I’m writing a very long article on front-end dev builds, this is a quick prelude to that! It’s common practice to define global typography style early in a stylesheet. This makes a lot of sense. After all, a good design has consistent typography with a clear hierarchy throughout. When writing this CSS, type selectors like: are necessary; adding classes to every […]
This week saw an echo of praise around the tech community for photography website 500px’s approach to its Terms of Service page. The basic idea being that the left column contains the verbose legal terms while the right column holds a brief layman’s translation. What I find worry is the vast number of web professionals who think this is a […]
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 […]
