Zeldman Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:46:19 +0000
My Glamorous Life: Lucy Ricardo, C’est Moi ... TRYING A NEW breakfast place. I tell the cashier, “Extra crispy bacon.” “Extra bacon,” she says. “No, not extra bacon. Extra crispy bacon,” I say. A fast-paced volley of shouted Spanish follows, between the cook, the cashier, and the server. A customer in line behind me chimes in. He is either describing my order to [...]
A List Apart: a change is gonna come, I can feel it ... TODAY, TWO invaluable contributors to A List Apart move on, and a new member joins our ranks: Aaron Gustafson (@aarongustafson), author of Adaptive Web Design (the clearest, most beautiful explanation of progressive enhancement I’ve ever read) and nearly a dozen brilliant A List Apart articles, has been a technical editor at A List Apart for [...]
A List Apart: Pricing Strategy for Creatives ... FREELANCERS AND STUDIO HEADS, learn what your rates say about your brand, and discover how to make more money by raising your rate strategically. A List Apart: Pricing Strategy for Creatives by JASON BLUMER. Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart Magazine.
A List Apart: Responsive Images: How they Almost Worked and What We Need ... RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGNERS, don’t miss Mat Marquis’ essential article in today’s A LIST APART, for people who make websites: Responsive Images: How they Almost Worked and What We Need. Mat shows why responsive images as we currently use them don’t quite cut it – and shares a way forward that involves the creation of a [...]
Dyson to NY: drop dead ... DYSON’S WEBSITE won’t sell me a vacuum cleaner. It claims New York, a U.S. state it provides in its own drop-down menu, is “not a valid state.” I have previously ordered Dyson products from the Dyson website and shipped them to a different address in New York. I have an account and everything. But the [...]
Accident ... CAR JUST HIT ME as I was crossing street. Van carrying old people. Driver didn’t see me. Van struck my head. # I punched door. Driver and passengers stared at me. Time slowed way down. I gestured for driver to pull over.# Asked woman on street if I was bleeding. She said no. Told van [...]
A List Apart Issue No. 342: A Pixel Identity Crisis; An Important Time for Design; Building Twitter Bootstrap ... In a triple issue of A List Apart for people who make websites, it’s time for designers to seize the day! Transcend mobile platform differences, harness the power of an open-source front-end toolkit, and band together to change the world: An Important Time for Design by CAMERON KOCZON Cameron Koczon says designers have now been [...]
Ding dong, SOPA is dead. ... DING DONG, THE WITCH IS DEAD. For now, at least, the “ill-conceived lobbyist-driven piece of legislation” known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is no more: Misguided efforts to combat online privacy have been threatening to stifle innovation, suppress free speech, and even, in some cases, undermine national security. As of yesterday, though, there’s [...]
Selling Design – an online reading list ... TOMORROW, WHICH IS also my birthday, I begin teaching “Selling Design” to second-year students in the MFA Interaction Design program at School of Visual Arts, New York. Liz Danzico and Steve Heller created and direct the MFA program, and this is my second year teaching this class, whose curriculum I pull out of my little [...]
The maker makes: on design, community, and personal empowerment ... THE FIRST THING I got about the web was its ability to empower the maker. The year was 1995, and I was tinkering at my first website. The medium was raw and ugly, like a forceps baby; yet even in its blind, howling state, it made me a writer, a designer, and a publisher — [...]
State of the web: of apps, devices, and breakpoints ... IN The ‘trouble’ with Android, Stephanie Rieger points out the ludicrous number of Android screen sizes on a typical UK client’s website and comes to this conclusion: If … you have built your mobile site using fixed widths (believing that you’ve designed to suit the most ‘popular’ screen size), or are planning to serve specific [...]
Hitler reacts to SOPA ...
Migrate if you like, but Touristeye is not a Gowalla partner. ... RECENTLY A COMPANY CALLED Touristeye has been emailing Gowalla users, encouraging them to migrate their data to Touristeye now that the Gowalla service is closing down. The emails tell you how a Gowalla friend (who is named) has just migrated her/his data to Touristeye and invite you to join her or him. Although Touristeye does [...]
The Big Web Show No. 61: Khoi Vinh of Mixel and NYTimes.com ... NOW ONLINE for your pleasure! In Episode No. 61 of The Big Web Show (“everything web that matters”), I interview Khoi Vinh, co-creator of Mixel, former NYTimes.com Design Director, co-founder of NYC design studio Behavior, and more. In this episode we discuss Khoi’s career, including his fine-art background, art school, and design classes, his time [...]
My glamorous life: some holiday! ... THIS WEEK I will finally sign my divorce papers. It’s like that old Woody Allen joke, “The food here is terrible – and such small portions.” I didn’t want to get divorced, and I’ve been waiting two years to do it. It’s a friendly little divorce that started out as a simple mediated settlement, but [...]

A List Apart
Responsive Images: How they Almost Worked and What We Need ... With a mobile-first responsive design approach, if any part of the process breaks down, your user can still receive a representative image and avoid an unnecessarily large request on a device that may have limited bandwidth. But with several newer browsers implementing an “image prefetching” feature that allows images to be fetched before parsing the document’s body, some of the web's brightest developers are abandoning responsive images in favor of user agent detection, at least as a temporary solution. For us standardistas, UA detection leaves a bad taste in the mouth. More importantly, as the number and kinds of devices continue to grow, UA detection will quickly become untenable—just as browser detection did back in the bad old days before web standards. What's really needed, argues Mat Marquis, is a new markup element that works the way the HTML5 video element works. Sound crazy? So crazy it just might work.
Pricing Strategy for Creatives ... Strategic pricing helps your brand and helps you to make more money. Issuing a price is like handing out a business card—it’s a great branding tool, but be careful about what it says to your market. Beginning relationships with customers at a high price makes the statement: “we’re good at what we do and we know it.” Fighting with a competitor over a low price says “I’m uncertain about my abilities, so I’ll take what I can get.” Failing to use a considered pricing policy will leave you treading water in a sea of design mediocrity, allowing you to just stay afloat while you sell commodities. Jason Blumer explains how to become strategic about your pricing—including three things you can do immediately to kick-start your journey toward strategic pricing.
Building Twitter Bootstrap ... Bootstrap is an open-source front-end toolkit created to help designers and developers quickly and efficiently build great stuff online. Its goal is to provide a refined, well-documented, and extensive library of flexible design components created with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for others to build and innovate on. Today, it has grown to include dozens of components and has become the most popular project on GitHub, with more than 13,000 watchers and 2,000 forks. Mark Otto, the co-creator of Bootstrap, sheds light on how and why Bootstrap was made, the processes used to create it, and how it has grown as a design system.
An Important Time for Design ... Design is on a roll. Client services are experiencing a major uptick in demand, seasoned design professionals are abandoning client work in favor of entrepreneurship, and designer-co-founded startups such as Kickstarter and Airbnb are taking center stage. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that design has a massive role to play in the evolution of the web and the next generation of web products. The result, says Cameron Koczon, is that designers have now been given a blank check—one that lets web designers band together as a community to change the way design is perceived; change the way products are built; and quite possibly change the world.
A Pixel Identity Crisis ... The pixel has long been the atomic particle of screen based design: a knowable, concrete unit of measurement. But layouts based on the hardware pixel are fast becoming an endangered species. Even the introduction of a new, W3C standard reference pixel, although it promises stability in the long-term, can't help us navigate the current chaos. Consider the two "standard" pixel definitions and 500 "standard" viewports your user's Android device may support. To create designs that transcend platform differences—the promise of the web and standards—you must normalize pixels across devices. Scott Kellum shows how math and media queries can keep you sane and help you design consistently across platforms.
What I Learned About the Web in 2011 ... As the year draws to a close, we asked some A List Apart readers to tell us what they learned about the web in 2011. Together their responses summarize the joys and challenges of this magical place we call the internet. We need to continue to iterate, to embrace change, and challenge complexity to keep shipping. Above all, we must continue to reach out to one another, to teach, to support, to help, and to build the community that sustains us.
Say No to SOPA ... A List Apart strongly opposes United States H.R.3261 AKA the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an ill-conceived lobbyist-driven piece of legislation that is technically impossible to enforce, cripplingly burdensome to support, and would, without hyperbole, destroy the internet as we know it. SOPA approaches the problem of content piracy with a broad brush, lights that brush on fire, and soaks the whole web in gasoline. If passed, SOPA will allow corporations to block the domains of websites that are “capable of” or “seem to encourage” copyright infringement. Once a domain is blocked, nobody can access it, unless they’ve memorized the I.P. address. Under SOPA, everything from your grandma’s knitting blog to mighty Google is guilty until proven innocent. Learn why SOPA must not pass, and find out what you can do to help stop it.
Getting Started with Sass ... CSS’ simplicity has always been one of its most welcome features. But as our sites and apps get bigger and become more complex, and target a wider range of devices and screen sizes, this simplicity—so welcome as we first started to move away from font tags and table-based layouts—has become a liability. Fortunately, a few years ago developers Hampton Catlin and Nathan Weizenbaum created a new style sheet syntax with features to help make our increasingly complex CSS easier to write and manage—and then used a preprocessor to translate the new smart syntax into the old, dumb CSS that browsers understand. Learn how Sass (“syntactically awesome style sheets”) can help simplify the creation, updating, and maintenance of powerful sites and apps.
The ALA 2011 Web Design Survey ... The profession that dares not speak its name needs you. Digital design is the wonder of the world. But the world hasn't bothered to stop and wonder about web workers—the designers, developers, project managers, information architects slash UX folk, content strategists, writers, editors, marketers, educators, and other professionals who make the web what it is. That’s where you come in. Take the survey!
Expanding Text Areas Made Elegant ... An expanding text area is a multi-line text input field that expands in height to fit its contents. Commonly found in both desktop and mobile applications, such as the SMS composition field on the iPhone, it’s a good choice when you don’t know how much text the user will write and you want to keep the layout compact; as such, it’s especially useful on interfaces targeted at smartphones. Yet despite the ubiquity of this control, there’s no way to create it using only HTML and CSS, and most JavaScript solutions have suffered from guesswork, inaccuracy, or a lack of elegance … until now.