Transcending CSS | The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke
‘A manifesto to transcend the web of today.’
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- Introduction: Dave Shea
- Foreword: Molly E. Holzschlag
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Buy from Amazon
Catch Andy Clarke on DVD in three new For A Beautiful Web titles covering topics including “Designing with CSS”, “Designing with Microformats”; and “Designing web accessibility”.
Published by New Riders and available from Peachpit and Amazon.
As Jeremy mentioned yesterday, just before An Event Apart in Seattle, I spent a few hours on a spot of guerrilla testing at an AT&T store. Specifically, I was looking at how Windows Phone 7’s Internet Explorer browser handles ‘responsive sites’.
Old fashioned causes like that still stand
Gotta rid this prejudice that ties you down
(Ghosts by The Jam)
Compare these.
Since Ethan Marcotte first lit the fire at An Event Apart in Seattle last year and later in that article, we’ve gone crazy about Responsive Web Design. But the more I think about what this means, the more CSS3 Media Queries I write, the more I realise something. I just don’t care about Responsive Web Design. I’ll tell you why.
Yesterday, something I said on Twitter seems to have resonated. “It takes a court order to get your personal data from Twitter, but just anyone can get it from Facebook.”
Ahead of an announcement I’ll be making tomorrow (don’t tell anyone, but it’s about Hardboiled Web Design workshops), I decided to make a little fun of myself.
If you didn’t get a chance to catch my Hardboiled Web Design talk at a conference this year, your luck just came in. Those fine chaps at CodeWorx have posted a high quality video of the entire talk. I’ll post a text transcript and slides from the talk later this week.
Back in August I started work on a new design for MobiCart, a new mobile e-commerce platform, designing both the front-of-house site and the back-end admin. It was fun, although it lasted only a few weeks.
Making layouts responsive using CSS3 Media Queries are a big part of the work that I’m doing for the Hardboiled Web Design site in the run up to the book’s launch.
We just can’t stay off the road. Two years since our last road trip when we drove an RV from Phoenix to Minneapolis, we’re again heading back West and this time we’re Looking for Yogi.
Yesterday, Mike Davidson announced the sweeping redesign of msnbc.com article pages. The redesign is especially brave from a traditional news outlet business perspective as it emphasizes readability and enjoyment over page views. But I do have a minor gripe with its typography and set out to find a solution.
Yesterday Microsoft announced the third Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9. I’ve been using this preview for a while, testing how their newest browser stands up to the examples I’ve designed for Hardboiled Web Design.
After spending weeks searching for a contract that was simple for me and my clients to understand, in 2008 I wrote my own and published it on 24ways for anyone to use. Now it’s time for an update.
It seems like months ago (it was) when I handed over my design templates for the redesign of CannyBill. Since then, the canny chaps have been working hard to implement the design and @RellyAB has been working her strange magic on their copy. Yesterday the new CannyBill site went live.
Today, RIM unveiled its latest mobile browser. It runs WebKit making every mobile platform except one run that rendering engine. With that in mind, I’d like you to try this experiment.
I asked: Web designers are cool, but private detectives are cooler. No argument, but why can’t you be both?
The answer? You can.
When the W3C announced that it was retreating from XHTML2 after years in the trenches, propagandists trumpeted that advocacy of XHTML had been foolish. With HTML5 again mired in corporate politics, egotism, squabbles and petty disagreements, it is easy to see why people are questioning if using or advocating HTML5 now is foolish too? At least until all parties reach some kind of armistice.
Hardboiled CSS3 Media Queries is a very good boilerplate made by Andy Clarke, and it’s modified and included in Mobile HTML5 Boilerplate beta. A recent mobile development makes me think maybe this has to be tweaked.
An important update from HTML5 Boilerplate team member Shi Chuan.
To hell with being graceful! We need to be really ambitious.
What? I actually said that? Who? Me?
Steve Faulkner:
Freedom scientific have provided documentaion on how the JAWS screen reader support WAI-ARIA. It is available as a microsoft word document. [Below] Here is the same information in HTML format
This HTML5 specification is like no other—It has been processed with you, the humble web developer, in mind.
See also Ben Schwarz’s background to the project.
The way I achieved this is by making the mobile stylesheet the default, and adding in the heavier page assets for the desktop theme using a media query:
Why didn’t I think of that? Genius!
The ADA requires Disney’s websites to respect the needs of the visually impaired, such as by accommodating the use of screen-reader technology. The Disney sites, which are created for Disney affiliate Walt Disney Parks and Resorts by two other affiliates, Disney Online and Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Online, are replete with video and audio trailers which cannot be turned off by people who cannot use a mouse and which drown out screen-readers. The websites also contain Flash content that is not accessible to blind persons. The Plaintiffs assert that Disney simply does not address the needs of people who are visually impaired in creating its webpages.
From my experience of working with Disney UK, it wasn’t that they didn’t care about accessibility, they just didn’t know a damn thing about it.
Those lovely folks over at Typekit published a guest article by my good self yesterday, Getting Hardboiled with CSS3 2D Transforms, where I’ used an example that was planned for Hardboiled Web Design, but never quite fitted in. The link to the hardboiled example file must have been stolen, so here is the final result.
Courtesy of my good friends at Media Temple, your chance to win one of five signed copies of Hardboiled Web Design. No, not the PDF silly! The full 400 page, 1.5kg printed version! To enter, simply leave a comment with your definition of ‘Hard Boiled Web Design.’ Good luck!
Update: Please leave your comment on the Media Temple blog, not here.
When Andy suggested asking the amazing illustrator Kevin Cornell to produce the front cover for Hardboiled Web Design, we were so excited by the possibility! So, when he said yes, we were made up! Kevin has produced a work of art! We'll be revealing the finished cover when the book goes on sale on the 19th October but read on for a few clues to what it will look like.
Juan Pablo Bravo:
Infographic showing 600 Hanna-Barbera Characters. The characters are shown in chronological order, with their respective names in english and spanish (of the TV series and the characters).
Mule Design Studio
A PSD is a painting of a website. We don’t spend weeks or months understanding a client’s complex needs and issues to make them paintings.
Don't say I never told you so.
I gave a presentation at entitled Highly Maintainable, Efficient, and Optimized CSS. I tried to squeeze as many tips as I could in to cover how to create CSS that is well organized and readable while still keeping efficiency in mind.
Contains some fantastic resources.
Thanks to Andy Clarke’s ‘Contract Killer’, we’ve adapted one of the best design contracts we’ve seen to make it not only relevant to email newsletter design, but fillable in 30-seconds or less!
Oli Studholme on HTML, microformats and WAI-ARIA roles. These are three topics I cover in Hardboiled Web Design, making this article a fantastic primer.
-webkit-background-clip: padding-box;
Have you ever gone clothes shopping for a person that you haven’t met or seen before? I’m not talking kids shopping, I’m talking full grown adults. How do you buy jeans for someone that you know nothing about?
Designer David Airey Shares his process for the branding design for goTeach. I’ve been working separately on the web interface and layouts.
While HTML5’s video support enables us to bring most of the content and features of YouTube to computers and other devices that don’t support Flash Player, it does not yet meet all of our needs. Today, Adobe Flash provides the best platform for YouTube’s video distribution requirements, which is why our primary video player is built with it.
An archive of blog entries since 2004 on subjects including CSS, web standards, accessibility, design and development.