Spotify have just released their Spotify Play Button allowing you to embed any song or playlist on your website or blog. It’s awesome, but it also comes at a cost. The whole include (which uses an iframe) weights in at close to 500kb and uses upwards of 30 http requests alone. Chunky! Chunkier than many web pages. Using this embedded play button […]
Here’s the deal: there’s no reasonable excuse to avoid using SVG for vector graphics on the Web (with a PNG fallback, primarily for IE < 9 and older Android). While there are legitimate design problems when using one single file with icons at multiple sizes, this is not unique to SVG and in the land of — for all […]
Yesterday TechCrunch reported on the start-up 4ormat and their decision to drop support for Internet Explorer entirely. Their logic behind this seems simple enough; developing for IE users did not equate to profit. Supporting variants of IE can easily increase design work by 30% to 100%, but complex features can easily double (or even triple) development time. It […]
Update — March 19th, 2013: please read this article for updates! I’ve always taken a very liberal/aggressive approach to progressive enhancement. Older browsers get accessible content but layout is limited and aesthetic styles are better lost completely than hacked on with nasty techniques. Every website is different of course. When I redesigned my personal website I had a large […]
Brad Frost wrote an excellent overview of Content Parity saying “it’s alright to optimize the presentation of content as long as the content remains accessible in some way, shape or form”. This is so vital to understand when designing for the Web across multiple devices. There are still far too many designers equating mobile with ‘on […]
Before I ramble on, if you haven’t seen Jeremy Keith’s talk on time, networks and history, may I point you to his article: Of Time And The Network. You can also watch his talk from Webstock ’12 on Vimeo. In regards to our content he says: Publish it. Publish it on the network. Put it out there, using standardised […]
Zero to 200,000 page views and 1000 members in less than 30 days. A brand new domain, no advertising. That’s the sort of website launch our clients convince themselves of but never see. Nobody is talking about a website they’ve never heard of, nobody is searching for something they didn’t know existed. And yet I sat […]
