Topic: Uncategorized

15 years ago this month, a plucky ALA staffer wrote “Much Ado About 5K,” an article on a contest created by Stewart Butterfield that challenged web designers and developers to build a complete website using less than 5K of images and code. As one group of modern web makers embraces mobile-first design and performance budgets, while another (the majority) worships at the altar of bigger, fatter, and slower, the 5K contest reminds us that a byte saved is a follower earned.

We talk a lot about having empathy for our users, but what about having empathy for each other? Susan Robertson describes how, as a developer, she practices empathy with her teammates.

If you were too buried in work this week to read the internet, don’t worry: the staff of A List Apart read it for you. Catch up with this week’s On Our Radar, featuring our new favorite Instagram account, Mozilla’s latest mission, Twitter bots, and more.

The responsive images spec has changed. Eric Portis updates us on what’s new since “Responsive Images in Practice” and shows how to handle sizes moving forward.

Video game designers start with the story. What would our work look like if we did too? Steph Hay advocates for a content-first approach to design and walks through how to start prototyping your content.

When it comes to new devices, context is everything. Smartphones and tablets gained popularity because they were useful in situations where our laptops weren’t. Will smartwatches do the same? Anthony Colangelo looks at the context of these new devices and how they might reach their full potential.

Accepting the “ebb and flow of things” is as challenging today as it was 15 years ago. Susan Robertson explores what it means to accept our lack of control on the web and shares how she acknowledges this in her work—from the CSS she writes, to the conversations she has with team members.

To preprocess or not to preprocess? ALA: On Air will cover just that—live on May 6. Featuring Rachel Andrew, Lyza Danger Gardner, Jeff Lembeck, and Susan Robertson, “Sass Talk” will discuss when, how, and whether to use Sass, taskrunners, and other tools.

15 years have passed since we published John Allsopp’s “A Dao of Web Design.” Join us as we take a look back at John’s piece and consider what it means for the web today.

Kids these days. When they’re not on our lawn, they’re using the web in some pretty unique ways. Debra Levin Gelman encourages us to take their needs into account and offers a fresh new method to help us design social tools for kids ages 8–12.