How We Hold Our Gadgets
A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Josh Clark's new book, Designing for Touch, available now from A Book Apart. Where do hands and fingers fall on the device? This question is the linchpin for every form factor this book examines, and the answer tells you how to design your layout for comfort and efficiency. Since we hold phones, phablets, tablets, and lap
Flat UI and Forms
Foremost, forms are about task completion. I’m sure I’m one of only a handful of people in the world who actually check out forms for fun; every other (reasonable) person just wants to fill out the form to get their car registered or buy those shiny new shoes. With content, however, finishing a task isn’t always a priority. Sometimes, we just want to browse without a specific end point in mind. (W
Understanding CSS3 Transitions
A note from the editors: We are pleased to present a portion of Chapter 2 of CSS3 for Web Designers by Dan Cederholm (A Book Apart, 2010). It was 1997 and I was sitting in a terribly run-down apartment in beautiful Allston, Massachusetts. A typical late night of viewing source and teaching myself HTML followed a day of packing CDs at a local record label for peanuts (hence the run-down apartment).
Getting Started with Sass
CSS’ simplicity has always been one of its defining, most welcome features. CSS style sheets are just long lists of rules, each consisting of a selector and some styles to apply. But as our websites and applications get bigger and become more complex, and target a wider range of devices and screen sizes, this simplicity—so welcome as we first started to move away from font tags and table-based lay
Organizing Mobile
Align with how people use their mobile devices and why. Emphasize content over navigation. Provide relevant options for exploration and pivoting. Maintain clarity and focus. Align with mobile behaviors In the previous part, we talked about the constraints and capabilities that make designing for mobile unique. Similarly, the desktop web also has a set of limitations and possibilities that make it
Responsive Web Design
The control which designers know in the print medium, and often desire in the web medium, is simply a function of the limitation of the printed page. We should embrace the fact that the web doesn’t have the same constraints, and design for this flexibility. But first, we must 'accept the ebb and flow of things.' John Allsopp, “A Dao of Web Design” The English architect Christopher Wren once quippe
CSS Floats 101
The float property is a valuable and powerful asset to any web designer/developer working with HTML and CSS. Tragically, it can also cause frustration and confusion if you don’t fully understand how it works. Also, in the past, it’s been linked to some pretty nasty browser bugs so it’s normal to get nervous about using the float property in your CSS rule sets. Let’s calm those nerves and ease that
Testing Accordion Forms
And take it seriously they should. Web forms are the linchpins of most online businesses and applications. Whether they are responsible for checkout on e-commerce sites, communication on social applications, or any kind of data entry on the web, forms allow people to complete important tasks. And web form design details can have a big influence on how successful, efficient, and happy people feel a
Inline Validation in Web Forms
Web forms aren’t great conversationalists. They ask a bunch of questions, then wait until you answer them all before they respond. So when you register for that cool social network or use an e-commerce site, it’s pretty much a monologue. You can blame most forms’ poor etiquette on the way they’re built. Web forms that use a basic submit-and-refresh model of interactivity don’t respond until you hi
In Defense of Eye Candy
We’ve all seen arguments in the design community that dismiss the role of beauty in visual interfaces, insisting that good designers base their choices strictly on matters of branding or basic design principles. Lost in these discussions is an understanding of the powerful role aesthetics play in shaping how we come to know, feel, and respond. Consider how designers “skin” an information architect
The Elements of Social Architecture
We are pleased to present a shortened and edited excerpt from the second edition of Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web. – Ed. Published in 1977, Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, contains the collective wisdom of world cultures on centuries of building human housing. It had a resounding effect not only on architecture and urban planning, but
Return of the Mobile Stylesheet
The past couple of years have seen numerous new web-capable mobile devices arise, including Apple’s iPhone and its Safari browser, the creation of Google’s Android platform and Webkit-based browser, the rise of so called “full web” browsers (Nokia’s S60, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, among others), the early development of Firefox’s mobile version, and more. These mobile browsers improve users’ exp
CSS Sprites2 – It’s JavaScript Time
A sense of movement is often the differentiator between Flash-heavy web sites and standards-based sites. Flash interfaces have always seemed more alive—responding to the user’s interactions in a dynamic way that standards-based web sites haven’t been able to replicate. Lately that’s been changing, of course, with a resurgence in dynamic interface effects, helped along by JavaScript libraries that
Sign Up Forms Must Die
We can do better. In fact, I believe we can get people engaged with digital services in a way that tells them how such services work and why they should care enough to use them. I also believe we can do this without explicitly making them fill out a sign-up form as a first step. But before we get into the potential of gradual engagement (your path out of sign-in “dullery”), let’s look at how the p
Faux Absolute Positioning
There are two popular approaches to positioning with CSS: float and absolute positioning. Both approaches have their pros and cons. My teammates and I have developed a new positioning approach that gives us the best of both worlds. After quite a bit of experimenting and testing, it’s time to share the technique with the rest of the world and see how we can work together to improve it. I’m calling
In Search of the Holy Grail
I’m sorry. Really. I didn’t name it. I don’t mean to overstate its importance or trivialize the other and rather weightier Holy Grails. But the name’s out there, and we all know what it means. Three columns. One fixed-width sidebar for your navigation, another for, say, your Google Ads or your Flickr photos—and, as in a fancy truffle, a liquid center for the real substance. Its wide applicability
Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards
We’ve been talking about Web 2.0 for so long now it’s already passé to argue about what it means and what it doesn’t. But one thing’s for sure, there’s a lot of data out there on the web these days. And as web designers, we’re designing a lot of data-driven sites. There are plenty of options out there for data visualization, too. Google’s recently-announced Charts API is a great example, but there
Prettier Accessible Forms
A note from the editors: While brilliant for its time, this article no longer reflects modern best practices. It can be time consuming to make web forms both pretty and accessible. In particular, laying out forms where the form label and input are horizontally adjacent, as in the image below, can be a real problem. We used to use tables, which worked well in this scenario—but forms don’t constitut
Keeping Your Elements’ Kids in Line with Offspring
CSS selectors are handy things. They make coding CSS easier, sure, but they can also help keep your markup clean. For example, here’s a chunk of code that doesn’t use selectors well: <ul class="products"> <li class="product">Item 1</li> <li class="product">Item 2</li> <li class="product">Item 3</li> </ul> This textbook class-itis leads to messy CSS: ul.products { /* Properties here */ } li.product
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Expanding Text Areas Made Elegant