Humans have become extremely adept at recognising patterns. Long ago it would have been a survival trait: those who could spot the tiger before it attacked would survive. Pattern recognition isn’t often needed in that capacity any more but we still have the skill and it’s so hard-wired into our system that most of the time we… Read More What’s so great about Pattern Libraries?
In my twitter stream this morning I found a link to a page full of examples of responsive design (http://thenextweb.com/dd/2012/02/01/10-beautiful-examples-of-responsive-web-design/) While these are undoubtedly beautiful and well-crafted examples of responsive design, I’m not sure how relevant the ‘responsiveness’ is to each site’s audience. Curiously, as available bandwidth increases for most users, the amount of bandwidth… Read More On Morality and Multi-screen
I just found this page with some interesting data on eye tracking and Facebook courtesy of Mashable.com http://mashable.com/2011/11/30/social-profile-eye-tracking/
Lea Verou has, rather masterfully, created a large library of CSS animations here: http://leaverou.github.com/animatable/ While this is undoubtedly an excellent way of showing off the capabilities of CSS I would still strongly advise against simply rushing out and plugging as many as possible into any site you may be working on. Libraries like this tend to make us all think… Read More CSS Libraries
The other day I was reading something that happened to mention Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was a 17th-century English philosopher. He saw humans as ego-driven, power-hungry machines whose seeming good intentions all mask entirely self-serving motives. The impact of this idea was so strong that even today, more than 300 years later, we still find it… Read More ‘The “Free” issue’ or ‘How 17th-century philosophy affects UX’
This is just a quick thought about the influence of broadband and any services that come after it on the design and development of websites and web-apps. As web designers and developers we’ve never had it so good. I can remember part of our testing process when I started in this business (A long time… Read More The influence of broadband on the future of design and development
This is not a post about using specific CSS properties. Nor is it a post about how to integrate CSS with HTML documents. This post is just about the best ways we’ve found to write useful, concise and reusable CSS. Selector Names Selector names are always going to be a tricky subject. Unless we build… Read More CSS Best Practices
Title tag The Title Tag normally sits within the head section of your HTML document and will look something like this: <title>Title tags and their usage – SEO tips – My Web Site</title> When you use this tag correctly, its contents will appear on the bar at the very top of your browser window (or… Read More Quick SEO Tips – It’s in your head!
Similar to ‘Interference Effects’, this is a measure of how much relevant to irrelevant content you have on a page. More ‘signal’ and less ‘noise’ is better.
Now that broadband is the norm, designers and developers often interpret the extra bandwidth as a licence to create complex layouts, heavy graphics and as many interactive elements as possible. The truth is that we should all be designing and developing as though we were still restricted by a 56kbps dial up service. As smart… Read More Optimization 101
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