Creating stuff for the web, if done right, is easy. A while ago, I saw this wonderful illustration by Mike Kus and decided to paint it onto a wall in our house. Painting an illustration like this onto your wall is a lot of work. First you have to design stencils in a vector editor, then you have to send these files to a laser cutter, then you have to drive to the laser cutter, get the stencils, buy paint, and finally paint the illustration onto the wall. I did that. And when I looked at it once it was finished I didn’t really like what I was seeing: the circles were not placed on a logical grid. The illustration was too big. Every circle should have been three centimetres smaller. Correcting this is really a lot of work. Redesign the stencil, send it to the laser cutter again, get the stencils, and paint every single circle back onto the wall. Again. After a month I finally had a beautiful illustration on my wall.
This was about the web, right?
Last week was weird. I gave a talk about the weird, weird web in Oslo, and a day later in Nürnberg, two cities I had never been to before. It was a wonderful week, in which I lost my passport, traveled on a laissez-passer, met lots of great people, and saw some very interesting talks.
What’s a laissez-passer?
We’ve all heard of Moore’s Law, the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years
. There are two things that are striking about this law. First of all, it seems to be correct, and second, it has a spelling mistake in its name.
Interesting, go on.
Oftentimes, when I hear people talk about creating, or optimising a website for tablets, they mention rich interactions and they make a cool, swinging swipe gesture, while making a swoosh sound. And I’ve seen many design sketches for websites that let the user swipe through image galleries. It seems like swiping is considered to be extremely cool. Scrolling, on the other hand, not so much. I understand that new stuff is exciting, and I also understand that new stuff has to be investigated. But I believe that as of today we can safely assume that swiping is not native to the web.
That’s a bold statement
This column was published in edition #60 of the Dutch, paper version of Web Designer Magazine. It’s in Dutch. Drie jaar geleden maakte ik mijn eerste responsieve website. Hij was bedoeld als voorbeeld voor onze sales-mensen, zodat ze aan klanten konden laten zien wat er tegenwoordig allemaal mogelijk is op het web. Om dit te illustreren toonde ik de navigatie dan weer bovenaan de pagina, dan weer links, dan weer rechts, dan weer fixed, en dan weer als lijst. Erg ingewikkeld allemaal. Ik had toen nog niet goed door dat complexiteit eigenlijk nooit de beste oplossing is.
O nee?
A while ago I wrote this quick post about the idea that the homepage is not important. Quite a few people took some time to write a reply, and in the end, it turned out that the wording I chose was not correct: the homepage is definitely important. Most people did agree though that it might indeed be less important than we sometimes think. Today I discussed this again with a colleague of mine. We agreed that the homepage should probably not be the first page to design, but he did emphasise the importance of it. He said that the homepage is the face of your website
.
I don’t agree
Everybody knows carrousels are silly. Instead of showing everything we want to show, they actually hide most of it. That’s it. End of discussion. It’s not even a discussion, because everybody knows this. And everyone who’s ever wasted their time to research this found out that, yes, people never click on items that are not shown to them. But, I don’t care about carrousels, because we usually only put them on the homepage. And to be honest, the homepage is uninteresting: it is the least interesting page of a website. And since it is the least interesting page of the site, we shouldn’t really worry about the cruft we put on it. We should focus on the pages that do make sense instead.
Who cares?
Today I was playing around with my new phone and looking at some sites I worked on in the past. One of these sites has the option to make the text of the site bigger. I always considered these text zoom options to be somewhat redundant, like a print-button inside a webpage. Just because you can, doesn’t automatically mean you should put it there. As we all know, if a site is built properly, you can easily make the text bigger, or zoom in. And printing has been a default option in every browser as long as I remember. So I asked on Twitter, as one does, if these options are useful for actual people (other that the person responsible for the accessibility checklist).
I got some interesting answers
Today I had a bit of a heated discussion on Twitter. It started with something I tweeted about a project I’m working on. It has one style for small screens, and a completely different style for big screens. Matijs answered with a tweet in which he said that I’m lucky, because sometimes designers create one single pixel perfect design for a desktop site, when the thing we’re making is in fact a responsive website. To which I replied that some designers still have difficulties with the web. Charis suggested that we should be friendly, and help these designer colleagues out. And then the discussion exploded. Well, actually, I exploded. Because to be honest, at that moment, I had enough of it.
Hot tempered?
Yesterday Opera launched a new browser for the iPad called Coast by Opera. It is a very interesting experiment in how you could use websites on tablets. You can save websites to the home screen in the app, and they look just like the apps on the home screen of your iPad. It is already possible, and pretty easy, to add a website to your home screen on the iPad, but on Coast it is even easier.
Sounds good, no catch?
This column was published in edition #59 of the Dutch, paper version of Web Designer Magazine. It’s in Dutch. We willen voorkomen dat we een roze site met hartjes maken als we iets ontwerpen voor keiharde metalfans, hoe mooi we dat zelf ook vinden. Daarom doen we onderzoek naar onze doelgroep voordat we beginnen. We willen graag inzicht krijgen in onze bezoekers: wat vinden ze tof, waar houden ze niet van, en wat verwachten ze van ons. Pas zodra we ze begrijpen kunnen we iets goed voor ze ontwerpen. De vraag is natuurlijk wel, hoeveel moeten we eigenlijk onderzoeken?
100? 200 misschien?
Today someone sent me a link on twitter to a page on the web which supposedly has a checklist for designers. I opened it on my phone, as one does with Twitter. I saw a yellow page with the message
Designers checklist advices
The iPhone version will be available soon ;) – Use your iPad or your desktop to view it
Is this a joke?
Back in the days when we created full flash sites, it was considered to be a best practice to create an HTML version of the site as a fallback, so people without flash could use it too. This practice was not used often, but the sites that did, still work today, on all current devices. Back when we created these sites, we thought the fallbacks would be used less and less in the future: everybody would have Flash in a few years time. This idea turned out to be false. We could not imagine a future where Flash would be gone.
Imagining the future is hard
This column was published in edition #58 of the Dutch, paper version of Web Designer Magazine. It’s in Dutch. Een tijdje geleden was ik aanwezig bij een bijeenkomst van webdesigners en webdevelopers; we spraken die avond over responsive web design. Mensen die me kennen weten dat ik altijd loop te zaniken over het bedroevende niveau van web design. Na afloop van deze avond was ik een stuk positiever gestemd dan daarvoor. Het lijkt er inderdaad op dat er eindelijk dingen gemaakt worden die écht web native zijn. Dingen die zich aanpassen aan de schermgrootte, dingen die er niet zomaar vanuit gaan dat je een muis hebt. We ontwerpen geen ideaalplaatjes meer van websites in fotobewerkingssoftware, we ontwerpen tegenwoordig echte websites, die het gewoon doen in browsers. Het enige waar ik nog echt gefrustreerd over kan zijn is het feit dat we dat nu pas doen, in plaats van tien jaar geleden.
Tien jaar is best lang
