Web Histories
Rachel is doing her dissertation project on the history of web design and development:
I intend this site to become a place to gather the stories of the early efforts to create an open web.
Take the survey to help out!
Rachel is doing her dissertation project on the history of web design and development:
I intend this site to become a place to gather the stories of the early efforts to create an open web.
Take the survey to help out!
I’d maybe simplify this people problem a bit: the codebase is easy to change, but the incentives within a company are not. And yet it’s the incentives that drive what kind of code gets written — what is acceptable, what needs to get fixed, how people work together. In short, we cannot be expected to fix the code without fixing the organization, too.
Considering how much accessibility work happens “under the hood”, it’s interesting that all five of these considerations are visibly testable.
- Think about accessible copy
- Don’t forget about the focus indicator
- Check your colour contrast
- Don’t just use colour to convey meaning
- Design in anticipation of text resizing
These survey results show that creating and maintaining an impactful design system comes with challenges such as planning a clear strategy, managing changes to the system, and fostering design system adoption across the organization. Yet the long-lasting value of a mature design system—like collaboration and better communication—awaits after the hard work of overcoming these challenges is done.
A great talk by Ethan called The Design Systems Between Us.
Trys has been investigating how to incorporate CSS clamp()
into the brilliant Utopia project. I won’t pretend to understand all the maths here—this is a very deep dive!
He’s also created a CSS generator Mark 2 if you want to use clamp()
in your fluid type.
I’ll be moderating this online panel next week with Emma Boulton, Holly Habstritt Gaal, Jean Laleuf, and Lola Oyelayo-Pearson.
There are still some spots available—it’s free to register. The discussion won’t be made public; the Chatham House Rule applies.
I’m looking forward to it! Come along if you’re interested in the future of design teams.
What will the near-future look like for design teams? Join us as we explore how processes, team structures and culture might change as our industry matures and grows.
Ten years ago I gave a talk at An Event Apart all about interaction design. It was called Paranormal Interactivity. You can watch the video, listen to the audio or read the transcript if you like.
I think it holds up pretty well. There’s one interaction pattern in particular that I think has stood the test of time. In the talk, I introduce this pattern as something you can see in action on Huffduffer:
I was thinking about how to tell the user that something’s happened without distracting them from their task, and I thought beyond the web. I thought about places that provide feedback mechanisms on screens, and I thought of video games.
So we all know Super Mario, right? And if you think about when you’re collecting coins in Super Mario, it doesn’t stop the game and pop up an alert dialogue and say, “You have just collected ten points, OK, Cancel”, right? It just does it. It does it in the background, but it does provide you with a feedback mechanism.
The feedback you get in Super Mario is about the number of points you’ve just gained. When you collect an item that gives you more points, the number of points you’ve gained appears where the item was …and then drifts upwards as it disappears. It’s unobtrusive enough that it won’t distract you from the gameplay you’re concentrating on but it gives you the reassurance that, yes, you have just gained points.
I think this a neat little feedback mechanism that we can borrow for subtle Ajax interactions on the web. These are actions that don’t change much of the content. The user needs to be able to potentially do lots of these actions on a single page without waiting for feedback every time.
On Huffduffer, for example, you might be looking at a listing of people that you can choose to follow or unfollow. The mechanism for doing that is a button per person. You might potentially be clicking lots of those buttons in quick succession. You want to know that each action has taken effect but you don’t want to be interrupted from your following/unfollowing spree.
You get some feedback in any case: the button changes. Maybe the text updates from “follow” to “unfollow” accompanied by a change in colour (this is what you’ll see on Twitter). The Super Mario style feedback is in addition to that, rather than instead of.
I’ve made a Codepen so you can see a reduced test case of the Super Mario feedback in action.
See the Pen Unobtrusive feedback by Jeremy Keith (@adactio) on CodePen.
Here’s the code available as a gist.
It’s a function that takes two arguments: the element that the feedback originates from (pass in a DOM node reference for this), and the contents of the feedback (this can be a string of text or it can be HTML …or SVG). When you call the function with those two arguments, this is what happens:
span
element and puts the feedback contents inside it.translateY
applied so it drifts upward. At the same time it gets its opacity reduced from 1 to 0 so it’s fading away.transitionend
event that fires when the animation is over. Once that event fires, the generated span
is destroyed.When I first used this pattern on Huffduffer, I’m pretty sure I was using jQuery. A few years later I rewrote it in vanilla JavaScript. That was four years ago so I wonder if the code could be improved. Have a go if you fancy it.
Still, even if the code could benefit from an update, I’m pleased that the underlying pattern still holds true. I used it recently on The Session and it’s working a treat for a new Ajax interaction there (bookmarking or unbookbarking an item).
If you end up using this unobtrusive feedback pattern anyway, please let me know—I’d love to see more examples of it in the wild.
This is an excellent framing for minimal viable products—what would the black box theatre production be?
Forget about all the production and complexity you could build. What’s the purpose you want to convey at the core?
The use of React complicates front-end build. We have very talented front-end developers, however, they are not React experts - nor should they need to be. I believe front-end should be built as standards-compliant HTML/CSS with JavaScript used to enrich functionality where necessary and appropriate.
Ah, look at this beautiful timeline that Cassie designed and built—so many beautiful little touches! It covers the fifteen years(!) of Clearleft so far.
But you can also contribute to it …by looking ahead to the next fifteen years:
Let’s imagine it’s 2035…
How do you hope the practice of design will have changed for the better?
Fill out an online postcard with your hopes for the future.
This is a terrific collection of guidelines for form design.
No matter what time zone you’re in, you can tune in to some excellent-sounding talks tomorrow.
No sign-up. No registration. All sessions are streamed live and publicly on the Inclusive Design 24 YouTube channel.
A short web book on the past, present and future of interfaces, written in a snappy, chatty style.
From oral communication and storytelling 500,000 years ago to virtual reality today, the purpose of information interfaces has always been to communicate more quickly, more deeply, to foster relationships, to explore, to measure, to learn, to build knowledge, to entertain, and to create.
We interface precisely because we are human. Because we are intelligent, because we are social, because we are inquisitive and creative.
We design our interfaces and they in turn redefine what it means to be human.
RFC 8890 maybe the closest thing we’ve got to a Hippocratic oath right now.
A community that agrees to principles that are informed by shared values can use them to navigate hard decisions.
Many discussions influenced this document, both inside and outside of the IETF and IAB. In particular, Edward Snowden’s comments regarding the priority of end users at IETF 93 and the HTML5 Priority of Constituencies were both influential.
An excellent explanation of the new leading-trim
and text-edge
properties in CSS, complete with an in-depth history of leading in typography.
(I’m very happy to finally have a permanent link to point to about this, rather than a post on Ev’s blog.)
Before the hagiographical praise for working with an iPad Pro, Robin nails the fundamental shape of the design process:
I had forgotten that there are two modes of design, just as there is in writing.
The first mode is understanding the problem, getting a ten-thousand foot view of the land. It’s getting people to acknowledge that this really is the problem we need to agree upon. This work needs to happen in a sketchbook in the form of messy, back-of-the-napkin drawings or in writing. All this helps you to form a proper argument and focus your thoughts.
The second mode of design is taking that ten-thousand foot view and zooming all the way in to the hairs on the back of the rabbit; figuring out the precise UI and components, the copywriting, the animations, the everything else. This should be done in a design tool like Figma or Sketch. And this is when we should be talking about color palettes, icons, design systems, and consistency.
The problem with almost all design work is that first phase never really happens. People don’t take that ten thousand foot view of the problem and are focusing instead on the pixels; they’re trapped by the system they know too well.
Yes, yes, yes! Spot on:
I think people get stuck in that second mode because productivity in design is often tied to “how many pages or frames did I design today?” when productivity should instead be thought of as “how did my understanding of the problem change?
This sounds like seamful design:
How to enable not users but adaptors? How can people move from using a product, to understanding how it hangs together and making their own changes? How do you design products with, metaphorically, screws not nails?
The removal of all friction should’t be a goal. Making things easy and making things hard should be a design tool, employed to aid the end user towards their loftiest goals.
The latest edition in this wonderful series of science-fictional typography has some truly twisty turbolift tangents.