In a lengthy and very inspiring blog post Peet Sneekes explains — in Dutch — that we should redefine the definition of perfection. Right now, most people think that perfection means something like new, or shiny or intact. But perfect things, says Peet, are things that can be used for a very long time, and after that time can be mended, if necessary. Things don’t have to look perfect to be perfect.
I’m writing an article for a magazine in which I need some pictures of responsive websites on multiple devices. I could open all these webpages on a view devices here at home and take a picture, but that’s too much work. So I created a simple webpage that lets me take a screenshot of several devices at once. You can drag this screenshot-bookmarklet to your toolbar to use this tool.
This week I started teaching our front-end development course to a few classes of students in the second year at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, where I work. One of the first questions I asked my students is why is this an important course, even for people who do not want to become a front-end developer. They all agreed that it makes complete sense to understand the material of the web if you want to create or design stuff for the web. Everybody I spoke to was looking forward to improving their HTML and CSS skills. You can understand that I am a very lucky lecturer, teaching a class like this.
A few months ago I attended A Responsive Day Out, a fantastic conference in Brighton about, indeed, responsive web design. All talks were just 20 minutes long, which forces the speakers to leave out the small talk and get on with it. And this resulted in a fantastic overload of information. And all talks — as one can expect from a Clearleft conference — were fantastic.
Apple heeft besloten om in de volgende versie van iOS zogenaamde content blockers toe te staan. Plugins waarmee je bepaalde types content kunt tegenhouden. Dit soort plugins kennen we natuurlijk al veel langer op andere platformen, voornamelijk als banner blockers en script blockers in browsers. Het tegenhouden van banners werd niet door iedereen gewaardeerd. Veel mensen vonden het een soort van broodroof. Maar dankzij de content blockers van Apple beginnen ook voorstanders van banners te twijfelen.
Sometimes it feels like more and more web developers and designers don’t want to build websites with progressive enhancement in mind. I think one of the reasons why, is because people haven’t seen enough real good examples. Last week I attended the fantastic Frontend Conference in Zürich where Patty Toland showed us many brilliant examples of sometimes very complex user interfaces in her talk about creating stuff for the web that works for everybody. We need more examples like these, preferably with the source code and an explanation.
There are some entertaining quotes in this article about the question if the robots are taking over our jobs as designers — like the title. But it’s not all just linkbaity power quotes. For instance, the observation that once the algorithms make every site look the same, making a design look different will be a simple task of breaking rank with the lockstep look and feel
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It happens often at search pages in web shops. Sometimes the results don’t fit on a single page and you click on the number 2 to see all the other items. But instead, on the second page, there’s just one single thing. I always wonder, why didn’t they show that single thing on the first page? A second page only makes sense when there are quite a few items. It turns out this is not hard at all, as Jonathan Snook shows in this example where he truncates a text after 200 characters, only if there are more than 300 characters. Which is similar. Simple, clever, and people will love you.
If the rest of the videos will be as good as the first one — with Jane Austin, Head of UX at The Telegraph on giving constructive feedback — Talking Design will be an absolutely fantastic website, and very valuable resource about communicating design. For designers, educators and students. I can’t wait to view the next videos, and the book it will ultimately result in.
In Zürich I met Gion Kunz, who is not just a very nice person to drink beer with — and a very nice person a disagree with about the use of px as a unit. He is also a brilliant developer who created Chartist.js, a beautifully simple charting library.
First I didn’t really understand the concept behind flex-basis until I saw how it was called in an older version of the spec: flex-preferred-size. It’s the preferred size of an item, and it often works as some kind of min-width.
Last week I bought a hanging chair. It’s not as beautiful as the one that Nanna Ditzel designed in 1957 though. And it’s definitely not as beautiful as the fantastic Bench for Two and her amazing Butterfly chair. But my chair is just perfect for reading. For instance, about women designers of the 20th century. Make sure not to miss the exhibition about Women in Danish Furniture Design when you’re in Denmark — but beware when you click that link, that site looks like it was created in 1957, not by a talented product designer like Nanna Ditzel, but by an unmotivated .net novice.
I’ve always enjoyed working with print stylesheets. A long time ago I liked to create jokes with them that nobody would ever see, and today I create websites with them that can be ordered as books.
Cool multimedia scroll stories often look terrible on non-desktop browsers — if they work at all. One of the bigger issues for these kinds of webpages is that there is no autoplay for video on most mobile devices. Hay Kranen worked on a cool multimedia scroll story recently and shares his solutions and ideas for the autoplay problem.