Website Design and Development!

I started writing a blog about all the cool things being a web designer has to offer, i.e. ever changing technologies (slicker browsers, screens with pixels pushed closer together, HTML5, CSS3 with shadows and rounded corners everywhere etc). But then I figured people have already done a better job than I could write on a Sunday afternoon, so I’m going to write the opposite. And it’s easy to moan.

I am in a good mood by the way this is a bit of a fake rant. But anyway, in no particular order of rage – I present 7 things I hate about web design and development:

#7 thing

Favicons. 16 by 16 pixels what is this 1995?

Rage rating: 5/10 – annoying but not much of a deal.

#6 thing

The “page-fold”. So at what arbitrary point do you fold your monitor?

Rage rating: 10/10 – is there some sort of secret society that I’m not invited to?

#5 thing

Adobe Flash. It’s the new IE6 - deprecated but impossible to kill. It’s sad because I know Flash and ActionScript like the back of my hand. Despite what people say Flash deserves a massive handshake for what it provided. Namely streaming video on sites like YouTube and BBC iPlayer. But now Flash is like that really fun guy at a party who has gotten progressively drunker and abusive and should have left a loooong time ago. Let HTML5 have the dance floor.

Rage rating: 6/10 – rising.

#4 thing

“Copy of copy of layer 1″. My Photoshop layers are as unorganised as everyone else but I really really really hate the default naming scheme Adobe uses. Seeing “copy of” just makes me so angry. It’s like nails on a blackboard, someone incessantly poking you, and OCD all in one.

Rage rating: 8/10 – like a pulsating headache.

#3 thing

The “font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif” default font stack. Arial is what happens when Microsoft doesn’t want to pay royalties for Helvetica so they buy a poor mans version. It’s almost the same, just a few subtle differences, all for the worse. Arial is packaged with Windows and Mac OS. That’s probably 99% of your traffic so why not just do “font-family: Arial;”. Or give your typography appreciative visitors a treat and go with “font-family: Helvetica, Arial;”. 

Rage rating: 4/10 – No one will notice either way.

#2 thing

Font rendering. Photoshop provides 4 different anti aliasing settings non of which replicate the horrendous mess most modern browsers produce. Have you ever tried using @font-face embedded text with a drop shadow? My Nintendo 64 could produce smoother edges.

Rage rating: 9/10 – always ends in disappointment.

#1 thing

“p { font-size: 10px; }” I’ll have to admit when I first started designing websites back when I was like 12, my eyes were 20/20 and my CRT looked like a chess board. Nowadays pixels are a tad denser and trying to read 12px text is like reading the ingredients off a chewing gum wrapper. 12px or lower is fine for minor things but never a good choice for body copy. And oh man don’t get me started on 12/12px line-height and 5000 character line length.

Rage rating: 3/10 – who am I kidding, I wasn’t going to read that anyway.

There! Glad I got that off my chest.

What makes you Hulk out? Leave a comment below!