Responsive Design case study | built by Boon
Here is a great case study of a build of a responsive site:
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Bobby
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Bobby
LukeW | An Event Apart: Content Strategy Roadmap
In her Content Strategy Roadmap presentation at An Event Apart in Chicago, IL 2012 Kristina Halvorson talked about how to integrate content strategy into a typical Web design workflow. Here’s my notes from her talk: read more here > LukeW | An Event Apart: Content Strategy Roadmap.
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Bobby
10 Brands Using Responsive Design | Digiday
You know RWD has hit the main stream when online mags like Digiday pick it up and write leading articles about it.
This is a pretty cool collection of RWD sites that major brands are using.
10 Brands Using Responsive Design | Digiday.
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Bobby
3 tips for PNG optimization
Good post on how to optimize PNG files
PNG (Porable Network Graphics) is considered to be one of the most popular formats, due in large part to its full-featured transparency and lossless data compression. Here are 3 ways to get the most out this format.
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Bobby
Towards A Retina Web | Smashing Coding
With the recent announcement and release of the Retina Macbook Pro, Apple has brought double-density screens to all of the product categories in its current lineup, significantly paving the way for the next wave of display standards. While the fourth-generation iPhone gave us a taste of the “non-Retina” Web in 2010, we had to wait for the third-generation iPad to fully realize how fuzzy and outdated our Web graphics and content images are.
In the confines of Apple’s walled garden, popular native apps get updated with Retina graphics in a timely fashion, with the help of a solid SDK and a well-documented transition process. By contrast, the Web is a gargantuan mass whose very open nature makes the transition to higher-density displays slow and painful. In the absence of industry-wide standards to streamline the process, each Web designer and developer is left to ensure that their users are getting the best experience, regardless of the display they are using.
Before diving into the nitty gritty, let’s briefly cover some basic notions that are key to understanding the challenges and constraints of designing for multiple display densities.
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Bobby
Responsive Navigation Patterns | Brad Frost Web
Top and left navigations are typical on large screens, but lack of screen real estate on small screens makes for an interesting challenge. As responsive design becomes more popular, it’s worth looking at the various ways of handling navigation for small screen sizes. Mobile web navigation must strike a balance between quick access to a site’s information and unobtrusiveness.
Here’s some of the more popular techniques for handling navigation in responsive designs:
- Top Nav or “Do Nothing” Approach
- The Footer Anchor
- The Select Menu
- The Toggle
- The Left Nav Flyout
- The Footer Only
- The “Hide and Cry”
There are of course advantages and disadvantages of each method and definitely some things to look out for when choosing what method’s right for your project.
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Bobby
Mobile Marketing: How do I create a mobile optimized email campaign? – Quora
and EXCELLENT post on Quora about mobile optimized email designs.
Mobile Marketing: How do I create a mobile optimized email campaign? – Quora.Here is a great list of links n’at.
Some recommended resources that our designers use when creating mobile ready emails.
- Designing emails for touch: Part 1(http://stylecampaign.co
m/blog/?p=98 ) and Part 2(http://stylecampaign.com/blog/?p=94 ) (and many other articles at the StyleCampaign blog) - Designing emails for mobile devices – http://www.smartinsights.
com/ema… - Mobile email design in practice – http://www.campaignmonito
r.com/b… - Your Subscribers Are Mobilizing — Is Your Email Program Ready? –http://www.mediapost.com/
publica… - 6 Design Tips for Mobile Email – http://infocenter.emailtr
ansmit…. - Five Keys to Mobile-Ready Email Design – http://chiefmarketer.com/
email/c… - Email insight: future of email part 1 – Mobile – http://emailblog.eu/2011/
03/14/e… - Designing Mobile Friendly Emails – http://blog.campaigner.co
m/2011/… - Menu size for touchscreen phones – http://emailfail.posterou
s.com/m… - Email Marketing Design for Mobile Devices – http://www.strongmail.com
/resour… - 5 Tactics For Successful Mobile Email Marketing – http://infocenter.emailtr
ansmit…. - Mobile Email: Is It Going Anywhere? – http://infocenter.emailtr
ansmit…. - The rapid growth of mobile email – http://infocenter.emailtr
ansmit…. - 5 Ways To Keep The Magic Alive In Your Email Design –http://infocenter.emailtr
ansmit…. - Designing an Email Newsletter: One Column vs. Two Columns –http://infocenter.emailtr
ansmit….
One last thing before you begin your campaign
Your team needs to decide…- Should we create and send a mobile ready email and a normal desktop email separately?
- Should we send a normal desktop email with a link to the mobile version?
- During sign up should we ask our clients whether they want to receive a mobile ready email?
- Designing emails for touch: Part 1(http://stylecampaign.co
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Bobby
Microsoft’s Site Redesign Will Introduce Mainstream Business To The Responsive Web – Forbes
When I think Microsoft, I think mainstream business. When I think funky startup in Brooklyn, I think Apple. Historically, if you are a designer, and the client said to “make it look more ‘business-like’,” this was often a very bad thing. If the client “designed” a sample to show you how they wanted something to look using a Microsoft product (Word, Powerpoint, remember Front page?) that was even worse. Such “input” was, with rare exception, of the very web 1.0, “let me show you our org chart” (and/or every feature in our incredibly bloated products) variety.
via Microsoft’s Site Redesign Will Introduce Mainstream Business To The Responsive Web – Forbes.
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Bobby
Our New Responsive Design Deliverable: The Style Prototype | Sparkbox
Our New Responsive Design Deliverable: The Style Prototype | Sparkbox.
In a nutshell, the goal of a Style Prototype is to allow a client to get a visual summary of a site’s proposed design direction without the time investment of creating multiple pages of Photoshop comps or fully developing HTML pages. A style prototype is a single HTML page which outlines site colors, typography, photographic style, button styles, rollovers, and other necessary elements to establish design direction. In a sense, it is a safety measure intended to avoid rehashing (or completely scrapping) site designs in which hours of time and budget have been invested.
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Bobby
* { box-sizing: border-box } FTW « Paul Irish
One of my least favorite parts about layout with CSS is the relationship of width and padding. You’re busy defining widths to match your grid or general column proportions, then down the line you start to add in text, which necessitates defining padding for those boxes. And ‘lo and behold, you now are subtracting pixels from your original width so the box doesn’t expand.
Ugh. If I say the width is 200px, gosh darn it, it’s gonna be a 200px wide box even if I have 20px of padding. So as you know, this is NOT how the box model has worked for the past ten years. Wikipedia has a great history of this box model. Jeff Kaufman also dove into the history
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Bobby
HTML5 Doctor, helping you implement HTML5 today
HTML5 Doctor, helping you implement HTML5 today.
Great resource for HTML5 tomfoolery.
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Bobby
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Bobby
Principles of User Interface Design
An excellent list of the principles of UI Design:
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Clarity is job #1
Clarity is the first and most important job of any interface. To be effective using an interface you’ve designed, people must be able to recognize what it is, care about why they would use it, understand what the interface is helping them interact with, predict what will happen when they use it, and then successfully interact with it. While there is room for mystery and delayed gratification in interfaces, there is no room for confusion. Clarity inspires confidence and leads to further use. One hundred clear screens is preferable to a single cluttered one.
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Interfaces exist to enable interaction
Interfaces exist to enable interaction between humans and our world. They can help clarify, illuminate, enable, show relationships, bring us together, pull us apart, manage our expectations, and give us access to services. The act of designing interfaces is not Art. Interfaces are not monuments unto themselves. Interfaces do a job and their effectiveness can be measured. They are not just utilitarian, however. The best interfaces can inspire, evoke, mystify, and intensify our relationship with the world.
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Conserve attention at all costs
We live in a world of interruption. It’s hard to read in peace anymore without something trying to distract us and direct our attention elsewhere. Attention is precious. Don’t litter the side of your applications with distractible material…remember why the screen exists in the first place. If someone is reading let them finish reading before showing that advertisement (if you must). Honor attention and not only will your readers be happier, your results will be better. When use is the primary goal, attention becomes the prerequisite. Conserve it at all costs.
Read the rest here: Principles of User Interface Design.
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Bobby
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Bobby
IcoMoon
We should be thinking more and more about how to use font icons in our designs over graphics whenever possible… especially with the retina display issues.
This site has a huge collection of icons that can used as fonts. Check it out:
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Bobby
How should we deal with retina displays? | Boagworld
How should we deal with retina displays? | Boagworld.
Paul B. tries to answer this question:
What do you think?
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Bobby
LukeW | An Event Apart: Mobile Content Strategy
LukeW | An Event Apart: Mobile Content Strategy.
As usual LukeW’s notes from one of the AEA presentations is priceless:
In her presentation at An Event Apart in Washington DC 2012 Karen McGrane outlined why providing content to mobile users is not only a strategic imperative but also an obligation for many organizations. Here’s my notes from her talk on Uncle Sam Wants You (To Optimize Your Content for Mobile):
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Bobby
247 Usability Guidelines.
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Bobby
Mobile Checkouts are getting really big for retailers. This could potentially save them a lot of money for cash register software licensing.
http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/2012/08/01/mobile-checkouts-will-be-game-changer-for-retailers
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Bobby
Making of: People Magazines Responsive Mobile Website Global Moxie
Making of: People Magazines Responsive Mobile Website Global Moxie.
A really good read about how a HUGE project went for Global Moxie.
Our brief was to design a responsive site for phones and 7” tablets (Kindle Fire, Nexus 7, etc.). People has two other sites: one for desktop and one for iPad. The new edition stakes out the smaller end of the spectrum, replacing a very simple site that has served phones for several years. The new site’s responsive web design adapts to three primary breakpoints: the phone, 7” portrait, and 7” landscape.
The irony for this “small-screen” website is that its 7” landscape layout is nearly as wide as People’s desktop design. In creating this small-screen design, in other words, we also created a desktop-sized design, too. This is the essential nature of responsive design, of course, a layout that adapts gracefully to a wide range of screen sizes.
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