the photo, giving the image that subtle gloss.



And his final color stop ends at the same fully transparent white, completing the effect. Hot? I do believe so.

Rocking the radials

We’ve been looking at linear gradients pretty exclusively. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention radial gradients as a viable option, including a modest one as a link accent on a navigation bar:



And here’s the relevant CSS:

background: -moz-radial-gradient(50% 100%, farthest-side,
	rgb(204, 255, 255) 1%,
	rgb(85, 85, 85) 15%,
	rgba(85, 85, 85, 0)
	);
background: -webkit-gradient(radial, 50% 100%, 0, 50% 100%, 15,
	from(rgb(204, 255, 255)),
	to(rgba(85, 85, 85, 0))
	);

Now, the syntax builds on what we’ve already learned about linear gradients, so much of it might be familiar to you, picking out color stops and transition points, as well as the two syntaxes’ reliance on either a separate property (-moz-radial-gradient) or parameter (-webkit-gradient(radial, …)) to shift into circular mode.

Mozilla introduces another stand-alone property (-moz-radial-gradient), and accepts a starting point (50% 100%) from which the circle radiates. There’s also a size constant defined (farthest-side), which determines the reach and shape of our gradient.

WebKit is again the more verbose of the two syntaxes, requiring both starting and ending points (50% 100% in both cases). Each also accepts a radius in pixels, allowing you to control the skew and breadth of the circle.

Again, this is a fairly modest little radial gradient. Time and article length (and, let’s be honest, your author’s completely inadequate grasp of geometry) prevent me from covering radial gradients in much more detail, because they are incredibly powerful. For those interested in learning more, I can’t recommend the references at Mozilla and Apple strongly enough.

Leave no browser behind

But no matter the kind of gradients you’re working with, there is a large swathe of browsers that simply don’t support gradients. Thankfully, it’s fairly easy to declare a sensible fallback—it just depends on the kind of fallback you’d like. Essentially, gradient-blind browsers will disregard any properties containing references to either -moz-linear-gradient, -moz-radial-gradient, or -webkit-gradient, so you simply need to keep your fallback isolated from those properties.

For example: if you’d like to fall back to a flat color, simply declare a separate background-color:

.nav {
	background-color: #000;
	background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0), rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45));
	background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%, from(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)), to(rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45)));
}

Or perhaps just create three separate background properties.

.nav {
	background: #000;
	background: #000 -moz-linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0), rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45));
	background: #000 -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%, from(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)), to(rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45)));
}

We can even build on this to fall back to a non-gradient image:

.nav {
	background: #000 <strong>url(""faux-gradient-lol.png"") repeat-x</strong>;
	background: #000 -moz-linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0), rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45));
	background: #000 -webkit-gradient(linear, 0 0, 0 100%, from(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)), to(rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.45)));
}

No matter the approach you feel most appropriate to your design, it’s really just a matter of keeping your fallback design quarantined from its CSS3-ified siblings.

(If you’re feeling especially masochistic, there’s even a way to get simple linear gradients working in IE via Microsoft’s proprietary filters. Of course, those come with considerable performance penalties that even Microsoft is quick to point out, so I’d recommend avoiding those.

And don’t tell Andy Clarke I told you, or he’ll probably unload his Derringer at me. Or something.)

Go forth and, um, gradientify!

It’s entirely possible your head’s spinning. Heck, mine is, but that might be the effects of the ’nog. But maybe you’re wondering why you should care about CSS gradients. After all, images are here right now, and work just fine. 

Well, there are some quick benefits that spring to mind: fewer HTTP requests are needed; CSS3 gradients are easily made scalable, making them ideal for variable widths and heights; and finally, they’re easily modifiable by tweaking a few CSS properties. Because, let’s face it, less time spent yelling at Photoshop is a very, very good thing.

Of course, CSS-generated gradients are not without their drawbacks. The syntax can be confusing, and it’s still under development at the W3C. As we’ve seen, browser support is still very much in flux. And it’s possible that gradients themselves have some real performance drawbacks—so test thoroughly, and gradient carefully.

But still, as syntaxes converge, and support improves, I think generated gradients can make a compelling tool in our collective belts. The tasteful design is, of course, entirely up to you.

So have fun, and get gradientin’.",2010,Ethan Marcotte,ethanmarcotte,2010-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-gradients/,code
236,Extreme Design,"Recently, I set out with twelve other designers and developers for a 19th century fortress on the Channel Island of Alderney. We were going to /dev/fort, a sort of band camp for geeks. Our cohort’s mission: to think up, build and finish something – without readily available internet access.

 Alderney runway, photo by Chris Govias



Wait, no internet?

Well, pretty much. As the creators of /dev/fort James Aylett and Mark Norman Francis put it: “Imagine a place with no distractions – no IM, no Twitter”. But also no way to quickly look up a design pattern, code sample or source material. Like packing for camping, /dev/fort means bringing everything you’ll need on your back or your hard drive: from long johns to your favourite icon set.

We got to work the first night discussing ideas for what we wanted to build. By the time breakfast was cleared up the next morning, we’d settled on Russ’s idea to make the Apollo 13 (PDF) transcript accessible. Days two and three were spent collaboratively planning (KJ style) what features we wanted to build, and unravelling the larger UX challenges of the project. The next five days were spent building it. Within 36 hours of touchdown at Southampton Airport, we launched our creation: spacelog.org

The weather was cold, the coal fire less than ideal, food and supplies a hike away, and the process lightning-fast. A week of designing under extreme circumstances called for an extreme process. Some of this was driven by James’s and Norm’s experience running these things, but a lot of it materialised while we were there – especially for our three-strong design team (myself, Gavin O’ Carroll and Chris Govias) who, though we knew each other, had never worked together as a group in this kind of scenario before.

The outcome was a pretty spectacular process, with a some key takeaways useful for any small group trying to build something quickly.

What it’s like inside the fort

/dev/fort has the pressure and pace of a hack day without being a hack day – primarily, no workshops or interruptions‚ but also a different mentality. While hack days are typically developer-driven with a ‘hack first, design later (if at all)’ attitude, James was quick to tell the team to hold off from writing any code until we had a plan. This put a healthy pressure on the design and product folks to slash through the UX problems before we started building.

While the fort had definitely more of a hack day feel, all of us were familiar with Agile methods, so we borrowed a few useful techniques such as morning stand-ups and an emphasis on teamwork. We cut some really good features to make our launch date, and chunked the work based on user goals, iterating as we went.

What made this design process work?

A golden ratio of teams

My personal experience both professionally and in free-form situations like this, is a tendency to get/hire a designer. Leaders of businesses, founders of start-ups, organisers of events: one designer is not enough! Finding one ace-blooded designer who can ‘do everything’ will always result in bottleneck and burnout. Like the nuances between different development languages, design is a multifaceted discipline, and very few can claim to be equally strong in every aspect. Overlap in skill set will result in a stronger, more robust interface.

More importantly, however, having lots of designers to go around meant that we all had the opportunity to pair with developers, polishing the details that don’t usually get polished. As soon as we launched, the public reception of the design and UX was overwhelmingly positive (proof!). But also, a lot of people asked us who the designer was, attributing it to one person.

While it’s important to note that everyone in our team was multitalented (and could easily shift between roles, helping us all stay unblocked), the golden ratio James and Norm devised was two product/developer folks, three interaction designers and eight developers.

 photo by Ben Firshman

Equality inside the fortress walls

Something magical about the fort is how everyone leaves the outside world on the drawbridge. Job titles, professional status, Twitter followers, and so on. Like scout camp, a mutual respect and trust is expected of all the participants. Like extreme programming, extreme design requires us all to be equal partners in a collaborative team. I think this is especially worth noting for designers; our past is filled with the clear hierarchy of the traditional studio system which, however important for taste and style, seems less compatible with modern web/software development methods.

Being equal doesn’t mean being the same, however. We established clear roles and teams for ourselves on the second day, deferring to that person when a decision needed to be made. As the interface coalesced, the designers and developers took ownership over certain parts to ensure the details got looked after, while staying open to ideas and revisions from the rest of the cohort.

Create a space where everyone who enters is equal, but be sure to establish clear roles. Even if it’s just for a short while, the environment will be beneficial.

 photo by Ben Firshman

Hang your heraldry from the rafters

Forts and castles are full of lore: coats of arms; paintings of battles; suits of armour. It’s impossible not to be surrounded by these stories, words and ways of thinking. Like the whiteboards on the walls, putting organisational lore in your physical surroundings makes it impossible not to see.

Ryan Alexander brought some of those static-cling whiteboard sheets which were quickly filled with use cases; IA; team roles; and, most importantly, a glossary. As soon as we started working on the project, we realised we needed to get clear on what certain words meant: what was a logline, a range, a phase, a key moment? Were the back-end people using these words in the same way design and product was? Quickly writing up a glossary of terms meant everyone was instantly speaking the same language. There was no “Ah, I misunderstood because in the data structure x means y” or, even worse, accidental seepage of technical language into the user interface copy.

Put a glossary of your internal terminology somewhere big and fat on the wall. Stand around it and argue until you agree on what it says. Leave it up; don’t underestimate the power of ambient communication and physical reference.

Plan more, download less

While internet is forbidden inside the fort, we did go on downloading expeditions: NASA photography; code documentation; and so on. The project wouldn’t have been possible without a few trips to the web. We had two lists on the wall: groceries and supplies; internets – “loo roll; Tom Stafford photo“.

This changed our usual design process, forcing us to plan carefully and think of what we needed ahead of time. Getting to the internet was a thirty-minute hike up a snow covered cliff to the town airport, so you really had to need it, too. 

 The path to the internet

For the visual design, especially, this resulted in more focus up front, and communication between the designers on what assets we required. It made us make decisions earlier and stick with them, creating less distraction and churn later in the process. 

Try it at home: unplug once you’ve got the things you need. As an artist, it’s easier to let your inner voice shine through if you’re not looking at other people’s work while creating.

Social design

Finally, our design team experimented with a collaborative approach to wireframing. Once we had collectively nailed down use cases, IA, user journeys and other critical artefacts, we tried a pairing approach. One person drew in Illustrator in real time as the other two articulated what to draw. (This would work equally well with two people, but with three it meant that one of us could jump up and consult the lore on the walls or clarify a technical detail.) The result: we ended up considering more alternatives and quickly rallying around one solution, and resolved difficult problems more quickly.

At a certain stage we discovered it was more efficient for one person to take over – this happened around the time when the basic wireframes existed in Illustrator and we’d collectively run through the use cases, making sure that everything was accounted for in a broad sense. At this point, take a break, go have a beer, and give yourself a pat on the back.

Put the files somewhere accessible so everyone can use them as their base, and divide up the more detailed UI problems, screens or journeys. At this level of detail it’s better to have your personal headspace.

Gavin called this ‘social design’. Chatting and drawing in real time turned what was normally a rather solitary act into a very social process, with some really promising results. I’d tried something like this before with product or developer folks, and it can work – but there’s something really beautiful about switching places and everyone involved being equally quick at drawing. That’s not something you get with non-designers, and frequent swapping of the ‘driver’ and ‘observer’ roles is a key aspect to pairing.

Tackle the forest collectively and the trees individually – it will make your framework more robust and your details more polished. Win/win. 

The return home

Grateful to see a 3G signal on our phones again, our flight off the island was delayed, allowing for a flurry of domain name look-ups, Twitter catch-up, and e-mails to loved ones. A week in an isolated fort really made me appreciate continuous connectivity, but also just how unique some of these processes might be. 

You just never know what crazy place you might be designing from next.",2010,Hannah Donovan,hannahdonovan,2010-12-09T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/extreme-design/,process
220,Finding Your Way with Static Maps,"Since the introduction of the Google Maps service in 2005, online maps have taken off in a way not really possible before the invention of slippy map interaction. Although quickly followed by a plethora of similar services from both commercial and non-commercial parties, Google’s first-mover advantage, and easy-to-use developer API saw Google Maps become pretty much the de facto mapping service.



It’s now so easy to add a map to a web page, there’s no reason not to. Dropping an iframe map into your page is as simple as embedding a YouTube video.

But there’s one crucial drawback to both the solution Google provides for you to drop into your page and the code developers typically implement themselves – they don’t work without JavaScript.

A bit about JavaScript

Back in October of this year, The Yahoo! Developer Network blog ran some tests to measure how many visitors to the Yahoo! home page didn’t have JavaScript available or enabled in their browser. It’s an interesting test when you consider that the audience for the Yahoo! home page (one of the most visited pages on the web) represents about as mainstream a sample as you’ll find. If there’s any such thing as an ‘average Web user’ then this is them.

The results surprised me. It varied from region to region, but at most just two per cent of visitors didn’t have JavaScript running. To be honest, I was expecting it to be higher, but this quote from the article caught my attention:


	While the percentage of visitors with JavaScript disabled seems like a low number, keep in mind that small percentages of big numbers are also big numbers.


That’s right, of course, and it got me thinking about what that two per cent means. For many sites, two per cent is the number of visitors using the Opera web browser, using IE6, or using Mobile Safari. 

So, although a small percentage of the total, users without JavaScript can’t just be forgotten about, and catering for them is at the very heart of how the web is supposed to work.

Starting with content in HTML, we layer on presentation with CSS and then enhance interactivity with JavaScript. If anything fails along the way or the network craps out, or a browser just doesn’t support one of the technologies, the user still gets something they can work with. 

It’s progressive enhancement – also known as doing our jobs properly.

Sorry, wasn’t this about maps?

As I was saying, the default code Google provides, and the example code it gives to developers (which typically just gets followed ‘as is’) doesn’t account for users without JavaScript. No JavaScript, no content.

When adding the ability to publish maps to our small content management system Perch, I didn’t want to provide a solution that only worked with JavaScript. I had to go looking for a way to provide maps without JavaScript, too.

There’s a simple solution, fortunately, in the form of static map tiles. All the various slippy map services use a JavaScript interface on top of what are basically rendered map image tiles. Dragging the map loads in more image tiles in the direction you want to view. If you’ve used a slippy map on a slow connection, you’ll be familiar with seeing these tiles load in one by one.

The Static Map API

The good news is that these tiles (or tiles just like them) can be used as regular images on your site. Google has a Static Map API which not only gives you a handy interface to retrieve a tile for the exact area you need, but also allows you to place pins, and zoom and centre the tile so that the image looks just so. 

This means that you can create a static, non-JavaScript version of your slippy map’s initial (or ideal) state to load into your page as a regular image, and then have the JavaScript map hijack the image and make it slippy.

Clearly, that’s not going to be a perfect solution for every map’s requirements. It doesn’t allow for panning, zooming or interrogation without JavaScript. However, for the majority of straightforward map uses online, a static map makes a great alternative for those visitors without JavaScript.



Here’s the how

Retrieving a static map tile is staggeringly easy – it’s just a case of forming a URL with the correct arguments and then using that as the src of an image tag.

<img src=""http://maps.google.com/maps/api/staticmap
	?center=Bethlehem+Israel
	&zoom=5
	&size=540x280
	&maptype=satellite
	&markers=color:red|31.4211,35.1144
	&sensor=false"" 
	width=""540"" height=""280"" alt=""Map of Bethlehem, Israel"" />

As you can see, there are a few key options that we pass along to the base URL. All of these should be familiar to anyone who’s worked with the JavaScript API.


	center determines the point on which the map is centred. This can be latitude and longitude values, or simply an address which is then geocoded.
	zoom sets the zoom level.
	size is the pixel dimensions of the image you require.
	maptype can be roadmap, satellite, terrain or hybrid.
	markers sets one or more pin locations. Markers can be labelled, have different colours, and so on – there’s quite a lot of control available.
	sensor states whether you are using a sensor to determine the user’s location. When just embedding a map in a web page, set this to false.


There are many options, including plotting paths and setting the image format, which can all be found in the straightforward documentation.

Adding to your page

If you’ve worked with the JavaScript API, you’ll know that it needs a container element which you inject the map into:

<div id=""map""></div>

All you need to do is put your static image inside that container:

<div id=""map"">
   <img src=""http://maps.google.com/maps/api/staticmap[...]"" />
 </div>

And then, in your JavaScript, find the image and remove it. For example, with jQuery you’d simply use:

$('#map img').remove();

Why not use a <noscript> element around the image? You could, and that would certainly work fine for browsers that do not support JavaScript. What that won’t cover, however, is the situation where the browser has JavaScript support but, for whatever reason, the JavaScript doesn’t run. This could be due to network issues, an aggressive corporate firewall, or even just a bug in your code. So for that reason, we put the image in for all browsers that show images, and then remove it when the JavaScript is  successfully running.

See an example in action

About rate limits

The Google Static Map API limits the requests per site viewer – currently at one thousand distinct maps per day per viewer. So, for most sites you really don’t need to worry about the rate limit. Requests for the same tile aren’t normally counted, as the tile has already been generated and is cached. You can embed the images direct from Google and let it worry about the distribution and caching.

In conclusion

As you can see, adding a static map alongside your dynamic map for those users without JavaScript is very easy indeed. There may not be a huge percentage of web visitors browsing without JavaScript but, as we’ve seen, a small percentage of a big number is still a big number. When it’s so easy to add a static map, can you really justify not doing it?",2010,Drew McLellan,drewmclellan,2010-12-01T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/finding-your-way-with-static-maps/,code
224,Go Forth and Make Awesomeness,"We’ve all dreamed of being a superhero: maybe that’s why we’ve ended up on the web—a place where we can do good deeds and celebrate them on a daily basis. 

Wear your dreams

At age four, I wore my Wonder Woman Underoos around my house, my grandparents’ house, our neighbor’s house, and even around the yard. I wanted to be a superhero when I grew up. I was crushed to learn that there is no school for superheroes—no place to earn a degree in how to save the world from looming evil. Instead, I—like everyone else—was destined to go to ordinary school to focus on ABCs and 123s. Even still, I want to save the world.

Intend your goodness

Random acts of kindness make a difference. Books, films, and advertising campaigns tout random acts of kindness and the positive influence they can have on the world. But why do acts of kindness have to be so random? Why can’t we intend to be kind? A true superhero wakes each morning intending to perform selfless acts for the community. Why can’t we do the same thing?

As a child, my mother taught me to plan to do at least three good deeds each day. And even now, years later, I put on my invisible cape looking for ways to do good.

Here are some examples:

	slowing down to allow another driver in before me from the highway on-ramp
	bringing a co-worker their favorite kind of coffee or tea
	sharing my umbrella on a rainy day
	holding a door open for someone with full hands
	listening intently when someone shares a story
	complimenting someone on a job well done
	thanking someone for a job well done
	leaving a constructive, or even supportive comment on someone’s blog


As you can see, these acts are simple. Doing good and being kind is partially about being aware—aware of the words we speak and the actions we take. Like superheroes, we create our own code of conduct to live by. Hopefully, we choose to put the community before ourselves (within reason) and to do our best not to damage it as we move through our lives.

Take a bite out of the Apple

With some thought, we can weave this type of thinking and action into our business choices. We can take the simple acts of kindness concept and amplify it a bit. With this amplification, we can be a new kind of superhero.

In 1997, during a presentation, Steve Jobs stated Apple’s core value in a simple, yet powerful, sentence:


	We believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.


Apple fan or not, those are powerful words.

Define your core

Every organization must define its core values. Core values help us to frame, recognize, and understand the principles our organization embodies and practices. It doesn’t matter if you’re starting a new organization or you want to define values within an existing organization. Even if you’re a freelancer, defining core values will help guide your decisions and actions.

If you can, work as a team to define core values. Gather the people who are your support system—your business partners, your colleagues, and maybe even a trusted client—this is now your core value creation team. Have a brainstorming session with your team. Let ideas flow. Give equal weight to the things people say. You may not hear everything you thought you might hear—that’s OK. You want the session to be free-flowing and honest. Ask yourself and your team questions like:


	What do you think my/our/your core values are?
	What do you think my/our/your priorities are?
	What do you think my/our/your core values should be?
	What do you think my/our/your priorities should be?
	How do you think I/we should treat customers, clients, and each other?
	How do we want others to treat us?
	What are my/our/your success stories?
	What has defined these experiences as successful?


From this brainstorming session, you will craft your superhero code of conduct. You will decide what you will and will not do. You will determine how you will and will not act. You’re setting the standards that you will live and work by—so don’t take this exercise lightly. Take your time. Use the exercise as a way to open a discussion about values. Find out what you and your team believe in. Set these values and keep them in place. Write them down and share these with your team and with the world. By sharing your core values, you hold yourself more accountable to them. You also send a strong message to the rest of the world about what type of organization you are and what you believe in. Other organizations and people may decide to align or not to align themselves with you because of your core values. This is good. Chances are, you’ll be happier and more profitable if you work with other organizations and people who share similar core values.

 Photo: Laura Winn

During your brainstorming session, list keywords. Don’t edit. Allow things to take their course. Some examples of keywords might be:

Ability · Achievement · Adventure · Ambition · Altruism · Awareness · Balance · Caring · Charity · Citizenship · Collaboration · Commitment · Community · Compassion · Consideration · Cooperation · Courage · Courtesy · Creativity · Democracy · Dignity · Diplomacy · Discipline · Diversity · Education · Efficiency · Energy · Equality · Excellence · Excitement · Fairness · Family · Freedom · Fun · Goodness · Gratefulness · Growth · Happiness · Harmony · Helping · Honor · Hope · Humility · Humor · Imagination · Individuality · Innovation · Integrity · Intelligence · Joy · Justice · Kindness · Knowledge · Leadership · Learning · Loyalty · Meaning · Mindfulness · Moderation · Modesty · Nurture · Openness · Organization · Passion · Patience · Peace · Planning · Principles · Productivity · Purpose · Quality · Reliability · Respectfulness · Responsibility · Security · Sensitivity · Service · Sharing · Simplicity · Stability · Tolerance · Transparency · Trust · Truthfulness · Understanding · Unity · Variety · Vision · Wisdom

After you have a list of keywords, create your core values statement using the themes from your brainstorming session. There are no rules: while above, Steve Jobs summed up Apple’s core values in one sentence, Zappos has ten core values:


	Deliver WOW Through Service
	Embrace and Drive Change
	Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
	Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
	Pursue Growth and Learning
	Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
	Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
	Do More With Less
	Be Passionate and Determined
	Be Humble


To see how Zappos’ employees embrace these core values, watch the video they created and posted on their website.

Dog food is yummy

Although I find merit in every keyword listed, I’ve distilled my core values to their simplest form:

Make awesomeness. Do good.

How do you make awesomeness and do good? You need ambition, balance, collaboration, commitment, fun, and you need every keyword listed to support these actions. Again, there are no rules: your core values can be one sentence or a bulleted list. What matters is being true to yourself and creating core values that others can understand.  Before I start any project I ask myself: is there a way to make awesomeness and to do good? If the answer is “yes,” I embrace the endeavor because it aligns with my core values. If the answer is “no,” I move on to a project that supports my core values.

Unleash your powers

Although every organization will craft different core values, I imagine that you want to be a superhero and that you will define “doing good” (or something similar) as one of your core values. Whether you work by yourself or with a team, you can use the web as a tool to help do good. It can be as simple as giving a free hug, or something a little more complex to help others and help your organization meet the bottom line. Some interesting initiatives that use the web to do good are:


	Yahoo!: How Good Grows
	Desigual: Happy Hunters
	Edge Shave Gel: Anti-irritation campaign




Knowing your underlying desire to return to your Underoos-and-cape-sporting childhood and knowing that you don’t always have the opportunity to develop an entire initiative to “do good,” remember that as writers, designers, and developers, we can perform superhero acts on a daily basis by making content, design, and development accessible to the greatest number of people. By considering other people’s needs, we are intentionally performing acts of kindness—we’re doing good. There are many ways to write, design, and develop websites—many of which will be discussed in other 24ways.org articles. As we make content, design, and development decisions—as we develop campaigns and initiatives—we need to keep our core values in mind. It’s easy to make a positive difference in the world. Just be the superhero you’ve always wanted to be. Go forth and make awesomeness.

If you would like to do good today, support The United Nations Children’s Fund, an organization that works for children’s rights, their survival, development and protection, by purchasing this year’s 24 ways Annual 2010 created by Five Simple Steps. All proceeds go to UNICEF.",2010,Leslie Jensen-Inman,lesliejenseninman,2010-12-04T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/go-forth-and-make-awesomeness/,business
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 does every fourth ancestor thereafter. The spiral completes a cycle every four steps, so this class allows styles to be reused on <div>s that appear at the same position in each cycle.

Golden proportions

To create our spiral we are going to exploit the unique properties of the golden rectangle, so our first priority is to ensure that we have a golden rectangle to begin with. If we pick a length for the short edge – say, 288 pixels – we can then calculate the length of the long edge by multiplying this value by 1.618. In this case, 288 × 1.618 = 466, so our starting point will be a <div> with these properties:

#container > div {
  width: 466px;
  height: 288px;
}

The greater than symbol is used here to single out the immediate child of the #container element, without affecting the grandchild or any of the more distant descendants.

We could go on to specify the precise pixel dimensions of every child element, but that means doing a lot of sums. It would be much easier if we just specified the dimensions for each element as a percentage of the width and height of its parent. This also has the advantage that if you change the size of the outermost container, all nested elements would be resized automatically – something that we shall exploit later.







The approximate value of 38.2% can be derived from (100 × 1 − phi) ÷ phi, where the Greek letter phi (ϕ) stands for the golden ratio. The value of phi can be expressed as phi = (1 + √5 ) ÷ 2, which is approximately 1.618. You don’t have to understand the derivation to use it. Just remember that if you start with a golden rectangle, you can slice 38.2% from it to create a new golden rectangle.

This can be expressed in CSS quite simply:

.cycle,
.cycle > div > div {
  height: 38.2%;
  width: 100%;
}
.cycle > div,
.cycle > div > div > div {
  width: 38.2%;
  height: 100%;
}

You can see the result so far by visiting Demo One. With no borders or shading, there is nothing to see yet, so let’s address that next.

Shading with transparency

We’ll need to apply some shading to distinguish each segment of the spiral from its neighbours. We could start with a white background, then progress through shades of grey: #eee, #ddd, #ccc and so on, but this means hard-coding the background-color for every element. A more elegant solution would be to use the same colour for every element, but to make each one slightly transparent.

The nested <div>s that we are working with could be compared to layers in Photoshop. By applying a semi-transparent shade of grey, each successive layer can build on top of the darker layers beneath it. The effect accumulates, causing each successive layer to appear slightly darker than the last. In his 2009 article for 24 ways, Drew McLellan showed how to create a semi-transparent effect by working with RGBA colour. Here, we’ll use the colour black with an alpha value of 0.07.

#container div { background-color: rgba(0,0,0,0.07) }

Note that I haven’t used the immediate child selector here, which means that this rule will apply to all <div> elements inside the #container, no matter how deeply nested they are. You can view the result in Demo Two. As you can see, the golden rectangles alternate between landscape and portrait orientation.



Demo Three).



CSS3 specification indicates that a percentage can be used to set the border-radius property, but using percentages does not achieve consistent results in browsers today. Luckily, if you specify a border-radius in pixels using a value that is greater than the width and height of the element, then the resulting curve will use the shorter length side as its radius. This produces exactly the effect that we want, so we’ll use an arbitrarily high value of 10,000 pixels for each border-radius:

.cycle {
  border-radius: 0px;
  border-bottom-left-radius: 10000px;
}
.cycle > div {
  border-radius: 0px;
  border-bottom-right-radius: 10000px;
}
.cycle > div > div {
  border-radius: 0px;
  border-top-right-radius: 10000px;
}
.cycle > div > div > div {
  border-radius: 0px;
  border-top-left-radius: 10000px;
}

Note that the specification for the border-radius property is still in flux, so it is advisable to use vendor-specific prefixes. I have omitted them from the example above for the sake of clarity, but if you view source on Demo Four then you’ll see that the actual styles are not quite as brief.







Filling the available space

We have created an approximation of the Golden Spiral using only HTML and CSS. Neat! It’s a shame that it occupies just a fraction of the available space. As a finishing touch, let’s make the golden spiral expand or contract to use the full space available to it.

Ideally, the outermost container should use the full available width or height that could accomodate a rectangle of golden proportions. This behaviour is available for background images using the “ background-size: contain; property, but I know of no way to make block level HTML elements behave in this fashion (if I’m missing something, please enlighten me). Where CSS fails to deliver, JavaScript can usually provide a workaround. This snippet requires jQuery:

$(document).ready(function() {
	var phi = (1 + Math.sqrt(5))/2;

	$(window).resize(function() {
		var goldenWidth  = windowWidth  = $(this).width(),
			goldenHeight = windowHeight = $(this).height();

		if (windowWidth/windowHeight > phi) {
			// panoramic viewport – use full height
			goldenWidth  = windowHeight * phi;
		} else {
			// portrait viewport  – use full width
			goldenHeight = windowWidth / phi;
		};

	$(""#container > div.cycle"")
		.width(goldenWidth)
		.height(goldenHeight);

	}).resize();

});

You can view the result by visiting Demo Five.







Is it just me, or can you see an elephant in there?

You can probably think of many ways to enhance this further, but for this study we’ll leave it there. It has been a good excuse to play with proportions, positioning and the immediate child selector, as well as new CSS3 features such as border-radius and RGBA colours. If you are not already designing with golden proportions, then perhaps this will inspire you to begin.",2010,Drew Neil,drewneil,2010-12-07T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/golden-spirals/,design
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 short, your tools should be designed not to be precious, but to quickly process your thoughts. Ideas can be expressed with a thick line marker or by drawing with a stick in the sand; it’s the ideas that matter, not the medium.

Input > Synthesise > Output

Ideas don’t materialise in a vacuum. Without constant input, the outputs will inevitably remain the same. As such, it’s essential to maintain an inquisitive mind, ensuring a steady flow of new triggers and stimuli that enable your thinking to evolve.

What every designer brings to the table is their prior experience and unique knowledge. It should come as no surprise to discover that a tried and tested method of increasing that knowledge is, believe it or not, to read – often and widely. The best and most nuanced ideas come after many years of priming the brain with an array of diverse material, a point made recently in Jessica Hische’s aptly named Why You Should Know Your Shit.

One of the best ways of synthesising the knowledge you accumulate is to write. The act of writing facilitates your thinking and stores the pieces of the jigsaw you’ll one day return to. You don’t have to write a book or a well-articulated article; a scribbled note in the margin will suffice in facilitating the process of digestion.

As with writing, we implore you to make sketching an essential part of your digestion process. More immediate than writing, sketching has the power to put yet unformed ideas down on paper, giving you an insight into the fantastic conceptions you’re more often than not still incubating.

Our second commandment is a practical one: always carry a sketchbook and a pen. Although it seems that the very best ideas are scribbled on the back of a beer mat or a wine-stained napkin, always carrying your ‘thinking utensils’ should be as natural as not leaving the house without your phone, wallet, keys or pants.

Further, the more you use your sketchbook, the less precious you’ll find yourself becoming. Sketching isn’t about being an excellent draughtsman, it’s about synthesising and processing your thoughts and ideas, as Jason Santa Maria summarises nicely in his article Pretty Sketchy:


	Sketchbooks are not about being a good artist, they’re about being a good thinker.

	Jason Santa Maria


The sketchbook and pen should become your trusted tools in your task to constantly survey the world around you. As Paul Smith says, You Can Find Inspiration in Anything; close the lid, look beyond the computer; there’s a whole world of inspiration out there.

Learn to love old dusty buildings

So, how do you learn? How do you push beyond the predictable world pre-filtered by Mr Google? The answer lies in establishing a habit of exploring the wonderful worlds of museums and libraries, dusty old buildings that repay repeated visits.

Once the primary repositories of thought and endless sources of inspiration, these institutions are now often passed over for the quick fix of a Google search or Wikipedia by you, the designer, chained to a desk and manacled to a MacBook. Whilst others might frown, we urge you to get away from your desk and take an eye-opening stroll through the knowledge-filled corridors of yore (and don’t forget to bring your sketchbook).

Here you’ll find ideas aplenty, ideas that will set you apart from your peers, who remain ever-reliant on the same old digital sources.

The idea generation toolbox

Now that we’ve established the importance of getting the process and the context right, it’s time to meet the idea generation toolbox: a series of tools and techniques that can be applied singularly or in combination to solve the perennial problem of the blank canvas.

The clean sheet of paper, numbing in its emptiness, can prove an insurmountable barrier to many a project, but the route beyond it involves just a few, well-considered steps. The route to a good idea lies in widening your pool of inspiration at the project outset. Let go and generate ideas quickly; it’s critical to diverge before you converge – but how do we do this and what exactly do we mean by this?

The temptation is to pull something out of your well-worn box of tricks, something that you know from experience will do the job. We urge you, however, not to fall prey to this desire. You can do better; better still, a few of you putting your minds together can do a lot better. By avoiding the path of least resistance, you can create something extraordinary.

Culturally, we value logical, linear thinking. Since the days of Plato and Aristotle, critical thinking, deduction and the pursuit of truth have been rewarded. To generate creative ideas, however, we need to start thinking sideways, making connections that don’t necessarily follow logically. Lateral thinking, a phrase coined by Edward de Bono in 1967, aptly describes this very process:


	With logic you start out with certain ingredients, just as in playing chess you start out with given pieces – lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces.

	Edward de Bono


One of the easiest ways to start thinking laterally is to start with a mind map, a perfect tool for widening the scope of a project beyond the predictable and an ideal one for getting the context right for discovery.

Making connections

Mind maps can be used to generate, visualise and structure ideas. Arranged intuitively and classified around groupings, mind maps allow chance connections to be drawn across related groups of information, and are perfect for exposing alogical associations and unexpected relationships.

Get a number of people together in a room, equipped with the Sharpie and Flip Chart Combo©. Give yourself a limited amount of time – half an hour should prove more than enough – and you’ll be surprised at the results a few well-chosen people can generate in a very short space of time. The key is to work fast, diverge and not inhibit thinking. 

We’ve been embracing Tony Buzan’s methods in our teaching for over a decade. His ideas on the power of radiant thinking and how this can be applied to mind maps, uncover the real power which lies in the human brain’s ability to spot connections across a mapped out body of diverse knowledge.

Frank Chimero wrote about this recently in How to Have an Idea, which beautifully illustrates Mr Buzan’s theories, articulating the importance of the brain’s ability to make abstract connections, finding unexpected pairings when a concept is mapped out on paper.

Once a topic is surveyed and a rich set of stimuli articulated, the next stage is to draw connections, pulling from opposite sides of the mind map. It’s at this point, when defining alogical connections, that the truly interesting and unexpected ideas are often uncovered.

The curve ball

If you’ve followed our instructions so far, all being well, you should have a number of ideas. Good news: we have one last technique to throw into the mix. We like to call it ‘the curve ball’, that last minute ‘something’ that forces you to rethink and encourages you to address a problem from a different direction.

There are a number of ways of throwing in a curve ball – a short, sharp, unexpected impetus – but we have a firm favourite we think you’ll appreciate. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies – subtitled ‘Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas’ – are the perfect creative tool for throwing in a spot of unpredictability. As Eno and Schmidt put it:


	The Oblique Strategies can be used as a pack (a set of possibilities being continuously reviewed in the mind) or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear. They are not final, as new ideas will present themselves, and others will become self-evident.

	Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt


Simply pick a card and apply the strategy to the problem at hand. The key here, as with de Bono’s techniques, is to embrace randomness and provocation to inspire lateral creative approaches.

To assist this process, you might wish to consult one of the many virtual decks of Oblique Strategies online.

Wrapping up

To summarise, it’s tempting to see the route to the fastest satisfactory conclusion in a computer when, in reality, that’s the last place you should start. The tools we’ve introduced, far from time-consuming, are hyper-efficient, always at hand and, if you factor them into your workflow, the key to unlocking the ideas that set the great designers apart.

We wish you well on your quest in search of the perfect idea, now armed with the knowledge that the quest begins on paper.",2010,The Standardistas,thestandardistas,2010-12-13T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/good-ideas-grow-on-paper/,process
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 in a cryptic format. It was OK for 1994, but really neither an easy nor a beautiful solution for the task of storing data on the client.

Then came a plethora of solutions by different vendors – from Microsoft’s userdata to Flash’s LSO, and from Silverlight isolated storage to Google’s Gears. If you want to know just how many crazy and convoluted ways there are to store a bit of information, check out Samy’s evercookie.

Clearly, we needed an easier and standardised way of storing local data.

Keeping it simple – local storage

And, lo and behold, we have one. The local storage API (or session storage, with the only difference being that session data is lost when the window is closed) is ridiculously easy to use. All you do is call a few methods on the window.localStorage object – or even just set the properties directly using the square bracket notation:

if('localStorage' in window && window['localStorage'] !== null){
	var store = window.localStorage;

	// valid, API way
		store.setItem(‘cow’,‘moo’);
		console.log(
		store.getItem(‘cow’)
	); // => ‘moo’

	// shorthand, breaks at keys with spaces
		store.sheep = ‘baa’ 
		console.log(
		store.sheep 
	); // ‘baa’

	// shorthand for all
		store[‘dog’] = ‘bark’
		console.log(
		store[‘dog’]
	); // => ‘bark’

}

Browser support is actually pretty good: Chrome 4+; Firefox 3.5+; IE8+; Opera 10.5+; Safari 4+; plus iPhone 2.0+; and Android 2.0+. That should cover most of your needs. Of course, you should check for support first (or use a wrapper library like YUI Storage Utility or YUI Storage Lite).

The data is stored on a per domain basis and you can store up to five megabytes of data in localStorage for each domain.

Strings attached

By default, localStorage only supports strings as storage formats. You can’t store results of JavaScript computations that are arrays or objects, and every number is stored as a string. This means that long, floating point numbers eat into the available memory much more quickly than if they were stored as numbers.

var cowdesc = ""the cow is of the bovine ilk, ""+
		""one end is for the moo, the ""+
		""other for the milk"";

var cowdef = {
	ilk“bovine”,
	legs,
	udders,
	purposes
		front“moo”,
		end“milk”
	}
};

window.localStorage.setItem(‘describecow’,cowdesc);
console.log(
	window.localStorage.getItem(‘describecow’)
); // => the cow is of the bovine… 

window.localStorage.setItem(‘definecow’,cowdef);
console.log(
	window.localStorage.getItem(‘definecow’)
); // => [object Object] = bad!

This limits what you can store quite heavily, which is why it makes sense to use JSON to encode and decode the data you store:

var cowdef = {
	""ilk"":""bovine"",
	""legs"":4,
	""udders"":4,
	""purposes"":{
	""front"":""moo"",
	""end"":""milk""
	}
};

window.localStorage.setItem(‘describecow’,JSON.stringify(cowdef));
console.log(
	JSON.parse(
		window.localStorage.getItem(‘describecow’)
	)
); // =>  Object { ilk=“bovine”,  more…}

You can also come up with your own formatting solutions like CSV, or pipe | or tilde ~ separated formats, but JSON is very terse and has native browser support.

Some use case examples

The simplest use of localStorage is, of course, storing some data: the current state of a game; how far through a multi-form sign-up process a user is; and other things we traditionally stored in cookies. Using JSON, though, we can do cooler things.

Speeding up web service use and avoiding exceeding the quota

A lot of web services only allow you a certain amount of hits per hour or day, and can be very slow. By using localStorage with a time stamp, you can cache results of web services locally and only access them after a certain time to refresh the data.

I used this technique in my An Event Apart 10K entry, World Info, to only load the massive dataset of all the world information once, and allow for much faster subsequent visits to the site. The following screencast shows the difference:



For use with YQL (remember last year’s 24 ways entry?), I’ve built a small script called YQL localcache that wraps localStorage around the YQL data call. An example would be the following:

yqlcache.get({
	yql: 'select * from flickr.photos.search where text=""santa""',
	id: 'myphotos',
	cacheage: ( 60*60*1000 ),
	callback: function(data) {
		console.log(data);
	}
});

This loads photos of Santa from Flickr and stores them for an hour in the key myphotos of localStorage. If you call the function at various times, you receive an object back with the YQL results in a data property and a type property which defines where the data came from – live is live data, cached means it comes from cache, and freshcache indicates that it was called for the first time and a new cache was primed. The cache will work for an hour (60×60×1,000 milliseconds) and then be refreshed. So, instead of hitting the YQL endpoint over and over again, you hit it once per hour.

Caching a full interface

Another use case I found was to retain the state of a whole interface of an application by caching the innerHTML once it has been rendered. I use this in the Yahoo Firehose search interface, and you can get the full story about local storage and how it is used in this screencast:



The stripped down code is incredibly simple (JavaScript with PHP embed):

// test for localStorage support
if(('localStorage' in window) && window['localStorage'] !== null){

var f = document.getElementById(‘mainform’);
// test with PHP if the form was sent (the submit button has the name “sent”)


	// get the HTML of the form and cache it in the property “state”
	localStorage.setItem(‘state’,f.innerHTML);

// if the form hasn’t been sent…


	// check if a state property exists and write back the HTML cache
	if(‘state’ in localStorage){
		f.innerHTML = localStorage.getItem(‘state’);  
	}

	

}

Other ideas

In essence, you can use local storage every time you need to speed up access. For example, you could store image sprites in base-64 encoded datasets instead of loading them from a server. Or you could store CSS and JavaScript libraries on the client. Anything goes – have a play.

Issues with local and session storage

Of course, not all is rainbows and unicorns with the localStorage API. There are a few niggles that need ironing out. As with anything, this needs people to use the technology and raise issues. Here are some of the problems:


	Inadequate information about storage quota – if you try to add more content to an already full store, you get a QUOTA_EXCEEDED_ERR and that’s it. There’s a great explanation and test suite for localStorage quota available.
	Lack of automatically expiring storage – a feature that cookies came with. Pamela Fox has a solution (also available as a demo and source code)
	Lack of encrypted storage – right now, everything is stored in readable strings in the browser.


Bigger, better, faster, more!

As cool as the local and session storage APIs are, they are not quite ready for extensive adoption – the storage limits might get in your way, and if you really want to go to town with accessing, filtering and sorting data, real databases are what you’ll need. And, as we live in a world of client-side development, people are moving from heavy server-side databases like MySQL to NoSQL environments.

On the web, there is also a lot of work going on, with Ian Hickson of Google proposing the Web SQL database, and Nikunj Mehta, Jonas Sicking (Mozilla), Eliot Graff (Microsoft) and Andrei Popescu (Google) taking the idea beyond simply replicating MySQL and instead offering Indexed DB as an even faster alternative.

On the mobile front, a really important feature is to be able to store data to use when you are offline (mobile coverage and roaming data plans anybody?) and you can use the Offline Webapps API for that.

As I mentioned at the beginning, we have a very exciting time ahead – let’s make this web work faster and more reliably by using what browsers offer us. For more on local storage, check out the chapter on Dive into HTML5.",2010,Christian Heilmann,chrisheilmann,2010-12-06T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/html5-local-storage/,code
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 achieved with a 3-D transform, placing the slides side-by-side in a circle (carousel) in three-dimensional space; in that arrangement, the last slide obviously comes before the first.

3-D transforms are more than just eye candy. We can also use them to solve dilemmas and make our applications more intuitive. 

Current support

The CSS 3D Transforms module has been out in the wild for over a year now. Currently, only Safari supports the specification – which includes Safari on Mac OS X and Mobile Safari on iOS. 

The support roadmap for other browsers varies. The Mozilla team has taken some initial steps towards implementing the module. Mike Taylor tells me that the Opera team is keeping a close eye on CSS transforms, and is waiting until the specification is fleshed out. And our best friend Internet Explorer still needs to catch up to 2-D transforms before we can talk about the 3-D variety.

To make matters more perplexing, Safari’s WebKit cousin Chrome currently accepts 3-D transform declarations, but renders them in 2-D space. Chrome team member Paul Irish, says that 3-D transforms are on the horizon, perhaps in one of the next 8.0 releases.

This all adds up to a bit of a challenge for those of us excited by 3-D transforms. I’ll give it to you straight: missing the dimension of depth can make degradation a bit ungraceful. Unless the transform is relatively simple and holds up in non-3D-supporting browsers, you’ll most likely have to design another solution. But what’s another hurdle in a steeplechase? We web folk have had our mettle tested for years. We’re prepared to devise multiple solutions.

Here’s the part of the article where I mention Modernizr, and you brush over it because you’ve read this part of an article hundreds of times before. But seriously, it’s the best way to test for CSS 3-D transform support. Use it.

Even with these difficulties mounting up, trying out 3-D transforms today is the right move. The CSS 3-D transforms module was developed by the same team at Apple that produced the CSS 2D Transforms and Animation modules. Both specifications have since been adopted by Mozilla and Opera. Transforming in three-dimensions now will guarantee you’ll be ahead of the game when the other browsers catch up.

The choice is yours. You can make excuses and pooh-pooh 3-D transforms because they’re too hard and only snobby Apple fans will see them today. Or, with a tip of the fedora to Mr Andy Clarke, you can get hard-boiled and start designing with the best features out there right this instant.

So, I bid you, in the words of the eternal Optimus Prime…


	Transform and roll out.


Let’s get coding.

Perspective

To activate 3-D space, an element needs perspective. This can be applied in two ways: using the transform property, with the perspective as a functional notation:

-webkit-transform: perspective(600);

or using the perspective property: 

-webkit-perspective: 600;

See example: Perspective 1.



 The red element on the left uses transform: perspective() functional notation; the blue element on the right uses the perspective property



These two formats both trigger a 3-D space, but there is a difference. The first, functional notation is convenient for directly applying a 3-D transform on a single element (in the previous example, I use it in conjunction with a rotateY transform). But when used on multiple elements, the transformed elements don’t line up as expected. If you use the same transform across elements with different positions, each element will have its own vanishing point. To remedy this, use the perspective property on a parent element, so each child shares the same 3-D space.

See Example: Perspective 2.



 Each red box on the left has its own vanishing point within the parent container; the blue boxes on the right share the vanishing point of the parent container



The value of perspective determines the intensity of the 3-D effect. Think of it as a distance from the viewer to the object. The greater the value, the further the distance, so the less intense the visual effect. perspective: 2000; yields a subtle 3-D effect, as if we were viewing an object from far away. perspective: 100; produces a tremendous 3-D effect, like a tiny insect viewing a massive object.

By default, the vanishing point for a 3-D space is positioned at its centre. You can change the position of the vanishing point with perspective-origin property.

-webkit-perspective-origin: 25% 75%;

See Example: Perspective 3.







3-D transform functions

As a web designer, you’re probably well acquainted with working in two dimensions, X and Y, positioning items horizontally and vertically. With a 3-D space initialised with perspective, we can now transform elements in all three glorious spatial dimensions, including the third Z dimension, depth. 

3-D transforms use the same transform property used for 2-D transforms. If you’re familiar with 2-D transforms, you’ll find the basic 3D transform functions fairly similar. 


	rotateX(angle)
	rotateY(angle)
	rotateZ(angle)
	translateZ(tz)
	scaleZ(sz)


Whereas translateX() positions an element along the horizontal X-axis, translateZ() positions it along the Z-axis, which runs front to back in 3-D space. Positive values position the element closer to the viewer, negative values further away.

The rotate functions rotate the element around the corresponding axis. This is somewhat counter-intuitive at first, as you might imagine that rotateX will spin an object left to right. Instead, using rotateX(45deg) rotates an element around the horizontal X-axis, so the top of the element angles back and away, and the bottom gets closer to the viewer.

See Example: Transforms 1.



3-D rotate() and translate() functions around each axis



There are also several shorthand transform functions that require values for all three dimensions:


	translate3d(tx,ty,tz)
	scale3d(sx,sy,sz)
	rotate3d(rx,ry,rz,angle)


Pro-tip: These foo3d() transform functions also have the benefit of triggering hardware acceleration in Safari. Dean Jackson, CSS 3-D transform spec author and main WebKit dude, writes (to Thomas Fuchs):


	In essence, any transform that has a 3D operation as one of its functions will trigger hardware compositing, even when the actual transform is 2D, or not doing anything at all (such as translate3d(0,0,0)). Note this is just current behaviour, and could change in the future (which is why we don’t document or encourage it). But it is very helpful in some situations and can significantly improve redraw performance.


For the sake of simplicity, my demos will use the basic transform functions, but if you’re writing production-ready CSS for iOS or Safari-only, make sure to use the foo3d() functions to get the best rendering performance.

Card flip

We now have all the tools to start making 3-D objects. Let’s get started with something simple: flipping a card.

Here’s the basic markup we’ll need:

<section class=""container"">
  <div id=""card"">
    <figure class=""front"">1</figure>
    <figure class=""back"">2</figure>
  </div>
</section>

The .container will house the 3-D space. The #card acts as a wrapper for the 3-D object. Each face of the card has a separate element: .front; and .back. Even for such a simple object, I recommend using this same pattern for any 3-D transform. Keeping the 3-D space element and the object element(s) separate establishes a pattern that is simple to understand and easier to style.

We’re ready for some 3-D stylin’. First, apply the necessary perspective to the parent 3-D space, along with any size or positioning styles.

.container { 
  width: 200px;
  height: 260px;
  position: relative;
  -webkit-perspective: 800;
}

Now the #card element can be transformed in its parent’s 3-D space. We’re combining absolute and relative positioning so the 3-D object is removed from the flow of the document. We’ll also add width: 100%;  and height: 100%;. This ensures the object’s transform-origin will occur in the centre of .container. More on transform-origin later. 

Let’s add a CSS3 transition so users can see the transform take effect. 

#card {
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  position: absolute;
  -webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d;
  -webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 1s;
}

The .container’s perspective only applies to direct descendant children, in this case #card. In order for subsequent children to inherit a parent’s perspective, and live in the same 3-D space, the parent can pass along its perspective with transform-style: preserve-3d. Without 3-D transform-style, the faces of the card would be flattened with its parents and the back face’s rotation would be nullified. 

To position the faces in 3-D space, we’ll need to reset their positions in 2-D with position: absolute. In order to hide the reverse sides of the faces when they are faced away from the viewer, we use backface-visibility: hidden. 

#card figure {
  display: block;
  position: absolute;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;
}

To flip the .back face, we add a basic 3-D transform of rotateY(180deg). 

#card .front {
  background: red;
}
#card .back {
  background: blue;
  -webkit-transform: rotateY(180deg);
}

With the faces in place, the #card requires a corresponding style for when it is flipped.

#card.flipped {
  -webkit-transform: rotateY(180deg);
}

Now we have a working 3-D object. To flip the card, we can toggle the flipped class. When .flipped, the #card will rotate 180 degrees, thus exposing the .back face.

See Example: Card 1.



Flipping a card in three dimensions



Slide-flip

Take another look at the Weather App 3-D transition. You’ll notice that it’s not quite the same effect as our previous demo. If you follow the right edge of the card, you’ll find that its corners stay within the container. Instead of pivoting from the horizontal centre, it pivots on that right edge. But the transition is not just a rotation – the edge moves horizontally from right to left. We can reproduce this transition just by modifying a couple of lines of CSS from our original card flip demo.

The pivot point for the rotation occurs at the right side of the card. By default, the transform-origin of an element is at its horizontal and vertical centre (50% 50% or center center). Let’s change it to the right side:

#card { -webkit-transform-origin: right center; }

That flip now needs some horizontal movement with translateX. We’ll set the rotation to -180deg so it flips right side out.

#card.flipped {
  -webkit-transform: translateX(-100%) rotateY(-180deg);
}

See Example: Card 2.



Creating a slide-flip from the right edge of the card



Cube

Creating 3-D card objects is a good way to get started with 3-D transforms. But once you’ve mastered them, you’ll be hungry to push it further and create some true 3-D objects: prisms. We’ll start out by making a cube.

The markup for the cube is similar to the card. This time, however, we need six child elements for all six faces of the cube:

<section class=""container"">
  <div id=""cube"">
    <figure class=""front"">1</figure>
    <figure class=""back"">2</figure>
    <figure class=""right"">3</figure>
    <figure class=""left"">4</figure>
    <figure class=""top"">5</figure>
    <figure class=""bottom"">6</figure>
  </div>
</section>

Basic position and size styles set the six faces on top of one another in the container.

.container {
  width: 200px;
  height: 200px;
  position: relative;
  -webkit-perspective: 1000;
}
#cube {
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  position: absolute;
  -webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d;
}
#cube figure {
  width: 196px;
  height: 196px;
  display: block;
  position: absolute;
  border: 2px solid black;
}

With the card, we only had to rotate its back face. The cube, however, requires that five of the six faces to be rotated. Faces 1 and 2 will be the front and back. Faces 3 and 4 will be the sides. Faces 5 and 6 will be the top and bottom.

#cube .front { -webkit-transform: rotateY(0deg); }
#cube .back { -webkit-transform: rotateX(180deg); }
#cube .right { -webkit-transform: rotateY(90deg); }
#cube .left { -webkit-transform: rotateY(-90deg); }
#cube .top { -webkit-transform: rotateX(90deg); }
#cube .bottom { -webkit-transform: rotateX(-90deg); }

We could remove the first #cube .front style declaration, as this transform has no effect, but let’s leave it in to keep our code consistent.

Now each face is rotated, and only the front face is visible. The four side faces are all perpendicular to the viewer, so they appear invisible. To push them out to their appropriate sides, they need to be translated out from the centre of their positions. Each side of the cube is 200 pixels wide. From the cube’s centre they’ll need to be translated out half that distance, 100px.

#cube .front { -webkit-transform: rotateY(0deg) translateZ(100px); }
#cube .back { -webkit-transform: rotateX(180deg) translateZ(100px); }
#cube .right { -webkit-transform: rotateY(90deg) translateZ(100px); }
#cube .left { -webkit-transform: rotateY(-90deg) translateZ(100px); }
#cube .top { -webkit-transform: rotateX(90deg) translateZ(100px); }
#cube .bottom { -webkit-transform: rotateX(-90deg) translateZ(100px); }

Note here that the translateZ function comes after the rotate. The order of transform functions is important. Take a moment and soak this up. Each face is first rotated towards its position, then translated outward in a separate vector.

We have a working cube, but we’re not done yet.

Returning to the Z-axis origin

For the sake of our users, our 3-D transforms should not distort the interface when the active panel is at its resting position. But once we start pushing elements off their Z-axis origin, distortion is inevitable. 

In order to keep 3-D transforms snappy, Safari composites the element, then applies the transform. Consequently, anti-aliasing on text will remain whatever it was before the transform was applied. When transformed forward in 3-D space, significant pixelation can occur. 

See Example: Transforms 2.







Looking back at the Perspective 3 demo, note that no matter how small the perspective value is, or wherever the transform-origin may be, the panel number 1 always returns to its original position, as if all those funky 3-D transforms didn’t even matter.

To resolve the distortion and restore pixel perfection to our #cube, we can push the 3-D object back, so that the front face will be positioned back to the Z-axis origin.

#cube { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px); }

See Example: Cube 1.



Restoring the front face to the original position on the Z-axis



Rotating the cube

To expose any face of the cube, we’ll need a style that rotates the cube to expose any face. The transform values are the opposite of those for the corresponding face. We toggle the necessary class on the #box to apply the appropriate transform.

#cube.show-front { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateY(0deg); }
#cube.show-back { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateX(-180deg); }
#cube.show-right { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateY(-90deg); }
#cube.show-left { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateY(90deg); }
#cube.show-top { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateX(-90deg); }
#cube.show-bottom { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateX(90deg); }

Notice how the order of the transform functions has reversed. First, we push the object back with translateZ, then we rotate it.

Finishing up, we can add a transition to animate the rotation between states. 

#cube { -webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 1s; }

See Example: Cube 2.



Rotating the cube with a CSS transition



Rectangular prism

Cubes are easy enough to generate, as we only have to worry about one measurement. But how would we handle a non-regular rectangular prism? Let’s try to make one that’s 300 pixels wide, 200 pixels high, and 100 pixels deep. 

The markup remains the same as the #cube, but we’ll switch the cube id for #box. The container styles remain mostly the same:

.container {
  width: 300px;
  height: 200px;
  position: relative;
  -webkit-perspective: 1000;
}
#box {
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  position: absolute;
  -webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d;
}

Now to position the faces. Each set of faces will need their own sizes. The smaller faces (left, right, top and bottom) need to be positioned in the centre of the container, where they can be easily rotated and then shifted outward. The thinner left and right faces get positioned left: 100px ((300 − 100) ÷ 2), The stouter top and bottom faces get positioned top: 50px ((200 − 100) ÷ 2).

#box figure {
  display: block;
  position: absolute;
  border: 2px solid black;
}
#box .front,
#box .back {
  width: 296px;
  height: 196px;
}
#box .right,
#box .left {
  width: 96px;
  height: 196px;
  left: 100px;
}
#box .top,
#box .bottom {
  width: 296px;
  height: 96px;
  top: 50px;
}

The rotate values can all remain the same as the cube example, but for this rectangular prism, the translate values do differ. The front and back faces are each shifted out 50 pixels since the #box is 100 pixels deep. The translate value for the left and right faces is 150 pixels for their 300 pixels width. Top and bottom panels take 100 pixels for their 200 pixels height:

#box .front { -webkit-transform: rotateY(0deg) translateZ(50px); }
#box .back { -webkit-transform: rotateX(180deg) translateZ(50px); }
#box .right { -webkit-transform: rotateY(90deg) translateZ(150px); }
#box .left { -webkit-transform: rotateY(-90deg) translateZ(150px); }
#box .top { -webkit-transform: rotateX(90deg) translateZ(100px); }
#box .bottom { -webkit-transform: rotateX(-90deg) translateZ(100px); }

See Example: Box 1.







Just like the cube example, to expose a face, the #box needs to have a style to reverse that face’s transform. Both the translateZ and rotate values are the opposites of the corresponding face.

#box.show-front { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-50px) rotateY(0deg); }
#box.show-back { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-50px) rotateX(-180deg); }
#box.show-right { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-150px) rotateY(-90deg); }
#box.show-left { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-150px) rotateY(90deg); }
#box.show-top { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateX(-90deg); }
#box.show-bottom { -webkit-transform: translateZ(-100px) rotateX(90deg); }

See Example: Box 2.



Rotating the rectangular box with a CSS transition



Carousel

Front-end developers have a myriad of choices when it comes to content carousels. Now that we have 3-D capabilities in our browsers, why not take a shot at creating an actual 3-D carousel?

The markup for this demo takes the same form as the box, cube and card. Let’s make it interesting and have a carousel with nine panels.

<div class=""container"">
  <div id=""carousel"">
    <figure>1</figure>
    <figure>2</figure>
    <figure>3</figure>
    <figure>4</figure>
    <figure>5</figure>
    <figure>6</figure>
    <figure>7</figure>
    <figure>8</figure>
    <figure>9</figure>
  </div>
</div>

Now, apply basic layout styles. Let’s give each panel of the #carousel 20 pixel gaps between one another, done here with left: 10px; and top: 10px;. The effective width of each panel is 210 pixels.

.container {
  width: 210px;
  height: 140px;
  position: relative;
  -webkit-perspective: 1000;
}
#carousel {
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  position: absolute;
  -webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d;
}
#carousel figure {
  display: block;
  position: absolute;
  width: 186px;
  height: 116px;
  left: 10px;
  top: 10px;
  border: 2px solid black;
}

Next up: rotating the faces. This #carousel has nine panels. If each panel gets an equal distribution on the carousel, each panel would be rotated forty degrees from its neighbour (360 ÷ 9).

#carousel figure:nth-child(1) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(0deg); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(2) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(40deg); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(3) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(80deg); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(4) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(120deg); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(5) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(160deg); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(6) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(200deg); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(7) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(240deg); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(8) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(280deg); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(9) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(320deg); }

Now, the outward shift. Back when we were creating the cube and box, the translate value was simple to calculate, as it was equal to one half the width, height or depth of the object. With this carousel, there is no size we can automatically use as a reference. We’ll have to calculate the distance of the shift by other means.



Drawing a diagram of the carousel, we can see that we know only two things: the width of each panel is 210 pixels; and the each panel is rotated forty degrees from the next. If we split one of these segments down its centre, we get a right-angled triangle, perfect for some trigonometry.

We can determine the length of r in this diagram with a basic tangent equation:



There you have it: the panels need to be translated 288 pixels in 3-D space. 

#carousel figure:nth-child(1) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(0deg) translateZ(288px); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(2) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(40deg) translateZ(288px); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(3) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(80deg) translateZ(288px); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(4) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(120deg) translateZ(288px); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(5) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(160deg) translateZ(288px); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(6) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(200deg) translateZ(288px); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(7) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(240deg) translateZ(288px); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(8) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(280deg) translateZ(288px); }
#carousel figure:nth-child(9) { -webkit-transform: rotateY(320deg) translateZ(288px); }

If we decide to change the width of the panel or the number of panels, we only need to plug in those two variables into our equation to get the appropriate translateZ value. In JavaScript terms, that equation would be:

var tz = Math.round( ( panelSize / 2 ) / 
  Math.tan( ( ( Math.PI * 2 ) / numberOfPanels ) / 2 ) );
// or simplified to
var tz = Math.round( ( panelSize / 2 ) / 
  Math.tan( Math.PI / numberOfPanels ) );

Just like our previous 3-D objects, to show any one panel we need only apply the reverse transform on the carousel. Here’s the style to show the fifth panel:

-webkit-transform: translateZ(-288px) rotateY(-160deg);

See Example: Carousel 1.







By now, you probably have two thoughts: 


	Rewriting transform styles for each panel looks tedious.
	Why bother doing high school maths? Aren’t robots supposed to be doing all this work for us?


And you’re absolutely right. The repetitive nature of 3-D objects lends itself to scripting. We can offload all the monotonous transform styles to our dynamic script, which, if done correctly, will be more flexible than the hard-coded version.

See Example: Carousel 2.

Conclusion

3-D transforms change the way we think about the blank canvas of web design. Better yet, they change the canvas itself, trading in the flat surface for voluminous depth.

My hope is that you took at least one peak at a demo and were intrigued. We web designers, who have rejoiced for border-radius, box-shadow and background gradients, now have an incredible tool at our disposal in 3-D transforms. They deserve just the same enthusiasm, research and experimentation we have seen on other CSS3 features. Now is the perfect time to take the plunge and start thinking about how to use three dimensions to elevate our craft. I’m breathless waiting for what’s to come. 

See you on the flip side.",2010,David DeSandro,daviddesandro,2010-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/intro-to-css-3d-transforms/,code
231,Designing for iOS: Life Beyond Media Queries,"Although not a new phenomenon, media queries seem to be getting a lot attention online recently and for the right reasons too – it’s great to be able to adapt a design with just a few lines of CSS – but many people are relying only on them to create an iPhone-specific version of their website. 

I was pleased to hear at FOWD NYC a few weeks ago that both myself and Aral Balkan share the same views on why media queries aren’t always going to be the best solution for mobile. Both of us specialise in iPhone design ourselves and we opt for a different approach to media queries. The trouble is, regardless of what you have carefully selected to be display:none; in your CSS, the iPhone still loads everything in the background; all that large imagery for your full scale website also takes up valuable mobile bandwidth and time.

You can greatly increase the speed of your website by creating a specific site tailored to mobile users with just a few handy pointers – media queries, in some instances, might be perfectly suitable but, in others, here’s what you can do.

Redirect your iPhone/iPod Touch users

To detect whether someone is viewing your site on an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can either use JavaScript or PHP. 

The JavaScript 

if((navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i)) || (navigator.userAgent.match(/iPod/i))) { 
    if (document.cookie.indexOf(""iphone_redirect=false"") == -1) window.location = ""http://mobile.yoursitehere.com""; 
}

The PHP

if(strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'iPhone') || strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'iPod')) 
{
    header('Location: http://mobile.yoursitehere.com');
    exit();
}

Both of these methods redirect the user to a site that you have made specifically for the iPhone. At this point, be sure to provide a link to the full version of the website, in case the user wishes to view this and not be thrown into an experience they didn’t want, with no way back.

Tailoring your site

So, now you’ve got 320 × 480 pixels of screen to play with – and to create a style sheet for, just as you would for any other site you build. There are a few other bits and pieces that you can add to your code to create a site that feels more like a fully immersive iPhone app rather than a website.

Retina display

When building your website specifically tailored to the iPhone, you might like to go one step further and create a specific style sheet for iPhone 4’s Retina display. Because there are four times as many pixels on the iPhone 4 (640 × 960 pixels), you’ll find specifics such as text shadows and borders will have to be increased. 

<link rel=""stylesheet"" 
   media=""only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2)"" 
   type=""text/css"" href=""../iphone4.css"" />

(Credit to Thomas Maier)

Prevent user scaling

This declaration, added into the <head>, stops the user being able to pinch-zoom in and out of your design, which is perfect if you are designing to the exact pixel measurements of the iPhone screen. 

<meta name=""viewport"" 
   content=""width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0;"">

Designing for orientation 

As iPhones aren’t static devices, you’ll also need to provide a style sheet for horizontal orientation. We can do this by inserting some JavaScript into the <head> as follows: 

<script type=""text/javascript"">
function orient() {
    switch(window.orientation) {
        case 0: 
            document.getElementById(""orient_css"").href = ""css/iphone_portrait.css"";
            break;
        case -90: 
            document.getElementById(""orient_css"").href = ""css/iphone_landscape.css"";
            break;
        case 90: 
            document.getElementById(""orient_css"").href = ""css/iphone_landscape.css"";
            break;
    }
}
window.onload = orient();
</script>

You can also specify orientation styles using media queries. This is absolutely fine, as by this point you’ll already be working with mobile-specific graphics and have little need to set a lot of things to display:none;

<link rel=""stylesheet"" 
   media=""only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)"" href=""/iphone.css"">
<link rel=""stylesheet"" 
   media=""only screen and (orientation: portrait)"" href=""/portrait.css"">
<link rel=""stylesheet"" 
   media=""only screen and (orientation: landscape)” href=""/landscape.css"">

Remove the address and status bars, top and bottom

To give you more room on-screen and to make your site feel more like an immersive web app, you can place the following declaration into the <head> of your document’s code to remove the address and status bars at the top and bottom of the screen. 

<meta name=""apple-mobile-web-app-capable"" content=""yes"" />

Making the most of inbuilt functions

Similar to mailto: e-mail links, the iPhone also supports another two handy URI schemes which are great for enhancing contact details. When tapped, the following links will automatically bring up the appropriate call or text interface:

<a href=""tel:01234567890"">Call us</a>
<a href=""sms:01234567890"">Text us</a>

iPhone-specific Web Clip icon

Although I believe them to be fundamentally flawed, since they rely on the user bookmarking your site, iPhone Web Clip icons are still a nice touch. You need just two declarations, again in the <head> of your document:

<link rel=""apple-touch-icon"" href=""icons/regular_icon.png"" />
<link rel=""apple-touch-icon"" sizes=""114x114"" href=""icons/retina_icon.png"" />

For iPhone 4 you’ll need to create a 114 × 114 pixels icon; for a non-Retina display, a 57 × 57 pixels icon will do the trick.

Precomposed 

Apple adds its standard gloss ‘moon’ over the top of any icon. If you feel this might be too much for your particular icon and would prefer a matte finish, you can add precomposed to the end of the apple-touch-icon declaration to remove the standard gloss. 

<link rel=""apple-touch-icon-precomposed"" href=""/images/touch-icon.png"" />

Wrapping up

Media queries definitely have their uses. They make it easy to build a custom experience for your visitor, regardless of their browser’s size. For more complex sites, however, or where you have lots of imagery and other content that isn’t necessary on the mobile version, you can now use these other methods to help you out. Remember, they are purely for presentation and not optimisation; for busy people on the go, optimisation and faster-running mobile experiences can only be a good thing. 

Have a wonderful Christmas fellow Webbies!",2010,Sarah Parmenter,sarahparmenter,2010-12-17T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/life-beyond-media-queries/,code
240,My CSS Wish List,"I love Christmas. I love walking around the streets of London, looking at the beautifully decorated windows, seeing the shiny lights that hang above Oxford Street and listening to Christmas songs.

I’m not going to lie though. Not only do I like buying presents, I love receiving them too. I remember making long lists that I would send to Father Christmas with all of the Lego sets I wanted to get. I knew I could only get one a year, but I would spend days writing the perfect list.

The years have gone by, but I still enjoy making wish lists. And I’ll tell you a little secret: my mum still asks me to send her my Christmas list every year.

This time I’ve made my CSS wish list. As before, I’d be happy with just one present.

Before I begin…

… this list includes:


	things that don’t exist in the CSS specification (if they do, please let me know in the comments – I may have missed them);
	others that are in the spec, but it’s incomplete or lacks use cases and examples (which usually means that properties haven’t been implemented by even the most recent browsers).


Like with any other wish list, the further down I go, the more unrealistic my expectations – but that doesn’t mean I can’t wish. Some of the things we wouldn’t have thought possible a few years ago have been implemented and our wishes fulfilled (think multiple backgrounds, gradients and transformations, for example).

The list

Cross-browser implementation of font-size-adjust

When one of the fall-back fonts from your font stack is used, rather than the preferred (first) one, you can retain the aspect ratio by using this very useful property. It is incredibly helpful when the fall-back fonts are smaller or larger than the initial one, which can make layouts look less polished.

What font-size-adjust does is divide the original font-size of the fall-back fonts by the font-size-adjust value. This preserves the x-height of the preferred font in the fall-back fonts. Here’s a simple example:

p {
    font-family: Calibri, ""Lucida Sans"", Verdana, sans-serif;
    font-size-adjust: 0.47;
}

In this case, if the user doesn’t have Calibri installed, both Lucida Sans and Verdana will keep Calibri’s aspect ratio, based on the font’s x-height. This property is a personal favourite and one I keep pointing to.

Firefox supported this property from version three. So far, it’s the only browser that does. Fontdeck provides the font-size-adjust value along with its fonts, and has a handy tool for calculating it.

More control over overflowing text

The text-overflow property lets you control text that overflows its container. The most common use for it is to show an ellipsis to indicate that there is more text than what is shown. To be able to use it, the container should have overflow set to something other than visible, and white-space: nowrap:

div {
    white-space: nowrap;
    width: 100%;
    overflow: hidden;
    text-overflow: ellipsis;
}

This, however, only works for blocks of text on a single line. In the wish list of many CSS authors (and in mine) is a way of defining text-overflow: ellipsis on a block of multiple text lines. Opera has taken the first step and added support for the -o-ellipsis-lastline property, which can be used instead of ellipsis. This property is not part of the CSS3 spec, but we could certainly make good use of it if it were…

WebKit has -webkit-line-clamp to specify how many lines to show before cutting with an ellipsis, but support is patchy at best and there is no control over where the ellipsis shows in the text. Many people have spent time wrangling JavaScript to do this for us, but the methods used are very processor intensive, and introduce a JavaScript dependency.

Indentation and hanging punctuation properties

You might notice a trend here: almost half of the items in this list relate to typography. The lack of fine-grained control over typographical detail is a general concern among designers and CSS authors. Indentation and hanging punctuation fall into this category.

The CSS3 specification introduces two new possible values for the text-indent property: each-line; and hanging. each-line would indent the first line of the block container and each line after a forced line break; hanging would invert which lines are affected by the indentation.

The proposed hanging-punctuation property would allow us to specify whether opening and closing brackets and quotes should hang outside the edge of the first and last lines. The specification is still incomplete, though, and asks for more examples and use cases.

Text alignment and hyphenation properties

Following the typographic trend of this list, I’d like to add better control over text alignment and hyphenation properties. The CSS3 module on Generated Content for Paged Media already specifies five new hyphenation-related properties (namely: hyphenate-dictionary; hyphenate-before and hyphenate-after; hyphenate-lines; and hyphenate-character), but it is still being developed and lacks examples.

In the text alignment realm, the new text-align-last property allows you to define how the last line of a block (or a line just before a forced break) is aligned, if your text is set to justify. Its value can be: start; end; left; right; center; and justify. The text-justify property should also allow you to have more control over text set to text-align: justify but, for now, only Internet Explorer supports this.

calc()

This is probably my favourite item in the list: the calc() function. This function is part of the CSS3 Values and Units module, but it has only been implemented by Firefox (4.0). To take advantage of it now you need to use the Mozilla vendor code, -moz-calc().

Imagine you have a fluid two-column layout where the sidebar column has a fixed width of 240 pixels, and the main content area fills the rest of the width available. This is how you could create that using -moz-calc():

#main {
    width: -moz-calc(100% - 240px);
}

Can you imagine how many hacks and headaches we could avoid were this function available in more browsers? Transitions and animations are really nice and lovely but, for me, it’s the ability to do the things that calc() allows you to that deserves the spotlight and to be pushed for implementation.

Selector grouping with -moz-any()

The -moz-any() selector grouping has been introduced by Mozilla but it’s not part of any CSS specification (yet?); it’s currently only available on Firefox 4.

This would be especially useful with the way HTML5 outlines documents, where we can have any number of variations of several levels of headings within numerous types of containers (think sections within articles within sections…).

Here is a quick example (copied from the Mozilla blog post about the article) of how -moz-any() works. Instead of writing:

section section h1, section article h1, section aside h1,
section nav h1, article section h1, article article h1,
article aside h1, article nav h1, aside section h1,
aside article h1, aside aside h1, aside nav h1, nav section h1,
nav article h1, nav aside h1, nav nav h1, {
    font-size: 24px;
}

You could simply write:

-moz-any(section, article, aside, nav)
-moz-any(section, article, aside, nav) h1 {
    font-size: 24px;
}

Nice, huh?

More control over styling form elements

Some are of the opinion that form elements shouldn’t be styled at all, since a user might not recognise them as such if they don’t match the operating system’s controls. I partially agree: I’d rather put the choice in the hands of designers and expect them to be capable of deciding whether their particular design hampers or improves usability.

I would say the same idea applies to font-face: while some fear designers might go crazy and litter their web pages with dozens of different fonts, most welcome the freedom to use something other than Arial or Verdana.

There will always be someone who will take this freedom too far, but it would be useful if we could, for example, style the default Opera date picker:

<input type=""date"" />



or Safari’s slider control (think star movie ratings, for example):

<input type=""range"" min=""0"" max=""5"" step=""1"" value=""3"" />



Parent selector

I don’t think there is one CSS author out there who has never come across a case where he or she wished there was a parent selector. There have been many suggestions as to how this could work, but a variation of the child selector is usually the most popular:

article < h1 {
…
}

One can dream…

Flexible box layout

The Flexible Box Layout Module sounds a bit like magic: it introduces a new box model to CSS, allowing you to distribute and order boxes inside other boxes, and determine how the available space is shared.

Two of my favourite features of this new box model are:


	the ability to redistribute boxes in a different order from the markup
	the ability to create flexible layouts, where boxes shrink (or expand) to fill the available space


Let’s take a quick look at the second case. Imagine you have a three-column layout, where the first column takes up twice as much horizontal space as the other two:

<body>
        <section id=""main"">
        </section>
        <section id=""links"">
        </section>
        <aside>
        </aside>
</body>

With the flexible box model, you could specify it like this:

body {
    display: box;
    box-orient: horizontal;
}
#main {
    box-flex: 2;
}
#links {
    box-flex: 1;
}
aside {
    box-flex: 1;
}

If you decide to add a fourth column to this layout, there is no need to recalculate units or percentages, it’s as easy as that.

Browser support for this property is still in its early stages (Firefox and WebKit need their vendor prefixes), but we should start to see it being gradually introduced as more attention is drawn to it (I’m looking at you…). You can read a more comprehensive write-up about this property on the Mozilla developer blog.

It’s easy to understand why it’s harder to start playing with this module than with things like animations or other more decorative properties, which don’t really break your layouts when users don’t see them. But it’s important that we do, even if only in very experimental projects.

Nested selectors

Anyone who has never wished they could do something like the following in CSS, cast the first stone:

article {
    h1 { font-size: 1.2em; }
    ul { margin-bottom: 1.2em; }
}

Even though it can easily turn into a specificity nightmare and promote redundancy in your style sheets (if you abuse it), it’s easy to see how nested selectors could be useful. CSS compilers such as Less or Sass let you do this already, but not everyone wants or can use these compilers in their projects.

Every wish list has an item that could easily be dropped. In my case, I would say this is one that I would ditch first – it’s the least useful, and also the one that could cause more maintenance problems. But it could be nice.

Implementation of the ::marker pseudo-element

The CSS Lists module introduces the ::marker pseudo-element, that allows you to create custom list item markers. When an element’s display property is set to list-item, this pseudo-element is created.

Using the ::marker pseudo-element you could create something like the following:

Footnote 1:  Both John Locke and his father, Anthony Cooper, are
named after 17th- and 18th-century English philosophers; the real
Anthony Cooper was educated as a boy by the real John Locke.
Footnote 2:  Parts of the plane were used as percussion instruments
and can be heard in the soundtrack.

where the footnote marker is generated by the following CSS:

li::marker {
    content: ""Footnote "" counter(notes) "":"";
    text-align: left;
    width: 12em;
}
li {
    counter-increment: notes;
}

You can read more about how to use counters in CSS in my article from last year.

Bear in mind that the CSS Lists module is still a Working Draft and is listed as “Low priority”. I did say this wish list would start to grow more unrealistic closer to the end…

Variables

The sight of the word ‘variables’ may make some web designers shy away, but when you think of them applied to things such as repeated colours in your stylesheets, it’s easy to see how having variables available in CSS could be useful.

Think of a website where the main brand colour is applied to elements like the main text, headings, section backgrounds, borders, and so on. In a particularly large website, where the colour is repeated countless times in the CSS and where it’s important to keep the colour consistent, using variables would be ideal (some big websites are already doing this by using server-side technology).

Again, Less and Sass allow you to use variables in your CSS but, again, not everyone can (or wants to) use these.

If you are using Less, you could, for instance, set the font-family value in one variable, and simply call that variable later in the code, instead of repeating the complete font stack, like so:

@fontFamily: Calibri, ""Lucida Grande"", ""Lucida Sans Unicode"", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
body {
    font-family: @fontFamily;
}

Other features of these CSS compilers might also be useful, like the ability to ‘call’ a property value from another selector (accessors):

header {
    background: #000000;
}
footer {
    background: header['background'];
}

or the ability to define functions (with arguments), saving you from writing large blocks of code when you need to write something like, for example, a CSS gradient:

.gradient (@start:"""", @end:"""") {
    background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(@start), to(@end));
    background: -moz-linear-gradient(-90deg,@start,@end);
}
button {
    .gradient(#D0D0D0,#9F9F9F);
}

Standardised comments

Each CSS author has his or her own style for commenting their style sheets. While this isn’t a massive problem on smaller projects, where maybe only one person will edit the CSS, in larger scale projects, where dozens of hands touch the code, it would be nice to start seeing a more standardised way of commenting.

One attempt at creating a standard for CSS comments is CSSDOC, an adaptation of Javadoc (a documentation generator that extracts comments from Java source code into HTML). CSSDOC uses ‘DocBlocks’, a term borrowed from the phpDocumentor Project. A DocBlock is a human- and machine-readable block of data which has the following structure:

/**
 * Short description
 *
 * Long description (this can have multiple lines and contain <p> tags
 *
 * @tags (optional)
 */

CSSDOC includes a standard for documenting bug fixes and hacks, colours, versioning and copyright information, amongst other important bits of data.

I know this isn’t a CSS feature request per se; rather, it’s just me pointing you at something that is usually overlooked but that could contribute towards keeping style sheets easier to maintain and to hand over to new developers.

Final notes

I understand that if even some of these were implemented in browsers now, it would be a long time until all vendors were up to speed. But if we don’t talk about them and experiment with what’s available, then it will definitely never happen.

Why haven’t I mentioned better browser support for existing CSS3 properties? Because that would be the same as adding chocolate to your Christmas wish list – you don’t need to ask, everyone knows you want it.

The list could go on. There are dozens of other things I would love to see integrated in CSS or further developed. These are my personal favourites: some might be less useful than others, but I’ve wished for all of them at some point.

Part of the research I did while writing this article was asking some friends what they would add to their lists; other than a couple of items I already had in mine, everything else was different. I’m sure your list would be different too. So tell me, what’s on your CSS wish list?",2010,Inayaili de León Persson,inayailideleon,2010-12-03T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/my-css-wish-list/,code
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 limitations, as it might hinder my creativity. Now that you know my motivations to stick with Photoshop for the time being, let’s see how we can optimize this beast.

Optimize your Photoshop workspace

In Photoshop CS5 you have a few default workspace options to choose from which can be found at the top right in the Application Bar (Window > Application Bar).



You can set up your panels and palettes the way you want, starting from the ‘Design’ workspace option, and save this workspace for future web work. Here is how I have set up things for when I work on a website design:



I have the layers palette open, and I keep the other palettes collapsed. Sometimes, when space permits, I open them all. For designers who work both on print and web, I think it’s worthwhile to save a workspace for both, or for when you’re doing photo retouching.

Set up a grid

When you work a lot with Shape Layers like I do, it’s really helpful to enable the Grid (View > Show > Grid) in combination with Snap to Grid (View > Snap To > Grid). This way, your vector-based work will be pixel-sharp, as it will always snap to the grid, and so you don’t end up with blurry borders.



To set up your preferred grid, go to Preferences > Guides, Grids and Slices. A good setting is to use ‘Gridline Every 10 pixels’ and ‘Subdivision 10’. You can switch it on and off at any time using the shortcut Cmd/Ctrl + ’.



It might also help to turn on Smart Guides (View > Show > Smart Guides).

Another important tip for making sure your Shape Layer boxes and other shapes are perfectly aligned to the pixel grid when you draw them is to enable Snap to Pixels. This option can be enabled in the Application bar in the Geometry options dropdown menu when you select one of the shape tools from the toolbox.



Use Shape Layers

To keep your design as flexible as possible, it’s a good thing to use Shape Layers wherever you can as they are scalable. I use them when I design for the iPhone. All my icons, buttons, backgrounds, illustrative graphics – they are all either Smart Objects placed from Illustrator, or Shape Layers. This way, the design is scalable for the retina display.



Use Smart Objects

Among the things I like a lot in Photoshop are Smart Objects. Smart Objects preserve an image’s source content with all its original characteristics, enabling you to perform non-destructive editing to the layer. For me, this is the ideal way of making my design flexible.



For example, a lot of elements are created in Illustrator and are purely vector-based. Placing these elements in Photoshop as Smart Objects (via copy and paste, or dragging from Illustrator into Photoshop) will keep them vector-based and scalable at all times without loss of quality.



Another way you could use Smart Objects is whenever you have repeating elements; for example, if you have a stream or list of repeating items. You could, for instance, create one, two or three different items (for the sake of randomness), make each one a Smart Object, and repeat them to create the list. Then, when you have to update, you need only change the Smart Object, and the update will be automatically applied in all its linked instances.

Turning photos into Smart Objects before you resize them is also worth considering – you never know when you’ll need that same photo just a bit bigger. It keeps things more flexible, as you leave room to resize the image at a later stage. I use this in combination with the Smart Filters a lot, as it gives me such great flexibility.



I usually use Smart Objects as well for the main sections of a web page, which are repeated across different pages of a site. So, for elements such as the header, footer and sidebar, it can be handy for bigger projects that are constantly evolving, where you have to create a lot of different pages in Photoshop.

You could save a template page that has the main sections set up as Smart Objects, always in their latest version. Each time you need to create new page, you can start from that template file. If you need to update an existing page because the footer (or sidebar, or header) has been updated, you can drag the updated Smart Object into this page. Although, do I wish Photoshop made it possible to have Smart Objects live as separate files, which are then linked to my different pages. Then, whenever I update the Smart Object, the pages are automatically updated next time I open the file. This is how linked files work in InDesign and Illustrator when you place a external image.

Use Layer Comps

In some situations, using Layer Comps can come in handy. I try to use them when the design consists of different states; for example, if there are hidden and show states of certain content, such as when content is shown after clicking a certain button. It can be useful to create a Layer Comp for each state. So, when you switch between the two Layer Comps, you’re switching between the two states.



It’s OK to move or hide content in each of these states, as well as apply different layer styles. I find this particularly useful when I need to save separate JPEG versions of each state to show to the client, instead of going over all the eye icons in the layers palette to turn the layers’ visibility on or off.



Create a set of custom colour swatches

I tend to use a distinct colour Swatches palette for each project I work on, by saving a separate Swatches palette in project’s folder (as an .ase file). You can do this through the palette’s dropdown menu, choosing Save Swatches for Exchange.



Selecting this option gives you the flexibility to load this palette in other Adobe applications like Illustrator, InDesign or Fireworks. This way, you have the colours of any particular project at hand. I name each colour, using the hexadecimal values.



Loading, saving or changing the view of the Swatches palette can be done via the palette’s dropdown menu. My preferred view is ‘Small List’ so I can see the hexadecimal values or other info I have added in the description.

I do wish Photoshop had the option of loading several different Styles palettes, so I could have two or more of them open at the same time, but each as a separate palette. This would be handy whenever I switch to another project, as I’m usually working on more than one project in a day. At the moment, you can only add a set of colours to the palette that is already open, which is frustrating and inefficient if you need to update the palette of a project separately.

Create a set of custom Styles

Just like saving a Swatches palette, I also always save the styles I apply in the Styles palette as a separate Styles file in the project’s folder when I work on a website design or design for iPhone/iPad. During the design process, I can save it each time styles are added. Again, though, it would be great if we could have different Styles palettes open at the same time.



Use a scratch file

What I also find particularly timesaving, when working on a large project, is using some kind of scratch file. By that, I mean a file that has elements in place that you reuse a lot in the general design. Think of buttons, icons and so on, that you need in every page or screen design. This is great for both web design work and iPad/iPhone work. 



Use the slice tool

This might not be something you think of at first, because you probably associate this way of working with ‘old-school’ table-based techniques. Still, you can apply your slice any way you want, keeping your way of working in mind. Just think about it for a second. If you use the slice tool, and you give each slice its proper filename, you don’t have to worry about it when you need to do updates on the slice or image. Photoshop will remember what the image of that slice is called and which ‘Save for Web’ export settings you’ve used for it. You can also export multiple slices all at once, or export only the ones you need using ‘Save selected slices’.



I hope this list of optimization tips was useful, and that they will help you improve and enjoy your time in Photoshop. That is, until the ultimate web design application makes its appearance. Somebody is building this as we speak, right?",2010,Veerle Pieters,veerlepieters,2010-12-10T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/optimize-your-web-design-workflow/,process
218,Put Yourself in a Corner,"Some backstory, and a shameful confession

For the first couple years of high school I was one of those jerks who made only the minimal required effort in school. Strangely enough, how badly I behaved in a class was always in direct proportion to how skilled I was in the subject matter. In the subjects where I was confident that I could pass without trying too hard, I would give myself added freedom to goof off in class.

Because I was a closeted lit-nerd, I was most skilled in English class. I’d devour and annotate required reading over the weekend, I knew my biblical and mythological allusions up and down, and I could give you a postmodern interpretation of a text like nobody’s business. But in class, I’d sit in the back and gossip with my friends, nap, or scribble patterns in the margins of my textbooks. I was nonchalant during discussion, I pretended not to listen during lectures. I secretly knew my stuff, so I did well enough on tests, quizzes, and essays. But I acted like an ass, and wasn’t getting the most I could out of my education.

The day of humiliation, but also epiphany

One day in Ms. Kaney’s AP English Lit class, I was sitting in the back doodling. An earbud was dangling under my sweater hood, attached to the CD player (remember those?) sitting in my desk. Because of this auditory distraction, the first time Ms. Kaney called my name, I barely noticed. I definitely heard her the second time, when she didn’t call my name so much as roar it. I can still remember her five feet frame stomping across the room and grabbing an empty desk. It screamed across the worn tile as she slammed it next to hers. She said, “This is where you sit now.” My face gets hot just thinking about it.

I gathered my things, including the CD player (which was now impossible to conceal), and made my way up to the newly appointed Seat of Shame. There I sat, with my back to the class, eye-to-eye with Ms. Kaney. From my new vantage point I couldn’t see my friends, or the clock, or the window. All I saw were Ms. Kaney’s eyes, peering at me over her reading glasses while I worked. In addition to this punishment, I was told that from now on, not only would I participate in class discussions, but I would serve detention with her once a week until an undetermined point in the future.

During these detentions, Ms. Kaney would give me new books to read, outside the curriculum, and added on to my normal homework. They ranged from classics to modern novels, and she read over my notes on each book. We’d discuss them at length after class, and I grew to value not only our private discussions, but the ones in class as well. After a few weeks, there wasn’t even a question of this being punishment. It was heaven, and I was more productive than ever.

To the point

Please excuse this sentimental story. It’s not just about honoring a teacher who cared enough to change my life, it’s really about sharing a lesson. The most valuable education Ms. Kaney gave me had nothing to do with literature. She taught me that I (and perhaps other people who share my special brand of crazy) need to be put in a corner to flourish. When we have physical and mental constraints applied, we  accomplish our best work.

For those of you still reading, now seems like a good time to insert a pre-emptive word of mediation. Many of you, maybe all of you, are self-disciplined enough that you don’t require the rigorous restrictions I use to maximize productivity. Also, I know many people who operate best in a stimulating and open environment. I would advise everyone to seek and execute techniques that work best for them. But, for those of you who share my inclination towards daydreams and digressions, perhaps you’ll find something useful in the advice to follow.

In which I pretend to be Special Agent Olivia Dunham

Now that I’m an adult, and no longer have Ms. Kaney to reign me in, I have to find ways to put myself in the corner. By rejecting distraction and shaping an environment designed for intense focus, I’m able to achieve improved productivity.

Lately I’ve been obsessed with the TV show Fringe, a sci-fi series about an FBI agent and her team of genius scientists who save the world (no, YOU’RE a nerd). There’s a scene in the show where the primary character has to delve into her subconscious to do extraordinary things, and she accomplishes this by immersing herself in a sensory deprivation tank. The premise is this: when enclosed in a space devoid of sound, smell, or light, she will enter a new plane of consciousness wherein she can tap into new levels of perception.

This might sound a little nuts, but to me this premise has some real-world application. When I am isolated from distraction, and limited to only the task at hand, I’m able to be productive on a whole new level. Since I can’t actually work in an airtight iron enclosure devoid of input, I find practical ways to create an interruption-free environment.

Since I work from home, many of my methods for coping with distractions wouldn’t be necessary for my office-bound counterpart. However for some of you 9-to-5-ers, the principles will still apply.

Consider your visual input

First, I have to limit my scope to the world I can (and need to) affect. In the largest sense, this means closing my curtains to the chaotic scene of traffic, birds, the post office, a convenience store, and generally lovely weather that waits outside my window. When the curtains are drawn and I’m no longer surrounded by this view, my sphere is reduced to my desk, my TV, and my cat. Sometimes this step alone is enough to allow me to focus. 

But, my visual input can be whittled down further still. For example, the desk where I usually keep my laptop is littered with twelve owl figurines, a globe, four books, a three-pound weight, and various nerdy paraphernalia (hard drives, Wacom tablets, unnecessary bluetooth accessories, and so on). It’s not so much a desk as a dumping ground for wacky flea market finds and impulse technology buys. Therefore, in addition to this Official Desk, I have an adult version of Ms. Kaney’s Seat of Shame. It’s a rusty old student’s desk I picked up at the Salvation Army, almost an exact replica of the model Ms. Kaney dragged across the classroom all those years ago.  This tiny reproduction Seat of Shame is literally in a corner, where my only view is a blank wall. When I truly need to focus, this is where I take refuge, with only a notebook and a pencil (and occasionally an iPad).

Find out what works for your ears

Even from my limited sample size of two people, I know there are lots of different ways to cope with auditory distraction. I prefer silence when focused on independent work, and usually employ some form of a white noise generator. I’ve yet to opt for the fancy ‘real’ white noise machines; instead, I use a desktop fan or our allergy filter machine. This is usually sufficient to block out the sounds of the dishwasher and the cat, which allows me to think only about the task of hand.

My boyfriend, the other half of my extensive survey, swears by another method. He  calls it The Wall of Sound, and it’s basically an intense blast of raucous music streamed directly into his head. The outcome of his technique is really the same as mine; he’s blocking out unexpected auditory input. If you can handle the grating sounds of noisy music while working, I suggest you give The Wall of Sound a try.

Don’t count the minutes

When I sat in the original Seat of Shame in lit class, I could no longer see the big classroom clock slowly ticking away the seconds until lunch. Without the marker of time, the class period often flew by. The same is true now when I work; the less aware of time I am, the less it feels like time is passing too quickly or slowly, and the more I can focus on the task (not how long it takes). 

Nowadays, to assist in my effort to forget the passing of time, I sometimes put a sticky note over the clock on my monitor. If I’m writing, I’ll use an app like WriteRoom, which blocks out everything but a simple text editor. 

There are situations when it’s not advisable to completely lose track of time. If I’m working on a project with an hourly rate and a tight scope, or if I need to be on time to a meeting or call, I don’t want to lose myself in the expanse of the day. In these cases, I’ll set an alarm that lets me know it’s time to reign myself back in (or on some days, take a shower).

Put yourself in a mental corner, too

When Ms. Kaney took action and forced me to step up my game, she had the insight to not just change things physically, but to challenge me mentally as well. She assigned me reading material outside the normal coursework, then upped the pressure by requiring detailed reports of the material. While this additional stress was sometimes uncomfortable, it pushed me to work harder than I would have had there been less of a demand. Just as there can be freedom in the limitations of a distraction-free environment, I’d argue there is liberty in added mental constraints as well.

Deadlines as a constraint

Much has been written about the role of deadlines in the creative process, and they seem to serve different functions in different cases. I find that deadlines usually act as an important constraint and, without them, it would be nearly impossible for me to ever consider a project finished. There are usually limitless ways to improve upon the work I do and, if there’s no imperative for me to be done at a certain point, I will revise ad infinitum. (Hence, the personal site redesign that will never end – Coming Soon, Forever!). But if I have a clear deadline in mind, there’s a point when the obsessive tweaking has to stop. I reach a stage where I have to gather up the nerve to launch the thing.

Putting the pro in procrastination

Sometimes I’ve found that my tendency to procrastinate can help my productivity. (Ducks, as half the internet throws things at her.) I understand the reasons why procrastination can be harmful, and why it’s usually a good idea to work diligently and evenly towards a goal. I try to divide my projects up in a practical way, and sometimes I even pull it off. But for those tasks where you work aimlessly and no focus comes, or you find that every other to-do item is more appealing, sometimes you’re forced to bring it together at the last moment. And sometimes, this environment of stress is a formula for magic. Often when I’m down to the wire and have no choice but to produce, my mind shifts towards a new level of clarity. There’s no time to endlessly browse for inspiration, or experiment with convoluted solutions that lead nowhere.

Obviously a life lived perpetually on the edge of a deadline would be a rather stressful one, so it’s not a state of being I’d advocate for everyone, all the time. But every now and then, the work done when I’m down to the wire is my best.

Keep one toe outside your comfort zone

When I’m choosing new projects to take on, I often seek out work that involves an element of challenge. Whether it’s a design problem that will require some creative thinking, or a coding project that lends itself to using new technology like HTML5, I find a manageable level of difficulty to be an added bonus. The tension that comes from learning a new skill or rethinking an old standby is a useful constraint, as it keeps the work interesting, and ensures that I continue learning.

There you have it

Well, I think I’ve spilled most of my crazy secrets for forcing my easily distracted brain to focus. As with everything we web workers do, there are an infinite number of ways to encourage productivity. I hope you’ve found a few of these to be helpful, and please share your personal techniques in the comments. Have a happy and productive new year!",2010,Meagan Fisher,meaganfisher,2010-12-20T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/put-yourself-in-a-corner/,process
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.

Physics

Understanding the physics of a situation is key to creating convincing animation, even if your animation seeks to defy conventional physics. Isaac Newton’s first law of motion’s_laws_of_motion states, “Every body remains in a state of rest or uniform motion (constant velocity) unless it is acted upon by an external unbalanced force.” Once a force acts upon an object, the object’s shape can change accordingly, depending on the strength of the force and the mass of the object. Another nugget of wisdom from Halas and Whitaker:


	All objects in nature have their own weight, construction, and degree of flexibility, and therefore each behaves in its own individual way when a force acts upon it. This behavior, a combination of position and timing, is the basis of animation. The basic question which an animator is continually asking himself is this: “What will happen to this object when a force acts upon it?” And the success of his animation largely depends on how well he answers this question.


In animating with CSS3 and JavaScript, keep physics in mind. How ‘heavy’ is the element you’re interacting with? What kind of force created the action? A gentle nudge? A forceful shove? These subtleties will add a sense of realism to your animations and make them much more believable to your users.

Misdirection

Magicians often use misdirection to get their audience to focus on one thing rather than another. They fool us into thinking something happened that actually didn’t.

Animation is the same, especially on a screen. By changing the arrangement of pixels on screen at a fast enough rate, your eyes fool your mind into thinking an object is actually in motion. 

Another important component of misdirecting in animation is the use of multiple objects. Try to recall a cartoon where a character vanishes. More often, the character makes some sort of exaggerated motion (this is called anticipation) then disappears, and a puff a smoke follows. That smoke is an extra element, but it goes a long way into make you believe that character actually disappeared.

Very rarely does a vanishing character’s opacity simply go from one hundred per cent to zero. That’s not believable. So why do we do it with <div>s?

Armed with the ammunition of metaphors and misdirection, let’s code an example.

Shake, rattle, and roll

(These demos require at least a basic understanding of jQuery and CSS3. Run away if your’re afraid, or brush up on CSS animation and resources for learning jQuery. Also, these demos use WebKit-specific features and are best viewed in the latest version of Safari, so performance in other browsers may vary.)

We often see the design pattern of clicking a link to reveal content. Our “first demo”:”/examples/2010/real-animation/demo1/ shows us exactly that. It uses jQuery’s “ slideDown()”:http://api.jquery.com/slideDown/ method, as many instances do.

But what force acted on the <div> that caused it to open? Did pressing the button unlatch some imaginary hook? Did it activate an unlocking sequence with some gears?

Take 2

Our second demo is more explicit about what happens: the button fell on the <div> and shook its content loose. Here’s how it’s done. 

function clickHandler(){
	$('#button').addClass('animate');
	return false;
}

Clicking the link adds a class of animate to our button. That class has the following CSS associated with it:

<style>
	.animate {
		-webkit-animation-name: ANIMATE;
		-webkit-animation-duration: 0.25s;
		-webkit-animation-iteration-count: 1;
		-webkit-animation-timing-function: ease-in;
	}
	@-webkit-keyframes ANIMATE {
		from {
		top: 72px;
		}
		to {
			top: 112px;
		}
	}
</style>

In our keyframe definition, we’ve specified from and to states. This is great, because we can be explicit about how an object starts and finishes moving. 

What’s also extra handy is that these CSS keyframes broadcast events that you can react to with JavaScript. In this example, we’re listening to the webkitAnimationEnd event and opening the <div> only when the sequence is complete. Here’s that code.

function attachAnimationEventHandlers(){
	var wrap = document.getElementById('wrap');
	wrap.addEventListener('webkitAnimationEnd', function($e) {
		switch($e.animationName){
			case ""ANIMATE"" :
			openMain();
			break;
			default:
		}
	}, false);
}
function openMain(){
	$('#main .inner').slideDown('slow');
}

(For more info on handling animation events, check out the documentation at the Safari Reference Library.)

Take 3

The problem with the previous demo is that the subtleties of timing aren’t evident. It still feels a bit choppy.

For our third demo, we’ll use percentages instead of keywords so that we can insert as many points as we need to communicate more realistic timing. The percentages allow us to add the keys to well-timed animation: anticipation, hold, release, and reaction. 

<style>
	@-webkit-keyframes ANIMATE {
		0% {
			top: 72px;
		}
		40% { /* anticipation */
			top: 57px;
		}
		70% { /* hold */
			top: 56px;
		}
		80% { /* release */
			top: 112px;
		}
		100% { /* return */
			top: 72px;
		}
	}
</style>

Take 4

The button animation is starting to feel much better, but the reaction of the <div> opening seems a bit slow.

This fourth demo uses jQuery’s delay() method to time the opening precisely when we want it. Since we know the button’s animation is one second long and its reaction starts at eighty per cent of that, that puts our delay at 800ms (eighty per cent of one second). However, here’s a little pro tip: let’s start the opening at 750ms instead. The extra fifty milliseconds makes it feel more like the opening is a reaction to the exact hit of the button. Instead of listening for the webkitAnimationEnd event, we can start the opening as soon as the button is clicked, and the movement plays on the specified delay.

function clickHandler(){
	$('#button').addClass('animate');
	openMain();
	return false;
}
function openMain(){
	$('#main .inner').delay(750).slideDown('slow');
}

Take 5

We can tweak the timing of that previous animation forever, but that’s probably as close as we’re going to get to realistic animation with CSS and JavaScript. However, for some extra sauce, we could relegate the whole animation in our final demo to a video sequence which includes more nuances and extra elements for misdirection.

Here’s the basis of video replacement. Add a <video> element to the page and adjust its opacity to zero. Once the button is clicked, fade the button out and start playing the video. Once the video is finished playing, fade it out and bring the button back.

function clickHandler(){
	if($('#main .inner').is(':hidden')){
		$('#button').fadeTo(100, 0);
		$('#clickVideo').fadeTo(100, 1, function(){
			var clickVideo = document.getElementById('clickVideo');
			clickVideo.play();
			setTimeout(removeVideo, 2400);
			openMain();
		});
	}
	return false;
}
function removeVideo(){
	$('#button').fadeTo(500, 1);
	$('#clickVideo').fadeOut('slow');
}
function openMain(){
	$('#main .inner').delay(1100).slideDown('slow');
}

Wrapping up

I’m no JavaScript expert by any stretch. I’m sure a lot of you scripting wizards out there could write much cleaner and more efficient code, but I hope this gives you an idea of the theory behind more realistic motion with the technology we’re using most. This is just one model of creating more convincing animation, but you can create countless variations of this, including…


	Exporting <video> animations in 3-D animation tools or 2-D animation tools like Flash or After Effects
	Using <canvas> or SVG instead of <video>
	Employing specific JavaScript animation frameworks
	Making use of all the powerful properties of CSS Transforms and CSS Animation
	Trying out emerging CSS3 animation tools like Sencha Animator


If it wasn’t already apparent, these demos show an exaggerated example and probably aren’t practical in a lot of environments. However, there are a handful of great sites out there that honor animation techniques—metaphor, physics, and misdirection, among others—like Benjamin De Cock’s vCard, 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web by Fantasy Interactive, and the Nike Snowboarding site by Ian Coyle and HEGA. They’re wonderful testaments to what you can do to aid interaction for users.

My goal was to show you the ‘why’ and the ‘how.’ Your charge is to discern the ‘where’ and the ‘when.’ Happy animating!",2010,Dan Mall,danmall,2010-12-15T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/real-animation-using-javascript-css3-and-html5-video/,code
229,Sketching to Communicate,"As a web designer I’ve always felt that I’d somehow cheated the system, having been absent on the day God handed out the ability to draw. I didn’t study fine art, I don’t have a natural talent to effortlessly knock out a realistic bowl of fruit beside a water jug, and yet somehow I’ve still managed to blag my way this far. I’m sure many of you may feel the same.

I had no intention of becoming an artist, but to have enough skill to convey an idea in a drawing would be useful. Instead, my inadequate instrument would doodle drunkenly across the page leaving a web of unintelligible paths instead of the refined illustration I’d seen in my mind’s eye. This – and the natural scrawl of my handwriting – is fine (if somewhat frustrating) when it’s for my eyes only but, when sketching to communicate a concept to a client, such amateur art would be offered with a sense of embarrassment. So when I had the opportunity to take part in some sketching classes whilst at Clearleft I jumped at the chance.

Why sketch?

In UX workshops early on in a project’s life, sketching is a useful and efficient way to convey and record ideas. It’s disposable and inexpensive, but needn’t look amateur. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a well executed sketch of how you’ll combine funny YouTube videos with elephants to make Lolephants.com could be worth millions in venture capital. Actually, that’s not bad… ;-)

Although (as you will see) the basics of sketching are easy to master, the kudos you will receive from clients for being a ‘proper designer’ makes it worthwhile!

Where to begin?

Start by not buying yourself a sketch pad. If you were the type of child who ripped the first page out of a school exercise book and started again if you made even a tiny mistake (you’re not alone!), Wreck This Journal may offer a helping hand. Practicing on plain A4 paper instead of any ‘special’ notepad will make the process a whole lot easier, no matter how deliciously edible those Moleskines look.

Do buy yourself a black fine-liner pen and a set of grey Pro Markers for shading. These pens are unlike any you will have used before, and look like blended watercolours once the ink is dry. Although multiple strokes won’t create unsightly blotches of heavy ink on the page, they will go right through your top sheet so always remember to keep a rough sheet in the second position as an ink blotter.

 photo by Tom Harrison

Don’t buy pencils to sketch with, as they lack the confidence afforded by the heavy black ink strokes of marker pens and fine-liners.

If you’re going to be sketching with clients then invest in some black markers and larger sheets of paper. At the risk of sounding like a stationery brand whore, Sharpies are ideal, and these comedy-sized Post-Its do the job far better than cheaper, less sticky alternatives. Although they’re thicker than most standard paper, be sure to double-layer them if you’re writing on them on a wall, unless you fancy a weekend redecorating your client’s swanky boardroom.

The best way to build confidence and improve your sketching technique is, obviously, to practise. Reading this article will be of no help unless you repeat the following examples several times each. Go grab a pen and some paper now, and notice how you improve within even a short period of time.

Sketching web UI

Most elements of any website can be drawn as a combination of geometric shapes.

 photo by Nathanael Boehm

Circles

To draw a circle, get in position and start by resting your hand on the page and making the circular motion a few times without putting pen to paper. As you lower your pen whilst continuing the motion, you should notice the resulting shape is more regular than it otherwise would have been.

Squares and rectangles

Draw one pair of parallel lines first, followed by the others to complete the shapes. Slightly overlap the ends of the lines to make corners feel more solid than if you were to leave gaps. If you’re drawing a container, always draw the contents first, that way it won’t be a squash to fit them in. If you’re drawing a grid (of thumbnails, for instance), draw all parallel lines first as a series of long dashes to help keep line lengths and angles consistent.



Shadows

To lift elements from the page for emphasis, add a subtle shadow with a grey marker. For the most convincing look, assume the light source to be at the top left of the page – the shadow should simply be a thick grey line along the bottom and up the right edge of your shape. If the shape is irregular, the shadow should follow its outline. This is a good way to emphasise featured items, speech bubbles, form buttons, and so on.



Sketching ideas

Arrows

Use arrows to show steps in a process or direction of movement. Giving shadows a 3-D feel, or adding a single colour, will help separate them from the rest of the sketch.



Faces

Start by drawing the circle. The direction of the nose (merely a point) indicates the direction of the person’s gaze. The eyes and mouth show emotion: more open and curvy for happy thoughts; more closed and jagged for angry thoughts. Try out a few shapes and see what emotions they convey.



People

Remember, we’re aiming for communication rather than realism here. A stick man would be fine. Give him a solid body, as shown in this example, and it becomes easier to pose him.



I know you think hands are hard, but they’re quite important to convey some ideas, and for our purposes we don’t need to draw hands with any detail. An oval with a stick does the job of a pointing hand. Close-ups might need more fingers showing, but still don’t require any degree of realism.

Signage

Don’t be afraid to use words. We’re sketching to communicate, so if the easiest way to show an office block is a building with a big ‘office’ sign on the roof, that’s fine!



Labels

Likewise, feel free to label interactions. Use upper-case letters for legibility and slightly angle the horizontal bars upwards to create a more positive feel.

Clichés

Clichés are your friend! Someone’s having an idea? Light bulb above the head. Computer’s crashed? Cloud of smoke with “$£%*!”





It’s good to practise regularly. Try applying these principles to still life, too. Look around you now and draw the cup on the table, or the books on the shelf. Think of it as a combination of shapes and aim for symbolism rather than realism, and it’s not as hard as you’d think.

I hope this has given you the confidence to give it a shot, and the ability to at least not be mortified with the results!

Tip: If you’re involving clients in design games like Leisa Reichelt’s ‘Design Consequences’ it may be wise to tone down the quality of your drawings at that point so they don’t feel intimidated. Remember, it’s important for them to feel at ease with the idea of wireframing in front of you and their colleagues, no matter how bad their line work.

For more information see davegrayinfo.com – Dave Gray taught me everything I know :-)",2010,Paul Annett,paulannett,2010-12-19T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/sketching-to-communicate/,business
219,Speed Up Your Site with Delayed Content,"Speed remains one of the most important factors influencing the success of any website, and the first rule of performance (according to Yahoo!) is reducing the number of HTTP requests. Over the last few years we’ve seen techniques like sprites and combo CSS/JavaScript files used to reduce the number of HTTP requests. But there’s one area where large numbers of HTTP requests are still a fact of life: the small avatars attached to the comments on articles like this one.

Avatars

Many sites like 24 ways use a fantastic service called Gravatar to provide user images. As a user, you can sign up to Gravatar, give them your e-mail address, and upload an image to represent you. Sites can then include your image by generating a one way hash of your e-mail address and using that to build an image URL. For example, the markup for the comments on this page looks something like this:

<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 everything else is done. That way we can give the impression that our site has loaded quickly even if some requests are still happening in the background.

Delaying image loading

The first problem we find is that there’s no way to prevent Internet Explorer, Chrome or Safari from loading an image without removing it from the HTML itself. Tricks like removing the images on the fly with JavaScript don’t work, as the browser has usually started requesting the images before we get a chance to stop it.

Removing the images from the HTML means that people without JavaScript enabled in their browser won’t see avatars. As Drew mentioned at the start of the month, this can affect a large number of people, and we can’t completely ignore them. But most sites already have a textual name attached to each comment and the avatars are just a visual enhancement. In most cases it’s OK if some of our users don’t see them, especially if it speeds up the experience for the other 98%.

Removing the images from the source of our page also means we’ll need to put them back at some point, so we need to keep a record of which images need to be requested. All Gravatar images have the same URL format; the only thing that changes is the e-mail hash. Storing this is a great use of HTML5 data attributes.

HTML5 data what?

Data attributes are a new feature in HTML5. The latest version of the spec says:


	A custom data attribute is an attribute in no namespace whose name starts with the string “data-”, has at least one character after the hyphen, is XML-compatible, and contains no characters in the range U+0041 to U+005A (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A to LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z).
[…]
Custom data attributes are intended to store custom data private to the page or application, for which there are no more appropriate attributes or elements. These attributes are not intended for use by software that is independent of the site that uses the attributes.


In other words, they’re attributes of an HTML element that start with “data-” which you can use to share data with scripts running on your site. They’re great for adding small bits of metadata that don’t fit into an existing markup pattern the way microformats do.

Let’s see this in action

Take a look at the markup for comments again:

<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>

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

<div>
	<h4><a href=""http://allinthehead.com/"" data-gravatar-hash=""13734b0cb20708f79e730809c29c3c48"">
    Drew McLellan
	</a></h4>
	<p>This is a great article!</p>
</div>

Once we’ve done this, we’ll need a small bit of JavaScript to find all these attributes, and replace them with images after the page has loaded. Here’s an example using jQuery:

$(window).load(function() {
	$('a[data-gravatar-hash]').prepend(function(index){
		var hash = $(this).attr('data-gravatar-hash')
		return '<img width=""100"" height=""100"" alt="""" src=""http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?size=100&gravatar_id=' + hash + '"">'
	})
})

This code waits until everything on the page is loaded, then uses jQuery.prepend to insert an image into every link containing a data-gravatar-hash attribute. It’s short and relatively simple, but in tests it reduced the rendering time of a sample page from over three seconds to well under one.

Finishing touches

We still need to consider the appearance of the page before the avatars have loaded. When our script adds extra content to the page it will cause a browser reflow, which is visually annoying. We can avoid this by using CSS to reserve some space for each image before it’s inserted into the HTML:

#comments div {
	padding-left: 110px;
	min-height: 100px;
	position: relative;
}
#comments div h4 img {
	display: block;
	position: absolute;
	top: 0;
	left: 0;
}

In a real world example, we’ll also find that the HTML for a comment is more varied as many users don’t provide a web page link. We can make small changes to our JavaScript and CSS to handle this case.

Put this all together and you get this example.

Taking this idea further

There’s no reason to limit this technique to sites using Gravatar; we can use similar code to delay loading any images that don’t need to be present immediately. For example, this year’s redesigned Flickr photo page uses a “data-defer-src” attribute to describe any image that doesn’t need to be loaded straight away, including avatars and map tiles.

You also don’t have to limit yourself to loading the extra resources once the page loads. You can get further bandwidth savings by waiting until the user takes an action before downloading extra assets. Amazon has taken this tactic to the extreme on its product pages – extra content is loaded as you scroll down the page.

So next time you’re building a page, take a few minutes to think about which elements are peripheral and could be delayed to allow more important content to appear as quickly as possible.",2010,Paul Hammond,paulhammond,2010-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/speed-up-your-site-with-delayed-content/,ux
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. The syntax for art, architecture, film, and furniture, industrial and graphic design (think Bauhaus and the Swiss style perhaps), this language urges us to become fluent if we aim for a more powerful dialogue with our audience.

 Figure 1: Structures (clockwise from top-left): Informal; Formal; Active; Visible.

The greatest creative minds our world has produced could understand some or all of this language. Line and point, form and shape. Abstract objects. Formal and informal structures. Visual distribution. Balance, composition and the multitudinous approaches to symmetry. Patterns and texture. Movement and paths. Repetition, rhythm and frequency. Colour theory. Whitespace and the pause. The list goes on.

The genius we perceive in our creative heroes is often a composite of experience, trial and error, conviction, intuition – even accident – but rarely does great work arise without an initial understanding of the nuts and bolts that help communicate an idea or emotion.

Our world of interactivity

As web designers, our connection with this language is most evident in graphic design. With more technological ease and power comes the responsibility to understand, wisely use, and be able to justify many of our decisions. We have moved beyond the scope of print into a world of interactivity, but we shouldn’t let go of any established principles without good reason.

 Figure 2: Understanding movement of objects in any direction along a defined path.

For example, immersion in this visual language can improve our implementation of CSS3 and JavaScript behaviour. With CSS3, we’ve seen a resurgence in CSS experimentation, some of which has been wonderful, but much of it has appeared clumsy. In the race to make something spin, twist, flip or fly from one corner to another, the designer sometimes fails to think about the true movement they seek to emulate. What forces are supposedly affecting this movement? What is the expected path of this transition and is it being respected?

Stopping to think about what is really supposed to be happening on the page compels us to use complex animations, diagrams and rotations more carefully. It helps us to better understand paths and movement.

 Figure 3: Repetition can occur through variations in colour, shape, direction, and so on.

It can only be of greater benefit to be mindful of symmetries, depth, affordance, juxtaposition, balance, economy and reduction. A deeper understanding of basic structures can help us to say more with sketches, wireframes, layouts and composition. We’ve all experimented with grids and rhythm but, to truly benefit from these long-established principles, we are duty-bound to understand their possibilities more than we will by simply leveraging a free framework or borrowing some CSS.

Design is not a science, but…

Threading through all of this is what we have learned from science, and what it teaches us of the human brain. This visual language matters because technology changes but, for the most part, people don’t. For centuries, we humans have received and interpreted information in much the same way. Understanding more of how we perceive meaning can help designers make smarter decisions, and call on visual language to underpin these decisions. It is our responsibility as designers to be aware of mental models, mapping, semiotics, sensory experience and human emotion.

Design itself is not a science, but the appropriate use of visual language and scientific understanding exposes the line between effective and awkward, between communicative and mute. By strengthening our mental and analytical approach to what is often done arbitrarily or “because it feels right”, we simply become better designers.

A visual language for the web

So, I’ve outlined numerous starting points and areas worthy of deeper investigation, and hopefully you’re eager to do some research. However, I’ve mostly discussed established ideas and principles that we as web designers can learn from. It’s my belief that our community has a shared responsibility to expand this visual language as it applies to the ebb and flow of the web. Indulge me as I conclude with a related tangent.

In defining a visual language specifically for the web, we must continue to mature. The old powerfully influences the new, but we must intelligently expand the visual language of masterful work and articulate what is uniquely ours.

For example, phrases like Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design aren’t merely elegant, they describe a new way of thinking and working, of communicating about designs and interaction patterns. These phrases broaden our vocabulary and are immediately adopted by designers worldwide, in both conversation and execution.

Our legacy

Our new definitions should flex and not be tied to specific devices or methods which fade away or morph with time. Our legacy is perhaps more about robust and flexible patterns and systems than it is about specific devices or programming languages.

 Figure 4: As web designers, we should think about systems, not pages.

The established principles we adopt and whatever new ways of thinking we define should slip neatly into a wider philosophy about our approach to web design. We’re called, as a community, to define what is distinctive about the visual language of the web, create this vocabulary, this dialect that resonates with us and moves us forward as we tackle each day’s work. Let’s give it some thought.

Further reading

This is my immediate “go-to” list of books that I bullishly believe all web designers should own, but there is so much more out there to read. Sadly, many great texts relating to this stuff are often out of print. Feel free to share your recommendations.


	Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
	Christian Leborg, Visual Grammar
	Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
	David Crow, Visible Signs
	William Lidwell and Katrina Holden, Universal Principles of Design",2010,Simon Collison,simoncollison,2010-12-16T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/the-articulate-web-designer-of-tomorrow/,process
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 missed until now.

Planning design reviews

Present design ideas face-to-face, or at least via video conference. Asynchronous methods like e-mail and Basecamp are slow, easily ignored, and deny you the opportunity to guide your colleagues through your work. In person, you profit from both the well-known benefits of non-verbal communication, and the chance to immediately respond to questions and elaborate on rationale.

Be sure to watch the numbers at your design review sessions, however. Any more than a handful of attendees and the meeting could quickly spiral into fruitless debate. Ask your project sponsor to appoint a representative to speak on behalf of each business function, rather than inviting too many cooks.

Where possible, show your work in its native format. Photocopy hand-drawn sketches to reinforce their disposability (the defining quality of a sketch) and encourage others to scribble their own thoughts on top. Show digital deliverables – wireframes, design concepts, rich interactions – on screen. The experience of a design is very different on screen than on paper. A monitor has appropriate dimensions and viewport size, presenting an accurate picture of the design’s visual hierarchy, and putting interactive elements in the right context. On paper, a link is merely underlined text. On screen, it is another step along the user’s journey.

Don’t waste time presenting multiple concepts. Not only is it costly to work up multiple concepts to the level required for fair appraisal, but the practice demonstrates a sorry abdication of responsibility. Designers should be custodians of design. Asking for feedback on multiple designs turns the critique process into a beauty pageant, relinquishing a designer’s authority. Instead of rational choices that meet genuine user and business needs, you may be stuck with a Frankensteinian monstrosity, assembled from incompatible parts: “This header plus the whizzy bit from Version C”.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t explore lots of ideas yourself. Divergent thinking early in the design process is the only way to break free of the clichéd patterns and fads that so often litter mediocre sites. But you must act as a design curator, choosing the best of your work and explaining its rationale clearly and succinctly. Attitude, then, is central to successful critique. It can be difficult to tread the fine line between the harmful extremes of doormat passivity and prima donna arrogance. Remember that you are the professional, but be mindful that even experts make mistakes, particularly when – as with all design projects – they don’t possess all the relevant information in advance. Present your case with open-minded confidence, while accepting that positive critique will make your design (and ultimately your skills) stronger.

The courage of your convictions

Ultimately, your success in the feedback process, and indeed in the entire design process, hinges upon the rationale you provide for your work. Ideally, you should be able to refer to your research – personas, usability test findings, analytics – to support your decisions. To keep this evidence in mind, print it out to share at the design review, or include it in your presentation. Explain the rationale behind the most important decisions before showing the design, so that you can be sure of the full attention of your audience.

Once you’ve covered these points, display your design and walk through the specific features of the page. A little honesty goes a long way here: state your case as strongly as your rationale demands. Sure of your reasoning? Be strong. Speculating an approach based on a hunch? Say so, and encourage your colleagues to explore the idea with you and see where it leads.

Of course, none of these approaches should be sacrosanct. A proficient designer must be able to bend his or her way of working to suit the situation at hand. So sometimes you’ll want to ignore these rules of thumb and explore your own hunches as required. More power to you. As long as you think as clearly about the feedback process as you have about the design itself, you’ll be able to enjoy the great unveiling as a moment to be savoured, not feared.",2010,Cennydd Bowles,cennyddbowles,2010-12-12T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/the-great-unveiling/,business
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 plugins from programs like RealPlayer and QuickTime eventually helped to fill the in-page audio/video gap, handling <object> and <embed> markup which pointed to .wav, .avi, .rm or .mov files. Suffice it to say, the experience was inconsistent at best and, on the standards side of the fence right now, so is HTML5 in terms of audio and video.

: the theory

As far as HTML goes, the code for <audio> is simple and logical. Just as with <img>, a src attribute specifies the file to load. Pretty straightforward – sounds easy, right?

<audio src=""mysong.ogg"" controls>
	<!-- alternate content for unsupported case -->
	Download <a href=""mysong.ogg"">mysong.ogg</a>;
</audio>

Ah, if only it were that simple. The first problem is that the OGG audio format, while ‘free’, is not supported by some browsers. Conversely, nor is MP3, despite being a de facto standard used in all kinds of desktop software (and hardware). In fact, as of November 2010, no single audio format is commonly supported across all major HTML5-enabled browsers.

What you end up writing, then, is something like this:

<audio controls>
	<source src=""mysong.mp3"" />
	<source src=""mysong.ogg"" />
	<!-- alternate content for unsupported case, maybe Flash, etc. -->
	Download <a href=""mysong.ogg"">mysong.ogg</a> or <a href=""mysong.mp3"">mysong.mp3</a>
</audio>

Keep in mind, this is only a ‘first class’ experience for the HTML5 case; also, for non-supported browsers, you may want to look at another inline player (object/embed, or a JavaScript plus Flash API) to have inline audio. You can imagine the added code complexity in the case of supporting ‘first class’ experiences for older browsers, too.

: the caveats

With <img>, you typically don’t have to worry about format support – it just works – and that’s part of what makes a standard wonderful. JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, even TIFF images all render just fine if for no better reason, perhaps, than being implemented during the ‘wild west’ days of the web. The situation with <audio> today reflects a very different – read: business-aware – environment in 2010. (Further subtext: There’s a lot of [potential] money involved.) Regrettably, this is a collision of free and commercial interests, where the casualty is ultimately the user. Second up in the casualty list is you, the developer, who has to write additional code around this fragmented support.

The HTML5 audio API as implemented in JavaScript has one of the most un-computer-like responses I’ve ever seen, and inspired the title of this post. Calling new Audio().canPlayType('audio/mp3'), which queries the system for format support according to a MIME type, is supposed to return one of “probably”, “maybe”, or “no”. Sometimes, you’ll just get a null or empty string, which is also fun. A “maybe” response does not guarantee that a format will be supported; sometimes audio/mp3 gives “maybe,” but then audio/mpeg; codecs=""mp3"" will give a more-solid “probably” response. This can vary by browser or platform, too, depending on native support – and finally, the user may also be able to install codecs, extending support to include other formats. (Are you excited yet?)

Damn you, warring formats!

New market and business opportunities go hand-in-hand with technology developments. What we have here is certainly not failure to communicate; rather, we have competing parties shouting loudly in public in attempts to influence mindshare towards a de facto standard for audio and video. Unfortunately, the current situation means that at least two formats are effectively required to serve the majority of users correctly.

As it currently stands, we have the free and open source software camp of OGG Vorbis/WebM and its proponents (notably, Mozilla, Google and Opera in terms of browser makers), up against the non-free, proprietary and ‘closed’ camp of MP3 and MPEG4/HE-AAC/H.264 – which is where you’ll find commitments from Apple and Microsoft, among others. Apple is likely in with H.264 for the long haul, given its use of the format for its iTunes music store and video offerings.

It is generally held that H.264 is a technically superior format in terms of file size versus quality, but it involves intellectual property and, in many use cases, requires licensing fees. To be fair, there is a business model with H.264 and much has been invested in its development, but this approach is not often the kind that wins over the web. On that front, OGG/WebM may eventually win for being a ‘free’ format that does not involve a licensing scheme.

Closed software and tools ideologically clash with the open nature of the web, which exists largely thanks to free and open technology. Because of philosophical and business reasons, support for audio and video is fragmented across browsers adopting HTML5 features. It does not help that a large amount of audio and video currently exists in non-free MP3 and MPEG-4 formats. Adoption of <audio> and <video> may be slowed, since it is more complex than <img> and may feel ‘broken’ to developers when edge cases are encountered. Furthermore, the HTML5 spec does not mandate a single required format. The end result is that, as a developer, you must currently provide at least both MP3 and OGG, for example, to serve most existing HTML5-based user agents.

Transitioning to 



There will be some growing pains as developers start to pick up the new HTML5 shiny, while balancing the needs of current and older agents that don’t support either <audio> or the preferred format you may choose (for example, MP3). In either event, Flash or other plugins can be used as done traditionally within HTML4 documents to embed and play the relevant audio.



The SoundManager 2 page player demo in action.



Ideally, HTML5 audio should be used whenever possible with Flash as the backup option. A few JavaScript/Flash-based audio player projects exist which balance the two; in attempting to tackle this problem, I develop and maintain SoundManager 2, a JavaScript sound API which transparently uses HTML5 Audio() and, if needed, Flash for playing audio files. The internals can get somewhat ugly, but the transition between HTML4 and HTML5 is going to be just that – and even with HTML5, you will need some form of format fall-back in addition to graceful degradation.

It may be safest to fall back to MP3/MP4 formats for inline playback at this time, given wide support via Flash, some HTML5-based browsers and mobile devices. Considering the amount of MP3/MP4 media currently available, it is wiser to try these before falling through to a traditional file download process.

Early findings

Here is a brief list of behavioural notes, annoyances, bugs, quirks and general weirdness I have found while playing with HTML5-based audio at time of writing (November 2010):

Apple iPad/iPhone (iOS 4, iPad 3.2+)


	Only one sound can be played at a time. If a second sound starts, the first is stopped.
	No auto-play allowed. Sounds follow the pop-up window security model and can only be started from within a user event handler such as onclick/touch, and so on. Otherwise, playback attempts silently fail.
	Once started, a sequence of sounds can be created or played via the ‘finish’ event of the previous sound (for example, advancing through a playlist without interaction after first track starts).
	iPad, iOS 3.2: Occasional ‘infinite loop’ bug seen where audio does not complete and stop at a sound’s logical end – instead, it plays again from the beginning. Might be specific to example file format (HE-AAC) encoded from iTunes.


Apple Safari, OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.5


	Critical bug: Safari 4 and 5 intermittently fail to load or play HTML5 audio on Snow Leopard due to bug(s) in QuickTime X and/or other underlying frameworks. Known Apple ‘radar’ bug: bugs.webkit.org #32159 (see also, test case.) Amusing side note: Safari on Windows is fine.


Apple Safari, Windows


	Food for thought: if you download “Safari” alone on Windows, you will not get HTML5 audio/video support (tested in WinXP). You need to download “Safari + QuickTime” to get HTML5 audio/video support within Safari. (As far as I’m aware, Chrome, Firefox and Opera either include decoders or use system libraries accordingly. Presumably IE 9 will use OS-level APIs.)


General Quirks


	Seeking and loading, ‘progress’ events, and calculating bytes loaded versus bytes total should not be expected to be linear, as users can arbitrarily seek within a sound. It appears that some support for HTTP ranges exists, which adds a bit of logic to UI code. Browsers seem to vary slightly in their current implementations of these features.
	The onload event of a sound may be of little relevance, if non-linear loading is involved (see above note re: seeking).
	Interestingly (perhaps I missed it), the current spec does not seem to specify a panning or left/right channel mix option.
	The preload attribute values may vary slightly between browsers at this time.


Upcoming shiny: HTML5 Audio Data API




	With access to audio data, you can incorporate waveform and spectrum elements that make your designs react to music.



The HTML5 audio spec does a good job covering the basics of playback, but did not initially get into manipulation or generation of audio on-the-fly, something Flash has had for a number of years now. What if JavaScript could create, monitor and change audio dynamically, like a sort of audio <canvas> element? With that kind of capability, many dynamic audio processing features become feasible and, when combined with other media, can make for some impressive demos.

What started as a small idea among a small group of audio and programming enthusiasts grew to inspire a W3C audio incubator group, and continued to establish the Mozilla Audio Data API. Contributors wrote a patch for Firefox which was reviewed and revised, and is now slated to be in the public release of Firefox 4. Some background and demos are also detailed in an article from the BBC R&D blog.

There are plenty of live demos to see, which give an impression of the new creative ideas this API enables. Many concepts are not new in themselves, but it is exciting to see this sort of thing happening within the native browser context.

Mozilla is not alone in this effort; the WebKit folks are also working on a JavaScriptAudioNode interface, which implements similar audio buffering and sample elements.

The future?

It is my hope that we’ll see a common format emerge in terms of support across the major browsers for both audio and video; otherwise, support will continue to be fragmented and mildly frustrating to develop for, and that can impede growth of the feature. It’s a big call, but if <img> had lacked a common format back in the wild west era, I doubt the web would have grown to where it is today.

Complaints and nitpicks aside, HTML5 brings excellent progress on the browser multimedia front, and the first signs of native support are a welcome improvement given all audio and video previously relied on plugins. There is good reason to be excited. While there is room for more, support could certainly be much worse – and as tends to happen with specifications, the implementations targeting them should improve over time.

Note: Thanks to Nate Koechley, who suggested the Audio().canPlayType() response be part of the article title.",2010,Scott Schiller,scottschiller,2010-12-08T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/the-state-of-html5-audio/,code
239,Using the WebFont Loader to Make Browsers Behave the Same,"Web fonts give us designers a whole new typographic palette with which to work. However, browsers handle the loading of web fonts in different ways, and this can lead to inconsistent user experiences.

Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer leave a blank space in place of the styled text while the web font is loading. Opera and Firefox show text with the default font which switches over when the web font has loaded, resulting in the so-called Flash of Unstyled Text (aka FOUT). Some people prefer Safari’s approach as it eliminates FOUT, others think the Firefox way is more appropriate as content can be read whilst fonts download. Whatever your preference, the WebFont Loader can make all browsers behave the same way.

The WebFont Loader is a JavaScript library that gives you extra control over font loading. It was co-developed by Google and Typekit, and released as open source. The WebFont Loader works with most web font services as well as with self-hosted fonts.

The WebFont Loader tells you when the following events happen as a browser downloads web fonts (or loads them from cache):


	when fonts start to download (‘loading’)
	when fonts finish loading (‘active’)
	if fonts fail to load (‘inactive’)


If your web page requires more than one font, the WebFont Loader will trigger events for individual fonts, and for all the fonts as a whole. This means you can find out when any single font has loaded, and when all the fonts have loaded (or failed to do so).

The WebFont Loader notifies you of these events in two ways: by applying special CSS classes when each event happens; and by firing JavaScript events. For our purposes, we’ll be using just the CSS classes.

Implementing the WebFont Loader

As stated above, the WebFont Loader works with most web font services as well as with self-hosted fonts.

Self-hosted fonts

To use the WebFont Loader when you are hosting the font files on your own server, paste the following code into your web page:

<script type=""text/javascript"">
WebFontConfig = {
	custom: { families: ['Font Family Name', 'Another Font Family'],
	urls: [ 'http://yourwebsite.com/styles.css' ] }
};
(function() {
	var wf = document.createElement('script');
	wf.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https' : 'http') + '://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/webfont/1/webfont.js';
	wf.type = 'text/javascript';
	wf.async = 'true';
	var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
	s.parentNode.insertBefore(wf, s);
})();
</script>

Replace Font Family Name and Another Font Family with a comma-separated list of the font families you want to check against, and replace http://yourwebsite.com/styles.css with the URL of the style sheet where your @font-face rules reside.

Fontdeck

Assuming you have added some fonts to a website project in Fontdeck, use the afore-mentioned code for self-hosted solutions and replace http://yourwebsite.com/styles.css with the URL of the <link> tag in your Fontdeck website settings page. It will look something like http://f.fontdeck.com/s/css/xxxx/domain/nnnn.css.

Typekit

Typekit’s JavaScript-based implementation incorporates the WebFont Loader events by default, so you won’t need to include any WebFont Loader code.

Making all browsers behave like Safari

To make Firefox and Opera work in the same way as WebKit browsers (Safari, Chrome, etc.) and Internet Explorer, and thus minimise FOUT, you need to hide the text while the fonts are loading.

While fonts are loading, the WebFont Loader adds a class of wf-loading to the <html> element. Once the fonts have loaded, the wf-loading class is removed and replaced with a class of wf-active (or wf-inactive if all of the fonts failed to load). This means you can style elements on the page while the fonts are loading and then style them differently when the fonts have finished loading.

So, let’s say the text you need to hide while fonts are loading is contained in all paragraphs and top-level headings. By writing the following style rule into your CSS, you can hide the text while the fonts are loading:

.wf-loading h1, .wf-loading p {
	visibility:hidden;
}

Because the wf-loading class is removed once the the fonts have loaded, the visibility:hidden rule will stop being applied, and the text revealed. You can see this in action on this simple example page.

That works nicely across the board, but the situation is slightly more complicated. WebKit doesn’t wait for all fonts to load before displaying text: it displays text elements as soon as the relevant font is loaded. 

To emulate WebKit more accurately, we need to know when individual fonts have loaded, and apply styles accordingly. Fortunately, as mentioned earlier, the WebFont Loader has events for individual fonts too.

When a specific font is loading, a class of the form wf-fontfamilyname-n4-loading is applied. Assuming headings and paragraphs are styled in different fonts, we can make our CSS more specific as follows:

.wf-fontfamilyname-n4-loading h1, 
.wf-anotherfontfamily-n4-loading p {
	visibility:hidden;
}

Note that the font family name is transformed to lower case, with all spaces removed. The n4 is a shorthand for the weight and style of the font family. In most circumstances you’ll use n4 but refer to the WebFont Loader documentation for exceptions.

You can see it in action on this Safari example page (you’ll probably need to disable your cache to see any change occur).

Making all browsers behave like Firefox

To make WebKit browsers and Internet Explorer work like Firefox and Opera, you need to explicitly show text while the fonts are loading. In order to make this happen, you need to specify a font family which is not a web font while the fonts load, like this:

.wf-fontfamilyname-n4-loading h1 { 
    font-family: 'arial narrow', sans-serif; 
}
.wf-anotherfontfamily-n4-loading p { 
    font-family: arial, sans-serif; 
}

You can see this in action on the Firefox example page (again you’ll probably need to disable your cache to see any change occur).

And there’s more

That’s just the start of what can be done with the WebFont Loader. More areas to explore would be tweaking font sizes to reduce the impact of reflowing text and to better cater for very narrow fonts. By using the JavaScript events much more can be achieved too, such as fading in text as the fonts load.",2010,Richard Rutter,richardrutter,2010-12-02T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/using-the-webfont-loader-to-make-browsers-behave-the-same/,code
269,Adaptive Images for Responsive Designs… Again,"When I was asked to write an article for 24 ways I jumped at the chance, as I’d been wanting to write about some fun hacks for responsive images and related parsing behaviours. My heart sank a little when Matt Wilcox beat me to the subject, but it floated back up when I realized I disagreed with his method and still had something to write about.

So, Matt Wilcox, if that is your real name (and I’m pretty sure it is), I disagree. I see your dirty server-based hack and raise you an even dirtier client-side hack. Evil laugh, etc., etc.

You guys can stomach yet another article about responsive design, right? Right?

Half the room gets up to leave

Whoa, whoa… OK, I’ll cut to the chase…

TL;DR

In a previous episode, we were introduced to Debbie and her responsive cat poetry page. Well, now she’s added some reviews of cat videos and some images of cats. Check out her new page and have a play around with the browser window. At smaller widths, the images change and the design responds. The benefits of this method are:


	it’s entirely client-side
	images are still shown to users without JavaScript
	your media queries stay in your CSS file
	no repetition of image URLs
	no extra downloads per image
	it’s fast enough to work on resize
	it’s pure filth


What’s wrong with the server-side solution?

Responsive design is a client-side issue; involving the server creates a boatload of problems.


	It sets a cookie at the top of the page which is read in subsequent requests. However, the cookie is not guaranteed to be set in time for requests on the same page, so the server may see an old value or no value at all.
	Serving images via server scripts is much slower than plain old static hosting.
	The URL can only cache with vary: cookie, so the cache breaks when the cookie changes, even if the change is unrelated. Also, far-future caching is out for devices that can change width.
	It depends on detecting screen width, which is rather messy on mobile devices.
	Responding to things other than screen width (such as DPI) means packing more information into the cookie, and a more complicated script at the top of each page.


So, why isn’t this straightforward on the client?

Client-side solutions to the problem involve JavaScript testing user agent properties (such as screen width), looping through some images and setting their URLs accordingly. However, by the time JavaScript has sprung into action, the original image source has already started downloading. If you change the source of an image via JavaScript, you’re setting off yet another request.

Images are downloaded as soon as their DOM node is created. They don’t need to be visible, they don’t need to be in the document.

new Image().src = url

The above will start an HTTP request for url. This is a handy trick for quick requests and preloading, but also shows the browser’s eagerness to download images.

Here’s an example of that in action. Check out the network tab in Web Inspector (other non-WebKit development aids are available) to see the image requests.

Because of this, some client-side solutions look like this:

<img src=""t.gif"" data-src=""real-image.jpg"" data-bigger-src=""real-bigger-image.jpg"">

where t.gif is a 1×1px tiny transparent GIF.

This results in no images if JavaScript isn’t available. Dealing with the absence of JavaScript is still important, even on mobile. I was recently asked to make a website work on an old Blackberry 9000. I was able to get most of the way there by preventing that OS parsing any JavaScript, and that was only possible because the site didn’t depend on it.

We need to delay loading images for JavaScript users, but ensure they load for users without JavaScript. How can we conditionally parse markup depending on JavaScript support?

Oh yeah! <noscript>!

<noscript>
    <img src=""image.jpg"">
</noscript>

Whoa! First spacer GIFs and now <noscript>? This really is the future! The image above will only load for users without JavaScript support. Now all we need to do is send JavaScript in there to get the textContent of the <noscript> element, then we can alter the image source before handing it to the DOM for parsing.

Here’s an example of that working … unless you’re using Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer doesn’t retain the content of <noscript> elements. As soon as it’s parsed, it considers it an empty element. FANKS INTERNET EXPLORER. This is why some solutions do this:

<noscript data-src=""image.jpg"">
    <img src=""image.jpg"">
</noscript>

so JavaScript can still get at the URL via the data-src attribute. However, repeating stuff isn’t great. Surely we can do better than that.

A dirty, dirty hack

Thankfully, I managed to come up with a solution, and by me, I mean someone cleverer than me. Pornel’s solution uses <noscript>, but surely we don’t need that.

Now, before we look at this, I can’t stress how dirty it is. It’s so dirty that if you’ve seen it, schools will refuse to employ you.

<script>document.write('<' + '!--')</script>
<img src=""image.jpg"">
<!---->

Phwoar! Dirty, isn’t it? I’ll stop for a moment, so you can go have a wash.

Done? Excellent.

With this, the image is wrapped in a comment only for users with JavaScript. Without JavaScript, we get the image. Unlike the <noscript> example above, we can get the text content of the comment pretty easily.

Hurrah! But wait… Some browsers are sometimes downloading the image, even with JavaScript enabled. Notably Firefox. Huh?

Images are downloaded in comments now? What?

No. What we’re seeing here is the effect of speculative parsing. Here’s what’s happening:



While the browser is parsing the script, it parses the rest of the document. This is usually a good thing, as it can download subsequent images and scripts without waiting for the script to complete. The problem here is we create an unbalanced tree.

 An unbalanced tree, yesterday.

In this case, the browser must throw away its speculative parsing and reparse from the end of the <script> element, taking our document.write into consideration. Unfortunately, by this stage it may have already discovered the image and sent an HTTP request for it.

A dirty, dirty hack… that works

Pornel was right: we still need the <noscript> element to cater for browsers with speculative parsing.

<script>document.write('<' + '!--')</script><noscript>
    <img src=""image.jpg"">
</noscript -->

And there we have it. We can now prevent images loading for users with JavaScript, but we can still get at the markup.

We’re still creating an unbalanced tree and there’s a performance impact in that. However, the parser won’t have got far by the time our script executes, so the impact is small. Unbalanced trees are more of a concern for external scripts; a lot of parsing can happen by the time the script has downloaded and parsed.

Using dirtiness to create responsive images

Now all we need to do is give each of our dirty scripts a class name, then JavaScript can pick them up, grab the markup from the comment and decide what to do with the images.

This technique isn’t exclusively useful for responsive images. It could also be used to delay images loading until they’ve scrolled into view. But to do that you’ll need a bulletproof way of detecting when elements are in view. This involves getting the height of the viewport, which is extremely unreliable on mobile devices.

Here’s a hastily thrown together example showing how it can be used for responsive images.

I adjust the end of the image URLs conditionally depending on the result of media queries. This is done on page load, and on resize.

I’m using regular expressions to alter the URLs. Using regex to deal with HTML is usually a sign of insanity, but parsing it with the browser’s DOM parser would trigger the download of images before we change the URLs. My implementation currently requires double-quoted image URLs, because I’m lazy. Wanna fight about it?

Media querying via JavaScript

Jeremy Keith used document.documentElement.clientWidth in his example, which is great as a proof of concept, but unfortunately is rather unreliable across mobile devices.

Thankfully, standards are coming to the rescue with window.matchMedia, which lets us provide a media query string and get a boolean result. There’s even a great polyfill for browsers that don’t support it (as long as they support media queries in CSS).

I didn’t go with that for three reasons:


	I’d like to keep media queries in the CSS file, if possible.
	I wanted something a little lighter to keep things speedy while resizing.
	It’s just not dirty enough yet.


To make things ultra-dirty, I add a test element to the page with a specific class, let’s say media-test. Then, I control the width of it using media queries in my CSS file:

@media all and (min-width: 640px) {
    .media-test {
        width: 1px;
    }
}
@media all and (min-width: 926px) {
    .media-test {
        width: 2px;
    }
}

The JavaScript part changes the URL suffix depending on the width of media-test. I’m using a min-width media query, but you can use others such as pixel-ratio to detect high DPI displays. Basically, it’s a hacky way for CSS to set a value that can be picked up by JavaScript. It means the bit that signals changes to the images sits with the rest of the responsive code, without duplication.

Also, phwoar, dirty!

The API

I threw a script together to demonstrate the technique. I’m not particularly attached to it, I’m not even sure I like it, but here’s the API:

responsiveGallery({
    // Class name of dirty script element(s) to target
    scriptClass: 'dirty-gallery-script',
    // Class name for our test element
    testClass: 'dirty-gallery-test',
    // The initial suffix of URLs, the bit that changes.
    initialSuffix: '-mobile.jpg',
    // A map of suffixes, for each width of 'dirty-gallery-test'
    suffixes: {
        '1': '-desktop.jpg',
        '2': '-large-desktop.jpg',
        '3': '-mobile-retina.jpg'
    }
});

The API can cover individual images or multiple galleries at once. In the example I gave at the start of the article I make two calls to the API, one for both galleries, and one for the single image above the video reviews. They’re separate calls because they respond slightly differently.

The future

Hopefully, we’ll get a proper solution to this soon. My favourite suggestion is the <picture> element that Bruce Lawson covers.

<picture alt=""Angry pirate"">
    <source src=""hires.png"" media=""min-width:800px"">
    <source src=""midres.png"" media=""min-width:480px"">
    <source src=""lores.png"">
    <!-- fallback for browsers without support -->
    <img src=""midres.png"" alt=""Angry pirate"">
</picture>

Unfortunately, we’re nowhere near that yet, and I’d still rather have my media queries stay in CSS. Perhaps the source elements could be skipped if they’re display:none; then they could have class names and be controlled via CSS. Sigh.

Well, I’m tired of writing now and I’m sure you’re tired of reading. I realize what I’ve presented is a yet another dirty hack to the responsive image problem (perhaps the dirtiest?) and may be completely unfeasible in professional situations. But isn’t that the true spirit of Christmas?

No.",2011,Jake Archibald,jakearchibald,2011-12-08T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/adaptive-images-for-responsive-designs-again/,ux
274,Adaptive Images for Responsive Designs,"So you’ve been building some responsive designs and you’ve been working through your checklist of things to do:


	You started with the content and designed around it, with mobile in mind first.
	You’ve gone liquid and there’s nary a px value in sight; % is your weapon of choice now.
	You’ve baked in a few media queries to adapt your layout and tweak your design at different window widths.
	You’ve made your images scale to the container width using the fluid Image technique.
	You’ve even done the same for your videos using a nifty bit of JavaScript.


You’ve done a good job so pat yourself on the back. But there’s still a problem and it’s as tricky as it is important: image resolutions.

HTML has an <img> problem

CSS is great at adapting a website design to different window sizes – it allows you not only to tweak layout but also to send rescaled versions of the design’s images. And you want to do that because, after all, a smartphone does not need a 1,900-pixel background image1.

HTML is less great. In the same way that you don’t want CSS background images to be larger than required, you don’t want that happening with <img>s either. A smartphone only needs a small image but desktop users need a large one. Unfortunately <img>s can’t adapt like CSS, so what do we do?

Well, you could just use a high resolution image and the fluid image technique would scale it down to fit the viewport; but that’s sending an image five or six times the file size that’s really needed, which makes it slow to download and unpleasant to use. Smartphones are pretty impressive devices – my ancient iPhone 3G is more powerful in every way than my first proper computer – but they’re still terribly slow in comparison to today’s desktop machines. Sending a massive image means it has to be manipulated in memory and redrawn as you scroll. You’ll find phones rapidly run out of RAM and slow to a crawl.

Well, OK. You went mobile first with everything else so why not put in mobile resolution <img>s too? Because even though mobile devices are rapidly gaining share in your analytics stats, they’re still not likely to be the major share of your user base. I don’t think desktop users would be happy with pokey little mobile resolution images, do you? What we need are adaptive images.

Adaptive image techniques

There are a number of possible solutions, each with pros and cons, and it’s not as simple to find a graceful solution as you might expect.

Your first thought might be to use JavaScript to trawl through the markup and rewrite the source attribute. That’ll get you the right end result, but it’ll have done it in a way you absolutely don’t want. That’s because of the way browsers load resources. It starts to load the HTML and builds the page on-the-fly; as soon as it finds an <img> element it immediately asks the server for that image. After the HTML has finished loading, the JavaScript will run, change the src attribute, and then the browser will request that new image too. Not instead of, but as well as. Not good: that’s added more bloat instead of cutting it.

Plain JavaScript is out then, which is a problem, because what other tools do we have to work with as web designers? Let’s ignore that for now and I’ll outline another issue with the concept of serving different resolution images for different window widths: a basic file management problem. To request a different image, that image has to exist on the server. How’s it going to get there? That’s not a trivial problem, especially if you have non-technical users that update content through a CMS. Let’s say you solve that – do you plan on a simple binary switch: big image|little image? Is that really efficient or future-proof? What happens if you have an archive of existing content that needs to behave this way? Can you apply such a solution to existing content or markup?

There’s a detailed round-up of potential techniques for solving the adaptive images problem over at the Cloud Four blog if you fancy a dig around exploring all the options currently available. But I’m here to show you what I think is the most flexible and easy to implement solution, so here we are.

Adaptive Images

Adaptive Images aims to mitigate most of the issues surrounding the problems of bringing the venerable <img> tag into the 21st century. And it works by leaving that tag completely alone – just add that desktop resolution image into the markup as you’ve been doing for years now. We’ll fix it using secret magic techniques and bottled pixie dreams. Well, fine: with one .htaccess file, one small PHP file and one line of JavaScript. But you’re killing the mystique with that kind of talk.

So, what does this solution do?


	It allows <img>s to adapt to the same break points you use in your media queries, giving granular control in the same way you get with your CSS.
	It installs on your server in five minutes or less and after that is automatic and you don’t need to do anything.
	It generates its own rescaled images on the server and doesn’t require markup changes, so you can apply it to existing web content.
	If you wish, it will make all of your images go mobile-first (just in case that’s what you want if JavaScript and cookies aren’t available).


Sound good? I hope so. Here’s what you do.

Setting up and rolling out

I’ll assume you have some basic server knowledge along with that wealth of front-end wisdom exploding out of your head: that you know not to overwrite any existing .htaccess file for example, and how to set file permissions on your server. Feeling up to it? Excellent.


	Download the latest version of Adaptive Images either from the website or from the GitHub repository.
	Upload the included .htaccess and adaptive-images.php files into the root folder of your website.
	Create a directory called ai-cache and make sure the server can write to it (CHMOD 755 should do it).
	Add the following line of JavaScript into the <head> of your site:


<script>document.cookie='resolution='+Math.max(screen.width,screen.height)+'; path=/‘;</script>

That’s it, unless you want to tweak the default settings. You likely do, but essentially you’re already up and running.

How it works

Adaptive Images does a number of things depending on the scenario the script has to handle, but here’s a basic overview of what it does when you load a page running it:


	A session cookie is written with the value of the visitor’s screen size in pixels.
	The HTML encounters an <img> tag and sends a request to the server for that image. It also sends the cookie, because that’s how browsers work.
	Apache sits on the server and receives the request for the image. Apache then has a look in the .htaccess file to see if there are any special instructions for files in the requested URL.
	There are! The .htaccess says “Hey, server! Any request you get for a JPG, GIF or PNG file just send to the adaptive-images.php file instead.”
	The PHP file then does some intelligent thinking which can cover a number of scenarios, but I’ll illustrate one path that can happen:


	
		The PHP file looks for the cookie and finds out that the user has a maximum screen width of 480px.
		The PHP has a look at the available media query sizes that were configured and decides which one matches the user’s device.
		It then has a look inside the /ai-cache/480/ folder to see if a rescaled image already exists there.
		We’ll pretend it doesn’t – the PHP then goes to the actual requested URI and finds that the original file does exist.
		It has a look to see how wide that image is. If it’s already smaller than the user’s screen width it sends it along and stops there. But, let’s pretend the image is 1,000px wide.
		The PHP then resizes the image and saves it into the /ai-cache/480 folder ready for the next time someone needs it.
	

It also does a few other things when needs arise, for example:


	It sends images with a cache header field that tells proxies not to cache the image, while telling browsers they should. This avoids problems with proxy servers and network caching systems grabbing the wrong image and storing it.
	It handles cases where there isn’t a cookie set, and you can choose whether to then send the mobile version or the largest configured media query size.
	It compares timestamps between the source image and the generated cache image – to ensure that if the source image gets updated, the old cached file won’t be sent.


Customizing

There are a few options you can customize if you don’t like the default values. By looking in the PHP’s configuration section at the top of the file, you can:


	Set the resolution breakpoints to match your media query break points.
	Change the name and location of the ai-cache folder.
	Change the quality level any generated JPG images are saved at.
	Have it perform a subtle sharpen on rescaled images to help keep detail.
	Toggle whether you want it to compare the files in the cache folder with the source ones or not.
	Set how long the browser should cache the images for.
	Switch between a mobile-first or desktop-first approach when a cookie isn’t found.


More importantly, you probably want to omit a few folders from the AI behaviour. You don’t need or want it resizing the images you’re using in your CSS, for example. That’s fine – just open up the .htaccess file and follow the instructions to list any directories you want AI to ignore. Or, if you’re a dab hand at RewriteRules you can remove the exclamation mark at the start of the rule and it’ll only apply AI behaviour to a given list of folders.

Caveats

As I mentioned, I think this is one of the most flexible, future-proof, retrofittable and easy to use solutions available today. But, there are problems with this approach as there are with all of the ones I’ve seen so far.

This is a PHP solution

I wish I was smarter and knew some fancy modern languages the cool kids discuss at parties, but I don’t. So, you need PHP on your server. That said, Adaptive Images has a Creative Commons licence2 and I would welcome anyone to contribute a port of the code3. 

Content delivery networks

Adaptive Images relies on the server being able to: intercept requests for images; do some logic; and send one of a given number of responses. Content delivery networks are generally dumb caches, and they won’t allow that to happen. Adaptive Images will not work if you’re using a CDN to deliver your website.

A minor but interesting cookie issue.

As Yoav Weiss pointed out in his article Preloaders, cookies and race conditions, there is no way to guarantee that a cookie will be set before images are requested – even though the JavaScript that sets the cookie is loaded by the browser before it finds any <img> tags. That could mean images being requested without a cookie being available. Adaptive Images has a two-fold mechanism to avoid this being a problem:


	The $mobile_first toggle allows you to choose what to send to a browser if a cookie isn’t set. If FALSE then it will send the highest configured resolution; if TRUE it will send the lowest.
	Even if set to TRUE, Adaptive Images checks the User Agent String. If it discovers the user is on a desktop environment, it will override $mobile_first and set it to FALSE.


This means that if $mobile_first is set to TRUE and the user was unlucky (their browser didn’t write the cookie fast enough), mobile devices will be supplied with the smallest image, and desktop devices will get the largest.

The best way to get a cookie written is to use JavaScript as I’ve explained above, because it’s the fastest way. However, for those that want it, there is a JavaScript-free method which uses CSS and a bogus PHP ‘image’ to set the cookie. A word of caution: because it requests an external file, this method is slower than the JavaScript one, and it is very likely that the cookie won’t be set until after images have been requested.

The future

For today, this is a pretty good solution. It works, and as it doesn’t interfere with your markup or source material in any way, the process is non-destructive. If a future solution is superior, you can just remove the Adaptive Images files and you’re good to go – you’d never know AI had been there.

However, this isn’t really a long-term solution, not least because of the intermittent problem of the cookie and image request race condition. What we really need are a number of standardized ways to handle this in the future.

First, we could do with browsers sending far more information about the user’s environment along with each HTTP request (device size, connection speed, pixel density, etc.), because the way things work now is no longer fit for purpose. The web now is a much broader entity used on far more diverse devices than when these technologies were dreamed up, and we absolutely require the server to have better knowledge about device capabilities than is currently possible. Relying on cookies to do this job doesn’t cut it, and the User Agent String is a complete mess incapable of fulfilling the various purposes we are forced to hijack it for.

Secondly, we need a W3C-backed markup level solution to supply semantically different content at different resolutions, not just rescaled versions of the same content as Adaptive Images does.

I hope you’ve found this interesting and will find Adaptive Images useful.

Footnotes

1 While I’m talking about preventing smartphones from downloading resources they don’t need: you should be careful of your media query construction if you want to stop WebKit downloading all the images in all of the CSS files.

2 Adaptive Images has a very broad Creative Commons licence and I warmly welcome feedback and community contributions via the GitHub repository. 

3 There is a ColdFusion port of an older version of Adaptive Images. I do not have anything to do with ported versions of Adaptive Images.",2011,Matt Wilcox,mattwilcox,2011-12-04T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/adaptive-images-for-responsive-designs/,ux
266,Collaborative Development for a Responsively Designed Web,"In responsive web design we’ve found a technique that allows us to design for the web as a medium in its own right: one that presents a fluid, adaptable and ever changing canvas.

Until this point, we gave little thought to the environment in which users will experience our work, caring more about the aggregate than the individual. The applications we use encourage rigid layouts, whilst linear processes focus on clients signing off paintings of websites that have little regard for behaviour and interactions. The handover of pristine, pixel-perfect creations to developers isn’t dissimilar to farting before exiting a crowded lift, leaving front-end developers scratching their heads as they fill in the inevitable gaps. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading Drew’s checklist of things to consider before handing over a design.

Somehow, this broken methodology has survived for the last fifteen years or so. Even the advent of web standards has had little impact. Now, as we face an onslaught of different devices, the true universality of the web can no longer be ignored.

Responsive web design is just the thin end of the wedge. Largely concerned with layout, its underlying philosophy could ignite a trend towards interfaces that adapt to any number of different variables: input methods, bandwidth availability, user preference – you name it!

With such adaptability, a collaborative and iterative process is required. Ethan Marcotte, who worked with the team behind the responsive redesign of the Boston Globe website, talked about such an approach in his book:


	The responsive projects I’ve worked on have had a lot of success combining design and development into one hybrid phase, bringing the two teams into one highly collaborative group.


Whilst their process still involved the creation of desktop-centric mock-ups, these were presented to the entire team early on, where questions about how pages might adapt and behave at different sizes were asked. Mock-ups were quickly converted into HTML prototypes, meaning further decisions could be based on usage rather than guesswork (and endless hours spent in Photoshop).

Regardless of the exact process, it’s clear that the relationship between our two disciplines is more crucial than ever. Yet, historically, it seems a wedge has been driven between us – perhaps a result of segregation and waterfall-style processes – resulting in animosity.

So how can we improve this relationship? Ultimately, we’ll need to adapt, but even within existing workflows we can start to overlap. Simply adjusting our attitude can effect change, and bring design and development teams closer together.


	Good design is constant contact.

	Mark Otto


The way we work needs to be more open and inclusive. For example, ensuring members of the development team attend initial kick-off meetings and design workshops will not only ensure technical concerns are raised, but mean that those implementing our designs better understand the problems we’re trying to solve.

It can also be useful at this stage to explain how you work and the sort of deliverables you expect to produce. This will give developers a chance to make recommendations on how these can be optimized for their own needs.

You may even find opportunities to share the load. On a recent project I worked on, our development partners offered to produce the interactive prototypes needed for user testing. This allowed us to concentrate on refining the experience, whilst they were able to get a head start on building the product.

While developers should be involved at the beginning of projects, it’s also important that designers are able to review and contribute to a product as it’s being built. Any handover should be done in person, and ideally you’ll have a day set aside to do so. Having additional budget available for follow-up design reviews is also recommended. Learning how to use version control tools like Subversion or Git will allow you to work within the same environment as developers, and allow you to contribute code or graphic assets directly to a project if needed.

Don’t underestimate the benefits of designer and developer sitting next to each other. Subtle nuances can be explored far more easily than if they were conducted over email or phone. As Ethan writes, “‘Design’ is the means, not merely the end; the path we walk over the course of a project, the choices we make”.

It’s from collaboration like this that I’ve become fond of producing visual style guides. These demonstrate typographic treatments for common markup and patterns (blockquotes, lists, pagination, basic form controls and so on). Thinking in terms of components rather than individual pages not only fits in better with how a developer will implement a site, but can also ensure your design works as a coherent whole.

Despite the amount of research and design produced, when it comes to the crunch, there will always be a need for compromise. As the old saying goes, ‘fast, cheap and good – pick two.’ It’s important that you know which pieces are crucial to a design and which areas can allow for movement. Pick your battles wisely. Having an agreed set of design principles can be useful when making such decisions, as they help everyone focus on the goals of the project.


	The best compromises are reached when both sides understand the issues of the other.

	Richard Rutter


Ultimately, better collaboration comes through a shared understanding of the different competencies required to build a website. Instead of viewing ourselves in terms of discrete roles, we should instead look to emphasize our range of abilities, and work with others whose skills are complementary.

Perhaps somebody who actively seeks to broaden their knowledge is the mark of a professional. Seek these people out.

The best developers I’ve worked with have a respect for design, probably having attempted to do some themselves! Having wrangled with a few MySQL databases myself, I certainly believe the obverse is true. While knowing HTML won’t necessarily make you a better designer, it will help you understand the issues being faced by a front-end developer and, more importantly, allow you to offer solutions or alternative approaches.

So take a moment to think about how you work with developers and how you could improve your relationship with them. What are you doing to ease the path towards our collaborative future?",2011,Paul Lloyd,paulrobertlloyd,2011-12-05T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/collaborative-development-for-a-responsively-designed-web/,business
285,"Composing the New Canon: Music, Harmony, Proportion","Ohne Musik wäre das Leben ein Irrtum
—Friedrich NIETZSCHE, Götzen-Dämmerung, Sprüche und Pfeile 33, 1889


Somehow, music is hardcoded in human beings. It is something we understand and respond to without prior knowledge. Music exercises the emotions and our imaginative reflex, not just our hearing. It behaves so much like our emotions that music can seem to symbolize them, to bear them from one person to another. Not surprisingly, it conjures memories: the word music derives from Greek μουσική (mousike), art of the Muses, whose mythological mother was Mnemosyne, memory. But it can also summon up the blood, console the bereaved, inspire fanaticism, bolster governments and dissenters alike, help us learn, and make web designers dance. And what would Christmas be without music?

Music moves us, often in ways we can’t explain. By some kind of alchemy, music frees us from the elaborate nuisance and inadequacy of words. Across the world and throughout recorded history – and no doubt well before that – people have listened and made (and made out to) music.


	[I]t appears probable that the progenitors of man, either the males or females or both sexes, before acquiring the power of expressing their mutual love in articulate language, endeavoured to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm.
—Charles DARWIN, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871


It’s so integral to humankind, we’ve sent it into space as a totem for who we are. (Who knows? It might be important.) Music is essential, a universal compulsion; as Nietzsche wrote, without music life would be a mistake.

Music, design and web design

There are some obvious and notable similarities between music and visual design. Both can convey mood and evoke emotion but, even under close scrutiny, how they do that remains to a great extent mysterious. Each has formal qualities or parts that can be abstracted, analysed and discussed, often using the same terminology: composition, harmony, rhythm, repetition, form, theme; even colour, texture and tone.

A possible reason for these shared aspects is that both visual design and music are means to connect with people in deep and lasting ways. Furthermore, I believe the connections to be made can complement direct emotional appeal. Certain aesthetic qualities in music work on an unconscious and, it could be argued, universal level. Using musical principles in our designs, then, can help provide the connectedness between content, device and user that we now seek as web designers.

Yet, when we talk about music and web design, the conversation is almost always about the music designers listen to while working, a theme finding its apotheosis in Designers.MX. Sometimes, articles in that dreary list format seek inspiration from music industry websites. There’s even a service offering pre-templated web designs for bands, and at least one book surveyed the landscape back in 2006. Occasionally, discussions broaden somewhat into whether and how different kinds of music can inspire and influence the design work we produce.

Such enquiries, it seems to me, are beside the point. Do I really design differently when I listen to Bach rather than Bacharach? Will the barely restrained energy of Count Basie’s The Kid from Red Bank mean I choose a lively colour palette, and rural, autumnal shades when inspired by Fleet Foxes? Mahler means a thirteen-column layout? Gillian Welch leads to distressed black and white photography? While reflecting the importance we place in music and how it seems to help us in our work, surveys on musical taste and lists of favourite artists fail to recognize that some of the fundamental aesthetic characteristics of music can be adapted and incorporated into modern web design.

Antiphonal geometry

Over recent years, web designers have embraced grid systems as powerful tools to help create good-looking and intuitive user experiences. With the advent of responsive design, these grids and their contents must adapt to the different screen sizes and properties of all kinds of user devices. Finding and using grid values that can scale well and retain or enhance their proportions and relationships while making the user experience meaningful in several different contexts is more important than ever.

In print, this challenge has always started with the dimensions and proportions of the page. Content can thereby be made to belong inside the page and be bound to it. And music has been used for centuries to further this aim. As Robert Bringhurst says in The Elements of Typographical Style:


	Indeed, one of the simplest of all systems of page proportions is based on the familiar intervals of the diatonic scale. Pages that embody these basic musical proportions have been in common use in Europe for more than a thousand years.


Very well. But while he goes on to list (from the full chromatic scale, rather than just diatonic) the proportions and the musical intervals they’re based on, Bringhurst fails to mention what they’re ratios of or their potential effects. Shame. In his favour, however, he later touches on how proportions in print might be considered to work:


	The page is a piece of paper. It is also a visible and tangible proportion, silently sounding the thoroughbass of the book. On it lies the textblock, which must answer to the page. The two together – page and textblock – produce an antiphonal geometry. That geometry alone can bond the reader to the book. Or conversely, it can put the reader to sleep, or put the reader’s nerves on edge, or drive the reader away.


So what does Bringhurst mean by antiphonal geometry, a phrase that marries the musical to the spatial? By stating that the textblock “must answer to the page”, the implication is that the relationship between the proportions of the page and the shape of the textblock printed on it embodies a spatial (geometrical) call-and-response (antiphony) that can be appealing or not.

Boulton’s new canon

But, as Mark Boulton has pointed out, on the web “there are no edges. There are no ‘pages’. We’ve made them up.” So, what is to be done? In January 2011 at the New Adventures in Web Design conference, Boulton presented his vision of a new canon of web design, a set of principles to guide us as we design the web. There are three overlapping tenets:


	design from the content out
	create connectedness between the different content elements
	bind the content to the web device


Rather than design from the edges in, we need to design layout systems from the content out. To this end, Boulton asserts that grid system design should begin with a constraint, and he suggests we use the size of a fixed content element, such as an advertising unit or image, as a starting point for online grid calculations. Khoi Vinh advocates the same approach in his book, Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design.

Boulton’s second and third tenets, however, are more complex and overlap significantly with each other. Connecting the different parts of the content and binding the content to the device share many characteristics and solutions:


	adopting ems and percentages as units of size for layout elements
	altering text size, line length and line height for different viewport dimensions
	providing higher resolution images for devices with greater pixel densities
	fluid layout grids, flexible images and responsive design


All can help relate the presentation of the content to its delivery in a certain context.

But how do we determine the relationship between one element of a layout and another? How can we avoid making arbitrary decisions about the relative sizes of parts of our designs? What can we use to connect the parts of our design to one another, and how can we bind the presentation of the content to the user’s device?

Tim Brown’s application of modular typographic scales hints at an answer. In the very useful tool he created for calculating such scales, Brown includes two musical ratios: the perfect fifth (2:3); and the perfect fourth (3:4). Why? Where do they come from? And what do they mean?

Harmonies musical and visual

Fundamental to music are rhythm and harmony.

As any drummer will tell you, without rhythm there is no music. Even when there’s no regular beat, any tune follows a rhythm, however irregular, simply because a change of note is a point of change in the music. Although rhythm, timing and pacing are all relevant to interaction design, right now it’s harmony we’re interested in.

Sometimes harmony is called the vertical aspect of music, and melody the horizontal. But this conceit overlooks the fact that harmony is both vertical and horizontal. A single melodic line, as it is played, implies various sets of harmonies on which it is grounded, whether or not those harmonies are played. So, harmony doesn’t just sit vertically beneath the horizontal melody, but moves horizontally as well, through harmonic progression.

To stretch this arrangement pixel-thin, we could argue that in onscreen design melody is the content, and the layout and arrangement of the content is the harmony. We sometimes say a design is harmonious when the interplay of different elements of a design is pleasing or balanced or in proportion, and the content (the melody) is set off or conveyed well by or appropriate to the design.

We seem to know instinctively whether a layout is harmonious…

In the design of The Great Discontent, the relationships between different elements combine to form a balanced whole.

…or not.

There’s no harmony in the Department for Education’s website because the different parts of the content don’t feel related to one another.

What is it that makes one design harmonious and another dissonant? It’s not just whether things line up, though that’s a start. I believe there are much deeper aesthetic forces at work, forces we can tap into in our onscreen designs. Now, I’m not going start a difficult discussion about aesthetics. For our purposes, we just need to know that it’s the branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, and the creation and perception of beauty. And among the key components in the perception of beauty are harmony and proportion. These have been part of traditional western aesthetics since Plato (about 2,500 years).

One of the ways we appreciate the beauty of music is through the harmonic intervals we hear. A musical interval is a combination of two notes and it describes the distance between the two pitches. For example, the distance between C and the G above it (if we take C as the tonic or root) is called a perfect fifth.

Left: C to G, a perfect fifth. Right: C and G, not a perfect fifth.

 

And, to get superficially scientific for a moment, each musical interval can be expressed as a ratio of the wavelength frequencies of the notes; for our perfect fifth, with every two wavelengths of C, there are three of G. And what is a ratio, if not a proportion of one thing to another?

So, simple musical harmony (using what’s known as just intonation1) affords us a set of proportions, expressed as ratios. Where better to apply these ideas of harmony and proportion from music in web design, than grid systems?

A digression: whither φ?

Quite often in our discussions of pure design and aesthetics, we mention the golden ratio and regurgitate the same justifications for its use: roots in antiquity; embodied in classical and Renaissance architecture and art; occurrence in nature; the New Twitter, and so forth (oh, really?).

Yet the ratios of musical intervals from just intonation are equally venerable and much more widespread: described by Pythagorus; employed in Palladian architecture, and printing, books and art from the Renaissance onwards; in modern times, film and television dimensions; standard international paper sizes (ISO 216, the A and B series); and, again and again, screen dimensions – chances are that screen you’re probably looking at right now has the proportions 2:3 (iPhone and iPod Touch), 3:4 (iPad and Kindle), 3:5 (many smartphones), 5:8 or 16:9 (many widescreen monitors), all ratios of musical intervals.

Back to our theme…

Musical interval ratios

Let’s take a look at most of the ratios within a couple of octaves and crunch some numbers to generate some percentages and other values that we can use in our designs. First, the intervals and their ratios in just intonation and expressed as ratios of one:


		
			Name 
			Interval in C 
			Ratio 
			Ratio (1:x) 
		
		
			 unison 
			 C→C 
			 1:1 
			 1:1 
		
		
			 minor second 
			 C→D♭ 
			 15:16 
			 1:1.067 
		
		
			 major second 
			 C→D 
			 8:9 
			 1:1.125 
		
		
			 minor third 
			 C→E♭ 
			 5:6 
			 1:1.2 
		
		
			 major third 
			 C→E 
			 4:5 
			 1:1.25 
		
		
			 perfect fourth 
			 C→F 
			 3:4 
			 1:1.333 
		
		
			 augmented fourth 
or diminished fifth 
			 C→F♯/G♭ 
			 1:√2 
			 1:1.414 
		
		
			 perfect fifth 
			 C→G 
			 2:3 
			 1:1.5 
		
		
			 minor sixth 
			 C→A♭ 
			 5:8 
			 1:1.6 
		
		
			 major sixth 
			 C→A 
			 3:5 
			 1:1.667 
		
		
			 minor seventh 
			 C→B♭ 
			 9:16 
			 1:1.778 
		
		
			 major seventh 
			 C→B 
			 8:15 
			 1:1.875 
		
		
			 octave 
			 C→C↑ 
			 1:2 
			 1:2 
		
		
			 major tenth 
			 C→E↑ 
			 2:5 
			 1:2.5 
		
		
			 major eleventh 
			 C→F↑ 
			 3:8 
			 1:2.667 
		
		
			 major twelfth 
			 C→G↑ 
			 1:3 
			 1:3 
		
		
			 double octave 
			 C→C↑ 
			 1:4 
			 1:4 
		
		
			Name 
			Interval in C 
			Ratio 
			Ratio (1:x) 
		


And now as percentages, of both the larger and smaller values in the ratios:


		
			Name 
			Ratio 
			% of larger value 
			% of smaller value 
		
		
			 unison 
			 1:1 
			 100% 
			 100% 
		
		
			 minor second 
			 15:16 
			 93.75% 
			 106.667% 
		
		
			 major second 
			 8:9 
			 88.889% 
			 112.5% 
		
		
			 minor third 
			 5:6 
			 83.333% 
			 120% 
		
		
			 major third 
			 4:5 
			 80% 
			 125% 
		
		
			 perfect fourth 
			 3:4 
			 75% 
			 133.333% 
		
		
			 augmented fourth 
or diminished fifth 
			 1:√2 
			 70.711% 
			 141.421% 
		
		
			 perfect fifth 
			 2:3 
			 66.667% 
			 150% 
		
		
			 minor sixth 
			 5:8 
			 62.5% 
			 160% 
		
		
			 major sixth 
			 3:5 
			 60% 
			 166.667% 
		
		
			 minor seventh 
			 9:16 
			 56.25% 
			 177.778% 
		
		
			 major seventh 
			 8:15 
			 53.333% 
			 187.5% 
		
		
			 octave 
			 1:2 
			 50% 
			 200% 
		
		
			 major tenth 
			 2:5 
			 40% 
			 250% 
		
		
			 major eleventh 
			 3:8 
			 37.5% 
			 266.667% 
		
		
			 major twelfth 
			 1:3 
			 33.333% 
			 300% 
		
		
			 double octave 
			 1:4 
			 25% 
			 400% 
		
		
			Name 
			Ratio 
			% of larger value 
			% of smaller value 
		


As you can see, the simple musical intervals are expressed as ratios of small whole numbers (integers). We can then normalize them as ratios of one, as well as derive percentage values, both in terms of the smaller value to the larger, and vice versa. These are the numbers we can incorporate into our designs. If you’ve ever written something like body { font: 100%/1.5 ""Museo Sans"", Helvetica, sans-serif; } in your CSS, you’re already using a musical ratio: the perfect fifth.

Modular scales allow us to generate a set of numbers based on a musical interval that can be used for all kinds of typographic and layout decisions to create harmony in a visual design for the web. As Tim Brown said at the 2010 Build conference:


	I think that from that most atomic unit – type – whole experiences can resonate, whole experiences can be harmonious. And whole experiences can have a purpose suited to our design intentions.


Once more, with feeling: connectedness

As well as modular scales, there are other methods of incorporating musical interval ratios into our work. Setting the ratio of font size to line height in CSS is one such example. We could also create a typographic hierarchy using the same principle and combining several ratios that we know harmonize well musically in a chord:

body { font-size: 75%; } /* =12px = base size or tonic */

h1 { font-size: 32px; font-size: 2.667rem; }
   /* =32px = 3:8 = major eleventh (C→F↑) */

h2 { font-size: 24px; font-size: 2rem; }
   /* =24px = 1:2 = octave (C→C↑) */

h3 { font-size: 20px; font-size: 1.667rem; }
   /* =20px = 3:5 = major sixth (C→A) */

figcaption, small { font-size: 9px; font-size : 0.75rem }
   /* =9px = 3:4 = perfect fourth (C→F) */

Whoa! Hold your reindeer, Santa! How can we know what interval combinations work well together to form chords? Well, I’m a classically trained musician, so perhaps I have an advantage. To avoid a long, technically complex digression into musical harmony, here are a few basic combinations of intervals that are harmonious in one way or another:


	unison; major third; perfect fifth; octave
	unison; perfect fourth; major sixth; octave
	unison; minor third; minor sixth; octave
	unison; minor third; diminished fifth; major sixth; octave


This isn’t to say that other combinations can’t be used to interesting effect and particular purpose – they surely can – but I have to make sure there’s something left for you to experiment with in the wee small hours over the holiday. Bear in mind, though, were I to play you two notes from the same scale to form a minor second, for example, you’d probably say it was dissonant and maybe that quality of the 15:16 ratio would be translated to the design.

 

In the typographic hierarchy above, you’ll notice I used an interval in the higher octave, which affords a broader range of ratios while retaining the harmony. Thus, a perfect fifth (2:3) becomes a major twelfth (1:3), or a major sixth (3:5) becomes a major thirteenth (3:10).

The harmonic ratios can obviously be used as proportions for layout as well, in several different ways:


	image width and height (for example, 450×800px = 9:16 = minor seventh)
	main content to page width (67%:100% = 2:3 = perfect fifth)
	page width to viewport width (80%:100% = 4:5 = major third)


One great benefit of using such ratios in web design work is that they can be applied in responsive web design. Proportional values, based on percentages or equivalent em units, will scale with changing viewports, so your layout and image proportions can be maintained or deliberately changed, as we’re about to find out, across devices.

Small speakers, tall speakers: binding to the device

The musical interval ratios also provide an opportunity, not only to create connectedness between the parts of a layout, but to bind the content to a device – that elusive antiphonal geometry. Just as a textblock and page resonate together, so too can web content and the screen. Earlier, I mentioned that several common screen aspect ratios match musical interval ratios. It would seem, then, that we have a set of proportions that we can use in different ways to establish and retain a sense of harmony that can be based on and change with those contexts. Using musical interval ratios, we can bind the display of our content to the device it’s displayed on.

If you haven’t met already, let me introduce you to the device-aspect-ratio property of CSS media queries.

@media only screen and (device-aspect-ratio: 3/4) { }
@media only screen and (device-aspect-ratio: 480/640) { }
@media only screen and (device-aspect-ratio: 600/800) { }
@media only screen and (device-aspect-ratio: 768/1024) { }

Regardless of the precise pixel values, each of these media queries would apply to devices whose display area has an aspect ratio of 3:4. It works by comparing the device-width with the device-height. (It’s not to be confused with aspect-ratio, which is defined by the width and height of the browser within the device.) The values in the media query are always presented as width/height, with portrait being the default orientation for smartphones and tablets; that is, to match an iPhone screen, you’d use device-aspect-ratio: 2/3, not 3/2, which won’t work.

Here’s a table of the musical intervals with their corresponding screens.


		
			Name 
			device-aspect-ratio 
			Screens 
			Common resolutions (pixels) 
		
		
			 major third 
			 5/4 
			 TFT LCD computer screens 
			 1,280×1,024 
		
		
			 perfect fourth 
			 3/4 or 4/3 
			 iPad, Kindle and other tablets, PDAs 
			 320×240, 768×1,024 
		
		
			 perfect fifth 
			 2/3 
			 iPhone, iPod Touch 
			 320×480, 640×960 
		
		
			 minor sixth 
			 8/5 (16/10) 
			 Many widescreens 
			 1,152×720, 1,440×900, 1,920×1,200 
		
		
			 major sixth 
			 3/5 
			 Many smartphones 
			 240×400, 480×800 
		
		
			 minor seventh 
			 16/9 or 9/16 
			 Many widescreens and some smartphones 
			 720×1,280, 1,366×768, 1,920×1,080, 2,560×1,440 
		


[You might argue that I’m playing fast and loose with the ratios. I suppose, mathematically speaking, 9:16 is not the same as 16:9: I’m no expert. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water, particularly at Christmas.]

With this in mind, we can begin to write media queries that will influence various typographic and layout values in line with the aspect ratios of specific screens and in combination with em-based min-width queries that work from smaller, mobile screens to larger, desktop screens.

Here’s a very simple demo page with only some text, an image with a caption and a little basic layout: no seasonal overindulgence here.

Demo: Sample page using device-aspect-ratio media queries based on musical interval ratios

Our initial styles for all devices are based on the perfect fifth, with the major third and octave rounding things out into a harmonious whole, whether or not media queries are supported. For example:

html { font-size: 100%; line-height: 1.5; }
   /* font-size:line-height = 16:24 = 2:3 = perfect fifth */

h1 { font-size: 32px; font-size: 2rem; line-height: 1.25; }
   /* font-size:line-height = 32:40 = 4:5 = major third
      body:h1 = 16:32 = 1:2 = octave */

While we should really consider methods of delivering images appropriate to the screen size, let’s just stick to a single image for all devices. But why don’t we change its aspect ratio from 4:3 to 3:2, to fit with our harmonic scheme? It’s easy enough to do with overflow:hidden on the <figure> element to hide a part of the image, and a negative margin fudge:

figure img { margin: -8.5% 0 0 0; width: 100%; max-width: 100%; }

Our first break point targets devices 320 pixels wide with an aspect ratio of 2:3, namely the iPhone and iPod Touch:

/* 320px = 20×16 */
@media only screen and (min-width: 20em) and (device-aspect-ratio: 2/3) { }

We’re actually already there, of course, as the intervals we’ve chosen resonate with this aspect ratio – the content is already bound to the device.

Our next media query, then, will make some changes to match a different ratio, the major sixth (3:5), which is same as that of many smartphones:

/* 480px = 30×16 */
@media only screen and (min-width: 30em) and (device-aspect-ratio: 3/5) { }

A different aspect ratio might require a change in harmony. For devices with these proportions, we’ll now use the perfect fourth (3:4) and the major sixth (3:5) along with the octave we already have to create a new resonating harmony. For instance, a slightly wider screen means we can increase the  line-height to aid the legibility of longer lines:

html { line-height: 1.667; }
   /* font-size:line-height = 16:26.672 = 3:5 = major sixth */

h1 { font-size: 32px; font-size: 2rem; line-height: 1.667; }
   /* font-size:line-height = 32:53.333 = 3:5 = major sixth
      body:h1 = 16:32 = 1:2 = octave */

and we can remove the negative margin to display our 4:3 image in its entirety.

Each screen displays content styled using relationships related to its own proportions. On the left, an iPhone 4 (2:3); on the right, a Samsung Nexus S (3:5). Your mileage may vary.

Another device, another media query. At 768 pixels, screens are wide enough to add columns. The ratios we’ve used for the 3:5 screens include the perfect fourth (3:4) so we don’t need to change any of the font measurements, but we can base the proportions of the columns on the major sixth interval:

article { float: left; width: 56%; }
   /* width of main column 3:5 (60% of 100%, major sixth)
      incorporating gutter width */

aside { float : right; width : 36%; }

On devices with a 3:4 aspect ratio, this works even better in landscape orientation.

While not every screen over 768 pixels wide will have 3:4 proportions, the range of intervals informing the design ensure harmonious relationships between the different parts of the layout.

For wide screens proper (break point at 1,280 pixels) we can employ a new set of harmonious intervals. Many laptop and desktop screens have a 16:10 aspect ratio, which boils down to 8:5, equivalent to the minor sixth (5:8). Combined with a minor third (5:6) and the octave (1:2), this creates a new harmony appropriate to these devices. Let’s increase the font size and change the image’s aspect ratio to match:

html { font-size: 120%; line-height: 1.6; }
   /* font-size increased for wider screens from 16px to 19.2px
      (5:6 = minor third)
      font-size:line-height = 19.2:30.72 = 5:8 = minor sixth */

figure img { margin: -12.5% 0 0 ; }	
   /* using -ve margin combined with overflow:hidden
      on the figure element
      to crop the image from 4:3 to 8:5 = minor sixth */

A wide screen with a 8:5 (16:10) aspect ratio and an image to match.

With more pixels at our disposal, we can also now use the musical interval ratios to determine the width of the layout, and change the column proportions as well:

section { margin: 0 auto; width: 83.333%; }
   /* content width:screen width = 5:6 = minor third */

article { width: 60%; }
   /* width of main column 5:8 (62.5% of 100%, minor sixth)
      incorporating gutter width */

aside { width: 35%; }

With some carefully targeted media queries, we can begin to reach towards fulfilling the second and third tenets of Boulton’s new canon for web design: connecting the parts of content through relationships embodied in the layout design; and binding the content to the devices people use to access it.

Coda

Musical interval ratios and screen aspect ratios reveal more than convenient correspondence. These proportions work on a deep aesthetic level. Much is claimed for the golden ratio φ, but none of the screens pervading our lives use it. Perhaps that’s an accident of technology, but can making screens to φ’s proportions be more difficult or expensive than 2:3 or 3:4 or 16:10? Here, then, is not just one but a set of proportions with a uniquely human focus, originating in nature, recognized in antiquity, fundamental still.

We find music to be an art steeped with meaning, yet, unlike literary and representational arts, purely instrumental music has no obvious semantic content. It boasts an ability to express emotions while remaining an abstract art in some sense, which makes it very like design. These days, we’re rightly encouraged to design for emotion, to make our users’ experience meaningful, seductive, delightful. Using musical ideas and principles in our designs can help achieve those ends.

Let’s not be naïve, of course; designing web pages is even less like composing music than it’s like designing for print. In visual design, the eye will always be sovereign to the ear; following these principles will only get us so far. We cannot truly claim that a carefully composed web page layout will have the same qualities and effect as any musical patterns that inform it. In music, a set of intervals is always harmonious in relation to other sets of intervals: music rarely stands still. What aspect ratios will future screens take? Already today there is great variation in devices and support for media queries (and within that, support for device-aspect-ratio). And what of non-western musical traditions? Or rhythm, form, tempo and dynamics? What I’ve demonstrated above is only a suggestion, a tentative exploration of one possible way forward.

But as our discipline matures and we become more articulate about what we do, we must look longer and deeper into areas of human endeavour already rich with value. Music is a fertile ground to explore and has the potential to yield up new approaches for web design.

Footnotes

 
 Just intonation is a system of tuning that uses small integers to describe the musical intervals, based initially on the perfect fifth, that most consonant of intervals. Simple instruments such as vibrating strings and natural horns, as well as unaccompanied voices, tend to fall into just intonation naturally.",2011,Owen Gregory,owengregory,2011-12-09T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/composing-the-new-canon/,design
280,Conditional Loading for Responsive Designs,"On the eighteenth day of last year’s 24 ways,  Paul Hammond  wrote a great article called Speed Up Your Site with Delayed Content. He outlined a technique for loading some content — like profile avatars — after the initial page load. This gives you a nice performance boost.

There’s another situation where this kind of delayed loading could be really handy: mobile-first responsive design.

Responsive design combines three techniques:


	a fluid grid
	flexible images
	media queries


At first, responsive design was applied to existing desktop-centric websites to allow the layout to adapt to smaller screen sizes. But more recently it has been combined with another innovative approach called mobile first.

Rather then starting with the big, bloated desktop site and then scaling down for smaller devices, it makes more sense to start with the constraints of the small screen and then scale up for larger viewports. Using this approach, your layout grid, your large images and your media queries are applied on top of the pre-existing small-screen design. It’s taking progressive enhancement to the next level.

One of the great advantages of the mobile-first approach is that it forces you to really focus on the core content of your page. It might be more accurate to think of this as a content-first approach. You don’t have the luxury of sidebars or multiple columns to fill up with content that’s just nice to have rather than essential.

But what happens when you apply your media queries for larger viewports and you do have sidebars and multiple columns? Well, you can load in that nice-to-have content using the same kind of Ajax functionality that Paul described in his article last year. The difference is that you first run a quick test to see if the viewport is wide enough to accommodate the subsidiary content. This is conditional delayed loading.

Consider this situation: I’ve published an article about cats and I’d like to include relevant cat-related news items in the sidebar …but only if there’s enough room on the screen for a sidebar.

I’m going to use Google’s News API to return the search results. This is the ideal time to use delayed loading: I don’t want a third-party service slowing down the rendering of my page so I’m going to fire off the request after my document has loaded.

Here’s an example of the kind of Ajax function that I would write:

var searchNews = function(searchterm) {
	var elem = document.createElement('script');
	elem.src = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/news?v=1.0&q='+searchterm+'&callback=displayNews';
	document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(elem);
};

I’ve provided a callback function called displayNews that takes the JSON result of that Ajax request and adds it an element on the page with the ID newsresults:

var displayNews = function(news) {
	var html = '',
	items = news.responseData.results,
	total = items.length;
	if (total>0) {
		for (var i=0; i<total; i++) {
			var item = items[i];
			html+= '<article>';
			html+= '<a href=""'+item.unescapedUrl+'"">';
			html+= '<h3>'+item.titleNoFormatting+'</h3>';
			html+= '</a>';
			html+= '<p>';
			html+= item.content;
			html+= '</p>';
			html+= '</article>';
		}
		document.getElementById('newsresults').innerHTML = html;
	}
};

Now, I can call that function at the bottom of my document:

<script>
    searchNews('cats');
</script>

If I only want to run that search when there’s room for a sidebar, I can wrap it in an if statement:

<script>
if (document.documentElement.clientWidth > 640) {
    searchNews('cats');
}
</script>

If the browser is wider than 640 pixels, that will fire off a search for news stories about cats and put the results into the newsresults element in my markup:

<div id=""newsresults"">
    <!-- search results go here -->
</div>

This works pretty well but I’m making an assumption that people with small-screen devices wouldn’t be interested in seeing that nice-to-have content. You know what they say about assumptions: they make an ass out of you and umptions. I should really try to give everyone at least the option to get to that extra content:

<div id=""newsresults"">
    <a href=""http://www.google.com/search?q=cats&tbm=nws"">Search Google News</a>
</div>

See the result

Visitors with small-screen devices will see that link to the search results; visitors with larger screens will get the search results directly.

I’ve been concentrating on HTML and JavaScript, but this technique has consequences for content strategy and information architecture. Instead of thinking about possible page content in a binary way as either ‘on the page’ or ‘not on the page’, conditional loading introduces a third ‘it’s complicated’ option.

This was just a simple example but I hope it illustrates that conditional loading could become an important part of the content-first responsive design approach.",2011,Jeremy Keith,jeremykeith,2011-12-02T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/conditional-loading-for-responsive-designs/,ux
275,Context First: Web Strategy in Four Handy Ws,"Many, many years ago, before web design became my proper job, I trained and worked as a journalist. I studied publishing in London and spent three fun years learning how to take a few little nuggets of information and turn them into a story. I learned a bunch of stuff that has all been a huge help to my design career. Flatplanning, layout, typographic theory. All of these disciplines have since translated really well to web design, but without doubt the most useful thing I learned was how to ask difficult questions.

Pretty much from day one of journalism school they hammer into you the importance of the Five Ws. Five disarmingly simple lines of enquiry that eloquently manage to provide the meat of any decent story. And with alliteration thrown in too. For a young journo, it’s almost too good to be true.

Who? What? Where? When? Why? It seems so obvious to almost be trite but, fundamentally, any story that manages to answer those questions for the reader is doing a pretty good job. You’ll probably have noticed feeling underwhelmed by certain news pieces in the past – disappointed, like something was missing. Some irritating oversight that really lets the story down. No doubt it was one of the Ws – those innocuous little suckers are generally only noticeable by their absence, but they sure get missed when they’re not there. 

Question everything

I’ve always been curious. An inveterate tinkerer with things and asker of dopey questions, often to the point of abject annoyance for anyone unfortunate enough to have ended up in my line of fire. So, naturally, the Five Ws started drifting into other areas of my life. I’d scrutinize everything, trying to justify or explain my rationale using these Ws, but I’d also find myself ripping apart the stuff that clearly couldn’t justify itself against the same criteria.

So when I started working as a designer I applied the same logic and, sure enough, the Ws pretty much mapped to the exact same needs we had for gathering requirements at the start of a project. It seemed so obvious, such a simple way to establish the purpose of a product. What was it for? Why we were making it? And, of course, who were we making it for? It forced clients to stop and think, when really what they wanted was to get going and see something shiny. Sometimes that was a tricky conversation to have, but it’s no coincidence that those who got it also understood the value of strategy and went on to have good solid products, while those that didn’t often ended up with arrogantly insular and very shiny but ultimately unsatisfying and expendable products. Empty vessels make the most noise and all that…

Content first

I was both surprised and pleased when the whole content first idea started to rear its head a couple of years back. Pleased, because without doubt it’s absolutely the right way to work. And surprised, because personally it’s always been the way I’ve done it – I wasn’t aware there was even an alternative way. Content in some form or another is the whole reason we were making the things we were making. I can’t even imagine how you’d start figuring out what a site needs to do, how it should be structured, or how it should look without a really good idea of what that content might be. It baffles me still that this was somehow news to a lot of people. What on earth were they doing? Design without purpose is just folly, surely?

It’s great to see the idea gaining momentum but, having watched it unfold, it occurred to me recently that although it’s fantastic to see a tangible shift in thinking – away from those bleak times, where making things up was somehow deemed an appropriate way to do things – there’s now a new bad guy in town.

With any buzzword solution of the moment, there’s always a catch, and it seems like some have taken the content first approach a little too literally. By which I mean, it’s literally the first thing they do. The project starts, there’s a very cursory nod towards gathering requirements, and off they go, cranking content. Writing copy, making video, commissioning illustrations.

All that’s happened is that the ‘making stuff up’ part has shifted along the line, away from layout and UI, back to the content. 

Starting is too easy

I can’t remember where I first heard that phrase, but it’s a great sentiment which applies to so much of what we do on the web. The medium is so accessible and to an extent disposable; throwing things together quickly carries far less burden than in any other industry. We’re used to tweaking as we go, changing bits, iterating things into shape. The ubiquitous beta tag has become the ultimate caveat, and has made the unfinished and unpolished acceptable. Of course, that can work brilliantly in some circumstances. Occasionally, a product offers such a paradigm shift it’s beyond the level of deep planning and prelaunch finessing we’d ideally like. But, in the main, for most client sites we work on, there really is no excuse not to do things properly. To ask the tricky questions, to challenge preconceptions and really understand the Ws behind the products we’re making before we even start. 

The four Ws

For product definition, only four of the five Ws really apply, although there’s a lot of discussion around the idea of when being an influencing factor. For example, the context of a user’s engagement with your product is something you can make a call on depending on the specifics of the project.

So, here’s my take on the four essential Ws. I’ll point out here that, of course, these are not intended to be autocratic dictums. Your needs may differ, your clients’ needs may differ, but these four starting points will get you pretty close to where you need to be.

Who 

It’s surprising just how many projects start without a real understanding of the intended audience. Many clients think they have an idea, but without really knowing – it’s presumptive at best, and we all know what presumption is the mother of, right? Of course, we can’t know our audiences in the same way a small shop owner might know their customers. But we can at least strive to find out what type of people are likely to be using the product. I’m not talking about deep user research. That should come later.

These are the absolute basics. What’s the context for their visit? How informed are they? What’s their level of comprehension? Are they able to self-identify and relate to categories you have created? I could go on, and it changes on a per-project basis. You’ll only find this out by speaking to them, if not in person, then indirectly through surveys, questionnaires or polls. The mechanism is less important than actually reaching out and engaging with them, because without that understanding it’s impossible to start to design with any empathy.

What

Once you become deeply involved directly with a product or service, it’s notoriously difficult to see things as an outsider would. You learn the thing inside and out, you develop shortcuts and internal phraseology. Colloquialisms creep in. You become too close. So it’s no surprise when clients sometimes struggle to explain what it is their product actually does in a way that others can understand.

Often products are complex but, really, the core reasons behind someone wanting to use that product are very simple. There’s a value proposition for the customer and, if they choose to engage with it, there’s a value exchange. If that proposition or exchange isn’t transparent, then people become confused and will likely go elsewhere. Make sure both your client and you really understand what that proposition is and, in turn, what the expected exchange should be. In a nutshell: what is the intended outcome of that engagement? Often the best way to do this is strip everything back to nothing. Verbosity is rife on the web. Just because it’s easy to create content, that shouldn’t be a reason to do so. Figure out what the value proposition is and then reintroduce content elements that genuinely help explain or present that to a level that is appropriate for the audience. 

Why 

In advertising, they talk about the truths behind a product or service. Truths can be both tangible or abstract, but the most important part is the resonance those truths hit with a customer. In a digital product or service those truths are often exposed as benefits. Why is this what I need? Why will it work for me? Why should I trust you? The why is one of the more fluffy Ws, yet it’s such an important one to nail. Clients can get prickly when you ask them to justify the why behind their product, but it’s a fantastic way to make sure the value proposition is clear, realistic and meets with the expectations of both client and customer.

It’s our job as designers to question things: we’re not just a pair of hands for clients. Just recently I spoke to a potential client about a site for his business. I asked him why people would use his product and also why his product seemed so fractured in its direction. He couldnt answer that question so, instead of ploughing on regardless, he went back to his directors and is now re-evaluating that business. It was awkward but he thanked me and hopefully he’ll have a better product as a result.

Where

In this instance, where is not so much a geographical thing, although in some cases that level of context may indeed become a influencing factor… The where we’re talking about here is the position of the product in relation to others around it. By looking at competitors or similar services around the one you are designing, you can start to get a sense for many of the things that are otherwise hard to pin down or have yet to be defined. For example, in a collection of sites all selling cars, where does yours fit most closely? Where are the overlaps? How are they communicating to their customers? How is the product range presented or categorized?

It’s good to look around and see how others are doing it. Not in a quest for homogeneity but more to reference or to avoid certain patterns that may or may not make sense for your own particular product. Clients often strive to be different for the sake of it. They feel they need to provide distinction by going against the flow a bit. We know different. We know users love convention. They embrace familiar mental models. They’re comfortable with things that they’ve experienced elsewhere. By showing your client that position is a vital part of their strategy, you can help shape their product into something great. 

To conclude

So there we have it – the four Ws. Each part tells a different and vital part of the story you need to be able to make a really good product. It might sound like a lot of work, particularly when the client is breathing down your neck expecting to see things, but without those pieces in place, the story you’re building your product on, and the content that you’re creating to form that product can only ever fit into one genre. Fiction.",2011,Alex Morris,alexmorris,2011-12-10T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/context-first/,content
272,Crafting the Front-end,"Much has been spoken and written recently about the virtues of craftsmanship in the context of web design and development. It seems that we as fabricators of the web are finally tiring of seeking out parallels between ourselves and architects, and are turning instead to the fabled specialist artisans.

Identifying oneself as a craftsman or craftswoman (let’s just say craftsperson from here onward) will likely be a trend of early 2012. In this pre-emptive strike, I’d like to expound on this movement as I feel it pertains to front-end development, and encourage care and understanding of the true qualities of craftsmanship (craftspersonship).

The core values

I’ll begin by defining craftspersonship. What distinguishes a craftsperson from a technician? Dictionaries tend to define a craftsperson as one who possesses great skill in a chosen field. The badge of a craftsperson for me, though, is a very special label that should be revered and used sparingly, only where it is truly deserved. A genuine craftsperson encompasses a few other key traits, far beyond raw skill, each of which must be learned and mastered.

A craftsperson has: 


	An appreciation of good work, in both the work of others and their own. And not just good as in ‘hey, that’s pretty neat’, I mean a goodness like a shining purity – the kind of good that feels right when you see it.
	A belief in quality at every level: every facet of the craftsperson’s product is as crucial as any other, without exception, even those normally hidden from view.
	Vision: an ability to visualize their path ahead, pre-empting the obstacles that may be encountered to plan a route around them.
	A preference for simplicity: an almost Bauhausesque devotion to undecorated functionality, with no unjustifiable parts included.
	Sincerity: producing work that speaks directly to its purpose with flawless clarity.


Only when you become a custodian of such values in your work can you consider calling yourself a craftsperson. Now let’s take a look at some steps we front-end developers can take on our journey of enlightenment toward craftspersonhood.

 Speaking of the craftsman’s journey, be sure to watch out for the video of The Standardistas’ stellar talk at the Build 2011 conference titled The Journey, which should be online sometime soon.

Building your own toolbox

My grandfather was a carpenter and trained as a young apprentice under a master. After observing and practising the many foundation theories, principles and techniques of carpentry, he was tasked with creating his own set of woodworking tools, which he would use and maintain throughout his career. By going through the process of having to create his own tools, he would be connected at the most direct level with every piece of wood he touched, his tools being his own creations and extensions of his own skilled hands. The depth of his knowledge of these tools must have surpassed the intricate as he fathered, used, cleaned and repaired them, day in and day out over many years.

And so it should be, ideally, with all crafts. We must understand our tools right down to the most fundamental level. I firmly believe that a level of true craftsmanship cannot be reached while there exists a layer that remains not wholly understood between a creator and his canvas. Of course, our tools as front-end developers are somewhat more complex than those of other crafts – it may seem reasonable to require that a carpenter create his or her own set of chisels, but somewhat less so to ask a front-end developer to code their own CSS preprocessor, or design their own computer.

However, it is still vitally important that you understand how your tools work. This is particularly critical when it comes to things like preprocessors, libraries and frameworks which aim to save you time by automating common processes and functions. For the most part, anything that saves you time is a Good Thing™ but it cannot be stressed enough that using tools like these in earnest should be avoided until you understand exactly what they are doing for you (and, to an extent, how they are doing it). 

In particular, you must understand any drawbacks to using your tools, and any shortcuts they may be taking on your behalf. I’m not suggesting that you steer clear of paid work until you’ve studied each of jQuery’s 9,266 lines of JavaScript source code but, all levity aside, it will further you on your journey to look at interesting or relevant bits of jQuery, and any other libraries you might want to use. Such libraries often directly link to corresponding sections of their source code on sites like GitHub from their official documentation. Better yet, they’re almost always written in high level languages (easy to read), so there’s no excuse not to don your pith helmet and go on something of an exploration. Any kind of tangential learning like this will drive you further toward becoming a true craftsperson, so keep an open mind and always be ready to step out of your comfort zone.

Downtime and tool honing

With any craft, it is essential to keep your tools in good condition, and a good idea to stay up-to-date with the latest equipment. This is especially true on the web, which, as we like to tell anyone who is still awake more than a minute after asking what it is that we do, advances at a phenomenal pace. A tool or technique that could be considered best practice this week might be the subject of haughty derision in a comment thread within six months.

I have little doubt that you already spend a chunk of time each day keeping up with the latest material from our industry’s finest Interblogs and Twittertubes, but do you honestly put aside time to collect bookmarks and code snippets from things you read into a slowly evolving toolbox? At @media in 2009, Simon Collison delivered a candid talk on his ‘Ultimate Package’. Those of us who didn’t flee the room anticipating a newfound and unwelcome intimacy with the contents of his trousers were shown how he maintained his own toolkit – a collection of files and folders all set up and ready to go for a new project. By maintaining a toolkit in this way, he has consistency across projects and a dependable base upon which to learn and improve.

The assembly and maintenance of such a personalized and familiar toolkit is probably as close as we will get to emulating the tool making stage of more traditional craft trades. Keep a master copy of your toolkit somewhere safe, making copies of it for new projects. When you learn of a way in which part of it can be improved, make changes to the master copy.

Simplicity through modularity

I believe that the user interfaces of all web applications should be thought of as being made up primarily of modular components. Modules in this context are patterns in design that appear repeatedly throughout the app. These can be small collections of elements, like a user profile summary box (profile picture, username, meta data), as well as atomic elements such as headings and list items.

Well-crafted front-end architectures have the ability to support this kind of repeating pattern as modules, with as close to no repetition of CSS (or JavaScript) as possible, and as close to no variations in HTML between instances as possible.

One of the most fundamental and well known tenets of software engineering is the DRY rule – don’t repeat yourself. It requires that “every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.” 

As craftspeople, we must hold this rule dear and apply it to the modules we have identified in our site designs. The moment you commit a second style definition for a module, the quality of your output (the front-end code) takes a huge hit. There should only ever be one base style definition for each distinct module or component. Keep these in a separate, sacred place in your CSS. I use a _modules.scss Sass include file, imported near the top of my main CSS files.

Be sure, of course, to avoid making changes to this file lightly, as the smallest adjustment can affect multiple pages (hint: keep a structure list of which modules are used on which pages). Avoid the inevitable temptation to duplicate code late in the project. Sticking to this rule becomes more important the more complex the codebase becomes.

If you can stick to this rule, using sensible class names and consistent HTML, you can reach a joyous, self-fulfilling plateau stage in each project where you are assembling each interface from your own set of carefully crafted building blocks.

Old school markup

Let’s take a step back. Before we fret about creating a divinely pure modular CSS framework, we need to know the site’s design and what it is made of. The best way to gain this knowledge is to go old school. Print out every comp, mockup, wireframe, sketch or whatever you have. If there are sections of pages that are hidden until some user action takes place, or if the page has multiple states, be sure that you have everything that could become visible to the user on paper.

Once you have your wedge of paper designs, lay out all the pages on the floor, or stick them to the wall if you can, arranging them logically according to the site hierarchy, by user journey, or whatever guidelines make most sense to you. Once you have the site laid out before you, study it for a while, familiarizing yourself with every part of every interface. This will eliminate nasty surprises late in the project when you realize you’ve duplicated something, or left an interface on the drawing board altogether.

Now that you know the site like it’s your best friend, get out your pens or pencils of choice and attack it. Mark it up like there’s no tomorrow. Pretend you’re a spy trying to identify communications from an enemy network hiding their messages in newspapers. Look for patterns and similarities, drawing circles around them. These are your modules. Start also highlighting the differences between each instance of these modules, working out which is the most basic or common type that will become the base definition from which all other representations are extended.

This simple but empowering exercise will equip you for your task of actually crafting, instead of just building, the front-end. Without the knowledge gained from this kind of research phase, you will be blundering forward, improvising as best you can, but ultimately making quality-compromising mistakes that could have been avoided.

For more on this theme, read Anna Debenham’s Front-end Style Guides which recommends a similar process, and the sublime idea of extending this into a guide to refer to during development and beyond.

Design homogeneity

Moving forward again, you now have your modules defined and things are looking good. I mentioned that many instances of these modules will carry minor differences. These differences must be given significant thinking time, and discussion time with your designer(s).

It should be common knowledge by now that successful software projects are not the product of distinct design and build phases with little or no bidirectional feedback. The crucial nature of the designer-developer relationship has been covered in depth this year by Paul Robert Lloyd, and a joint effort from both teams throughout the project lifecycle is pivotal to your ability to craft and ship successful products.

This relationship comes into play when you’re well into the development of the site, and you start noticing these differences between instances of modules (they’ll start to stand out very clearly to you and your carefully regimented modular CSS system). Before you start overriding your base styles, question the differences with the designer to work out why they exist. Perhaps they are required and are important to their context, but perhaps they were oversights from earlier design revisions, or simple mistakes.

The craftsperson’s gland

As you grow towards the levels of expertise and experience where you can proudly and honestly consider yourself a craftsperson, you will find that you steadily develop what initially feels like a kind of sixth sense. I think of it more as a new hormonal gland, secreting into your bloodstream a powerful messenger chemical that can either reward or punish your brain. This gland is connected directly to your core understanding of what good quality work looks and feels like, an understanding that itself improves with experience. 

This gland will make itself known to you in two ways. First, when you solve a problem in a beautifully elegant way with clean and unobtrusive code that looks good and just feels right, your craftsperson’s gland will ooze something delicious that makes your brain and soul glow from the inside out. You will beam triumphantly at the succinct lines of code on your computer display before bounding outside with a spring in your step to swim up glittering rainbows and kiss soft fluffy puppies.

The second way that you may become aware of your craftsperson’s gland, though, is somewhat less pleasurable. In an alternate reality, your parallel self is faced with the same problem, but decides to take a shortcut and get around it by some dubious means – the kind of technical method that the words hack, kludge and bodge are reserved for. As soon as you have done this, or even as you are doing it, your craftsperson’s gland will damn well let you know that you took the wrong fork in the road. As your craftsperson’s gland begins to secrete a toxic pus, you will at first become entranced into a vacant stare at the monstrous mess you are considering unleashing upon your site’s visitors, before writhing in the horrible agony of an itch that can never be scratched, and a feeling of being coated with the devil’s own deep and penetrating filth that no shower will ever cleanse.

Perhaps I exaggerate slightly, but it is no overstatement to suggest that you will find yourself being guided by proverbial angels and demons perched on opposite shoulders, or a whispering voice inside your head. If you harness this sense, sharpening it as if it were another tool in your kit and letting it guide or at least advise your decision making, you will transcend the rocky realm of random trial and error when faced with problems, and tend toward the right answers instinctively.

This gland can also empower your ability to assess your own work, becoming a judge before whom all your work is cross-examined. A good craftsperson regularly takes a step back from their work, and questions every facet of their product for its precise alignment with their core values of quality and sincerity, and even the very necessity of each component.

The wrapping

By now, you may be thinking that I take this kind of thing far too seriously, but to terrify you further, I haven’t even shared the half of it. Hopefully, though, this gives you an idea of the kind of levels of professionalism and dedication that it should take to get you on your way to becoming a craftsperson. It’s a level of accomplishment and ability toward which we all should strive, both for our personal fulfilment and the betterment of the products we use daily. I look forward to seeing your finely crafted work throughout 2012.",2011,Ben Bodien,benbodien,2011-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/crafting-the-front-end/,process
271,Creating Custom Font Stacks with Unicode-Range,"Any web designer or front-end developer worth their salt will be familiar with the CSS @font-face rule used for embedding fonts in a web page. We’ve all used it — either directly in our code ourselves, or via one of the web font services like Fontdeck, Typekit or Google Fonts.

If you’re like me, however, you’ll be used to just copying and pasting in a specific incantation of lines designed to get different formats of fonts working in different browsers, and may not have really explored all the capabilities of @font-face properties as defined by the spec.

One such property — the unicode-range descriptor — sounds pretty dull and is easily overlooked. It does, however, have some fairly interesting possibilities when put to use in creative ways.

Unicode-range

The unicode-range descriptor is designed to help when using fonts that don’t have full coverage of the characters used in a page. By adding a unicode-range property to a @font-face rule it is possible to specify the range of characters the font covers. 

@font-face {
    font-family: BBCBengali;
    src: url(fonts/BBCBengali.ttf) format(""opentype"");
    unicode-range: U+00-FF;
}

In this example, the font is to be used for characters in the range of U+00 to U+FF which runs from the unexciting control characters at the start of the Unicode table (symbols like the exclamation mark start at U+21) right through to ÿ at U+FF – the extent of the Basic Latin character range.

By adding multiple @font-face rules for the same family but with different ranges, you can build up complete coverage of the characters your page uses by using different fonts.

When I say that it’s possible to specify the range of characters the font covers, that’s true, but what you’re really doing with the unicode-range property is declaring which characters the font should be used for. This becomes interesting, because instead of merely working with the technical constraints of available characters in a given font, we can start picking and choosing characters to use and selectively mix fonts together.

The best available ampersand

A few years back, Dan Cederholm wrote a post encouraging designers to use the best available ampersand. Dan went on to outline how this can be achieved by wrapping our ampersands in a <span> element with a class applied:

<span class=""amp"">&</span>

A CSS rule can then be written to select the <span> and apply a different font:

span.amp {
    font-family: Baskerville, Palatino, ""Book Antiqua"", serif;
}

That’s a perfectly serviceable technique, but the drawbacks are clear — you have to add extra markup which is borderline presentational, and you also have to be able to add that markup, which isn’t always possible when working with a CMS.

Perhaps we could do this with unicode-range.

A better best available ampersand

The Unicode code point for an ampersand is U+26, so the ampersand font stack above can be created like so:

@font-face {
    font-family: 'Ampersand';
    src: local('Baskerville'), local('Palatino'), local('Book Antiqua');
    unicode-range: U+26;
}

What we’ve done here is specify a new family called Ampersand and created a font stack for it with the user’s locally installed copies of Baskerville, Palatino or Book Antiqua. We’ve then limited it to a single character range — the ampersand. Of course, those don’t need to be local fonts — they could be web font files, too. If you have a font with a really snazzy ampersand, go for your life.

We can then use that new family in a regular font stack.

h1 {
    font-family: Ampersand, Arial, sans-serif;
}

With this in place, any <h1> elements in our page will use the Ampersand family (Baskerville, Palatino or Book Antiqua) for ampersands, and Arial for all other characters. If the user doesn’t have any of the Ampersand family fonts available, the ampersand will fall back to the next item in the font stack, Arial.

You didn’t think it was that easy, did you?

Oh, if only it were so. The problem comes, as ever, with the issue of browser support. The unicode-range property has good support in WebKit browsers (like Safari and Chrome, and the browsers on most popular smartphone platforms) and in recent versions of Internet Explorer. The big stumbling block comes in the form of Firefox, which has no support at all.

If you’re familiar with how CSS works when it comes to unsupported properties, you’ll know that if a browser encounters a property it doesn’t implement, it just skips that declaration and moves on to the next. That works perfectly for things like border-radius — if the browser can’t round off the corners, the declaration is skipped and the user sees square corners instead. Perfect.

Less perfect when it comes to unicode-range, because if no range is specified then the default is that the font is applied for all characters — the whole range. If you’re using a fancy font for flamboyant ampersands, you probably don’t want that applied to all your text if unicode-range isn’t supported. That would be bad. Really bad.

Ensuring good fallbacks

As ever, the trick is to make sure that there’s a sensible fallback in place if a browser doesn’t have support for whatever technology you’re trying to use. This is where being a super nerd about understanding the spec you’re working with really pays off.

We can make use of the rules of the CSS cascade to make sure that if unicode-range isn’t supported we get a sensible fallback font. What would be ideal is if we were able to follow up the @font-face rule with a second rule to override it if Unicode ranges aren’t implemented.

@font-face {
    font-family: 'Ampersand';
    src: local('Baskerville'), local('Palatino'), local('Book Antiqua');
    unicode-range: U+26;
}
@font-face {
    font-family: 'Ampersand';
    src: local('Arial');
}

In theory, this code should make sense for all browsers. For those that support unicode-range the two rules become cumulative. They specify different ranges for the same family, and in WebKit browsers this has the expected result of using Arial for most characters, but Baskerville and friends for the ampersand. For browsers that don’t have support, the second rule should just supersede the first, setting the font to Arial. 

Unfortunately, this code causes current versions of Firefox to freak out and use the first rule, applying Baskerville to the entire range. That’s both unexpected and unfortunate. Bad Firefox. On your rug.

If that doesn’t work, what can we do? Well, we know that if given a unicode-range Firefox will ignore the range and apply the font to all characters. That’s really what we’re trying to achieve. So what if we specified a range for the fallback font, but made sure it only covers some obscure high-value Unicode character we’re never going to use in our page? Then it wouldn’t affect the outcome for browsers that do support ranges.

@font-face {
    font-family: 'Ampersand';
    src: local('Baskerville'), local('Palatino'), local('Book Antiqua');
    unicode-range: U+26;
}
@font-face {
    /* Ampersand fallback font */
    font-family: 'Ampersand';
    src: local('Arial');
    unicode-range: U+270C;
}

By specifying a range on the fallback font, Firefox appears to correctly override the first based on the cascade sort order. Browsers that do support ranges take the second rule in addition, and apply Arial for that obscure character we’re not using in any of our pages — U+270C.

So we get our nice ampersands in browsers that support unicode-range and, thanks to our styling of an obscure Unicode character, the font falls back to a perfectly acceptable Arial in browsers that do not offer support. Perfect!

That obscure character, my friends, is what Unicode defines as the VICTORY HAND.

✌

So, how can we use this?

Ampersands are a neat trick, and it works well in browsers that support ranges, but that’s not really the point of all this. Styling ampersands is fun, but they’re only really scratching the surface. Consider more involved examples, such as substituting a different font for numerals, or symbols, or even caps. Things certainly begin to get a bit more interesting.

How do you know what the codes are for different characters? Richard Ishida has a handy online conversion tool available where you can type in the characters and get the Unicode code points out the other end.

Of course, the fact remains that browser support for unicode-range is currently limited, so any application needs to have fallbacks that you’re still happy for a significant proportion of your visitors to see. In some cases, such as dedicated pages for mobile devices in an HTML-based phone app, this is immediately useful as support in WebKit browsers is already very good. In other cases, you’ll have to use your own best judgement based on your needs and audience.

One thing to keep in mind is that if you’re using web fonts, the entire font will be downloaded even if only one character is used. That said, the font shouldn’t be downloaded if none of the characters within the Unicode range are present in a given page.

As ever, there are pros and cons to using unicode-range as well as varied but increasing support in browsers. It remains a useful tool to understand and have in your toolkit for when the right moment comes along.",2011,Drew McLellan,drewmclellan,2011-12-01T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/creating-custom-font-stacks-with-unicode-range/,code
283,"CSS3 Patterns, Explained","Many of you have probably seen my CSS3 patterns gallery. It became very popular throughout the year and it showed many web developers how powerful CSS3 gradients really are. But how many really understand how these patterns are created? The biggest benefit of CSS-generated backgrounds is that they can be modified directly within the style sheet. This benefit is void if we are just copying and pasting CSS code we don’t understand. We may as well use a data URI instead.

Important note

In all the examples that follow, I’ll be using gradients without a vendor prefix, for readability and brevity. However, you should keep in mind that in reality you need to use all the vendor prefixes (-moz-, -ms-, -o-, -webkit-) as no browser currently implements them without a prefix. Alternatively, you could use -prefix-free and have the current vendor prefix prepended at runtime, only when needed.

The syntax described here is the one that browsers currently implement. The specification has since changed, but no browser implements the changes yet. If you are interested in what is coming, I suggest you take a look at the dev version of the spec.

If you are not yet familiar with CSS gradients, you can read these excellent tutorials by John Allsopp and return here later, as in the rest of the article I assume you already know the CSS gradient basics:


	CSS3 Linear Gradients
	CSS3 Radial Gradients


The main idea

I’m sure most of you can imagine the background this code generates:

background: linear-gradient(left, white 20%, #8b0 80%);

It’s a simple gradient from one color to another that looks like this:

 See this example live

As you probably know, in this case the first 20% of the container’s width is solid white and the last 20% is solid green. The other 60% is a smooth gradient between these colors. Let’s try moving these color stops closer to each other:

background: linear-gradient(left, white 30%, #8b0 70%);

 See this example live

background: linear-gradient(left, white 40%, #8b0 60%);

 See this example live

background: linear-gradient(left, white 50%, #8b0 50%);

 See this example live

Notice how the gradient keeps shrinking and the solid color areas expanding, until there is no gradient any more in the last example. We can even adjust the position of these two color stops to control where each color abruptly changes into another:

background: linear-gradient(left, white 30%, #8b0 30%);

 See this example live

background: linear-gradient(left, white 90%, #8b0 90%);

 See this example live

What you need to take away from these examples is that when two color stops are at the same position, there is no gradient, only solid colors. Even without going any further, this trick is useful for a number of different use cases like faux columns or the effect I wanted to achieve in my homepage or the -prefix-free page where the background is only shown on one side and hidden on the other:



Combining with background-size

We can do wonders, however, if we combine this with the CSS3 background-size property:

background: linear-gradient(left, white 50%, #8b0 50%);
background-size: 100px 100px;

 See this example live

And there it is. We just created the simplest of patterns: (vertical) stripes. We can remove the first parameter (left) or replace it with top and we’ll get horizontal stripes. However, let’s face it: Horizontal and vertical stripes are kinda boring. Most stripey backgrounds we see on the web are diagonal. So, let’s try doing that.

Our first attempt would be to change the angle of the gradient to something like 45deg. However, this results in an ugly pattern like this: 

 See this example live

Before reading on, think for a second: why didn’t this produce the desired result? Can you figure it out?

The reason is that the gradient angle rotates the gradient inside each tile, not the tiled background as a whole. However, didn’t we have the same problem the first time we tried to create diagonal stripes with an image? And then we learned that every stripe has to be included twice, like so:



So, let’s try to create that effect with CSS gradients. It’s essentially what we tried before, but with more color stops:

background: linear-gradient(45deg, white 25%,
    #8b0 25%, #8b0 50%, 
    white 50%, white 75%, 
    #8b0 75%);
background-size:100px 100px;

 See this example live

And there we have our stripes! An easy way to remember the order of the percentages and colors it is that you always have two of the same in succession, except the first and last color.

Note: Firefox for Mac also needs an additional 100% color stop at the end of any pattern with more than two stops, like so: ..., white 75%, #8b0 75%, #8b0). The bug was reported in February 2011 and you can vote for it and track its progress at Bugzilla.

Unfortunately, this is essentially a hack and we will realize that if we try to change the gradient angle to 60deg:

 See this example live

Not that maintainable after all, eh? Luckily, CSS3 offers us another way of declaring such backgrounds, which not only helps this case but also results in much more concise code:

background: repeating-linear-gradient(60deg, white, white 35px, #8b0 35px, #8b0 70px);

 See this example live

In this case, however, the size has to be declared in the color stop positions and not through background-size, since the gradient is supposed to cover the entire container. You might notice that the declared size is different from the one specified the previous way. This is because the size of the stripes is measured differently: in the first example we specify the dimensions of the tile itself; in the second, the width of the stripes (35px), which is measured diagonally.

Multiple backgrounds

Using only one gradient you can create stripes and that’s about it. There are a few more patterns you can create with just one gradient (linear or radial) but they are more or less boring and ugly. Almost every pattern in my gallery contains a number of different backgrounds. For example, let’s create a polka dot pattern:

background: radial-gradient(circle, white 10%, transparent 10%),
radial-gradient(circle, white 10%, black 10%) 50px 50px;
background-size:100px 100px;

 See this example live

Notice that the two gradients are almost the same image, but positioned differently to create the polka dot effect. The only difference between them is that the first (topmost) gradient has transparent instead of black. If it didn’t have transparent regions, it would effectively be the same as having a single gradient, as the topmost gradient would obscure everything beneath it.

There is an issue with this background. Can you spot it?

This background will be fine for browsers that support CSS gradients but, for browsers that don’t, it will be transparent as the whole declaration is ignored. We have two ways to provide a fallback, each for different use cases. We have to either declare another background before the gradient, like so:

background: black;
background: radial-gradient(circle, white 10%, transparent 10%),
radial-gradient(circle, white 10%, black 10%) 50px 50px;
background-size:100px 100px;

or declare each background property separately:

background-color: black;
background-image: radial-gradient(circle, white 10%, transparent 10%),
radial-gradient(circle, white 10%, transparent 10%);
background-size:100px 100px;
background-position: 0 0, 50px 50px;

The vigilant among you will have noticed another change we made to our code in the last example: we altered the second gradient to have transparent regions as well. This way background-color serves a dual purpose: it sets both the fallback color and the background color of the polka dot pattern, so that we can change it with just one edit. Always strive to make code that can be modified with the least number of edits. You might think that it will never be changed in that way but, almost always, given enough time, you’ll be proved wrong.

We can apply the exact same technique with linear gradients, in order to create checkerboard patterns out of right triangles:

background-color: white;
background-image: linear-gradient(45deg, black 25%, transparent 25%, transparent 75%, black 75%), 
linear-gradient(45deg, black 25%, transparent 25%, transparent 75%, black 75%);
background-size:100px 100px;
background-position: 0 0, 50px 50px;

 See this example live

Using the right units

Don’t use pixels for the sizes without any thought. In some cases, ems make much more sense. For example, when you want to make a lined paper background, you want the lines to actually follow the text. If you use pixels, you have to change the size every time you change font-size. If you set the background-size in ems, it will naturally follow the text and you will only have to update it if you change line-height.

Is it possible?

The shapes that can be achieved with only one gradient are:


	stripes
	right triangles
	circles and ellipses
	semicircles and other shapes formed from slicing ellipses horizontally or vertically


You can combine several of them to create squares and rectangles (two right triangles put together), rhombi and other parallelograms (four right triangles), curves formed from parts of ellipses, and other shapes.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should

Technically, anything can be crafted with these techniques. However, not every pattern is suitable for it. The main advantages of this technique are:


	no extra HTTP requests
	short code
	human-readable code (unlike data URIs) that can be changed without even leaving the CSS file.


Complex patterns that require a large number of gradients are probably better left to SVG or bitmap images, since they negate almost every advantage of this technique:


	they are not shorter
	they are not really comprehensible – changing them requires much more effort than using an image editor


They still save an HTTP request, but so does a data URI.

I have included some very complex patterns in my gallery, because even though I think they shouldn’t be used in production (except under very exceptional conditions), understanding how they work and coding them helps somebody understand the technology in much more depth.

Another rule of thumb is that if your pattern needs shapes to obscure parts of other shapes, like in the star pattern or the yin yang pattern, then you probably shouldn’t use it. In these patterns, changing the background color requires you to also change the color of these shapes, making edits very tedious.

If a certain pattern is not practicable with a reasonable amount of CSS, that doesn’t mean you should resort to bitmap images. SVG is a very good alternative and is supported by all modern browsers.

Browser support

CSS gradients are supported by Firefox 3.6+, Chrome 10+, Safari 5.1+ and Opera 11.60+ (linear gradients since Opera 11.10). Support is also coming in Internet Explorer when IE10 is released. You can get gradients in older WebKit versions (including most mobile browsers) by using the proprietary -webkit-gradient(), if you really need them.

Epilogue

I hope you find these techniques useful for your own designs. If you come up with a pattern that’s very different from the ones already included, especially if it demonstrates a cool new technique, feel free to send a pull request to the github repo of the patterns gallery. Also, I’m always fascinated to see my techniques put in practice, so if you made something cool and used CSS patterns, I’d love to know about it!

Happy holidays!",2011,Lea Verou,leaverou,2011-12-16T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/css3-patterns-explained/,code
286,Defending the Perimeter Against Web Widgets,"On July 14, 1789, citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille, igniting a revolution that toppled the French monarchy. On July 14 of this year, there was a less dramatic (though more tweeted) takedown: The Deck network, which delivers advertising to some of the most popular web design and culture destinations, was down for about thirty minutes. During this period, most partner sites running ads from The Deck could not be viewed as result.

A few partners were unaffected (aside from not having an ad to display). Fortunately, Dribbble, was one of them. In this article, I’ll discuss outages like this and how to defend against them. But first, a few qualifiers: The Deck has been rock solid – this is the only downtime we’ve witnessed since joining in June. More importantly, the issues in play are applicable to any web widget you might add to your site to display third-party content.

Down and out

Your defense is only as good as its weakest link. Web pages are filled with links, some of which threaten the ability of your page to load quickly and correctly. If you want your site to work when external resources fail, you need to identify the weak links on your site. In this article, we’ll talk about web widgets as a point of failure and defensive JavaScript techniques for handling them.

Widgets 101

Imagine a widget that prints out a Pun of the Day on your site. A simple technique for both widget provider and consumer is for the provider to expose a URL:

http://widgetjonesdiary.com/punoftheday.js

which returns a JavaScript file like this:

document.write(""<h2>The Pun of the Day</h2><p>Where do frogs go for beers after work? Hoppy hour!</p>"");

The call to document.write() injects the string passed into the document where it is called. So to display the widget on your page, simply add an external script tag where you want it to appear:

<div class=""punoftheday"">
  <script src=""http://widgetjonesdiary.com/punoftheday.js""></script>
  <!-- Content appears here as output of script above -->
</div>

This approach is incredibly easy for both provider and consumer. But there are implications…

document.write()… or wrong?

As in the example above, scripts may perform a document.write() to inject HTML. Page rendering halts while a script is processed so any output can be inlined into the document. Therefore, page rendering speed depends on how fast the script returns the data. If an external JavaScript widget hangs, so does the page content that follows. It was this scenario that briefly stalled partner sites of The Deck last summer.

The elegant solution

To make our web widget more robust, calls to document.write() should be avoided. This can be achieved with a technique called JSONP (AKA JSON with padding). In our example, instead of writing inline with document.write(), a JSONP script passes content to a callback function:

publishPun(""<h2>Pun of the Day</h2><p>Where do frogs go for beers after work? Hoppy hour!</p>"");

Then, it’s up to the widget consumer to implement a callback function responsible for displaying the content. Here’s a simple example where our callback uses jQuery to write the content into a target <div>:

<!-- Where widget content should appear -->
<div class=""punoftheday""></div>

…


<br />
function publishPun(content) {
  $(&#8216;.punoftheday&#8217;).html(content); // Writes content display location<br />
}<br />




View Example 1

Even if the widget content appears at the top of the page, our script can be included at the bottom so it’s non-blocking: a slow response leaves page rendering unaffected. It simply invokes the callback which, in turn, writes the widget content to its display destination.

The hack

But what to do if your provider doesn’t support JSONP? This was our case with The Deck. Returning to our example, I’m reminded of computer scientist David Wheeler’s statement, “All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection… Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection.”

In our case, the indirection is to move the widget content into position after writing it to the page. This allows us to place the widget <script> tag at the bottom of the page so rendering won’t be blocked, but still display the widget in the target. The strategy:


	Load widget content into a hidden <div> at the bottom of the page.
	Move the loaded content from the hidden <div> to its display location.


and the code:

<!-- Where widget content should appear -->
<div class=""punoftheday""></div>

…



  
  



<br />
$(&#8216;.punoftheday&#8217;).append($(&#8216;.loading-dock&#8217;).children(&#8216;:gt(0)&#8217;));<br />

View Example 2

After the external punoftheday.js script has processed, the rendered HTML will look as follows:

<div class=""loading-dock hidden"">
  <script src=""http://widgetjonesdiary.com/punoftheday.js""></script>
  <h2>Pun of the Day</h2>
  <p>Where do frogs go for beers after work? Hoppy hour!</p>
</div>

The ‘loading-dock’ <div> now includes the widget content, albeit hidden from view (if we’ve styled the ‘hidden’ class with display: none). There’s just one more step: move the content to its display destination. This line of jQuery (from above) does the trick:

$('.punoftheday').append($('.loading-dock').children(':gt(0)'));

This selects all child elements in the ‘loading-doc’ <div> except the first – the widget <script> tag which generated it – and moves it to the display destination. Worth noting is the :gt(0) jQuery selector extension, which allows us to exclude the first (in a 0-based array) child element – the widget <script> tag – from selection.

Since all of this happens at the bottom of the page, just before the </body> tag, no rendering has to wait on the external widget script. The only thing that fails if our widget hangs is… the widget itself. Our weakest link has been strengthened and so has our site. DE-FENSE!",2011,Rich Thornett,richthornett,2011-12-06T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/defending-the-perimeter-against-web-widgets/,process
279,Design the Invisible to Tell Better Stories on the Web,"For design to be meaningful we need to tell stories. We need to design the invisible, the cues, the messages and the extra detail hidden beneath the aesthetics. It’s all about the story.



From verbal exchanges around the campfire to books, the web and everything in between, storytelling allows us to share, organize and process information more efficiently. It helps us understand our surroundings and make emotional connections to people, places and experiences.

Web design lends itself perfectly to the conventions of storytelling, a universal process. However, the stories vary because they’re defined by culture, society, politics and religion. All of which need considering if you are to design stories that are relevant to your target audience.

The benefits of approaching design with storytelling in mind from the very start of the project is that we are creating considered design that allows users to quickly gather meaning from the website. They do this by reading between the lines and drawing on the wealth of knowledge they have acquired about the associations between colours, typyefaces and signs.

With so much recognition and analysis happening subconsciously you have to consider how design communicates on this level. This invisible layer has a significant impact on what you say, how you say it and who you say it to.

How can we design something that’s invisible?

By researching and making conscious decisions about exactly what you are communicating, you can make the invisible visible. As is often quoted, good design is like air, you only notice it when it’s bad. So by designing the invisible the aim is to design stories that the audience receive subliminally, so that they go somewhat unnoticed, like good air.

Storytelling strands

To share these stories through design, you can break it down into several strands. Each strand tells a story on its own, but when combined they may start to tell a different story altogether. These strands are colour, typefaces, branding, tone of voice and symbols. All are literal and visible but the invisible element is the meaning behind them – meaning that you can extract and share. In this article I want to focus on colour, typefaces and tone of voice and on how combining story strands can change the meaning.

Colour

Let’s start with colour. Red represents emotions such as love but can also signify war. Green is commonly used for all things environmental and purple is a colour that connotes wealth and royalty. These associations between colour and emotion or value have been learned over time and are continually reinforced through media and culture. 



With this knowledge come expectations from your users. For example, they will expect Valentine’s Day sites to be red and kids’ sites to be bright and colourful. This is true in the same way audiences have expectations of certain genres of film or music. These conventions help savvy audiences decode texts and read between the lines or, rather, to draw meaning from the invisible. It’s practically an innate skill. This is why you need to design the invisible: because users will quickly deduce meaning from your site and fill in the story’s gaps, it’s important to give them as much of that story to begin with. A story relevant to their culture.



Of all the ways you can tell stories through web design, colour is the most fascinating and important. Not only does it evoke emotions in users but its meaning varies significantly between cultures. In the west, for example, white is a colour associated with weddings, and black is the colour of mourning. This is signified by the traditions of brides wearing white and those in mourning wearing black. In other cultures the meanings are reversed, as black is a colour that represents good luck and white is a colour that signifies mourning. If you assume the same values are true in all cultures then you risk offending the very people you are targeting.

When colours combine, the story being told can change. If you design using red, white and blue then it’s going to be difficult to shake off patriotic connotations because this colour combination is so ingrained as being American or British or French thanks largely to their flags. This extends to politics too. Each party has its own representative colour. In the UK, the Conservatives are blue and Labour is red so it would be inappropriate storytelling to design a Labour-related website in blue as there would be a conflict between the content and the design, a conflict that would result in a poor user experience.

Conflicts become more of an issue when you start to combine story strands. I once saw a No VAT advert use the symbol on the left:



There’s a complete conflict in storytelling here between the sign and its colour. The prohibition sign was used over the word VAT to mean no VAT; that makes sense. But this is a symbol that is used to communicate to people that something is being prohibited or prevented, it mustn’t continue. So to use green contradicts the message of the sign itself; green is used as a colour to say yes, go, proceed, enter. The same would be true if we had a tick in red and a cross in green. Bad design here means the story is flawed and the user experience is compromised.

Typefaces

Typefaces also tell stories. They are so much more than the words that are written with them because they connote different values. Here are a few:



Serif fonts are more formal and are associated with tradition, sophistication and high-end values. Sans serif fonts, on the other hand, are synonymous with modernity, informality and friendliness. These perceptions are again reinforced through more traditional media such as newspaper mastheads, where the serious news-focused broadsheets have serif titles, and the showbiz and gossip-led tabloids have sans serif titles. This translates to the web as well. With these associations already familiar to users, they may see copy and focus on the words, but if the way that copy is displayed jars with the context then we are back to having conflicting stories like the No VAT sign earlier.

Let’s take official institutions, for example. The White House, the monarchy, 10 Downing Street and other government departments are formal, traditional and important organisations. If the copy on their websites were written in a typeface like Cooper Black, it would erase any authority and respect that they were due. They need people to take them seriously and trust them, and part of the way to do this is to have a typeface that represents those values.

It works both ways though. If Innocent, Threadless or other fun companies used traditional typefaces, they wouldn’t be accurate reflections of their core values, brand and personality. They are better positioned to use friendly, informal and modern typefaces. But still never Comic Sans.

Tone of voice

Closely tied to this is tone of voice, my absolute bugbear on the web. Tone of voice isn’t what is said but, rather, how it is said. When we interact with others in person we don’t just listen to the words they say, but we also draw meaning from their body language, and pitch and tone of voice. Just because the web removes that face-to-face interaction with your audience it doesn’t mean you can’t have a tone of voice. 



Innocent pioneered the informal chatty tone of voice that so many others have since emulated, but unless it is representative of your company, then it’s not appropriate. It works for Innocent because the tone of voice is consistent across all the company’s materials, both online and offline. Ben and Jerry’s takes the same approach, as does Threadless, but maybe you need a more formal or corporate tone of voice. It really depends on what your business or service is and who it is for, and that is why I think LoveFilm has it all wrong. 

LoveFilm offers a film and game rental service, something fun for people in their downtime. While they aren’t particularly stuffy, neither is their tone of voice very friendly or informal, which is what I would expect from a service like theirs. The reason they have it wrong is in the language they use and the way their sentences are constructed.

This is the first time we’ve discussed language because, on the whole, designing the invisible isn’t concerned with language at all. But that doesn’t mean that these strands can’t still elicit an emotional response in users. Jon Tan quoted Dr Mazviita Chirimuuta in his New Adventures in Web Design talk in January 2011:


	Although there is no absolute separation between language and emotion, there will still be countless instances where you have emotional response without verbal input or linguistic cognition. In general language is not necessary for emotion.


This is even more pertinent when the emotions evoked are connected to people’s culture, surroundings and way of life. It makes design personal, something that audiences can connect with at more than just face value but, rather, on a subliminal or, indeed, invisible level. 

It also means that when you are asked the inevitable question of why – why is blue the dominant colour? why have you used that typeface? why don’t we sound like Innocent? – you will have a rationale behind each design decision that can explain what story you are telling, how you discovered the story and how it is targeted at the core audience.

Research

This is where research plays a vital role in the project cycle. If you don’t know and understand your audience then you don’t know what story to design. Every project lends itself to some level of research, but how in-depth and what methods are most appropriate will be dictated by project requirements and budget restrictions – but do your research. 

Even if you think you know your audience, it doesn’t hurt to research and reaffirm that because cultures and society do change, albeit slowly, but they can change. So ask questions at the start of the project during the research phase:


	What do different colours mean for your audience’s culture?
	Do the typeface and tone of voice appeal to the demographic?
	Does the brand identity represent the values and personality of your service?
	Are there any social, political or religious significances associated with your audience that you need to take into consideration so you don’t offend them?


Ask questions, understand your audience, design your story based on these insights, and create better user experiences in context that have good, solid storytelling at their heart.

Major hat tip to Gareth Strange for the beautiful graphics used within this article.",2011,Robert Mills,robertmills,2011-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/design-the-invisible/,design
265,Designing for Perfection,"Hello, 24 ways readers. I hope you’re having a nice run up to Christmas. This holiday season I thought I’d share a few things with you that have been particularly meaningful in my work over the last year or so. They may not make you wet your santa pants with new-idea-excitement, but in the context of 24 ways I think they may serve as a nice lesson and a useful seasonal reminder going into the New Year. Enjoy!

Story

Despite being a largely scruffy individual for most of my life, I had some interesting experiences regarding kitchen tidiness during my third year at university. 

As a kid, my room had always been pretty tidy, and as a teenager I used to enjoy reordering my CDs regularly (by artist, label, colour of spine – you get the picture); but by the time I was twenty I’d left most of these traits behind me, mainly due to a fear that I was turning into my mother. The one remaining anally retentive part of me that remained however, lived in the kitchen. For some reason, I couldn’t let all the pots and crockery be strewn across the surfaces after cooking. I didn’t care if they were washed up or not, I just needed them tidied. The surfaces needed to be continually free of grated cheese, breadcrumbs and ketchup spills. Also, the sink always needed to be clear. Always. Even a lone teabag, discarded casually into the sink hours previously, would give me what I used to refer to as “kitchen rage”.

Whilst this behaviour didn’t cause any direct conflicts, it did often create weirdness. We would be happily enjoying a few pre-night out beverages (Jack Daniels and Red Bull – nice) when I’d notice the state of the kitchen following our round of customized 49p Tesco pizzas. Kitchen rage would ensue, and I’d have to blitz the kitchen, which usually resulted in me having to catch everyone up at the bar afterwards.

One evening as we were just about to go out, I was stood there, in front of the shithole that was our kitchen with the intention of cleaning it all up, when a realization popped into my head. In hindsight, it was a pretty obvious one, but it went along the lines of “What the fuck are you doing? Sort your life out”. I sodded the washing up, rolled out with my friends, and had a badass evening of partying.

After this point, whenever I got the urge to clean the kitchen, I repeated that same realization in my head. My tidy kitchen obsession strived for a level of perfection that my housemates just didn’t share, so it was ultimately pointless. It didn’t make me feel that good, either; it was like having a cigarette after months of restraint – initially joyous but soon slightly shameful.

Lesson

Now, around seven years later, I’m a designer on the web and my life is chaotic. It features no planning for significant events, no day-to-day routine or structure, no thought about anything remotely long-term, and I like to think I do precisely what I want. It seems my days at striving for something ordered and tidy, in most parts of my life, are long gone.

For much of my time as a designer, though, it’s been a different story. I relished industry-standard terms such as ‘pixel perfection’ and ‘polished PSDs’, taking them into my stride as I strove to design everything that was put on my plate perfectly. Even down to grids and guidelines, all design elements would be painstakingly aligned to a five-pixel grid. There were no seven-pixel margins or gutters to be found in my design work, that’s for sure. I put too much pride and, inadvertently, too much ego into my work. Things took too long to create, and because of the amount of effort put into the work, significant changes, based on client feedback for example, were more difficult to stomach.

Over the last eighteen months I’ve made a conscious effort to change the way I approach designing for the web. Working on applications has probably helped with this; they seem to have a more organic development than rigid content-based websites. Mostly though, a realization similar to my kitchen rage one came about when I had to make significant changes to a painstakingly crafted Photoshop document I had created. The changes shouldn’t have been difficult or time-consuming to implement, but they were turning out to be. One day, frustrated with how long it was taking, the refrain “What the fuck are you doing? Sort your life out” again entered my head. I blazed the rest of the work, not rushing or doing scruffy work, but just not adhering to the insane levels of perfection I had previously set for myself. When the changes were presented, everything went down swimmingly. The client in this case (and I’d argue most cases) cared more about the ideas than the perfect way in which they had been implemented. I had taken myself and my ego out of the creative side of the work, and it had been easier to succeed.

Argument

I know many other designers who work on the web share such aspirations to perfection. I think it’s a common part of the designer DNA, but I’m not sure it really has a place when designing for the web.

First, there’s the environment. The landscape in which we work is continually shifting and evolving. The inherent imperfection of the medium itself makes attempts to create perfect work for it redundant. Whether you consider it a positive or negative point, the products we make are never complete. They’re always scaling and changing. 

Like many aspects of web design, this striving for perfection in our design work is a way of thinking borrowed from other design industries where it’s more suited. A physical product cannot be as easily altered or developed after it has been manufactured, so the need to achieve perfection when designing is more apt.

Designers who can relate to anything I’ve talked about can easily let go of that anal retentiveness if given the right reasons to do so. Striving for perfection isn’t a bad thing, but I simply don’t think it can be achieved in such a fast-moving, unique industry. I think design for the web works better when it begins with quick and simple, followed by iteration and polish over time. 

To let go of ego and to publish something that you’re not completely happy with is perhaps the most difficult part of the job for designers like us, but it’s followed by a satisfaction of knowing your product is alive and breathing, whereas others (possibly even competitors) may still be sitting in Photoshop, agonizing over whether a margin should be twenty or forty pixels.

I keep telling myself to stop sitting on those two hundred ideas that are all half-finished. Publish them, clean them up and iterate over time. I’ve been telling myself this for months and, hopefully, writing this article will give me the kick in the arse I need. Hopefully, it will also give someone else the same kick.",2011,Greg Wood,gregwood,2011-12-17T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/designing-for-perfection/,process
288,Displaying Icons with Fonts and Data- Attributes,"Traditionally, bitmap formats such as PNG have been the standard way of delivering iconography on websites. They’re quick and easy, and it also ensures they’re as pixel crisp as possible. Bitmaps have two drawbacks, however: multiple HTTP requests, affecting the page’s loading performance; and a lack of scalability, noticeable when the page is zoomed or viewed on a screen with a high pixel density, such as the iPhone 4 and 4S.

The requests problem is normally solved by using CSS sprites, combining the icon set into one (physically) large image file and showing the relevant portion via background-position. While this works well, it can get a bit fiddly to specify all the positions. In particular, scalability is still an issue. A vector-based format such as SVG sounds ideal to solve this, but browser support is still patchy.



The rise and adoption of web fonts have given us another alternative. By their very nature, they’re not only scalable, but resolution-independent too. No need to specify higher resolution graphics for high resolution screens! 

That’s not all though:


	Browser support: Unlike a lot of new shiny techniques, they have been supported by Internet Explorer since version 4, and, of course, by all modern browsers. We do need several different formats, however!
	Design on the fly: The font contains the basic graphic, which can then be coloured easily with CSS – changing colours for themes or :hover and :focus styles is done with one line of CSS, rather than requiring a new graphic. You can also use CSS3 properties such as text-shadow to add further effects. Using -webkit-background-clip: text;, it’s possible to use gradient and inset shadow effects, although this creates a bitmap mask which spoils the scalability.
	Small file size: specially designed icon fonts, such as Drew Wilson’s Pictos font, can be as little as 12Kb for the .woff font. This is because they contain fewer characters than a fully fledged font. You can see Pictos being used in the wild on sites like Garrett Murray’s Maniacal Rage.


As with all formats though, it’s not without its disadvantages: 


	Icons can only be rendered in monochrome or with a gradient fill in browsers that are capable of rendering CSS3 gradients. Specific parts of the icon can’t be a different colour.
	It’s only appropriate when there is an accompanying text to provide meaning. This can be alleviated by wrapping the text label in a tag (I like to use <b> rather than <span>, due to the fact that it’s smaller and isn’ t being used elsewhere) and then hiding it from view with text-indent:-999em.
	Creating an icon font can be a complex and time-consuming process. While font editors can carry out hinting automatically, the best results are achieved manually.
	Unless you’re adept at creating your own fonts, you’re restricted to what is available in the font. However, fonts like Pictos will cover the most common needs, and icons are most effective when they’re using familiar conventions.


The main complaint about using fonts for icons is that it can mean adding a meaningless character to our markup. The good news is that we can overcome this by using one of two methods – CSS generated content or the data-icon attribute – in combination with the :before and :after pseudo-selectors, to keep our markup minimal and meaningful. 

Our simple markup looks like this:

<a href=""/basket"" class=""icon basket"">View Basket</a>

Note the multiple class attributes. Next, we’ll import the Pictos font using the @font-face web fonts property in CSS:

@font-face {
    font-family: 'Pictos';
    src: url('pictos-web.eot');
    src: local('☺'), 
    url('pictos-web.woff') format('woff'), 
    url('pictos-web.ttf') format('truetype'),
    url('pictos-web.svg#webfontIyfZbseF') format('svg');
}

This rather complicated looking set of rules is (at the time of writing) the most bulletproof way of ensuring as many browsers as possible load the font we want.  We’ll now use the content property applied to the :before pseudo-class selector to generate our icon. Once again, we’ll use those multiple class attribute values to set common icon styles, then specific styles for .basket. This helps us avoid repeating styles:

.icon {
    font-family: 'Pictos';
    font-size: 22px:
}

.basket:before {
    content: ""$"";
}

What does the :before pseudo-class do? It generates the dollar character in a browser, even when it’s not present in the markup. Using the generated content approach means our markup stays simple, but we’ll need a new line of CSS, defining what letter to apply to each class attribute for every icon we add.

data-icon is a new alternative approach that uses the HTML5 data- attribute in combination with CSS attribute selectors. This new attribute lets us add our own metadata to elements, as long as its prefixed by data- and doesn’t contain any uppercase letters. In this case, we want to use it to provide the letter value for the icon. Look closely at this markup and you’ll see the data-icon attribute.

<a href=""/basket"" class=""icon"" data-icon=""$"">View Basket</a>



We could add others, in fact as many as we like.

<a href=""/"" class=""icon"" data-icon=""k"">Favourites</a>
<a href=""/"" class=""icon"" data-icon=""t"">History</a>
<a href=""/"" class=""icon"" data-icon=""@"">Location</a>



Then, we need just one CSS attribute selector to style all our icons in one go:

.icon:before {
    content: attr(data-icon);
    /* Insert your fancy colours here */
    }

By placing our custom attribute data-icon in the selector in this way, we can enable CSS to read the value of that attribute and display it before the element (in this case, the anchor tag). It saves writing a lot of CSS rules. I can imagine that some may not like the extra attribute, but it does keep it out of the actual content – generated or not.





This could be used for all manner of tasks, including a media player and large simple illustrations. See the demo for live examples. Go ahead and zoom the page, and the icons will be crisp, with the exception of the examples that use -webkit-background-clip: text as mentioned earlier.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that with both generated content and the data-icon method, the letter will be announced to people using screen readers. For example, with the shopping basket icon above, the reader will say “dollar sign view basket”. As accessibility issues go, it’s not exactly the worst, but could be confusing. You would need to decide whether this method is appropriate for the audience. Despite the disadvantages, icon fonts have huge potential.",2011,Jon Hicks,jonhicks,2011-12-12T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/displaying-icons-with-fonts-and-data-attributes/,code
287,Extracting the Content,"As we throw away our canvas in approaches and yearn for a content-out process, there remains a pain point: the Content. It is spoken of in the hushed tones usually reserved for Lord Voldemort. The-thing-that-someone-else-is-responsible-for-that-must-not-be-named.

Designers and developers have been burned before by not knowing what the Content is, how long it is, what style it is and when the hell it’s actually going to be delivered, in internet eons past. Warily, they ask clients for it. But clients don’t know what to make, or what is good, because no one taught them this in business school. Designers struggle to describe what they need and when, so the conversation gets put off until it’s almost too late, and then everyone is relieved that they can take the cop-out of putting up a blog and maybe some product descriptions from the brochure.

The Content in content out.

I’m guessing, as a smart, sophisticated, and, may I say, nicely-scented reader of the honourable and venerable tradition of 24 ways, that you sense something better is out there. Bunches of boxes to fill in just don’t cut it any more in a responsive web design world. The first question is, how are you going to design something to ensure users have the easiest access to the best Content, if you haven’t defined at the beginning what that Content is? Of course, it’s more than possible that your clients have done lots of user research before approaching you to start this project, and have a plethora of finely tuned Content for you to design with.

Have you finished laughing yet? Alright then. Let’s just assume that, for whatever reason of gross oversight, this hasn’t happened. What next?

Bringing up Content for the first time with a client is like discussing contraception when you’re in a new relationship. It might be awkward and either party would probably rather be doing something else, but it needs to be broached before any action happens (that, and it’s disastrous to assume the other party has the matter in hand). If we can’t talk about it, how can we expect people to be doing it right and not making stupid mistakes? That being the case, how do we talk about Content? Let’s start by finding a way to talk about it without blushing and scuffing our shoes. And there’s a reason I’ve been treating Content as a Proper Noun. 

The first step, and I mean really-first-step-way-back-at-the-beginning-of-the-project-while-you-are-still-scoping-out-what-the-hell-you-might-do-for-each-other-and-it’s-still-all-a-bit-awkward-like-a-first-date, is for you to explain to the client how important it is that you, together, work out what is important to your users as part of the user experience design, so that your users get the best user experience. The trouble is that, in most cases, this would lead to blank stares, possibly followed by a light cough and a query about using Comic Sans because it seems friendly.

Let’s start by ensuring your clients understand the task ahead. You see, all the time we talk about the Content we do our clients a big disservice. Content is poorly defined. It looms over a project completion point like an unscalable (in the sense of a dozen stacked Kilimanjaros), seething, massive, singular entity. The Content.

Defining the problem. 

We should really be thinking of the Content as ‘contents’; as many parts that come together to form a mighty experience, like hit 90s kids’ TV show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers*.

*For those of you who might have missed the Power Rangers, they were five teenagers with attitude, each given crazy mad individual skillz and a coloured lycra suit from an alien overlord. In return, they had to fight a new monster of the week using their abilities and weaponry in sync (even if the audio was not) and then, finally, in thrilling combination as a Humongous Mechanoid Machine of Awesome. They literally joined their individual selves, accessories and vehicles into a big robot. It was a toy manufacturer’s wet dream.

So, why do I say Content is like the Power Rangers? Because Content is not just a humongous mecha. It is a combination of well-crafted pieces of contents that come together to form a well-crafted humongous mecha. Of Content.

The Red Power Ranger was always the leader. You can imagine your text contents, found on about pages, product descriptions, blog articles, and so on, as being your Red Power Ranger.

Maybe your pictures are your Yellow Power Ranger; video is Blue (not used as much as the others, but really impressive when given a good storyline); maybe Pink is your infographics (it’s wrong to find it sexier than the other equally important Rangers, but you kind of do anyway). And so on. 

These bits of content – Red Text Ranger, Yellow Picture Ranger and others – often join together on a page, like they are teaming up to fight the bad guy in an action scene, and when they all come together (your standard workaday huge mecha) in a launched site, that’s when Content becomes an entity.

While you might have a vision for the whole site, Content rarely works that way. Of course, you keep your eye on the bigger prize, the completion of your mega robot, but to get there you need to assemble your working parts, the cogs and springs of contents that will mesh together to finally create your Humongous Mecha of Content. You create parts and join them to form a whole. (It’s rarely seamless; often we need to adjust as we go, but we can create our Mecha’s blueprint by making sure we have all the requisite parts.)

The point here is the order these parts were created. No alien overlord plans a Humongous Mechanoid and then thinks, “Gee, how can I split this into smaller fighting units powered by teenagers in snazzy shiny suits?” No toy manufacturer goes into production of a mega robot, made up of model mecha vehicles with detachable arsenal, without thinking how they will easily fit back together to form the ‘Buy all five now to create the mega robot’ set. No good contents are created as a singular entity and chunked up to be slotted in to place any which way, into the body of a site.

Think contents, not the Content. Think of contents as smaller units, or as a plural. The Content is what you have at the end. The contents are what you are creating and they are easy to break down. You are no longer scaling the unscalable. You can draw the map and plot the path, page by page, section by section.

The page table is your friend

To do this, I use a page table. A page table is a simple table template you can create in the word processor of your choice, that you use to tell you everything about the contents of a page – everything except the contents itself. 

Here’s a page table I created for an employee’s guide to redundancy in the alpha.gov.uk website:

 

Guide to redundancy for employees


	Page objective: Provide specific information for employees who are facing redundancy about the process, their options and next steps.
	Source content: directgov page on Redundancy.
	Scope: In scope



		
			Page title 
			 An employee’s guide to redundancy 
		
		
			Priority content 
			 Message: You have rights as an employee facing redundancy
Method: A guide written in plain English, with links to appropriate additional content.
A video guide (out of scope).
Covers the stages of redundancy and rights for those in trade unions and not in trade unions. Glossary of unfamiliar terms.
Call to action: Read full guide, act to explore redundancy actions, benefits or new employment.
Assets: link to redundancy calculator. 
		
		
			Secondary 
			 Related items, or popular additional links. 
Additional tools, such as search and suggestions.



	location set v not set states
	microcopy encouraging location set where location may make a difference to the content – ie, Scotland/Northern Ireland.

		
		
			Tertiary 
			 Footer and standard links. 
		



	Content creation: Content exists but was created within the constraints of the previous CMS. Review, correct and edit where necessary.
	Maintenance: should be flagged for review upon advice from Department of Work and Pensions, and annually.
	Technology/Publishing/Policy implications: Should be reviewed once the glossary styles have been decided. No video guide in scope at this time, so languages should be simple and screen reader friendly.
	Reliance on third parties: None, all content and source exists in house.
	Outstanding questions: None.


 

Download a copy of this page table

This particular page table template owes a lot to Brain Traffic’s version found in Kristina Halvorson’s book Content Strategy for the Web. With smaller clients than, say, the government, I might use something a bit more casual. With clients who like timescales and deadlines, I might turn it into a covering sheet, with signatures and agreements from two departments who have to work together to get the piece done on time.

I use page tables, and the process of working through them, to reassure clients that I understand the task they face and that I can help them break it down section by section, page stack to page, down to product descriptions and interaction copy. About 80% of my clients break into relieved smiles. Most clients want to work with you to produce something good, they just don’t understand how, and they want you to show them the mountain path on the map. With page tables, clients can understand that with baby steps they can break down their content requirements and commission content they need in time for the designers to work with it (as opposed to around it).  If I was Santa, these clients would be on my nice list for sure.

My own special brand of Voldemort-content-evilness comes in how I wield my page tables for the other 20%. Page tables are not always thrilling, I’ll admit. Sometimes they get ignored in favour of other things, yet they are crucial to the continual growth and maintenance of a truly content-led site. For these naughty list clients who, even when given the gift of the page table, continually say “Ooh, yes. Content. Right”, I have a special gift. I have a stack of recycled paper under my desk and a cheap black and white laser printer. And I print a blank page table for every conceivable page I can find on the planned redesign. If I’m feeling extra nice, I hole punch them and put them in a fat binder. 

There is nothing like saying, “This is all the contents you need to have in hand for launch”, and the satisfying thud the binder makes as it hits the table top, to galvanize even the naughtiest clients to start working with you to create the content you need to really create in a content-out way.",2011,Relly Annett-Baker,rellyannettbaker,2011-12-15T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/extracting-the-content/,content
270,From Side Project to Not So Side Project,"In the last article I wrote for 24 ways, back in 2009, I enthused about the benefits of having a pet project, suggesting that we should all have at least one so that we could collaborate with our friends, escape our day jobs, fulfil our own needs, help others out, raise our profiles, make money, and — most importantly — have fun. I don’t think I need to offer any further persuasions: it seems that designers and developers are launching their own pet projects left, right and centre. This makes me very happy.

However, there still seems to be something of a disconnect between having a side project and turning it into something that is moderately successful; in particular, the challenge of making enough money to sustain the project and perhaps even elevating it from the sidelines so that it becomes something not so on the side at all.

Before we even begin this, let’s spend a moment talking about money, also known as…

Evil, nasty, filthy money

Over the last couple of years, I’ve started referring to myself as an accidental businessman. I say accidental because my view of the typical businessman is someone who is driven by money, and I usually can’t stand such people. Those who are motivated by profit, obsessed with growth, and take an active interest in the world’s financial systems don’t tend to be folks with whom I share a beer, unless it’s to pour it over them. Especially if they’re wearing pinstriped suits.

That said, we all want to make money, don’t we? And most of us want to make a relatively decent amount, too. I don’t think there’s any harm in admitting that, is there? Hello, I’m Elliot and I’m a capitalist.

The key is making money from doing what we love. For most people I know in our community, we’ve already achieved that — I’m hard-pressed to think of anyone who isn’t extremely passionate about working in our industry and I think it’s one of the most positive, unifying benefits we enjoy as a group of like-minded people — but side projects usually arise from another kind of passion: a passion for something other than what we do as our day jobs. Perhaps it’s because your clients are driving you mental and you need a break; perhaps it’s because you want to create something that is truly your own; perhaps it’s because you’re sick of seeing your online work disappear so fast and you want to try your hand at print in order to make a more permanent mark.

The three factors I listed there led me to create 8 Faces, a printed magazine about typography that started as a side project and is now a very significant part of my yearly output and income.

Like many things that prove fruitful, 8 Faces’ success was something of an accident, too. For a start, the magazine was never meant to be profitable; its only purpose at all was to scratch my own itch. Then, after the first issue took off and I realized how much time I needed to spend in order to make the next one decent, it became clear that I would have to cover more than just the production costs: I’d have to take time out from client work as well. Doing this meant I’d have to earn some money. Probably not enough to equate to the exact amount of time lost when I could be doing client work (not that you could ever describe time as being lost when you work on something you love), but enough to survive; for me to feel that I was getting paid while doing all of the work that 8 Faces entailed. The answer was to raise money through partnerships with some cool companies who were happy to be associated with my little project.

A sustainable business model

Business model! I can’t believe I just wrote those words! But a business model is really just a loose plan for how not to screw up. And all that stuff I wrote in the paragraph above about partnering with companies so I could get some money in while I put the magazine together? Well, that’s my business model. 

If you’re making any product that has some sort of production cost, whether that’s physical print run expenses or up-front dev work to get an app built, covering those costs before you even release your product means that you’ll be in profit from the first copy you sell. This is no small point: production expenses are pretty much the only cost you’ll ever need to recoup, so having them covered before you launch anything is pretty much the best possible position in which you could place yourself. Happy days, as Jamie Oliver would say.

Obtaining these initial funds through partnerships has another benefit. Sure, it’s a form of advertising but, done right, your partners can potentially provide you with great content, too. In the case of 8 Faces, the ads look as nice as the rest of the magazine, and a couple of our partners also provide proper articles: genuinely meaningful, relevant, reader-pleasing articles at that. You’d be amazed at how many companies are willing to become partners and, as the old adage goes, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

With profit comes responsibility

Don’t forget about the responsibility you have to your audience if you engage in a relationship with a partner or any type of advertiser: although I may have freely admitted my capitalist leanings, I’m still essentially a hairy hippy, and I feel that any partnership should be good for me as a publisher, good for the partner and — most importantly — good for the reader. Really, the key word here is relevance, and that’s where 99.9% of advertising fails abysmally. 

(99.9% is not a scientific figure, but you know what I’m on about.)

The main grey area when a side project becomes profitable is how you share that profit, partly because — in my opinion, at least — the transition from non-profitable side project to relatively successful source of income can be a little blurred. Asking for help for nothing when there’s no money to be had is pretty normal, but sometimes it’s easy to get used to that free help even once you start making money. I believe the best approach is to ask for help with the promise that it will always be rewarded as soon as there’s money available. (Oh, god: this sounds like one of those nightmarish client proposals. It’s not, honest.) If you’re making something cool, people won’t mind helping out while you find your feet.

Events often think that they’re exempt from sharing profit. Perhaps that’s because many event organizers think they’re doing the speakers a favour rather than the other way around (that’s a whole separate article), but it’s shocking to see how many people seem to think they can profit from content-makers — speakers, for example — and yet not pay for that content. It was for this reason that Keir and I paid all of our speakers for our Insites: The Tour side project, which we ran back in July. We probably could’ve got away without paying them, especially as the gig was so informal, but it was the right thing to do.

In conclusion: money as a by-product

Let’s conclude by returning to the slightly problematic nature of money, because it’s the pivot on which your side project’s success can swing, regardless of whether you measure success by monetary gain. I would argue that success has nothing to do with profit — it’s about you being able to spend the time you want on the project. Unfortunately, that is almost always linked to money: money to pay yourself while you work on your dream idea; money to pay for more servers when your web app hits the big time; money to pay for efforts to get the word out there. The key, then, is to judge success on your own terms, and seek to generate as much money as you see fit, whether it’s purely to cover your running costs, or enough to buy a small country. There’s nothing wrong with profit, as long as you’re ethical about it. (Pro tip: if you’ve earned enough to buy a small country, you’ve probably been unethical along the way.)

The point at which individuals and companies fail — in the moral sense, for sure, but often in the competitive sense, too — is when money is the primary motivation. It should never be the primary motivation. If you’re not passionate enough about something to do it as an unprofitable side project, you shouldn’t be doing it all. 

Earning money should be a by-product of doing what you love. And who doesn’t want to spend their life doing what they love?",2011,Elliot Jay Stocks,elliotjaystocks,2011-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/from-side-project-to-not-so-side-project/,business
282,Front-end Style Guides,"We all know that feeling: some time after we launch a site, new designers and developers come in and make adjustments. They add styles that don’t fit with the content, use typefaces that make us cringe, or chuck in bloated code. But if we didn’t leave behind any documentation, we can’t really blame them for messing up our hard work.

To counter this problem, graphic designers are often commissioned to produce style guides as part of a rebranding project. A style guide provides details such as how much white space should surround a logo, which typefaces and colours a brand uses, along with when and where it is appropriate to use them.

Design guidelines

Some design guidelines focus on visual branding and identity. The UK National Health Service (NHS) refer to theirs as “brand guidelines”. They help any designer create something such as a trustworthy leaflet for an NHS doctor’s surgery. Similarly, Transport for London’s “design standards” ensure the correct logos and typefaces are used in communications, and that they comply with the Disability Discrimination Act.

Some guidelines go further, encompassing a whole experience, from the visual branding to the messaging, and the icon sets used. The BBC calls its guidelines a “Global Experience Language” or GEL. It’s essential for maintaining coherence across multiple sites under the same BBC brand.


The BBC’s Global Experience Language.

Design guidelines may be brief and loose to promote creativity, like Mozilla’s “brand toolkit”, or be precise and run to many pages to encourage greater conformity, such as Apple’s “Human Interface Guidelines”.

Whatever name or form they’re given, documenting reusable styles is invaluable when maintaining a brand identity over time, particularly when more than one person (who may not be a designer) is producing material.

Code standards documents

We can make a similar argument for code. For example, in open source projects, where hundreds of developers are submitting code, it makes sense to set some standards. Drupal and Wordpress have written standards that make editing code less confusing for users, and more maintainable for contributors.

Each community has nuances: Drupal requests that developers indent with two spaces, while Wordpress stipulates a tab. Whatever the rules, good code standards documents also explain why they make their recommendations.

The front-end developer’s style guide

Design style guides and code standards documents have been a successful way of ensuring brand and code consistency, but in between the code and the design examples, web-based style guides are emerging. These are maintained by front-end developers, and are more dynamic than visual design guidelines, documenting every component and its code on the site in one place.

Here are a few examples I’ve seen in the wild:

Natalie Downe’s pattern portfolio

Natalie created the pattern portfolio system while working at Clearleft. The phrase describes a single HTML page containing all the site’s components and styles that can act as a deliverable.


Pattern portfolio by Natalie Downe for St Paul’s School, kept up to date when new components are added. The entire page is about four times the length shown.

Each different item within a pattern portfolio is a building block or module. The components are decoupled from the layout, and linearized so they can slot into anywhere on a page.


	The pattern portfolio expresses every component and layout structure in the smallest number of documents. It sets out how the markup and CSS should be, and is used to illustrate the project’s shared vocabulary.

	Natalie Downe


By developing a system, rather than individual pages, the result is flexible when the client wants to add more pages later on.

Paul Lloyd’s style guide

Paul Lloyd has written an extremely comprehensive style guide for his site. Not only does it feature every plausible element, but it also explains in detail when it’s appropriate to use each one.


Paul’s style guide is also great educational material for people learning to write code.

Oli Studholme’s style guide

Even though Oli’s style guide is specific to his site, he’s written it as though it’s for someone else. It’s exhaustive and gives justifications for all his decisions. In some places, he links to browser bug tickets and makes recommendations for cross-browser compatibility.


Oli has released his style guide under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license, and encourages others to create their own versions.

Jeremy Keith’s pattern primer

Front-end style guides may have comments written in the code, annotations that appear on the page, or they may list components alongside their code, like Jeremy’s pattern primer.


You can watch or fork Jeremy’s pattern primer on Github.



Linearizing components like this resembles a kind of mobile first approach to development, which Jeremy talks about on the 5by5 podcast: The Web Ahead 3.

The benefits of maintaining a front-end style guide

If you still need convincing that producing documentation like this for every project is worth the effort, here are a few nice side-effects to working this way:

Easier to test

A unified style guide makes it easier to spot where your design breaks. It’s simple to check how components adapt to different screen widths, test for browser bugs and develop print style sheets when everything is on the same page. When I worked with Natalie, she’d resize the browser window and bump the text size up and down during development to see if anything would break.

Better workflow

The approach also forces you to think how something works in relation to the whole site, rather than just a specific page, making it easier to add more pages later on. Starting development by creating a style guide makes a lot more sense than developing on a page-by-page basis.

Shared vocabulary

Natalie’s pattern portfolio in particular creates a shared vocabulary of names for components (teaser, global navigation, carousel…), so a team can refer to different regions of the site and have a shared understanding of its meaning.

Useful reference

A combined style guide also helps designers and writers to see the elements that will be incorporated in the site and, therefore, which need to be designed or populated. A boilerplate list of components for every project can act as a reminder of things that may get missed in the design, such as button states or error messages. 

Creating your front-end style guide

As you’ve seen, there are plenty of variations on the web style guide. Which method is best depends on your project and workflow. Let’s say you want to show your content team how blockquotes and asides look, when it’s appropriate to use them, and how to create them within the CMS. In this case, a combination of Jeremy’s pattern primer and Paul’s descriptive style guide – with the styled component alongside a code snippet and a description of when to use it – may be ideal. 

Start work on your style guide as soon as you can, preferably during the design stage:


	Simply presenting flat image comps is by no means enough - it’s only the start… As layouts become more adaptable, flexible and context-specific, so individual components will become the focus of our design. It is therefore essential to get the foundational aspects of our designs right, and style guides allow us to do that.

	Paul Lloyd on Style guides for the Web 



	Print out the designs and label the unique elements and components you’ll need to add to your style guide. Make a note of the purpose of each component. While you’re doing this, identify the main colours used for things like links, headings and buttons.
I draw over the print-outs on to tracing paper so I can make more annotations. Here, I’ve started annotating the widths from the designer’s mockup so I can translate these into percentages.
	Start developing your style guide with base styles that target core elements: headings, links, tables, blockquotes, ordered lists, unordered lists and forms. For these elements, you could maintain a standard document to reuse for every project.
	Next, add the components that override the base styles, like search boxes, breadcrumbs, feedback messages and blog comments. Include interaction styles, such as hover, focus and visited state on links, and hover, focus and active states on buttons.
	Now start adding layout and begin slotting the components into place. You may want to present each layout as a separate document, or you could have them all on the same page stacked beneath one another.


Document code practices

Code can look messy when people use different conventions, so note down a standard approach alongside your style guide. For example, Paul Stanton has documented how he writes CSS.

The gift wrapping

Presenting this documentation to your client may be a little overwhelming so, to be really helpful, create a simple page that links together all your files and explains what each of them do.


This is an example of a contents page that Clearleft produce for their clients. They’ve added date stamps, subversion revision numbers and written notes for each file.

Encourage participation

There’s always a risk that the person you’re writing the style guide for will ignore it completely, so make your documentation as user-friendly as possible. Justify why you do things a certain way to make it more approachable and encourage similar behaviour.

As always, good communication helps. Working with the designer to put together this document will improve the site. It’s often not practical for designers to provide a style for everything, so drafting a web style guide and asking for feedback gives designers a chance to make sure any default styles fit in.

If you work in a team with other developers, documenting your code and development decisions will not only be useful as a deliverable, but will also force you to think about why you do things a certain way.

Future-friendly

The roles of designer and developer are increasingly blurred, yet all too often we work in isolation. Working side-by-side with designers on web style guides can vastly improve the quality of our work, and the collaborative approach can spark discussions like “how would this work on a smaller screen?”

Sometimes we can be so focused on getting the site ready and live, that we lose sight of what happens after it’s launched, and how it’s going to be maintained. A simple web style guide can make all the difference.

If you make your own style guide, I’d love to add it to my stash of examples so please share a link to it in the comments.",2011,Anna Debenham,annadebenham,2011-12-07T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/front-end-style-guides/,process
268,Getting the Most Out of Google Analytics,"Something a bit different for today’s 24 ways article. For starters, I’m not a designer or a developer. I’m an evil man who sells things to people on the internet. Second, this article will likely be a little more nebulous than you’re used to, since it covers quite a number of points in a relatively short space. 

This isn’t going to be the complete Google Analytics Conversion University IQ course compressed into a single article, obviously. What it will be, however, is a primer on setting up and using Google Analytics in real life, and a great deal of what I’ve learned using Google Analytics nearly every working day for the past six (crikey!) years.

Also, to be clear, I’ll be referencing new Google Analytics here; old Google Analytics is for loooosers (and those who want reliable e-commerce conversion data per site search term, natch).

You may have been running your Analytics account for several years now, dipping in and out, checking traffic levels, seeing what’s popular… and that’s about it. Google Analytics provides so much more than that, but the number of reports available can often intimidate users, and documentation and case studies on their use are minimal at best. 

Let’s start! Setting up your Analytics profile

Before we plough on, I just want to run through a quick checklist that some basic settings have been enabled for your profile. If you haven’t clicked it, click the big cog on the top-right of Google Analytics and we’ll have a poke about.


	If you have an e-commerce site, e-commerce tracking has been enabled

	If your site has a search function, site search tracking has been enabled.
	Query string parameters that you do not want tracked as separate pages have been excluded (for example, any parameters needed for your platform to function, otherwise you’ll get multiple entries for the same page appearing in your reports)
	Filters have been enabled on your main profile to exclude your office IP address and any IPs of people who frequently access the site for work purposes. In decent numbers they tend to throw data off a tad.

	You may also find the need to set up multiple profiles prefiltered for specific audience segments. For example, at Lovehoney we have seventeen separate profiles that allow me quick access to certain countries, devices and traffic sources without having to segment first. You’ll also find load time for any complex reports much improved. Use the same filter screen as above to set up a series of profiles that only include, say, mobile visits, or UK visitors, so you can quickly analyse important segments.


Matt, what’s a segment?

A segment is a subsection of your visitor base, which you define and then call on in reports to see specific data for that subsection. For example, in this report I’ve defined two segments, the first for IE6 users and the second for IE7.



Segments are easily created by clicking the Advanced Segments tabs at the top of any report and clicking +New Custom Segment.



What does your site do?

Understanding the goals of your site is an oft-covered topic, but it’s necessary not just to form a better understand of your business and prioritize your time. Understanding what you wish visitors to do on your site translates well into a goal-driven analytics package like Google Analytics.  

Every site exists essentially to sell something, either financially through e-commerce, or to sell an idea or impart information, get people to download a CV or enquire about service, or to sell space on that website to advertisers. If the site did not provide a positive benefit to its owners, it would not have a reason for being. 

Once you have understood the reason why you have a site, you can map that reason on to one of the three goal types Google Analytics provides. 

E-commerce 

This conversion type registers transactions as part of a sales process which requires a monetary value, what products have been bought, an SKU (stock keeping unit), affiliation (if you’re then attributing the sale to a third party or franchise) and so on.

The benefit of e-commerce tracking is not only assigning non-arbitrary monetary value to behaviour of visitors on your site, as well as being able to see ancillary costs such as shipping, but seeing product-level information, like which products are preferred from various channels, popular categories, and so on.



However, I find the e-commerce tracking options also useful for non-e-commerce sites. For example, if you’re offering downloads or subscriptions and having an email address or user’s details is worth something to you, you can set up e-commerce tracking to understand how much value your site is bringing. For example, an email address might be worth 20p to you, but if it also includes a name it’s worth 50p. A contact telephone number is worth £2, and so on.

Page goals

Page goals, unsurprisingly, track a visit to a page (often with a sequence of pages leading up to that page). This is what’s referred to as a goal funnel, and is generally used to track how visitors behave in a multistep checkout. 



Interestingly, the page doesn’t have to actually exist. For example, if you have a single page checkout, you can register virtual page views using trackPageview() when a visitor clicks into a particular section of the checkout or other form. If your site is geared towards getting someone to a particular page, but where there isn’t a transaction (for example, a subscription page) this is for you.

There are also behavioural goals, such as time on site and number of pages viewed, which are geared towards sites that make money from advertising.

But, going back to the page goals, these can be abstracted using regular expressions, meaning that you can define a funnel based on page type rather than having to set individual folders.



In this example, I’ve created regexes for the main page types on my site, so I can create a wide funnel that captures visitors from where they enter through to checkout.

Events

Event tracking registers a predefined event, such as playing a video, or some interaction that can trigger JavaScript, such as a Tweet This button. Events can then be triggered using the trackEvent() call. If you want someone to complete watching a video, you would code your player to fire trackEvent() upon completion. 

While I don’t use events as goals, I use events elsewhere to see how well a video play aids to conversion. This not only helps me justify the additional spend on creating video content, but also quickly highlights which videos are underperforming as sales tools.



What a visitor can tell you


Now you have some proper goals set up, we can start to see how changes in content (on-site and external) affect those goals. 

Ultimately, when a visitor comes to your site, they bring information with them:


	where they came from (a search engine – including: keyword searched for; a referral; direct; affiliate; or ad campaign)
	demographics (country; whether they’re new or returning, within thirty days)
	technical information (browser; screen size; device; bandwidth)
	site-specific information (landing page; next click; previous values assigned to them as custom variables*)


 * A note about custom variables. There’s no hope in hell that I can cover custom variables in this article. Go research them. Custom variables are the single best way to hack Google Analytics and bend it to your will. Custom variables allow you to record anything you want about a visitor, which that visitor will then carry around with them between visits. It’s also great for plugging other services into Google Analytics (as shown by the marvelous way Visual Website Optimizer allows you to track and segment tests within the GA interface). Just make sure not to breach the terms of service, eh?

CSI your website

Police procedural TV shows are all the same: the investigators are called to a crime and come across a clue; there’s then an autopsy; new evidence leads them to a new location; they find a new clue; they put two and two together; they solve the mystery.

This is your life now. Exciting!

So, now you’re gathering a wealth of information about what sort of people visit your site, what they do when they’re there, and what eventually gets them to drive value to you. It’s now your job to investigate all these little clues to see which types of people drive the most value, and what you can change to improve it.

Maybe not that exciting.

However, Google Analytics comes pre-armed with extensive reports for you to delve into. As an e-commerce guy (as opposed to a page goal guy) my day pretty much follows the pattern below.


	Look at e-commerce conversion rate by traffic source compared to the same day in the previous week and previous month. As ours is an e-commerce site, we have weekly and monthly trends. A big spike on Sundays and Mondays, and payday towards the end of the month is always good; on the third week of a month there tends to be a lull. Spend time letting your Google Analytics data brew, understand your own trends and patterns, and you’ll start to get a feel for when something isn’t quite right.
	
		Traffic Sources → Sources → All Traffic
	
	Look at the conversion rate by landing page for any traffic source that feels significantly different to what’s expected. Check bounce rates, drill down to likely landing pages and check search keyword or referral site to see if it’s a particular subset of visitor. You can do this by clicking Secondary Dimension and choosing Keyword or Source. If it’s direct, choose Visitor Type to break down by new or returning visitor.
	
		Content → Site Content → Landing Pages
	
	I then tend to flip into Content Drilldown to see what the next clicks were from those landing pages, and whether they changed significantly to the date I’m comparing with. If they have, that’s usually an indicator of changed content (or its relevancy). Remember, if a bunch of people have found their way to your page via a method you’re not expecting (such as a mention on a Spanish radio station – this actually happened to me once), while the content hasn’t changed, the relevancy of it to the audience may have.
	
		Content → Site Content → Content Drilldown
	
	Once I have an idea of what content was consumed, and whether it was relevant to the user, I then look at the visitor specifics, such as browser or demographic data, to see again whether the change was limited to a specific subset. Site speed, for example, is normally a good factor towards bounce rate, so compare that with previous data as well.


Now, to be investigating at this level you still need a serious amount of data, in order to tell what’s a significant change or not. If you’re struggling with a small number of visitors, you might find reporting on a weekly or fortnightly basis more appropriate. 

However, once you’ve looked into the basics of why changes happen to the value of your site, you’ll soon find yourself limited by the reports offered in Standard Reporting. So, it’s time to build your own. Hooray!

Custom reporting

Google Analytics provides the tools to build reports specific to the types of investigations you frequently perform. 



Welcome to my world.

Custom reports are quite simple to build: first, you determine the metric you want the report to cover (number of visitors, bounce rate, conversion rate, and so on), then choose a set of dimensions that you’d like to segment the report by (say, the source of the traffic, and whether they were new or returning users). You can filter the report, including or excluding particular dimension values, and you can assign the report to any of the profiles you created earlier. 

In the example below, I’ve created a report that shows me visits and conversion rate for any Google traffic that landed directly only on a product page. I can then drill down on each product page to see the complete phrases use to search. I can use this information in two ways:


	I can see which products aren’t converting, which shows me where I need to work harder on merchandising.
	I can give this information to my content team, showing them the actual phrases visitors used to reach our product content, helping them write better targeted product descriptions.




The possibilities here are nearly endless, but here are a few examples of reports I find useful:


	Non-brand inbound search
By creating a report that shows inbound search traffic which doesn’t include your brand, you can see more clearly the behaviour of visitors most likely to be unfamiliar with your site and brand values, without having to rely on the clumsy new or returning demographic date.
	Traffic/conversion/sales by hour
This is pure stats porn, but actually more useful than real-time data. By seeing this data broken down at an hourly level, you can not only compare the current day to previous days, but also see the best performing times for email broadcasts and tweets.
	Visits, load time, conversion and sales by page and browser
Page speed can often kill conversion rates, but it’s difficult to prove the value of focusing on speed in monetary terms. Having this report to hand helps me drive Operation Greenbelt, our effort to get into the sub-1.5 second band in Google Webmaster Tools.


Useful things you can’t do in custom reporting

If you have a search function on your website, then Conversion Rate and Products Bought by Site Search Term is an incredibly useful report that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your site’s search engine at returning products and content related to the search term used. By including the products actually bought by visitors who searched for each term, you can use this information to better searchandise these results, escalating high propensity and high value products to the top of the results.

However, it’s not possible to get this information out of new Google Analytics. 

Try it, select the following in the report builder:


	Metrics: total unique searches; e-commerce or goal conversion rate
	Dimensions: search term; product


You’ll see that the data returned is a little nonsensical, though a 2,000% conversion rate would be nice. However, you can get more accurate information using advanced segments. By creating individual segments to define users who have searched for a particular term, you can run the sales performance and product performance reports as normal. It’s laborious, but it teaches a good lesson: data that seems inaccessible can normally be found another way!

Reporting infrastructure

Now that you have a series of reports that you can refer to on a daily or weekly basis, it’s time to put together a regular reporting infrastructure. 

Even if you’re not reporting to someone, having a set of key performance indicators that you can use to see how your performance is improving over time allows you to set yourself business goals on a monthly and annual basis.

For my own reporting, I take some high-level metrics (such as visitors, conversion rate and average order value), and segment them by traffic source and, separately, landing page. These statistics I record weekly and report:


	current week compared with previous week
	same week previous year (if available)
	4 week average
	13 week average
	52 week average (if available)


This takes into account weekly, monthly, seasonal and annual trends, and gives you a much clearer view of your performance.

Getting data in other ways

If you’re using Google Analytics frequently, with any large site you’ll come to a couple of conclusions:


	Doing any kind of practical comparative analysis is unwieldy.
	Boy, Google Analytics is slow!


As you work with bigger datasets and put together more complex queries, you’ll see the loading graphic more than you’ll see actual data. So when you reach that level, there are ways to completely bypass the Google Analytics interface altogether, and get data into your own spreadsheet application for manipulation.

Data Feed Query Explorer

If you just want to pull down some quick statistics but still use complex filters and exotic metric and dimension combinations, the Data Feed Query Explorer is the quickest way of doing so. Authenticate with your Google Analytics account, select a profile, and you can start selecting metrics and dimensions to be generated in a handy, selectable tabulated format.

Google Analytics API

If you’re feeling clever, you can bypass having to copy and paste data by pulling in directly into Excel, Google Docs or your own application using the Google Analytics API. There are several scripts and plugins available to do this. I use Automate Analytics Google Docs code (there’s also a paid version that simplifies setup and creates some handy reports for you).

New shiny things

Well, now that that’s over, I can show you some cool stuff. Well, at least it’s cool to me. Google Analytics is being constantly improved and new functionality is introduced nearly every month. Here are a couple of my favourites.

Multichannel attribution

Not every visitor converts on your site on the first visit. They may not even do so on the second visit, or third. If they convert on the fourth visit, but each time they visit they do so via a different channel (for example, Search PPC, Search Organic, Direct, Email), which channel do you attribute the conversion to? The last channel, or the first? Dilemma!  

Google now has a Multichannel Attribution report, available in the Conversion category, which shows how each channel assists in converting, the overlap between channels, and where in the process that channel was important. 



For example, you may have analysed your blog traffic from Twitter and become disheartened that not many people were subscribing after visiting from Twitter links, but instead your high-value subscribers were coming from natural search. On the face of it, you’d spend less time tweeting, but a multichannel report may tell you that visitors first arrived via a Twitter link and didn’t subscribe, but then came back later after searching for your blog name on Google, after which they did. Don’t pack Twitter in yet!

Visitor and goal flow

Visitor and goal flow are amazing reports that help you visualize the flow of traffic through your site and, ultimately, into your checkout funnel or similar goal path. Flow reports are perfect for understanding drop-off points in your process, as well as what the big draws are on each page. 



Previously, if you wanted to visualize this data you had to set up several abstracted microgoals and chain them together in custom reports. Frankly, it was a pain in the arse and burned through your precious and limited goal allocation.

Visitor flow bypasses all that and produces the report in an interactive flow diagram. While it doesn’t show you the holy grail of conversion likelihood by each path, you can segment visitor flow so that you can see very specifically how different segments of your visitor base behave.

Go play with it now!",2011,Matt Curry,mattcurry,2011-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/getting-the-most-out-of-google-analytics/,business
278,Going Both Ways,"It’s that time of the year again: Santa is getting ready to travel the world. Up until now, girls and boys from all over have sent in letters asking for what they want. I hope that Santa and his elves have—unlike me—learned more than just English.

On the Internet, those girls and boys want to participate in sharing their stories and videos of opening presents and of being with friends and family. Ah, yes, the wonders of user generated content. But more than that, people also want to be able to use sites in the language they know.

While you and I might expect the text to read from left to right, not all languages do. Some go from right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew. (Some also go from top to bottom, but for now, let’s just worry about those first two directions!)

If we were building a site for girls and boys to send their letters to Santa, we need to consider having the interface in the language and direction that they prefer. On the elves’ side, they may be viewing the site in one direction but reading the user generated content in the other direction. We need to build a site that supports bidirectional (or bidi) text.

Let’s take a look at some things to be aware of when it comes to building bidi interfaces.

Setting the direction of the interface

Right off the bat, we need to tell the browser what direction the text should be going in. To do this, we add the dir attribute to an HTML element and set it to either LTR (for left to right) or RTL (for right to left).

<body dir=""rtl"">

You can add the dir attribute to any element and it will set or change the direction for the content within that element. 

<body dir=""ltr"">
   Here is English Content.
   <div dir=""rtl"">الموضوع</div>
</body>

You can also set the direction via CSS.

.rtl {
    direction: rtl;
    }

It’s generally recommended that you don’t use CSS to set the direction of the text. Text direction is an important part of the content that should be retained even in environments where the CSS may not be available or fails to load.

How things change with the direction attribute

Just adding the dir attribute tells the browser to render the content within it differently. 



The text aligns to the right of the page and, interestingly, punctuation appears at the left of the sentence. (We’ll get to that in a little bit.) 

Scrollbars in most browsers will appear on the left instead of the right. Webkit is the notable exception here which always shows the scrollbar on the right, no matter what the text direction is. Avoid having a design that has an expectation that the scrollbar will be in a specific place (and a specific size).

Changing the order of text mid-way

As we saw in that previous example, the punctuation appeared at the beginning of the sentence instead of the end, even though the text was English. At Yahoo!, we have an interesting dilemma where the company name has punctuation in it. Therefore, when the name appears in the middle of (for example) Arabic text, the exclamation mark appears at the beginning of the word instead of the end.



There are two ways in which this problem can be solved:

1. Use HTML around the left-to-right content, or

To solve the problem of the Yahoo! name in the midst of Arabic text, we can wrap a span around it and change the direction on that element.



2. Use a text direction mark in the content.

Unicode has two marks, U+200E and U+200F, that tell the browser that the text is in a particular direction. Placing this right after the punctuation will correct the placement.

Using the HTML entity:
Yahoo!‎

Tables

Thankfully, the cells of a data table also get reordered from right to left. Equally as nice, if you’re using display:table, the content will still get reordered.



CSS

So far, we’ve seen that the dir attribute does a pretty decent job of getting content flowing in the direction that we need it. Unfortunately, there are huge swaths of design that is handled by CSS that the handy dir attribute has zero effect over.

Many properties, like float or absolute positioning with left and right values, are unaffected and must be handled manually. Elements that were floated left must now by floated right. Left margins and paddings must now move to the right and the right margins and paddings must now move to the left.

Since the browser won’t handle this for us, we have a couple approaches that we can use:

CSS Only

We can take advantage of the attribute selector to target CSS to apply in one direction or another.

[dir=ltr] .module {
	float: left;
	margin: 0 0 0 20px;
}

[dir=rtl] .module {
	float: right;
	margin: 0 20px 0 0;
}

As you can see from this example, both of the properties have been modified for the flipped interface. If your interface is rather complicated, you will have to create a lot of duplicate rules to have the site looking good in both directions while serving up a single stylesheet.

CSSJanus

Google has a tool called CSSJanus. It’s a Python script that runs over the LTR versions of your CSS files and generates RTL versions. For the RTL version of the site, just serve up those CSS files instead of the LTR versions.

The script looks for keywords and value combinations and automatically swaps them so you don’t have to. 

At Yahoo!, CSSJanus was a huge help in speeding up our development of a bidi interface. We’ve also made a number of improvements to the script to better handle border radius, background positioning, and gradients. We will be pushing those changes back into the CSSJanus project. 



Background Images

Background images, especially for things like CSS sprites, also raise an interesting dilemma. Background images are positioned relative to the left of the element. In a flipped interface, however, we need to position it relative to the right. An icon that would be to the left of some text will now need to appear on the right.



If the x position of the background is percentage-based, then it’s fairly easy to swap the values. 0 becomes 100%, 10% becomes 90% and so on. If the x position is pixel-based, then we’re in a bit of a pickle. There’s no way to say that the image should be a certain number of pixels from the right.

Therefore, you’ll need to ensure that any background image that needs to be swapped should be percentage-based. (99.9% of the the time, the background position will need to be 0 so that it can be changed to 100% for RTL.)

If you’re taking an existing implementation, background positioning will likely be the biggest hurdle you’ll have to overcome in swapping your interface around. If you make sure your x position is always percentage-based from the beginning, you’ll have a much smoother process ahead of you!

Flipping Images

This is a more subtle point and one where you’ll really want an expert with the region to weigh in on. In RTL interfaces, users may expect certain icons to also be flipped. Pencil icons that skew to the right in LTR interfaces might need to be swapped to skew to the left, instead. Chat bubbles that come from the left will need to come from the right.

The easiest way to handle this is to create new images. Name the LTR versions with -ltr in the name and name the RTL versions with -rtl in the name. CSSJanus will automatically rename all file references from -ltr to -rtl.

The Future

Thankfully, those within the W3C recognize that CSS should be more agnostic. As a result, they’ve begun introducing new properties that allow the browser to manage the swapping from left to right for us.

The CSS3 specification for backgrounds allows for the background-position to be relative to other corners other than the top left by specifying keywords before each position.

This will position the background 5px from the bottom right of the element.

background-position: right 5px bottom 5px;

Opera 11.60 is currently the only browser that supports this syntax.

For margin and padding, we have margin-start and margin-end. In LTR interfaces, margin-start would be the same as margin-left and in RTL interfaces, margin-start would be the same as margin-right. 

Firefox and Webkit support these but with vendor prefixes right now:

-webkit-margin-start: 20px;
-moz-margin-start: 20px;

In the CSS3 Images working draft specification, there’s an image() property that allows us to specify image fallbacks and whether those fallbacks are for LTR or RTL interfaces.

background: image('sprite.png' ltr, 'sprite-rtl.png' rtl);

Unfortunately, no browser supports this yet but it’s nice to be able to dream of how much easier this will be in the future!

Ho Ho Ho

Hopefully, after all of this, you’re full of cheer knowing that you’re well on your way to creating interfaces that can go both ways!",2011,Jonathan Snook,jonathansnook,2011-12-19T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/going-both-ways/,ux
281,Nine Things I've Learned,"I’ve been a professional graphic designer for fourteen years and for just under four of those a professional web designer. Like most designers I’ve learned a lot in my time, both from a design point of view and in business as freelance designer. A few of the things I’ve learned stick out in my mind, so I thought I’d share them with you. They’re pretty random and in no particular order.

1. Becoming the designer you want to be

When I started out as a young graphic designer, I wanted to design posters and record sleeves, pretty much like every other young graphic designer. The problem is that the reality of the world means that when you get your first job you’re designing the back of a paracetamol packet or something equally weird. I recently saw a tweet that went something like this: “You’ll never become the designer you always dreamt of being by doing the work you never wanted to do”. This is so true; to become the designer you want to be, you need to be designing the things you’re passionate about designing. This probably this means working in the evenings and weekends for little or no money, but it’s time well spent. Doing this will build up your portfolio with the work that really shows what you can do! Soon, someone will ask you to design something based on having seen this work. From this point, you’re carving your own path in the direction of becoming the designer you always wanted to be.

2. Compete on your own terms

As well as all being friends, we are also competitors. In order to win new work we need a selling point, preferably a unique selling point. Web design is a combination of design disciplines – user experience design, user interface Design, visual design, development, and so on. Some companies will sell themselves as UX specialists, which is fine, but everyone who designs a website from scratch does some sort of UX, so it’s not really a unique selling point. Of course, some people do it better than others.

One area of web design that clients have a strong opinion on, and will judge you by, is visual design. It’s an area in which it’s definitely possible to have a unique selling point. Designing the visual aesthetic for a website is a combination of logical decision making and a certain amount of personal style. If you can create a unique visual style to your work, it can become a selling point that’s unique to you.

3. How much to charge and staying motivated

When you’re a freelance designer one of the hardest things to do is put a price on your work and skills. Finding the right amount to charge is a fine balance between supplying value to your customer and also charging enough to stay motivated to do a great job. It’s always tempting to offer a low price to win work, but it’s often not the best approach: not just for yourself but for the client as well.

A client once asked me if I could reduce my fee by £1,000 and still be motivated enough to do a good job. In this case the answer was yes, but it was the question that resonated with me. I realized I could use this as a gauge to help me price projects. Before I send out a quote I now always ask myself the question “Is the amount I’ve quoted enough to make me feel motivated to do my best on this project?” I never send out a quote unless the answer is yes. In my mind there’s no point in doing any project half-heartedly, as every project is an opportunity to build your reputation and expand your portfolio to show potential clients what you can do. Offering a client a good price but not being prepared to put everything you have into it, isn’t value for money.  

4. Supplying the right design

When I started out as a graphic designer it seemed to be the done thing to supply clients with a ton of options for their logo or brochure designs. In a talk given by Dan Rubin, he mentioned that this was a legacy of agencies competing with each other in a bid to create the illusion of offering more value for money. Over the years, I’ve realized that offering more than one solution makes no sense. The reason a client comes to you as a designer is because you’re the person than can get it right. If I  were to supply three options, I’d be knowingly offering my client at least two options that I didn’t think worked.

To this day I still get asked how many homepage design options I’ll supply for the quoted amount. The answer is one. Of course, I’m more than happy to iterate upon the design to fine-tune it and, on the odd occasion, I do revisit a design concept if I just didn’t nail the design first time around. Your time is much better spent refining the right design option than rushing out three substandard designs in the same amount of time.

5. Colour is key

There are many contributing factors that go into making a good visual design, but one of the simplest ways to do this is through the use of colour. The colour palette used in a design can have such a profound effect on a visual design that it almost feels like you’re cheating. It’s easy to add more and more subtle shades of colour to add a sense of sophistication and complexity to a design, but it dilutes the overall visual impact. When I design, I almost have a rule that only allows me to use a very limited colour palette. I don’t always stick to it, but it’s always in mind and something I’m constantly reviewing through my design process.

6. Creative thinking is central to good or boundary-pushing web design

When we think of creativity in web design we often link this to the visual design, as there is an obvious opportunity to be creative in this area if the brief allows it. Something that I’ve learnt in my time as a web designer is that there’s a massive need for creative thinking in the more technical aspects of web design. The tools we use for building websites are there to be manipulated and used in creative ways to design exciting and engaging user experiences. Great developers are constantly using their creativity to push the boundaries of what can be done with CSS, jQuery and JavaScript. 

Being creative and creative thinking are things we should embrace as an industry and they are qualities that can be found in anyone, whether they be a visual designer or Rails developer.

7. Creative block: don’t be afraid to get things wrong

Creative block can be a killer when designing. It’s often applied to visual design, which is more subjective. I suffer from creative block on a regular basis. It’s hugely frustrating and can screw up your schedule. Having thought about what creative block actually is, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s actually more of a lack of direction than a lack of ideas. You have ideas and solutions in mind but don’t feel committed to any of them. You’re scared that whatever direction you take, it’ll turn out to be wrong. I’ve found that the best remedy for this is to work through this barrier. It’s a bit like designing with a blindfold on – you don’t really know where you’re going. If you stick to your guns and keep pressing forward I find that, nine times out of ten, this process leads to a solution. As the page begins to fill, the direction you’re looking for slowly begins to take shape.

8. You get better at designing by designing

I often get emails asking me what books someone can read to help them become a better designer. There are a lot of good books on subjects like HTML5, CSS, responsive web design and the like, that will really help improve anyone’s web design skills. But, when it comes to visual design, the best way to get better is to design as much as possible. You can’t follow instructions for these things because design isn’t following instructions. A large part of web design is definitely applying a set of widely held conventions, but there’s another part to it that is invention and the only way to get better at this is to do it as much as possible.

9. Self-belief is overrated

Throughout our lives we’re told to have self-belief. Self-belief and confidence in what we do, whatever that may be. The problem is that some people find it easier than others to believe in themselves. I’ve spent years trying to convince myself to believe in what I do but have always found it difficult to have complete confidence in my design skills. Self-doubt always creeps in.

I’ve realized that it’s ok to doubt myself and I think it might even be a good thing!  I’ve realized that it’s my self-doubt that propels me forward and makes me work harder to achieve the best results. The reason I’m sharing this is because I know I’m not the only designer that feels this way. You can spend a lot of time fighting self-doubt only to discover that it’s your body’s natural mechanism to help you do the best job possible.",2011,Mike Kus,mikekus,2011-12-11T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/nine-things-ive-learned/,business
277,Raising the Bar on Mobile,"One of the primary challenges of designing for mobile devices is that screen real estate is often in limited supply. Through the advocacy of Luke W and others, we’ve drawn comfort from the idea that this constraint ends up benefiting users and designers alike, from obvious advantages like portability and reach, to influencing our content strategy decisions through focus and restraint. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take advantage of every last pixel of that screen we can snag!

As anyone who has designed a website for use on a smartphone can attest, there’s an awful lot of space on mobile screens dedicated to browser functions that would be better off toggled out of view. Unfortunately, the visibility of some of these elements is beyond our control, such as the buttons fixed to the bottom of the viewport in iOS’s Safari and the WebOS browser. However, in many devices, the address bar at the top can be manually hidden, and its absence frees up enough pixel room for a large, impactful heading, a critical piece of navigation, or even just a little more white space to air things out.

So, as my humble contribution to this most festive of web publications, today I’ll dig into the approach I used to hide the address bar in a browser-agnostic fashion for sites like BostonGlobe.com, and the jQuery Mobile framework.

Surveying the land

First, let’s assess the chromes of some popular, current mobile browsers. For example purposes, the following screen-captures feature the homepage of the Boston Globe site, without any address-bar-hiding logic in place.

Note: these captures are just mockups – actual experience on these platforms may vary.

 On the left is iOS5’s Safari (running on iPhone), and on the right is Windows Phone 7 (pre-Mango).

 BlackBerry 7 (left), and Android 2.3 (right).

 WebOS (left), Opera Mini (middle), and Opera Mobile (right).

Some browsers, such the default browsers on WebOS and BlackBerry 5, hide the bar automatically without any developer intervention, but many of them don’t. Of these, we can only manually hide the address bar on iOS Safari and Android (according to Opera Web Opener, Mike Taylor, some discussion is underway for support in Opera Mini and Mobile as well, which would be great!). This is unfortunate, but iOS and Android are incredibly popular, so let’s direct our focus there.

Great API, or greatest API?

As it turns out, iOS and Android not only allow you to hide the address bar, they use the same JavaScript method to do so, too (this shouldn’t be surprising, given that they are both WebKit browsers, but nothing expected happens in mobile). However, the method they use is not exactly intuitive. You might set out looking for a JavaScript API dedicated to this purpose, like, say, window.toolbar.hide(), but alas, to hide the address bar you need to use the window.scrollTo method!

window.scrollTo(0, 0);

The scrollTo method is not new, it’s just this particular use of it that is. For the uninitiated, scrollTo is designed to scroll a document to a particular set of coordinates, assuming the document is large enough to scroll to that spot. The method accepts two arguments: a left coordinate; and a top coordinate. It’s both simple and supported well pretty much everywhere. In iOS and Android, these coordinates are calculated from the top of the browser’s viewport, just below the address bar (interestingly, it seems that some platforms like BlackBerry 6 treat the top of the browser chrome as 0 instead, meaning the page content is closer to 20px from the top).

Anyway, by passing the coordinates 0, 0 to the scrollTo method, the browser will jump to the top of the page and pull the address bar out of view! Of course, if a quick call to scrollTo was all we need to do to hide the address bar in iOS and Android, this article would be pretty short, and nothing new. Unfortunately, the first issue we need to deal with is that this method alone will not usually do the trick: it must be called after the page has finished loading.

The browser gives us a load event for just that purpose, so we’ll wrap our scrollTo method in it and continue on our merry way! We’ll use the standard, addEventListener method to bind the the load event, passing arguments for event name load, and a callback function to execute when the event is triggered.

window.addEventListener(""load"",function() {
    window.scrollTo(0, 0);
});

For the sake of preventing errors in those using browsers that don’t support addEventListener, such as Internet Explorer 8 and under, let’s make sure that method exists before we use it:

if( window.addEventListener ){
    window.addEventListener(""load"",function() {
        window.scrollTo(0, 0);
    });
}

Now we’re getting somewhere, but we must also call the method after the load event’s default behavior has been applied. For this, we can use the setTimeout method, delaying its execution to after the load event has run its course.

if( window.addEventListener ){
    window.addEventListener(""load"",function() {
        setTimeout(function(){
            window.scrollTo(0, 0);
        }, 0);
    });
}

Sweet sugar of Christmas! Hit this demo in iOS and watch that address bar drift up and away!

Not so fast…

We’ve got a little problem: the approach above does work in iOS but, in some cases, it works a little too well. In the process of applying this behavior, we’ve broken one of the primary tenets of responsible web development: don’t break the browser’s default behaviour. This usability rule of thumb is often violated by developers with even the best of intentions, from breaking the browser’s back button through unrecorded Ajax page refreshes, to fancy momentum touch scrolling scripts that can wreak havoc in all but the most sophisticated of devices. In this case, we’ve prevented the browser’s native support of deep-linking to sections of a page (a hash identifier in the URL matching a page element’s id attribute, for example, http://example.com#contact) from working properly, because our script always scrolls to the top.

To avoid this collision, we’ll need to detect whether a deep link, or hash, is present in the URL before applying our logic. We can do this by ensuring that the location.hash property is falsey:

if( !window.location.hash && window.addEventListener ){
    window.addEventListener( ""load"",function() {
        setTimeout(function(){
            window.scrollTo(0, 0);
        }, 0);
    });
}

Still works great! And a quick test using a hash-based URL confirms that our script will not execute when a deep anchor is in play. Now iOS is looking sharp, and we’ve added our feature defensively to avoid conflicts.



Now, on to Android…

Wait. You didn’t expect that we could write code for one browser and be finished, right? Of course you didn’t. I mentioned earlier that Android uses the same method for getting rid of the scrollbar, but I left out the fact that the arguments it prefers vary slightly, but significantly, from iOS. Bah!

Differering from the earlier logic from iOS, to remove the address bar on Android’s default browser, you need to pass a Y coordinate of 1 instead of 0. Aside from being just plain odd, this is particularly unfortunate because to any other browser on the planet, 1px is a very real, however small, distance from the top of the page!

window.scrollTo( 0, 1 );

Looks like we’re going to need a fork…

R UA Android?

At this point, some developers might decide to simply not support this feature in Android, and more determined devs might decide that a quick check of the User Agent string would be a reliable way to determine the browser and tweak the scroll value accordingly. Neither of those decisions would be tragic, but in the spirit of cross-browser and future-friendly development, I’ll propose an alternative.

By this point, it should be clear that neither of the implementations above offer a particularly intuitive way to hide an address bar. As such, one might be skeptical that these approaches will stick around very long in their present state in either browser. Perhaps at some point, Android will decide to use 0 like iOS, making our lives a little easier, or maybe some new browser will decide to model their address bar hiding method after one of these implementations. In any case, detecting the User Agent only allows us to apply logic based on the known present, and in the world of mobile, let’s face it, the present is already the past.

Writing a check

In this next step of today’s technique, we’ll apply some logic to quickly determine the behavior model of the browser we’re using, then capitalize on that model – without caring which browser it happens to come from – by applying the appropriate scroll distance.

To do this, we’ll rely on a fortunate side effect of Android’s implementation, which is when you programatically scroll the page to 1 using scrollTo, Android will report that it’s still at 0 because oddly enough, it is! Of course, any other browser in this situation will report a scroll distance of 1. Thus, by scrolling the page to 1, then asking the browser its scroll distance, we can use this artifact of their wacky implementation to our advantage and scroll to the location that makes sense for the browser in play.

Getting the scroll distance

To pull off our test, we’ll need to ask the browser for its current scroll distance. The methods for getting scroll distance are not entirely standardized across popular browsers, so we’ll need to use some cross-browser logic. The following scroll distance function is similar to what you’d find in a library like jQuery. It checks the few common ways of getting scroll distance before eventually falling back to 0 for safety’s sake (that said, I’m unaware of any browsers that won’t return a numeric value from one of the first three properties).

// scrollTop getter
function getScrollTop(){
    return scrollTop  = window.pageYOffset ||
document.compatMode === ""CSS1Compat"" && document.documentElement.scrollTop ||
document.body.scrollTop || 0;
}

In order to execute that code above, the body object (referenced here as document.body) will need to be defined already, or we’ll risk an error. To determine that it’s defined, we can run a quick timer to execute code as soon as that object is defined and ready for use.

var bodycheck = setInterval(function(){
    if( document.body ){
        clearInterval( bodycheck );
        //more logic can go here!!
    }   
}, 15 );

Above, we’ve defined a 15 millisecond interval called bodycheck that checks if document.body is defined and, if so, clears itself of running again. Within that if statement, we can extend our logic further to run other code, such as our check for the scroll distance, defined via the variable scrollTop below:

var scrollTop,
    bodycheck = setInterval(function(){
    if( document.body ){
        clearInterval( bodycheck );
        scrollTop = getScrollTop();
    }   
}, 15 );

With this working, we can immediately scroll to 1, then check the scroll distance when the body is defined. If the distance reports 1, we’re likely in a non-Android browser, so we’ll scroll back to 0 and clean up our mess.

window.scrollTo( 0, 1 );

var scrollTop,
    bodycheck = setInterval(function(){
    if( document.body ){
        clearInterval( bodycheck );
        scrollTop = getScrollTop();
        window.scrollTo( 0, scrollTop === 1 ? 0 : 1 );
    }   
}, 15 );

Cashing in

All of the pieces are written now, so all we need to do is combine them with our previous logic for scrolling when the window is loaded, and we’ll have a cross-browser solution of which John Resig would be proud. Here’s our combined code snippet, with some formatting updates rolled in as well:

(function( win ){
	var doc = win.document;

	// If there’s a hash, or addEventListener is undefined, stop here
	if( !location.hash && win.addEventListener ){
		//scroll to 1
		window.scrollTo( 0, 1 );
		var scrollTop = 1,
			getScrollTop = function(){
				return win.pageYOffset || doc.compatMode = ""CSS1Compat"" && doc.documentElement.scrollTop || doc.body.scrollTop || 0;
			},
			//reset to 0 on bodyready, if needed
			bodycheck = setInterval(function(){
				if( doc.body ){
					clearInterval( bodycheck );
					scrollTop = getScrollTop();
					win.scrollTo( 0, scrollTop = 1 ? 0 : 1 );
				}	
			}, 15 );
		win.addEventListener( “load”, function(){
			setTimeout(function(){
					//reset to hide addr bar at onload
					win.scrollTo( 0, scrollTop === 1 ? 0 : 1 );
			}, 0);
		} );
	}
})( this );
View code example

And with that, we’ve got a bunch more room to play with on both iOS and Android.



Break out the eggnog

…because we’re not done yet! In the spirit of making our script act more defensively, there’s still another use case to consider. It was essential that we used the window’s load event to trigger our scripting, but on pages with a lot of content, its use can come at a cost. Often, a user will begin interacting with a page, scrolling down as they read, before the load event has fired. In those situations, our script will jump the user back to the top of the page, resulting in a jarring experience.

To prevent this problem from occurring, we’ll need to ensure that the page has not been scrolled beyond a certain amount. We can add a simple check using our getScrollTop function again, this time ensuring that its value is not greater than 20 pixels or so, accounting for a small tolerance.

if( getScrollTop() < 20 ){
    //reset to hide addr bar at onload
    window.scrollTo( 0, scrollTop === 1 ? 0 : 1 );
}

And with that, we’re pretty well protected! Here’s a final demo.

The completed script can be found on Github (full source: https://gist.github.com/1183357 ). It’s MIT licensed. Feel free to use it anywhere or any way you’d like!

Your thoughts?

I hope this article provides you with a browser-agnostic approach to hiding the address bar that you can use in your own projects today. Perhaps alternatively, the complications involved in this approach convinced you that doing this well is more trouble than it’s worth and, depending on the use case, that could be a fair decision. But at the very least, I hope this demonstrates that there’s a lot of work involved in pulling off this small task in only two major platforms, and that there’s a real need for standardization in this area.

Feel free to leave a comment or criticism and I’ll do my best to answer in a timely fashion.

Thanks, everyone!

Some parting notes

I scream, you scream…

At the time of writing, I was not able to test this method on the latest Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) build. According to Sencha Touch’s browser scorecard, the browser in 4.0 may have a different way of managing the address bar, so I’ll post in the comments once I get a chance to dig into it further.

Short pages get no love

Today’s technique only works when the page is as tall, or taller than, the device’s available screen height, so that the address bar may be scrolled out of view. On a short page, you might work around this issue by applying a minimum height to the body element ( body { min-height: 460px; } ), but given the variety of screen sizes out there, not to mention changes in orientation, it’s tough to find a value that makes much sense (unless you manipulate it with JavaScript).",2011,Scott Jehl,scottjehl,2011-12-20T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/raising-the-bar-on-mobile/,design
284,Subliminal User Experience,"The term ‘user experience’ is often used vaguely to quantify common elements of the interaction design process: wireframing, sitemapping and so on. UX undoubtedly involves all of these principles to some degree, but there really is a lot more to it than that.

Good UX is characterized by providing the user with constant feedback as they step through your interface. It means thinking about and providing fallbacks and error resolutions in even the rarest of scenarios. It’s about omitting clutter to make way for the necessary, and using the most fundamental of design tools to influence a user’s path. It means making no assumptions, designing right down to the most distinct details and going one step further every single time. In many cases, good UX is completely subliminal.

There are simple tools and subtleties we can build into our products to enhance the overall experience but, in order to do so, we really have to step beyond where we usually draw the line on what to design.

The purpose of this article is not to provide technical how-tos, as the functionality is, in most cases, quite simple and could be implemented in a myriad of ways. Rather, it will present a handful of ideas for enhancing the experience of an interface at a deeper level of design without relying on the container.

We’ll cover three elements that should get you thinking in the right mindset:


	progress activity and post-active states
	pseudo-class preloading
	buttons and their (mis)behaviour


Progress activity and the post-active state

We’ve long established that we can’t control the devices our products are viewed on, which browser they’ll run in or what connection speed will be used to access them. We accept this all as factual, so why is it so often left to the browser to provide feedback to the user when an event is triggered or an error encountered? The browser isn’t part of the interface — it’s merely a container. A simple, visual recognition of your users’ activity may be all it takes to make or break the product.

Let’s begin with a commonly overlooked case: progress activity.

A user moves their cursor over a hyperlink or button, which is clearly defined as one by the visual language of your content. Upon doing so, they trigger the :hover state to confirm this element is indeed interactive. So far, so good. What happens next is where it starts to fall apart: the user hits this link, presumably triggering an :active state, which is then returned to the normal state upon release. And then what?



From this point on, your user is in limbo. The link has fallen back to either its regular or :visited state. You’ve effectively abandoned them and are relying entirely on the browser they’re using to communicate that something is happening. This poses quite a few problems:


	The user may lose focus of what they were doing.
	There is little consistency between progress indication in browsers.
	The user may not even notice that their action has been acknowledged.


How many times have one or more of these events happened to you due to a lack of communication from the interface?

Think about the differences between Safari and Chrome in this area — two browsers that, when compared to each other, are relatively similar in nature, though this basic feature differs in execution.



Like all aspects of designing the user experience, there is no one true way to fix this problem, but we can introduce details that many users will unconsciously appreciate.

Consider the basic loading indicator. It’s nothing new — in fact, some would argue it’s quite a cliché. However, whether using a spinning wheel or a progress bar, a gif or JavaScript, or something more sophisticated, these simple tools create an illusion of movement, progress and activity. Depending on the implementation, progress indication graphics can significantly increase a user’s perception of the speed in which an event is taking place. Combine this with a cursor change and a lock over the element to prevent double-clicking or reloading, and your chances of keeping your user’s valuable attention have significantly increased.

Demo: Progress activity and the post-active state

This same logic applies to all aspects of defaulting in a browser, from micro-elements like this up to something as simple as a 404 page. The difference in a user’s reaction to hitting the default Apache 404 and a hand-crafted, branded page are phenomenal and there are no prizes for guessing which one they’re more likely to exit from.

Pseudo-class preloading

Another detail that it pays well to look after is the use and abuse of the :hover element and, more importantly, the content revealed by it. Chances are you’re using the :hover pseudo-class somewhere in almost every screen you create. If content is being revealed on :hover and that content takes some time to load, there will inevitably be a delay the first time it is initiated. It appears tacky and half-finished when a tooltip or drop-down loads instantly, only to have its background or supporting elements follow through a second or two later. So, let’s preload the elements we know we’ll need.

A very simple application of this would be to load each file into the default state of a visible element and offset them by a large number. This ensures our elements have loaded and are ready if and when they need to be displayed.

element {
    background: url(path/to/image.jpg) -9999em -9999em no-repeat;
    }
element .tooltip {
    display: none;
    }
element:hover .tooltip {
    display: block;
    background: url(path/to/image.jpg) 0 0;
    }

Background images are just one example. Of course, the same logic can apply to any form of revealed content. Using a sprite graphic can also be a clever — albeit tedious — method for achieving the same goal, so if you’re using a sprite, preloading in this way may not be necessary

The differences between preloading and not can only be visualized properly with an actual demonstration.

Demo: Preloading revealed content

Buttons and their (mis)behaviour

Almost all of the time, a button serves just one purpose: to be clicked (or tapped). When a button’s pressed, therefore, if anything other than triggering the desired event occurs, a user naturally becomes frustrated. I often get funny looks when talking about this, but designing the details of a button is something I consider essential.

It goes without saying that a button should always visually recognise :hover and :active states. We can take that one step further and disable some actions that get in the way of pressing the button.

It’s rare that a user would ever want to select and use the text on a button, so let’s cleanly disable it:

element {
    -moz-user-select: -moz-none;
    -webkit-user-select: none;
    user-select: none;
    }

If the button is image-based or contains an image, we could also disable user dragging to make sure the image element stays locked to the button:

element {
    -moz-user-drag: -moz-none;
    -webkit-user-drag: none;
    user-drag: none;
    }

Demo: A more usable button

Disabling global features like this should be done with utmost caution as it’s very easy to cross the line between enhancement and friction. Cases where this is acceptable are very rare, but it’s a good trick to keep in mind nevertheless. Both Apple’s iCloud and Metalab’s Flow applications use these tools appropriately and to great extent.

You could argue that the visual feedback of having the text selected or image dragged when a user mis-hits the button is actually a positive effect, informing the user that their desired action did not work. However, covering for human error should be a designer’s job, not that of our users. We can (almost) ensure it does work for them by accommodating for errors like this in most cases.

Final thoughts

Designing to this level of detail can seem obsessive, but as a designer and user of many interfaces and applications, I believe it can be the difference between a good user experience and a great one.

The samples you’ve just seen are only a fraction of the detail we can design for. Keep in mind that the demonstrations, code and methods above outline just one way to do this. You may not agree with all of these processes or have the time and desire to consider them, but one fact remains: it’s not the technology, or the way it’s done that’s important — it’s the logic and the concept of designing everything.",2011,Chris Sealey,chrissealey,2011-12-03T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/subliminal-user-experience/,ux
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, developer, content alchemist, user experience discombobulator, or whatever you call yourself, you’re often wrestling with a wealth of material, a huge number of features, and numerous objectives. In many cases, much of that stuff is extraneous, and goes in the dustbin. However, it can be just as likely that there’s a truckload of suggested features and content because it all needs to be there. Don’t be afraid of that weight.

In the right hands, less can indeed mean more, but it’s just as likely that less can very often lead to, well… less.

Complexity is powerful

Simple is the ability to offer a powerful experience without overwhelming the audience or inducing information anxiety. Giving them everything they need, without having them ferret off all over a site to get things done, is important.

It’s useful to ask throughout a site’s lifespan, “does the user have everything they need?” It’s so easy to let our designer egos get in the way and chop stuff out, reduce down to only the things we want to see. That benefits us in the short term, but compromises the audience long-term.

The trick is not to be afraid of complexity in itself, but to avoid creating the perception of complexity. Give a user a flight simulator and they’ll crash the plane or jump out. Give them everything they need and more, but make it feel simple, and you’re building a relationship, empowering people.

This can be achieved carefully with what some call gradual engagement, and often the sensible thing might be to unleash complexity in carefully orchestrated phases, initially setting manageable levels of engagement and interaction, gradually increasing the inherent power of the product and fostering an empowered community.

The design aesthetic

Here’s a familiar scenario: the client or project lead gets overexcited and skips most of the important decision-making, instead barrelling straight into a bout of creative direction Tourette’s. Visually, the design needs to be minimal, white, crisp, full of white space, have big buttons, and quite likely be “clean”. Of course, we all like our websites to be clean as that’s more hygienic.

But what do these words even mean, really? Early in a project they’re abstract distractions, unnecessary constraints. This premature narrowing forces us to think much more about throwing stuff out rather than acknowledging that what we’re building is complex, and many of the components perhaps necessary.

Simple is not a formula. It cannot be achieved just by using a white background, by throwing things away, or by breathing a bellowsful of air in between every element and having it all float around in space. Simple is not a design treatment. Simple is hard. Simple requires deep investigation, a thorough understanding of every aspect of a project, in line with the needs and expectations of the audience.

Recognizing this helps us empathize a little more with those most vocal of UX practitioners. They usually appreciate that our successes depend on a thorough understanding of the user’s mental models and expected outcomes. I personally still consider UX people to be web designers like the rest of us (mainly to wind them up), but they’re web designers that design every decision, and by putting the user experience at the heart of their process, they have a greater chance of finding simplicity in complexity. The visual design aesthetic — the façade — is only a part of that.

Divide and conquer

I’m currently working on an app that’s complex in architecture, and complex in ambition. We’ll be releasing in carefully orchestrated private phases, gradually introducing more complexity in line with the unavoidably complex nature of the objective, but my job is to design the whole, the complete system as it will be when it’s out of beta and beyond.

I’ve noticed that I’m not throwing much out; most of it needs to be there. Therefore, my responsibility is to consider interesting and appropriate methods of navigation and bring everything together logically.

I’m using things like smart defaults, graphical timelines and colour keys to make sense of the complexity, techniques that are sympathetic to the content. They act as familiar points of navigation and reference, yet are malleable enough to change subtly to remain relevant to the information they connect. It’s really OK to have a lot of stuff, so long as we make each component work smartly.

It’s a divide and conquer approach. By finding simplicity and logic in each content bucket, I’ve made more sense of the whole, allowing me to create key layouts where most of the simplified buckets are collated and sometimes combined, providing everything the user needs and expects in the appropriate places.

I’m also making sure I don’t reduce the app’s power. I need to reflect the scale of opportunity, and provide access to or knowledge of the more advanced tools and features for everyone: a window into what they can do and how they can help. I know it’s the minority who will be actively building the content, but the power is in providing those opportunities for all.

Much of this will be familiar to the responsible practitioners who build websites for government, local authorities, utility companies, newspapers, magazines, banking, and we-sell-everything-ever-made online shops. Across the web, there are sites and tools that thrive on complexity.

Alas, the majority of such sites have done little to make navigation intuitive, or empower audiences. Where we can make a difference is by striving to make our UIs feel simple, look wonderful, not intimidating — even if they’re mind-meltingly complex behind that façade.

Embrace, empathize and tame

So, there are loads of ways to exploit complexity, and make it seem simple. I’ve hinted at some methods above, and we’ve already looked at gradual engagement as a way to make sense of complexity, so that’s a big thumbs-up for a release cycle that increases audience power.

Prior to each and every release, it’s also useful to rest on the finished thing for a while and use it yourself, even if you’re itching to release. ‘Ready’ often isn’t, and ‘finished’ never is, and the more time you spend browsing around the sites you build, the more you learn what to question, where to add, or subtract. It’s definitely worth building in some contingency time for sitting on your work, so to speak.

One thing I always do is squint at my layouts. By squinting, I get a sort of abstract idea of the overall composition, and general feel for the thing. It makes my face look stupid, but helps me see how various buckets fit together, and how simple or complex the site feels overall.

I mentioned the need to put our design egos to one side and not throw out anything useful, and I think that’s vital. I’m a big believer in economy, reduction, and removing the extraneous, but I’m usually referring to decoration, bells and whistles, and fluff. I wouldn’t ever advocate the complete removal of powerful content from a project roadmap.

Above all, don’t fear complexity. Embrace and tame it. Work hard to empathize with audience needs, and you can create elegant, playful, risky, surprising, emotive, delightful, and ultimately simple things.",2011,Simon Collison,simoncollison,2011-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/taming-complexity/,ux
273,There’s No Formula for Great Designs,"Before he combined them with fluid images and CSS3 media queries to coin responsive design, Ethan Marcotte described fluid grids — one of the most enjoyable parts of responsive design. Enjoyable that is, if you like working with math(s). But fluid grids aren’t perfect and, unless we’re careful when applying them, they can sometimes result in a design that feels disconnected.

Recapping fluid grids

If you haven’t read Ethan’s Fluid Grids, now would be a good time to do that. It centres around a simple formula for converting pixel widths to percentages:

(target ÷ context) × 100 = result

How does that work in practice? Well, take that Fireworks or Photoshop comp you’re working on (I call them static design visuals, or just visuals.) Of course, everything on that visual — column divisions, inline images, navigation elements, everything — is measured in pixels. Now:


	Pick something in the visual and measure its width. That’s our target.
	Take that target measurement and divide it by the width of its parent (context).
	Multiply what you’ve got by 100 (shift two decimal places).
	What you’re left with is a percentage width to drop into your style sheets.


For example, divide this 300px wide sidebar division by its 948px parent and then multiply by 100: your original 300px is neatly converted to 31.646%.

.content-sub {
width : 31.646%; /* 300px ÷ 948px = .31646 */ }

That formula makes it surprisingly simple for even die-hard fixed width aficionados to convert their visuals to percentage-based, fluid layouts.

It’s a handy formula for those who still design using static visuals, and downright essential for those situations where one person in an organization designs in Fireworks or Photoshop and another develops with CSS. Why?

Well, although I think that designing in a browser makes the best sense — particularly when designing for multiple devices — I’ll wager most designers still make visuals in Fireworks or Photoshop and use them for demonstrations and get feedback and sign-off. That’s OK. If you haven’t made the transition to content-out designing in a browser yet, the fluid grids formula helps you carry on pushing pixels a while longer.

You can carry on moving pixel width measurements from your visuals to your style sheets, too, in the same way you always have. You can be precise to the pixel and even apply a grid image as a CSS background to help you keep everything lined up perfectly.

Once you’re done, and the fixed width layout in the browser matches your visual, loop back through your style sheets and convert those pixels to percentages using the fluid grids formula. With very little extra work, you’ll have a fluid implementation of your fixed width layout.

The fluid grids formula is simple and incredibly effective, but not long after I started working responsively I realized that the formula shouldn’t (always) be a one-fix, set-and-forget calculation. I noticed that unless we compensate for problems it sometimes creates, the result can be a disconnected design.

Staying connected

Good design relies on connectedness, a feeling of natural balance between elements and the grid they’re placed on. Give an element greater prominence or position in a visual hierarchy and you can fundamentally alter the balance and sometimes the meaning of a design.

Different from a browser’s page zooming feature — where images, text and overall layout change size by the same ratio — fluid grids flex a layout in response to a window or device width. Columns expand and contract, and within them fluid media (images and videos) can also change size. This can be one of the most impressive demonstrations of responsive design.

But not every element within a fluid grid can change size along with the window or device width. For example, type size and leading won’t change along with a column’s width.

When columns and elements within them change width, all too easily a visual hierarchy can be broken and along with it the relationship between element sizes and the outer window or viewport. This can happen quickly if you make just one set of fluid grid calculations and use those percentages across every screen width, from smartphones through tablets and up to large desktops.

The answer? Make several sets of fluid grids calculations, each one at a significant window or device width breakpoint. Then apply those new percentages, when needed, to help keep elements in proportion and maintain balance and connectedness. Here’s how I work.

Avoiding disconnection

I’ve never been entirely happy with grid frameworks such as the 960 Grid System, so I start almost every project by creating a custom grid to inform my layout decisions. Here’s a plain version of a grid from a recent project that I’ll use as an illustration.

This project’s grid comprises 84px columns and 24px gutters. This creates an odd number of columns at common tablet and desktop widths, and allows for 300px fixed width assets — useful when I need to fit advertising into a desktop layout’s sidebar.

 Showing common advertising sizes (Larger image)

For this project I chose three 320 and Up breakpoints above 320px and, after placing as many columns as would fit those breakpoint widths, I derived three content widths:


		
			Breakpoint 
			Columns 
			Content width 
		
		
			768px 
			 7 
			 732px 
		
		
			992px 
			 9 
			 948px 
		
		
			1,382px 
			 13 
			 1,380px 
		


Here’s my grid again, this time with pixel measurements and breakpoints overlaid.

 Showing pixel measurements and breakpoints (Larger image)

Now cast your mind back to the fluid grids calculation I made earlier. I divided a 300px element by 948px and arrived at 31.646%. For some elements it’s possible to use that percentage across all screen widths, but others will feel too small in relation to a narrower 768px and too large inside 1,380px.

To help maintain connectedness, I make a set of fluid grids calculations based on each of the content widths I established earlier. Now I can shift an element’s percentage width up or down when I switch to a new breakpoint and content width. For example:


	300px is 40.984% of 732px
	300px is 31.646% of 948px
	300px is 21.739% of 1,380px


I’ll add all those fluid grid percentages to my grid image and save it for quick reference.

 Showing percentages at all breakpoints (Larger image)

Then I can apply those different percentage widths to elements at each breakpoint using CSS3 media queries. For example, that sidebar division again:

/*  732px, 7-column width */

@media only screen and (min-width: 768px) {

    .content-sub {
        width : 40.983%; /* 300px ÷ 732px = .40983 */ }

}

/*  948px, 9-column width */
@media only screen and (min-width: 992px) {

    .content-sub {
        width : 31.645%; /* 300px ÷ 948px = .31645 */ }

}

/*  1380px, 13-column width */
@media only screen and (min-width: 1382px) {

    .content-sub {
        width : 21.739%; /* 300px ÷ 1380px = .21739 */ }

}

The number of changes you make to a layout at different breakpoints will, of course, depend on the specifics of the design you’re working on. Yes, this is additional work, but the result will be a layout that feels better balanced and within which elements remain in harmony with each other while they respond to new screen or device widths.

Putting the design in responsive web design

Until now, many of the conversations around responsive web design have been about aspects of technical implementation, rather than design. I believe we’re only beginning to understand what’s involved in designing responsively. In future, we’ll likely be making design decisions not just about proportions but also about responsive typography. We’ll also need to learn how to adapt our designs to device characteristics such as touch targets and more.

Sometimes we’ll make decisions to improve function, other times because they make a design ‘feel’ right. You’ll know when you’ve made a right decision. You’ll feel it.

After all, there really is no formula for making great designs.",2011,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2011-12-23T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/theres-no-formula-for-great-designs/,ux
276,Your jQuery: Now With 67% Less Suck,"Fun fact: more websites are now using jQuery than Flash.

jQuery is an amazing tool that’s made JavaScript accessible to developers and designers of all levels of experience. However, as Spiderman taught us, “with great power comes great responsibility.” The unfortunate downside to jQuery is that while it makes it easy to write JavaScript, it makes it easy to write really really f*&#ing bad JavaScript. Scripts that slow down page load, unresponsive user interfaces, and spaghetti code knotted so deep that it should come with a bottle of whiskey for the next sucker developer that has to work on it. 

This becomes more important for those of us who have yet to move into the magical fairy wonderland where none of our clients or users view our pages in Internet Explorer. The IE JavaScript engine moves at the speed of an advancing glacier compared to more modern browsers, so optimizing our code for performance takes on an even higher level of urgency.

Thankfully, there are a few very simple things anyone can add into their jQuery workflow that can clear up a lot of basic problems. When undertaking code reviews, three of the areas where I consistently see the biggest problems are: inefficient selectors; poor event delegation; and clunky DOM manipulation. We’ll tackle all three of these and hopefully you’ll walk away with some new jQuery batarangs to toss around in your next project.

Selector optimization

Selector speed: fast or slow?

Saying that the power behind jQuery comes from its ability to select DOM elements and act on them is like saying that Photoshop is a really good tool for selecting pixels on screen and making them change color – it’s a bit of a gross oversimplification, but the fact remains that jQuery gives us a ton of ways to choose which element or elements in a page we want to work with. However, a surprising number of web developers are unaware that all selectors are not created equal; in fact, it’s incredible just how drastic the performance difference can be between two selectors that, at first glance, appear nearly identical. For instance, consider these two ways of selecting all paragraph tags inside a <div> with an ID.

$(""#id p"");

$(""#id"").find(""p"");

Would it surprise you to learn that the second way can be more than twice as fast as the first? Knowing which selectors outperform others (and why) is a pretty key building block in making sure your code runs well and doesn’t frustrate your users waiting for things to happen.

There are many different ways to select elements using jQuery, but the most common ways can be basically broken down into five different methods. In order, roughly, from fastest to slowest, these are:


	$(""#id""); 
This is without a doubt the fastest selector jQuery provides because it maps directly to the native document.getElementbyId() JavaScript method. If possible, the selectors listed below should be prefaced with an ID selector in conjunction with jQuery’s .find() method to limit the scope of the page that has to be searched (as in the $(""#id"").find(""p"") example shown above).
	$(""p"");, $(""input"");, $(""form""); and so on
Selecting elements by tag name is also fast, since it maps directly to the native document.getElementsByTagname() method.
	$("".class""); 
Selecting by class name is a little trickier. While still performing very well in modern browsers, it can cause some pretty significant slowdowns in IE8 and below. Why? IE9 was the first IE version to support the native document.getElementsByClassName() JavaScript method. Older browsers have to resort to using much slower DOM-scraping methods that can really impact performance.
	$(""[attribute=value]"");
There is no native JavaScript method for this selector to use, so the only way that jQuery can perform the search is by crawling the entire DOM looking for matches. Modern browsers that support the querySelectorAll() method will perform better in certain cases (Opera, especially, runs these searches much faster than any other browser) but, generally speaking, this type of selector is Slowey McSlowersons.
	$("":hidden"");
Like attribute selectors, there is no native JavaScript method for this one to use. Pseudo-selectors can be painfully slow since the selector has to be run against every element in your search space. Again, modern browsers with querySelectorAll() will perform slightly better here, but try to avoid these if at all possible. If you must use one, try to limit the search space to a specific portion of the page: $(""#list"").find("":hidden"");


But, hey, proof is in the performance testing, right? It just so happens that said proof is sitting right here. Be sure to notice the class selector numbers beside IE7 and 8 compared to other browsers and then wonder how the people on the IE team at Microsoft manage to sleep at night. Yikes.

Chaining

Almost all jQuery methods return a jQuery object. This means that when a method is run, its results are returned and you can continue executing more methods on them. Rather than writing out the same selector multiple times over, just making a selection once allows multiple actions to be run on it.

Without chaining

$(""#object"").addClass(""active"");
$(""#object"").css(""color"",""#f0f"");
$(""#object"").height(300);

With chaining

$(""#object"").addClass(""active"").css(""color"", ""#f0f"").height(300);

This has the dual effect of making your code shorter and faster. Chained methods will be slightly faster than multiple methods made on a cached selector, and both ways will be much faster than multiple methods made on non-cached selectors. Wait… “cached selector”? What is this new devilry? 

Caching

Another easy way to speed up your code that seems to be a mystery to developers is the idea of caching your selectors. Think of how many times you end up writing the same selector over and over again in any project. Every $("".element"") selector has to search the entire DOM each time, regardless of whether or not that selector had been previously run. Running the selection once and then storing the results in a variable means that the DOM only has to be searched once. Once the results of a selector have been cached, you can do anything with them.

First, run your search (here we’re selecting all of the <li> elements inside <ul id=""blocks"">): 

var blocks = $(""#blocks"").find(""li"");

Now, you can use the blocks variable wherever you want without having to search the DOM every time.

$(""#hideBlocks"").click(function() {
    blocks.fadeOut();
});
$(""#showBlocks"").click(function() {
    blocks.fadeIn();
});

My advice? Any selector that gets run more than once should be cached. This jsperf test shows just how much faster a cached selector runs compared to a non-cached one (and even throws some chaining love in to boot).

Event delegation

Event listeners cost memory. In complex websites and apps it’s not uncommon to have a lot of event listeners floating around, and thankfully jQuery provides some really easy methods for handling event listeners efficiently through delegation.

In a bit of an extreme example, imagine a situation where a 10×10 cell table needs to have an event listener on each cell; let’s say that clicking on a cell adds or removes a class that defines the cell’s background color. A typical way that this might be written (and something I’ve often seen during code reviews) is like so:

$('table').find('td').click(function() {
    $(this).toggleClass('active');
});

jQuery 1.7 has provided us with a new event listener method, .on(). It acts as a utility that wraps all of jQuery’s previous event listeners into one convenient method, and the way you write it determines how it behaves. To rewrite the above .click() example using .on(), we’d simply do the following:

$('table').find('td').on('click',function() {
    $(this).toggleClass('active');
});

Simple enough, right? Sure, but the problem here is that we’re still binding one hundred event listeners to our page, one to each individual table cell. A far better way to do things is to create one event listener on the table itself that listens for events inside it. Since the majority of events bubble up the DOM tree, we can bind a single event listener to one element (in this case, the <table>) and wait for events to bubble up from its children. The way to do this using the .on() method requires only one change from our code above:

$('table').on('click','td',function() {
    $(this).toggleClass('active');
});

All we’ve done is moved the td selector to an argument inside the .on() method. Providing a selector to .on() switches it into delegation mode, and the event is only fired for descendants of the bound element (table) that match the selector (td). With that one simple change, we’ve gone from having to bind one hundred event listeners to just one. You might think that the browser having to do one hundred times less work would be a good thing and you’d be completely right. The difference between the two examples above is staggering.

(Note that if your site is using a version of jQuery earlier than 1.7, you can accomplish the very same thing using the .delegate() method. The syntax of how you write the function differs slightly; if you’ve never used it before, it’s worth checking the API docs for that page to see how it works.)

DOM manipulation

jQuery makes it very easy to manipulate the DOM. It’s trivial to create new nodes, insert them, remove other ones, move things around, and so on. While the code to do this is simple to write, every time the DOM is manipulated, the browser has to repaint and reflow content which can be extremely costly. This is no more evident than in a long loop, whether it be a standard for() loop, while() loop, or jQuery $.each() loop.

In this case, let’s say we’ve just received an array full of image URLs from a database or Ajax call or wherever, and we want to put all of those images in an unordered list. Commonly, you’ll see code like this to pull this off:

var arr = [reallyLongArrayOfImageURLs]; 
    $.each(arr, function(count, item) {
        var newImg = '<li><img src=""'+item+'""></li>';
        $('#imgList').append(newImg);
    });

There are a couple of problems with this. For one (which you should have already noticed if you’ve read the earlier part of this article), we’re making the $(""#imgList"") selection once for each iteration of our loop. The other problem here is that each time the loop iterates, it’s adding a new <li> to the DOM. Each of those insertions is going to be costly, and if our array is quite large then this could lead to a massive slowdown or even the dreaded ‘A script is causing this page to run slowly’ warning.

var arr = [reallyLongArrayOfImageURLs],
    tmp = ''; 
$.each(arr, function(count, item) {
    tmp += '<li><img src=""'+item+'""></li>';
});
$('#imgList').append(tmp);

All we’ve done here is create a tmp variable that each <li> is added to as it’s created. Once our loop has finished iterating, that tmp variable will contain all of our list items in memory, and can be appended to our <ul> all in one go. Browsers work much faster when working with objects in memory rather than on screen, so this is a much faster, more CPU-cycle-friendly method of building a list.

Wrapping up

These are far from being the only ways to make your jQuery code run better, but they are among the simplest ones to implement. Though each individual change may only make a few milliseconds of difference, it doesn’t take long for those milliseconds to add up. Studies have shown that the human eye can discern delays of as few as 100ms, so simply making a few changes sprinkled throughout your code can very easily have a noticeable effect on how well your website or app performs. Do you have other jQuery optimization tips to share? Leave them in the comments and help make us all better.

Now go forth and make awesome!",2011,Scott Kosman,scottkosman,2011-12-13T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/your-jquery-now-with-less-suck/,code
75,A Harder-Working Class,"Class is only becoming more important. Focusing on its original definition as an attribute for grouping (or classifying) as well as linking HTML to CSS, recent front-end development practices are emphasizing class as a vessel for structured, modularized style packages. These patterns reduce the need for repetitive declarations that can seriously bloat file sizes, and instil human-readable understanding of how the interface, layout, and aesthetics are constructed.

In the next handful of paragraphs, we will look at how these emerging practices – such as object-oriented CSS and SMACSS – are pushing the relevance of class. We will also explore how HTML and CSS architecture can be further simplified, performance can be boosted, and CSS utility sharpened by combining class with the attribute selector.

A primer on attribute selectors

While attribute selectors were introduced in the CSS 2 spec, they are still considered rather exotic. These well-established and well-supported features give us vastly improved flexibility in targeting elements in CSS, and offer us opportunities for smarter markup. With an attribute selector, you can directly style an element based on any of its unique – or uniquely shared – attributes, without the need for an ID or extra classes. Unlike pseudo-classes, pseudo-elements, and other exciting features of CSS3, attribute selectors do not require any browser-specific syntax or prefix, and are even supported in Internet Explorer 7. 

For example, say we want to target all anchor tags on a page that link to our homepage. Where otherwise we might need to manually identify and add classes to the HTML for these specific links, we could simply write:

[href=index.html] {  }

This selector reads: target every element that has an href attribute of “index.html”. 

Attribute selectors are more faceted, though, as they also give us some very simple regular expression-like logic that helps further narrow (or widen) a selector’s scope. In our previous example, what if we wanted to also give indicative styles to any anchor tag linking to an external site? With no way to know what the exact href value would be for every external link, we need to use an expression to match a common aspect of those links. In this case, we know that all external links need to start with “http”, so we can use that as a hook:

[href^=http] {  }

The selector here reads: target every element that has an href attribute that begins with “http” (which will also include “https”). The ^= means “starts with”. There are a few other simple expressions that give us a lot of flexibility in targeting elements, and I have found that a deep understanding of these and other selector types to be very useful.

The class-attribute selector

By matching classes with the attribute selector, CSS can be pushed to accomplish some exciting new feats. What I call a class-attribute selector combines the advantages of classes with attribute selectors by targeting the class attribute, rather than a specific class. Instead of selecting .urgent, you could select [class*=urgent]. The latter may seem like a more verbose way of accomplishing the former, but each would actually match two subtly different groups of elements.

Eric Meyer first explored the possibility of using classes with attribute selectors over a decade ago. While his interest in this technique mostly explored the different facets of the syntax, I have found that using class-attribute selectors can have distinct advantages over either using an attribute selector or a straightforward class selector.

First, let’s explore some of the subtleties of why we would target class before other attributes:


	Classes are ubiquitous. They have been supported since the HTML 4 spec was released in 1999. Newer attributes, such as the custom data attribute, have only recently begun to be adopted by browsers.
	Classes have multiple ways of being targeted. You can use the class selector or attribute selector (.classname or [class=classname]), allowing more flexible specificity than resorting to an ID or !important.
	Classes are already widely used, so adding more classes will usually require less markup than adding more attributes.
	Classes were designed to abstractly group and specify elements, making them the most appropriate attribute for styling using object-oriented methods (as we will learn in a moment).


Also, as Meyer pointed out, we can use the class-attribute selector to be more strict about class declarations. Of these two elements:

<h2 class=""very urgent"">

<h2 class=""urgent"">

…only the second h2 would be selected by [class=urgent], while .urgent would select both. The use of = matches any element with the exact class value of “urgent”. Eric explores these nuances further in his series on attribute selectors, but perhaps more dramatic is the added power that class-attribute selectors can bring to our CSS.

More object-oriented, more scalable and modular

Nicole Sullivan has been pushing abstracted, object-oriented thinking in CSS development for years now. She has shared stacks of knowledge on how behemoth sites have seen impressive gains in maintenance overhead and CSS file sizes by leaning heavier on classes derived from common patterns. Jonathan Snook also speaks, writes and is genuinely passionate about improving our markup by using more stratified and modular class name conventions. With SMACSS, he shows this to be highly useful across sites – both complex and simple – that exhibit repeated design patterns. Sullivan and Snook both push the use of class for styling over other attributes, and many front-end developers are fast advocating such thinking as best practice.

With class-attribute selectors, we can further abstract our CSS, pushing its scalability. In his chapter on modules, Snook gives the example of a .pod class that might represent a certain set of styles. A .pod style set might be used in varying contexts, leading to CSS that might normally look like this:

.pod {  }
form .pod {  }
aside .pod {  }

According to Snook, we can make these styles more portable by targeting more verbose classes, rather than context:

.pod {  }
.pod-form {  }
.pod-sidebar {  }

…resulting in the following HTML:

<div class=""pod"">
<div class=""pod pod-form"">
<div class=""pod pod-sidebar"">

This divorces the <div>’s styles from its context, making it applicable to any situation in which it is needed. The markup is clean and portable, and the classes are imbued with meaning as to what module they belong to. 

Using class-attribute selectors, we can simplify this further:

[class*=pod] {  }
.pod-form {  }
.pod-sidebar {  }

The *= tells the browser to look for any element with a class attribute containing “pod”, so it matches “pod”, “pod-form”, “pod-sidebar”, etc. This allows only one class per element, resulting in simpler HTML:

<div class=""pod"">
<div class=""pod-form"">
<div class=""pod-sidebar"">

We could further abstract the concept of “form” and “sidebar” adjustments if we knew that each of those alterations would always need the same treatment.

/* Modules */
[class*=pod] {  }
[class*=btn] {  }

/* Alterations */
[class*=-form] {  }
[class*=-sidebar] {  }

In this case, all elements with classes appended “-form” or “-sidebar” would be altered in the same manner, allowing the markup to stay simple:

<form>
  <h2 class=""pod-form"">
  <a class=""btn-form"" href=""#"">

<aside>
  <h2 class=""pod-sidebar"">
  <a class=""btn-sidebar"" href=""#"">

50+ shades of specificity

Classes are just powerful enough to override element selectors and default styling, but still leave room to be trumped by IDs and !important styles. This makes them more suitable for object-oriented patterns and helps avoid messy specificity issues that can not only be a pain for developers to maintain, but can also affect a site’s performance. As Sullivan notes, “In almost every case, classes work well and have fewer unintended consequences than either IDs or element selectors”. Proper use of specificity and cascade is crucial in building straightforward, efficient CSS.

One interesting aspect of attribute selectors is that they can be compounded for increasing levels of specificity. Attribute selectors are assigned a specificity level of ten, the same as class selectors, but both class and attribute selectors can be chained together, giving them more and more specificity with each link. Some examples:

.box {  } 
/* Specificity of 10 */

.box.promo {  } 
/* Specificity of 20 */

[class*=box] {  } 
/* Specificity of 10 */

[class*=box][class*=promo] {  } 
/* Specificity of 20 */

You can chain both types together, too:

.box[class*=promo] {  } 
/* Specificity of 20 */

I was amused to find, though, that you can chain the exact same class and attribute selectors for infinite levels of specificity

.box {  } 
/* Specificity of 10 */

.box.box {  } 
/* Specificity of 20 */

.box.box.box {  } 
/* Specificity of 30 */

[class*=box] {  }
/* Specificity of 10 */

[class*=box][class*=box] {  }
/* Specificity of 20 */

[class*=box][class*=box][class*=box] {  }
/* Specificity of 30 */

.box[class*=box].box[class*=box] {  } 
/* Specificity of 40 */

To override .box styles for promo, we wouldn’t need to add an ID, change the order of .promo and .box in the CSS, or resort to an !important style. Granted, any issue that might need this fine level of specificity tweaking could probably be better solved with clever cascades, but having options never hurts.

Smarter CSS

One of the most powerful aspects of the class-attribute selector is its ability to expand the simple logic found in CSS. When developing Gridset (an online tool for building grids and outputting them as CSS), I realized that with the right class name conventions, class-attribute selectors would allow the CSS to be smart enough to automatically adjust for column offsets without the need for extra classes. This imbued the CSS output with logic that other frameworks lacked, and makes a developer’s job much easier. 

Say you need an element that spans column five (c5) to column six (c6) on your grid, and is preceded by an element spanning column one (c1) to column three (c3). The CSS can anticipate such a scenario:

.c1-c3 + .c5-c6 {
  margin-left: 25%; /* …or the width of column four plus two gutter widths */
}

…but to accommodate all of the margin offsets that could span that same gap, we would need to write a rather protracted list for just a six column grid:

.c1-c3 + .c5-c6,
.c1-c3 + .c5,
.c2-c3 + .c5-c6,
.c2-c3 + .c5,
.c3 + .c5-c6,
.c3 + .c5 {
  margin-left: 25%; 
}

Now imagine how the verbosity compounds when we repeat this type of declaration for every possible margin in a grid. The more columns added to the grid, the longer this selector list would get, too, making the CSS harder for the developer to maintain and slowing the load time. Using class-attribute selectors, though, this can be much simpler:

[class*=c3] + [class*=c5] {
  margin-left: 25%;
}

I’ve detailed how we extract as much logic as possible from as little CSS as needed on the Gridset blog.

More flexible selectors

In a recent project, I was working with Drupal-generated classes to change styles for certain special pages on a site. Without being able to change the code base, I was left trying to find some specific aspect of the generated HTML to target. I noticed that every special page was given a prefixed class, unique to the page, resulting in CSS like this:

.specialpage-about,
.specialpage-contact,
.specialpage-info,
…

…and the list kept growing with each new special page. Such bloat would lead to problems down the line, and add development overhead to editorial decisions, which was a situation we were trying to avoid. I was easily able to fix this, though, with a concise class-attribute selector:

[class*=specialpage-]

The CSS was now flexible enough to accommodate both the editorial needs of the client, and the development restrictions of the CMS.

Selector performance

As Snook tells us in his chapter on Selector Performance, selectors are read by the browser from right to left, matching every element that adheres to each rule (or part of the selector). The more specific we can make the right-most rules – and every other part of your selectors – the more performant your CSS will be. So this selector:

.home-page .promo .main-header

…would be more performant than:

.home-page div header

…because there are likely many more header and div elements on the page, but not so many elements with those specific classes.

Now, the class-attribute selector could be more general than a class selector, but not by much. I ran numerous tests based on the work of Steve Souders (and a few others) to test a class-attribute selector against a normal class selector. Given that Javascript will freeze during style rendering, I created a script that will add, then remove, a stylesheet on a page 5000 times, and measure only the time that elapses during the rendering freeze. The script runs four tests, essentially: one where a class selector and class-attribute Selector match a single element, and one they match multiple elements on the page.

After running the test over 100 times and averaging the results, I have not seen a significant difference in rendering times. (As of this writing, the class-attribute selector has been 0.398% slower on average.) View the results here.

Given the sheer amount of bytes potentially saved by reducing selector lists, though, I am confident class-attribute selectors could shorten load times on larger sites and, at the very least, save precious development time.

Conclusion

With its flexibility and broad remit, class has at times been derided as too lenient, allowing CMSes and lazy developers to fill its values with presentational hacks or verbose gibberish. There have even been calls for an early retirement. Class continues, though, to be one of our most crucial tools.

Front-end developers are rightfully eager to expand production abilities through innovations such as Sass or LESS, but this should not preclude us from honing the tools we already know as well. Every technique demonstrated in this article was achievable over a decade ago and most of the same thinking could be applied to IDs, rels, or any other attribute (though the reasons listed above give class an edge). The recent advent of methods such as object-oriented CSS and SMACSS shows there is still much room left to expand what simple HTML and CSS can accomplish. Progress may not always be found in the innovation of our tools, but through sharpening our understanding of them.",2012,Nathan Ford,nathanford,2012-12-15T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/a-harder-working-class/,code
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 World Wide Web. Based on the earlier “Enquire” work, it was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents.


I’m delighted to find that this spirit of collaborative ingenuity is alive and well on the web today. Take the story of Off Canvas as an example. I was at an ATX Dribbble meet up where I met Jason Weaver and chatted to him about his recent work on the responsive layout prototype, Off Canvas. Jason said he came across a post by Luke Wroblewski outlining the idea and saw this:


	If anyone is interested in building a complete example of this approach using responsive Web design techniques, let me know!


From there Luke recounts: 


	We went back and forth on email, with me laying out ideas and Jason doing all the hard work to see if they can be done and improving them bit by bit! Once we got to something we both liked, I wrote up an article explaining things and he hosted the examples.


Luke took the time to clearly outline and diagram his ideas, and Jason responded with a solid proof of concept that has evolved into a tool we all have at our disposal. Victory!

I have also benefitted from comrades who have taken an idea of mine into development. After blogging about some concerns in regards to maintaining hierarchy as media queries are used to shift layouts, Jordan Moore rebounded with some responsive demos where he used flexbox to (re)order content as viewport sizing changes.

Similar stories can be found behind the development of things like FitVids, FitText, and Molten Leading. I love this pattern of collaboration because it involves a fairly specific process:


	Initial idea or prototype is outlined or built, then shared
	Discuss
	Someone develops or improves it, then shares it
	Discuss
	Someone else develops or improves it, then shares it.
	Infinity.


This is what the web looks like when we build it together, and I’d argue that steps 2+ are absolutely crucial. A web where everyone develops their own ideas and tools independent of one another is like a room full of people talking and no one listening. 



The pattern itself mimics a literal web structure, and ideally we’d be able to follow a strand from one idea to the next and so on.

Blessed are the curators

Sometimes those lines aren’t easy to find or follow. Thankfully, there are people who painstakingly log each experiment and index much of what’s out there. Chris Coyier does this with CSS in general, and Brad Frost is doing this for responsive and multi-device design with his Pattern Library. Seriously, take a look at this page and imagine what it would take to find, track and organize the progression of each of these resources yourself. I’d argue that ongoing collections like these are more valuable than the sum of their parts when they are updated regularly as opposed to a top ten tips blog post format.

Here’s my soapbox

Here are a few things I appreciate about how things are shared and contributed online. And yes, I could do way better at all of them myself.


	Concise write-ups: honor others’ time by getting to the point. Not every idea or solution needs two thousand words to convey fully. I love long-form posts, but there’s a time and a place for them.
	Visual aids: if a quick illustration, screenshot, or graphic helps illustrate your point or problem, yes please.


By the way, Luke Wroblewski rules the school on both of these.


	Demo it: host it yourself, or put it on CodePen or JS Bin for others to see.
	Put it on Github: share and improve with the rest of the community. Consider, however, that because someone puts something on Github doesn’t mean they’re forever bound to provide support or instruction.


This isn’t a call for everyone to learn everything all the time, but if you’re curious or interested in something, skip the shortcut and get your hands dirty: sketch, prototype, question, debate, fork, and share. Figuring these things out on our own makes us valuable contributors to the web – the thing that ultimately we’re all trying to figure out together.",2012,Trent Walton,trentwalton,2012-12-03T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/being-prepared-to-contribute/,process
77,Colour Accessibility,"Here’s a quote from Josef Albers:

In visual perception a colour is almost never seen as it really is[…] This fact makes colour the most relative medium in art.Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, 1963

Albers was a German abstract painter and teacher, and published a very famous course on colour theory in 1963. Colour is very relative — not just in the way that it appears differently across different devices due to screen quality and colour management, but it can also be seen differently by different people — something we really need to be more mindful of when designing.

What is colour blindness?

Colour blindness very rarely means that you can’t see any colour at all, or that people see things in greyscale. It’s actually a decreased ability to see colour, or a decreased ability to tell colours apart from one another. 

How does it happen?

Inside the typical human retina, there are two types of receptor cells — rods and cones. Rods are the cells that allow us to see dark and light, and shape and movement. Cones are the cells that allow us to perceive colour. There are three types of cones, each responsible for absorbing blue, red, and green wavelengths in the spectrum.

Problems with colour vision occur when one or more of these types of cones are defective or absent entirely, and these problems can either be inherited through genetics, or acquired through trauma, exposure to ultraviolet light, degeneration with age, an effect of diabetes, or other factors.

Colour blindness is a sex-linked trait and it’s much more common in men than in women. The most common type of colour blindness is called deuteranomaly which occurs in 7% of males, but only 0.5% of females. That’s a pretty significant portion of the population if you really stop and think about it — we can’t ignore this demographic.

What does it look like?

People with the most common types of colour blindness, like protanopia and deuteranopia, have difficulty discriminating between red and green hues. There are also forms of colour blindness like tritanopia, which affects perception of blue and yellow hues. Below, you can see what a colour wheel might look like to these different people.



What can we do?

Here are some things you can do to make your websites and apps more accessible to people with all types of colour blindness.

Include colour names and show examples

One of the most common annoyances I’ve heard from people who are colour-blind is that they often have difficulty purchasing clothing and they will sometimes need to ask another person for a second opinion on what the colour of the clothing might actually be. While it’s easier to shop online than in a physical store, there are still accessibility issues to consider on shopping websites.

Let’s say you’ve got a website that sells T-shirts. If you only show a photo of the shirt, it may be impossible for a person to tell what colour the shirt really is. For clarification, be sure to reference the name of the colour in the description of the product.



United Pixelworkers does a great job of following this rule. The St. John’s T-shirt has a quirky palette inspired by the unofficial pink, white and green Newfoundland flag, and I can imagine many people not liking it.

Another common problem occurs when a colour filter has been added to a product search. Here’s an example from a clothing website with unlabelled colour swatches, and how that might look to someone with deuteranopia-type colour blindness.



The colour search filter below, from the H&M website, is much better since it uses names instead.



At first glance, Urban Outfitters also uses unlabelled colour swatches on product pages (below), but on closer inspection, the colour name is displayed on hover. This isn’t an ideal solution, because although it’ll work on a desktop browser, it won’t work on a touchscreen device where hovering isn’t an option. 



Using overly fancy colour names, like the ones you might find labelling high-end interior paint can be just as confusing as not using a colour name at all. Names like grape instead of purple don’t really give the viewer any useful information about what the colour actually is on a colour wheel. Is grape supposed to be purple, or could it refer to red grapes or even green? Stick with hue names as much as possible.

Avoid colour-specific instructions

When designing forms, avoid labelling required fields only with coloured text. It’s safer to use a symbol cue like the asterisk which is colour-independent. 



A similar example would be directing a user to click a green button to purchase a product. Label your buttons clearly and reference them in the site copy by function, not colour, to avoid confusion.

Don’t rely on colour coding

Designing accessible maps and infographics can be much more challenging. 

Don’t rely on colour coding alone — try to use a combination of colour and texture or pattern, along with precise labels, and reflect this in the key or legend. Combine a blue background with a crosshatched pattern, or a pink background with a stippled dot — your users will always have two pieces of information to work with.



The map of the London subway system is an iconic image not just in London, but around the world. Unfortunately, it contains some colours that are indistinguishable from each other to a person with a vision problem. This is true not only for the London underground, but also for any other wayfinding system that relies on colour coding as the only key in a legend. 



There are printable versions of the map available online in black and white, using patterns and shades of black and grey that are distinguishable, but the point is that there would be no need for such a map if it were designed with accessibility in mind from the beginning. And, if you’re a person who has a physical disability as well as a vision problem, the “Step-Free” guide map which shows stations is based on the original coloured map. 



Provide alternatives and customization

While it’s best to consider these issues and design your app to be accessible by default, sometimes this might not be possible. Providing alternative styles or allowing users to edit their own colours is a feature to keep in mind.

The developers of the game Faster Than Light created an alternate colour-blind mode and asked for public feedback to make sure that it passed the test. Not much needed to be done, but you can see they added stripes to the red zones and changed some outlines to blue.



iChat is also a good example. Although by default it uses coloured bubbles to indicate a user’s status (available for chat, away or idle, or busy), included in the preferences is a “User Shapes to Indicate Status” option, which changes the shape of the standard circles to green circles, yellow triangles and red squares.



Pay attention to contrast  

Colours that are similar in value but different in hue may be easy to distinguish between for a user with good vision, but a person who suffers from colour blindness may not be able to tell them apart at all. Proofing your work in greyscale is a quick way to tell if there’s enough contrast between the most important information in your design.

Check with a simulator

There are many tools out there for simulating different types of colour blindness, and it’s worth checking your design to catch any potential problems up front. 

One is called Sim Daltonism and it’s available for Mac OS X. It’ll show a pop-up preview next to your cursor and you can choose which type of colour blindness you want to test from a drop-down menu. 



You can also proof for the two most common types of colour blindness right in Photoshop or Illustrator (CS4 and later) while you’re designing. 



The colour contrast check tool from designer and developer Jonathan Snook gives you the option to enter a colour code for a background, and a colour code for text, and it’ll tell you if the colour contrast ratio meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. You can use the built-in sliders to adjust your colours until they meet the compliant contrast ratios. This is a great tool to test your palette before going live.



For live websites, you can use the accessibility tool called WAVE, which also has a contrast checker. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that while WAVE can identify contrast errors in text, other things can slip through, so a site that passes the test does not automatically mean it’s accessible in reality.

For example, the contrast checker here doesn’t notice that our red link in the introduction isn’t underlined, and therefore could blend into the surrounding paragraph text. 



I know that once I started getting into the habit of checking my work in a simulator, I became more mindful of any potential problem areas and it was easier to avoid them up front. It’s also made me question everything I see around me and it sends red flags off in my head if I think it’s a serious colour blindness fail. Understanding that colour is relative in the planning stages and following these tips will help us make more accessible design for all.",2012,Geri Coady,gericoady,2012-12-04T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/colour-accessibility/,design
87,Content Planning Demystified,"The first thing you learn as a junior editor is that you can’t do everything yourself. You must rely on someone else to do at least part of what must be done: the long-range planning, the initial drafting or shooting or recording, the editing, the production, the final polish. All of those pieces of work that belong to someone else take quite a lot of time — days, weeks, sometimes months. If you’re the sort of person who wrote college term papers the night before they were due, this can come as a bit of a shock. To my twenty-two-year-old self, it certainly did. 

It turns out that the only real way to avoid a trainwreck with editorial work is to get ahead of the trouble, line everything up carefully, and leave oodles of room for all the pieces to connect on time. The same is true of content strategy, content planning, and just about everything to do with content on the web, except for the writing itself — and that, too, usually takes far longer than anyone expects. If you’re not a professional editor and you suddenly find yourself dealing with content creation, you’re almost certainly going to underestimate the time and effort involved, or to skip something important in the planning process that pops up to bite you later. 

Without good content, it doesn’t matter how well designed or coded your web project is, because it won’t be doing the thing it’s meant to do. And even if content is far from your specialty, you may well end up being the only one willing to coordinate it far enough in advance to avoid a chaotic ending. Whether you’re hiring writers and editors for a big project, working with a small client, or coaxing some editorial help out of a co-worker, getting the planning work done correctly — and ahead of time — will allow you to orchestrate a glorious ballet of togetherness, instead of feverishly scraping together something to put on your site when the deadline looms. So get out the graph paper and the pocket protector, because we’re going to go Full Nerd on this problem.

Know your poison

Anyone who’s seen a project delayed for six months by content trouble, or derailed by content that’s bland and unhelpful, knows this stuff can make you feel like a dead sock. To get ahead of the problem, you’re going to have to learn to spot common problems and plan your way around them. On web projects without a dedicated editorial lead, you’re likely to encounter content that is:


	Useless – Content that doesn’t serve your readers’ needs in some way is pointless. And because it takes up your time and crowds out genuinely helpful things, it’s actually damaging. The logic is simple: you can make content that’s all about you, and that serves your stated messaging goals, but if no one is motivated to read it, it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
	Badly written – When you publish articles or instructions or other content that is too stiffly formal, overly wordy, hard to understand, offensive, unintentionally cheesy, or otherwise off in tone or style, you’re doing two things. First, you’re weakening the information you’re trying to convey by making it obscure or annoying. Second — and this one is even more damaging — you’re demonstrating bad taste. When you get the cultural elements of publishing wrong, you encourage your readers to believe that you either don’t understand them or don’t care about getting it wrong.
	Gooey – Content strategists have been talking about structured content (that’s chunks versus blobs) for years. If you’re publishing more than a few dozen pages without thinking through the structure of your content, you’re probably missing a chance to improve your long-term efficiency. If you’re publishing more than a couple of thousand pages without taking care of your content structure, you’re probably doing a lot more manual wrangling (or cumbersome CMS work) than you need to be, especially when it comes to cross-platform publishing.
	Unregulated – If you’re not tracking what works and what doesn’t — and especially if you don’t know what “works” means for your project or organization — you’re almost certainly getting worse results than you should be, for more work.
	Overabundant – As demonstrated by the cinnamon challenge, too much of a delicious thing can be a giant and publicly embarrassing disaster. For most projects and organizations, if you’re making more stuff than your readers can handle, or if you’re spreading your creative and editorial resources too thinly, that’s bad. Spammers, content farms, and barrel-bottom tabloids have their own special math, the side effects of which include insomnia, irritability, and crying in traffic while silently mouthing Wilson Phillips lyrics.



Prevent all preventable damage

Once you know what kind of trouble to look for, you can prevent a lot of it by doing some smart planning well before someone starts writing (or recording or shooting video).


	To prevent uselessness: Know your readers and decide what you’re trying to accomplish — with your website as a whole, and with each piece of content, always. Once you know what you’re trying to achieve, you can evaluate your work as you go to make sure that it’s actually doing the right thing. (I’ve written a lot more about this for A List Apart and in The Elements of Content Strategy.)
	To prevent bad writing: Establish a consistent and appropriate style using examples (and a style guide if you need one), designate an editor, hire good writers, and make time for quality control. Kate Kiefer’s style guide for MailChimp is a superb example of style-wrangling that everyone can use.
	To prevent repulsive goo: Give your content as much structure as possible, and know how structure relates to your entire publishing ecosystem, including all those mobile devices. Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s Content Everywhere and Karen McGrane’s Content Strategy for Mobile offer brilliant yet friendly introductions to the wide world of structured content.
	To prevent unregulated chaos: Measure everything that matters to your project, your client, your organization, and especially your readers — not generic measures of someone else’s success. Measure it all regularly. Be disciplined. Adjust at regular intervals. Rick Allen’s series on content strategy analytics is an excellent place to begin (part one; part two).
	To prevent overabundance: Stop trying to do everything and focus on giving your readers just a few things they want and genuinely need. Don’t establish a schedule your writers might not be able to keep, and focus on differentiating yourself with quality, not quantity. (And while you’re at it, scratch the auto-posting to social networks and the cross-posting between them. It’s about as engaging as an automated phone system.)


At a slightly higher level, pick the right content person (or team) for the work. If you really only need a few pages of copy, find a smart writer who does good work for multi-platform readers. If you’re slinging tens of thousands of pages of content, get someone with field experience in high-level editorial planning and the ability to turn blobs into chunks and melted goo into Legos. If you’re starting a project that involves making a lot of content over time, bring in someone with journalism experience (or get your client to do so). 

“But wait!” you may say. “I’m not hiring anyone. I have to do this all myself.” That’s not uncommon at all. The bad news is, you have to learn a bunch of stuff. The good news is, you get to learn a bunch of awesome stuff. Figure out what the project needs, just as though you were going to hire someone, and then give yourself time to get up to speed. If it’s a really complicated project, you’re probably going to have trouble unless you eventually get professional help. But if it’s small and you can do it in steps, you can certainly do much better by giving yourself a plan and working on the things that matter most.


Plan for the marathon, not the sprint

Launching with awesome content is a tiny fraction of a victory, which is why it’s so important that your content not be gooey or unregulated. It also means that if you don’t plan for a realistic publication schedule, you are going to slam into reality in a really unpleasant way not too long after you’ve begun. If you’re asking people to make words (or videos or whatever) for you, they’re going to have to do less of something else, so plan for that beforehand. 

And while you’re at it, unless publishing is your core business, ditch the feed-the-beast plan that leads to fluffy blog posts and spiritless, unhelpful social media content. It’s antisocial for your reading community, offers short-term gains at best, and will burn you out or lower your standards until you don’t even know you’re doing lousy work. Good content is expensive, no matter how you do it, but spreading yourself too thin is a much worse investment than doing a smaller thing well and gradually building up a body of superb content that people want to share and keep and return to.",2012,Erin Kissane,erinkissane,2012-12-20T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/content-planning-demystified/,content
95,Giving Content Priority with CSS3 Grid Layout,"Browser support for many of the modules that are part of CSS3 have enabled us to use CSS for many of the things we used to have to use images for. The rise of mobile browsers and the concept of responsive web design has given us a whole new way of looking at design for the web. However, when it comes to layout, we haven’t moved very far at all. We have talked for years about separating our content and source order from the presentation of that content, yet most of us have had to make decisions on source order in order to get a certain visual layout. 

Owing to some interesting specifications making their way through the W3C process at the moment, though, there is hope of change on the horizon. In this article I’m going to look at one CSS module, the CSS3 grid layout module, that enables us to define a grid and place elements on to it. This article comprises a practical demonstration of the basics of grid layout, and also a discussion of one way in which we can start thinking of content in a more adaptive way.

Before we get started, it is important to note that, at the time of writing, these examples work only in Internet Explorer 10. CSS3 grid layout is a module created by Microsoft, and implemented using the -ms prefix in IE10. My examples will all use the -ms prefix, and not include other prefixes simply because this is such an early stage specification, and by the time there are implementations in other browsers there may be inconsistencies. The implementation I describe today may well change, but is also there for your feedback.

If you don’t have access to IE10, then one way to view and test these examples is by signing up for an account with Browserstack – the free trial would give you time to have a look. I have also included screenshots of all relevant stages in creating the examples.

What is CSS3 grid layout?

CSS3 grid layout aims to let developers divide up a design into a grid and place content on to that grid. Rather than trying to fabricate a grid from floats, you can declare an actual grid on a container element and then use that to position the elements inside. Most importantly, the source order of those elements does not matter. 

Declaring a grid

We declare a grid using a new value for the display property: display: grid. As we are using the IE10 implementation here, we need to prefix that value: display: -ms-grid;.

Once we have declared our grid, we set up the columns and rows using the grid-columns and grid-rows properties.

.wrapper {
    display: -ms-grid;
    -ms-grid-columns: 200px 20px auto 20px 200px;
    -ms-grid-rows: auto 1fr;
}

In the above example, I have declared a grid on the .wrapper element. I have used the grid-columns property to create a grid with a 200 pixel-wide column, a 20 pixel gutter, a flexible width auto column that will stretch to fill the available space, another 20 pixel-wide gutter and a final 200 pixel sidebar: a flexible width layout with two fixed width sidebars. Using the grid-rows property I have created two rows: the first is set to auto so it will stretch to fill whatever I put into it; the second row is set to 1fr, a new value used in grids that means one fraction unit. In this case, one fraction unit of the available space, effectively whatever space is left.

Positioning items on the grid

Now I have a simple grid, I can pop items on to it. If I have a <div> with a class of .main that I want to place into the second row, and the flexible column set to auto I would use the following CSS:

.content {
    -ms-grid-column: 3;
    -ms-grid-row: 2;
    -ms-grid-row-span: 1;
}

If you are old-school, you may already have realised that we are essentially creating an HTML table-like layout structure using CSS. I found the concept of a table the most helpful way to think about the grid layout module when trying to work out how to place elements.

Creating grid systems

As soon as I started to play with CSS3 grid layout, I wanted to see if I could use it to replicate a flexible grid system like this fluid 16-column 960 grid system.

I started out by defining a grid on my wrapper element, using fractions to make this grid fluid.

.wrapper {	 
    width: 90%;
    margin: 0 auto 0 auto;
    display: -ms-grid;
    -ms-grid-columns: 1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[16];
    -ms-grid-rows: (auto 20px)[24];
}

Like the 960 grid system I was using as an example, my grid starts with a gutter, followed by the first actual column, plus another gutter repeated sixteen times. What this means is that if I want to span two columns, as far as the grid layout module is concerned that is actually three columns: two wide columns, plus one gutter. So this needs to be accounted for when positioning items.

I created a CSS class for each positioning option: column position; rows position; and column span. For example:

.grid1 {-ms-grid-column: 2;} /* applying this class positions an item in the first column (the gutter is column 1) */
.grid2 {-ms-grid-column: 4;} /* 2nd column - gutter|column 1|gutter */
.grid3 {-ms-grid-column: 6;} /* 3rd column - gutter|column 1|gutter|column2|gutter */

.row1 {-ms-grid-row:1;}
.row2 {-ms-grid-row:3;}
.row3 {-ms-grid-row:5;}

.colspan1 {-ms-grid-column-span:1;}
.colspan2 {-ms-grid-column-span:3;}
.colspan3 {-ms-grid-column-span:5;}

I could then add multiple classes to each element to set the position on on the grid.



This then gives me a replica of the fluid grid using CSS3 grid layout. To see this working fire up IE10 and view Example 1.

This works, but…

This worked, but isn’t ideal. I considered not showing this stage of my experiment – however, I think it clearly shows how the grid layout module works and is a useful starting point. That said, it’s not an approach I would take in production. First, we have to add classes to our markup that tie an element to a position on the grid. This might not be too much of a problem if we are always going to maintain the sixteen-column grid, though, as I will show you that the real power of the grid layout module appears once you start to redefine the grid, using different grids based on media queries. If you drop to a six-column layout for small screens, positioning items into column 16 makes no sense any more.

Calculating grid position using LESS

As we’ve seen, if you want to use a grid with main columns and gutters, you have to take into account the spacing between columns as well as the actual columns. This means we have to do some calculating every time we place an item on the grid. In my example above I got around this by creating a CSS class for each position, allowing me to think in sixteen rather than thirty-two columns. But by using a CSS preprocessor, I can avoid using all the classes yet still think in main columns.

I’m using LESS for my example. My simple grid framework consists of one simple mixin.

.position(@column,@row,@colspan,@rowspan) {
    -ms-grid-column: @column*2;
    -ms-grid-row: @row*2-1;
    -ms-grid-column-span: @colspan*2-1;
    -ms-grid-row-span: @rowspan*2-1;
}

My mixin takes four parameters: column; row; colspan; and rowspan. So if I wanted to place an item on column four, row three, spanning two columns and one row, I would write the following CSS:

.box {
    .position(4,3,2,1);
}

The mixin would return:

.box {
    -ms-grid-column: 8;
    -ms-grid-row: 5;
    -ms-grid-column-span: 3;
    -ms-grid-row-span: 1;
}

This saves me some typing and some maths. I could also add other prefixed values into my mixin as other browsers started to add support.

We can see this in action creating a new grid. Instead of adding multiple classes to each element, I can add one class; that class uses the mixin to create the position. I have also played around with row spans using my mixin and you can see we end up with a quite complicated arrangement of boxes. Have a look at example two in IE10. I’ve used the JavaScript LESS parser so that you can view the actual LESS that I use. Note that I have needed to escape the -ms prefixed properties with ~"""" to get LESS to accept them.



This is looking better. I don’t have direct positioning information on each element in the markup, just a class name – I’ve used grid(x), but it could be something far more semantic. We can now take the example a step further and redefine the grid based on screen width.

Media queries and the grid

This example uses exactly the same markup as the previous example. However, we are now using media queries to detect screen width and redefine the grid using a different number of columns depending on that width.

I start out with a six-column grid, defining that on .wrapper, then setting where the different items sit on this grid:

.wrapper {	 
    width: 90%;
    margin: 0 auto 0 auto;
    display: ~""-ms-grid""; /* escaped for the LESS parser */
    -ms-grid-columns: ~""1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[6]""; /* escaped for the LESS parser */
    -ms-grid-rows: ~""(auto 20px)[40]""; /* escaped for the LESS parser */
}
.grid1 { .position(1,1,1,1); } 
.grid2 { .position(2,1,1,1); } 
/* ... see example for all declarations ... */



Using media queries, I redefine the grid to nine columns when we hit a minimum width of 700 pixels.

@media only screen and (min-width: 700px) {
.wrapper {
    -ms-grid-columns: ~""1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[9]"";
    -ms-grid-rows: ~""(auto 20px)[50]"";
}
.grid1 { .position(1,1,1,1); } 
.grid2 { .position(2,1,1,1); } 
/* ... */
}



Finally, we redefine the grid for 960 pixels, back to the sixteen-column grid we started out with.

@media only screen and (min-width:  940px) {
.wrapper {	 
    -ms-grid-columns:~"" 1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[16]"";
    -ms-grid-rows:~"" (auto 20px)[24]"";
}
.grid1 { .position(1,1,1,1); } 
.grid2 { .position(2,1,1,1); } 
/* ... */
}

If you view example three in Internet Explorer 10 you can see how the items reflow to fit the window size. You can also see, looking at the final set of blocks, that source order doesn’t matter. You can pick up a block from anywhere and place it in any position on the grid.

Laying out a simple website

So far, like a toddler on Christmas Day, we’ve been playing with boxes rather than thinking about what might be in them. So let’s take a quick look at a more realistic layout, in order to see why the CSS3 grid layout module can be really useful. At this time of year, I am very excited to get out of storage my collection of odd nativity sets, prompting my family to suggest I might want to open a museum. Should I ever do so, I’ll need a website, and here is an example layout.



As I am using CSS3 grid layout, I can order my source in a logical manner. In this example my document is as follows, though these elements could be in any order I please:

<div class=""wrapper"">
  <div class=""welcome"">
  ...
  </div>
  <article class=""main"">
  ...
  </article>
  <div class=""info"">
  ...
  </div>
  <div class=""ads"">
  ...
  </div>
</div>

For wide viewports I can use grid layout to create a sidebar, with the important information about opening times on the top righ,t with the ads displayed below it. This creates the layout shown in the screenshot above.

@media only screen and (min-width:  940px) {
  .wrapper {	 
    -ms-grid-columns:~"" 1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[16]"";
    -ms-grid-rows:~"" (auto 20px)[24]"";
  }
  .welcome {
    .position(1,1,12,1);
    padding: 0 5% 0 0;
  }
  .info {
    .position(13,1,4,1);
    border: 0;
    padding:0;
   }
  .main {
    .position(1,2,12,1);
    padding: 0 5% 0 0;
  }  
  .ads {
    .position(13,2,4,1);
    display: block;
    margin-left: 0;
  }
}

In a floated layout, a sidebar like this often ends up being placed under the main content at smaller screen widths. For my situation this is less than ideal. I want the important information about opening times to end up above the main article, and to push the ads below it. With grid layout I can easily achieve this at the smallest width .info ends up in row two and .ads in row five with the article between.

.wrapper {	 
  display: ~""-ms-grid"";
  -ms-grid-columns: ~""1fr (4.25fr 1fr)[4]"";
  -ms-grid-rows: ~""(auto 20px)[40]"";
}
.welcome {
    .position(1,1,4,1);
}
.info {
    .position(1,2,4,1);
    border: 4px solid #fff;
    padding: 10px;
}
.content {
    .position(1,3,4,5);
}
.main {
    .position(1,3,4,1);
}
.ads {
    .position(1,4,4,1);
}



Finally, as an extra tweak I add in a breakpoint at 600 pixels and nest a second grid on the ads area, arranging those three images into a row when they sit below the article at a screen width wider than the very narrow mobile width but still too narrow to support a sidebar. 

@media only screen and (min-width:  600px) {
  .ads {
    display: ~""-ms-grid"";
    -ms-grid-columns: ~""20px 1fr 20px 1fr 20px 1fr"";
    -ms-grid-rows: ~""1fr"";
    margin-left: -20px;
  }
  .ad:nth-child(1) {
    .position(1,1,1,1);
  }
  .ad:nth-child(2) {
    .position(2,1,1,1);
  }
  .ad:nth-child(3) {
    .position(3,1,1,1);
  }
}

View example four in Internet Explorer 10.



This is a very simple example to show how we can use CSS grid layout without needing to add a lot of classes to our document. It also demonstrates how we can mainpulate the content depending on the context in which the user is viewing it.

Layout, source order and the idea of content priority

CSS3 grid layout isn’t the only module that starts to move us away from the issue of visual layout being linked to source order. However, with good support in Internet Explorer 10, it is a nice way to start looking at how this might work. If you look at the grid layout module as something to be used in conjunction with the flexible box layout module and the very interesting CSS regions and exclusions specifications, we have, tantalizingly on the horizon, a powerful set of tools for layout.

I am particularly keen on the potential separation of source order from layout as it dovetails rather neatly into something I spend a lot of time thinking about. As a CMS developer, working on larger scale projects as well as our CMS product Perch, I am interested in how we better enable content editors to create content for the web. In particular, I search for better ways to help them create adaptive content; content that will work in a variety of contexts rather than being tied to one representation of that content.

If the concept of adaptive content is new to you, then Karen McGrane’s presentation Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content is the place to start. Karen talks about needing to think of content as chunks, that might be used in many different places, displayed differently depending on context.

I absolutely agree with Karen’s approach to content. We have always attempted to move content editors away from thinking about creating a page and previewing it on the desktop. However at some point content does need to be published as a page, or a collection of content if you prefer, and bits of that content have priority. Particularly in a small screen context, content gets linearized, we can only show so much at a time, and we need to make sure important content rises to the top. In the case of my example, I wanted to ensure that the address information was clearly visible without scrolling around too much. Dropping it with the entire sidebar to the bottom of the page would not have been so helpful, though neither would moving the whole sidebar to the top of the screen so a visitor had to scroll past advertising to get to the article.

If our layout is linked to our source order, then enabling the content editor to make decisions about priority is really hard. Only a system that can do some regeneration of the source order on the server-side – perhaps by way of multiple templates – can allow those kinds of decisions to be made. For larger systems this might be a possibility; for smaller ones, or when using an off-the-shelf CMS, it is less likely to be. Fortunately, any system that allows some form of custom field type can be used to pop a class on to an element, and with CSS grid layout that is all that is needed to be able to target that element and drop it into the right place when the content is viewed, be that on a desktop or a mobile device.

This approach can move us away from forcing editors to think visually. At the moment, I might have to explain to an editor that if a certain piece of content needs to come first when viewed on a mobile device, it needs to be placed in the sidebar area, tying it to a particular layout and design. I have to do this because we have to enforce fairly strict rules around source order to make the mechanics of the responsive design work. If I can instead advise an editor to flag important content as high priority in the CMS, then I can make decisions elsewhere as to how that is displayed, and we can maintain the visual hierarchy across all the different ways content might be rendered.

Why frustrate ourselves with specifications we can’t yet use in production?

The CSS3 grid layout specification is listed under the Exploring section of the list of current work of the CSS Working Group. While discussing a module at this stage might seem a bit pointless if we can’t use it in production work, there is a very real reason for doing so. If those of us who will ultimately be developing sites with these tools find out about them early enough, then we can start to give our feedback to the people responsible for the specification. There is information on the same page about how to get involved with the disussions.

So, if you have a bit of time this holiday season, why not have a play with the CSS3 grid layout module? I have outlined here some of my thoughts on how grid layout and other modules that separate layout from source order can be used in the work that I do. Likewise, wherever in the stack you work, playing with and thinking about new specifications means you can think about how you would use them to enhance your work. Spot a problem? Think that a change to the specification would improve things for a specific use case? Then you have something you could post to www-style to add to the discussion around this module.

All the examples are on CodePen so feel free to play around and fork them.",2012,Rachel Andrew,rachelandrew,2012-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/css3-grid-layout/,code
83,Cut Copy Paste,"Long before I got into this design thing, I was heavily into making my own music inspired by the likes of Coldcut and Steinski. I would scour local second-hand record shops in search of obscure beats, loops and bits of dialogue in the hope of finding that killer sample I could then splice together with other things to make a huge hit that everyone would love. While it did eventually lead to a record contract and getting to release a few 12″ singles, ultimately I knew I’d have to look for something else to pay the bills.

I may not make my own records any more, but the approach I took back then – finding (even stealing) things, cutting and pasting them into interesting combinations – is still at the centre of how I work, only these days it’s pretty much bits of code rather than bits of vinyl. Over the years I’ve stored these little bits of code (some I’ve found, some I’ve created myself) in Evernote, ready to be dialled up whenever I need them. 

So when Drew got in touch and asked if I’d like to do something for this year’s 24 ways I thought it might be kind of cool to share with you a few of these snippets that I find really useful. Think of these as a kind of coding mix tape; but remember – don’t just copy as is: play around, combine and remix them into other wonderful things. 

Some of this stuff is dirty; some of it will make hardcore programmers feel ill. For those people, remember this – while you were complaining about the syntax, I made something.

Create unique colours

Let’s start right away with something I stole. Well, actually it was given away at the time by Matt Biddulph who was then at Dopplr before Nokia destroyed it. Imagine you have thousands of words and you want to assign each one a unique colour. Well, Matt came up with a crazily simple but effective way to do that using an MD5 hash. Just encode said word using an MD5 hash, then take the first six characters of the string you get back to create a hexadecimal colour representation. 

I can’t guarantee that it will be a harmonious colour palette, but it’s still really useful. The thing I love the most about this technique is the left-field thinking of using an encryption system to create colours! Here’s an example using JavaScript:

// requires the MD5 library available at http://pajhome.org.uk/crypt/md5

  function MD5Hex(str){
    result = MD5.hex(str).substring(0, 6);
    return result;
  }

Make something breathe using a sine wave

I never paid attention in school, especially during double maths. As a matter of fact, the only time I received corporal punishment – several strokes of the ruler – was in maths class. Anyway, if they had shown me then how beautiful mathematics actually is, I might have paid more attention. Here’s a little example of how a sine wave can be used to make something appear to breathe. 

I recently used this on an Arduino project where an LED ring surrounding a button would gently breathe. Because of that it felt much more inviting. I love mathematics.

for(int i = 0; i<360; i++){    
  float rad = DEG_TO_RAD * i;
  int sinOut = constrain((sin(rad) * 128) + 128, 0, 255);
  analogWrite(LED, sinOut);
  delay(10);   
}

Snap position to grid

This is so elegant I love it, and it was shown to me by Gary Burgess, or Boom Boom as myself and others like to call him. It snaps a position, in this case the X-position, to a grid. Just define your grid size (say, twenty pixels) and you’re good.

snappedXpos = floor( xPos / gridSize) * gridSize;

Calculate the distance between two objects

For me, interaction design is about the relationship between two objects: you and another object; you and another person; or simply one object to another. How close these two things are to each other can be a handy thing to know, allowing you to react to that information within your design. Here’s how to calculate the distance between two objects in a 2-D plane:

deltaX = round(p2.x-p1.x);
deltaY = round(p2.y-p1.y);
diff = round(sqrt((deltaX*deltaX)+(deltaY*deltaY)));

Find the X- and Y-position between two objects

What if you have two objects and you want to place something in-between them? A little bit of interruption and disruption can be a good thing. This small piece of code will allow you to place an object in-between two other objects:

// set the position: 0.5 = half-way	

float position = 0.5;
float x = x1 + (x2 - x1) *position;  
float y = y1 + (y2 - y1) *position;  

Distribute objects equally around a circle 	

More fun with maths, this time adding cosine to our friend sine. Let’s say you want to create a circular navigation of arbitrary elements (yeah, Jakob, you heard), or you want to place images around a circle. Well, this piece of code will do just that. You can adjust the size of the circle by changing the distance variable and alter the number of objects with the numberOfObjects variable. Example below is for use in Processing.

// Example for Processing available for free download at processing.org

void setup() {

  size(800,800);
  int numberOfObjects = 12;
  int distance = 100;
  float inc = (TWO_PI)/numberOfObjects;
  float x,y;
  float a = 0;

  for (int i=0; i < numberOfObjects; i++) {
    x = (width/2) + sin(a)*distance;
    y = (height/2) + cos(a)*distance;
    ellipse(x,y,10,10);
    a += inc;

  }
}

Use modulus to make a grid

The modulus operator, represented by %, returns the remainder of a division. Fallen into a coma yet? Hold on a minute – this seemingly simple function is very powerful in lots of ways. At a simple level, you can use it to determine if a number is odd or even, great for creating alternate row colours in a table for instance:

boolean checkForEven(numberToCheck) {
  if (numberToCheck % 2 == 0) 
    return true;
  } else {
    return false; 
  }
}

That’s all well and good, but here’s a use of modulus that might very well blow your mind. Construct a grid with only a few lines of code. Again the example is in Processing but can easily be ported to any other language.

void setup() {

size(600,600);
int numItems = 120;
int numOfColumns = 12;
int xSpacing = 40;
int ySpacing = 40;
int totalWidth = xSpacing*numOfColumns;

for (int i=0; i < numItems; i++) {

ellipse(floor((i*xSpacing)%totalWidth),floor((i*xSpacing)/totalWidth)*ySpacing,10,10);

}
}

Not all the bits of code I keep around are for actual graphical output. I also have things that are very utilitarian, but which I still consider part of the design process. Here’s a couple of things that I’ve found really handy lately in my design workflow. They may be a little specific, but I hope they demonstrate that it’s not about working harder, it’s about working smarter. 

Merge CSV files into one file

Recently, I’ve had to work with huge – about 1GB – CSV text files that I then needed to combine into one master CSV file so I could then process the data. Opening up each text file and then copying and pasting just seemed really dumb, not to mention slow, so I thought there must be a better way. After some Googling I found this command line script that would combine .txt files into one file and add a new line after each:  

awk 1 *.txt > finalfile.txt

But that wasn’t what I was ideally after. I wanted to merge the CSV files, keeping the first row of the first file (the column headings) and then ignore the first row of subsequent files. Sure enough I found the answer after some Googling and it worked like a charm. Apologies to the original author but I can’t remember where I found it, but you, sir or madam, are awesome. Save this as a shell script:

FIRST=

for FILE in *.csv
  do
    exec 5<""$FILE"" # Open file
    read LINE <&5 # Read first line
      [ -z ""$FIRST"" ] && echo ""$LINE"" # Print it only from first file
      FIRST=""no""

      cat <&5 # Print the rest directly to standard output
      exec 5<&- # Close file
      # Redirect stdout for this section into file.out 

done > file.out

Create a symbolic link to another file or folder

Oftentimes, I’ll find myself hunting through a load of directories to load a file to be processed, like a CSV file. Use a symbolic link (in the Terminal) to place a link on your desktop or wherever is most convenient and it’ll save you loads of time. Especially great if you’re going through a Java file dialogue box in Processing or something that doesn’t allow the normal Mac dialog box or aliases.

cd /DirectoryYouWantShortcutToLiveIn
ln -s /Directory/You/Want/ShortcutTo/ TheShortcut

You can do it, in the mix

I hope you’ve found some of the above useful and that they’ve inspired a few ideas here and there. Feel free to tell me better ways of doing things or offer up any other handy pieces of code. Most of all though, collect, remix and combine the things you discover to make lovely new things.",2012,Brendan Dawes,brendandawes,2012-12-17T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/cut-copy-paste/,code
93,Design Systems,"The most important part of responsive web design is that, no matter what the viewport width, the content is accessible in an optimum display. The best responsive designs are those that allow you to go from one optimised display to another, but with the feeling that these experiences are part of a greater product whole.

Responsive design: where we’ve been going wrong

Responsive web design was a shock to my web designer system. Those of us who had already been designing sites for mobile probably had the biggest leap to make. We might have been detecting user agents in order to deliver a mobile-specific site, or using the slightly more familiar Bushido technique to deliver sites optimised for device type and viewport size, but either way our focus was on devices. A site was optimised for either a mobile phone or a desktop.

Responsive web design brought us back to pre-table layout fluid sites that expanded or contracted to fit the viewport. This was a big difference to get our heads around when we were so used to designing for fixed-width layouts. Suddenly, an element could be any width or, at least, we needed to consider its maximum and minimum widths. Pixel perfection, while pretty, became wholly unrealistic, and a whole load of designers who prided themselves in detailed and precise designs got a bit scared.

Hanging on to our previous processes and typical deliverables led us to continue to optimise our sites for particular devices and provide pixel-perfect mockups for those device widths.

With all this we were concentrating on devices, not content, deliverables and not process, and making assumptions about users and their devices based on nothing but the width of the viewport.

I don’t think this is a crime, I think it was inevitable.

We can be up to date with our principles and ideals, but it’s never as easy in practice. That’s why it’s more important than ever to share our successful techniques and processes. Let’s drag each other into modern web design.

Design systems: the principles

What are design systems?

A visual design system is built out of the core components of typography, layout, shape or form, and colour. When considering the design of a whole product, a design system should also include patterns in user flow, content strategy, copy, and tone of voice. These concepts, design decisions or rules, created around the core components are used consistently across your product to create a cohesive feel, whether it’s from one element to another, page to page, or viewport width to viewport width.

Responsive design is one of the most important considerations in the components of a design system. For each component, you must decide what will unite the design across the viewports to maintain that consistent feel, and what parts of the design will differentiate in order to provide a flexible and optimal experience for different viewport sizes.

Components you might keep the same across viewports


	typeface
	base unit
	colour
	shape/form


Components you might differentiate across viewports


	grids
	layout
	font size
	measure (line length)
	leading (line height)


Content: it must always be the same

The focus of a design system is the optimum display of content. As Mark Boulton put it, designing “content out, not canvas in.” Chris Armstrong puts the emphasis on not designing for viewports but for content – “we need to build on what we do know: content.” In order to do this, we must share the same content across all devices and focus on how best to display and represent content through design system components.

The practical: core visual components

Typography first

When you work with a lot of text content, typography is the easiest way to set the visual tone of the design across all viewport widths. It’s likely that you’ll choose one or two typefaces to use across the whole system, but you might change the most legible font size, balanced with the most comfortable measure, as the viewport width changes.

Where typography meets layout

The unit on which you choose to base the grid and layout design, font sizes and leading could be based on the typeface, an optimal reading size, or something more arbitrary. Sometimes I’ll choose a unit based on multiples of ten because it makes the maths in the CSS easier. Tim Brown suggests trying a modular scale. Chris Armstrong suggests basing it on your ideal measure, or the width of a fixed item of content such as an ad unit.

Grids and layouts

Sensible grid design can be a flexible yet solid foundation for your design system layout component. But you must be wary in responsive design that a grid might not work across all widths: even four columns could make for very cramped content and one-word measures on smaller screens.

Maybe the grid columns are something you differentiate across widths, but you can keep the concept of the grid consistent. If the content has blocks in groups of three, you might decide on a three-column grid which folds down to one column for narrow viewports. If the grid focuses on the idea of symmetry and has a four-column grid on larger viewports, it might fold down to two columns for narrower viewports. These consistencies may seem subtle, not at all obvious to many except the designer, but it’s all these little constants and patterns across the whole of the design system that makes design decisions easier to make (as they adhere to the guiding concepts of your system), and give the product a uniform feel no matter what the device.

Shape or form

The shape or form components are concepts you already use in fixed-width web design for a strong, consistent look and feel. 

Since CSS border-radius became widely supported by browsers, a lot of designs feature circle themes. These are very distinctive and can be used across viewport widths giving them the same united feel, even if they’re not used in the same way. This could also apply to border styles, consistent shadows and any number of decorative details and textures. These are the elements that make up the shape or form of a design system.

Colour

Colour is the most basic way to reinforce a brand and unite experiences across viewports. The same hex colour used system-wide is instantly recognisable, no matter what the viewport width.

The process

While using a design system isn’t necessarily attached to any particular process, it does lend itself to some process ideals.

Detaching design considerations from viewport widths

A design system allows you to focus separately on the components that make up the system, disconnecting the look and feel from the layout. This helps prevent us getting stuck in the rut of the Apple breakpoints (brilliantly coined by Simon Foster) of mobile, tablet and desktop. It also forces us to design for variation in viewport experiences side by side, not one after the other.

Design in the browser

I can’t start off designing in the browser – it just doesn’t seem to bring out my creative side (and I’m incredibly envious of you if you can; I just have to start on paper) – but static mock-ups aren’t the only alternative. Style guides and style tiles are perfect for expressing the concepts of your design system. Pattern libraries could also work well.

Mock-ups and breakpoints

At some point, whether it’s to test your system ideas, or because a client needs help visualising how your system might work, you may end up producing some static mock-ups. It’s not the end of the world, but you must ensure that these consider all the viewports, not just those of the iDevices, or even the devices currently on the market. You need to decide the breakpoints where the states of your design change. The blocks within your content will always have optimum points for their display (based on their hierarchy, density, width, or type of interaction) and so your breakpoints should be based around these points.

These are probably the ideal points at which to produce static mockups; treat them as snapshots. They’re not necessarily mock-ups, so much as a way of capturing how your design system would be interpreted when frozen at that particular viewport width.

The future

Creating design systems will give us the flexibility we need for working with the unknown devices of the future. It may be a change in process, but it shouldn’t be too much of a difference in thinking. The pioneers in responsive design have a hard job. Some of these problems may have already been solved in other technologies or industries, but it’s up to the pioneers to find those connections and help us formulate solutions and standards that will make responsive design the best it can possibly be. We need to keep experimenting and communicating, particularly in the area of design, as good user experiences are the true sign of whether our products are a success.",2012,Laura Kalbag,laurakalbag,2012-12-12T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/design-systems/,design
89,"Direction, Distance and Destinations","With all these new smartphones in the hands of lost and confused owners, we need a better way to represent distances and directions to destinations. The immediate examples that jump to mind are augmented reality apps which let you see another world through your phone’s camera. While this is interesting, there is a simpler way: letting people know how far away they are and if they are getting warmer or colder. 

In the app world, you can easily tap into the phone’s array of sensors such as the GPS and compass, but what people rarely know is that you can do the same with HTML. The native versus web app debate will never subside, but at least we can show you how to replicate some of the functionality progressively in HTML and JavaScript.

In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to create a simple webpage listing distances and directions of a few popular locations around the world. We’ll use JavaScript to access the device’s geolocation API and also attempt to access the compass to get a heading. Both of these APIs are documented, to be included in the W3C geolocation API specification, and can be used on both desktop and mobile devices today.

To get started, we need a list of a few locations around the world. I have chosen the highest mountain peak on each continent so you can see a diverse set of distances and directions. 


		
			Mountain 
			°Latitude 
			°Longitude 
		
		
			Kilimanjaro
			-3.075833
			37.353333
		
		
			Vinson Massif
			-78.525483
			-85.617147
		
		
			Puncak Jaya
			-4.078889
			137.158333
		
		
			Everest
			27.988056
			86.925278
		
		
			Elbrus
			43.355
			42.439167
		
		
			Mount McKinley
			63.0695
			-151.0074
		
		
			Aconcagua
			-32.653431
			-70.011083
		


Source: Wikipedia 

We can put those into an HTML list to be styled and accessed by JavaScript to create some distance and directions calculations.

The next thing we need to do is check to see if the browser and operating system have geolocation support. To do this we test to see if the function is available or not using a single JavaScript if statement.

<script>
// If this is true, then the method is supported and we can try to access the location
if (navigator.geolocation) {
	navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(geo_success, geo_error);
}
</script>

The if statement will be false if geolocation support is not present, and then it is up to you to do something else instead as a fallback. For this example, we’ll do nothing since our page should work as is and only get progressively better if more functionality is available. 

The if statement will be true if there is support and therefore will continue inside the curly brackets to try to get the location. This should prompt the reader to accept or deny the request to get their location. If they say no, the second function callback is processed, in this case a function called geo_error; whereas if the location is available, it fires the geo_success function callback.

The function geo_error(){ } isn’t that exciting. You can handle this in any way you see fit. The success function is more interesting. We get a position object passed into the function which contains a series of exciting attributes, namely the latitude and longitude of the device’s current location.

function geo_success(position){
	gLat = position.coords.latitude;
	gLon = position.coords.longitude;
}

Now, in the variables gLat and gLon we have the user’s approximate geographical position. We can use this information to start to calculate some distances between where they are and all the destinations.

At the time of writing, you can also get position.coords.heading, but on Windows and iOS devices this returned NULL. In the future, if and when this is supported, this is also where you can easily grab the compass information.

Inside the geo_success function, we want to loop through the HTML to get all of the mountain peaks’ latitudes and longitudes and compute the distance.

...
$('.geo').each(function(){
	// Get the lat/lon from the HTML
	tLat = $(this).find('.lat').html()
	tLon = $(this).find('.lon').html()

	// compute the distances between the current location and this points location
	dist = distance(tLat,tLon,gLat,gLon);

	// set the return values into something useful
	d = parseInt(dist[0]*10)/10;
	a = parseFloat(dist[1]);

	// display the value in the HTML and style the arrow
	$(this).find('.distance').html(d+' km away');
	$(this).find('.direction').css('-webkit-transform','rotate(-' + a + 'deg)');

	// store the arc for later use if compass is available
	$(this).attr('data-arc',a);
}

In the variable d we have the distance between the current location and the location of the mountain peak based on the Haversine Formula. The variable a is the arc, which has a value from 0 to 359.99. This will be useful later if we have compass support. Given these two values we have a distance and a heading to style the HTML.

The next thing we want to do is check to see if the device has a compass and then get access to the the current heading. As we’ll see, there are several ways to do this, some of which work on certain devices but not others. The W3C geolocation spec says that, along with the coordinates, there are several other attributes: accuracy; altitude; and heading. Heading is the direction to true north, which is different than magnetic north! WebKit and Windows return NULL for the heading value, but WebKit has an experimental method to fetch the heading. If you get into accessing these sensors, you’ll have to try to catch a few of these methods to finally get a value. Assuming you do, we can move on to the more interesting display opportunities.

In an ideal world, this would succeed and set a variable we’ll call compassHeading to get a value between 0 and 359.99 degrees. Now we know which direction north is, we also know the direction relative to north of the path to our destination, so we can can subtract the two values to get an arrow to display on the screen. But we’re not finished yet: we also need to get the device’s orientation (landscape or portrait) and subtract the correct amount from the angle for the arrow. Once we have a value, we can use CSS to rotate the arrow the correct number of degrees.

-webkit-transform: rotate(-180deg)

Not all devices support a standard way to access compass information, so in the meantime we need to use a work around. On iOS, you can use the experimental event method e.webkitCompassHeading. We want the compass to update in real time as the device is moved around, so we’ll put this inside an event listener.

window.addEventListener('deviceorientation', function(e) {
	// Loop through all the locations on the page
	$('.geo').each(function(){
		// get the arc value from north we computed and stored earlier
		destination_arc = parseInt($(this).attr('data-arc'))
		compassHeading = e.webkitCompassHeading + window.orientation + destination_arc;
		// find the arrow element and rotate it accordingly
		$(this).find('.direction').css('-webkit-transform','rotate(-' + compassHeading + 'deg)');		
	}
}

As the device is rotated, the compass arrow will constantly be updated. If you want to see an example, you can have a look at this page which shows the distances to all the peaks on each continent.

With progressive enhancement, we slowly layer on additional functionality as we go. The reader will first see the list of locations with a latitude and longitude. If the device is capable and permissions allow, it will then compute the distance. If a compass is available, with the correct permissions it will then add the final layer which is direction.

You should consider this code a stub for your projects. If you are making a hyperlocal webpage with restaurant locations, for example, then consider adding these features. Knowing not only how far away a place is, but also the direction can be hugely important, and since the compass is always active, it acts as a guide to the location. 

Future developments

Improvements to this could include setting a timer and recalling the navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition() function and updating the distances. I chose very distant mountains so kilometres made sense, but you can divide again by 1,000 to convert to metres if you are dealing with much nearer places. Walking or driving would change the distances so the ability to refresh would be important. 

It is outside the scope of this article, but if you manage to get this HTML to work offline, then you can make a nice web app which sits on your devices’ homescreens and works even without an internet connection. This could be ideal for travellers in an unknown city looking for your destination. Just with offline storage, base64 encoding and data URIs, it is possible to embed plenty of design and functionality into a small offline webpage.

Now you know how to use JavaScript to look up a destination’s location and figure out the distance and direction – never get lost again.",2012,Brian Suda,briansuda,2012-12-19T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/direction-distance-and-destinations/,code
86,Flashless Animation,"Animation in a Flashless world

When I splashed down in web design four years ago, the first thing I wanted to do was animate a cartoon in the browser. I’d been drawing comics for years, and I’ve wanted to see them come to life for nearly as long. Flash animation was still riding high, but I didn’t want to learn Flash. I wanted to learn JavaScript!

Sadly, animating with JavaScript was limiting and resource-intensive. My initial foray into an infinitely looping background did more to burn a hole in my CPU than amaze my friends (although it still looks pretty cool). And there was still no simple way to incorporate audio. The browser technology just wasn’t there.

Things are different now. CSS3 transitions and animations can do most of the heavy lifting and HTML5 audio can serve up the music and audio clips. You can do a lot without leaning on JavaScript at all, and when you lean on JavaScript, you can do so much more!

In this project, I’m going to show you how to animate a simple walk cycle with looping audio. I hope this will inspire you to do something really cool and impress your friends. I’d love to see what you come up with, so please send your creations my way at rachelnabors.com!

Note: Because every browser wants to use its own prefixes with CSS3 animations, and I have neither the time nor the space to write all of them out, I will use the W3C standard syntaxes; that is, going prefix-less. You can implement them out of the box with something like Prefixfree, or you can add prefixes on your own. If you take the latter route, I recommend using Sass and Compass so you can focus on your animations, not copying and pasting.

The walk cycle

Walk cycles are the “Hello world” of animation. One of the first projects of animation students is to spend hours drawing dozens of frames to complete a simple loopable animation of a character walking.

Most animators don’t have to draw every frame themselves, though. They draw a few key frames and send those on to production animators to work on the between frames (or tween frames). This is meticulous, grueling work requiring an eye for detail and natural movement. This is also why so much production animation gets shipped overseas where labor is cheaper.

Luckily, we don’t have to worry about our frame count because we can set our own frames-per-second rate on the fly in CSS3. Since we’re trying to impress friends, not animation directors, the inconsistency shouldn’t be a problem. (Unless your friend is an animation director.)

This is a simple walk cycle I made of my comic character Tuna for my CSS animation talk at CSS Dev Conference this year:



The magic lies here:

animation: walk-cycle 1s steps(12) infinite;

Breaking those properties down:

animation: <name> <duration> <timing-function> <iteration-count>;

walk-cycle is a simple @keyframes block that moves the background sprite on .tuna around:

@keyframes walk-cycle {  
    0% {background-position: 0 0; }
    100% {background-position: 0 -2391px;}
}

The background sprite has exactly twelve images of Tuna that complete a full walk cycle. We’re setting it to cycle through the entire sprite every second, infinitely. So why isn’t the background image scrolling down the .tuna container? It’s all down to the timing function steps(). Using steps() let us tell the CSS to make jumps instead of the smooth transitions you’d get from something like linear. Chris Mills at dev.opera wrote in his excellent intro to CSS3 animation :


	Instead of giving a smooth animation throughout, [steps()] causes the animation to jump between a set number of steps placed equally along the duration. For example, steps(10) would make the animation jump along in ten equal steps. There’s also an optional second parameter that takes a value of start or end. steps(10, start) would specify that the change in property value should happen at the start of each step, while steps(10, end) means the change would come at the end.


(Seriously, go read his full article. I’m not going to touch on half the stuff he does because I cannot improve on the basics any more than he already has.)

The background

A cat walking in a void is hardly an impressive animation and certainly your buddy one cube over could do it if he chopped up some of those cat GIFs he keeps using in group chat. So let’s add a parallax background! Yes, yes, all web designers signed a peace treaty to not abuse parallax anymore, but this is its true calling—treaty be damned.



And to think we used to need JavaScript to do this! It’s still pretty CPU intensive but much less complicated. We start by splitting up the page into different layers, .foreground, .midground, and .background. We put .tuna in the .midground.

.background has multiple background images, all set to repeat horizontally:

background-image:
    url(background_mountain5.png),
    url(background_mountain4.png),
    url(background_mountain3.png),
    url(background_mountain2.png),
    url(background_mountain1.png);
background-repeat: repeat-x;

With parallax, things in the foreground move faster than those in the background. Next time you’re driving, notice how the things closer to you move out of your field of vision faster than something in the distance, like a mountain or a large building. We can imitate that here by making the background images on top (in the foreground, closer to us) wider than those on the bottom of the stack (in the distance).

The different lengths let us use one animation to move all the background images at different rates in the same interval of time:   

animation: parallax_bg linear 40s infinite;

The shorter images have less distance to cover in the same amount of time as the longer images, so they move slower.



Let’s have a look at the background’s animation:

@keyframes parallax_bg {  
  0% {
    background-position: -2400px 100%, -2000px 100%, -1800px 100%, -1600px 100%, -1200px 100%;
  }
  100% {
    background-position: 0 100%, 0 100%, 0 100%, 0 100%, 0 100%;
  }
}

At 0%, all the background images are positioned at the negative value of their own widths. Then they start moving toward background-position: 0 100%. If we wanted to move them in the reverse direction, we’d remove the negative values at 0% (so they would start at 2400px 100%, 2000px 100%, etc.). Try changing the values in the codepen above or changing background-repeat to none to see how the images play together.

.foreground and .midground operate on the same principles, only they use single background images.

The music

After finishing the first draft of my original walk cycle, I made a GIF with it and posted it on YTMND with some music from the movie Paprika, specifically the track “The Girl in Byakkoya.” After showing it to some colleagues in my community, it became clear that this was a winning combination sure to drive away dresscode blues. So let’s use HTML5 to get a clip of that music looping in there!

Warning, there is sound. Please adjust your volume or apply headphones as needed.



We’re using HTML5 audio’s loop and autoplay abilities to automatically play and loop a sound file on page load:

<audio loop autoplay>
  <source src=""http://music.com/clip.mp3"" />
</audio>

Unfortunately, you may notice there is a small pause between loops. HTML5 audio, thou art half-baked still. Let’s hope one day the Web Audio API will be able to help us out, but until things improve, we’ll have to hack our way around these shortcomings.

Turns out there’s a handy little script called seamlessLoop.js which we can use to patch this. Mind you, if we were really getting crazy with the Cheese Whiz, we’d want to get out big guns like sound.js. But that’d be overkill for a mere loop (and explaining the Web Audio API might bore, rather than impress your friends)!

Installing seamlessLoop.js will get rid of the pause, and now our walk cycle is complete.

(I’ve done some very rough sniffing to see if the browser can play MP3 files. If not, we fall back to using .ogg formatted clips (Opera and Firefox users, you’re welcome).)

Really impress your friends by adding a run cycle

So we have music, we have a walk cycle, we have parallax. It will be a snap to bring them all together and have a simple, endless animation. But let’s go one step further and knock the socks off our viewers by adding a run cycle.

The run cycle

Tacking a run cycle on to our walk cycle will require a third animation sequence: a transitional animation of Tuna switching from walking to running. I have added all these to the sprite:



Let’s work on getting that transition down. We’re going to use multiple animations on the same .tuna div, but we’re going to kick them off at different intervals using animation-delay—no JavaScript required! Isn’t that magical?



It requires a wee bit of math (not much, it doesn’t hurt) to line them up. We want to:


	Loop the walk animation twice
	Play the transitional cycle once (it has a finite beginning and end perfectly drawn to pick up between the last frame of the walk cycle and the first frame of the run cycle—no looping this baby)
	RUN FOREVER.


Using the pattern animation: <name> <duration> <timing-function> <delay> <iteration-count>, here’s what that looks like:

animation:
    walk-cycle 1s steps(12) 2,
    walk-to-run .75s steps(12) 2s 1,
    run-cycle .75s steps(13) 2.75s infinite;

I played with the times to get make the movement more realistic. You may notice that the running animation looks smoother than the walking animation. That’s because it has 13 keyframes running over .75 second instead of 12 running in one second. Remember, professional animation studios use super-high frame counts. This little animation isn’t even up to PBS’s standards!

The music: extended play with HTML5 audio sprites

My favorite part in the The Girl in Byakkoya is when the calm opening builds and transitions into a bouncy motif. I want to start with Tuna walking during the opening, and then loop the running and bounciness together for infinity.


	The intro lasts for 24 seconds, so we set our 1 second walk cycle to run for 24 repetitions: 
walk-cycle 1s steps(12) 24
	We delay walk-to-run by 24 seconds so it runs for .75 seconds before…
	We play run-cycle at 24.75 seconds and loop it infinitely


For the music, we need to think of it as two parts: the intro and the bouncy loop. We can do this quite nicely with audio sprites: using one HTML5 audio element and using JavaScript to change the play head location, like skipping tracks with a CD player. Although this technique will result in a small gap in music shifts, I think it’s worth using here to give you some ideas.

// Get the audio element
var byakkoya = document.querySelector('audio');
// create function to play and loop audio
function song(a){
    //start playing at 0
    a.currentTime = 0;
    a.play();
    //when we hit 64 seconds...
    setTimeout(function(){
        // skip back to 24.5 seconds and keep playing...
        a.currentTime = 24.55;
        // then loop back when we hit 64 again, or every 59.5 seconds.
        setInterval(function(){
            a.currentTime = 24.55;
        },39450);
    },64000);
}

The load screen

I’ve put it off as long as I can, but now that the music and the CSS are both running on their own separate clocks, it’s imperative that both images and music be fully downloaded and ready to run when we kick this thing off. So we need a load screen (also, it’s nice to give people a heads-up that you’re about to blast them with music, no matter how wonderful that music may be).

Since the two timers are so closely linked, we’d best not run the animations until we run the music:

* { animation-play-state: paused; }

animation-play-state can be set to paused or running, and it’s the most useful thing you will learn today.

First we use an event listener to see when the browser thinks we can play through from the beginning to end of the music without pause for buffering:

byakkoya.addEventListener(""canplaythrough"", function () { });

(More on HTML5 audio’s media events at HTML5doctor.com)

Inside our event listener, I use a bit of jQuery to add class of .playable to the body when we’re ready to enable the play button:

$(""body"").addClass(""playable"");
    $(""#play-me"").html(""Play me."").click(function(){
      song(byakkoya);
      $(""body"").addClass(""playing"");
    });

That .playing class is special because it turns on the animations at the same time we start playing the song:

.playing * { animation-play-state: running; }

The background

We’re almost done here! When we add the background, it needs to speed up at the same time that Tuna starts running. The music picks up speed around 24.75 seconds in, and so we’re going to use animation-delay on those backgrounds, too.

This will require some math. If you try to simply shorten the animation’s duration at the 24.75s mark, the backgrounds will, mid-scroll, jump back to their initial background positions to start the new animation! Argh! So let’s make a new @keyframe and calculate where the background position would be just before we speed up the animation.

Here’s the formula:

new 0% value = delay ÷ old duration × length of image

new 100% value = new 0% value + length of image

Here’s the formula put to work on a smaller scale:



Voilà! The finished animation!



I’ve always wanted to bring my illustrations to life. Then I woke up one morning and realized that I had all the tools to do so in my browser and in my head. Now I have fallen in love with Flashless animation.

I’m sure there will be detractors who say HTML wasn’t meant for this and it’s a gross abuse of the DOM! But I say that these explorations help us expand what we expect from devices and software and challenge us in good ways as artists and programmers. The browser might not be the most appropriate place for animation, but is certainly a fun place to start.

There is so much you can do with the spec implemented today, and so much of the territory is still unexplored. I have not yet begun to show you everything. In eight months I expect this demo will represent the norm, not the bleeding edge. I look forward to seeing the wonderful things you create.

(Also, someone, please, do something about that gappy HTML5 audio looping. It’s a crying shame!)",2012,Rachel Nabors,rachelnabors,2012-12-06T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/flashless-animation/,code
78,Fluent Design through Early Prototyping,"There’s a small problem with wireframes. They’re not good for showing the kind of interactions we now take for granted – transitions and animations on the web, in Android, iOS, and other platforms. There’s a belief that early prototyping requires a large amount of time and effort, and isn’t worth an early investment. But it’s not true!

It’s still normal to spend a significant proportion of time working in wireframes. Given that wireframes are high-level and don’t show much detail, it’s tempting to give up control and responsibility for things like transitions and other things sidelined as visual considerations. These things aren’t expressed well, and perhaps not expressed at all, in wireframes, yet they critically influence the quality of a product. Rapid prototyping early helps to bring sidelined but significant design considerations into focus.

Speaking fluent design

Fluency in a language means being able to speak it confidently and accurately. The Latin root means flow.

By design fluency, I mean using a set of skills in order to express or communicate an idea. Prototyping is a kind of fluency. It takes designers beyond the domain of grey and white boxes to consider all the elements that make up really good product design.

Designers shouldn’t be afraid of speaking fluent design. They should think thoroughly about product decisions beyond their immediate role — not for the sake of becoming some kind of power-hungry design demigod, but because it will lead to better, more carefully considered product design.

Wireframes are incomplete sentences

Wireframes, once they’ve served their purpose, are a kind of self-imposed restriction.

Mostly made out of grey and white boxes, they deliberately express the minimum. Important details — visuals, nuanced transitions, sounds — are missing. Their appearance bears little resemblance to the final thing. Responsibility for things that traditionally didn’t matter (or exist) is relinquished. Animations and transitions in particular are increasingly relevant to the mobile designer’s methods. And rather than being fanciful and superfluous visual additions to a product, they help to clarify designs and provide information about context.

Wireframes are useful in the early stages. As a designer trying to persuade stakeholders, clients, or peers, sometimes it will be in your interests to only tell half the story. They’re ideal for gauging whether a design is taking the right direction, and they’re the right medium for deciding core things, such as the overall structure and information architecture.

But spending a long time in wireframes means delaying details to a later stage in the project, or to the end, when the priority is shifted to getting designs out of the door. This leaves little time to test, finesse and perfect things which initially seemed to be less important. I think designers should move away from using wireframes as primary documentation once the design has reached a certain level of maturity.

A prototype is multiple complete sentences

Paragraphs, even.

Unlike a wireframe, a prototype is a persuasive storyteller. It can reveal the depth and range of design decisions, not just the layout, but also motion: animations and transitions. If it’s a super-high-fidelity prototype, it’s a perfect vessel for showing the visual design as well. It’s all of these things that contribute to the impression that a product is good… and useful, and engaging, and something you’d like to use.

A prototype is impressive. A good prototype can help to convince stakeholders and persuade clients. With a compelling demo, people can more easily imagine that this thing could actually exist. “Hey”, they’re thinking. “This might actually be pretty good!”

How to make a prototype in no time and with no effort

Now, it does take time and effort to make a prototype. However, good news! It used to require a lot more effort. There are tools that make prototyping much quicker and easier.

If you’re making a mobile prototype (this seems quite likely), you will want to test and show this on the actual device. This sounds like it could be a pain, but there are a few ways to do this that are quite easy.

Keynote, Apple’s presentation software, is an unlikely candidate for a prototyping tool, but surprisingly great and easy for creating prototypes with transitions that can be shown on different devices.

Keynote enables you to do a few useful, excellent things. You can make each screen in your design a slide, which can be linked together to allow you to click through the prototype. You can add customisable transitions between screens. If you want to show a panel that can slide open or closed on your iPad mockup, for example, transitions can also be added to individual elements on the screen. The design can be shown on tablet and mobile devices, and interacted with like it’s a real app. Another cool feature is that you can export the prototype as a video, which works as another effective format for demoing a design.

Overall, Keynote offers a very quick, lightweight way to prototype a design. Once you’ve learned the basics, it shouldn’t take longer than a few hours – at most – to put together a respectable clickable prototype with transitions.

Download the interactive MOV example

Holly icon by Megan Sheehan from The Noun Project

This is a Quicktime movie exported from Keynote. This version is animated for demonstration purposes, but download the interactive original and you can click the screen to move through the prototype. It demonstrates the basic interactivity of an iPhone app. This anonymised example was used on a project at Fjord to create a master example of an app’s transitions.

Prototyping drawbacks, and perceived drawbacks

If prototyping is so great, then why do we leave it to the end, or not bother with it at all? There are multiple misconceptions about prototyping: they’re too difficult to make; they take too much time; or they’re inaccurate (and dangerous) documentation.

A prototype is a preliminary model. There should always be a disclaimer that it’s not the real thing to avoid setting up false expectations.

A prototype doesn’t have to be the main deliverable. It can be a key one that’s supported by visual and interaction specifications. And a prototype is a lightweight means of managing and reflecting changes and requirements in a project.

An actual drawback of prototyping is that to make one too early could mean being gung-ho with what you thought a client or stakeholder wanted, and delivering something inappropriate. To avoid this, communicate, iterate, and keep things simple until you’re confident that the client or other stakeholders are happy with your chosen direction.

The key throughout any design project is iteration. Designers build iterative models, starting simple and becoming increasingly sophisticated. It’s a process of iterative craft and evolution. There’s no perfect methodology, no magic recipe to follow.

What to do next

Make a prototype! It’s the perfect way to impress your friends.

It can help to advance a brilliant idea with a fraction of the effort of complete development. Sketches and wireframes are perfect early on in a project, but once they’ve served their purpose, prototypes enable the design to advance, and push thinking towards clarifying other important details including transitions.

For Keynote tutorials, Keynotopia is a great resource. Axure is standard and popular prototyping software many UX designers will already be familiar with; it’s possible to create transitions in Axure. POP is an iPhone app that allows you to design apps on paper, take photos with your phone, and turn them into interactive prototypes. Ratchet is an elegant iPhone prototyping tool aimed at web developers.

There are perhaps hundreds of different prototyping tools and methods. My final advice is not to get bogged down in (or limited by) any particular tool, but to remember you’re making quick and iterative models. Experiment and play!

Prototyping will push you and your designs to a scary place without limitations. No more grey and white boxes, just possibilities!",2012,Rebecca Cottrell,rebeccacottrell,2012-12-10T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/fluent-design-through-early-prototyping/,ux
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, to be a huge help in past projects for me.)

// defining the animation
@keyframes catFall {
 from { background-position: center 0;}
 to {background-position: center 1000px;}
}
@-webkit-keyframes catFall {
 from { background-position: center 0;}
 to {background-position: center 1000px;}
}
@-moz-keyframes catFall {
 from { background-position: center 0;}
 to {background-position: center 1000px;}
}
@-ms-keyframes catFall {
 from { background-position: center 0;}
 to {background-position: center 1000px;}
}

…

// class that assigns the animation

.catsBackground {
 height: 100%;
 background: transparent url(../endlessKittens.png) 0 0 repeat-y;
 animation: catFall 1s linear infinite;
 -webkit-animation: catFall 1s linear infinite;
 -moz-animation: catFall 1s linear infinite;
 -ms-animation: catFall 1s linear infinite;
}

If we don’t need it, why load it?

Having all those CSS animations and transitions in one file gives us the added flexibility to load them only when we want to. Loading a whole lot of things that will never be used might seem like a bit of a waste.

While CSS has us impressed with its motion chops, it falls flat when it comes to the logic and fine-grained control. JavaScript, on the other hand, is pretty good at both those things. Chances are the content of your animations.css file isn’t acting alone. You’ll likely be adding and removing classes via JavaScript to manage your CSS animations at the very least. If your CSS animations are so entwined with JavaScript, why not let them hang out with the rest of the behaviour layer and only come out to play when JavaScript is supported?

Dynamically linking your animations.css file like this means it will be completely ignored if JavaScript is off or not supported. No JavaScript? No additional behaviour, not even the parts handled by CSS.

<script>
document.write('<link rel=""stylesheet"" type=""text/css"" href=""animations.css"">');
</script>

This technique comes up in progressive enhancement techniques as well, but it can help here to keep your presentation and behaviour nicely separated when more than one language is involved. The aim in both cases is to avoid loading files we won’t be using.

If you happen to be doing something a bit fancier – like 3-D transforms or critical animations that require more nuanced fallbacks – you might need something like modernizr to step in to determine support more specifically. But the general idea is the same.

Summing it all up

Using a couple of simple techniques like these, we get to pick where to best draw the line between behaviour and presentation based on the situation at hand, not just on what language we’re using. The power of when to separate and how to reassemble the individual pieces can be even greater if you use preprocessors as part of your process. We’ve got a lot of options! The important part is to make forward-thinking choices to save your future self, and even your current self, unnecessary headaches.",2012,Val Head,valhead,2012-12-08T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/giving-css-animations-and-transitions-their-place/,code
73,How to Make Your Site Look Half-Decent in Half an Hour,"Programmers like me are often intimidated by design – but a little effort can give a huge return on investment. Here are one coder’s tips for making any site quickly look more professional. 

I am a programmer. I am not a designer. I have a degree in computer science, and I don’t mind Comic Sans. (It looks cheerful. Move on.)

But although I am a programmer, I want to make my sites look attractive. This is partly out of vanity, and partly realism. Vanity because I want people to think my work is good, and realism because the research shows that people won’t think a site is credible unless it also looks attractive.

For a very long time after I became a programmer, I was scared of design. Design seemed to consist of complicated rules that weren’t written down anywhere, plus an unlearnable sense of taste, possessed only by a black-clad elite. 

But a little while ago, I decided to do my best to hack what it took to make my own projects look vaguely attractive. And although this doesn’t come close to the effect a professional designer could achieve, gathering these resources for improving a site’s look and feel has been really helpful. 

If I hadn’t figured out some basic design shortcuts, it’s unlikely that a weekend hack of mine would have ended up on page three of the Daily Mail. And too often now, I see excellent programming projects that don’t reach the audience they deserve, simply because their design doesn’t match their execution. 

So, if you are a developer, my Christmas present to you is this: my own collection of hacks that, used rightly, can make your personal programming projects look professional, quickly. None are hard to learn, most are free, and they let you focus on writing code.

One thing to note about these tips, though. They are a personal, pragmatic compilation. They are suggestions, not a definitive guide. You will definitely get better results by working with a professional designer, and by studying design more deeply. 

If you are a designer, I would love to hear your suggestions for the best tools that I’ve missed, and I’d love to know how we programmers can do things better.

With that, on to the tools…

1. Use Bootstrap

If you’re not already using Bootstrap, start now. I really think that Bootstrap is one of the most significant technical achievements of the last few years: it democratizes the whole process of web design. 

Essentially, Bootstrap is a a grid system, with a bunch of common elements. So you can lay your site out how you want, drop in simple elements like forms and tables, and get a good-looking, consistent result, without spending hours fiddling with CSS. You just need HTML. 

Another massive upside is that it makes it easy to make any site responsive, so you don’t have to worry about writing media queries. Go, get Bootstrap and check out the examples. To keep your site lightweight, you can customize your download to include only the elements you want.  

If you have more time, then Mark Otto’s article on why and how Bootstrap was created at Twitter is well worth a read. 

2. Pimp Bootstrap

Using Bootstrap is already a significant advance on not using Bootstrap, and massively reduces the tedium of front-end development. But you also run the risk of creating Yet Another Bootstrap Site, or Hack Day Design, as it’s known. 

If you’re really pressed for time, you could buy a theme from Wrap Bootstrap. These are usually created by professional designers, and will give a polish that we can’t achieve ourselves. Your site won’t be unique, but it will look good quickly. 

Luckily, it’s pretty easy to make Bootstrap not look too much like Bootstrap – using fonts, CSS effects, background images, colour schemes and so on. Most of the rest of this article covers different ways to achieve this. 

We are going to customize this Bootstrap example page.

This already has some custom CSS in the <head>. We’ll pull it all out, and create a new CSS file, custom.css. Then we add a reference to it in the header. Now we’re ready to start customizing things.



3. Fonts

Web fonts are one of the quickest ways to make your site look distinctive, modern, and less Bootstrappy, so we’ll start there. 

First, we can add some sweet fonts, from Google Web Fonts. The intimidating bit is choosing fonts that look nice together. Luckily, there are plenty of suggestions around the web: we’re going to use one of DesignShack’s suggested free Google Fonts pairings. Our fonts are Corben (for headings) and Nobile (for body copy). 

Then we add these files to our <head>. 

<link href=""http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Corben:bold"" rel=""stylesheet"" type=""text/css"">
 <link href=""http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Nobile"" rel=""stylesheet"" type=""text/css"">

…and this to custom.css: 

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
    font-family: 'Corben', Georgia, Times, serif;
}
p, div {
    font-family: 'Nobile', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
}

Now our example looks like this. It’s not going to win any design awards, but it’s immediately better:



I also recommend the web font services Fontdeck, or Typekit – these have a wider selection of fonts, and are worth the investment if you regularly need to make sites look good. For more font combinations, Just My Type suggests appealing pairings from Typekit. Finally, you can experiment with type pairing ideas at Type Connection. For the design background on pairing fonts, Typekit’s post is worth a read. 

4. Textures

An instant way to make a site look classy is to use textures. You know the grey, stripy, indefinably elegant background on 24ways.org? That.

If only there was a superb resource listing attractive, free, ready-to-use textures… Oh wait, there’s Atle Mo’s Subtle Patterns. 

We’re going to use Cream Dust, for an effect that can only be described as subtle. We download the file to a new /img/ directory, then add this to the CSS file:

body { 
    background: url(/img/cream_dust.png) repeat 0 0;
}

Bang:



For some design background on patterns, I recommend reading through Smashing Magazine’s guidelines on textures. (TL;DR version: use textures to enhance beauty, and clarify the information architecture of your site; but don’t overdo it, or inadvertently obscure your text.)

Still more to do, though. Onwards. 

5. Icons

Last year’s 24 ways taught us to use icon fonts for our site icons. 

This is great for the time-pressed coder, because icon fonts don’t just cut down on HTTP requests – they’re a lot quicker to set up than image-based icons, too. 

Bootstrap ships with an extensive, free for commercial use icon set in the shape of Font Awesome. Its icons are safe for screen readers, and can even be made to work in IE7 if needed (we’re not going to bother here). 

To start using these icons, just download Font Awesome, and add the /fonts/ directory to your site and the font-awesome.css file into your /css/ directory. Then add a reference to the CSS file in your header:

<link rel=""stylesheet"" href=""/css/font-awesome.css"">

Finally, we’ll add a truck icon to the main action button, as follows. Why a truck? Why not?

<a class=""btn btn-large btn-success"" href=""#""><i class=""icon-truck""></i> Sign up today</a>

We’ll also tweak our CSS file to stop the icon nudging up against the button text:

.jumbotron .btn i { 
    margin-right: 8px;  
}

And this is how it looks:



Not the most exciting change ever, but it livens up the page a bit. The licence is CC-BY-3.0, so we also include a mention of Font Awesome and its URL in the source code. 

If you’d like something a little more distinctive, Shifticons lets you pay a few cents for individual icons, with the bonus that you only have to serve the icons you actually use, which is more efficient. Its icons are also friendly to screen readers, but won’t work in IE7. 

6. CSS3

The next thing you could do is add some CSS3 goodness. It can really help the key elements of the site stand out. 

If you are pressed for time, just adding box-shadow and text-shadow to emphasize headings and standouts can be useful: 

h1 { 
    text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px #ccc;
}
.div-that-you want-to-stand-out { 
    box-shadow: 0 0 1em 1em #ccc;
}

We have a little more time though, so we’re going to do something more subtle. We’ll add a radial gradient behind the main heading, using an online gradient editor. 

The output is hefty, but you can see it in the CSS. Note that we also need to add the following to our HTML, for IE9 support: 

<!--[if gte IE 9]>
  <style type=""text/css"">
    .gradient {
       filter: none;
    }
  </style>
<![endif]-->

And the effect – I don’t know what a designer would think, but I like the way it makes the heading pop.



For a crash course in useful modern CSS effects, I highly recommend CodeSchool’s online course in Functional HTM5 and CSS3. It costs money ($25 a month to subscribe), but it’s worth it for the time you’ll save. As a bonus, you also get access to some excellent JavaScript, Ruby and GitHub courses. 

(Incidentally, if you find yourself fighting with basic float and display attributes in CSS – and there’s no shame in it, CSS layout is not intuitive – I recommend the CSS Cross-Country course at CodeSchool.)

7. Add a twist

We could leave it there, but we’re going to add a background image, and give the site some personality. 

This is the area of design that I think many programmers find most intimidating. How do we create the graphics and photographs that a designer would use? The answer is iStockPhoto and its competitors – online image libraries where you can find and pay for images. They won’t be unique, but for our purposes, that’s fine. 

We’re going to use a Christmassy image. For a twist, we’re going to use Backstretch to make it responsive. 

We must pay for the image, then download it to our /img/ directory. Then, we set it as our <body>’s background-image, by including a JavaScript file with just the following line: 

$.backstretch(""/img/winter.jpg"");

We also reset the subtle pattern to become the background for our container image. It would look much better transparent, so we can use this technique in GIMP to make it see-through:

.container-narrow {
    background: url(/img/cream_dust_transparent.png) repeat 0 0;
}

We also fiddle with the padding on body and .container-narrow a bit, and this is the result: 



(Aside: If this were a real site, I’d want to buy images in multiple sizes and ensure that Backstretch chose the most appropriately sized image for our screen, perhaps using responsive images.)

How to find the effects that make a site interesting? I keep a set of bookmarks for interesting JavaScript and CSS effects I might want to use someday, from realistic shadows to animating grids. The JavaScript Weekly newsletter is a great source of ideas. 

8. Colour schemes

We’re just about getting there – though we’re probably past half an hour now – but that button and that menu still both look awfully Bootstrappy. 

Real sites, with real designers, have a colour palette, carefully chosen to harmonize and match the brand profile. For our purposes, we’re just going to borrow some colours from the image. We use Gimp’s colour picker tool to identify the hex values of the blue of the snow. Then we can use Color Scheme Designer to find contrasting, but complementary, colours. 

Finally, we use those colours for our central button. There are lots of tools to help us do this, such as Bootstrap Buttons. The new HTML is quite long, so I won’t paste it all here, but you can find it in the CSS file. 

We also reset the colour of the pills in the navigation menu, which is a bit easier: 

.nav-pills > .active > a, .nav-pills > .active > a:hover {
    background-color: #FF9473;
}

I’m not sure if the result is great to be honest, but at least we’ve lost those Bootstrap-blue buttons:



Another way to do it, if you didn’t have an image to match, would be to borrow an attractive colour scheme. Colourlovers is a community where people create and share ready-made colour palettes. 

The key thing is to find a palette with an open licence, so you can legitimately use it. Unfortunately, you can’t search for palettes by licence type, but many do have open licences. Here’s a popular palette with a CC-BY-SA licence that allows reuse with attribution.  

As above, you can use the hex values from the palette in your custom CSS, and bask in the newly colourful results.

9. Read on

With the above techniques, you can make a site that is starting to look slightly more professional, pretty quickly. 

If you have the time to invest, it’s well worth learning some design principles, if only so that design seems less intimidating and more like fun. As part of my design learning, I read a few introductory design books aimed at coders. The best I found was David Kadavy’s Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty, which explains the basic principles behind choosing colours, fonts, typefaces and layout.

In the introduction to his book, David writes: 


	No group stands to gain more from design literacy than hackers do… The one subject that is exceedingly frustrating for hackers to try to learn is design. Hackers know that in order to compete against corporate behemoths with just a few lines of code, they need to have good, clear design, but the resources with which to learn design are simply hard to find.


Well said. If you have half a day to invest, rather than half an hour, I recommend getting hold of David’s book.

And the journey is over. Perhaps that took slightly more than half an hour, but with practice, using the above techniques can become second nature. What useful tools have I missed? Designers, how would you improve on the above? I would love to know, so please give me your views in the comments.",2012,Anna Powell-Smith,annapowellsmith,2012-12-16T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/how-to-make-your-site-look-half-decent/,design
80,HTML5 Video Bumpers,"Video is a bigger part of the web experience than ever before. With native browser support for HTML5 video elements freeing us from the tyranny of plugins, and the availability of faster internet connections to the workplace, home and mobile networks, it’s now pretty straightforward to publish video in a way that can be consumed in all sorts of ways on all sorts of different web devices.

I recently worked on a project where the client had shot some dedicated video shorts to publish on their site. They also had some five-second motion graphics produced to top and tail the videos with context and branding. This pretty common requirement is a great idea on the web, where a user might land at your video having followed a link and be viewing a page without much context.

Known as bumpers, these short introduction clips help brand a video and make it look a lot more professional.



Adding bumpers to a video

The simplest way to add bumpers to a video would be to edit them on to the start and end of the video file itself. Cooking the bumpers into the video file is easy, but should you ever want to update them it can become a real headache. If the branding needs updating, for example, you’d need to re-edit and re-encode all your videos. Not a fun task.

What if the bumpers could be added dynamically? That would enable you to use the same bumper for multiple videos (decreasing download time for users who might watch more than one) and to update the bumpers whenever you wanted. You could change them seasonally, update them for special promotions, run different advertising slots, perform multivariate testing, or even target different bumpers to different users.

The trade-off, of course, is that if you dynamically add your bumpers, there’s a chance that a user in a given circumstance might not see the bumper. For example, if the main video feature was uploaded to YouTube, you’d have no way to control the playback. As always, you need to weigh up the pros and cons and make your choice.

HTML5 bumpers

If you wanted to dynamically add bumpers to your HTML5 video, how would you go about it? That was the question I found myself needing to answer for this particular client project.

My initial thought was to treat it just like an image slideshow. If I were building a slideshow that moved between images, I’d use CSS absolute positioning with z-index to stack the images up on top of each other in a pile, with the first image on top. To transition to the second image, I’d use JavaScript to fade the top image out, revealing the second image beneath it.



Now that video is just a native object in the DOM, just like an image, why not do the same? Stack the videos up with the opening bumper on top, listen for the video’s onended event, and fade it out to reveal the main feature behind. Good idea, right?

Wrong

Remember that this is the web. It’s never going to be that easy. The problem here is that many non-desktop devices use native, dedicated video players. Think about watching a video on a mobile phone – when you play the video, the phone often goes full-screen in its native player, leaving the web page behind. There’s no opportunity to fade or switch z-index, as the video isn’t being viewed in the page. Your page is left powerless. Powerless!



So what can we do? What can we control?

Those of us with particularly long memories might recall a time before CSS, when we’d have to use JavaScript to perform image rollovers. As CSS background images weren’t a practical reality, we would use lots of <img> elements, and perform a rollover by modifying the src attribute of the image. 

Turns out, this old trick of modifying the source can help us out with video, too. In most cases, modifying the src attribute of a <video> element, or perhaps more likely the src attribute of a source element, will swap from one video to another.

Swappin’ it

Let’s take a deliberately simple example of a super-basic video tag:

<video src=""mycat.webm"" controls>no fallback coz i is lame, innit.</video>

We could very simply write a script to find all video tags and give them a new src to show our bumper.

<script>
	var videos, i, l;
	videos = document.getElementsByTagName('video');
	for(i=0, l=videos.length; i<l; i++) {
		videos[i].setAttribute('src', 'bumper-in.webm');
	}
</script>

View the example in a browser with WebM support. You’ll see that the video is swapped out for the opening bumper. Great!

Beefing it up

Of course, we can’t just publish video in one format. In practical use, you need a <video> element with multiple <source> elements containing your different source formats.

<video controls>
    <source src=""mycat.mp4"" type=""video/mp4"" />
    <source src=""mycat.webm"" type=""video/webm"" />
    <source src=""mycat.ogv"" type=""video/ogg"" />
</video>

This time, our script needs to loop through the sources, not the videos. We’ll use a regular expression replacement to swap out the file name while maintaining the correct file extension.

<script>
    var sources, i, l, orig;
    sources = document.getElementsByTagName('source');
    for(i=0, l=sources.length; i<l; i++) {
        orig = sources[i].getAttribute('src');
        sources[i].setAttribute('src', orig.replace(/(w+).(w+)/, 'bumper-in.$2'));
        // reload the video
        sources[i].parentNode.load();
    }
</script>

The difference this time is that when changing the src of a <source> we need to call the .load() method on the video to get it to acknowledge the change.

See the code in action, this time in a wider range of browsers.

But, my video!

I guess we should get the original video playing again. Keeping the same markup, we need to modify the script to do two things:


	Store the original src in a data- attribute so we can access it later
	Add an event listener so we can detect the end of the bumper playing, and load the original video back in


As we need to loop through the videos this time to add the event listener, I’ve moved the .load() call into that loop. It’s a bit more efficient to call it only once after modifying all the video’s sources.

<script>
var videos, sources, i, l, orig;
sources = document.getElementsByTagName('source');
for(i=0, l=sources.length; i<l; i++) {
    orig = sources[i].getAttribute('src');
    sources[i].setAttribute('data-orig', orig);
    sources[i].setAttribute('src', orig.replace(/(w+).(w+)/, 'bumper-in.$2'));
}
videos = document.getElementsByTagName('video');
for(i=0, l=videos.length; i<l; i++) {
    videos[i].load();
    videos[i].addEventListener('ended', function(){
        sources = this.getElementsByTagName('source');
        for(i=0, l=sources.length; i<l; i++) {
            orig = sources[i].getAttribute('data-orig');
            if (orig) {
                sources[i].setAttribute('src', orig);
            }
            sources[i].setAttribute('data-orig','');
        }
        this.load();
        this.play();
    });
}
</script>

Again, view the example to see the bumper play, followed by our spectacular main feature. (That’s my cat, Widget. His interests include sleeping and internet marketing.)

Tidying things up

The final thing to do is add our closing bumper after the main video has played. This involves the following changes:


	We need to keep track of whether the src has been changed, so we only play the video if it’s changed. I’ve added the modified variable to track this, and it stops us getting into a situation where the video just loops forever.
	Add an else to the event listener, for when the orig is false (so the main feature has been playing) to load in the end bumper. We also check that we’re not already playing the end bumper. Because looping.


<script>
var videos, sources, i, l, orig, current, modified;
sources = document.getElementsByTagName('source');
for(i=0, l=sources.length; i<l; i++) {
   orig = sources[i].getAttribute('src');
   sources[i].setAttribute('data-orig', orig);
   sources[i].setAttribute('src', orig.replace(/(w+).(w+)/, 'bumper-in.$2'));
}
videos = document.getElementsByTagName('video');
for(i=0, l=videos.length; i<l; i++) {
   videos[i].load();
   modified = false;
   videos[i].addEventListener('ended', function(){
      sources = this.getElementsByTagName('source');
      for(i=0, l=sources.length; i<l; i++) {
         orig = sources[i].getAttribute('data-orig');
         if (orig) {
            sources[i].setAttribute('src', orig);
            modified = true;
         }else{
            current = sources[i].getAttribute('src');
            if (current.indexOf('bumper-out')==-1) {
               sources[i].setAttribute('src', current.replace(/([w]+).(w+)/, 'bumper-out.$2'));
               modified = true;
            }else{
               this.pause();
               modified = false;
            }
         }
         sources[i].setAttribute('data-orig','');
      }
      if (modified) {
         this.load();
         this.play();
      }
   });
}
</script>

Yo ho ho, that’s a lot of JavaScript. See it in action – you should get a bumper, the cat video, and an end bumper.

Of course, this code works fine for demonstrating the principle, but it’s very procedural. Nothing wrong with that, but to do something similar in production, you’d probably want to make the code more modular to ease maintainability. Besides, you may want to use a framework, rather than basic JavaScript. 

The end credits

One really important principle here is that of progressive enhancement. If the browser doesn’t support JavaScript, the user won’t see your bumper, but they will get the main video. If the browser supports JavaScript but doesn’t allow you to modify the src (as was the case with older versions of iOS), the user won’t see your bumper, but they will get the main video.

If a search engine or social media bot grabs your page and looks for content, they won’t see your bumper, but they will get the main video – which is absolutely what you want.

This means that if the bumper is absolutely crucial, you may still need to cook it into the video. However, for many applications, running it dynamically can work quite well.

As always, it comes down to three things:


	Measure your audience: know how people access your site
	Test the solution: make sure it works for your audience
	Plan for failure: it’s the web and that’s how things work ‘round these parts


But most of all play around with it, have fun and build something awesome.",2012,Drew McLellan,drewmclellan,2012-12-01T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/html5-video-bumpers/,code
91,Infinite Canvas: Moving Beyond the Page,"Remember Web 2.0? I do. In fact, that phrase neatly bifurcates my life on the internet. Pre-2.0, I was occupied by chatting on AOL and eventually by learning HTML so I could build sites on Geocities. Around 2002, however, I saw a WYSIWYG demo in Dreamweaver. The instructor was dragging boxes and images around a canvas. With a few clicks he was able to build a dynamic, single-page interface. Coming from the world of tables and inline HTML styles, I was stunned.

As I entered college the next year, the web was blossoming: broadband, Wi-Fi, mobile (proud PDA owner, right here), CSS, Ajax, Bloglines, Gmail and, soon, Google Maps. I was a technology fanatic and a hobbyist web developer. For me, the web had long been informational. It was now rapidly becoming something else, something more: sophisticated, presentational, actionable.

In 2003 we watched as the internet changed. The predominant theme of those early Web 2.0 years was the withering of Internet Explorer 6 and the triumph of web standards. Upon cresting that mountain, we looked around and collectively breathed the rarefied air of pristine HMTL and CSS, uncontaminated by toxic hacks and forks – only to immediately begin hurtling down the other side at what is, frankly, terrifying speed.

Ten years later, we are still riding that rocket. Our days (and nights) are spent cramming for exams on CSS3 and RWD and Sass and RESS. We are the proud, frazzled owners of tiny pocket computers that annihilate the best laptops we could have imagined, and the architects of websites that are no longer restricted to big screens nor even segregated by device. We dragoon our sites into working any time, anywhere. At this point, we can hardly ask the spec developers to slow down to allow us to catch our breath, nor should we. It is, without a doubt, a most wonderful time to be a web developer.

But despite the newfound luxury of rounded corners, gradients, embeddable fonts, low-level graphics APIs, and, glory be, shadows, the canyon between HTML and native appears to be as wide as ever. The improvements in HTML and CSS have, for the most part, been conveniences rather than fundamental shifts. What I’d like to do now, if you’ll allow me, is outline just a few of the remaining gaps that continue to separate web sites and applications from their native companions.

What I’d like for Christmas

There is one irritant which is the grandfather of them all, the one from which all others flow and have their being, and it is, simply, the page refresh. That’s right, the foundational principle of the web is our single greatest foe. To paraphrase a patron saint of designers everywhere, if you see a page refresh, we blew it.

The page refresh brings with it, of course, many noble and lovely benefits: addressability, for one; and pagination, for another. (See also caching, resource loading, and probably half a dozen others.) Still, those concerns can be answered (and arguably answered more compellingly) by replacing the weary page with the young and hearty document. Flash may be dead, but it has many lessons yet to bequeath.

Preparing a single document when the site loads allows us to engage the visitor in a smooth and engrossing experience. We have long known this, of course. Twitter was not the first to attempt, via JavaScript, to envelop the user in a single-page application, nor the first to abandon it. Our shared task is to move those technologies down the stack, to make them more primitive, so that the next Twitter can be built with the most basic combination of HTML and CSS rather than relying on complicated, slow, and unreliable scripted solutions.

So, let’s take a look at what we can do, right now, that we might have a better idea of where our current tools fall short.

A print magazine in HTML clothing

Like many others, I suspect, one of my earliest experiences with publishing was laying out newsletters and newspapers on a computer for print. If you’ve ever used InDesign or Quark or even Microsoft Publisher, you’ll remember reflowing content from page to page. The advent of the internet signaled, in many ways, the abandonment of that model. Articles were no longer constrained by the physical limitations of paper. In shedding our chains, however, it is arguable that we’ve lost something useful. We had a self-contained and complete package, a closed loop. It was a thing that could be handled and finished, and doing so provided a sense of accomplishment that our modern, infinitely scrolling, ever-fractal web of content has stolen.

For our purposes today, we will treat 24 ways as the online equivalent of that newspaper or magazine. A single year’s worth of articles could easily be considered an issue. Right now, navigating between articles means clicking on the article you’d like to view and being taken to that specific address via a page reload. If Drew wanted to, it wouldn’t be difficult to update the page in place (via JavaScript) and change the address (again via JavaScript with the History API) to reflect the new content found at the new location. But what if Drew wanted to do that without  JavaScript? And what if he wanted the site to not merely load the content but actually whisk you along the page in a compelling and delightful way, à la the Mag+ demo we all saw a few years ago when the iPad was first introduced? Uh, no.

We’re all familiar with websites that have attempted to go beyond the page by weaving many chunks of content together into a large document and for good reason. There is tremendous appeal in opening and exploring the canvas beyond the edges of our screens.

In one rather straightforward example from last year, Mozilla contacted Full Stop to build a website promoting Aza Raskin’s proposal for a set of Creative Commons-style privacy icons. Like a lot of the sites we build (including our own), the amount of information we were presenting was minimal. In these instances, we encourage our clients to consider including everything on a single page. The result was a horizontally driven site that was, if not whimsical, at least clever and attractive to the intended audience. An experience that is taken for granted when using device-native technology is utterly, maddeningly impossible to replicate on the web without jumping through JavaScript hoops.

In another, more complex example, we again had the pleasure of working with Aza earlier this year, this time on a redesign of the Massive Health website. Our assignment was to design and build a site that communicated Massive’s commitment to modern personal health. The site had to be visually and interactively stunning while maintaining a usable and clear interface for the casual visitor. Our solution was to extend the infinite company logo into a ribbon that carried the visitor through the site narrative. It also meant we’d be asking the browser to accommodate something it was never designed to handle: a non-linear design. (Be sure to play around. There’s a lot going on under the hood. We were also this close to a ZUI, if WebKit didn’t freak out when pages were scaled beyond 10×.) Despite the apparent and deliberate design simplicity, the techniques necessary to implement it are anything but. From updating the URL to moving the visitor from section to section, we’re firmly in JavaScript territory. And that’s a shame.

What can we do?

We might not be able to specify these layouts in HTML and CSS just yet, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn a few new tricks while we wait. Let’s see how close we can come to recreating the privacy icons design, the Massive design, or the Mag+ design without resorting to JavaScript.

A horizontally paginated site

The first thing we’re going to need is the concept of a page within our HTML document. Using plain old HTML and CSS, we can stack a series of <div>s sideways (with a little assist from our new friend, the viewport-width unit, not that he was strictly necessary). All we need to know is how many pages we have. (And, boy, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to know that without having to predetermine it or use JavaScript?)

.window {
overflow: hidden;
  width: 100%;
}
.pages {
  width: 200vw;
}
.page {
  float: left;
  overflow: hidden;
  width: 100vw;
}

If you look carefully, you’ll see that the conceit we’ll use in the rest of the demos is in place. Despite the document containing multiple pages, only one is visible at any given time. This allows us to keep the user focused on the task (or content) at hand.

By the way, you’ll need to use a modern, WebKit-based browser for these demos. I recommend downloading the WebKit nightly builds, Chrome Canary, or being comfortable with setting flags in Chrome.

A horizontally paginated site, with transitions

Ah, here’s the rub. We have functional navigation, but precious few cues for the user. It’s not much good shoving the visitor around various parts of the document if they don’t get the pleasant whooshing experience of the journey. You might be thinking, what about that new CSS selector, target-something…? Well, my friend, you’re on the right track. Let’s test it. We’re going to need to use a bit of sleight of hand. While we’d like to simply offset the containing element by the number of pages we’re moving (like we did on Massive), CSS alone can’t give us that information, and that means we’re going to need to fake it by expanding and collapsing pages as you navigate. Here are the bits we’re going to need:

.page {
  -webkit-transition: width 1s; // Naturally you're going to want to include all the relevant prefixes here
  float: left;
  left: 0;
  overflow: hidden;
  position: relative;
  width: 100vw;
}
.page:not(:target) {
  width: 0;
}

Ah, but we’re not fooling anyone with that trick. As soon as you move beyond a single page, the visitor’s disbelief comes tumbling down when the linear page transitions are unaffected by the distance the pages are allegedly traveling. And you may have already noticed an even more fatal flaw: I secretly linked you to the first page rather than the unadorned URL. If you visit the same page with no URL fragment, you get a blank screen. Sure, we could force a redirect with some server-side trickery, but that feels like cheating. Perhaps if we had the CSS4 subject selector we could apply styles to the parent based on the child being targeted by the URL. We might also need a few more abilities, like determining the total number of pages and having relative sibling selectors (e.g. nth-sibling), but we’d sure be a lot closer.

A horizontally paginated site, with transitions – no cheating

Well, what other cards can we play? How about the checkbox hack? Sure, it’s a garish trick, but it might be the best we can do today. Check it out. 

label {
  cursor: pointer;
}
input {
 display: none;
}
input:not(:checked) + .page {
  max-height: 100vh;
  width: 0;
}

Finally, we can see the first page thanks to the state we are able to set on the appropriate radio button. Of course, now we don’t have URLs, so maybe this isn’t a winning plan after all. While our HTML and CSS toolkit may feel primitive at the moment, we certainly don’t want to sacrifice the addressability of the web. If there’s one bedrock principle, that’s it.

A horizontally paginated site, with transitions – no cheating and a gorgeous homepage

Gorgeous may not be the right word, but our little magazine is finally shaping up. Thanks to the CSS regions spec, we’ve got an exciting new power, the ability to begin an article in one place and bend it to our will. (Remember, your everyday browser isn’t going to work for these demos. Try the WebKit nightly build to see what we’re talking about.) As with the rest of the examples, we’re clearly abusing these features. Off-canvas layouts (you can thank Luke Wroblewski for the name) are simply not considered to be normal patterns… yet.

Here’s a quick look at what’s going on:

.excerpt-container {
  float: left;
  padding: 2em;
  position: relative;
  width: 100%;
}
.excerpt {
  height: 16em;
}
.excerpt_name_article-1,
.page-1 .article-flow-region {
  -webkit-flow-from: article-1;
}
.article-content_for_article-1 {
  -webkit-flow-into: article-1;
}

The regions pattern is comprised of at least three components: a beginning; an ending; and a source. Using CSS, we’re able to define specific elements that should be available for the content to flow through. If magazine-style layouts are something you’re interested in learning more about (and you should be), be sure to check out the great work Adobe has been doing.

Looking forward, and backward

As designers, builders, and consumers of the web, we share a desire to see the usability and enjoyability of websites continue to rise. We are incredibly lucky to be working in a time when a three-month-old website can be laughably outdated. Our goal ought to be to improve upon both the weaknesses and the strengths of the web platform. We seek not only smoother transitions and larger canvases, but fine-grained addressability. Our URLs should point directly and unambiguously to specific content elements, be they pages, sections, paragraphs or words. Moreover, off-screen design patterns are essential to accommodating and empowering the multitude of devices we use to access the web. We should express the desire that interpage links take advantage of the CSS transitions which have been put to such good effect in every other aspect of our designs. Transitions aren’t just nice to have, they’re table stakes in the highly competitive world of native applications. 

The tools and technologies we have right now allow us to create smart, beautiful, useful webpages. With a little help, we can begin removing the seams and sutures that bind the web to an earlier, less sophisticated generation.",2012,Nathan Peretic,nathanperetic,2012-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/infinite-canvas-moving-beyond-the-page/,code
90,Monkey Business,"“Too expensive.” “Over-priced.” “A bit rich.”

They all mean the same thing.

When you say that something’s too expensive, you’re doing much more than commenting on a price. You’re questioning the explicit or implicit value of a product or a service. You’re asking, “Will I get out of it what you want me to pay for it?” You’re questioning the competency, judgement and possibly even integrity of the individual or company that gave you that price, even though you don’t realise it. You might not be saying it explicitly, but what you’re implying is, “Have you made a mistake?”, “Am I getting the best deal?”, “Are you being honest with me?”, “Could I get this cheaper?”

Finally, you’re being dishonest, because deep down you know all too well that there’s no such thing as too expensive. 

Why? 

It doesn’t matter what you’re questioning the price of. It could be a product, a service or the cost of an hour, day or week of someone’s time. Whatever you’re buying, too expensive is always an excuse. Saying it shifts acceptability of a price back to the person who gave it. What you should say, but are too afraid to admit, is:


	“It’s more money than I wanted to pay.”
	“It’s more than I estimated it would cost.”
	“It’s more than I can afford.”


Everyone who’s given a price for a product or service will have been told at some point that it’s too expensive. It’s never comfortable to hear that. Thoughts come thick and fast: “What do I do?” “How do I react?” “Do I really want the business?” “Am I prepared to negotiate?” “How much am I willing to compromise?”

It’s easy to be defensive when someone questions a price, but before you react, stay calm and remember that if someone says what you’re offering is too expensive, they’re saying more about themselves and their situation than they are about your price. Learn to read that situation and how to follow up with the right questions.

Imagine you’ve quoted someone for a week of your time. “That’s too expensive,” they respond. How should you handle that? Think about what they might otherwise be saying.



“It’s more money than I want to pay” may mean that they don’t understand the value of your service. How could you respond?

Start by asking what similar projects they’ve worked on and the type of people they worked with. Find out what they paid and what they got for their money, because it’s possible what you offer is different from what they had before. Ask if they saw a return on that previous investment. Maybe their problem isn’t with your headline price, but the value they think they’ll receive. Put the emphasis on value and shift the conversation to what they’ll gain, rather than what they’ll spend.

It’s also possible they can’t distinguish your service from those of your competitors, so now would be a great time to explain the differences. Do you work faster? Explain how that could help them launch faster, get customers faster, make money faster. Do you include more? Emphasise that, and how unique the experience of working with you will be.



“It’s more than I estimated it would cost” could mean that your customer hasn’t done their research properly. You’d never suggest that to them, of course, but you should ask how they’ve arrived at their estimate. Did they base it on work they’ve purchased previously? How long ago was that? Does it come from comparable work or from a different sector?

Help your customer by explaining how you arrived at your estimate. Break down each element and while you’re doing that, emphasise the parts of your process that you know will appeal to them. If you know that they’ve had difficulty with something in the past, explain how your approach will benefit them. People almost always value a positive experience more than the money they’ll save.



“It’s more than I can afford” could mean they can’t afford what you offer at all, but it could also mean they can’t afford it right now or all at once. So ask if they could afford what you’re asking if they spread payment over a longer period? Ask, “Would that mean you’ll give me the business?”

It’s possible they’re asking for too much for what they can afford to pay. Will they compromise? Can you reach an agreement on something less? Ask, “If we can agree what’s in and what’s out, will you give me the business?”

What can they afford? When you know, you’re in a good position to decide if the deal makes good business sense, for both of you. Ask, “If I can match that price, will you give me the business?”

There’s no such thing as “a bit rich”, only ways for you to get to know your customer better. There’s no such thing as “over-priced”, only opportunities for you to explain yourself better. You should relish those opportunities. There’s really also no such thing as “too expensive”, just ways to set the tone for your relationship and help you develop that relationship to a point where money will be less of a deciding factor.

Unfinished Business

Join me and my co-host Anna Debenham next year for Unfinished Business, a new discussion show about the business end of working in web, design and creative industries.",2012,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2012-12-23T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/monkey-business/,business
92,Redesigning the Media Query,"Responsive web design is showing us that designing content is more important than designing containers. But if you’ve given RWD a serious try, you know that shifting your focus from the container is surprisingly hard to do. There are many factors and
instincts working against you, and one culprit is a perpetrator you’d least suspect.

The media query is the ringmaster of responsive design. It lets us establish the rules of the game and gives us what we need most: control. However, like some kind of evil double agent, the media query is actually working against you.

Its very nature diverts your attention away from content and forces you to focus on the container.

The very act of choosing a media query value means choosing a screen size.

Look at the history of the media query—it’s always been about the container. Values like screen, print, handheld and tv don’t have anything to do with content. The modern media query lets us choose screen dimensions, which is great because it makes RWD possible. But it’s still the act of choosing something that is completely unpredictable.

Content should dictate our breakpoints, not the container. In order to get our focus back to the only thing that matters, we need a reengineered media query—one that frees us from thinking about screen dimensions. A media query that works for your content, not the window. Fortunately, Sass 3.2 is ready and willing to take on this challenge.

Thinking in Columns

Fluid grids never clicked for me. I feel so disoriented and confused by their squishiness. Responsive design demands their use though, right?

I was ready to surrender until I found a grid that turned my world upright again. The Frameless Grid by Joni Korpi demonstrates that column and gutter sizes can stay fixed. As the screen size changes, you simply add or remove columns to accommodate. This made sense to me and armed with this concept I was able to give Sass the first component it needs to rewrite the media query: fixed column and gutter size variables.

$grid-column: 60px;
$grid-gutter: 20px;

We’re going to want some resolution independence too, so let’s create a function that converts those nasty pixel values into ems.

@function em($px, $base: $base-font-size) {
	@return ($px / $base) * 1em;
}

We now have the components needed to figure out the width of multiple columns in ems. Let’s put them together in a function that will take any number of columns and return the fixed width value of their size.

@function fixed($col) {
	@return $col * em($grid-column + $grid-gutter)
}

With the math in place we can now write a mixin that takes a column count as a parameter, then generates the perfect media query necessary to fit that number of columns on the screen. We can also build in some left and right margin for our layout by adding an additional gutter value (remembering that we already have one gutter built into our fixed function).

@mixin breakpoint($min) {
	@media (min-width: fixed($min) + em($grid-gutter)) {
		@content
	}
}

And, just like that, we’ve rewritten the media query. Instead of picking a minimum screen size for our layout, we can simply determine the number of columns needed. Let’s add a wrapper class so that we can center our content on the screen.

@mixin breakpoint($min) {
    @media (min-width: fixed($min) + em($grid-gutter)) {
	.wrapper {
		width: fixed($min) - em($grid-gutter);
		margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;
	}
	@content
    }
}

Designing content with a column count gives us nice, easy, whole numbers to work with. Sizing content, sidebars or widgets is now as simple as specifying a single-digit number.

@include breakpoint(8) {
	.main { width: fixed(5); }
	.sidebar { width: fixed(3); }
}

Those four lines of Sass just created a responsive layout for us. When the screen is big enough to fit eight columns, it will trigger a fixed width layout. And give widths to our main content and sidebar. The following is the outputted CSS…

@media (min-width: 41.25em) {
  .wrapper {
    width: 38.75em;
    margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;
  }
  .main { width: 25em; }
  .sidebar { width: 15em; }
}

Demo

I’ve created a Codepen demo that demonstrates what we’ve covered so far. I’ve added to the demo some grid classes based on Griddle by Nicolas Gallagher to create a floatless layout. I’ve also added a CSS gradient overlay to help you visualize columns. Try changing the column variable sizes or the breakpoint includes to see how the layout reacts to different screen sizes.

Responsive Images

Responsive images are a serious problem, but I’m excited to see the community talk so passionately about a solution. Now, there are some excellent stopgaps while we wait for something official, but these solutions require you to mirror your breakpoints in JavaScript or HTML. This poses a serious problem for my Sass-generated media queries, because I have no idea what the real values of my breakpoints are anymore. For responsive images to work, JavaScript needs to recognize which media query is active so that proper images can be loaded for that layout.

What I need is a way to label my breakpoints. Fortunately, people much smarter than I have figured this out. Jeremy Keith devised a labeling method by using CSS-generated content as the storage method for breakpoint labels. We can use this technique in our breakpoint mixin by passing a label as another argument.

@include breakpoint(8, 'desktop') { /* styles */ }

Sass can take that label and use it when writing the corresponding media query. We just need to slightly modify our breakpoint mixin.

@mixin breakpoint($min, $label) {
    @media (min-width: fixed($min) + em($grid-gutter)) {

        // label our mq with CSS generated content
	body::before { content: $label; display: none; }

	.wrapper {
		width: fixed($min) - em($grid-gutter);
		margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;
	}
	@content
    }
}

This allows us to label our breakpoints with a user-friendly string. Now that our media queries are defined and labeled, we just need JavaScript to step in and read which label is active.

// get css generated label for active media query
var label = getComputedStyle(document.body, '::before')['content'];

JavaScript now knows which layout is active by reading the label in the current media query—we just need to match that label to an image. I prefer to store references to different image sizes as data attributes on my image tag.

<img class=""responsive-image"" data-mobile=""mobile.jpg"" data-desktop=""desktop.jpg"" />
<noscript><img src=""desktop.jpg"" /></noscript>

These data attributes have names that match the labels set in my CSS. So while there is some duplication going on, setting a keyword like ‘tablet’ in two places is much easier than hardcoding media query values. With matching labels in CSS and HTML our script can marry the two and load the right sized image for our layout.

// get css generated label for active media query
var label = getComputedStyle(document.body, '::before')['content'];

// select image
var $image = $('.responsive-image');

// create source from data attribute
$image.attr('src', $image.data(label));

Demo

With some slight additions to our previous Codepen demo you can see this responsive image technique in action. While the above JavaScript will work it is not nearly robust enough for production so the demo uses a jQuery plugin that can accomodate multiple images, reloading on screen resize and fallbacks if something doesn’t match up.

Creating a Framework

This media query mixin and responsive image JavaScript are the center piece of a front end framework I use to develop websites. It’s a fluid, mobile first foundation that uses the breakpoint mixin to structure fixed width layouts for tablet and desktop. Significant effort was focused on making this framework completely cross-browser. For example, one of the problems with using media queries is that essential desktop structure code ends up being hidden from legacy Internet Explorer. Respond.js is an excellent polyfill, but if you’re comfortable serving a single desktop layout to older IE, we don’t need JavaScript. We simply need to capture layout code outside of a media query and sandbox it under an IE only class name.

// set IE fallback layout to 8 columns
$ie-support = 8;

// inside of our breakpoint mixin (but outside the media query)
@if ($ie-support and $min <= $ie-support) {
	.lt-ie9 { @content; }
}

Perspective Regained

Thinking in columns means you are thinking about content layout. How big of a screen do you need for 12 columns? Who cares? Having Sass write media queries means you can use intuitive numbers for content layout. A fixed grid means more layout control and less edge cases to test than a fluid grid. Using CSS labels for activating responsive images means you don’t have to duplicate breakpoints across separations of concern. 

It’s a harmonious blend of approaches that gives us something we need—responsive design that feels intuitive. And design that, from the very outset, focuses on what matters most. Just like our kindergarten teachers taught us: It’s what’s inside that counts.",2012,Les James,lesjames,2012-12-13T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/redesigning-the-media-query/,code
79,Responsive Images: What We Thought We Needed,"If you were to read a web designer’s Christmas wish list, it would likely include a solution for displaying images responsively. For those concerned about users downloading unnecessary image data, or serving images that look blurry on high resolution displays, finding a solution has become a frustrating quest.

Having experimented with complex and sometimes devilish hacks, consensus is forming around defining new standards that could solve this problem. Two approaches have emerged.

The <picture> element markup pattern was proposed by Mat Marquis and is now being developed by the Responsive Images Community Group. By providing a means of declaring multiple sources, authors could use media queries to control which version of an image is displayed and under what conditions:

<picture width=""500"" height=""500"">
  <source media=""(min-width: 45em)"" src=""large.jpg"">
  <source media=""(min-width: 18em)"" src=""med.jpg"">
  <source src=""small.jpg"">
  <img src=""small.jpg"" alt="""">
  <p>Accessible text</p>
</picture>

A second proposal put forward by Apple, the srcset attribute, uses a more concise syntax intended for use with the <img> element, although it could be compatible with the <picture> element too. This would allow authors to provide a set of images, but with the decision on which to use left to the browser:

<img src=""fallback.jpg"" alt="""" srcset=""small.jpg 640w 1x, small-hd.jpg 640w 2x, med.jpg 1x, med-hd.jpg 2x "">

Enter Scrooge


	Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead.
Ebenezer Scrooge


Given the complexity of this issue, there’s a heated debate about which is the best option. Yet code belies a certain truth. That both feature verbose and opaque syntax, I’m not sure either should find its way into the browser – especially as alternative approaches have yet to be fully explored.

So, as if to dampen the festive cheer, here are five reasons why I believe both proposals are largely redundant.

1. We need better formats, not more markup

As we move away from designs defined with fixed pixel values, bitmap images look increasingly unsuitable. While simple images and iconography can use scalable vector formats like SVG, for detailed photographic imagery, raster formats like GIF, PNG and JPEG remain the only suitable option.

There is scope within current formats to account for varying bandwidth but this requires cooperation from browser vendors. Newer formats like JPEG2000 and WebP generate higher quality images with smaller file sizes, but aren’t widely supported.

While it’s tempting to try to solve this issue by inventing new markup, the crux of it remains at the file level.

Daan Jobsis’s experimentation with image compression strengthens this argument. He discovered that by increasing the dimensions of a JPEG image while simultaneously reducing its quality, a smaller files could be produced, with the resulting image looking just as good on both standard and high-resolution displays.

This may be a hack in lieu of a more permanent solution, but it’s applied in the right place. Easy to accomplish with existing tools and without compatibility issues, it has few downsides. Further experimentation in this area should be encouraged, with standardisation efforts more helpful if focused on developing new image formats or, preferably, extending existing ones.

2. Art direction doesn’t belong in markup

A desired benefit of the <picture> markup pattern is to allow for greater art direction. For example, rather than scaling down images on smaller displays to the point that their content is hard to discern, we could present closer crops instead:



This can be achieved with CSS of course, although with a download penalty for those parts of an image not shown. This point may be negligible, however, since in the context of adaptable layouts, these hidden areas may end up being revealed anyway.

Art direction concerns design, not content. If we wish to maintain a separation of concerns, including presentation within our markup seems misguided.

3. The size of a display has little relation to the size of an image

By using media queries, the <picture> element allows authors to choose which characteristics of the screen or viewport to query for different images to be displayed.

In developing sites at Clearleft, we have noticed that the viewport is essentially arbitrary, with the size of an image’s containing element more important. For example, look at how this grid of images may adapt at different viewport widths:



As we build more modular systems, components need to be adaptable in and of themselves. There is a case to be made for developing more contextual methods of querying, rather than those based on attributes of the display.

4. We haven’t lived with the problem long enough

A key strength of the web is that the underlying platform can be continually iterated. This can also be problematic if snap judgements are made about what constitutes an improvement.

The early history of the web is littered with such examples, be it the perceived need for blinking text or inline typographic styling. To build a platform for the future, additions to it should be carefully considered. And if we want more consistent support across browsers, burdening vendors with an ever increasing list of features seems counterproductive.

Only once the need for a new feature is sufficiently proven, should we look to standardise it. Before we could declare hover effects, rounded corners and typographic styling in CSS, we used JavaScript as a polyfill. Sure, doing so was painful, but use cases were fully explored, and the CSS specification better reflected the needs of authors.

5. Images and the web aesthetic

The srcset proposal has emerged from a company that markets its phones as being able to browse the real – yet squashed down, tapped and zoomable – web. Perhaps Apple should make its own website responsive before suggesting how the rest of us should do so.

Converserly, while the <picture> proposal has the backing of a few respected developers and designers, it was born out of the work Mat Marquis and Filament Group did for the Boston Globe. As the first large-scale responsive design, this was a landmark project that ignited the responsive web design movement and proved its worth. But it was the first.

Its design shares a vernacular to that of contemporary newspaper websites, with a columnar, image-laden and densely packed layout. Compared to more recent examples – Quartz, The Next Web and the New York Times Skimmer – it feels out of step with the future direction of news sites. In seeking out a truer aesthetic for the web in which software interfaces have greater influence, we might discover that the need for responsive images isn’t as great as originally thought.



Building for the future

With responsive design, we’ve accepted the idea that a fully fluid layout, rather than a set of fixed layouts, is best suited to the web’s unpredictable nature. Current responsive image proposals are antithetical to this approach.

We need solutions that lack complexity, are device-agnostic and work within existing workflows. Any proposal that requires different versions of the same image to be created, is likely to have to acquiesce under the pressure of reality.

While it’s easy to get distracted about the size and quality of an image, and how we might choose to serve it, often the simplest solution is not to include it at all. After years of gluttonous design practice, in which fast connections and expansive display sizes were an accepted norm, we have got use to filling pages with needless images and countless items of page furniture.

To design more adaptable experiences, the presence of every element needs to be questioned, for its existence requires additional data to be downloaded or futher complexity within a design system. Conditional loading techniques mean that the inclusion of images is no longer a binary choice, but can instead appear in a progressively enhanced manner.

So here is my proposal. Instead of spending the next year worrying about responsive images, let’s embrace the constraints of the medium, and seek out new solutions that can work within them.",2012,Paul Lloyd,paulrobertlloyd,2012-12-11T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/responsive-images-what-we-thought-we-needed/,code
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 any) attention was given to their performance.

It would be one thing if these were the exceptions, but unfortunately they’re not. Guy Podjarny, who has done a lot of research around responsive performance, discovered that 86% of the responsive sites he tested were either the same size or larger on the small screen as they were on the desktop.

The reality is that high performance should be a requirement on any web project, not an afterthought. Poor performance has been tied to a decrease in revenue, traffic, conversions, and overall user satisfaction. Case study after case study shows that improving performance, even marginally, will impact the bottom line. The situation is no different on mobile where 71% of people say they expect sites to load as quickly or faster on their phone when compared to the desktop.

The bottom line: performance is a fundamental component of the user experience.

So, given it’s extreme importance in the success of any web project, why is it that we’re seeing so many bloated responsive sites?

First, I adamantly disagree with the belief that poor performance is inherent to responsive design. That’s not a rule – it’s a cop-out. It’s an example of blaming the technique when we should be blaming the implementation. This argument also falls flat because it ignores the fact that the trend of fat sites is increasing on the web in general. While some responsive sites are the worst offenders, it’s hardly an issue resigned to one technique.

To fix the issue, we need to stop making excuses and start making improvements instead. Here, then, are some things we can do to start improving the state of responsive performance, and performance in general, right now.

Create a culture of performance

If you understand just how important performance is to the success of a project, the natural next step is to start creating a culture where high performance is a key consideration. 

One of the things you can do is set a baseline. Determine the maximum size and number of requests you are going to allow, and don’t let a page go live if either of those numbers is exceeded. The BBC does this with its responsive mobile site.

A variation of that, which Steve Souders discussed in a recent podcast is to create a performance budget based on those numbers. Once you have that baseline set, if someone comes along and wants to add a something to the page, they have to make sure the page remains under budget. If it exceeds the budget, you have three options:


	Optimize an existing feature or asset on the page
	Remove an existing feature or asset from the page
	Don’t add the new feature or asset


The idea here is that you make performance part of the process instead of something that may or may not get tacked on at the end.

Embrace the pain

This troubling trend of web bloat can be blamed in part on the lack of pain associated with poor performance. Most of us work on high-speed connections with low latency. When we fire up a 4Mb site, it doesn’t feel so bad. 

When I tested the previously mentioned 5,942kb site on a 3G network, it took over 93 seconds to load. A minute and a half just staring at a white screen. Had anyone working on that project experienced that, you can bet the site wouldn’t have launched in that state.

Don’t just crunch numbers. Fire up your site on a slower network and see what it feels like to wait. If you don’t have access to a slow network, simulate one using a tool like Slowy, Throttle or the Network Conditioner found in Mac OS X 10.7.

Watch for low-hanging fruit

There are a bunch of general performance improvements that apply to any site (responsive or not) but often aren’t made. A great starting point is to refer to Yahoo!‘s list of rules.

Some of this might sound complicated or intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. You can grab an .htaccess file from HTML 5 Boilerplate or use Sergey Chernyshev’s drop-in .htaccess file. You can use tools like SpriteMe to simplify the creation of sprites, and ImageOptim to compress images.

Just by implementing these simple optimizations you will achieve a noticeable improvement in terms of weight and page load time.

Be careful with images

The most common offender for poor responsive performance is downloading unnecessarily large images, or worse yet, multiple sizes of the same image. 

For background images, simply being careful with where and how you include the image can ensure you don’t get caught in the trap of multiple background images being downloaded without being used. Don’t count on display:none to help. While it may hide elements from displaying on screen, those images will still be requested and downloaded.

Content images can be a little trickier. Whatever you do, don’t serve a large image that works on a large screen display to small screens. It’s wasteful, not only in terms of adding weight to the page, but also in wasting precious memory. Instead, use a tool like Adaptive Images or src.sencha.io to make sure only appropriately sized images are being downloaded. 

The new <picture> element that has been so often discussed is another excellent solution if you’re feeling particularly future-oriented. A picture polyfill exists so that you can start using the element now without any worries about support.

Conditional loading

Don’t load any more than you absolutely need to. If a script isn’t needed at certain sizes, use the matchMedia polyfill to ensure it only loads when needed. Use eCSSential to do the same for unnecessary CSS files.

Last year on 24 ways, Jeremy Keith wrote an article about conditional loading of content in a responsive design based on the screen width. The technique was later refined by the Filament Group into what they dubbed the Ajax-Include Pattern. It’s a powerful and simple way to lighten the load on small screens as well as reduce clutter.

Go vanilla?

If you take a look at the HTTP Archive you’ll see that other than image size, JavaScript is the heaviest asset on a page weighing in at 215kb on average. It also boasts the fifth highest correlation to load time as well as the second highest correlation to render time. 

Much of the weight can be attributed to our industry’s increasing reliance on frameworks. This is especially a concern on mobile devices. PPK recently exclaimed that current JavaScript libraries are just “too heavy for mobile”. “Research from Stoyan Stefanov on parse times supports this. On some Android and iOS devices, it can take as long as 200-300ms just to parse jQuery.

There’s nothing wrong about using a framework, but the problem is that they’ve become the default. Before dropping another framework or plugin into a page, we should stop to consider the value it adds and whether we could accomplish what we need to do using a combination of vanilla JavaScript and CSS instead. (This is a great example of a scenario where a performance budget could help.)

Start thinking beyond visual aesthetics

We love to tout the web’s universality when discussing the need for responsive design. But that universality is not limited simply to screen size. Networks and hardware capabilities must factor in as well.

The web is an incredibly dynamic and interactive medium, and designing for it demands that we consider more than just visual aesthetics. Let’s not forget to give those other qualities the attention they deserve.",2012,Tim Kadlec,timkadlec,2012-12-05T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/responsive-responsive-design/,design
81,Science!,"Sometimes we want to capture people’s attention at a glance to communicate something fast. At other times we want to have the interface fade away into the background, letting people paint pictures in their minds with our words (if you’ll forgive a little flowery festive flourish).

I tend to distinguish between these two broad objectives as designing for impact on the one hand, and designing for immersion on the other. What defines them is interruption. Impact needs an attention-grabbing interruption. Immersion requires us to remove interruption from the interface. Careful design deliberately interrupts but doesn’t accidentally disrupt. If that seems to make sense to you, then you’ll find the following snippets of science as useful as I did.

Saccades and fixations

As you’re reading this your eyes are skipping along the lines in tiny jumps. During each jump everything is blurred. Each jump ends in a small pause so your brain can take a snapshot of the letters. It arranges them into words, and then parses out the meaning — fast — in around a quarter of a second.

The jumps are called saccades. The pauses are called fixations. Sometimes we take regressive saccades, skipping back to reread. There’s a simple example in the excellent little book, Detail in Typography, by Jost Hochuli.



If you want to explore the science of reading in much more depth, I recommend the excellent paper, “The Science of Word Recognition”, by Dr Kevin Larson of Microsoft.

To design for legibility and readability is to design for saccades and fixations. It’s the craft of making it easy for people’s brains to extract meaning, using techniques like good contrast, font size, spacing and structure, and only interrupting the reading experience deliberately.

Scan paths

At some point when visiting 24 ways you probably scanned the screen to get orientated. The journey your eyes took is known as a scan path. Scan paths are made up of saccades and fixations. Right now you’re following a scan path as you read, along one line, and down to the next. This is a map of the scan paths found by Olivier Le Meur from observing people looking at Rembrandt’s Leçon d’anatomie:



For websites, the scan path is a little different. This is an aggregate scan path of Google from LC Technologies:



The average shape of a website scan path becomes clearer in this average scan path taken by forty-six people during research by the Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools:



Just like when we read text arranged left to right in a vertical column, scan paths follow a roughly Z-shaped pattern from the top left to bottom right. Sometimes we skip back to reread a word or sentence, or glance again at a specific element, but the Z-shaped scan path persists.

Designing for scan paths is to organise content to help people move through an interface to get orientated, and to read.

The elements that are important enough to need impact must interrupt the scan path and clearly call attention to themselves. However, they don’t always need to clip people round the ear from multiple directions at once to get attention. It helps to list elements by importance. That gives us an interruption hierarchy to work with. Elements can then interrupt the design with degrees of contrast to the rest of the content using either positioning, treatment, or both. Ta-da! Impact achieved, but gently. No clips round the ear required.

Swinging mood

Human beings are resilient. Among the immersion and occasional interruptions, we even like a little disruption, especially if it’s absurd and funny. The Ling’s Cars website proves it. In fact, we’re so resilient that we can work around all kinds of mayhem to get a seemingly simple task done.

In one study, “The Aesthetics of Reading” (PDF, 480Kb), Dr Kevin Larson of Microsoft and Dr Rosalind Picard of MIT explored the effect of good typography on mood. Two versions of the New Yorker ePeriodical were created. One was typeset well and the other poorly.



They engaged twenty volunteers — half male, half female — and showed the good version to half of the participants. The other half saw the poor version.

The good doctors found that, “there are important differences between good and poor typography that appear to have little effect on common performance measures such as reading speed and comprehension.” In short, good typography didn’t help people read faster or comprehend better.

Oh. On the face of it that seems to invalidate what we designers do. Hold your horses, though! They also found that “the participants who received the good typography performed better on relative subjective duration and on certain cognitive tasks”, and that “good typography induces a good mood.”

This means that even though there were no actual differences in reading speed and comprehension, the people who read the version with good typography thought that it took less time to read, and were induced into a good mood by doing so. Not only that, but by being in a good mood, people were more capable of completing creative tasks faster.

That was a revelation to me. It means that the study showed there is a positive, measurable, emotional and perceptual benefit to good typography and design. To paraphrase: time and tasks fly when you’re having fun!



Source: Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands: Cheering man after the first goal, Netherlands vs. Belgium, Amsterdam, 1931.

So, among all my talk of saccades, fixations, scan paths and typesetting, there is science, and the science helps us qualify our design decisions when we need to, and do our jobs better. The science helps us understand how people will interact with our work, and what the actual benefits are for them, and the products or organisations we serve. Good design equals a subjectively quicker experience, a good mood, objectively faster completion of tasks, and happiness for everyone. Thank you, science!",2012,Jon Tan,jontan,2012-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/science/,design
74,Should We Be Reactive?,"Evolution

Looking at the evolution of the web and the devices we use should help remind us that the times we’re adjusting to are just another step on a journey. These times seem to be telling us that we need to embrace flexibility.

Imagine an HTML file containing nothing but text. It’s viewable on any web-capable device and reasonably readable: the notion of the universality of the web was very much a founding principle. Right from the beginning, browser vendors understood that we’d want text to reflow (why wouldn’t we?), so I consider the first websites to have been fluid. 

As we attempted to exert more control through our designs in the early days of the web, debates about whether we should produce fixed or fluid sites raged. We could create fluid designs using tables, but what we didn’t have then was a wide range of web capable devices or the ability to control this fluidity. The biggest changes occurred when stats showed enough people using a different screen resolution we could cater for.

To me, the techniques of responsive web design provide the control we were missing. Combining new approaches to layout and images with media queries empowered us to learn how to embrace the inherent flexibility of the web in ways to suit our work and the devices used by our audience.

Perhaps another kind of flexibility might be found in how we use context to affect how we present our content; to consider how we might use the information we can access from people, browsers and devices to provide web experiences – effectively creating sites that react to initial or changing circumstances in the relationship between people and our content.

Embracing flexibility

So what is context? Put simply, you could think of it as a secondary piece of information that helps clarify the meaning of the first. It helps set a scene or describe circumstances. I think that Cennydd Bowles has summed it up really well through talks he’s given recently, in which he’s arrived at the acronym DETAILS (Device, Environment, Time, Activity, Individual, Location, Social) – I encourage you to keep an eye out for his next book due in the new year where he’ll explore this idea much further. This clarity over what context could mean in terms of what we do on the web is fundamental, directing us towards ways we might use it.

When you stop to think about it, we’ve been using some basic pieces of this information right from the beginning, like bits of JavaScript or Java applets that serve an appropriate greeting to your site’s visitors, or show their location, or even local weather. But what if we think of this from the beginning of our projects?

We should think about our content first. Once we know this and have a direction, perhaps then we can think about what context, or even multiple contexts, might help us to communicate more effectively.

The real world

There’s always been a disconnect between the real world and the web, which is to be expected. But the world around us is a sea of data; every fundamental building block: people, places, events and things have information waiting to be explored. 

For sites based around physical objects or locations, this divide is really apparent. We don’t ordinarily take the time to describe in code the properties of a place, or consider whether your relationship to the place in the real world should have any impact on your relationship with a site about it.

When I think about local businesses, they have such rich properties to draw on and yet we don’t really explore them in any meaningful way, even through something as simple as opening hours.

Now we have data…

We’ve long had access to the current time both on server- and client-sides. The use of geolocation is easier than ever, but when we look at the range of information we could glean to help us make some choices, maybe there’s some help on the horizon from projects like the W3C Device APIs Working Group. This might prove useful to help make us aware of network and battery conditions of a device, along with the potential to gain data from other sensors, which could tell us about lighting conditions, ambient noise levels and temperature depending on the capabilities of the device.

It may be that our sites have some form of login or access to your profile from another site. Along with data from our devices and browsers, this should give us a sense of how best to talk to our audience in certain situations. We don’t necessarily need to know any personal details, just enough to make decisions about how to present our sites.

The reactive web?

So why reactive web design? I’m hoping that a name might help us to have a common vocabulary not only about what we mean when we talk about context, but how it could be considered through our projects, right from the early stages. How could this manifest itself?

A simple example might be a location-aware panel on your site. Perhaps the space is a little down in your content hierarchy but serves a perfectly valid purpose by default. To visitors outside the country perhaps this works fine, but within your country maybe this panel could be used to communicate more effectively. Further still, if we knew the visitors were in the vicinity, we could talk to them more directly. 

What if both time and location were relevant? This space could work as before but you could consider how time could intersect with your local audience. If you know they’re local and it’s a certain time of day, you could communicate directly with them.

This example isn’t beyond what banner ads often do and uses easily accessible information. There are more unusual combinations we may be able to find, such as movement and presence. Perhaps a site that tells a story, which changes design and content based on whether you’re moving, how long you’ve been on the site and how far you’ve travelled. This isn’t what we typically expect from websites, but we should bear in mind that what websites are now will not be what they become in the future.

You could do much of this contextual presentation through native apps, of course. The Silent History, an app novel written and designed for iPad and iPhone, uses an exploration element, providing “hundreds of location-based stories across the U.S. and around the world. These can be read only when your device’s GPS matches the coordinates of the specified location.” But considering the universality of the web, we could redefine what web-based experiences should be like. Not all methods would work well on the web, but that’s a decision that has to be made for a specific project.

By thinking more broadly about any web-capable device, we can use what we know to provide relevant experiences for our site’s visitors. We need to be sure what we mean by relevant, of course!

Reality bites

While there are incredible possibilities, from a simple panel on a site to something bordering on living sites that evolve and change with our circumstances, we need to act with a degree of pragmatism and understand how much of what we could do is based on assumptions and the bias of our own experiences.

We could go wild with changing the way our content is presented based on contextual information, but if we’re not careful what we end up with confuses and could provide a very fractured experience. As much as possible we need to think more ethnographically, observe and question people in the situations we think may be relevant, and test our assumptions as early as we can. Even on small projects, there may be ways we can validate our assumptions and test with our audience. The key to applying contextual content or cues is not to break the experience between contextual views (as I think we now wouldn’t when hiding content on a mobile view). 

It’s another instance of progressive enhancement – as we know certain pieces of information, we can enhance the experience. Also, if you do change content, how can you not make a more cumbersome experience for your visitors?

It’s all about communication

Content is at the core of what we do, but if we consider context we need to understand the impact on that. The effect could be as subtle as an altered hierarchy, involve swapping out panels of content, or in extreme instances perhaps all of your content might change. In some ways, this extends the notion of adaptive content that Karen McGrane has been talking about, to how we write and store the content we create. Thinking about the the impact of context may require us to re-evaluate our site structure, too. Whatever we decide, we have to be clear what will happen and manage the expectations of our users.

The bottom line

What I’m proposing isn’t that we go crazy and end up with a confused, disjointed set of experiences across the web. What I hope is that starting right from the beginning of a project, we think about what context is and could be, and see what relevance it might have to what we’re trying to communicate. This strategic process leads us to think about design.

We are slowly adapting to what it means to be flexible through responsive and adaptive processes. What does thinking about contextual states mean to us (or designing for state in general)? Does this highlight again how difficult it’ll be for our tools to keep up with our processes and output?

In terms of code, the vast majority of this data comes from the client-side through JavaScript. While we can progressively enhance, this could lead to a lot of code bloat through feature or capability detection, and potentially a lot of conditional loading of scripts. It’s a real shame we don’t get much we can rely on from the server-side – we know how unreliable user agents are!

We need to understand why we’d do this. Are we trying to communicate well and be useful, or doing it to show off? Underneath it all, what do we base our decisions on? Do we have actual insight or are we proceeding from our assumptions and the bias of our own experiences? Scott Jenson summed it up best for me: (to paraphrase) the pain we put people through has to be greatly outweighed by the value we offer.

I see that this could be another potential step in our evolution on the web; continuing this exploration of the flexibility the web allows us. It’s amazing we can do such incredible things from what is essentially a set of disparate, linked documents.",2012,Dan Donald,dandonald,2012-12-09T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/should-we-be-reactive/,design
85,Starting Your Project on the Right Foot (and Keeping It There),"I’m not sure if anything is as terrifying as beginning a new design project. I often spend hours trying to find the best initial footing in a design, so I’ve been working hard to improve my process, particularly for the earliest stages of a project. I want to smooth out the bumps that disrupt my creative momentum and focus on the emotional highs and lows I experience, and then try to minimize the lows and ride the highs as long as possible. 

Design is often a struggle broken up by blissful moments of creative clarity that provide valuable force to move your work forward. Momentum is a powerful tool in creative work, and it’s something we don’t always maximize when we’re working because of the hectic nature of our field. Obviously, every designer is going to have a different process, but I thought I’d share some of the methods I’ve begun to adopt. I hope this will spark a conversation among designers who are interested in looking at process in a new way.

Jump-starting a project

I cannot overstate the importance of immersing yourself in design and collecting ample amounts of inspiration when beginning a project. I make it a daily practice to visit a handful of sites (Dribbble, Graphic Exchange, Web Creme, siteInspire, Designspiration, and others) and save any examples of design that I like. I then sort them into general categories (publication design, illustration, typography, web design, and so on). Enjoying a bit of fresh design every day helps me absorb it and analyze why it’s effective instead of just imitating it. 

Many designers are afraid to look at too much design for fear that they’ll be tempted to copy it, but I feel a steady influx of design inspiration reduces that possibility. You’re much more likely to take the easy way out and rip off a design if you’re scrambling for inspiration after getting stuck. If you are immersed in design from a variety of mediums, you’ll engage your creative brain on multiple levels and have an easier time creating something unique for your project. Looking at good design will not make you a good designer but it will make you a better designer.

Design is design

Try not to limit your visual research to the medium you’re working in. Websites, books, posters and packaging all have their own unique limitations and challenges, and any one of those characteristics could be useful to you. Posters need to grab the viewer and pass on a small tidbit of information; packaging needs to encourage physical interaction; and websites need to encourage exploration. If you know the challenges you’ll be facing, you will know where to look for design that tackles those same problems.

I find it refreshing to look at design from the turn of the nineteenth century, when type was laid out on objects without thought to aesthetics. Many vintage packages break all sorts of modern design rules, and looking at that kind of work is a great way to spark your creativity. Pulling yourself out of the box and away from the rules of what you’re working on can reveal solutions that are innovative and unique. After a little finessing, the warning label text from a 1940s hazardous chemical box from could have the exact type and icon arrangement you need for your project. There’s a massive pool of design to pull from that doesn’t have the limitations the web has, and exploring those design worlds will help you grow your own repertoire.

If all else fails, start with the footer

The very beginning of a project is the most frustrating point in a project for me. I’m trying to figure out typeface combinations, colors and the overall voice of the design, and until I find the right solutions, I’m a wreck. I’ve found often that my frustration stems from trying to solve too many problems at once. The beginning of a project has a lot of moving targets, nearly endless possible solutions, and constantly changing variables. You’ll knock out one problem only to discover your solution doesn’t jive with something you worked out earlier — you end up designing in circles.

If you find yourself getting stuck at the beginning of a website design, try working out one specific element of the site and see what emerges. I’m going to recommend the footer. Why? Footers can easily be ignored in a design or become a dumping ground for items that couldn’t be worked into the main layout. But, at the start of most projects, the minimum content requirements for the footer are usually established. There needs to be a certain number of links, social media buttons, copyright details, a search bar, and so on. It’s a self-contained item within the design that has a specific purpose, and that’s a great element to focus on when you’re stuck in a design. Colors, typefaces, link styles, input fields and buttons can all be sketched out from just the footer. It’s a very flexible element that can be as prominent or subtle as you want, and it’s a solid starting point for setting the tone and style of a site.

Save the details

Designers love details. I love details. But don’t let nitpicking early on in your process kill your creative momentum. Design is an emotional process, and being frustrated or defeated by a tricky problem or a graphical detail you just can’t nail down can deflate your creative energies. If you hit a roadblock, set it aside and tackle another piece of the project. As you spend time engaged in a design, the style you develop will evolve according to the needs of the content, and you might arrive naturally at a solution that will work perfectly for the problem that had you stuck before. 

If I find myself working on one particular element for more than a half an hour without any clear movement, I shelve it. Designers often wear their obsessive detail-oriented tendencies as a badge of honor, but there’s a difference between making the design better and wasting time. If you’ve spent hours nudging elements around pixel by pixel and can’t settle on something, it probably means what you’re doing isn’t making a huge improvement on the design. Don’t be afraid to let it lie and come at it again with fresh eyes. You will be better equipped to tackle the finer points of a project once you’ve got the broad strokes defined.

Have a plan when you start and stop designing

We all know that creativity isn’t something you can turn on effortlessly, and it’s easy to forget the emotional process that goes along with design. If you leave a project in a place of frustration, it’s going to stay with you in your free time and affect you negatively, like a dark cloud of impending disaster. Try to end each design session with a victory, a small bit of definable progress that you can take with you in your downtime. Even something as small as finding the right opacity for the interior shadow on the search bar in the header of the site is a win. Likewise, when you return to a project after a break, it can be difficult to get the ball rolling on the design again if you set it down without a clear path for the next steps. I find that I work on details best when I’m returning from downtime, when I’m fresh and re-energized and ready to dig in again. Try to pick out at least one element you’d like to fine-tune when you are winding down in a design session and use it to kick-start your next session.

Content is king

I would argue there is nothing more crucial to the success of a design than having the content defined from the outset. Designing without content is similar to designing without an audience, and designing with vague ideas of content types and character limits is going to result in a muted design that doesn’t reach its full potential. Images and language go hand in hand with design, and can take a design from functional to outstanding if you have them available from the outset. We don’t always have the luxury of having content to build a design around, but fight for it whenever you can. For example, if the site you are designing is full of technical jargon, your paragraphs might need a longer line length to accommodate the longer words being used. 

Often, working with content will lead to design solutions you wouldn’t have come to otherwise. Design speaks to content, and content speaks to design. Lorem ipsum doesn’t speak to anyone (unless you know Latin, in which case, congratulations!).

Every project has its own set of needs, and every designer has his or her own method of working. There’s obviously no perfect process to design, and being dogmatic about process can be just as harmful as not having one. Exposing yourself to new design and new ways of designing is an easy way to test your skills and grow. When things are hard and you can’t get any momentum going on a design, this is when your skill set is truly challenged. We all hope to get wonderful projects with great assets and ample creative possibilities, but you won’t always be so blessed, and this is when the quality of your process is really going to shine.",2012,Bethany Heck,bethanyheck,2012-12-02T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/starting-your-project-on-the-right-foot/,process
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 to the problem might look like first, rather than coding speculatively to find out.

There are easy ways you can get into this habit of putting the thought and design up front, and it doesn’t have to mean spending more time on the project as a whole. It also doesn’t have to result in reams of functional specifications. Instead, let the code itself form the specification.

As JavaScript applications become more complex, unit testing is becoming ever more important. So embrace it, whether you prefer QUnit, or Mocha, or any of the other JavaScript testing frameworks out there. The TDD (or test-driven development) pattern is all about writing the tests first and then writing functional code to pass those tests; or, if you prefer, code that meets the specification given by the tests.

Sounds like a hassle at first, but once you get into the rhythm of it you should find that the time spent writing tests up front is no greater, and often significantly less, than the time you would have spent fixing bugs afterwards.

If what you’re working on requires an API between client and server (usually Ajax but this can apply to any method of sending or receiving data) then spend a bit of time with the back-end developer to design the data contracts, before either of you cut any code. Work out what the API endpoints are going to be, and what the data structure you’ll get back from a certain endpoint looks like. A mock JSON object documented on a wiki is enough and it can be atomic. Don’t worry about planning the entire project at once, just plan enough to get on with your current tasks.

Definition in this way doesn’t have to make your API immutable – change is still fine – but if you know roughly where you’re heading, then not only can your team’s efforts become more parallel, but you’re far more likely to have an easier time making it all work. And again, you have a specification – the shape of the data – to write your JavaScript against.

Putting everything together, you end up with a logical flow of development, from the specification agreed with the client (your backlog), to the specification agreed with your team (the API contract design), to the specification agreed with your code (your unit tests). Hopefully, there will be ample clues in all of this to inform your front-end library choices, because by then you should have a better picture of what you’re going to need.

What the framework?

As a JavaScript developer predominantly, these are the choices I’m particularly interested in – how and why you use JavaScript libraries and frameworks, both what you expect from them and what you actually get.

If we look back at how web development, and specifically JavaScript development has progressed – from the earliest days of using lines and lines of Dreamweaver code-barf to make an image rollover effect, to today’s large frameworks that handle working with the DOM, Ajax communication and visual effects all in one hit – the purpose of it is clear: to smooth over the inconsistent bumps between browsers and give a solid, reliable, predictable base on which to put our desired functionality.

Understanding what we expect the language as a specification to do, and matching that to what we observe browsers actually doing, and then smoothing out the differences, is a big job. Since the language and the implementations are also changing as we go along, it also feels like a never-ending job. So make full use of this valuable effort. Use jQuery or YUI or anything else you’re comfortable with, but it still pays to think early on about what you need your library to do and what the best choice is to meet that need.

I’ve come in to projects as a fixer and found, to take a recent example, that jQuery UI was being used just to provide a date picker and a modal effect. That’s a lot of code weight to provide two fairly simple pieces of functionality that could easily be covered by smaller plugins. Which isn’t to say that jQuery UI itself is a bad choice, but I could see that it had been included late on just to do those things, whereas a more considered approach would have been to put the library in early and use it more universally.

There are other choices, too. If you automatically throw in jQuery (or whatever your favourite main library is) to a small site with limited functionality, you might only touch a tiny fraction of its scope. In my own development I started looking at what I actually needed from a JavaScript library. For a simple project like What the Framework?, all jQuery needed to do was listen for .ready() and then perform some light DOM selection before handing over to a client-side MVC framework. So perhaps there was another way to go about this while still avoiding the cross-browser headaches.

Deleting jQuery

But the jQuery pattern is compelling and familiar. And once you’re comfortable with something, it’s a bit of an effort to force yourself out of that comfort zone and learn. But looking back at my whole career, I realised that I’ve relearned pretty much everything I do, probably several times, since I started out. So it’s worth keeping in mind that learning and trying new things is how development has advanced to where it is now, and how it will keep advancing in the future.

In the end this lead me to Ender, which is billed as an NPM-style package manager for the browser, letting you search for and manage small, loosely coupled modules and their dependencies, and compile them to one file with a common API.

For What the Framework I ended up with a set of DOM tools, Underscore and Knockout, all minified into 25kb of JavaScript. This compares really well with 32kb minified for jQuery on its own, and Ender’s use of the dollar variable and the jQuery-like syntax in many modules makes switching over a low-friction experience.

On more complex projects, where you’re really going to use all the features of something like jQuery, but want to minimise the loading of other dependencies when you don’t need them, I’ve recently started looking at Jam. This uses the RequireJS pattern to compile commonly used code into a library file and then manage dependencies and bring in others on a per-page basis depending on how you need it. Again, it all comes down to thinking about what you need and using it only when you need it. And the configurability of tools like Ender or Jam allow you to be responsive to changing requirements as your project grows.

There is no right answer

That’s not to say this way of working automatically makes things easier. It doesn’t. On a large, long-running project or one where future functionality is unknown, it’s still hard to predict and plan for everything – at least until crystal balls as a service come about. But by including strong engineering practices in your front-end, and trying to minimise technical debt, you’re at least giving yourself a decent safety net to guard against the “can we just…?” tendencies that are a fact of life.

So, really, this is not an advocation of using a particular technology or framework, because I can’t tell you what works for you or your team. But what I can tell you is that working this way round has done wonders for my productivity and enthusiasm, both for code quality and for trying out new libraries. Give it a go, you might like it!",2012,Stephen Fulljames,stephenfulljames,2012-12-07T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/think-first-code-later/,process
96,Unwrapping the Wii U Browser,"The Wii U was released on 18 November 2012 in the US, and 30 November in the UK. It’s the first eighth generation home console, the first mainstream second-screen device, and it has some really impressive browser specs.

Consoles are not just for games now: they’re marketed as complete entertainment solutions. Internet connectivity and browser functionality have gone from a nice-to-have feature in game consoles to a selling point. In Nintendo’s case, they see it as a challenge to design an experience that’s better than browsing on a desktop.


	Let’s make a browser that users can use on a daily basis, something that can really handle everything we’ve come to expect from a browser and do it more naturally.
Sasaki – Iwata Asks on Nintendo.com


With 11% of people using console browsers to visit websites, it’s important to consider these devices right from the start of projects. Browsing the web on a TV or handheld console is a very different experience to browsing on a desktop or a mobile phone, and has many usability implications.

Console browser testing

When I’m testing a console browser, one of the first things I do is run Niels Leenheer’s HTML5 test and Lea Verou’s CSS3 test. I use these benchmarks as a rough comparison of the standards each browser supports.

In October, IE9 came out for the Xbox 360, scoring 120/500 in the HTML5 test and 32% in the CSS3 test. The PS Vita also had an update to its browser in recent weeks, jumping from 58/500 to 243/500 in the HTML5 test, and 32% to 55% in the CSS3 test. Manufacturers have been stepping up their game, trying to make their browsing experiences better.

To give you an idea of how the Wii U currently compares to other devices, here are the test results of the other TV consoles I’ve tested. I’ve written more in-depth notes on TV and portable console browsers separately.


Year of releaseHTML5 scoreCSS3 scoreNotes
Wii U2012258/50048%Runs a Netfront browser (WebKit).
Wii200689/500Wouldn’t runRuns an Opera browser.
PS3200668/50038%Runs a Netfront browser (WebKit).
Xbox 3602005120/50032%A browser for the Xbox (IE9) was only recently released in October 2012. The Kinect provides voice and gesture support. There’s also SmartGlass, a second-screen app for platforms including Android and iOS.


The Wii U browser is Nintendo’s fifth attempt at a console browser. Based on these tests, it’s already looking promising.

Why console browsers used to suck

It takes a lot of system memory to run a good browser, and the problem of older consoles is that they don’t have much memory available. The original Nintendo DS needs a memory expansion pack just to run the browser, because the 4MB it has on board isn’t enough. I noticed that even on newer devices, some sites fail to load because the system runs out of memory.

The Wii came out six years ago with an Opera browser. Still being used today and with such low resources available, the latest browser features can’t reasonably be supported. There’s also pressure to add features such as tabs, and enable gamers to use the browser while a game is paused. Nintendo’s browser team have the advantage of higher specs to play with on their new console (1GB of memory dedicated to games, 1GB for the system), which makes it easier to support the latest standards. But it’s still a challenge to fit everything in.


	…even though we have more memory, the amount of memory we can use for the browser is limited compared to a PC, so we’ve worked in ways that efficiently allocates the available memory per tab. To work on this, the experience working on the browser for the Nintendo 3DS system under a limited memory constraint helped us greatly.
Sasaki – Iwata Asks on Nintendo.com


In the box

The Wii U consists of a console unit which plugs into a TV (the first to support HD), and a wireless controller known as a gamepad. The gamepad is a lot bigger than typical TV console controllers, and it has a touchscreen on the front. The touchscreen is resistive, responding to pressure rather than electrical current. It’s intended to be used with a stylus (provided) but fingers can be used.

It might look a bit like one, but the gamepad isn’t a portable console designed to be taken out like the PS Vita. The gamepad can be used as a standalone screen with the TV switched off, as long as it’s within range of the console unit – it basically piggybacks off it.



It’s surprisingly lightweight for its size. It has a wealth of detectors including 9-axis control. Sensors wake the device from sleep when it’s picked up. There’s also a camera on the front, and a headphone port and speakers, with audio coming through both the TV and the gamepad giving a surround sound feel.

Up to six tabs can be opened at once, and the browser can be used while games are paused. There’s a really nice little feature here – the current game’s name is saved as a search option, so it’s really quick to look up contextual content such as walk-throughs.

Controls

Only one gamepad can be used to control the browser, but if there are Wiimotes connected, they can be used as pointers. This doesn’t let the user do anything except point (they each get a little hand icon with a number on it displayed on the screen), but it’s interesting that multiple people can be interacting with a site at once.



See a bigger version

The gamepad can also be used as a simple TV remote control, with basic functions such as bringing up the programme guide, adjusting volume and changing channel. I found the simplified interface much more usable than a full-featured remote control.



I’m used to scrolling being sluggish on consoles, but the Wii U feels almost as snappy as a desktop browser. Sites load considerably faster compared with others I’ve tested.

Tilt-scroll

Holding down ZL and ZR while tilting the screen activates an Instapaper-style tilt to scroll for going up and down the page quickly, useful for navigating very long pages.

Second screen

The TV mirrors most of what’s on the gamepad, although the TV screen just displays the contents of the browser window, while the gamepad displays the site along with the browser toolbar.

When the user with the gamepad is typing, the keyboard is hidden from the TV screen – there’s just a bit of text at the top indicating what’s happening on the gamepad.

Pressing X draws an on-screen curtain over the TV, hiding the content that’s on the gamepad from the TV. Pressing X again opens the curtains, revealing what’s on the gamepad. Holding the button down plays a drumroll before it’s released and the curtains are opened. I can imagine this being used in meetings as a fun presentation tool.




	In a sense, browsing is a personal activity, but you get the idea that people will be coming and going through the room. When I first saw the curtain function, it made a huge impression on me. I walked around with it all over the company saying, “They’ve really come up with something amazing!”
Iwata – Iwata Asks on Nintendo.com


Text

Writing text

Unlike the capacitive screens on smartphones, the Wii U’s resistive screen needs to be pressed harder than you’re probably used to for registering a touch event. The gamepad screen is big, which makes it much easier to type on this device than other handheld consoles, even without the stylus. It’s still more fiddly than a full-sized keyboard though. When you’re designing forms, consider the extra difficulty console users experience.



Although TV screens are physically big, they are typically viewed from further away than desktop screens. This makes readability an issue, so Nintendo have provided not one, but four ways to zoom in and out:


	Double-tapping on the screen.
	Tapping the on-screen zoom icons in the browser toolbar.
	Pressing the + and - buttons on the device.
	Moving the right analogue stick up and down.


As well as making it easy to zoom in and out, Nintendo have done a few other things to improve the reading experience on the TV.

System font

One thing you’ll notice pretty quickly is that the browser lacks all the fonts we’re used to falling back to. Serif fonts are replaced with the system’s sans-serif font. I couldn’t get Typekit’s font loading method to work but Fontdeck, which works slightly differently, does display custom fonts.

 The system font has been optimised for reading at a distance and is easy to distinguish because the lowercase e has a quirky little tilt.

Don’t lose :focus

Using the D-pad to navigate is similar to using a keyboard. Individual links are focused on, with a blue outline drawn around them.

The recently redesigned An Event Apart site is an example that improves the experience for keyboard and D-pad users. They’ve added a yellow background colour to links on focus. It feels nicer than the default blue outline on its own.



Media

This year, television overtook PCs as the primary way to watch online video content. TV is the natural environment for video, and 42% of online TVs in the US are connected to the internet via a console. Unfortunately, the <video> tag isn’t supported in most console browsers, and those that have Flash installed often have such an old version that the video won’t play.

I suspect this has been a big driver in getting console browsers to support web standards. The Wii U is designed with video content in mind. It doesn’t support Flash but it does support the HTML5 <video> tag.

Some video formats can’t be played, but those that are supported bring up an optimised interface with a custom scrub bar. This is where the device switches from mirroring the TV to being a second screen. The full-screen video is displayed on the TV, and the interface on the gamepad.

The really clever bit is that while a video is playing, the gamepad user can keep the video playing on the TV screen while searching for another video or browsing the web. This is the same for images too.

On the left, the video is being shown full-screen on the TV and gamepad. Only the gamepad gets the scrub bar. Clicking the slide up/down button (circled) lets the gamepad user browse the web while the video on the TV continues to play full-screen, as shown in the image on the right.

There’s support for SVG images, and they look great on a high-definition TV screen. However, there’s currently no way to save or download files.

Preparing for console users

I wasn’t expecting to be quite as impressed as I am by this browser. It’s encouraging to see console makers investing time into improving the experience as well as the standards support. In the same way there was an explosion in mobile browser use as the experience got better, I’m sure we’ll see the same with console browsers as the experience improves.

The value of detection

Consoles offer a range of inputs including gesture, voice and controller buttons. That means we have to think about more diverse methods of input than just touch and click.

This is where I could tell you to add some detection methods such as user agent string sniffing to target a different experience for console users. But the majority of the time, that really isn’t necessary. TV console browsers are getting a lot better at compensating for the living room environment, and they’re designed to work with websites that haven’t been optimised for this context.

Rather than tighten our grip on optimising experiences for every device out there, we’ve got to be pragmatic. There are so many new devices coming out every week, our designs need to be future-proof rather than fixed to a particular device in time.

Even fuzzy device detection isn’t reliable – the PS Vita declares itself to be mobile, a mobile device and a Kindle Fire tablet, while the two DS devices state they’re neither mobile nor mobile phones nor tablets, but computers. They’re weird outliers, but they’re still important devices to consider.

Thinking broadly about how our designs will be interacted with and viewed on a TV screen can help improve that experience for everyone. This is about accessibility. Considering how someone uses a site with a D-pad, we can improve the experience for keyboard users. When we think about colour contrast and text legibility on TV screens, we can apply that for anyone who reads content on the web. So why just offer this to the TV users?

Playing with the browser


	…we want to prove to them through this Wii U Internet Browser that browsing itself can be an entertainment.
Iwata – Iwata Asks on Nintendo.com


Although I’m cautious about designing experiences for specific devices, it’s fun to experiment with the technology available. Nintendo have promised web developers access to the Wii U’s buttons and sensors. There’s already some JavaScript documentation, and a demo for you to try.

If you’re interested in making your own games, thanks to web standards, a lot of HTML5 games work already on the device. Matt Hackett wrote up his experience of testing the game he built, and he talks about some of features the browser lacks. There’s certainly an incentive there for console manufacturers to improve their HTML5 support so more games can be played in their browser.

What excites me about consoles is that it’s like looking at what might be available to us in future browsers. As well as thinking about how our sites work on small screens, we should also consider big screens. We’re already figuring out how images should work at different screen widths and connection speeds, but we’ve also got some interesting challenges ahead of us catering for second screen experiences and 3D-enabled devices. 

So, this Christmas, if you’re huddled round the game console or a smart TV, give the browser in it a try.",2012,Anna Debenham,annadebenham,2012-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/unwrapping-the-wii-u-browser/,ux
94,Using Questionnaires for Design Research,"How do you ask the right questions? 

In this article, I share a bunch of tips and practical advice on how to write and use your own surveys for design research.

I’m an audience researcher – I’m not a designer or developer. I’ve spent much of the last thirteen years working with audience data both in creative agencies and on the client-side. I’m also a member of the Market Research Society. I run user surveys and undertake user research for our clients at the design studio I run with my husband – Mark Boulton Design.

So let’s get started!

Who are you designing for?

Good web designers and developers appreciate the importance of understanding the audience they are designing or building a website or app for. I’m assuming that because you are reading a quality publication like 24 ways that you fall into this category, and so I won’t begin this article with a lecture.

Suffice it to say, it’s a good idea to involve research of some sort during the life cycle of every project you undertake. I don’t just mean visual or competitor research, which of course is also very important. I mean looking at or finding your own audience or user data. Whether that be auditing existing data or research available from the client, carrying out user interviews, A/B testing, or conducting a simple questionnaire with users, any research is better than none. If you create personas as a design tool, they should always be based on research, so you will need to have plenty of data to hand for that.

Where do I start?

In the initial kick-off stages of a project, it’s a good idea to start by asking your client (when working in-house you still have a client – you might even be the client) what research or audience data they have available. Some will have loads – analytics, surveys, focus groups and insights – from talking to customers. Some won’t have much at all and you’ll be hard pressed to find out much about the audience. It’s best to review existing research first without rushing headlong into doing new research. Get a picture of what the data tells you and perhaps get this into a document – who, what, why and how are they using this website or app? What gaps are there in existing research? What else do you need to know? Then you can decide what else you need to do to plug these gaps. Think about the information first before deciding on the methodology. The rest of my article talks mostly about running self-completion online surveys. You can of course do face-to-face surveys, self-completion written questionnaires or phone polls, but I won’t cover those here. That’s for another article.

Why run a survey?

Surveys are great for getting a broad picture of your audience. As long as they are designed carefully, you can create an overview of them, how they use the site and their opinions of it, with an idea of which parts of this picture are more important than others. By using a limited amount of open-ended questions, you can also get some more qualitative feedback or insights on your website or app. The clients we work with surprisingly often don’t have much in the way of audience research available, even basic analytics, so I will often suggest running a short survey, just to create a picture of who is out there.

OK, what should I do first?

Before you rush into writing questions, stop and think about what you’re trying to find out. Remember being in school when you studied science and you had to propose a hypothesis? This could be a starting point – something to prove or disprove. Or, even better, write a research brief. It doesn’t have to be long; it can be just a sentence that encapsulates what you’re trying to do, like a good creative brief. For the purposes of this article, I created a short, slightly silly survey on Christmas and beliefs in Father Christmas.

My research brief was:


	To find out more about people’s beliefs about Father Christmas and their experiences of Christmas.


Inevitably, as you start thinking of what questions to ask, you will find that you go off at tangents or your client will want you to add in everything but the kitchen sink. In order for your questionnaire not to get too long and lose focus, you could write lists of what it is and what it’s not. This is how I’d apply it to my Christmas questionnaire example:

What it is about


	How people communicate with Father Christmas
	If someone’s background has affected their likelihood of believing in Father Christmas


What it is not about


	What colour to change Father Christmas’s coat to
	Father Christmas’s elves


Let’s get down to business: the questions. 

Kinds of questions

There are two basic kinds of questions: open-ended and closed. Closed questions limit answers by giving the respondent a number of predefined lists of options to choose from. Typically, these are multiple-choice questions with a list of responses. You can either select one or tick all that apply. Another useful type of closed question I often use is a rating scale, where a respondent can assess a situation along a continuum of values. These can also be useful as a measure of advocacy or strength of feeling about something. There is a standard measure called the Net Promoter score, which measures how likely someone is to recommend your product or service to a friend or acquaintance. It’s a useful benchmark as you can compare your scores to others in a similar sector.



Open-ended questions often take the form of a statement which requires a response. Generally, respondents are given a text box to fill in. It’s useful to limit this in some way so that people have an idea of how long the expected response should be; for example, a single line for an email address (Q18), or a larger text area for a longer response (Q6).

If you plan to send your survey out to a large number of people, I would suggest using mostly closed questions, unless you want to spend a long time wading through comments and hand-coded responses. I’d always advise adding a general request at the end of a survey (‘Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?’). You’d be surprised how many interesting and insightful comments people will add.

There are times when it’s better to provide an open-ended text box rather than a predefined list makes assumptions about your audience’s groupings. For example, we ran a short survey for our Gridset beta testers and rather than assume we knew who they were, we decided to ask an open-ended question: “What is your current job title?”



The analysis took quite a bit longer than responses using a predefined list, but it meant that we were able to make sure we didn’t miss anyone. And next time we run a survey for Gridset, I can use the responses gathered from this survey to help create a predefined list to make analysis easier.

What to ask

The questions to ask depend on what you want to know, but your brief and lists of what the survey is and isn’t should help here. I always ask the design team and client to give me ideas of what they are interested in finding out, and combine this with a mix of new and standard questions I have used in other surveys. I find Survey Monkey’s question bank a very useful source of example questions and help with tricky wording.

I always include simple demographics so I can compare my results to the population at large or internet users as a whole – just going on age, gender and location can be quite illuminating. For example, with the Christmas survey, I can see that the respondents were typical of the online design and dev community, mainly young and male.

If appropriate, I add questions on disability, ethnic background, religion and community of interest. Questions about ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, disability and other sensitive subjects can feel awkward and difficult to ask. This is not a good reason to not ask them. Perhaps you’re working for a public sector client, like a local council, so it’s likely you will need to consider groups of people who maybe under-represented, who may have differing views to others, or who you need to look at specifically as a subset.

How to ask

Although they may seem clunky and wordy, it’s often best to use the census wording or professional body wording for such demographic questions. For example, I used the UK census 2011 wording for Wales on my Christmas questionnaire in my questions on religion [PDF] (Q16) and ethnicity [PDF] (Q17). I had to adapt them slightly for the Survey Monkey format – self-completion online, rather than pen and paper – which is why “White Welsh” came up as the first option for the ethnicity question. For similar questions for US audiences, try the Census Bureau website.

When conducting a survey for a project that has a global audience, you need to consider who your primary audience is. For example, I recently created a questionnaire for a global news website. A large proportion of its audience is based in the USA, so I was careful to word things in a way Americans would find familiar. I used the US ethnic background census question wording and options, and looked at data for US competitor news websites to decide which to include.

You should also consider people whose first language isn’t English. Working as an audience researcher at BBC Wales, every survey we did was bilingual. I’ve also recently run a user survey in Arabic using Google Forms. During this project, we found that while Survey Monkey supports different languages, including Arabic, the text ran left to right with no option to change it to right to left – an essential when it comes to reading Arabic! If research is a deliverable in a client project, and you know you’ll need to conduct it in a foreign language, always build in extra time for translation at both the questionnaire design and analysis stages. Make sure you also allow for plenty of checks. In this case we had to change to Google Forms after initially creating our survey with Survey Monkey to get the functionality we needed.

Look and feel

Think about the survey as another way your audience will experience your brand. Take care getting the tone of voice right. There are plenty of great articles and books out there about tone of voice – try Letting Go of the Words by Ginny Redish for starters, or Brand Language by Liz Doig. The basic rule of thumb is to sound like a human, and use clear and friendly language. If, like me, you are lucky enough to work with journalists or copy editors, you should ask for their help, particularly in the preamble, linking text and closing statements. I find it helpful to break my questions down into sections and to have a page for each. I then have an introductory piece of text for each section to guide the respondent through the survey.

You should also make sure you check with your designers how your survey looks – use a company logo and branding, and make the typography legible. Many survey apps like Survey Monkey and Google Forms have a progress bar. This is helpful for users to see how far through your survey they are. I generally time the survey and give an indication in the preamble: “This survey will only take five minutes of your time.”

You also need to think about how you will technically serve the questionnaire. For example, will it be via email, social media, a pop-up or lightbox on your website, or (not recommended but possible) in an ad space?

Ethical considerations

Something else to think about are any local laws that govern how you collect and store data, such as the Data Protection Act in the UK. As a member of the Market Research Society, I am also obliged to consider its guidelines, but even if you’re not, it’s always a good idea to deal with personal data ethically.

If you collect personal data that can identify individuals, you must ask their permission to share it with others, and store it securely for no longer than two years. If you want to contact people afterwards, you must ask for their permission. If you ask for email addresses, as I did in question 18, you have a ready-made sample for a further survey, interviews or focus groups. Remember, you shouldn’t survey people under sixteen years old without the permission of their parents or legal guardians, so if you know your website is likely to be used by children, you must ask for verification of age early on, and your survey should close someone answers that they are under sixteen. The ESOMAR guidelines for online research [PDF] are well worth reading, as they go into detail about such issues, as well as privacy guidelines – using cookies, storing IP addresses, and so on.

Tools

Unless you work in-house and have proprietary software, or at a market research agency and you’re using specialist software such as Snap or IBM SPSS Statistics (previously just SPSS), you will need to use a good tool to run your survey, collect your responses and, ideally, help with the analysis. I like Survey Monkey because of the question bank and analysis tools. The software graphs your results and does simple cross-tabbing and filtering. What this means is you can slice the data in more interesting ways and delve a bit deeper. For example, in the Gridset questionnaire I mentioned earlier, I cross-tabbed responses to questions against whether a person worked in-house, for an agency or as a freelancer. 

Other well known online tools that I also use from time to time are Wufoo and Google Forms. Smart Surveys is a similar service to Survey Monkey and it’s used by many leading brands in the UK. Snap Surveys mentioned above is a well-established player in the market research scene, used a lot for face-to-face surveys and also on tablets and smartphones.

Analysis

Analysis is often overlooked but is as important as the design of the questionnaire. Don’t just rely on looking at the summary report and charts generated as standard by your form or survey software. Spend time with your data. Spend at least a week now and then if you can, looking at the data. Keep coming back to it and tweaking or cutting it a different way to see if there are any different pictures. Slice it up in different ways to reveal new insights. Here is the data from my dummy survey (apart from the open-ended responses). 

For open-ended questions, you can analyse collaboratively. Print and cut out the open-ended responses and do a cluster analysis or affinity sort with a colleague. 



Discussing the comments helps you to understand them. You will also find the design team are more likely to buy into the research as they have uncovered the insights for themselves. Always make sure to treat open-ended responses sensitively and don’t share anything publicly in a way that identifies the respondent.

Write a report

Never hand over a dataset to your client without a summary of the findings. Data on its own can be skewed to suit the reader’s needs, and not everyone is able to find the story in a dataset. Even if it’s not a deliverable, it’s always a good idea to capture your findings in a report of some sort. Use graphs sparingly to show really interesting things or to aid the reader’s understanding. I have written a quick dummy report using the data from the Christmas questionnaire so you can see how it’s done.

I highly recommend Brian Suda’s book A Practical Guide to Designing with Data for tips on how to present data effectively, but that’s a subject that benefits a whole article (indeed book) in itself. 

I am not a designer. I am a researcher, so I never write design recommendations in a report unless they have been talked about or suggested by the designers I work with. More often, I write up the results and we talk about them and what impact they have on the project or design. Often they lead to more questions or further research.

So that’s it: a brief introduction to using questionnaires for design research. Here’s a quick summary to remind you what I have talked about, and a list of resources if you’re interested in reading further.

Top 10 things to remember when using questionnaires for design research:


	Start by auditing existing research to identify gaps in data.
	Write a research brief. Work out exactly what you’re trying to find out – what is the survey about, and what is it not about?
	The two basic kinds of questions are open-ended and closed.
	Closed questions limit responses by giving the respondent a number of predefined lists of options to choose from (multiple choice, rating scales, and so on).
	Open-ended questions are often in the form of a statement which requires a response. Always ask one at the end of a questionnaire.
	Always include simple demographics to enable you to compare your sample against the population in general.
	It’s best to use official census or professional body wording for questions on ethnicity, disability and religion.
	Be sure to think carefully about your tone of voice and the look of your questionnaire.
	Pay attention to guidelines and laws on storing personal data, cookies and privacy.
	Invest plenty of time in analysis and report writing. Don’t just look at the obvious – dig deep for more interesting insights.


Some useful resources for further study

Online research


	Design Research: Methods and Perspectives edited by Brenda Laurel
	Online Research Essentials by Brenda Russell and John Purcell
	Handbook of Online and Social Media Research by Ray Poynter
	ESOMAR guidelines for online research [PDF]
	Online questionnaires


Market research books on questionnaire design


	Using Questionnaires in Small-Scale Research: A Beginner’s Guide by Pamela Munn
	Questionnaire Design by A N Oppenheim
	Developing a Questionnaire by Bill Gillham",2012,Emma Boulton,emmaboulton,2012-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/using-questionnaires-for-design-research/,business
23,Animating Vectors with SVG,"It is almost 2014 and fifteen years ago the W3C started to develop a web-based scalable vector graphics (SVG) format. As web technologies go, this one is pretty old and well entrenched. 

See the Pen yJflC by Drew McLellan (@drewm) on CodePen


Embed not working on your device? Try direct. 

Unlike rasterized images, SVG files will stay crisp and sharp at any resolution. With high-DPI phones, tablets and monitors, all those rasterized icons are starting to look a bit old and blocky. There are several options to get simpler, decorative pieces to render smoothly and respond to various device widths, shapes and sizes. Symbol fonts are one option; the other is SVG.

I’m a big fan of SVG. SVG is an XML format, which means it is possible to write by hand or to script. The most common way to create an SVG file is through the use of various drawing applications like Illustrator, Inkscape or Sketch. All of them open and save the SVG format.

But, if SVG is so great, why doesn’t it get more attention?

The simple answer is that for a long time it wasn’t well supported, so no one touched the technology. SVG’s adoption has always been hampered by browser support, but that’s not the case any more. Every modern browser (at least three versions back) supports SVG. Even IE9. 

Although the browsers support SVG, it is implemented in many different ways.

SVG in HTML

Some browsers allow you to embed SVG right in the HTML: the <svg> element. Treating SVG as a first-class citizen works — sometimes. Another way to embed SVG is via the <img> element; using the src attribute, you can refer to an SVG file. Again, this only works sometimes and leaves you in a tight space if you need to have a fallback for older browsers. The most common solution is to use the <object> element, with the data attribute referencing the SVG file. When a browser does not support this, it falls back to the content inside the <object>. This could be a rasterized fallback <img>. This method gets you the best of both worlds: a nice vector image with an alternative rasterized image for browsers that don’t support SVG. The downside is that you need to manage both formats, and some browsers will download both the SVG and the rasterized version, becoming a performance problem.

Alexey Ten came up with a brilliant little trick that uses inline SVG combined with an SVG <image> element. This has an SVG href pointing to the vector SVG representation and a src attribute to the rasterized version. Older browsers will rewrite the <image> element as <img> and use the rasterized src attribute, but modern browsers will show the vector SVG.

<svg width=""96"" height=""96"">
    <image xlink:href=""svg.svg"" src=""svg.png"" width=""96"" height=""96""/>
</svg>

It is a great workaround for most situations. You will have to determine the browsers you want or need to support and consider performance issues to decide which method is best for you.

So it can be used in HTML. Why?

There are two compelling reasons why vector graphics in the form of icons and symbols are going to be important on the web. With higher resolution screens, going from 72dpi to 200, 300, even over 400dpi, your rasterized icons are looking a little too blocky. As we zoom and print, we expect the visuals on the site to also stay smooth and crisp.

The other main reason vector graphics are useful is scaling. As responsive websites become the norm, we need a way to dynamically readjust the heights, widths and styles of various elements. SVG handles this perfectly, since vectors remain smooth when changing size.

SVG files are text-based, so they’re small and can be gzipped nicely. There are also techniques for creating SVG sprites to further squeeze out performance gains. But SVG really shines when you begin to couple it with JavaScript. Since SVG elements are part of the DOM, they can be interacted with just like any other element you are used to.

The folks at Vox Media had an ingenious little trick with their SVG for a Playstation and Xbox One reviews. I’ve used the same technique for the 24 ways example. Vox Media spent a lot of time creating SVG line art of the two consoles, but once in place the artwork scaled and resized beautifully. 

They still had another trick up their sleeves. In their example, they knew each console was line art, so they used SVG’s line dash property to simulate the lines being drawn by animating the growth of the line by small percentage increments until the lines were complete.

This is a great example of a situation where the alternatives wouldn’t be as straightforward to implement. Using an animated GIF would create a heavy file since it would need to contain all the frames of the animation at a large size to permit scaling; even then, smooth aliasing would be lost. canvas and plenty of JavaScript would be another alternative, but this is a rasterized format. It would need be redrawn at each scale, which is certainly possible, but smoothness would be lost when zooming or printing.

The HTML, SVG and JavaScript for this example is less than 4KB! Let’s have a quick look at the code:

<script>
var current_frame = 0;
var total_frames = 60;
var path = new Array();
var length = new Array();
for(var i=0; i<4;i++){
	path[i] = document.getElementById('i'+i);
	l = path[i].getTotalLength();
	length[i] = l;
	path[i].style.strokeDasharray = l + ' ' + l; 
	path[i].style.strokeDashoffset = l;
}
var handle = 0;

var draw = function() {
   var progress = current_frame/total_frames;
   if (progress > 1) {
     window.cancelAnimationFrame(handle);
   } else {
     current_frame++;
     for(var j=0; j<path.length;j++){
	     path[j].style.strokeDashoffset = Math.floor(length[j] * (1 - progress));
     }
     handle = window.requestAnimationFrame(draw);
   }
};
draw();
</script>

First, we need to initialize a few variables to set the current frame, the number of frames, how fast the animation will run, and we get each of the paths based on their IDs. With those paths, we set the dash and dash offset.

path[i].style.strokeDasharray = l + ' ' + l; 
path[i].style.strokeDashoffset = l;

We start the line as a dash, which effectively makes it blank or invisible.

Next, we move to the draw() function. This is where the magic happens. We want to increment the frame to move us forward in the animation and check it’s not finished. If it continues, we then take a percentage of the distance based on the frame and then set the dash offset to this new percentage. This gives the illusion that the line is being drawn. Then we have an animation callback, which starts the draw process over again.

That’s it! It will work with any SVG <path> element that you can draw.

Libraries to get you started

If you aren’t sure where to start with SVG, there are several libraries out there to help. They also abstract all browser compatibility issues to make your life easier.


	Raphaël
	Snap.svg
	svg.js


You can also get most vector applications to export SVG. This means that you can continue your normal workflows, but instead of flattening the image as a PNG or bringing it over to Photoshop to rasterize, you can keep all your hard work as vectors and reap the benefits of SVG.",2013,Brian Suda,briansuda,2013-12-07T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/animating-vectors-with-svg/,
17,Bringing Design and Research Closer Together,"The ‘should designers be able to code’ debate has raged for some time, but I’m interested in another debate: should designers be able to research? 

Are you a designer who can do research? Good research and the insights you uncover inspire fresh ways of thinking and get your creative juices flowing. Good research brings clarity to a woolly brief. Audience insight helps sharpen your focus on what’s really important. Experimentation through research and design brings a sense of playfulness and curiosity to your work. Good research helps you do good design.

Being a web designer today is pretty tough, particularly if you’re a freelancer and work on your own. There are so many new ideas, approaches to workflow and trends and tools to keep up with. How do you decide which things to do and which to ignore? A modern web designer needs to be able to consider the needs of the audience, design appropriate IAs and layouts, choose colour palettes, pick appropriate typefaces and type layouts, wrangle with content, style, code, dabble in SEO, and the list goes on and on. Not only that, but today’s web designer also has to keep up with the latest talking points in the industry: responsive design, Agile, accessibility, Sass, Git, lean UX, content first, mobile first, blah blah blah. Any good web designer doesn’t need to be persuaded about the merits of including research in their toolkit, but do you really have time to include research too? 

Who is responsible for research?

Generally, research in the web industry forms part of other disciplines and isn’t so much a discipline in its own right. It’s very often thought of as part of UX, or activities that make up a process such as IA or content strategy. Research is often undertaken by UX designers, information architects or content strategists and isn’t something designers or developers get that involved in. Some people lump all of these activities together and label it design research and have design researchers to do it. Some companies, such as the one I run with my husband Mark, are lucky enough to have someone with specialist research knowledge (yup, that would be me folks) who can lead all or most of the research work undertaken by the company. See also Mule Design, GOV.UK, the BBC, Mailchimp, Facebook and Twitter. 

What if you’re not lucky enough to have your own researcher or team of researchers? Often research is the kind of thing that’s nice to have, or it can be cut from scope when doing the budget dance with a client. It often forms part of the discovery phase of a project and sometimes just becomes a tick-box exercise. But research isn’t just user testing and it shouldn’t just live in a report on Basecamp that no one reads. I would argue that research and experimentation is a way of working or an approach to how you design. Research can be used during the whole design process and must be a vital part of a designer’s workflow on every project. Even if you work in a small studio, you can still create a culture of audience insight. Even if you work on your own, you can still absorb yourself in as much audience data as you can throughout the project life cycle. Here’s how.

Research is everyone’s job

There is a subtle difference between writing a research report and delivering it to a client, and them actually using it and applying the insights to their thought process. In my experience of working in the audiences team at the BBC, research was most effective when the role was embedded in the production team and insights were used as part of the editorial process.

In this section I’ll talk through some common problems you might encounter in a typical project life cycle and show you ways you can use research to help you. For the sake of this article, let’s imagine that we’re talking about a particular project here and not ongoing product development. The same principles can of course be applied then, but even if you work in-house rather than on the agency side, you’re probably used to working on distinct projects or phases of work.

1. Problem: I want to come up with a new product idea. 

Solution: Inspiration through insights.

Before you begin a new project, a good way of quickly absorbing all the existing knowledge that there maybe about a theme, product type or website is to literally surround yourself with it. This is especially relevant for new ideas or product development. Create an incident room if you can: fill the walls of your meeting room, the walls near your desk, or even just use a pinboard or online pinboard if space is tight or you’re working with a dispersed team. The same process can be used throughout a project’s or product life cycle — read about how MailChimp has applied this idea. 

Let’s take a new product idea as an example. Say you wanted to develop a responsive tool for web designers but you weren’t sure what aspect of responsive design to focus on. First of all, you should pose a hypothesis or problem statement to gather ideas around. For example: “How to speed up a designer’s responsive workflow.” You would then need to gather insights around this topic. You could run some interviews with freelance designers about how they work responsively. You could shadow a development team for the day to understand their processes. You could observe conversations on Twitter or IRC or wherever your target audience interact to see what people talk about. You could search out industry data and articles currently available.

The next stage is to comb through this data and extract insights from it. You can use good old Post-it notes and a sharpie: capture one insight or thought per Post-it. If one insight leads into another, use two Post-its. The objective is volume. Try to ensure clarity in each Post-it so you don’t have to go back and reference material again (maybe you could use a key if you think it’ll get confusing).



After this, stick them all up and synthesise the same way you would for any kind of cluster or affinity sort. Organise into broad themes. These themes then become springboards for further exploration and idea generation. You might see a gap or opportunity in one particular area, both from a workflow perspective but also from a business perspective. Bingo. Your insights then become the fuel for ideas generation.

This method doesn’t just have to be used for new products — it works particularly well in a discovery phase for new projects or for new features in an existing product. We’re doing something similar for our own responsive tool, Gridset at the moment.

Resources:


	Sticky Wisdom by Dave Allan, Matt Kingdon, Kris Murrin, Daz Rudkin
	The Science of Serendipity by Matt Kingdon
	The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley


2. Problem: You’re starting a new project and need to know the basics before you get headlong into designing or building. 

Solution: Quantitative survey.

Common questions might be:


	Who are the users?
	How many are there?
	What are they like?
	Why do they use the site?
	What do they need from the site?
	What are their goals?


Print out and stick up what you already know and have in your project space or ‘incident room’: any reports you have found or been given, analytics graphs, personas, pen portraits, as well as screengrabs of the current website, product or branding. Spend time looking through it all and identify the gaps. 

If you have very little existing audience data, a quick and easy way to get some baseline information is to run a quick user survey on a current website. You can establish basic demographic information, appreciation and views of the website as it stands, as well as delve a little deeper into needs and wants. This is also vital if you want some kind of trackable measures to go back to once you have designed and built your shiny new website for your client — read more in my article for 24 ways last year.)



We use surveys a lot at Mark Boulton Design for our client work. Here’s a screen grab of one we ran in March on http://info.cern.ch before we redesigned the site and did the work on the First Website Project. We repeated the survey after the new website went live and were able to compare the results. Both surveys were a great source of insight to the project team as well as for the project stakeholders who needed to pitch the idea of the hack days and fundraise for them.



Once you’ve run your survey, you should always write up a short summary for yourself and your client to refer to. If you’re not a trained researcher, you should try to read up on analysis techniques or data visualisation. It can be easy to misinterpret data and make it bend to the story you are trying to tell. You should be looking for the story in the data and present it without bias. 

If you’re using the ‘incident room’ method I mentioned earlier on, you can also extract the insights onto post it notes and add them to your growing body of knowledge.

Resources: 


	Using Questionnaires for Design Research by Emma Boulton
	Data-driven Design with an Annual Survey by Aarron Walter
	Research Methods for Product Design by Alex Milton and Paul Rodgers
	A Practical Guide to Designing with Data by Brian Suda


3. Problem: You have a prototype of a new design and you need some feedback from real users. 

Solution: User interviews and task based testing.

Interviewing is a staple research method that every designer should master as it can be used throughout a project life cycle. Erika Hall recently wrote a great article on the basics for A List Apart. From stakeholder interviews in a discovery phase, to initial user research, right through to task based testing and iteration, interviews can be enormously helpful. They are very time-consuming, however, and although speaking to someone is better than speaking to no one, it’s always better to plan to do a few interviews at once, rather than one or two. I generally find that patterns only start to emerge after I’ve spoken to 4 or 5 people. Interviews are another thing we do a lot of at Mark Boulton Design. Most of the interviews we do are remote due to the location of our clients and their users. 



Rigour is an important consideration in all research activities and especially if you’re a non-researcher. Interviews particularly can be easily skewed by an inexperienced facilitator, which is why pairing can be a good approach. Building rapport, questioning, time keeping, note taking and thinking on your feet can be difficult to do all at once, so having a colleague take notes while you concentrate on leading the conversation can work really well. It’s important for the note taker to sit in on more than one interview so that they get a more rounded view of the feedback. The same person should also be involved in the analysis of the data. 



Interviews can be analysed and written up in a report or summary as with other types of research. I often use the same kind of collaborative process detailed earlier for deciding on themes, particularly if multiple members of the team have been involved in interviewing. 

Interviews are particularly useful for our incident room and can provide much colour and insight to an exploratory process. I often find verbatim quotes to be the most insightful type of data. You might find that an inexperienced researcher (or designer who is used to solving problems) will jump to interpretation too soon and forget to just listen to what the interviewee is saying. Capturing the exact form of words a person uses can help get away from this.

Resources: 


	Interviewing Humans by Erika Hall
	A Pocket Guide to Interviewing for Research by Andrew Travers
	Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal


4. Problem: How successful have I been with this new design? 

Solution: Key performance indicators

Once your new design has been realised, it’s important to evaluate it. What works, what doesn’t work so well? As well as a straightforward design crit, don’t forget to introduce audience insights into a review meeting or project wash up. 



Work out what your KPIs — your key performance indicators — will be beforehand and then you can start to track them over time. For example, number of visits, appreciation of the site, willingness to recommend the site to a friend, number of sales, and number of conversions are all sensible measures to track. Interviews can again be helpful but cold, hard numbers are often better here. Read Corey Vilhauer’s take on this on A List Apart.

Consistency is key here. If you have looked at your analytics and done a survey beforehand, you will have a baseline to start from. Don’t keep changing your measures and questions, or your data will not be comparable. Pick a few key questions or a set of measures, create a survey and then run it once a month, once a quarter, every six months or annually. You’ll start to see changes over time as the design beds in. You may see seasonal trends and spot patterns in the data related to other activities like marketing, promotion and so on. Keeping a record of all of this will increase your understanding of your audience. We’ve created a satisfaction survey for Gridset with a number of measures that we track on an ongoing basis. MailChimp has also created an annual survey with the aim of tracking their audience measures over time

Resources:


	Search Analytics by Louis Rosenfeld
	A Primer on A/B Testing by Lara Swanson
	Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf


Anyone can do research

Research can be brought into the project life cycle at any stage. And of course, anyone can do research — you don’t need to be a researcher. Some of the main skills most designers possess are also key research skills: inquisitive nature, problem solving, playfulness, empathy, and so on.

We have a small team at Mark Boulton Design. Most of the team are designers and the rest of us focus on supporting the team and clients both in terms of billable work (research, content strategy, project management) as well as the non-billable things like finance and studio management.

Despite my best intentions, in the past I’ve undertaken research for clients in isolation — first being briefed by the design lead, carrying out the research and then delivering the findings back, trusting the design team to take the findings on board. This was often due to time and availability of resources.

We’ve been trying hard to join up our processes and collaborate even more across the team. Undertaking heuristic or design reviews collaboratively; taking part in frequent critiques of our work and the work of others together; pairing a researcher and a designer to run interviews; workshopping results from interviews to come up with recommendations; working closely together on questionnaire design; shadowing each other on tasks that don’t fall within our core skills. A little thing like moving our desks around has also helped us have more conversations that we can all be a part of.



I’ve come to the conclusion that my role as the research director at Mark Boulton Design is actually a facilitator of research. As well as carrying out research, I am responsible for ensuring that research happens consistently across the team. I am responsible for empowering and training our designers so they feel confident in carrying out their own user, audience or design research for clients. So they know what to look for, when to listen, when to probe and when to take note of something. So they know how to look for themes, how to synthesise insights from research and how to apply them to their work.

Better research leads to better design

So, are you a designer who can do research? Are you a researcher who can design? The best designers are a lucky combination of researcher and designer. If you’re not one of those, look at ways of enhancing the skills you lack. Because there’s no doubt in my mind, that becoming a better researcher will make you a better designer.

General resources: 


	Seeing the Elephant by Louis Rosenfeld
	Connected UX by Aarron Walter
	Beyond Usability Testing by Devan Goldstein
	Just Enough Research by Erika Hall
	The User Experience Team of One by Leah Buley
	Undercover User Experience Design by Cennydd Bowles and James Box
	A Pocket Guide to Psychology for Designers by Joe Leech
	A Pocket Guide to International User Research by Chui Chui Tan
	Remote Research by Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte
	A Pocket Guide to Experiments for Designers by Colin McFarland",2013,Emma Boulton,emmaboulton,2013-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/bringing-design-and-research-closer-together/,ux
8,Coding Towards Accessibility,"“Can we make it AAA-compliant?” – does this question strike fear into your heart? Maybe for no other reason than because you will soon have to wade through the impenetrable WCAG documentation once again, to find out exactly what AAA-compliant means?

I’m not here to talk about that.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are a comprehensive and peer-reviewed resource which we’re lucky to have at our fingertips. But they are also a pig to read, and they may have contributed to the sense of mystery and dread with which some developers associate the word accessibility.

This Christmas, I want to share with you some thoughts and some practical tips for building accessible interfaces which you can start using today, without having to do a ton of reading or changing your tools and workflow.

But first, let’s clear up a couple of misconceptions.

Dreary, flat experiences

I recently built a front-end framework for the Post Office. This was a great gig for a developer, but when I found out about my client’s stringent accessibility requirements I was concerned that I’d have to scale back what was quite a complex set of visual designs.

Sites like Jakob Neilsen’s old workhorse useit.com and even the pioneering GOV.UK may have to shoulder some of the blame for this. They put a premium on usability and accessibility over visual flourish. (Although, in fairness to Mr Neilsen, his new site nngroup.com is really quite a snazzy affair, comparatively.)

Of course, there are other reasons for these sites’ aesthetics — and it’s not because of the limitations of the form. You can make an accessible site look as glossy or as plain as you want it to look. It’s always our own ingenuity and attention to detail that are going to be the limiting factors.

Synecdoche

We must always guard against the tendency to assume that catering to screen readers means we have the whole accessibility ballgame covered. 

There’s so much more to accessibility than assistive technology, as you know. And within the field of assistive technology there are plenty of other devices for us to consider.

Planning to accommodate all these users and devices can be daunting. When I first started working in this field I thought that the breadth of technology was prohibitive. I didn’t even know what a screen reader looked like. (I assumed they were big and heavy, perhaps like an old typewriter, and certainly they would be expensive and difficult to fathom.) This is nonsense, of course. Screen reader emulators are readily available as browser extensions and can be activated in seconds. Chromevox and Fangs are both excellent and you should download one or the other right now.

But the really good news is that you can emulate many other types of assistive technology without downloading a byte. And this is where we move from misconceptions into some (hopefully) useful advice.

The mouse trap

The simplest and most effective way to improve your abilities as a developer of accessible interfaces is to unplug your mouse.

Keyboard operation has its own WCAG chapter, because most users of assistive technology are navigating the web using only their keyboards. You can go some way towards putting yourself into their shoes so easily — just by ditching a peripheral.

Learning this was a lightbulb moment for me. When I build interfaces I am constantly flicking between code and the browser, testing or viewing the changes I have made. Now, instead of checking a new element once, I check it twice: once with my mouse and then again without.

Don’t just :hover

The reality is that when you first start doing this you can find your site becomes unusable straightaway. It’s easy to lose track of which element is in focus as you hit the tab key repeatedly.

One of the easiest changes you can make to your coding practice is to add :focus and :active pseudo-classes to every hover state that you write. I’m still amazed at how many sites fail to provide a decent focus state for links (and despite previous 24 ways authors in 2007 and 2009 writing on this same issue!).

You may find that in some cases it makes sense to have something other than, or in addition to, the hover state on focus, but start with the hover state that your designer has taken the time to provide you with. It’s a tiny change and there is no downside. So instead of this:

.my-cool-link:hover {
	background-color: MistyRose ;	
}

…try writing this:

.my-cool-link:hover,
.my-cool-link:focus,
.my-cool-link:active {
	background-color: MistyRose ;	
}

I’ve toyed with the idea of making a Sass mixin to take care of this for me, but I haven’t yet. I worry that people reading my code won’t see that I’m explicitly defining my focus and active states so I take the hit and write my hover rules out longhand.

JavaScript can play, too

This was another revelation for me. Keyboard-only navigation doesn’t necessitate a JavaScript-free experience, and up-to-date screen readers can execute JavaScript. So we’re able to create complex JavaScript-driven interfaces which all users can interact with.

Some of the hard work has already been done for us. First, there are already conventions around keyboard-driven interfaces. Think about the last time you viewed a photo album on Facebook. You can use the arrow keys to switch between photos, and the escape key closes whichever lightbox-y UI thing Facebook is showing its photos in this week. Arrow keys (up/down as well as left/right) for progression through content; Escape to back out of something; Enter or space bar to indicate a positive intention — these are established keyboard conventions which we can apply to our interfaces to improve their accessiblity. 

Of course, by doing so we are improving our interfaces in general, giving all users the option to switch between keyboard and mouse actions as and when it suits them.

Second, this guy wants to help you out. Hans Hillen is a developer who has done a great deal of work around accessibility and JavaScript-powered interfaces. Along with The Paciello Group he has created a version of the jQuery UI library which has been fully optimised for keyboard navigation and screen reader use. It’s a fantastic reference which I revisit all the time 

I’m not a huge fan of the jQuery UI library. It’s a pain to style and the code is a bit bloated. So I’ve not used this demo as a code resource to copy wholesale. I use it by playing with the various components and seeing how they react to keyboard controls. Each component is also fully marked up with the relevant ARIA roles to improve screen reader announcement where possible (more on this below).

Coding for accessibility promotes good habits

This is a another observation around accessibility and JavaScript. I noticed an improvement in the structure and abstraction of my code when I started adding keyboard controls to my interface elements. 

Your code has to become more modular and event-driven, because any number of events could trigger the same interaction. A mouse-click, the Enter key and the space bar could all conceivably trigger the same open function on a collapsed accordion element. (And you want to keep things DRY, don’t you?) 

If you aren’t already in the habit of separating out your interface functionality into discrete functions, you will be soon.

var doSomethingCool = function(){
	// Do something cool here.
}

// Bind function to a button click - pretty vanilla
$('.myCoolButton').on('click', function(){
	doSomethingCool();
	return false;
});

// Bind the same function to a range of keypresses
$(document).keyup(function(e){
	switch(e.keyCode) {
		case 13: // enter
		case 32: // spacebar
			doSomethingCool();
			break;
		case 27: // escape
			doSomethingElse();
			break;
	}
});

To be honest, if you’re doing complex UI stuff with JavaScript these days, or if you’ve been building any responsive interfaces which rely on JavaScript, then you are most likely working with an application framework such as Backbone, Angular or Ember, so an abstraced and event-driven application structure will be familar to you. It should be super easy for you to start helping out your keyboard-only users if you aren’t already — just add a few more event bindings into your UI layer!

Manipulating the tab order

So, you’ve adjusted your mindset and now you test every change to your codebase using a keyboard as well as a mouse. You’ve applied all your hover states to :focus and :active so you can see where you’re tabbing on the page, and your interactive components react seamlessly to a mixture of mouse and keyboard commands. Feels good, right?

There’s another level of optimisation to consider: manipulating the tab order. Certain DOM elements are naturally part of the tab order, and others are excluded. Links and input elements are the main elements included in the tab order, and static elements like paragraphs and headings are excluded. What if you want to make a static element ‘tabbable’? 

A good example would be in an expandable accordion component. Each section of the accordion should be separated by a heading, and there’s no reason to make that heading into a link simply because it’s interactive.

<div class=""accordion-widget"">
	<h3>Tyrannosaurus</h3>
	<p>Tyrannosaurus; meaning ""tyrant lizard""...<p>

	<h3>Utahraptor</h3>
	<p>Utahraptor is a genus of theropod dinosaurs...<p>

	<h3>Dromiceiomimus</h3>
	<p>Ornithomimus is a genus of ornithomimid dinosaurs...<p>
</div>

Adding the heading elements to the tab order is trivial. We just set their tabindex attribute to zero. You could do this on the server or the client. I prefer to do it with JavaScript as part of the accordion setup and initialisation process.

$('.accordion-widget h3').attr('tabindex', '0');

You can apply this trick in reverse and take elements out of the tab order by setting their tabindex attribute to −1, or change the tab order completely by using other integers. This should be done with great care, if at all. You have to be sure that the markup you remove from the tab order comes out because it genuinely improves the keyboard interaction experience. This is hard to validate without user testing. The danger is that developers will try to sweep complicated parts of the UI under the carpet by taking them out of the tab order. This would be considered a dark pattern — at least on my team!

A farewell ARIA

This is where things can get complex, and I’m no expert on the ARIA specification: I feel like I’ve only dipped my toe into this aspect of coding for accessibility. But, as with WCAG, I’d like to demystify things a little bit to encourage you to look into this area further yourself.

ARIA roles are of most benefit to screen reader users, because they modify and augment screen reader announcements. 

Let’s take our dinosaur accordion from the previous section. The markup is semantic, so a screen reader that can’t handle JavaScript will announce all the content within the accordion, no problem.

But modern screen readers can deal with JavaScript, and this means that all the lovely dino information beneath each heading has probably been hidden on document.ready, when the accordion initialised. It might have been hidden using display:none, which prevents a screen reader from announcing content. If that’s as far as you have gone, then you’ve committed an accessibility sin by hiding content from screen readers. Your user will hear a set of headings being announced, with no content in between. It would sound something like this if you were using Chromevox:

> Tyrannosaurus. Heading Three.
> Utahraptor. Heading Three.
> Dromiceiomimus. Heading Three.

We can add some ARIA magic to the markup to improve this, using the tablist role. Start by adding a role of tablist to the widget, and roles of tab and tabpanel to the headings and paragraphs respectively. Set boolean values for aria-selected, aria-hidden and aria-expanded. The markup could end up looking something like this.

<div class=""accordion-widget"" role=""tablist"">
	<!-- T-rex -->	
	<h3 role=""tab"" 
		tabindex=""0"" 
		id=""tab-2"" 
		aria-controls=""panel-2"" 
		aria-selected=""false"">Utahraptor</h3>
	<p	role=""tabpanel"" 
		id=""panel-2"" 
		aria-labelledby=""tab-2"" 
		aria-expanded=""false"" 
		aria-hidden=""true"">Utahraptor is a genus of theropod dinosaurs...</p>
	<!-- Dromiceiomimus -->	
</div>

Now, if a screen reader user encounters this markup they will hear the following:

> Tyrannosaurus. Tab not selected; one of three.
> Utahraptor. Tab not selected; two of three.
> Dromiceiomimus. Tab not selected; three of three.

You could add arrow key events to help the user browse up and down the tab list items until they find one they like. 

Your accordion open() function should update the ARIA boolean values as well as adding whatever classes and animations you have built in as standard. Your users know that unselected tabs are meant to be interacted with, so if a user triggers the open function (say, by hitting Enter or the space bar on the second item) they will hear this:

> Utahraptor. Selected; two of three.

The paragraph element for the expanded item will not be hidden by your CSS, which means it will be announced as normal by the screen reader.

This kind of thing makes so much more sense when you have a working example to play with. Again, I refer you to the fantastic resource that Hans Hillen has put together: this is his take on an accessible accordion, on which much of my example is based.

Conclusion

Getting complex interfaces right for all of your users can be difficult — there’s no point pretending otherwise. And there’s no substitute for user testing with real users who navigate the web using assistive technology every day. This kind of testing can be time-consuming to recruit for and to conduct. On top of this, we now have accessibility on mobile devices to contend with. That’s a huge area in itself, and it’s one which I have not yet had a chance to research properly.

So, there’s lots to learn, and there’s lots to do to get it right. But don’t be disheartened. If you have read this far then I’ll leave you with one final piece of advice: don’t wait.

Don’t wait until you’re building a site which mandates AAA-compliance to try this stuff out. Don’t wait for a client with the will or the budget to conduct the full spectrum of user testing to come along. Unplug your mouse, and start playing with your interfaces in a new way. You’ll be surprised at the things that you learn and the issues you uncover. 

And the next time an true accessibility project comes along, you will be way ahead of the game.",2013,Charlie Perrins,charlieperrins,2013-12-03T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/coding-towards-accessibility/,code
4,Credits and Recognition,"A few weeks ago, I saw a friendly little tweet from a business congratulating a web agency on being nominated for an award. The business was quite happy for them and proud to boot — they commented on how the same agency designed their website, too.

What seemed like a nice little shout-out actually made me feel a little disappointed. Why? In reality, I knew that the web agency didn’t actually design the site — I did, when I worked at a different agency responsible for the overall branding and identity.

I certainly wasn’t disappointed at the business — after all, saying that someone designed your site when they were responsible for development is an easy mistake to make. Chances are, the person behind the tweets and status updates might not even know the difference between words like design and development. 

What really disappointed me was the reminder of how many web workers out there never explain their roles in a project when displaying work in a portfolio. If you’re strictly a developer and market yourself as such, there might be less room for confusion, but things can feel a little deceptive if you offer a wide range of services yet never credit the other players when collaboration is part of the game. Unfortunately, this was the case in this situation. Whatever happened to credit where credit’s due?

Advertising attribution

Have you ever thumbed through an advertising annual or browsed through the winners of an advertising awards website, like the campaign below from Kopenhagen Chocolate on Advertising Age? If so, it’s likely that you’ve noticed some big differences in how the work is credited.

 Everyone involved in a creative advertising project is mentioned.

Art directors, writers, creative directors, photographers, illustrators and, of course, the agency all get a fair shot at fifteen minutes of fame. Why can’t we take this same idea and introduce it to our own showcases?

Crediting on client sites

Ah, the good old days of web rings, guestbooks, and under construction GIFs, when slipping in a cheeky “designed by” link in the footer of your masterpiece was just another common practice. These days most clients, especially larger companies and corporations, aren’t willing to have any names on their site except their own. 

If you’d still like to leave a little proof of authorship on a website, consider adding a humans.txt file to the root of the site and, if possible, add an author tag in the <head> of the site:

<link type=""text/plain"" rel=""author"" href=""http://domain/humans.txt"">

It’s a great way to add more detailed information than just a meta name without being intrusive. The example on the humanstxt.org website serves to act as a guideline, but how much detail you add is completely up to you and your team.

 Part of the humans.txt file on humanstxt.org

Alternatively, you can use the HTML5 rel=""author"" attribute to link to information about the author of the page in the form of a mailto: address, a link to a contact form, or a separate authors page.

Crediting in portfolios

While humans.txt is a great approach when you’re authoring a site, it’s even more important to clearly define your role in your own portfolio. 

While I believe it’s proper etiquette to include the names of folks you collaborated with, sometimes it might not be necessary (or even possible) to list every single person, especially if you’ve worked with a large agency. 

“Fake it till you make it” is not a term that should apply to your portfolio. Clearly stating your own responsibilities means that nobody else browsing your work samples will assume that you did more than your actual share, and being ambiguous about your role isn’t fair to yourself, or others. 

Before adding any work to your portfolio, ensure that you have permission from your client. Even if you included a clause in your contract about being allowed to post your work online, it’s always best to double-check. Sometimes you might not know if your work has been officially launched, and leaking something before it’s ready is bound to make a client frown.

Examples

There are plenty of portfolios out there that we can use for inspiration. Here are some examples that I like from other folks in the web industry:

Anna Debenham

 In her portfolio, Anna outlines her responsibilities and those of others.

In the description, Anna clearly explains her duties of doing the HTML and CSS, along with performing research and testing the prototype in schools. She also credits Laura Kalbag for the design work.

Naomi Atkinson Design

The work portfolio of Naomi Atkinson Design is short and to the point — they were responsible for the iPhone app design and IA for Artspotter.

 The portfolio of Naomi Atkinson Design states clearly what they did.

Amber Weinberg

Amber Weinberg is strictly a developer, but a potential client could see her portfolio and assume she might be a designer as well. To avoid any misunderstandings, she states her roles up front in a section called “What I Did,” supported by examples of her code.

 Amber Weinberg sets out all her roles in each of her portfolio’s case studies.

What if someone doesn’t want to be credited?

Let’s face it — we’ve all been there. A project, for whatever reason, turns out to be an absolute disaster and we don’t feel like it’s an accurate representation of the quality of our work. 

If you’re crediting someone else but suspect they might rather pretend it never happened, be sure to drop them a line and ask if they’d like to be included. And, if someone contacts you and asks to remove their name, don’t feel offended — just politely remove it.

Get updating!

Now that the holiday season is almost here, many of you might be planning to set aside some time for personal projects. Grab yourself a gingerbread latte and get those portfolios up to date. Remember, It doesn’t have to be long-winded, just honest. Happy holidays!",2013,Geri Coady,gericoady,2013-12-16T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/credits-and-recognition/,process
13,Data-driven Design with an Annual Survey,"Too often, we base designs on assumptions that don’t match customer perspectives. Why? Because the data we need to make informed decisions isn’t available.

Imagine starting off the year with a treasure trove of user data that can be filtered, sliced, and diced to inform new UI designs, help you discover where users struggle the most, and expose emerging trends in your customers’ needs that could lead to new features. Why, that would be useful indeed. And it’s easy to obtain by conducting an annual survey.

Annual surveys may seem as exciting as receiving socks and undies for Christmas, but they’re the gift that keeps on giving all year long (just like fresh socks and undies). I’m not ashamed to admit it: I love surveys! Each time my design research team runs a survey, we learn so much about customer motivations, interests, and behaviors. 

Surveys provide an aggregate snapshot of your users that can’t easily be obtained by other research methods, and they can be conducted quickly too. You can build a survey in a few hours, run a pilot test in a day, and have real results streaming in the following day. Speed is essential if design research is going to keep pace with a busy product release schedule. 

Surveys are also an invaluable springboard for customer interviews, which provide deep perspectives on user behavior. If you play your cards right as you construct your survey, you can capture a user ID and an email address for each respondent, making it easy to get in touch with customers whose feedback is particularly intriguing. No more recruiting customers for your research via Twitter or through a recruiting company charging a small fortune. You can filter survey responses and isolate the exact customers to talk with in moments, not months.

I love this connected process of sending targeted surveys, filtering the results, and then — with surgical precision — selecting just the right customers to interview. Not only is it fast and cheap, but it lets design researchers do quantitative and qualitative research in a coordinated way. Aggregate survey responses help you quantify the perspectives of different user segments, and interviews help you get into the heads of your customers.

An annual survey can give your team the data needed to make more informed designs in the new year. It all starts with a plan.

Planning your survey

Before you start jotting down questions to ask users, spend some time thinking about the work your team will be doing in the coming year. Are you planning new mobile apps or a responsive redesign? Then questions about devices used and behaviors around mobile devices might be in order. Rethinking your content strategy? Then you might want to ask a few questions about how your customers consume content.

You can’t predict all of the projects you’ll be working on in the coming year, but tuck a couple of sections in your survey about the projects you’re certain about. This will give you the research you need to start new projects with solid foundational data.

Google Drive is a great place to start collaboratively building survey questions with colleagues. Questions that seem crystal clear in your head get challenged, refined, or even expanded quickly when the entire team can chime in. 

As you craft your survey, try to consider how you’ll filter it once all of the data is compiled. Do you need to see responses by industry, by age of an account, by devices used, or by size of company? Adding the right filter questions can help you discover fascinating patterns in user segments. Filtering on responses to a few questions can surface insights like: customers in non-profit companies with more than 100 employees are 17% more likely to use an Android phone and are most attracted to features A, D, and F. A designer working on the landing page for a non-profit would love to have concrete information like this. Filter questions are key, so consider them carefully. But don’t go overboard — too many of them and you’ll start to hurt your survey response rate.

Multiple choice questions are the heart of most surveys because respondents can complete them quickly, which increases response rate, and researchers can analyze them without a lot of manual categorization. Open text field questions are valuable too, but be careful not to add too many to your survey. You’ll hate yourself after the survey’s done and you have to sort through and tag thousands of open responses so patterns become visible. Oy vey!

An open-ended question works well towards the end of the survey. At this point respondents have a lot of topics swirling around in their head and tend to say weird things that will pique your interest. This is where you’ll find the outliers who are using your product. They’ll be fascinating to interview, and on occasion will help you see your work in a brand new way.

Conclude your survey with a question asking permission to get in touch for a followup interview so you don’t pester people who want to be left alone. 

With your questions nailed down, it’s time to build out that survey and get it ready for sending!

Building your survey

There are dozens of apps you could use to build your survey, but SurveyMonkey is the one that I prefer. It lets you pass in variables for each respondent such as user ID and email address. Metadata about respondents is essential if you’re going to do any follow-up interviews with your customers in the coming year. SurveyMonkey also makes it easy to set up question logic, showing questions to customers only if they responded in a certain way to a prior question. This helps you avoid asking irrelevant questions to some respondents.

Determining survey recipients

Once you’ve chosen a survey tool and entered all of your questions, you need to gather a list of recipients. Your first instinct will be to send it to everyone. You might say, “I need maximum response and metric shit tons of data!” But this is rarely the best approach — broad distribution almost always leads to lower response rates, increased noise, and decreased signal in your data. Are there subsets of customers you could send to, like only those who are active, those who are paying, or have been with you for a certain length of time? Talk to the keepers of your customer database and see how they can segment it so you can be certain you’re talking to just the people who will have the most relevant responses for your needs. 

If you want to get super nerdy when finding the right customer sample to survey, use a [sample size calculator]. Sampling is a deep subject best explored in other articles. 

Crafting your survey email

After focusing your energies on writing and building your survey, the email asking your customers to respond seems almost trivial, but it will greatly influence your response rate. Take great care when writing your subject line and the body of the email. If you can pull it off, A/B testing subject lines can greatly improve the open rate of your email and click-through to your survey. My design research team has seen a ~10% increase in open and click rates when we A/B tested. We’ve found that personalizing subject lines and greetings with the recipients name (ie. “Hey, Aarron. How can we make our app work better for you?”) gave us the best response rates. Your mileage may vary.

The tone of your email is important — be friendly, honest, and to the point. Those that are passionate about your product will be happy to share their perspective. Writing a survey email that people will actually respond to ain’t easy — in fact, they’re almost always annoying. But Ben Chestnut found a non-annoying way to send a survey email and improve response rates.

The email sent for the 2013 MailChimp survey let customers know what we’d been up to in the previous year, and invited feedback on what we should work on in the coming year.

The link to your survey should be a clear call to action. A big button with a label like “Answer a few questions” generally does the trick. The URL linking to the survey will need to include some variables like user ID and email. It might look something like this if you’re using SurveyMonkey:

http://surveymonkey.com/s/somesurveyid/?uid=*|UID|*&email=*|email|*

As each email is sent, the proper data will be populated in the variables, passing it on to the survey app for inclusion in each response. This is the magic that will help you pinpoint customers to interview down the road, so take special care to test that all is working before sending to all recipients. How you construct the survey link will vary depending on what survey tool and email service provider you use, so don’t take my example as gospel. You’ll need to read the documentation for your survey and email apps to set things up properly.

Pilot before sending

By now, you’ve whipped yourself into a fever pitch over your brilliant survey and the data you hope to collect. Your finger is on the send button, poised for action, but there’s one very important thing to do before you send to the entire list of customers: send a pilot email. How do you know if your questions are clear, your form logic is sound, and you’re passing variables from the email to the survey properly? You won’t, unless you send to a small segment of your recipients first. 

The data collected in your pilot will make plain where your survey needs refinement. This data won’t be used in your final analysis, as you’re probably going to make a few changes to your questions.

Send the pilot survey to enough people that you can really stress test the clarity of the questions and data you’re gathering, while considering how much data can you comfortably throw out. If you’re sending your final survey to a few thousand people, you might find a couple of hundred recipients for your pilot will give you enough insight into what to improve while leaving the vast majority of the recipients for your final survey.

After you’ve sent your pilot, made your survey adjustments, and ensured the variables are being passed from your email into the survey app, you’re ready to send to the remainder of your customers. This is your moment of glory!

Analyzing your results

After a couple of weeks you can probably safely close the survey so no other responses come in as you transition from data gathering to data analysis. Any survey app worth its salt will chart responses to your multiple choice questions. Reviewing these charts is a great place to start your analysis. Is there anything particularly interesting that stands out? Jot down some of your observations. I like to print screenshots of the charts for each question, highlighting areas of interest. These prints become a particularly handy reference point for the next step in your analysis. 

Printing results from a survey makes comparing different customers easy.

Viewing aggregate data about all responses is interesting, but the deltas between different types of customers are where the real revelations happen. Remember those filter questions you added to your survey? They’re the tool that’ll help you compare customer segments.

Most survey apps will let you filter the data based on response to a question. If the one you’re using doesn’t, you can always export your data and create pivot tables in Excel. Try filtering your data based on one of your filter questions, such as industry, company size, or devices used. Now compare those printed screenshots of baseline responses to the filtered data. Chances are you’ll see some significant differences in how each group responded to your questions, giving you clues about the variance in interests and motivations in customer segments and a leg up as you work on future design projects. 

Open-ended responses are equally interesting, but much more time-consuming to analyze. Yes, you need to read through thousands of responses, some of which are constructive and some of which are not. Taking the time to tag each open response will help you see trends and filter out the responses that are unhelpful.

Unlike questions with predefined answers, open-ended responses let users express unique ideas and use cases you may not be looking for. The tedium of reading thousands of response is always cut by eureka moments when users tell you something fascinating that changes your perspective on your app. These are the folks you want to pull out for follow-up interviews. Because you’ve already captured their email addresses when you set up your survey and your email, getting in touch will be a piece of cake.

Filter, compare, interview, and summarize; then share your findings with your colleagues. Reports are great for head honchos, but if you want to really inform and inspire, create a video, a poster series, or even a comic to communicate what you’ve learned. Want to get really fancy? Store your survey results in a centrally accessible location so anyone in your company can research and discover the insights they need to make more informed designs. 

Good design researchers discover valuable insights. Great design researchers turn those insights into stories.

Conclusion

As we enter the new year, it’s a great time to reflect on the work we’ve done in the past and how we can do better in the future. Without a doubt, designers working with a foundation of insights about customers can make more effective UIs. But designers aren’t the only ones who stand to gain from the data collected in an annual survey—anyone who makes things for or communicates with customers will find themselves empowered to do better work when they know more about the people they serve. The data you collect with your survey is a fantastic holiday gift to your colleagues, one that they’ll appreciate throughout the year.",2013,Aarron Walter,aarronwalter,2013-12-13T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/data-driven-design-with-an-annual-survey/,design
7,Get Started With GitHub Pages (Plus Bonus Jekyll),"After several failed attempts at getting set up with GitHub Pages, I vowed that if I ever figured out how to do it, I’d write it up. Fortunately, I did eventually figure it out, so here is my write-up.

Why I think GitHub Pages is cool

Normally when you host stuff on GitHub, you’re just storing your files there. If you push site files, what you’re storing is the code, and when you view a file, you’re viewing the code rather than the output. What GitHub Pages lets you do is store those files, and if they’re HTML files, you can view them like any other website, so there’s no need to host them separately yourself.

GitHub Pages accepts static HTML but can’t execute languages like PHP, or use a database in the way you’re probably used to, so you’ll need to output static HTML files. This is where templating tools such as Jekyll come in, which I’ll talk about later.

The main benefit of GitHub Pages is ease of collaboration. Changes you make in the repository are automatically synced, so if your site’s hosted on GitHub, it’s as up-to-date as your GitHub repository. This really appeals to me because when I just want to quickly get something set up, I don’t want to mess around with hosting; and when people submit a pull request, I want that change to be visible as soon as I merge it without having to set up web hooks.

Before you get started

If you’ve used GitHub before, already have an account and know the basics like how to set up a repository and clone it to your computer, you’re good to go. If not, I recommend getting familiar with that first. The GitHub site has extensive documentation on getting started, and if you’re not a fan of using the command line, the official GitHub apps for Mac and Windows are great.

I also found this tutorial about GitHub Pages by Thinkful really useful, and it contains details on how to turn an existing repository into a GitHub Pages site.

Although this involves a bit of using the command line, it’s minimal, and I’ll guide you through the basics.

Setting up GitHub Pages

For this demo we’re going to build a Christmas recipe site — nothing complex, just a place to store recipes so we can share them with people, and they can fork or suggest changes to ones they like. My GitHub username is maban, and the project I’ve set up is called christmas-recipes, so once I’ve set up GitHub Pages, the site can be found here: http://maban.github.io/christmas-recipes/

You can set up a custom domain, but by default, the URL for your GitHub Pages site is your-username.github.io/your-project-name.

Set up the repository

The first thing we’re going to do is create a new GitHub repository, in exactly the same way as normal, and clone it to the computer. Let’s give it the name christmas-recipes. There’s nothing in it at the moment, but that’s OK.



After setting up the repository on the GitHub website, I cloned it to my computer in my Sites folder using the GitHub app (you can clone it somewhere else, if you want), and now I have a local repository synced with the remote one on GitHub.

Navigate to the repository

Now let’s open up the command line and navigate to the local repository. The easiest way to do this in Terminal is by typing cd  and dragging and dropping the folder into the terminal window and pressing Return. You can refer to Chris Coyier’s GIF illustrating this very same thing, from last week’s 24 ways article “Grunt for People Who Think Things Like Grunt are Weird and Hard” (which is excellent).

So, for me, that’s…

cd /Users/Anna/Sites/christmas-recipes 

Create a special GitHub Pages branch

So far we haven’t done anything different from setting up a regular repository, but here’s where things change.

Now we’re in the right place, let’s create a gh-pages branch. This tells GitHub that this is a special branch, and to treat the contents of it differently.

Make sure you’re still in the christmas-recipes directory, and type this command to create the gh-pages branch:

git checkout --orphan gh-pages

That --orphan option might be new to you. An orphaned branch is an empty branch that’s disconnected from the branch it was created off, and it starts with no commits, making it a special standalone branch. checkout switches us from the branch we were on to that branch.

If all’s gone well, we’ll get a message saying Switched to a new branch ‘gh-pages’.

You may get an error message saying you don’t have admin privileges, in which case you’ll need to type sudo at the start of that command.

Make gh-pages your default branch (optional)

The gh-pages branch is separate to the master branch, but by default, the master branch is what will show up if we go to our repository’s URL on GitHub. To change this, go to the repository settings and select gh-pages as the default branch.



If, like me, you only want the one branch, you can delete the master branch by following Oli Studholme’s tutorial. It’s actually really easy to do, and means you only have to worry about keeping one branch up to date.

If you prefer to work from master but push updates to the gh-pages branch, Lea Verou has written up a quick tutorial on how to do this, and it basically involves working from the master branch, and using git rebase to bring one branch up to date with another.

At the moment, we’ve only got that branch on the local machine, and it’s empty, so to be able to see something at our special GitHub Pages URL, we’ll need to create a page and push it to the remote repository.

Make a page

Open up your favourite text editor, create a file called index.html in your christmas-recipes folder, and put some exciting text in it. Don’t worry about the markup: all we need is text because right now we’re just checking it works.



Now, let’s commit and push our changes. You can do that in the command line if you’re comfortable with that, or you can do it via the GitHub app. Don’t forget to add a useful commit message.



Now we’re ready to see our gorgeous new site! Go to your-username.github.io/your-project-name and, hopefully, you’ll see your first GitHub Pages site. If not, don’t panic, it can take up to ten minutes to publish, so you could make a quick cake in a cup while you wait.

After a short wait, our page should be live! Hopefully that wasn’t too traumatic. Now we know it works, we can add some proper markup and CSS and even some more pages.

If you’re feeling brave, how about we take it to the next level…

Setting up Jekyll

Since GitHub Pages can’t execute languages like PHP, we need to give it static HTML files. This is fine if there are only a few pages, but soon we’ll start to miss things like PHP includes for content that’s the same on every page, like headers and footers.

Jekyll helps set up templates and turn them into static HTML. It separates markup from content, and makes it a lot easier for people to edit pages collaboratively. With our recipe site, we want to make it really easy for people to fix typos or add notes, without having to understand PHP. Also, there’s the added benefit that static HTML pages load really fast.

Jekyll isn’t officially supported on Windows, but it is still possible to run it if you’re prepared to get your hands dirty.

Install Jekyll

Back in Terminal, we’re going to install Jekyll…

gem install jekyll

…and wait for the script to run. This might take a few moments. It might take so long that you get worried its broken, but resist the urge to start mashing your keyboard like I did.

Get Jekyll to run on the repository

Fingers crossed nothing has gone wrong so far. If something did go wrong, don’t give up! Check this helpful post by Andy Taylor – you probably just need to install something else first. 

Now we’re going to tell Jekyll to set up a new project in the repository, which is in my Sites folder (yours may be in a different place). Remember, we can drag the directory into the terminal window after the command.

jekyll new /Users/Anna/Sites/christmas-recipes

If everything went as expected, we should get this error message: Conflict: /Users/Anna/Sites/christmas-recipes exists and is not empty.

But that’s OK. It’s just upset because we’ve got that index.html file and possibly also a README.md in there that we made earlier. So move those onto your desktop for the moment and run the command again.

jekyll new /Users/Anna/Sites/christmas-recipes

It should say that the site has installed.

Check you’re in the repository, and if you’re not, navigate to it by typing cd , drag the christmas-recipes directory into terminal…

jekyll cd /Users/Anna/Sites/christmas-recipes

…and type this command to tell Jekyll to run:

jekyll serve --watch

By adding --watch at the end, we’re forcing Jekyll to rebuild the site every time we hit Save, so we don’t have to keep telling it to update every time we want to view the changes. We’ll need to run this every time we start work on the project, otherwise changes won’t be applied. For now, wait while it does its thing. 

Update the config file

When it’s finished, we’ll see the text press ctrl-c to stop. Don’t do that, though. Instead, open up the directory. You’ll notice some new files and folders in there. There’s one called _site, and that’s where all the site files are saved when they’re turned into static HTML. Don’t touch the files in here — they’re the generated files and will get overwritten every time we make changes to pages and layouts.

There’s a file in our directory called _config.yml. This has some settings we can change, one of them being what our base URL is. GitHub Pages will assume the base URL is above the project repository, so changing the settings here will help further down the line when setting up navigation links.

Replace the contents of the _config.yml file with this:

name: Christmas Recipes
markdown: redcarpet
pygments: true
baseurl: /christmas-recipes

Set up your files

Overwrite the index.html file in the root with the one we made earlier (you might want to pop the README.md back in there, too). 

Delete the files in the css folder — we’ll add our own later.

View the Jekyll site

Open up your favourite browser and type http://localhost:4000/christmas-recipes in the address bar.



Check it out, that’s your site! But it could do with a bit more love.

Set up the _includes files

It’s always useful to be able to pull in snippets of content onto pages, such as the header and footer, so they only need to be updated in one place. That’s what an _includes folder is for in Jekyll. Create a folder in the root called _includes, and within it add two files: head.html and foot.html. 

In head.html, paste the following:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset=""utf-8"">
        <title>{{ page.title }}</title>
        <link rel=""stylesheet"" href=""{{ site.baseurl }}/css/main.css"" >
    </head>
    <body>

and in foot.html:

</body>
</html>

Whenever we want to pull in something from the _includes folder, we can use {% include filename.html %} in the layout file — I’ll show you how to set that up in next step.

Making layouts

In our directory, there’s a folder called _layouts and this lets us create a reusable template for pages. Inside that is a default.html file. 

Delete everything in default.html and paste in this instead:

{% include head.html %}

    <h1>{{ page.title }}</h1>

    {{ content }}

{% include foot.html %}

That’s a very basic page with a header, footer, page title and some content. To apply this template to a page, go back into the index.html page and add this snippet to the very top of the file:

---
layout: default
title: Home
---

Now save the index.html file and hit Refresh in the browser. We should see a heading where {{ page.title }} was in the layout, which matches what comes after title: on the page itself (in this case, Home). So, if we wanted a subheading to appear on every page, we could add {{ page.subheading }} to where we want it to appear in our layout file, and a line that says subheading: This is a subheading in between the dashes at the top of the page itself.

Using Markdown for templates

Anything on a page that sits under the closing dashes is output where {{ content }} appears in the template file. At the moment, this is being output as HTML, but we can use Markdown instead, and Jekyll will convert that into HTML. For this recipe site, we want to make it as easy as possible for people to be able to collaborate, and also have the markup separate from the content, so let’s use Markdown instead of HTML for the recipes.

Telling a page to use Markdown instead of HTML is incredibly simple. All we need to do is change the filename from .html to .md, so let’s rename the index.html to index.md. Now we can use Markdown, and Jekyll will output that as HTML.

Create a new layout

We’re going to create a new layout called recipe which is going to be the template for any recipe page we create. Let’s keep it super simple.

In the _layouts folder, create a file called recipe.html and paste in this:

{% include head.html %}

	<main>

    	<h1>{{ page.title }}</h1>

    	{{ content }}

    	<p>Recipe by <a href=""{{ page.recipe-attribution-link }}"">{{ page.recipe-attribution }}</a>.</p>

	</main>

	{% include nav.html %}

{% include foot.html %}

That’s our template. The content that goes on the recipe layout includes a page title, the recipe content, a recipe attribution and a recipe attribution link.

Adding some recipe pages

Create a new file in the root of the christmas-recipes folder and call it gingerbread.md. Paste the following into it:

---
layout: recipe
title: Gingerbread
recipe-attribution: HungryJenny
recipe-attribution-link: http://www.opensourcefood.com/people/HungryJenny/recipes/soft-christmas-gingerbread-cookies
---
Makes about 15 small cookies.

## Ingredients

* 175g plain flour
* 90g brown sugar
* 50g unsalted butter, diced, at room temperature
* 2 tbsp golden syrup
* 1 egg, beaten
* 1 tsp ground ginger
* 1 tsp cinnamon
* 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
* Icing sugar to dust

## Method

1. Sift the flour, ginger, cinnamon and bicarbonate of soda into a large mixing bowl.
2. Use your fingers to rub in the diced butter. Mix in the sugar.
3. Mix the egg with the syrup then pour into the flour mixture. Fold in well to form a dough.
4. Tip some flour onto the work surface and knead the dough until smooth.
5. Preheat the oven to 180°C.
6. Roll the dough out flat and use a shaped cutter to make as many cookies as you like.
7. Transfer the cookies to a tray and bake in the oven for 15 minutes. Lightly dust the cookies with icing sugar.

The content is in Markdown, and when we hit Save, it’ll be converted into HTML in the _site folder. Save the file, and go to http://localhost:4000/christmas-recipes/gingerbread.html in your favourite browser.

 

As you can see, the Markdown content has been converted into HTML, and the attribution text and link has been inserted in the right place.


Add some navigation

In your _includes folder, create a new file called nav.html. Here is some code that will generate your navigation:

<nav class=""nav-primary"" role=""navigation"" >
    <ul>
        {% for p in site.pages %}
        <li>
        	<a {% if p.url == page.url %}class=""active""{% endif %} href=""{{ site.baseurl }}{{ p.url }}"">{{ p.title }}</a>
        </li>
        {% endfor %}
    </ul>
</nav>

This is going to look for all pages and generate a list of them, and give the navigation item that is currently active a class of active so we can style it differently.

Now we need to include that navigation snippet in our layout. Paste {% include nav.html %} in default.html file, under {{ content }}.

Push the changes to GitHub Pages

Now we’ve got a couple of pages, it’s time to push our changes to GitHub. We can do this in exactly the same way as before. Check your special GitHub URL (your-username.github.io/your-project-name) and you should see your site up and running.

If you quit Terminal, don’t forget to run jekyll serve --watch from within the directory the next time you want to work on the files.

Next steps

Now we know the basics of creating Jekyll templates and publishing them as GitHub Pages, we can have some fun adding more pages and styling them up.

 
 
 Here’s one I made earlier


I’ve only been using Jekyll for a matter of weeks, mainly for prototyping. It’s really good as a content management system for blogs, and a lot of people host their Jekyll blogs on GitHub, such as Harry Roberts


	By hosting the code so openly it will make me take more pride in it and allow me to work on it much more easily; no excuses now!


Overall, the documentation for Jekyll feels a little sparse and geared more towards blogs than other sites, but as more people discover the benefits of it, I’m sure this will improve over time.

If you’re interested in poking about with some code, all the files from this tutorial are available on GitHub.",2013,Anna Debenham,annadebenham,2013-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/get-started-with-github-pages/,
15,Git for Grown-ups,"You are a clever and talented person. You create beautiful designs, or perhaps you have architected a system that even my cat could use. Your peers adore you. Your clients love you. But, until now, you haven’t *&^#^! been able to make Git work. It makes you angry inside that you have to ask your co-worker, again, for that *&^#^! command to upload your work.

It’s not you. It’s Git. Promise.

Yes, this is an article about the popular version control system, Git. But unlike just about every other article written about Git, I’m not going to give you the top five commands that you need to memorize; and I’m not going to tell you all your problems would be solved if only you were using this GUI wrapper or that particular workflow. You see, I’ve come to a grand realization: when we teach Git, we’re doing it wrong.

Let me back up for a second and tell you a little bit about the field of adult education. (Bear with me, it gets good and will leave you feeling both empowered and righteous.) Andragogy, unlike pedagogy, is a learner-driven educational experience. There are six main tenets to adult education: 


	Adults prefer to know why they are learning something.
	The foundation of the learning activities should include experience.
	Adults prefer to be able to plan and evaluate their own instruction.
	Adults are more interested in learning things which directly impact their daily activities.
	Adults prefer learning to be oriented not towards content, but towards problems.
	Adults relate more to their own motivators than to external ones.


Nowhere in this list does it include “memorize the five most popular Git commands”. And yet this is how we teach version control: init, add, commit, branch, push. You’re an expert! Sound familiar? In the hierarchy of learning, memorizing commands is the lowest, or most basic, form of learning. At the peak of learning you are able to not just analyze and evaluate a problem space, but create your own understanding in relation to your existing body of knowledge.

“Fine,” I can hear you saying to yourself. “But I’m here to learn about version control.” Right you are! So how can we use this knowledge to master Git? First of all: I give you permission to use Git as a tool. A tool which you control and which you assign tasks to. A tool like a hammer, or a saw. Yes, your mastery of your tools will shape the kinds of interactions you have with your work, and your peers. But it’s yours to control. Git was written by kernel developers for kernel development. The web world has adopted Git, but it is not a tool designed for us and by us. It’s no Sass, y’know? Git wasn’t developed out of our frustration with managing CSS files in an increasingly complex ecosystem of components and atomic design. So, as you work through the next part of this article, give yourself a bit of a break. We’re in this together, and it’s going to be OK.

We’re going to do a little activity. We’re going to create your perfect Git cheatsheet.

I want you to start by writing down a list of all the people on your code team. This list may include:


	developers
	designers
	project managers
	clients


Next, I want you to write down a list of all the ways you interact with your team. Maybe you’re a solo developer and you do all the tasks. Maybe you only do a few things. But I want you to write down a list of all the tasks you’re actually responsible for. For example, my list looks like this:


	writing code
	reviewing code
	publishing tested code to your server(s)
	troubleshooting broken code


The next list will end up being a series of boxes in a diagram. But to start, I want you to write down a list of your tools and constraints. This list potentially has a lot of noun-like items and verb-like items:


	code hosting system (Bitbucket? GitHub? Unfuddle? self-hosted?)
	server ecosystem (dev/staging/live)
	automated testing systems or review gates
	automated build systems (that Jenkins dude people keep referring to)


Brilliant! Now you’ve got your actors and your actions, it’s time to shuffle them into a diagram. There are many popular workflow patterns. None are inherently right or wrong; rather, some are more or less appropriate for what you are trying to accomplish.

Centralized workflow

Everyone saves to a single place. This workflow may mean no version control, or a very rudimentary version control system which only ever has a single copy of the work available to the team at any point in time.

 

Branching workflow

Everyone works from a copy of the same place, merging their changes into the main copy as their work is completed. Think of the branches as a motorcycle sidecar: they’re along for the ride and probably cannot exist in isolation of the main project for long without serious danger coming to the either the driver or sidecar passenger. Branches are a fundamental concept in version control — they allow you to work on new features, bug fixes, and experimental changes within a single repository, but without forcing the changes onto others working from the same branch.

 

Forking workflow

Everyone works from their own, independent repository. A fork is an exact duplicate of a repository that a developer can make their own changes to. It can be kept up to date with additional changes made in other repositories, but it cannot force its changes onto another’s repository. A fork is a complete repository which can use its own workflow strategies. If developers wish to merge their work with the main project, they must make a request of some kind (submit a patch, or a pull request) which the project collaborators may choose to adopt or reject. This workflow is popular for open source projects as it enforces a review process.

 

Gitflow workflow

A specific workflow convention which includes five streams of parallel coding efforts: master, development, feature branches, release branches, and hot fixes. This workflow is often simplified down to a few elements by web teams, but may be used wholesale by software product teams. The original article describing this workflow was written by Vincent Driessen back in January 2010.

 

But these workflows aren’t about you yet, are they? So let’s make the connections.

From the list of people on your team you identified earlier, draw a little circle. Give each of these circles some eyes and a smile. Now I want you to draw arrows between each of these people in the direction that code (ideally) flows. Does your designer create responsive prototypes which are pushed to the developer? Draw an arrow to represent this.

Chances are high that you don’t just have people on your team, but you also have some kind of infrastructure. Hopefully you wrote about it earlier. For each of the servers and code repositories in your infrastructure, draw a square. Now, add to your diagram the relationships between the people and each of the machines in the infrastructure. Who can deploy code to the live server? How does it really get there? I bet it goes through some kind of code hosting system, such as GitHub. Draw in those arrows.

But wait!

The code that’s on your development machine isn’t the same as the live code. This is where we introduce the concept of a branch in version control. In Git, a repository contains all of the code (sort of). A branch is a fragment of the code that has been worked on in isolation to the other branches within a repository. Often branches will have elements in common. When we compare two (or more) branches, we are asking about the difference (or diff) between these two slivers. Often the master branch is used on production, and the development branch is used on our dev server. The difference between these two branches is the untested code that is not yet deployed.

On your diagram, see if you can colour-code according to the branch names at each of the locations within your infrastructure. You might find it useful to make a few different copies of the diagram to isolate each of the tasks you need to perform. For example: our team has a peer review process that each branch must go through before it is merged into the shared development branch.

Finally, we are ready to add the Git commands necessary to make sense of the arrows in our diagram. If we are bringing code to our own workstation we will issue one of the following commands: clone (the first time we bring code to our workstation) or pull. Remembering that a repository contains all branches, we will issue the command checkout to switch from one branch to another within our own workstation. If we want to share a particular branch with one of our team mates, we will push this branch back to the place we retrieved it from (the origin). Along each of the arrows in your diagram, write the name of the command you are are going to use when you perform that particular task.

 

From here, it’s up to you to be selfish. Before asking Git what command it would like you to use, sketch the diagram of what you want. Git is your tool, you are not Git’s tool. Draw the diagram. Communicate your tasks with your team as explicitly as you can. Insist on being a selfish adult learner — demand that others explain to you, in ways that are relevant to you, how to do the things you need to do today.",2013,Emma Jane Westby,emmajanewestby,2013-12-04T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/git-for-grownups/,code
18,Grunt for People Who Think Things Like Grunt are Weird and Hard,"Front-end developers are often told to do certain things:


	Work in as small chunks of CSS and JavaScript as makes sense to you, then concatenate them together for the production website.
	Compress your CSS and minify your JavaScript to make their file sizes as small as possible for your production website.
	Optimize your images to reduce their file size without affecting quality.
	Use Sass for CSS authoring because of all the useful abstraction it allows.


That’s not a comprehensive list of course, but those are the kind of things we need to do. You might call them tasks.

I bet you’ve heard of Grunt. Well, Grunt is a task runner. Grunt can do all of those things for you. Once you’ve got it set up, which isn’t particularly difficult, those things can happen automatically without you having to think about them again.

But let’s face it: Grunt is one of those fancy newfangled things that all the cool kids seem to be using but at first glance feels strange and intimidating. I hear you. This article is for you.

Let’s nip some misconceptions in the bud right away

Perhaps you’ve heard of Grunt, but haven’t done anything with it. I’m sure that applies to many of you. Maybe one of the following hang-ups applies to you.

I don’t need the things Grunt does

You probably do, actually. Check out that list up top. Those things aren’t nice-to-haves. They are pretty vital parts of website development these days. If you already do all of them, that’s awesome. Perhaps you use a variety of different tools to accomplish them. Grunt can help bring them under one roof, so to speak. If you don’t already do all of them, you probably should and Grunt can help. Then, once you are doing those, you can keep using Grunt to do more for you, which will basically make you better at doing your job.

Grunt runs on Node.js — I don’t know Node

You don’t have to know Node. Just like you don’t have to know Ruby to use Sass. Or PHP to use WordPress. Or C++ to use Microsoft Word.

I have other ways to do the things Grunt could do for me

Are they all organized in one place, configured to run automatically when needed, and shared among every single person working on that project? Unlikely, I’d venture.

Grunt is a command line tool — I’m just a designer

I’m a designer too. I prefer native apps with graphical interfaces when I can get them. But I don’t think that’s going to happen with Grunt1.

The extent to which you need to use the command line is:


	Navigate to your project’s directory.
	Type grunt and press Return.


After set-up, that is, which again isn’t particularly difficult.

OK. Let’s get Grunt installed

Node is indeed a prerequisite for Grunt. If you don’t have Node installed, don’t worry, it’s very easy. You literally download an installer and run it. Click the big Install button on the Node website.

You install Grunt on a per-project basis. Go to your project’s folder. It needs a file there named package.json at the root level. You can just create one and put it there.

 package.json at root

The contents of that file should be this:

{
  ""name"": ""example-project"",
  ""version"": ""0.1.0"",
  ""devDependencies"": {
    ""grunt"": ""~0.4.1""
  }
}

Feel free to change the name of the project and the version, but the devDependencies thing needs to be in there just like that.

This is how Node does dependencies. Node has a package manager called NPM (Node packaged modules) for managing Node dependencies (like a gem for Ruby if you’re familiar with that). You could even think of it a bit like a plug-in for WordPress.

Once that package.json file is in place, go to the terminal and navigate to your folder. Terminal rubes like me do it like this:

 Terminal rube changing directories

Then run the command:

npm install

After you’ve run that command, a new folder called node_modules will show up in your project.

 Example of node_modules folder

The other files you see there, README.md and LICENSE are there because I’m going to put this project on GitHub and that’s just standard fare there.

The last installation step is to install the Grunt CLI (command line interface). That’s what makes the grunt command in the terminal work. Without it, typing grunt will net you a “Command Not Found”-style error. It is a separate installation for efficiency reasons. Otherwise, if you had ten projects you’d have ten copies of Grunt CLI.

This is a one-liner again. Just run this command in the terminal:

npm install -g grunt-cli

You should close and reopen the terminal as well. That’s a generic good practice to make sure things are working right. Kinda like restarting your computer after you install a new application was in the olden days.

Let’s make Grunt concatenate some files

Perhaps in our project there are three separate JavaScript files:


	jquery.js – The library we are using.
	carousel.js – A jQuery plug-in we are using.
	global.js – Our authored JavaScript file where we configure and call the plug-in.


In production, we would concatenate all those files together for performance reasons (one request is better than three). We need to tell Grunt to do this for us.

But wait. Grunt actually doesn’t do anything all by itself. Remember Grunt is a task runner. The tasks themselves we will need to add. We actually haven’t set up Grunt to do anything yet, so let’s do that.

The official Grunt plug-in for concatenating files is grunt-contrib-concat. You can read about it on GitHub if you want, but all you have to do to use it on your project is to run this command from the terminal (it will henceforth go without saying that you need to run the given commands from your project’s root folder):

npm install grunt-contrib-concat --save-dev

A neat thing about doing it this way: your package.json file will automatically be updated to include this new dependency. Open it up and check it out. You’ll see a new line:

""grunt-contrib-concat"": ""~0.3.0""

Now we’re ready to use it. To use it we need to start configuring Grunt and telling it what to do.

You tell Grunt what to do via a configuration file named Gruntfile.js2

Just like our package.json file, our Gruntfile.js has a very special format that must be just right. I wouldn’t worry about what every word of this means. Just check out the format:

module.exports = function(grunt) {

    // 1. All configuration goes here 
    grunt.initConfig({
        pkg: grunt.file.readJSON('package.json'),

        concat: {
            // 2. Configuration for concatinating files goes here.
        }

    });

    // 3. Where we tell Grunt we plan to use this plug-in.
    grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-concat');

    // 4. Where we tell Grunt what to do when we type ""grunt"" into the terminal.
    grunt.registerTask('default', ['concat']);

};

Now we need to create that configuration. The documentation can be overwhelming. Let’s focus just on the very simple usage example.

Remember, we have three JavaScript files we’re trying to concatenate. We’ll list file paths to them under src in an array of file paths (as quoted strings) and then we’ll list a destination file as dest. The destination file doesn’t have to exist yet. It will be created when this task runs and squishes all the files together.

Both our jquery.js and carousel.js files are libraries. We most likely won’t be touching them. So, for organization, we’ll keep them in a /js/libs/ folder. Our global.js file is where we write our own code, so that will be right in the /js/ folder. Now let’s tell Grunt to find all those files and squish them together into a single file named production.js, named that way to indicate it is for use on our real live website.

concat: {   
    dist: {
        src: [
            'js/libs/*.js', // All JS in the libs folder
            'js/global.js'  // This specific file
        ],
        dest: 'js/build/production.js',
    }
}

Note: throughout this article there will be little chunks of configuration code like above. The intention is to focus in on the important bits, but it can be confusing at first to see how a particular chunk fits into the larger file. If you ever get confused and need more context, refer to the complete file.

With that concat configuration in place, head over to the terminal, run the command:

grunt

and watch it happen! production.js will be created and will be a perfect concatenation of our three files. This was a big aha! moment for me. Feel the power course through your veins. Let’s do more things!

Let’s make Grunt minify that JavaScript

We have so much prep work done now, adding new tasks for Grunt to run is relatively easy. We just need to:


	Find a Grunt plug-in to do what we want
	Learn the configuration style of that plug-in
	Write that configuration to work with our project


The official plug-in for minifying code is grunt-contrib-uglify. Just like we did last time, we just run an NPM command to install it:

npm install grunt-contrib-uglify --save-dev

Then we alter our Gruntfile.js to load the plug-in:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-uglify');

Then we configure it:

uglify: {
    build: {
        src: 'js/build/production.js',
        dest: 'js/build/production.min.js'
    }
}

Let’s update that default task to also run minification:

grunt.registerTask('default', ['concat', 'uglify']);

Super-similar to the concatenation set-up, right?

Run grunt at the terminal and you’ll get some deliciously minified JavaScript:

 Minified JavaScript

That production.min.js file is what we would load up for use in our index.html file.

Let’s make Grunt optimize our images

We’ve got this down pat now. Let’s just go through the motions. The official image minification plug-in for Grunt is grunt-contrib-imagemin. Install it:

npm install grunt-contrib-imagemin --save-dev

Register it in the Gruntfile.js:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-imagemin');

Configure it:

imagemin: {
    dynamic: {
        files: [{
            expand: true,
            cwd: 'images/',
            src: ['**/*.{png,jpg,gif}'],
            dest: 'images/build/'
        }]
    }
}

Make sure it runs:

grunt.registerTask('default', ['concat', 'uglify', 'imagemin']);

Run grunt and watch that gorgeous squishification happen:

 Squished images

Gotta love performance increases for nearly zero effort.

Let’s get a little bit smarter and automate

What we’ve done so far is awesome and incredibly useful. But there are a couple of things we can get smarter on and make things easier on ourselves, as well as Grunt:


	Run these tasks automatically when they should
	Run only the tasks needed at the time


For instance:


	Concatenate and minify JavaScript when JavaScript changes
	Optimize images when a new image is added or an existing one changes


We can do this by watching files. We can tell Grunt to keep an eye out for changes to specific places and, when changes happen in those places, run specific tasks. Watching happens through the official grunt-contrib-watch plugin.

I’ll let you install it. It is exactly the same process as the last few plug-ins we installed. We configure it by giving watch specific files (or folders, or both) to watch. By watch, I mean monitor for file changes, file deletions or file additions. Then we tell it what tasks we want to run when it detects a change.

We want to run our concatenation and minification when anything in the /js/ folder changes. When it does, we should run the JavaScript-related tasks. And when things happen elsewhere, we should not run the JavaScript-related tasks, because that would be irrelevant. So:

watch: {
    scripts: {
        files: ['js/*.js'],
        tasks: ['concat', 'uglify'],
        options: {
            spawn: false,
        },
    } 
}

Feels pretty comfortable at this point, hey? The only weird bit there is the spawn thing. And you know what? I don’t even really know what that does. From what I understand from the documentation it is the smart default. That’s real-world development. Just leave it alone if it’s working and if it’s not, learn more.

Note: Isn’t it frustrating when something that looks so easy in a tutorial doesn’t seem to work for you? If you can’t get Grunt to run after making a change, it’s very likely to be a syntax error in your Gruntfile.js. That might look like this in the terminal:

 Errors running Grunt

Usually Grunt is pretty good about letting you know what happened, so be sure to read the error message. In this case, a syntax error in the form of a missing comma foiled me. Adding the comma allowed it to run.

Let’s make Grunt do our preprocessing

The last thing on our list from the top of the article is using Sass — yet another task Grunt is well-suited to run for us. But wait? Isn’t Sass technically in Ruby? Indeed it is. There is a version of Sass that will run in Node and thus not add an additional dependency to our project, but it’s not quite up-to-snuff with the main Ruby project. So, we’ll use the official grunt-contrib-sass plug-in which just assumes you have Sass installed on your machine. If you don’t, follow the command line instructions.

What’s neat about Sass is that it can do concatenation and minification all by itself. So for our little project we can just have it compile our main global.scss file:

sass: {
    dist: {
        options: {
            style: 'compressed'
        },
        files: {
            'css/build/global.css': 'css/global.scss'
        }
    } 
}

We wouldn’t want to manually run this task. We already have the watch plug-in installed, so let’s use it! Within the watch configuration, we’ll add another subtask:

css: {
    files: ['css/*.scss'],
    tasks: ['sass'],
    options: {
        spawn: false,
    }
}

That’ll do it. Now, every time we change any of our Sass files, the CSS will automaticaly be updated.

Let’s take this one step further (it’s absolutely worth it) and add LiveReload. With LiveReload, you won’t have to go back to your browser and refresh the page. Page refreshes happen automatically and in the case of CSS, new styles are injected without a page refresh (handy for heavily state-based websites).

It’s very easy to set up, since the LiveReload ability is built into the watch plug-in. We just need to:


Install the browser plug-in
Add to the top of the watch configuration:
. watch: {
    options: {
        livereload: true,
    },
    scripts: {   
    /* etc */

Restart the browser and click the LiveReload icon to activate it.
Update some Sass and watch it change the page automatically.


 Live reloading browser

Yum.

Prefer a video?

If you’re the type that likes to learn by watching, I’ve made a screencast to accompany this article that I’ve published over on CSS-Tricks: First Moments with Grunt

Leveling up

As you might imagine, there is a lot of leveling up you can do with your build process. It surely could be a full time job in some organizations.

Some hardcore devops nerds might scoff at the simplistic setup we have going here. But I’d advise them to slow their roll. Even what we have done so far is tremendously valuable. And don’t forget this is all free and open source, which is amazing.

You might level up by adding more useful tasks:


	Running your CSS through Autoprefixer (A+ Would recommend) instead of a preprocessor add-ons.
	Writing and running JavaScript unit tests (example: Jasmine).
	Build your image sprites and SVG icons automatically (example: Grunticon).
	Start a server, so you can link to assets with proper file paths and use services that require a real URL like TypeKit and such, as well as remove the need for other tools that do this, like MAMP.
	Check for code problems with HTML-Inspector, CSS Lint, or JS Hint.
	Have new CSS be automatically injected into the browser when it ever changes.
	Help you commit or push to a version control repository like GitHub.
	Add version numbers to your assets (cache busting).
	Help you deploy to a staging or production environment (example: DPLOY).


You might level up by simply understanding more about Grunt itself:


	Read Grunt Boilerplate by Mark McDonnell.
	Read Grunt Tips and Tricks by Nicolas Bevacqua.
	Organize your Gruntfile.js by splitting it up into smaller files.
	Check out other people’s and projects’ Gruntfile.js.
	Learn more about Grunt by digging into its source and learning about its API.


Let’s share

I think some group sharing would be a nice way to wrap this up. If you are installing Grunt for the first time (or remember doing that), be especially mindful of little frustrating things you experience(d) but work(ed) through. Those are the things we should share in the comments here. That way we have this safe place and useful resource for working through those confusing moments without the embarrassment. We’re all in this thing together!

 

1 Maybe someday someone will make a beautiful Grunt app for your operating system of choice. But I’m not sure that day will come. The configuration of the plug-ins is the important part of using Grunt. Each plug-in is a bit different, depending on what it does. That means a uniquely considered UI for every single plug-in, which is a long shot.

Perhaps a decent middleground is this Grunt DevTools Chrome add-on.

2 Gruntfile.js is often referred to as Gruntfile in documentation and examples. Don’t literally name it Gruntfile — it won’t work.",2013,Chris Coyier,chriscoyier,2013-12-11T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/grunt-is-not-weird-and-hard/,code
10,Home Kanban for Domestic Bliss,"My wife is an architect. I’m a leader of big technical teams these days, but for many years after I was a dev I was a project/program manager. Our friends and family used to watch Grand Designs and think that we would make the ideal team — she could design, I could manage the project of building or converting whatever dream home we wanted.

Then we bought a house.

A Victorian terrace in the north-east of England that needed, well, a fair bit of work. The big decisions were actually pretty easy: yes, we should knock through a double doorway from the dining room to the lounge; yes, we should strip out everything from the utility room and redo it; yes, we should roll back the hideous carpet in the bedrooms upstairs and see if we could restore the original wood flooring.

Those could be managed like a project.

What couldn’t be was all the other stuff. Incremental improvements are harder to schedule, and in a house that’s over a hundred years old you never know what you’re going to find when you clear away some tiles, or pull up the carpets, or even just spring-clean the kitchen (“Erm, hon? The paint seems to be coming off. Actually, so does the plaster…”). A bit like going in to fix bugs in code or upgrade a machine — sometimes you end up quite far down the rabbit hole.

And so, as we tried to fit in those improvements in our evenings and weekends, we found ourselves disagreeing. Arguing, even. We were both trying to do the right thing (make the house better) but since we were fitting it in where we could, we often didn’t get to talk and agree in detail what was needed (exactly how to make the house better). And it’s really frustrating when you stay up late doing something, just to find that your other half didn’t mean that they meant this instead, and so your effort was wasted.

Then I saw this tweet from my friend and colleague Jamie Arnold, who was using the same kanban board approach at home as we had instituted at the UK Government Digital Service to manage our portfolio.

Mrs Arnold embraces Kanban wall at home. Disagreements about work in progress and priority significantly reduced.. ;) pic.twitter.com/407brMCH— Jamie Arnold (@itsallgonewrong) October 27, 2012

And despite Jamie’s questionable taste in fancy dress outfits (look closely at that board), he is a proper genius when it comes to processes and particularly agile ones. So I followed his example and instituted a home kanban board.

What is this kanban of which you speak?

Kanban boards are an artefact from lean manufacturing — basically a visualisation of a production process. They are used to show you where your bottlenecks are, or where one part of the process is producing components faster than another part of the process can cope. Identifying the bottlenecks leads you to set work in progress (WIP) limits, so that you get an overall more efficient system.

Increasingly kanban is used as an agile software development approach, too, especially where support work (like fixing bugs) needs to be balanced with incremental enhancement (like adding new features).

I’m a big advocate of kanban when you have a system that needs to be maintained and improved by the same team at the same time. Rather than the sprint-based approach of scrum (where the next sprint’s stories or features to be delivered are agreed up front), kanban lets individuals deal with incidents or problems that need investigation and bug fixing when urgent and important. Then, when someone has capacity, they can just go to the board and pull down the next feature to develop or test.

So, how did we use it?

One of the key tenets of kanban is that you visualise your workflow, so we put together a whiteboard with columns: Icebox; To Do Next; In Process; Done; and also a section called Blocked. Then, for each thing that needed to happen in the house, we put it on a Post-it note and initially chucked them all in the Icebox — a collection with no priority assigned yet.

Each week we looked at the Icebox and pulled out a set of things that we felt should be done next. This was pulled into the To Do Next column, and then each time either of us had some time, we could just pull a new thing over into the In Process column. We agreed to review at the end of each week and move things to Done together, and to talk about whether this kanban approach was working for us or not.

We quickly learned for ourselves why kanban has WIP limits as a key tenet — it’s tempting to pull everything into the To Do Next column, but that’s unrealistic. And trying to do more than one or two things each at a given time isn’t terribly productive owing to the cost of task switching. So we tend to limit our To Do Next to about seven items, and our In Process to about four (a max of two each, basically).

We use the Blocked column when something can’t be completed — perhaps we can’t fix something because we discovered we don’t have the required tools or supplies, or if we’re waiting for a call back from a plumber. But it’s nice to put it to one side, knowing that it won’t be forgotten.

What helped the most?

It wasn’t so much the visualisation that helped us to see what we needed to do, but the conversation that happened when we were agreeing priorities, moving them to In Process and then on to Done made the biggest difference. Getting clear on the order of importance really is invaluable — as is getting clear on what Done really means!

The Blocked column is also great, as it helps us keep track of things we need to do outside the house to make sure we can make progress. We also found it really helpful to examine the process itself and figure out whether it was working for us. For instance, one thing we realised is it’s worth tracking some regular tasks that need time invested in them (like taking recycling that isn’t picked up to the recycling centre) and these used to cycle around and around. So they were moved to Done as part of our weekly review, but then immediately put back in the Icebox to float back to the top again at a relevant time.

But the best thing of all? That moment where we get to mark something as done! It’s immensely satisfying to review at the end of the week and have a physical marker of the progress you’ve made.

All in all, a home kanban board turned out to be a very effective way to pull tasks through stages rather than always trying to plan them out in advance, and definitely made collaboration on our home tasks significantly smoother. Give it a try!",2013,Meri Williams,meriwilliams,2013-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/home-kanban-for-domestic-bliss/,process