Adactio: Links

On pattern portfolios | Clear Thinking - The Clearleft Blog

Jon gives some insight into how and why we use pattern portfolios as deliverables at Clearleft.

Reorganization by Trent Walton

Trent hammers home the point that the kind of compartmentalisation that’s traditionally been part and parcel of the web dev workflow just won’t cut it anymore.

Responsive Deliverables by Dave Rupert

Dave talks about the kind of deliverables that get handed over in a responsive project. Sounds a lot like what we do at Clearleft.

Responsive deliverables should look a lot like fully-functioning Twitter Bootstrap-style systems custom tailored for your clients’ needs.

Check you’re wearing trousers first by Robert Heaton

Some cautionary tales of over-engineering solutions before doing some quick user-testing to establish what the real problems are.

It’s a pleasant delusion to believe that all our problems require hard solutions.

Responsive Day Out by Laura Kalbag

A terrific, in-depth round-up and recollection of the Responsive Day Out by Laura that ties all of the strands together.

The Perfect Cup of Tea

Anna documents her tea-making process.

Responsive design – have we come full circle?

Everything old is new again. Ross noticed that many of the themes recurring at the Responsive Day Out hark back to best practices from over a decade ago: progressive enhancement, performance, good ol’ information architecture…

Program Your Own Mind 2: A responsive day out

Some thoughts and soul-searching prompted by talks at the Responsive Day Out.

Our thoughts about Responsive Day Out by Si digital

Some nice recollections from the Responsive Day Out.

A Responsive Day Out, Brighton by Hydrant

A nice write-up of the Responsive Day Out with all the right take-aways.

Responsive web design: the war has not yet been won

This was the crux of Elliot’s excellent talk at the Responsive Day Out. I heartily concur with this:

Once you overcome that initial struggle of adapting to a new process, designing and building responsive sites needn’t take any longer, or cost any more money. The real obstacle is designers and developers being set in their ways.

“The Post-PSD Era: A problem of expectations,” an article by Dan Mall

I really like Dan’s take on using Photoshop (or Fireworks) as part of today’s web design process. The problem is not with the tool; the problem is with the expectations set by showing comps to clients.

By default, presenting a full comp says to your client, “This is how everyone will see your site.” In our multi-device world, we’re quickly moving towards, “This is how some people will see your site,” but we’re not doing a great job of communicating that.

Metadesign at Hack Farm by James Box

James’s notes from the most recent Hack Farm show that, even without a finished product, there were a lot of benefits.

Flickr: ugordan’s Photostream

Gorgeous colour-processed images from NASA probes. I could stare at the fountains of Enceladus all day.

The Pastry Box Project | 7 December 2012, baked by Cennydd Bowles

Beauteous and true.

Real design is political.

All Systems Are Go!(ing to Come Apart) - Cognition: The blog of web design

I really like these thoughts on the importance of design systems for the web. It’s not about providing a few perfect deliverables that won’t survive once they go live; it’s about designing for the unexpected, the unpredictable:

Design for every state, not the best state.

Let’s Talk Solar | LOGO24

Here’s a really useful case study for anyone who wants to do “guerrilla” responsive design: when you’re handed a fixed-width mockup but you know that responsive is the way to go:

I started by styling up every element, without layout. The result was a fully elastic layout that effectively served as a mobile, or small screen, layout, which just needed some tweaking of horizontal spacing.

Bingo! And this approach had knock-on benefits as it “supported writing component-based, or modular, CSS”.

Skinny Ties and responsive eCommerce » Blog » Gravity Department

Another responsive design case study. This one’s got numbers too.

A Responsive Design Case Study – David Bushell – Web Design & Front-end Development

I love seeing the process behind responsive projects. This one is particularly nice.

Responsive IA: IA in the touchscreen era - Martin Belam at EuroIA

A really terrific piece about wireframing for responsive designs. Again, it’s all about the prototypes.

» 23 October 2012, baked by Leisa Reichelt @ The Pastry Box Project

Less wireframing, more prototyping.

—Leisa

Adaptive Content Management | Journal | The Personal Disquiet of Mark Boulton

Mark gets to the heart of the issue with making responsive designs work with legacy Content Management Systems …or, more accurately, Web Publishing Tools. There’s a difference. A very important difference.

A List Apart: Articles: Responsive Comping: Obtaining Signoff with Mockups

A peak behind the scenes at the responsive design and development workflow at Bearded. It makes a lot of sense.

Programming, Motherfucker - Do you speak it?

Does Zed Shaw look like a bitch to you?

I said does Zed Shaw look like a bitch to you?

The Airfix Responsive Workflow by Jordan Moore — Web Designer

A nice look at some possible ways to approach workflow on a responsive project.

{ io: The Web Is Growing Up }

A lovely bit of hypertext.

Blame the implementation, not the technique | TimKadlec.com

It might seem like an obvious point, but what Tim is talking about here happens over and over again: a technique is dismissed based on bad implementation.

Laying Down our Burdens: Steps towards simplifying the mobile Web

Amen, Lyza, Amen. Instead of treating web development for the multitude of devices out there as an overwhelming nigh-on-impossible task, let’s accept the fact that there are certain things that are beyond our control. And that’s okay.

Let’s build on the commonality core to the web where we can. To do this, I think we need to let go of a few things, to lay down our burdens.

Related: do websites need to look the same in every browser? NO!

The Story of the New Microsoft.com — Rainypixels

Nishant gives a great overview of the responsive redesign of the Microsoft home page, ably abetted by the Paravel gang.

Encouraging Better Client Participation In Responsive Design Projects | Smashing Magazine

Andy’s talk from the Smashing Conference in Freiburg.

14islands: Smashing Conference take-aways

A nice round-up of some of the themes that emerged at Smashing Conference. As with An Event Apart, there was a definite focus on process.

» 4 August 2012, baked by Bruce Lawson @ The Pastry Box Project

Bruce writes about a worrying trend in standards work:

Tossing a specification that you’ve written in-house, in secret and already implemented onto a table at W3C, saying “here, standardise this” as you saunter past isn’t a Get Out of Jail Free card for proprietary misdemeanours. And it isn’t standardisation.

A future friendly workflow | Opinion | .net magazine

Some more thoughts on how our workflow needs to adapt to the current ever-changing device landscape.

Making of: People Magazine’s Responsive Mobile Website (Global Moxie)

An in-depth look behind the scenes of the responsive relaunch of People Magazine’s mobile site that Josh, Karen, and Ethan were involved in. I love it when people share their process and build stories like this.

Matthew Butterick: Reversing the Tide of Declining Expectations

I don’t agree with everything in this presentation—there’s a nostalgic bias to the non-existent “good ol’ days”—but this is still very engaging and thought-provoking.

fberriman » Accidental designer

Everything Frances has written here resonates with me.

I don’t really want a label. I hate labels. I loathe the term “user experience designer”, because I still believe that “user experience” is just a fundamental to what you’re doing, and shouldn’t need stating. There is nothing but user experience design if you’re building products for people.

Web Native Design on Vimeo

A great talk on the nature of the web that Paul gave in Copenhagen recently.

Bringing a knife to a gunfight — my slide deck from An Event Apart, Austin 2012 | Stuff & Nonsense

Andy remarks on the same synchronicity I talked about at An Event Apart Austin:

Every An Event Apart conference feels special, but at this one the (unplanned) recurring themes were spooky.

Client/Agency Engagement is F*cked, Waterfall UX Design is a Symptom | disambiguity

Leisa nails it. The real stumbling block with trying to change the waterfall-esque nature of agency work (of which Clearleft has certainly been guilty) can be summed up in two words: sign off.

And from a client’s perspective, this emphasis on sign-off is completely understandable.

It takes a special kind of client to take the risk and develop the level of trust and integration required to work the way that Mr Popoff-Walker any many, many other inhabitants of agency world would like to work.

UX Design at Digital Agencies is F*cked | RossPW

This resonates a lot with me. It also hits very close to home: at Clearleft, we’ve definitely been guilty of taking the wrong approach as described here.

Sketching A New Mobile Web - Smashing Mobile | Smashing Mobile

A great article on the importance of sketching for mobile-first responsive designs, complete with practical ideas for workshopping.

IE-friendly mobile-first CSS with Sass 3.2

Jake demonstrates his technique for preprocessor-generated stylesheets for older versions of Internet Explorer (while other browsers get the same styles within media queries).

Issue #408: Generate a separate css with flattened media queries

This is an excellent idea from Jake: use a preprocessor to automatically spit out a stylesheet for older versions of IE that includes desktop styles (garnered from the declarations within media queries).

If you’re a dab hand with Ruby and you’d like to see this in SASS, you can help.

Responsive workflow

One developer shares how his workflow has changed thanks to responsive design. It’s insightful.

Kiwibank: Standing Up for Something New — Paul Robert Lloyd

Paul interviews the team behind Kiwibank’s responsive homepage. There are some great insights into their process here, like the way that copywriters worked side by side with developers.

Shallow Thoughts » srcset vs. picture

A well thought-out evaluation on responsive images from Bridget.

Mocking Up Is Hard To Do

This seems like an eminently sensible thing to do when building responsive sites: ditch mock-ups entirely. The reasons and the workflow outlined here make a lot of sense.

10 questions about web performance – Jeremy Keith at Clearleft

I had a chat with the guys from Pingdom about performance’n’stuff. If I sound incoherent, that’s because this is a direct transcription of a Skype call, where, like, apparently I don’t, y’know, talk in complete sentences and yeah.

GDS design principles

A great set of design principles for gov.uk — I’ve added them to http://principles.adactio.com/

Throw away Photoshop and be true to your medium | Government Digital Service

How designing in the browser works for rapid iteration.

» 28 March 2012, baked by Cennydd Bowles @ The Pastry Box Project

I like Cennydd’s thoughts on the fundamental difference between skill and process:

Skilled people without a process will always find a way to get things done. Skill begets process. But process doesn’t beget skill.

ESPI at work: The power of Keynote| Edenspiekermann

Using Keynote as a web design tool? Why not? It makes as much sense as Photoshop or Fireworks, perhaps more.

A List Apart: Articles: Style Tiles and How They Work

Samantha does an excellent job of explaining how useful style tiles can be for visual design and iteration.

Stop solving problems you don’t yet have | this is rachelandrew.co.uk

I completely agree with everything Rachel says here. I see far too many projects that start out with pre-emptive conditional comments, JavaScript libraries and polyfills, without knowing whether or not they’re actually going to be needed.

About HTML semantics and front-end architecture – Nicolas Gallagher

An in-depth look at naming patterns for classes to help streamline CSS.

Style Tiles

Samantha put together this handy one-page site to explain Style Tiles as part of her South by Southwest presentation.

How I’m implementing Responsive Web Design – JeffCroft.com

Jeff documents some of the techniques he’s using to tackle responsive design, with some tips specifically for SASS.

Responsive Summit » Blog » Elliot Jay Stocks

Elliot jots down some of the issues discussed at the responsive summit.

Responsive Summit: The One Tool | Mark Boulton

Mark talks about the tools web designers use and the tools web designers want. The upshot: use whatever you’re most comfortable with.

JoshEmerson.co.uk · Blog · The Responsive Process

Josh goes through the talking points from the recent Responsive Summit he attended. Sounds like it was a great get-together.

Redefined | Trent Walton

Man, I love Trent’s honesty! This had me nodding my head vigorously — yes, responsive design means fundamentally approaching the way we build for the web …that’s what makes it so exciting!

I suspect that some naysayers of responsive design, were they to do some soul-searching, would find themselves relating to Trent’s initial scepticism.

How to Approach a Responsive Design | Upstatement

A great behind-the-scenes look at the process behind the responsive Boston Globe site, with a particular emphasis on the visual and interactive design challenges.

stevenberlinjohnson.com: Anatomy Of An Idea

Steven Johnson describes the beautifully chaotic way that ideas collide and coalesce. Oh, and this bit…

Listening to Cerf talk about the origins of the Internet — and thinking about the book project — made me wonder who had actually come up with the original idea for a decentralized network. So that day, I tweeted out that question, and instantly got several replies. One of those Twitter replies pointed to a Wired interview from a decade ago with Paul Baran, the RAND researcher who was partially responsible for the decentralized design.

That reply on Twitter was from me!

Athena - MediaWiki

Documentation of an ongoing project to create a mobile-first responsive MediaWiki theme.

“Mobile first” CSS and getting Sass to help with legacy IE – Nicolas Gallagher

If you use Sass, this could be a really handy technique for handling IE<9 support with mobile-first responsive designs.

Responsive Design Essentials: Look Great on any Device - Facebook developers

The process behind the mobile-first responsive design of audiovroom.com.

Mark Boulton on designing websites using ‘content out’ | Interview | .net magazine

Mark continues to hammer home the most important thing to keep in mind when creating responsive designs: design from the content out, not the canvas in.

First Responder | Rob Weychert

Rob documents how he approached his first responsive design.

The typography-out approach in the world of browser-based web design » Blog » Elliot Jay Stocks

An insight into Elliot’s current design process which highlights the advantages of designing in the browser when you take a content-first approach.

Caleb Ogden

The process behind a responsive realignment …and the end result is very nice indeed.

That Squiggle of the Design Process | Central

A visual representation of the design process.

Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS

Jonathan has encapsulated his CSS methodology into a short online book. He isn’t presenting this as the “right” way to do things: he’s simply documenting what he does in the hope that it will help others.

agile approach | The Anatomy of a Design Decision: Examiner’s 2012 Campaign Site

Samantha gives the rundown of a hands-on use of Style Tiles.

CreativeJS | The very best of creative JavaScript and HTML5

This is your one-stop shop for envelope-pushing in the browser:

The very best of creative JavaScript and HTML5.

ART=WORK · Design for a Target Experience First

A thoughtful post on how to approach responsive web design. In short, it’s going to be different for every project.

Content Choreography | Trent Walton

A wonderful post by Trent Walton on the thinking and workflows we can employ with responsive design. So many opportunities!

Web designers will have to look beyond the layout in front of them to envision how its elements will reflow & lockup at various widths while maintaining form & hierarchy. Media queries can be used to do more than patch broken layouts: with proper planning, we can begin to choreograph content proportional to screen size, serving the best possible experience at any width.

[whatwg] The blockquote element spec vs common quoting practices

I’m getting behind Oli’s proposal to allow non-quoted footers within blockquotes in HTML. Here’s where I quote the design principles to support his case.

Two Years — Paul Robert Lloyd

On the two-year anniversary of his arrival at Clearleft, Paul takes a look at where the craft of web design is today and where it’s heading tomorrow.

The Story of the HTML5 Shiv « Paul Irish

This dovetails nicely with my recent post about the spirit of distributed collaboration. Here’s a great little bit of near-history spelunking from Paul, all about styling new HTML5 elements in pesky older versions of Internet Explorer.

the html5 switch | the 200ok weblog

Ben Buchanan has a nice round-up of some of the options available when you’re switching over to HTML5.

Samantha Warren’s Web Design Blog | Design ~ Web Typography ~ Inspiration

An excellent design technique from Samantha that allows you to nail down a visual vocabulary without using something as wishy-washy as a mood board or as rigid as a fully-blown comp. Brilliant!

The style tile is not a literal translation of what the website is going to be, but a starting point for the designer and the client to have a conversation and establish a common visual language.

Tags: process

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