Animation has come a long way over the course of the web’s still-young history. For years, designers felt the need to take sides. Should we build hypnotic sites in Flash? Or should we stick to static, standards-compliant sites built with HTML and CSS? Author Val Head never wanted to choose. Her new book, Designing Interface Animation, celebrates how animation is finally coming into its own, and shows us what we can do with it. In this wide-ranging interview, she tells us why she loves animation so much.
Topic: State of the Web
The Future of the Web
Is the web’s way forward to be defined by a bunch of renegade mavericks armed with Flash or JavaScript? Matt Griffin argues that it may not be so bad to let web authors kludge together the things they’d like to build, and follow where their mistakes lead us.
The Rich (Typefaces) Get Richer
Type on the web has come a long way since the beginning of the decade. We now have literally thousands of fonts at our disposal to use on our sites. But the same faces—the Futuras, the Gothams, the Proxima Novas—crop up everywhere. Jeremiah Shoaf encourages us to break out of our cognitive ruts and explore the wealth of typographic diversity at our fingertips.
Meaningful CSS: Style Like You Mean It
Our markup too often remains a snarl of divs, our CSS a chaos of classes. Tim Baxter urges us to move beyond that. We can use real objects now instead of abstract representations. We can write CSS to support our markup instead of the other way around, and both can be more semantic and meaningful. The browser support is there; the standards are in place. Only habit is stopping us.
Back to the Future in 2016
Practicing kickflips. Standing still. Drawing. Learning JavaScript (finally). Messing around with Arduino. Reading and writing books. Jumping into CSS Grid Layout. Sunbathing with cats. We asked some of our smartest friends in the web design and development communities what new focuses they planned to bring to their lives and work in 2016. Their answers fell into four categories—design, insight, tools, and work—but one idea cropped up over and over: sometimes you need to take a step back in order to move forward.
2015 Summer Reading Issue
The dog days are upon us—but instead of giving up in the summer swelter, take heart! We’ve got an extra-special reading list of bright, insightful brainfood. ALA’s third annual summer reader explores what’s been on the web industry’s mind lately, from accessibility to performance, from CSS techniques to web type, from mentorship to more collaborative approaches. It’s a list as cool and fancy as a watermelon-basil popsicle. Yeah, that does sound good, doesn’t it? Kick back, chill out, and get to reading.
Container Queries: Once More Unto the Breach
Media queries have been the go-to tool in building responsive sites, allowing us to resize and recombine modules to suit multiple contexts, layouts, and viewports. But relying on fixed viewport sizes can quickly twist stylesheets into Gordian knots. We still need a future-friendly way to manage responsive CSS. Mat Marquis explores the problem and the progress toward the solution—and issues a rallying call.
No Good Can Come of Bad Code
More than a decade after we won the battle for web standards, too much code is still crap. Dr. Web is back to answer your career and industry questions. This time out, the good doctor considers what you can do when your boss is satisfied with third-party code that would make Stalin yak.
Instant Web
For some, Facebook’s Instant Articles is a sign that the traditional web stack is incapable of giving users a first-class reading experience. But the sluggish performance of the web isn’t due to an inherent flaw in the technology. That particular problem originates between the seat and the keyboard, where builders make choices that bloat their sites. For Mark Llobrera, Instant Articles is a sign that we need to prioritize performance like we actually mean it.
SHOUTERS, Inc.
Sometimes, to make change happen, there has to be shouting. Other times, the shouting has to stop to allow change to happen. Right now we need to be talking—and listening—to each other, in our industry as well as in society. So why is it so hard to get these conversations going? Well, there’s the genuine guilt and anger that makes this super uncomfortable. On top of that, could it be we often lose our nerve at the prospect of feeding the indignation of the ALL-CAPS side of the internet? WAKE UP PEOPLE!
