The Articles
Issue № 374
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Even Better In-Browser Mockups with Node.js
Designing in the browser has all sorts of benefits, like producing more accurate, comprehensive results and removing the extra step of converting from image file to markup and CSS. But even sites designed in a browser still require pasting in content, faking interactions with the server, and creating placeholder JavaScript that isn’t usable on the live site. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go from just designing layouts and interactions to designing the whole client side of the application during the same process? We can, says Garann Means in the first of two articles explaining how Node.js can streamline your design process.
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Node at Work: A Walkthrough
In “Even Better In-Browser Mockups with Node.js,” Garann Means explained why Node.js makes designing applications easier and more efficient, and how to get started. Now it’s time to see your new design process in action. In this walkthrough, we’ll build a feature for a mock art store, complete with live demo and GitHub repository. Follow along at home (or in your cubicle) and you’ll have a mockup that mimics the interactions it will have with its production server precisely on the client—without the need for hard-coded data or temporary workarounds.
Issue № 373
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Growing Your Design Business
So you’ve launched your own creative business, and you’re starting to grow. That’s great! But good growth won’t just happen. Just as a junior designer starts with small projects and slowly builds her skills, a new business needs time to mature, test new ideas, and prepare itself, too. If you want to grow in a sustainable, satisfying way, then you need to pay attention to how you’re growing, not just how much. Jason Blumer looks at four common pitfalls of growth in the design industry, and how to avoid them.
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Hack Your Maps
Web maps have come a long way. A ubiquitous and critical component of many apps, they’ve also become one of the mobile space’s most successful transplants. The core web map UI paradigm itself—a continuous, pannable, zoomable surface—has even spread beyond mapping to interfaces everywhere. Yet nearly five years since Paul Smith’s landmark article, “Take Control of Your Maps,” web maps are still a blind spot for most web designers. It’s time to integrate maps into our designs in powerful, creative, progressively enhanced new ways. Young Hahn starts us on the journey to map mastery.
Issue № 372
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Material Honesty on the Web
Material honesty—the idea that a substance should be itself, rather than mimic something else—has guided everyone from Ruskin to Charles and Ray Eames. How might material honesty apply to our immaterial (digital) projects? What light might its principles shed on such aesthetic debates as flat versus skeumorphic web design? And how might a materially honest approach change how we conceive and sell our projects? Kevin Goldman forecasts increased longevity for our work and even our careers if we apply the principles of material honesty to our digital world.
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“Like”-able Content: Spread Your Message with Third-Party Metadata
Woman does not share by links alone. Although formatting our content via structural markup makes it accessible across a multitude of platforms, standard HTML by itself offers no means to control how our message will come across when shared on popular social networks. Enter third-party metadata schemas. Facebook’s Open Graph protocol (OG) and Twitter’s Cards are metadata protocols designed to provide a better user experience around content shared on these social platforms. Clinton Forry explains how to use these tools for good.
Issue № 371
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Improving UX Through Front-End Performance
Adding half a second to a search results page can decrease traffic and ad revenues by 20 percent, says a Google study. For every additional 100 milliseconds of load time, sales decrease by 1 percent, Amazon finds. Users expect pages to load in two seconds—and after three seconds, up to 40 percent will simply leave. The message is clear: we must make performance optimization a fundamental part of how we design, build, and test every site we create—for every device. Design for performance; measure the results.
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The Era of Symbol Fonts
Welcome to the third epoch in web performance optimization: symbol fonts. Everything from bullets and arrows to feed and social media icons can now be bundled into a single, tiny font file that can be cached and rendered at various sizes without needing multiple images or colors. This has the same caching and file size benefits as a CSS sprite, plus additional benefits we’re only now realizing with high-resolution displays. Discover the advantages and explore the challenges you’ll encounter when using a symbol font.
Issue № 370
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See What I Mean
We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Kevin Cheng’s new book, See What I Mean: How to Use Comics to Communicate Ideas, available now from Rosenfeld Media.
Issue № 369
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Environmental Design with the Device API
Real-world factors like low batteries and weak signal strength can turn even the most expertly crafted digital experience into a frustrating clustercuss. These factors are beyond your control, and, until recently, there was nothing you could do about them. Now there just may be. Tim Wright explains how to begin improving your users’ experiences under constantly shifting (and sometimes quite dreadful) conditions, via environmental design thinking and the Device API.
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Your Website has Two Faces
Your website must serve human and robot masters. An interface that reflects too much of a system’s internals will confuse human users; but if data doesn’t conform to a specific structure, it’s likely to confuse the machines that need to use it. How can your designs serve these very different masters? Jon Postel's Robustness Principle, although usually applied to low-level protocols like TCP, offers a clue to designing experiences that meet human and machine needs with equal grace. Lyle Mullican explains.
Issue № 368
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A List Apart 5.0
A design that departs from our past and a platform on which to build the future. Welcome to the relaunch of A List Apart, for people who make websites.
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What We Learned in 2012
A new A List Apart means a new design, new features, and renewed excitement about the future. But before plowing full-steam into tomorrow-land, we asked some of our friendly authors and readers to share lessons they learned last year, and how those lessons can help all of us work smarter in 2013.
Issue № 367
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Vexing Viewports
Each week, new devices appear with varying screen sizes, pixel densities, input types, and more. As developers and designers, we agree to use standards to mark up, style, and program what we create. Browser makers in turn agree to support those standards and set defaults appropriately, so we can hold up our end of the deal. This agreement has never been more important. That’s why it hurts when a device or browser maker does something that goes against our agreement—especially when they’re a very visible and trusted friend of the web like Apple. Peter-Paul Koch, Lyza Danger Gardner, Luke Wroblewski, and Stephanie Rieger explain why Apple’s newest tablet, the iPad Mini, creates a vexing situation for people who are trying to do the right thing and build flexible, multi-device experiences.
Issue № 366
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Designing Contracts for the XXI Century
A design contract is like a business card—it comes from the same desk, and bears the same creative mark. But it’s also the business card you hate handing out: a folder of legal gibberish with terrible formatting that reminds the client of everything that could possibly go wrong before the work has even started. If we want to address the readability problems unique to our era—and improve communication with our clients—then it’s time we fix the language, layout, and typesetting of our contracts. And who better than designers to do it? Veronica Picciafuoco shows how modernizing your contract to match your carefully crafted brand can also help you reach an agreement faster, and even strengthen your position when negotiating.
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Translation is UX
We—the people who make websites—now study almost every aspect of our trade, from content and usability to art direction and typography. Our attention to detail has never been greater as we strive to provide the best possible experience. Yet many users still experience products that lack personality or are difficult to understand. They are users of a translated version. While good localization boosts conversion rates, bad or partial translation may ruin a user experience, giving people an uneasy feeling about the whole company. If we care equally about all our users, it’s time we start thinking of translation as something slightly more complex than a word-to-word job. Antoine Lefeuvre shares why translation matters, and what it takes to get it right.
Issue № 365
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Becoming Better Communicators
As designers, we already know how to communicate with users in a language they understand. Yet, we often don't do this when communicating with those whom our work requires us to talk to every day: our own colleagues. Inayaili de León shows us why—and how we can build the human relationships and shared vocabularies we need to get better at it.
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Universal Design IRL
We talk a lot about building a web that’s accessible to anyone—a web that serves more of us, more fully. But are our own events and conferences as inclusive as the web we’re all working toward? Sara Wachter-Boettcher explores how we can improve the design of our own community.
