The Articles
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How the Sausage Gets Made: The Hidden Work of Content
Making great content is the messy part of our design and development process that we often overlook and underestimate. Through an Emmy award-winning experience, Caroline Roberts shares helpful tools and tips to help you get the whole team on board, improve your process, and make the best content sausage you possibly can.
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The Best Request Is No Request, Revisited
Now that HTTP/2 is enjoying greater ubiquity than ever, it’s especially important to challenge the once unquestionable rule of resource bundling in client side performance. Join Stefan Baumgartner as he walks you through the potential pitfalls and ill effects of bundling in HTTP/2 environments.
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Faux Grid Tracks
The only way to win IS to play. Join Eric Meyer on a journey through the inner workings of CSS Grid as he tests various techniques to build a tic-tac-toe board filled with content. Hearkening back to the early days of CSS and A List Apart, these playful hacks rekindle a spirit of experimentation.
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Feedback That Gives Focus
As creative professionals, we might see ourselves as the hero of our work’s story. But this can make feedback—an inevitable part of our work—seem like the villain. Learn how to reframe your relationship to your biggest nemesis. Make feedback your trusted sidekick instead.
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Planning for Accessibility
Incorporating accessibility from the beginning of a web design project is easier, more effective, and less expensive than making accessibility fixes after the fact. Yet most of us too often get stuck doing the latter. Fear not! ALA’s exclusive excerpt from Laura Kalbag’s Accessibility for Everyone is here to help. You’ll learn how to make the case for accessibility to reluctant coworkers, bosses, or clients. How to build your team, scope the project, and even budget the job.
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Ten Extras for Great API Documentation
In this follow-up to her first article on the essentials of a good API, Diana Lakatos dives deep on helpful extras that will take your API documentation to the next level. Her tips will help you make your API more usable and readable, imbue it with personality, and explore beyond the basics.
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What the Failure of New Coke Can Teach Us About User Research And Design
Coca-Cola conducted extensive market research before launching New Coke in 1985, yet the product still turned out to be one of the great marketing failures of all time. Designer Adam Silver draws on Coca-Cola’s infamous blunder to offer some important lessons for conducting successful user research for websites and digital services.
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Web Typography: Designing Tables to be Read, Not Looked At
You may not think about it often, but tables are meant to be read. In this excerpt from Chapter 2 of his book, Web Typography, Richard Rutter explains how typography can improve the UX of our rows and columns.
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Coding with Clarity
Always writing the clearest possible code is what helps separate the great developers from the merely good. It cuts confusion, reduces headaches for current and future developers, and saves everybody time in the long run. And though not always as easy as it sounds, with good forward planning, a logical approach to code structure, and adherence to a few guiding principles, coding with greater clarity is something all developers can achieve.
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The New CSS Layout, An Excerpt
In this excerpt from Chapter 3 of Rachel Andrew’s The New CSS Layout, she shows us how to create a basic 3-column grid using using CSS Grid Layout. She then dives into how to span elements across multiple columns and rows as well as how to use named areas to describe your layout right in your CSS.
