Discover the latest, hottest responsive image techniques—and why they're not good enough any more. Then learn to charge for your work like the pro you are.
Strategic pricing helps your brand and helps you to make more money. Issuing a price is like handing out a business card—it’s a great branding tool, but be careful about what it says to your market. Beginning relationships with customers at a high price makes the statement: “we’re good at what we do and we know it.” Fighting with a competitor over a low price says “I’m uncertain about my abilities, so I’ll take what I can get.” Failing to use a considered pricing policy will leave you treading water in a sea of design mediocrity, allowing you to just stay afloat while you sell commodities. Jason Blumer explains how to become strategic about your pricing—including three things you can do immediately to kick-start your journey toward strategic pricing.
With a mobile-first responsive design approach, if any part of the process breaks down, your user can still receive a representative image and avoid an unnecessarily large request on a device that may have limited bandwidth. But with several newer browsers implementing an “image prefetching” feature that allows images to be fetched before parsing the document’s body, some of the web’s brightest developers are abandoning responsive images in favor of user agent detection, at least as a temporary solution. For us standardistas, UA detection leaves a bad taste in the mouth. More importantly, as the number and kinds of devices continue to grow, UA detection will quickly become untenable—just as browser detection did back in the bad old days before web standards. What’s really needed, argues Mat Marquis, is a new markup element that works the way the HTML5 video element works. Sound crazy? So crazy it just might work.
Colin Eagan and Jeffrey MacIntyre offer a “ground-up” approach to implementing personalized digital experiences that are intentional, ethical, and technologically sound.
Why do so many content models still look more like design systems rather than reflecting structured data? Mike Wills takes us on a personal journey as he examines his own past experiences and invites us to conceive content models that articulate meaning and group related content together for use on any channel.
In this excerpt from Voice Content and Usability, author Preston So talks about the messy, primordial nature of human speech and challenges with programming computers to deal with these complexities.
As devices continue to diversify in dizzying ways, how can we make sure our work on the web stays as relevant as ever for the long haul? Cathy Dutton shares how practitioners must perfect designs both for the paradigms of the present and the twists of the future, come what may.
Receiving feedback can be a stressful experience: will an open-ended question attract helpful guidance or harsh criticism? Erin “Folletto“ Casali coaches us through a process to ensure that feedback always lands gracefully.
