Fluid Grids
Early last year, I worked on the redesign of a rather content-heavy website. Design requirements were fairly light: the client asked us to keep the organization’s existing logo and to improve the dense typography and increase legibility. So, early on in the design process, we spent a sizable amount of time planning a well-defined grid for a library of content modules. Over the past few years, this
Modern Debugging Tips and Tricks
Luckily, we also have better tools. The JavaScript console is a standard feature of most major browsers. Both JavaScript and the HTML DOM offer native error handling. We also have services and applications that help us remotely debug our sites. In this article I’ll cover error thowing and handling, code injection, and mobile debugging. For more on debugging, see Hallvord R.M. Steen and Chris Mills
Fluid Images
But then, as often happens with web design, despair set in. Currently, our page is awash in words, and little else. Actually, nothing else: our page is nothing but text. Why is this a problem? Well, text reflows effortlessly within a flexible container—and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the Internet seems to have one or two of those “image” things lying around. None of which we’ve incorporate
Cross Platform Scalable Vector Graphics with svgweb
Pity Scalable Vector Graphics. It’s been an official standard since before IE6 was released yet has never found much of an audience on the web, certainly not the one it deserves. Just as SVG was starting to establish some browser support, along came the canvas tag, stealing the thunder of dynamically generated client-side images. Despite all the attention being paid to canvas, there’s still a plac
Sketching: the Visual Thinking Power Tool
I used drawing as a primary language for capturing thoughts, exploring ideas, and then sharing those ideas. Teachers and mentors encouraged me, helping to sustain sketching as a key skill throughout school and into my professional career. Good fortune has ignited my passion to become a sketch advocate, helping others rediscover sketching as a powerful problem-solving and communication tool. I’m ex
A Simpler Page
But what about digital books? Tablets are in many ways just like physical books—the screen has well defined boundaries and the optimal number of words per line doesn’t suddenly change on the screen. But in other ways, tablets are nothing like physical books—the text can extend in every direction, the type can change size. So how do we reconcile these similarities and differences? Where is the base
Smartphone Browser Landscape
How do you make websites mobile compatible? The answer is obvious: By testing them on all mobile phones, and by solving the problems you encounter. But, that’s a useless answer. It’s impossible to test your designs on every mobile phone out there. Within the mobile phone landscape, there are at least ten operating systems (OSs) and fifteen browsers that require consideration. Mobile devices are ex
Testing Content
Nobody needs to convince you that it’s important to test your website’s design and interaction with the people who will use it, right? But if that’s all you do, you’re missing out on feedback about the most important part of your site: the content. Whether the purpose of your site is to convince people to do something, to buy something, or simply to inform, testing only whether they can find infor
Get Started with Git
If you’re a designer or developer, you’ve probably heard about Git, and you might know that it has become immensely popular, especially among the open source community. Though it may seem cryptic at first, this version control system could change the way you work with text, whether you’re writing code, or a novel. This article covers why version control is important, how to install the Git version
Art Direction and Design
Glorifying the supposed arrival of art direction on the web is one of the latest trends in interactive design. There are several galleries devoted to it. There’s even a plug-in for it. Sadly, many designers don’t understand the difference between design and art direction; sadder still, many art directors don’t either: Art direction gives substance to design. Art direction adds humanity to design.
Forward Thinking Form Validation
Form validation has been a finicky business since the web was born. First came the server-side validation error summary. Then we evolved to client-side validation to verify results inline. Now, we have the marching giant that is HTML5 and CSS3: HTML5’s forms chapter offers new input types and attributes that make validation constraints possible. CSS3’s basic UI module provides several pseudo-class
Strategic Content Management
Trying to fix an organization’s content problems by installing a content management system (CMS) is like trying to save a marriage by booking a holiday. We know that a successful web project needs a content strategy—but when it comes to the CMS, we stop thinking strategically. Despite all the talk about user-centered design, we rarely consider the user experience of the editorial team—the people w
Web Fonts at the Crossing
Starting in 1998 with Internet Explorer 4, and then from March 2008 through March of 2010, one by one, all of the “big five” desktop browsers—Safari, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome—have rolled out roughly comparable implementations of @font-face font linking. With these, an indispensable piece of the web publishing puzzle—a piece missing since the web began—has fallen into place, and a true web-specif
On Web Typography
There are many books and articles on typography, but considerably few explore typeface selection and pairing. With the floodgates poised to open and the promise of many typefaces being freed up for use on websites, choosing the right face to complement a website’s design will need to become another notch in the designer’s belt. But where do we start? Until now, using any typefaces beyond those ins
Real Web Type in Real Web Context
Now that browsers support real fonts in web pages and we can license complete typefaces for such use, let’s move past the hype of web type and think pragmatically about how to use real fonts in our web projects. Several experiments with the CSS @font-face property, including some preliminary work with the much-anticipated Typekit, have led me to a single, urgent conclusion: I need to know how my t
JavaScript MVC
Once a bit player, JavaScript increasingly takes center stage. Its footprint—the space it takes up on our servers and in our development schedules—continues to grow. So how can we make our JavaScript more reusable and easier to maintain? Perhaps MVC will offer some clues. While MVC is a familiar term to those in back-end application development—using frameworks such as Struts, Ruby on Rails, and C
CSS Design: Going to Print
A note from the editors: The print style sheet discussed below was used in ALA 2.0, whose February 2001 CSS redesign helped usher in the modern CSS-layout era. Some details below pertain only to that layout, and not to ALA 3.0. But the principles Eric Meyer discusses in this article are as true and as generally applicable today as they were when this article first appeared in ALA. You’ve seen them
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