I’ve always been a proponent of progressive enhancement. I promoted it with clients when I still had those, and I teach it to my students now that I’m a lecturer. But this will have to change. Heydon Pickering, a true master in using valid arguments, wrote this very convincing article called Progressive Enhancement Makes Me Sad. Here’s one final reason not to use it: We do not want sad Heydons.
I really like these Principles of Web Development. For some reason Adam Scott, the author of these principles, thought it necessary to add the word ethical to the name, but to me that seems redundant. These are simply the Principles of Web Development.
My neck hurts a bit. I’ve been nodding along while reading this essay about typography on the web by Robin Rendle. It starts with a nice introduction about Jan Tschichold. About his life, and more importantly, about the context of his ideas. And then he goes on to translate these ideas about book typography to our current time, to web typography.
I remember the first time I wrote some JavaScript I was very, very disappointed in how stupid computers are. They only understand loops, ifs, and elses. That’s it. And if you type esle instead of else it doesn’t understand what you mean. On the other hand I was surprised that I was able to create wonderful stuff with just these ifs, elses and loops. Breaking a problem down to these building blocks made me understand the issue better. I had a similar aha-erlebnis while I was reading the part in this article about parsing CSS with JavaScript by supernerd Peter van der Zee.
The things we write online cease to exist when our servers stop working. This can happen when we stop caring about the things we wrote, when we run out of money, when the host goes bankrupt and eventually when we die. I really don’t know how to reach this exact article under this exact URL in 500 years time. Joel Dueck says it like this in his essay The Unbearable Lightness of Web Pages:
I had never heard of Ilonka Karasz before reading this great introduction to her work. She was an incredibly talented designer who created some highly mathematical yet beautiful things. Things I wouldn’t mind possessing at all. I always think that creating geometric things is easy, because it’s something I know how to do. But maybe I only know how to do geometric stuff because I don’t know how to create real things. Ilonka Karasz did know how to create real stuff as well. According to the article, she created 186 eye-catching New Yorker covers published between 1925 and 1973
. Again a fantastic addition to the wonderful series of Designing Women.
I just sent out the second edition of the Active Idler, my already irregular newsletter. It’s about the free meetups I organise, and which you should attend. It’s about the stuff I wrote, and the stuff I read, and about the stuff I enjoyed. You might want to subscribe, if you like receiving these kinds of things via e-mail.
In zijn prachtig vormgegeven, en briljant geschreven essay What Screens Want legt Frank Chimero uit dat het een tijdje duurt voordat we goed begrijpen wat we met een nieuw materiaal kunnen. De eerste films, bijvoorbeeld, waren toneelstukken die met een camera met een vast standpunt werden gefilmd. Later ontdekten we pas dat de eigenschappen van film, zoals montage en cameravoering, de boel een stuk spannender kunnen maken. Het duurt even voordat een materiaal echt goed begrepen wordt.
Last week, while I was looking at some layouts for websites my students presented, it occurred to me that a layout for a webpage should be compared to a sculpture, and not to a painting. There is a very big difference between how you see a poster, or the cover of a book, and how you see a webpage. A poster is seen as a whole, and should have a single, striking composition. Whereas a webpage is viewed in stages, while scrolling. Which means that it doesn’t have one single composition. This also means that it’s much harder to make the layout of a webpage look balanced, wherever you are on a page.
I sent the first edition of my newsletter to 34 more people than I ever thought would be interested in such a thing. If you, like me, don’t really like e-mail, here’s a good old clicky thing that links to it.
I call it blogging via e-mail. And it reminds me of spam. And I want the things I write to have a URL. I’m not a huge fan of e-mail newsletters. But it turns out not everybody dislikes them. So if you’re one of those, and you want to stay up to date about some of the things I do — all related to design, the web, education and random stuff, I won’t bore you too much with my private life — and if you don’t mind an occasional e-mail, you can join the 28 early adopters here.
I wrote about the futility of logo’s before. A good design doesn’t need a logo. I won’t go as far as saying that every logo makes every design worse, but especially on the web, logo’s are of very limited use.
Last week, while she was enjoying yet another holiday, Charis posted this picture of her watch. The two hands of her little clock say what and ever. This corresponds a bit with how I think about time. So I decided to recreate her clock in the browser.
My old Blackberry Playbook serves as a digital canvas to display digital works of art. And since I only use my iPad mini at night to read, it serves as a canvas during the day as well. I would really like a bigger canvas though. I think these circles that slowly turn into squares, or this slowly animating sliced blob would look excellent in a much bigger format.