CSS Shapes 101 · An A List Apart Article.
This is pretty awesome. Being able to format text blocks into shapes (much like you can in InDesign for print) could vastly change how we layout content heavy pages.
I guess the question now is when will all the browsers catch up with this newish CSS style? Also does this make sense for mobile? hmmm.
Lessons in communication. What NOT to do. http://giantconf.com/updates/2014/5/1/speakerfees
@nickf I already said why I pulled out here: http://t.co/JcPSA9KrQi @MeganWhalin @GiantConf
— Sarah Parmenter (@sazzy) May 2, 2014
Improving readability for these users creates better design for everybody.
Consider sites such as Medium, which remove visual noise (sidebars, navigation) and use larger type sizes, contrasting type styles, and more white space—especially line height—all of which help dyslexics and the general reading population alike.
At least 10% of people have dyslexia, dysgraphia affects an estimated 5% to 20% of the population and approximately 11 percent of kids ages 4 to 17 have ADHD along with 4 percent of adults.
If you read your email regularly using an Internet-enabled phone, you probably know that it’s an experience that can swing from awesome to awful. While an email newsletter can look superb in the inbox, when squeezed onto a small screen, it can become absolutely unusable, with small fonts, narrow columns and broken layouts being common issues.
In this guide, we’ll look at why designing for mobile has become a necessary skill for email designers, cover the fundamentals of designing and building a mobile-friendly email and back it all up with some neat tips and techniques. We’ll assume you know a little about coding HTML for email, but if not, we’ve also got a couple of great guides to get you started.
There isn’t just one way to animate SVG. There is the <animate> tag that goes right into the SVG code. There are libraries that help with it like Snap.svg or SVG.js. We’re going to look at another way: using inline SVG (SVG code right inside HTML) and animating the parts right through CSS.
read all about it Animating SVG with CSS | CSS-Tricks.
SO…
Seriously – extremely useful tool. I absolutely used this tool today to determine what platform a client site was built with…
Love this. A decent technique that has a lot of potential for secondary CTA’s and creating hierarchy within multiple CTA’s on a page.
UX Myths collects the most frequent user experience misconceptions and explains why they don’t hold true. And you don’t have to take our word for it, we’ll show you a lot of research findings and articles by design and usability gurus.
Good find. UX Myths can really eff up a design, especially when presenting it to someone who thinks they know design and UX because they follow a ux designer on Twitter.
You know the situation, you’ve got a new logo or image you want to use across your social media and the next hour is taken up Googling what size each image needs to be, how big the file should be and how many different options you need. Well now you can use that hour to sit back and relax. We’ve done all this hard work for you and put together our awesome social media cheat sheet just for you! via Social media cheat sheet (2014) – super speedy, all you needy | The Pink Group.
Interesting read about how the new “Attention Web” is more concerned with holding your attention than your clicks.
http://time.com/12933/what-you-think-you-know-about-the-web-is-wrong/
Spurred by new technology and plummeting click-through rates, what happens between the clicks is becoming increasingly important and the media world is scrambling to adapt.
And debunking some myths:
Myth 1: We read what we’ve clicked on
Chartbeat looked at deep user behavior across 2 billion visits across the web over the course of a month and found that most people who click don’t read. In fact, a stunning 55% spent fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page.
Myth 2: The more we share the more we read
We looked at 10,000 socially-shared articles and found that there is no relationship whatsoever between the amount a piece of content is shared and the amount of attention an average reader will give that content.
Myth 3: Native advertising is the savior of publishing
On a typical article two-thirds of people exhibit more than 15 seconds of engagement, on native ad content that plummets to around one-third.
Myth 4: Banner ads don’t work
Here’s the skinny, 66% of attention on a normal media page is spent below the fold. That leaderboard at the top of the page? People scroll right past that and spend their time where the content not the cruft is. Yet most agency media planners will still demand that their ads run in the places where people aren’t and will ignore the places where they are.
Handy little checklist for catching common usability problems before user testing http://userium.com/
Nice first post
jQuery is a fantastic library for designing and developing user interactions quickly. Whether it’s an image gallery or form, content-revealing animation or an explosion effect, the library provides the core building-blocks to allow you to rapidly prototype and deliver a unique user interface with the minimum of code and effort.
This presents an interesting question, however. Just because you can roll your own solution to any given problem, does that mean you should? Of course not! There’s absolutely no need to reinvent the wheel every time you want to create a bit of common functionality; use plugins to instantly add a behaviour. Doing so will save you even more time and effort! Here’s a nice new list.
doge
Reveal Animations When You Scroll. Very Animate.css Friend 🙂
Easily customize animation settings: style, delay, length, offset, iterations…
via WOW.js – Reveal Animations When You Scroll. Very Animate.css Friend..
flat design is more than just an artistic treatment; it’s a response to the serious functionality issues that skeuomorphism presents.
Another excellent read about the positives of the Flat Design “trend”. What I like about this one is how they tackle the subject of it being a trend. Is it really a trend or is it a solution to a problem?
I think these 2 bullets pretty much explain how and why flat design is the right way to approach web design.
Embracing the limits of the screen and working within those parameters rather than trying to disguise them.
Using this newfound simplicity as a starting point for streamlining designs, and making websites faster and more functional.
The author also articulates the point about how going “flat” doesn’t mean you have to go without perspective and dimensionality:
Flat design doesn’t necessarily mean that anything hinting at dimensionality is out of place. For example,this website features an angled illustration with a clear perspective. But the overall trajectory of the trend is towards simplicity and minimalism. The buttons are plain fields of color with sharp corners. There’s not a drop shadow, beveled edge, or gradient to be seen.
Once again UX Mag publishes an article that is a must read for any designer out there.
Most businesses — especially small companies and startups — can’t afford to hire a dedicated UX designer, but that shouldn’t stop them from adopting some UX techniques. Trust me, it’s much easier than you think.
read the whole huge thing at Pragmatic UX Techniques For Smarter Websites | Smashing UX Design.
“To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse.” – Paul Rand
read the deets @ Principles of User Interface Design.
It’s never a great idea to blindly follow trends, but it’s good to know what they are. It’s kind of similar to the old maxim that ‘you have to know the rules to break the rules’.
But in fractured and disjointed world, working out what the latest visual design trends actually are can be difficult. A trend might be big in Europe but absent in North America; yet with more demand for designs that appeal across international boundaries, how do you get a handle on what will work?
Well one way is to analyse the raw data. Image library Shutterstock is in a good position to do just that – and so for its third annual global design trends infographic it extracted details of over 350 million downloads and found some revealing patterns.
Infographic: Shutterstock’s Global Design Trends 2014 — The Shutterstock Blog.
Infographic: Shutterstock’s Global Design Trends 2014 — The Shutterstock Blog.
The part I found most interesting were the global download trends. Cool promotional idea from Shutterstock.
That was some good stuff RyRy
greg 8:35 am on May 6, 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
i can see how mobile would work – but its going to make the fight for screen space harder than it
is.