2015 Summer Reading Issue

Summer is halfway over. Have you hid out for a day of reading yet? Grab a shady spot and a picnic blanket (or just park it in front of the nearest AC unit), turn off your notifications, and unwrap this tasty treat: our 2015 summer reader.

Refresh your mind, heart, and spirit with this curated list of articles, videos, and other goodies from the recent past—from A List Apart and across the web.

Which web do we want?#section2

Is the web “a place to connect knowledge, people, and cats,” or do “hordes threaten all that we have built for one another”? Where will native-versus-web fights end up? And why are we all here, doing this work, anyhow?

From us#section3

• Ross Penman, Let Links Be Links | March 31, 2015
• Jory Burson, Standardization and the Open Web | April 21, 2015
• Rian van der Merwe, Why? | April 22, 2015

From elsewhere#section4

• Maciej Ceglowski, Web Design: The First 100 Years
• Doc Searls and David Weinburger, Internet Under Fire Gets New Manifesto (Medium)
• Hossein Derakhshan, The Web We Have to Save (Medium)
• Chris Wilson, The Web is Not Poor Man’s Native

Toward an inclusive industry#section5

This web is what we make of it. We can use it to insult strangers in a comments field, or to fight for greater fairness and opportunity in our world. We are inspired by those who choose the path of inclusion:

From us#section6

• Christina Wodtke, Tweaking the Moral UI | December 16, 2014
• Sara Wachter-Boettcher, We (Still) Have Work to Do | May 29, 2015
• Anna Debenham, Making Our Events More Inclusive For Those Under 21 (and Also Everyone Else) | September 29, 2014

From elsewhere#section7

• Erin Kissane, Codes of Conduct
• Victor Yocco, The UX of Alcohol Abuse (Model View Culture)
• Nina Alter, Diversity 101: The How (Medium)

Trying out new techniques#section8

Today’s code is so complex no individual can master it all—but that also means there’s always something new to learn…like these new, niche, or just plain cool techniques.

From us#section9

• Heydon Pickering, Axiomatic CSS and Lobotomized Owls | October 21, 2014
• Sara Soueidan, CSS Shapes 101 | April 29, 2014
• Tingan Ho, Pluralization for JavaScript | March 17, 2015
• Jeff Lembeck, Getting Started with Gulp | December 22, 2014
• Jason Rodriguez, Can Email Be Responsive? | May 13, 2014

Speeding up#section10

Big, lumbering websites, endless load times, and crappy experiences on mobile? No, thanks! Here’s to those in the trenches of performance, fighting the good fight.

From us#section11

• Santiago Valdarrama, One Step Ahead: Improving Performance with Prebrowsing | August 19, 2014
• ALA Event, Designing for Performance | February 26, 2015
• Scott Jehl, Planning for Performance | November 25, 2014

From elsewhere#section12

• Tim Kadlec, Performance Budget Metrics
• Yesenia Perez-Cruz, Design Decisions Through The Lens Of A Performance Budget (Smashing Conference)

Accessibility for everyone#section13

“The power of the Web is in its universality,” Tim Berners-Lee once said—and that means working for all kinds of people, with all kinds of abilities. Let’s stop leaving accessibility for last, and instead start from a place that embraces the needs of all our users.

From us#section14

• Anne Gibson, Reframing Accessibility for the Web | February 3, 2015
• Andrew Hoffman, Accessibility: The Missing Ingredient | May 13, 2014

From elsewhere#section15

• Sara Hendren, All Technology is Assistive (Medium)

Working better, together#section16

What comes after static comps and toss-it-over-the-wall processes? We’re still figuring that out—but one thing’s for sure: people are at the center.

From us#section17

• Katie Kovalcin, 80/20 Practitioners Make Better Communicators | March 17, 2015
• Mark Llobrera, Prototyping Your Workflow | June 3, 2014
• Garin Evans, The Specialist-Generalist Balance | February 17, 2015
• Amanda Costello, The Specialized Web: Working with Subject-Matter Experts | October 21, 2014
• Emma Jane Hogbin Westby, Running Code Reviews with Confidence | September 2, 2014
• ALA Event, Responsive Style Guides | June 16, 2015
• Matt Griffin, The People are the Work | January 22, 2015

From elsewhere#section18

• Mandy Brown and Kaeti Hinck, Remote Control (Source)

Becoming mentors#section19

The more we teach, the more we learn—and the more our industry benefits. Discover the joys of mentoring and the future of web education.

From us#section20

• Georgy Cohen, Cultivating the Next Generation of Web Professionals | November 18, 2014
• Alice Mottola, Initiation to Code | March 31, 2015

From elsewhere#section21

• The Web Ahead, Web Design Education with Leslie Jensen-Inman
• Big Web Show, Those Who Can Teach with Jared Spool

Getting content right#section22

In the beginning was content—and it’s the core of every experience we design and build. Connect the right person to the right content at the right time using strategy, design, and writing.

From us#section23

• Ida Aalen, The Core Model: Designing Inside Out for Better Results | January 6, 2015
• Gerry McGovern, What Really Matters: Focusing on Top Tasks | April 21, 2015
• Eileen Webb, Training the CMS | October 7, 2014
• Jeff Eaton, The Battle for the Body Field | February 25, 2015
• Allen Tan, Gardens, Not Graves | July 29, 2014
• Senongo Akpem, Building Nonlinear Narratives for the Web | May 5, 2015

From elsewhere#section24

• Nicole Fenton, Interface Writing: Code for Humans

The evolution of type#section25

If not yet ubiquitous, sophisticated typography on the web is now at least possible. It continues to evolve apace—virtually anything we could do in print, we can now do on screens.

From us#section26

• Andrew Johnson, Live Font Interpolation on the Web | January 20, 2015
• Nick Sherman, Variable Fonts for Responsive Web Design | January 23, 2015

From elsewhere#section27

• Tobias Frere-Jones, Typeface Mechanics 001
• Kenneth Ormandy, Efficient Web Type Circa 1556
• Tanvi Misra, Can Google Build A Typeface To Support Every Written Language? (NPR Code Switch)