I don’t really understand why the logo needs to be in the top left corner of every single page on the web. I consider this to be a waste of very valuable space. I propose a different solution. Not a new solution, it’s actually a very old idea I remember from the days I worked in paper design (those were really just a few days).
I’ve been thinking about browser support all day. It was triggered by this tweet by Maaike which translates to something like Silly nerds! Of course people who still use Android 2.3 won’t install Opera, all of a sudden. They don’t even know what it is :-)
A silly post I wrote resulted in a small discussion on Twitter—the perfect place for discussions. Some people said that enhancing the contrast of the monitor of the designer would result in even worse designs with even less contrast. Of course you could try this for yourself, but I’ll try to explain what happens, or what I think happens, when you enhance the contrast of your monitor.
Last Friday I was lucky enough to attend A Responsive Day Out, a conference in Brighton about, yes, responsive web design. Is responsive web design big enough for a whole conference? All speakers, and all visitors seemed to agree that its impact is bigger than the impact of web standards. Web standards was mostly of influence on web developers, not so much on designers. Responsive web design impacts the whole web industry, everybody. That’s huge. So yes, it’s big enough for a whole conference. And it’s big enough for many more conferences. Some questions I had personally – like: how do you implement a responsive workflow into a big agency? – were left unanswered, I’ll need to attend more conferences to find those answers. But many other questions were answered.
It seems some people did not really get it. So just to be sure: this post should not be taken too seriously
There is a trend among designers to use as little contrast as possible. This results in invisible interface items and unreadable text for people with a bad monitor or people who are older than the designer (which is probably almost everybody). And it results in embarrassing moments when the designer has to present the work on a beamer, to the client. It’s a bit minimal, isn’t it?
This column was published in edition #54 of the Dutch, paper version of Web Designer Magazine. It’s in Dutch. In de jaren negentig was een website 640 pixels breed. Dat hadden we zo afgesproken. De eerste jaren van deze eeuw groeide een site naar 800 pixels. En een paar jaar later werden websites 1024 pixels breed. We hebben altijd gezocht naar houvast op het web. We hebben dus altijd vaste formaten afgesproken zodat het designen van een website makkelijker werd. Maar tegelijkertijd wisten we altijd ook dat het eigenlijk niet klopte. Het web is nooit een vast formaat geweest. We wisten misschien wel dat de meeste beeldschermen breder dan 1024 pixels waren, maar hoe breed de browservensters waren lieten we voor het gemak altijd buiten beschouwing.
In the past few months I read two classic books about typography: The Elements Of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst and Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Müller-Brockmann. I was mainly interested in their theories behind deciding how wide a text column should be. The width of the measure, in technical terms. Because I had come up with the theory that maybe we should define the layout of our sites, and the different breakpoints, based on this width. This theory works. But the most interesting thing I found out was what happens if you apply the theory by Josef Müller-Brockmann to an international site. Let me explain the theories first.
Progressive enhancement is a logical principle. At least, for the people who understand it. It is a pretty complex and confusing principle for those who’ve never heard of it, like clients, sales people, designers, but also rusty software developers and front-end developers. When you work on bigger projects, with many stakeholders and many specialists in a team, it can be very hard to convince your colleagues about the need of a good architecture based on progressive enhancement. So more often than not, progressive enhancement is the sole responsibility of the front-end developer who gets it. This is a shame. The end result can be so much better if everybody involved truly understands the different technical and visual layers that make a website, not just the nerds.
Testing a website is easy. You save a file, reload a browser and see what happens. Testing an ePub is not so simple. But there are some tools and tricks that make it a bit faster. First of all, you will need Sigil (or something else if you know anything better). You can edit all the files within Sigil, which has a decent HTML and CSS editor. But you can also open the files in your editor of choice. This is probably a very good idea for most of us. The downside is that you will have to save your work twice: first you have to save the HTML or CSS file in your text editor, and then you have to save the ePub file in order to test it on different devices and readers. So far so good. Testing on devices is the real pain.
The eternal discussion: which browsers should we support? Should the site look exactly the same in IE7 as in the latest version of Chrome? Clients and designers are still struggling with these questions. According to many, websites have to look and behave the same everywhere, just like print work. A few years ago Adobe, a company that only recently started to understand the web a bit, sold a tool that could show a website in various browsers on top of each other so you could spot the pixel differences. Such a waste of everybody’s time.
On Yammer (which is a terrible platform for discussions, by the way) I was having a discussion about the usage of custom fonts on websites. A visual designer argued that the web was more and more about experiences and that we should do everything in our might to make these experiences as incredible as possible. And today on Twitter (which is a terrible platform for discussions as well, but I really like discussing on Twitter) Johan Ronsse wondered why all evolution in eBook space stopped after the Al Gore book
. This tweet and the yammer-message got me thinking. Are richer experiences really what we need? Does evolution mean ever richer experiences?
When I look at the talented designers around me I get jealous. I would just love to have a slice of their talent so I could create something else than just a one column layout with minimal use of color.
I can get mad at font-foundries because I believe their licensing models for web fonts are a scam. But I can also get mad at designers who still don’t know this and just keep on using custom fonts in their Photoshop mockups without understanding what this means. That’s why I wrote this article. For designers to understand the issues with font-licenses. I’ll try to explain what happens if we want to use a font from, for instance, MyFonts. Eric Eggert rightly pointed me in the directions of some errors in this post. I have corrected these errors, and nuanced the article here and there.
Yesterday I wrote down some thoughts about the idea that we need more artists working with the web as a medium. Right now we approach the web from a purely functional direction, I think there are more ways to work with it. I am especially interested in the fact that you do not control the way a user sees your work. That fact alone should be an incredible source of inspiration and research for artists. What happens to a work of art on different types of monitors? On different screen sizes, on fast and slow computers. Different kinds of interaction make the visitors experience the work differently. Even network speed and reliability add a layer of obscurity to the final appearance of the work.