rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic 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 . 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 . …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: Finally, we’ll add a truck icon to the main action button, as follows. Why a truck? Why not? Sign up today 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: 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 ’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 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 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 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 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:

Accessible text

 A second proposal put forward by Apple, the srcset attribute, uses a more concise syntax intended for use with the element, although it could be compatible with the element too. This would allow authors to provide a set of images, but with the decision on which to use left to the browser: 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 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 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 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 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 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