Category: The Essentials
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Kiss My Classname
SORRY. I disagree. Nonsemantic classnames that refer to visual styles will always be a bad idea. I’m sure you’re a good coder. Probably much better than I am these days. I know most of you…
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To Save Real News
IN a world where newspapers are dying and half the public believes fake news, what online news experiences need is design that is branded, authoritative, and above all, readable: Branded, because we need to convert…
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From climate change to Swedish hip hop
A few years ago, my Swedish friend Peyo cofounded a start-up that brought affordable solar power to rural villages in India—profoundly poor villages where, until that time, folks had relied on dirty gasoline-powered generators to…
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Private Parts: unlikely advocate fights for online privacy, anonymity
MESMERIZED as we have been by the spectacle of the flaming garbage scow of U.S. election news, it would have been easy to miss this other narrative. But in the past few days, just as…
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Ten Years Ago on the Web
2006 DOESN’T seem forever ago until I remember that we were tracking IE7 bugs, worrying about the RSS feed validator, and viewing Drupal as an accessibility-and-web-standards-positive platform, at the time. Pundits were claiming bad design was good for the web…
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Pinterest giveth, and Pinterest taketh away
AS MY design career has taken on more and more strategic and managerial freight, I’ve done less and less hands-on design. This year, I decided to change that. As part of my reimmersion, I found…
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The Year in Design
Mobile is today’s first screen. So design responsively, focusing on content and structure first. Websites and apps alike should remove distractions and let people interact as directly as possible with content. 90 percent of design…
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Ad Blocking Phase II
The world has finally caught up with Been, Inc. Three years ago, this tiny start-up company shared my studio space in New York. Their product idea was remarkably original: instead of passively accepting the data…
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Responsive times two: essential new books from Ethan Marcotte & Karen McGrane
Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Design: Patterns and Principles and Karen McGrane’s Going Responsive are now available in our A Book Apart store.
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Zen & The Art of iTunes Failure
What a recent iTunes failure taught me about attachment to work and memories.
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Web Performance Today
Front-end design/development then and now. As web design becomes more complicated, so do performance solutions. Enjoy a nostalgic look back at yesterday’s best practices, and dive into great resources for optimizing today’s complex websites and…
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You’re welcome: cutting the mustard then and now.
EVERY TIME I hear a brilliant young web developer cite the BBC’s forward-thinking practice of “cutting the mustard,” by which they mean testing a receiving web device for certain capabilities before serving content, I remember…
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Publishing v. Performance—or, The Soul of the Web
Publishing Versus Performance: Our Struggle for the Soul of the Web
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Usability Testing
Usability testing doesn’t reveal problems in your product so much as it uncovers arrogance in your thinking.
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My website is 20 years old today.
MY WEBSITE is 20 years old today. I’m dictating these remarks into a tiny handheld device, not to prove a point, but because, with gorgeously ironic timing, my wired internet connection has gone out. It’s…