Webdesigninformer.com

Newcastle : An impromptu compilation using footage I gathered during my stay in Newcastle Upon Tyne and Gateshead (UK). This was my first visit to Newcastle, in town to speak at DIBI 2012. I flew in Sunday evening, dropped off my luggage, grabbed my camera, and proceeded to lose myself in the streets of the city. The camera captured what I saw. I later debuted this video during my presentation. I didn’t have a tripod with me as I was traveling light. … Read the rest here

Skipping vs. Internalizing

SimpleBits Go to the source

Skipping vs. Internalizing : Stephen Anderson, commenting on concerns within the community regarding “skipping the critical IA step” or “ditching wireframes to go straight to hi-fidelity”: Human beings don’t think about content separate from presentation separate from structure separate from (fill in the blank)… We experience the world around us as one integrated whole. By insisting that we create these artificial distinctions [with clients and our projects], we confuse more than help. Asking someone to comment just on the interaction or just on the structure — independent of the other pieces — is a bit like asking someone to judge a chocolate chip cookie based on only a handful of ingredients. … Read the rest here

A Typographic Refresh

A little over five years ago, Greg Storey suggested Whitney for the SimpleBits logotype that went along with a previous brand update . I’m thankful he did, because since then it’s become a favorite typeface around these parts, eventually becoming the base for the current ‘SB’ mark. Over the next few years, Hoefler & Frere-Jones catalog became my standard go-to font choices for presentation slides. I was hooked. Over the weekend I made some subtle design tweaks here, and some not-so-subtle type refreshing. I’m honored to be beta testing H&FJ’s forthcoming webfonts offering. … Read the rest here

Customizing Your Markup

So HTML5 allows you (at the moment) to create your own custom elements. Only, not really. Suppose you’re creating a super-sweet JavaScript library to improve text presentation—like, say, TypeButter —and you need to insert a bunch of elements that won’t accidentally pick up pre-existing CSS. That rules span right out the door, and anything else would be either a bad semantic match, likely to pick up CSS by mistake, or both. Assuming you don’t want to spend the hours and lines of code necessary to push ahead with span and a whole lot of dynamic CSS rewriting, the obvious solution is to invent a new element and drop that into place. If you’re doing kerning, then a kern element makes a lot of sense, right? … Read the rest here

Invented Elements

This morning I caught a pointer to TypeButter , which is a jQuery library that does “optical kerning” in an attempt to improve the appearance of type. I’m not going to get into its design utility because I’m not qualified; I only notice kerning either when it’s set insanely wide or when it crosses over into keming . I suppose I’ve been looking at web type for so many years, it looks normal to me now. (Well, almost normal, but I’m not going to get into my personal typographic idiosyncrasies now.) My reason to bring this up is that I’m very interested by how TypeButter accomplishes its kerning: it inserts kern elements with inline style attributes that bear letter-spacing values. Not span elements, kern elements. … Read the rest here

Sharing pattern libraries

I’ve been huffduffing talks from this year’s South by Southwest , revisiting some of the ones I saw and catching up with some of the ones I missed. There are some really design and development resources in there that I didn’t get to see in person: Phil ’s talk on Excessive Enhancement: JavaScript’s Dark Side , Samantha ’s talk on Faster Design Decisions with Style Tiles , Josh ’s talk on Tapworthy Touchscreen Design , and Scott ’s talk on Why Mobile Apps Must Die . One talk I did get to see was Andy ’s CSS for Grown Ups: Maturing Best Practices . CSS for Grown Ups: Maturing Best Practices on Huffduffer It was excellent. … Read the rest here

Of Time and the Network and the Long Bet

When I went to Webstock , I prepared a new presentation called Of Time And The Network : Our perception and measurement of time has changed as our civilisation has evolved. That change has been driven by networks, from trade routes to the internet. I was pretty happy with how it turned out. It was a 40 minute talk that was pretty evenly split between the past and the future. … Read the rest here

Ideas of March

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. –W. Somerset Maugham Pressing ‘Pause’ on this site for a while has afforded me time and distance to realign my writing objectives. An invitation from Chris Shiflett to join today’s “ Ideas of March ” has afforded me an opportunity to break the silence… Read the rest here

Publishing Paranormal Interactivity

I’ve published the transcript of a talk I gave at An Event Apart in 2010 . It’s mostly about interaction design, with a couple of diversions into progressive enhancement and personality in products. It’s called Paranormal Interactivity . I had a lot of fun with this talk. It’s interspersed with videos from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy , Alan Partridge , and Super Mario , with special guest appearances from the existentialist chalkboard and Poshy’s upper back torso . If you don’t feel like reading it , you can always watch the video or listen to the audio . … Read the rest here

Cool your eyes don’t change

At last November’s Build conference I gave a talk on digital preservation called All Our Yesterdays : Our communication methods have improved over time, from stone tablets, papyrus, and vellum through to the printing press and the World Wide Web. But while the web has democratised publishing, allowing anyone to share ideas with a global audience, it doesn’t appear to be the best medium for preserving our cultural resources: websites and documents disappear down the digital memory hole every day. This presentation will look at the scale of the problem and propose methods for tackling our collective data loss. The video is now on vimeo . The audio has been huffduffed … Read the rest here

Presentation: Fake it ’til you make it

Snook Go to the source

From my presentation at StarTech , here are my slides. Fake it ’til you make it shows some code and examples on how to make a web app look more like a native mobile application. This can provide a way to build quick prototypes or to build using familiar technologies. … Read the rest here

One Web, transcribed

I spoke at the DIBI conference back in June . It was a really good event, despite its annoying two-track format. My talk was entitled One Web : The range of devices accessing the web is increasing. We are faced with a choice in how we deal with this diversity. We can either fracture the web by designing a multitude of device-specific silos, or we can embrace the flexibility of the web and create experiences that can adapt to any device or browser… Read the rest here

CSS Modules Throughout History

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

For very little reason other than I was curious to see what resulted, I’ve compiled a list of various CSS modules’ version histories, and then used CSS to turn it into a set of timelines . It’s kind of a low-cost way to visualize the life cycle of and energy going into various CSS modules. I’ll warn you up front that as of this writing the user interaction is not ideal, and in some places the presentation suffers from too much content overlap. This happens in timelines where lots of drafts were released in a short period of time. … Read the rest here

Five & Ten

This year marks my site’s tenth birthday online, so I’m celebrating with a new design edition. This is number five! I noticed something with my last site a little while ago. The custom designed articles I was posting (and that I loved to post) were keeping me from writing more regularly. It had nothing to do with the time involved to design those article, I usually kept things simple and got to be pretty fast at it, but more the presentation that bugged me. In order to post something, I felt it couldn’t be short or just a quip on a topic, it had to be substantial. I fell into a design trap I unknowingly set for myself. … Read the rest here

All Our Yesterdays: the links

If you were at An Event Apart in Boston and you want to follow up on some of the things I mentioned in my talk, here are some links: Stock and Flow by Robin Sloan. Archive Fever by Matt Ogle. This Place Is Not A Place Of Honor on Damn Interesting. The 10,000 Year Clock by The Long Now Foundation. Carl Sagan And Ann Druyan’s Ultimate Mix Tape by Radiolab. Small Pieces, Loosely Joined by David Weinberger. … Read the rest here

CSS Pocket Reference: The Cutting Room

Andy Budd Go to the source

I just shipped off the last of my drafts for CSS Pocket Reference, 4th Edition to my editor. In the process of writing the entries, I set up an ad-hoc test suite and made determinations about what to document and what to cut. That’s what you do with a book, particularly a book that’s meant to fit into a pocket. My general guide was to cut anything that isn’t supported in any rendering engine, though in a few cases I decided to cut properties that were supported by a lone browser but had no apparent prospects of being supported by anyone else, ever. For fun, and also to give fans of this or that property a chance to petition for re-inclusion, here are the properties and modules I cut… Read the rest here

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love SXSW

I’ve been coming to SXSW for 7 years and I’ve seen it change from a small and intimate event to the tech sector’s equivalent of Glastonbury. Back then bloggers were king and CSS2.1 was the hot technology of the day. Today the conference has gone from 2,500 people to an astonishing 25,000. Blogging is considered old hat, and the new tech superstars are the start-up founders, the professional publishers and the best selling authors. … Read the rest here

Reset 2.0b2: Paring Down

A few changes for beta 2 of the updated reset, presented here: /* http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/ v2.0b2 | 201101 NOTE: THIS IS A BETA VERSION (see previous line) USE WITH CAUTION AND TEST WITH ABANDON */ html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre, a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code, del, dfn, em, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp, small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var, b, u, i, center, dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li, fieldset, form, label, legend, table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td, article, aside, canvas, details, embed, figure, figcaption, footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, output, ruby, section, summary, time, mark, audio, video { margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0; font-size: 100%; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; } /* HTML5 display-role reset for older browsers */ article, aside, details, figcaption, figure, footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, section { display: block; } body { line-height: 1; } ol, ul { list-style: none; } blockquote, q { quotes: none; } blockquote:before, blockquote:after, q:before, q:after { content: ”; content: none; } table { border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0; } First, the small changes: adding embed , output , and ruby to the first rule. I went back and forth on these quite a bit, which is why they weren’t in the first cut. However, none of them seem to be replaced so they’re in. Others, such as command , are replaced and so stay out for the same reason that form inputs are left out. ( img is a special case.) The HTML5 element I’m still stuck on is datalist , which seems sort of replaced but then again maybe not. I’m really close to including it on the same grounds that I include canvas , but it’s hard to know if that’s a good idea… Read the rest here

Following Up on Instagram, Flickr