For me, I do find that Webmentions are really enhancing linking—by offering a type of bidirectional hyperlink. I think if they could see widespread use, we’d see a Renaissance of blogging on the Web. Webmentions are just so versatile—you can use them to commment, you an form ad-hoc directories with them, you can identify yourself to a wider community. I really feel like they are a useful modernization.
This is a really great, balanced profile of the Indie Web movement. There’s thoughtful criticism alongside some well-deserved praise:
If we itemize the woes currently afflicting the major platforms, there’s a strong case to be made that the IndieWeb avoids them. When social-media servers aren’t controlled by a small number of massive public companies, the incentive to exploit users diminishes. The homegrown, community-oriented feel of the IndieWeb is superior to the vibe of anxious narcissism that’s degrading existing services.
Tantek’s barnstorming closing talk from Beyond Tellerrand. This is well worth 30 minutes of your time.
Own your domain. Own your content. Own your social connections. Own your reading experience. IndieWeb services, tools, and standards enable you to take back your web.
There is one alternative to social media sites and publishing platforms that has been around since the early, innocent days of the web. It is an alternative that provides immense freedom and control: The personal website. It’s a place to write, create, and share whatever you like, without the need to ask for anyone’s permission.
A wonderful and inspiring call to arms for having your own website—a place to express yourself, and a playground, all rolled into one.
Building and maintaining your personal website is an investment that is challenging and can feel laborious at times. Be prepared for that. But what you will learn along the way does easily make up for all the effort and makes the journey more than worthwhile.
There’s a new reissue of the twenty year old documentary on Justin Hall’s links.net and the early days of the web.
Inspired by Charlie, here’s a straightforward bit of code for starting or joining your own webring.
Charlie muses on ol’ fashioned web rings …and the cultural needs they fulfilled.
We suffer from homogenous dirge in most of our contemporary web presences. Having a personal website has become a rarer and rarer thing in this time of social media profile pages.
However, recent months have seen a surge in personal websites and blogging amongst some members of the web tech community. This is something that we urgently need to encourage!
Paul is writing weeknotes. Here’s his latest.
Amy is writing weeknotes. Here’s her latest.
Aegir is writing weeknotes. Here’s his latest.
Nat is writing weeknotes. Here’s their latest.
Alice is writing weeknotes. Here’s her latest.
Mark is writing weeknotes. Here’s his latest.
I enjoy them all.
Writing on your own website associates your thoughts and ideas with you as a person. Having a distinct website design helps strengthen that association. Writing for another publication you get a little circular avatar at the beginning of the post and a brief bio at the end of the post, and that’s about it. People will remember the publication, but probably not your name.
Oh, Aaron!
For my hack day project I made the avatar on each post in my website change depending on the emoji I use in the post!
My goodness, Meagan’s new site design is absolutely gorgeous! The colour palette, the typography, the texture, the motion design …it all communicates character and personality. Beautiful work!
Craig’s slow walk away from Instagram:
I want to have a place very far apart from that, where I can post photos on my own terms. Not have an algorithm decide which of my posts is best (have you noticed Instagram making the second photo in series appear first in the carousel?). And I don’t want to be rewarded for being anodyne, which is what these general algorithms seem to optimize for: things that are easily digestible, firmly on the scale of “fine, just fine.” It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the more boring stuff we shove into our eyeballs, the more boring our taste becomes.
Facebook isn’t really all that much better or more convenient than having your own website, or sending emails or chats. But for some reason, Facebook (and Instagram) are where we post now.
A personal history of personal publishing from Ana—it’s wonderful!
When I was feeling low and alone I would recall how happy I used to be before I was working in tech. I would remember my silly fan sites, my experiments, my blogs and everything that I loved so much that made me become a developer.
Paul was at the Material conference in Iceland too, and we had some good chats. Here, he speaks his brains with Deep Thoughts prompted by the event.
I really get where he’s coming from when he says that “certain websites feel more ‘webby’ than others”, but it sure is tricky to nail down.
I quite like Phil’s idea of having charts like this. It might be a fun project for Homebrew Website Club to do something like this for my site.
This is something I struggle to articulate to friends who are suffering because they feel tied to silos like Facebook and Twitter:
What self-publishing does is provide me a choice, which makes me feel good. I feel like I can step away from platforms at will and I don’t feel as shackled as I have done previously.
I’m telling you this stuff is often too important and worthy to be owned by an algorithm and lost in the stream.
Before social media monoliths made us into little mechanical turks for advertising platforms, we had organic homes on the web. We had pages that were ours. And they could look however you wanted. And you could write whatever you wanted on there.
There weren’t comments if you didn’t want them. There were no photo dimensions to adhere to. No 140-character limits. No BS. Or lots of BS. Either way, the choice was yours because you owned your site and you could do whatever you wanted.
It’s day two of An Event Apart in Boston and Val is giving a new talk about building expressive products:
The products we design today must connect with customers across different screen sizes, contexts, and even voice or chat interfaces. As such, we create emotional expressiveness in our products not only through visual design and language choices, but also through design details such as how interface elements move, or the way they sound. By using every tool at our disposal, including audio and animation, we can create more expressive products that feel cohesive across all of today’s diverse media and social contexts. In this session, Val will show how to harness the design details from different media to build overarching themes—themes that persist across all screen sizes and user and interface contexts, creating a bigger emotional impact and connection with your audience.
I’m going to attempt to live blog her talk. Here goes…
This is about products that intentionally express personality. When you know what your product’s personality is, you can line up your design choices to express that personality intentionally (as opposed to leaving it to chance).
Tunnel Bear has a theme around a giant bear that will product you from all the bad things on the internet. It makes a technical product very friendly—very different from most VPN companies.
Mailchimp have been doing this for years, but with a monkey (ape, actually, Val), not a bear—Freddie. They’ve evolved and changed it over time, but it always has personality.
But you don’t need a cute animal to express personality. Authentic Weather is a sarcastic weather app. It’s quite sweary and that stands out. They use copy, bold colours, and giant type.
Personality can be more subtle, like with Stripe. They use slick animations and clear, concise design.
Being expressive means conveying personality through design. Type, colour, copy, layout, motion, and sound can all express personality. Val is going to focus on the last two: motion and sound.
Animation can be used to tell your story. We can do that through:
Here are four personality types…
You can use opacity, soft blurs, small movements, and easing curves with gradual changes. You can use:
Pro tip for blurs: the end of blurs always looks weird. Fade out with opacity before your blur gets weird.
You can use Penner easing equations to do your easings. See them in action on easings.net. They’re motion graphs plotting animation against time. The flatter the curve, the more linear the motion. They have a lot more range than the defaults you get with CSS keyword values.
For calm, soft, and reassuring, you could use easeInQuad, easeOutQuad, or easeInOutQuad. But that’s like saying “you could use dark blue.” These will get you close, but you need to work on the detail.
You can use direct movements, straight lines, symmetrical ease-in-outs. You should avoid blurs, bounces, and overshoots. You can use:
You can use Penner equations like easeInCubic, easeOutCubic and easeInOutCubic.
You can use overshoots, anticipation, and “snappy” easing curves. You can use:
To get the sense of overshoots and anticipations you can use easing curves like easeInBack, easeOutBack, and easeInOutBack. Those aren’t the only ones though. Anything that sticks out the bottom of the graph will give you anticipation. Anything that sticks out the top of the graph will give you overshoot.
If cubic bezier curves don’t get you quite what you’re going for, you can add keyframes to your animation. You could have keyframes for: 0%, 90%, and 100% where the 90% point is past the 100% point.
Stripe uses a touch of overshoot on their charts and diagrams; nice and subtle. Slack uses a bit of overshoot to create a sense of friendliness in their loader.
You can use bounces, shape morphs, squashes and stretches. This is probably not the personality for a bank. But it could be for a game, or some other playful product. You can use:
You can use easing equations for the first two, but for the others, they’re really hard to pull off with just CSS. You probably need JavaScript.
The easing curve for elastic movement is more complicated Penner equation that can’t be done in CSS. GreenSock will help you visual your elastic easings. For springs, you probably need a dedicated library for spring motions.
We don’t talk about sound much in web design. There are old angry blog posts about it. And not every website should use sound. But why don’t we even consider it on the web?
We were burnt by those terrible Flash sites with sound on every single button mouseover. And yet the Facebook native app does that today …but in a much more subtle way. The volume is mixed lower, and the sound is flatter; more like a haptic feel. And there’s more variation in the sounds. Just because we did sound badly in the past doesn’t mean we can’t do it well today.
People say they don’t want their computers making sound in an office environment. But isn’t responsive design all about how we don’t just use websites on our desktop computers?
Amber Case has a terrific book about designing products with sound, and she’s all about calm technology. She points out that the larger the display, the less important auditive and tactile feedback becomes. But on smaller screens, the need increases. Maybe that’s why we’re fine with mobile apps making sound but not with our desktop computers doing it?
People say that sound is annoying. That’s like saying siblings are annoying. Sound is annoying when it’s:
But all of those are design decisions that we can control.
So what can we do with sound?
Sound can enhance what we perceive from animation. The “breathe” mode in the Calm meditation app has some lovely animation, and some great sound to go with it. The animation is just a circle getting smaller and bigger—if you took the sound away, it wouldn’t be very impressive.
Sound can also set a mood. Sirin Labs has an extreme example for the Solarin device with futuristic sounds. It’s quite reminiscent of the Flash days, but now it’s all done with browser technologies.
Sound is a powerful brand differentiator. Val now plays sounds (without visuals) from:
They have strong associations for us. These are earcons: icons for the ears. They can be designed to provoke specific emotions. There was a great explanation on the Blackberry website, of all places (they had a whole design system around their earcons).
Here are some uses of sounds…
You have a new message. You have new email. Your timer is up. You might not be looking at the screen, waiting for those events.
Apple TV has layers of menus. You go “in” and “out” of the layers. As you travel “in” and “out”, the animation is reinforced with sound—an “in” sound and an “out” sound.
When you buy with Apple Pay, you get auditory feedback. Twitter uses sound for the “pull to refresh” action. It gives you confirmation in a tactile way.
This is a great way of making a positive impact in your user’s minds—celebrate the accomplishments. Clear—by Realmac software—gives lovely rising auditory feedback as you tick things off your to-do list. Compare that to hardware products that only make sounds when something goes wrong—they don’t celebrate your accomplishments.
Here are some best practices for user interface sounds:
When it comes to being expressive with sounds, different intervals can evoke different emotions:
People have made sounds for you if you don’t want to design your own. Octave is a free library of UI sounds. You can buy sounds from motionsound.io, targetted specifically at sounds to go with motions.
Let’s wrap up by exploring where to find your product’s personality:
You can workshops to answer these questions. You can also do research with your users. You might have one idea about your product’s personality that’s different to your customer’s. You need to project a believable personality. Talk to your customers.
Designing for Emotion has some great exercises for finding personality. Conversational Design also has some great exercises in it. Once you have the words to describe your personality, it gets easier to design for it.
So have a think about using motion and sound to express your product’s personality. Be intentional about it. It will also make the web a more interesting place.