Engaging with users in a meaningful dialogue can seem daunting. Scary even. Understanding how to do it well will pay great dividends because UX is heading in that direction. Find out more in this excerpt from Erika Hall’s latest book, Conversational Design.
Topic: Design
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.
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.
The Story of CSS Grid, from Its Creators
Designers have used grids for centuries. And after more than 20 years of waiting, they are finally here for the browser. This is the story of CSS Grid. It took a lot of people in the right place and at the right time to make it happen.
Web Typography: Numerals
In this excerpt from Chapter 2 of Richard Rutter’s Web Typography, he explains the importance of proper numeral usage in our work, including when you should and shouldn’t use “old-style” numerals.
Using Webfonts
Using webfonts begins with a simple CSS declaration, but creating usable font stacks and fallbacks is not as simple as it might sound. Bram Stein sets us up for success in an exclusive excerpt from Chapter 2 of his spanking new Webfont Handbook, available now from A Book Apart.
User Interfaces for Variable Fonts
The tools we design with have a unique effect on the way we work, constraining and empowering us while we explore, examine and create. Variable fonts give us a new, wide open typographic space with which to work. Instead of prescribing value to individual UI elements in a vacuum, we should take a hybrid and calculated approach to variable font interfaces. How do we structure our design tools to adapt to the new advantages variable fonts provide us with?
Practical CSS Grid: Adding Grid to an Existing Design
CSS Grid is here—and easier than you might expect. Eric Meyer shows us how to use Grid on an existing design without breaking things for non-grid browsers. With pictures! Also a couple of gotchas.
Long-Term Design: Rewriting the Design Sales Pitch
Hyping the latest, greatest, flashiest design options may be fun and attention-grabbing, but it doesn’t always serve your bottom line. Author Jarrod Drysdale says instead of constantly pitching new products to new customers, consider standing behind your original great designs and pitch ongoing support and design evolution to your existing clients.
I Don’t Need Help
People assume help will be there when they need it. They don’t want to wait and they don’t want to have to ask. As Neha Singh explains, designers must accept these basic human traits and develop sites accordingly. There’s no design so intuitive that it doesn’t need a help function, and there’s no complex help app so engaging that it will hold user interest.
