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Caveats Obviously there are some potential semantic hang-ups with these methods. While classes like pic and caption stem the tide a bit, others like left and right are tougher to justify. This is something that you have to decide for yourself; I’m fine with the occasional four or left class because I think there’s a good tradeoff. Just as a fully semantic solution to this problem would likely be imperfect, this solution is imperfect from the other side of the semantic fence. Additionally, IE6 doesn’t understand the chain of classes within a CSS selector (like .right.inset). If you need to support IE6, you may have to write a few more CSS rules to accommodate any discrepancies. Opportunities This is clearly a simple example, but starting with a modular foundation like this leaves the door open for opportunity. We’ve created a highly flexible and human-readable system for layout manipulation. Obviously, this is something that would need to be tailored to the spacing and sizes of your site, but the systematic approach is very powerful, especially for editorial websites whose articles might have lots of images of varying sizes. It may not get us fully to the flexibility of WYSIWYG print layouts, but methods like this point us in a direction of designs that can adapt to the needs of the content. View the example: without grid and with grid.",2008,Jason Santa Maria,jasonsantamaria,2008-12-15T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2008/making-modular-layout-systems/,process 101,Easing The Path from Design to Development,"As a web developer, I have the pleasure of working with a lot of different designers. There has been a lot of industry discussion of late about designers and developers, focusing on how different we sometimes are and how the interface between our respective phases of a project (that is to say moving from a design phase into production) can sometimes become a battleground. I don’t believe it has to be a battleground. It’s actually more like being a dance partner – our steps are different, but as long as we know our own part and have a little knowledge of our partner’s steps, it all goes together to form a cohesive dance. Albeit with less spandex and fewer sequins (although that may depend on the project in question). As the process usually flows from design towards development, it’s most important that designers have a little knowledge of how the site is going to be built. At the specialist web development agency I’m part of, we find that designs that have been well considered from a technical perspective help to keep the project on track and on budget. Based on that experience, I’ve put together my checklist of things that designers should consider before handing their work over to a developer to build. Layout One rookie mistake made by traditionally trained designers transferring to the web is to forget a web browser is not a fixed medium. Unlike designing a magazine layout or a piece of packaging, there are lots of available options to consider. Should the layout be fluid and resize with the window, or should it be set to a fixed width? If it’s fluid, which parts expand and which not? If it’s fixed, should it sit in the middle of the window or to one side? If any part of the layout is going to be flexible (get wider and narrower as required), consider how any graphics are affected. Images don’t usually look good if displayed at anything other that their original size, so should they behave? If a column is going to get wider than it’s shown in the Photoshop comp, it may be necessary to provide separate wider versions of any background images. Text size and content volume A related issue is considering how the layout behaves with both different sizes of text and different volumes of content. Whilst text zooming rather than text resizing is becoming more commonplace as the default behaviour in browsers, it’s still a fundamentally important principal of web design that we are suggesting and not dictating how something should look. Designs must allow for a little give and take in the text size, and how this affects the design needs to be taken into consideration. Keep in mind that the same font can display differently in different places and platforms. Something as simple as Times will display wider on a Mac than on Windows. However, the main impact of text resizing is the change in how much vertical space copy takes up. This is particularly important where space is limited by the design (making text bigger causes many more problems than making text smaller). Each element from headings to box-outs to navigation items and buttons needs to be able to expand at least vertically, if not horizontally as well. This may require some thought about how elements on the page may wrap onto new lines, as well as again making sure to provide extended versions of any graphical elements. Similarly, it’s rare theses days to know exactly what content you’re working with when a site is designed. Many, if not most sites are designed as a series of templates for some kind of content management system, and so designs cannot be tweaked around any specific item of content. Designs must be able to cope with both much greater and much lesser volumes of content that might be thrown in at the lorem ipsum phase. Particular things to watch out for are things like headings (how do they wrap onto multiple lines) and any user-generated items like usernames. It can be very easy to forget that whilst you might expect something like a username to be 8-12 characters, if the systems powering your site allow for 255 characters they’ll always be someone who’ll go there. Expect them to do so. Again, if your site is content managed or not, consider the possibility that the structure might be expanded in the future. Consider how additional items might be added to each level of navigation. Whilst it’s rarely desirable to make significant changes without revisiting the site’s information architecture more thoroughly, it’s an inevitable fact of life that the structure needs a little bit of flexibility to change over time. Interactions with and without JavaScript A great number of sites now make good use of JavaScript to streamline the user interface and make everything just that touch more usable. Remember, though, that any developer worth their salt will start by building the interface without JavaScript, get it all working, and then layer that JavaScript on top. This is to allow for users viewing the site without JavaScript available or enabled in their browser. Designers need to consider both states of any feature they’re designing – how it looks and functions with and without JavaScript. If the feature does something fancy with Ajax, consider how the same can be achieved with basic HTML forms, links and intermediary pages. These all need to be designed, because this is how some of your users will interact with the site. Logged in and logged out states When designing any type of web application or site that has a membership system – that is to say users can create an account and log into the site – the design will need to consider how any element is presented in both logged in and logged out states. For some items there’ll be no difference, whereas for others there may be considerable differences. Should an item be hidden completely not logged out users? Should it look different in some way? Perhaps it should look the same, but prompt the user to log in when they interact with it. If so, what form should that prompt take on and how does the user progress through the authentication process to arrive back at the task they were originally trying to complete? Couple logged in and logged out states with the possible absence of JavaScript, and every feature needs to be designed in four different states: Logged out with JavaScript available Logged in with JavaScript available Logged out without JavaScript available Logged in without JavaScript available Fonts There are three main causes of war in this world; religions, politics and fonts. I’ve said publicly before that I believe the responsibility for this falls squarely at the feet of Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop, like a mistress at a brothel, parades a vast array of ropey, yet strangely enticing typefaces past the eyes of weak, lily-livered designers, who can’t help but crumble to their curvy charms. Yet, on the web, we have to be a little more restrained in our choice of typefaces. The purest solution is always to make the best use of the available fonts, but this isn’t always the most desirable solution from a design point of view. There are several technical solutions such as techniques that utilise Flash (like sIFR), dynamically generated images and even canvas in newer browsers. Discuss the best approach with your developer, as every different technique has different trade-offs, and this may impact the design in other ways. Messaging Any site that has interactive elements, from a simple contact form through to fully featured online software application, involves some kind of user messaging. By this I mean the error messages when something goes wrong and the success and thank-you messages when something goes right. These typically appear as the result of an interaction, so are easy to forget and miss off a Photoshop comp. For every form, consider what gets displayed to the user if they make a mistake or miss something out, and also what gets displayed back when the interaction is successful. What do they see and where do the go next? With Ajax interactions, the user doesn’t get any visual feedback of the site waiting for a response from the server unless you design it that way. Consider using a ‘waiting’ or ‘in progress’ spinner to give the user some visual feedback of any background processes. How should these look? How do they animate? Similarly, also consider the big error pages like a 404. With luck, these won’t often be seen, but it’s at the point that they are when careful design matters the most. Form fields Depending on the visual style of your site, the look of a browser’s default form fields and buttons can sometimes jar. It’s understandable that many a designer wants to change the way they look. Depending on the browser in question, various things can be done to style form fields and their buttons (although it’s not as flexible as most would like). A common request is to replace the default buttons with a graphical button. This is usually achievable in most cases, although it’s not easy to get a consistent result across all browsers – particularly when it comes to vertical positioning and the space surrounding the button. If the layout is very precise, or if space is at a premium, it’s always best to try and live with the browser’s default form controls. Whichever way you go, it’s important to remember that in general, each form field should have a label, and each form should have a submit button. If you find that your form breaks either of those rules, you should double check. Practical tips for handing files over There are a couple of basic steps that a design can carry out to make sure that the developer has the best chance of implementing the design exactly as envisioned. If working with Photoshop of Fireworks or similar comping tool, it helps to group and label layers to make it easy for a developer to see which need to be turned on and off to get to isolate parts of the page and different states of the design. Also, if you don’t work in the same office as your developer (and so they can’t quickly check with you), provide a PDF of each page and state so that your developer can see how each page should look aside from any confusion with quick layers are switched on or off. These also act as a handy quick reference that can be used without firing up Photoshop (which can kill both productivity and your machine). Finally, provide a colour reference showing the RGB values of all the key colours used throughout the design. Without this, the developer will end up colour-picking from the comps, and could potentially end up with different colours to those you intended. Remember, for a lot of developers, working in a tool like Photoshop is like presenting a designer with an SSH terminal into a web server. It’s unfamiliar ground and easy to get things wrong. Be the expert of your own domain and help your colleagues out when they’re out of their comfort zone. That goes both ways. In conclusion When asked the question of how to smooth hand-over between design and development, almost everyone who has experienced this situation could come up with their own list. This one is mine, based on some of the more common experiences we have at edgeofmyseat.com. So in bullet point form, here’s my checklist for handing a design over. Is the layout fixed, or fluid? Does each element cope with expanding for larger text and more content? Are all the graphics large enough to cope with an area expanding? Does each interactive element have a state for with and without JavaScript? Does each element have a state for logged in and logged out users? How are any custom fonts being displayed? (and does the developer have the font to use?) Does each interactive element have error and success messages designed? Do all form fields have a label and each form a submit button? Is your Photoshop comp document well organised? Have you provided flat PDFs of each state? Have you provided a colour reference? Are we having fun yet?",2008,Drew McLellan,drewmclellan,2008-12-01T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2008/easing-the-path-from-design-to-development/,process 107,Using Google App Engine as Your Own Content Delivery Network,"Do you remember, years ago, when hosting was expensive, domain names were the province of the rich, and you hosted your web pages on Geocities? It seems odd to me now that there was a time when each and every geek didn’t have his own top-level domain and super hosting setup. But as the parts became more and more affordable a man could become an outcast if he didn’t have his own slightly surreal-sounding TLD. And so it will be in the future when people realise with surprise there was a time before affordable content delivery networks. A content delivery network, or CDN, is a system of servers spread around the world, serving files from the nearest physical location. Instead of waiting for a file to find its way from a server farm in Silicon Valley 8,000 kilometres away, I can receive it from London, Dublin, or Paris, cutting down the time I wait. The big names — Google, Yahoo, Amazon, et al — use CDNs for their sites, but they’ve always been far too expensive for us mere mortals. Until now. There’s a service out there ready for you to use as your very own CDN. You have the company’s blessing, you won’t need to write a line of code, and — best of all — it’s free. The name? Google App Engine. In this article you’ll find out how to set up a CDN on Google App Engine. You’ll get the development software running on your own computer, tell App Engine what files to serve, upload them to a web site, and give everyone round the world access to them. Creating your first Google App Engine project Before we do anything else, you’ll need to download the Google App Engine software development kit (SDK). You’ll need Python 2.5 too — you won’t be writing any Python code but the App Engine SDK will need it to run on your computer. If you don’t have Python, App Engine will install it for you (if you use Mac OS X 10.5 or a Linux-based OS you’ll have Python; if you use Windows you won’t). Done that? Excellent, because that’s the hardest step. The rest is plain sailing. You’ll need to choose a unique ‘application id’ — nothing more than a name — for your project. Make sure it consists only of lowercase letters and numbers. For this article I’ll use 24ways2008, but you can choose anything you like. On your computer, create a folder named after your application id. This folder can be anywhere you want: your desktop, your documents folder, or wherever you usually keep your web files. Within your new folder, create a folder called assets, and within that folder create three folders called images, css, and javascript. These three folders are the ones you’ll fill with files and serve from your content delivery network. You can have other folders too, if you like. That will leave you with a folder structure like this: 24ways2008/ assets/ css/ images/ javascript/ Now you need to put a few files in these folders, so we can later see our CDN in action. You can put anything you want in these folders, but for this example we’ll include an HTML file, a style sheet, an image, and a Javascript library. In the top-level folder (the one I’ve called 24ways2008), create a file called index.html. Fill this with any content you want. In the assets/css folder, create a file named core.css and throw in a couple of CSS rules for good measure. In the assets/images directory save any image that takes your fancy — I’ve used the silver badge from the App Engine download page. Finally, to fill the JavaScript folder, add in this jQuery library file. If you’ve got the time and the inclination, you can build a page that uses all these elements. So now we should have a set of files and folders that look something like this: 24ways2008/ assets/ index.html css/ core.css images/ appengine-silver-120x30.gif javascript/ jquery-1.2.6.min.js Which leaves us with one last file to create. This is the important one: it tells App Engine what to do with your files. It’s named app.yaml, it sits at the top-level (inside the folder I’ve named 24ways2008), and it needs to include these lines: application: 24ways2008 version: 1 runtime: python api_version: 1 handlers: - url: / static_files: assets/index.html upload: assets/index.html - url: / static_dir: assets You need to make sure you change 24ways2008 on the first line to whatever you chose as your application id, but otherwise the content of your app.yaml file should be identical. And with that, you’ve created your first App Engine project. If you want it, you can download a zip file containing my project. Testing your project As it stands, your project is ready to be uploaded to App Engine. But we couldn’t call ourselves professionals if we didn’t test it, could we? So, let’s put that downloaded SDK to good use and run the project from your own computer. One of the files you’ll find App Engine installed is named dev_appserver.py, a Python script used to simulate App Engine on your computer. You’ll find lots of information on how to do this in the documentation on the development web server, but it boils down to running the script like so (the space and the dot at the end are important): dev_appserver.py . You’ll need to run this from the command-line: Mac users can run the Terminal application, Linux users can run their favourite shell, and Windows users will need to run it via the Command Prompt (open the Start menu, choose ‘Run…’, type ‘cmd‘, and click ‘OK’). Before you run the script you’ll need to make sure you’re in the project folder — in my case, as I saved it to my desktop I can go there by typing cd ~/Desktop/24ways2008 in my Mac’s Terminal app; if you’re using Windows you can type cd ""C:\Documents and Settings\username\Desktop\24ways2008"" If that’s successful, you’ll see a few lines of output, the last looking something like this: INFO 2008-11-22 14:35:00,830 dev_appserver_main.py] Running application 24ways2008 on port 8080: http://localhost:8080 Now you can power up your favourite browser, point it to http://localhost:8080/, and you’ll see the page you saved as index.html. You’ll also find your CSS file at http://localhost:8080/css/core.css. In fact, anything you put inside the assets folder in the project will be accessible from this domain. You’re running our own App Engine web server! Note that no-one else will be able to see your files: localhost is a special domain that you can only see from your computer — and once you stop the development server (by pressing Control–C) you’ll not be able to see the files in your browser until you start it again. You might notice a new file has turned up in your project: index.yaml. App Engine creates this file when you run the development server, and it’s for internal App Engine use only. If you delete it there are no ill effects, but it will reappear when you next run the development server. If you’re using version control (e.g. Subversion) there’s no need to keep a copy in your repository. So you’ve tested your project and you’ve seen it working on your own machine; now all you need to do is upload your project and the world will be able to see your files too. Uploading your project If you don’t have a Google account, create one and then sign in to App Engine. Tell Google about your new project by clicking on the ‘Create an Application’ button. Enter your application id, give the application a name, and agree to the terms and conditions. That’s it. All we need do now is upload the files. Open your Mac OS X Terminal, Windows Command Prompt, or Linux shell window again, move to the project folder, and type (again, the space and the dot at the end are important): appcfg.py update . Enter your email address and password when prompted, and let App Engine do it’s thing. It’ll take no more than a few seconds, but in that time App Engine will have done the equivalent of logging in to an FTP server and copying files across. It’s fairly understated, but you now have your own project up and running. You can see mine at http://24ways2008.appspot.com/, and everyone can see yours at http://your-application-id.appspot.com/. Your files are being served up over Google’s content delivery network, at no cost to you! Benefits of using Google App Engine The benefits of App Engine as a CDN are obvious: your own server doesn’t suck up the bandwidth, while your visitors will appreciate a faster site. But there are also less obvious benefits. First, once you’ve set up your site, updating it is an absolute breeze. Each time you update a file (or a batch of files) you need only run appcfg.py to see the changes appear on your site. To paraphrase Joel Spolsky, a good web site must be able to be updated in a single step. Many designers and developers can’t make that claim, but with App Engine, you can. App Engine also allows multiple people to work on one application. If you want a friend to be able to upload files to your site you can let him do so without giving him usernames and passwords — all he needs is his own Google account. App Engine also gives you a log of all actions taken by collaborators, so you can see who’s made updates, and when. Another bonus is the simple version control App Engine offers. Do you remember the file named app.yaml you created a while back? The second line looked like this: version: 1 If you change the version number to 2 (or 3, or 4, etc), App Engine will keep a copy of the last version you uploaded. If anything goes wrong with your latest version, you can tell App Engine to revert back to that last saved version. It’s no proper version control system, but it could get you out of a sticky situation. One last thing to note: if you’re not happy using your-application-id.appspot.com as your domain, App Engine will quite happily use any domain you own. The weak points of Google App Engine In the right circumstances, App Engine can be a real boon. I run my own site using the method I’ve discussed above, and I’m very happy with it. But App Engine does have its disadvantages, most notably those discussed by Aral Balkan in his post ‘Why Google App Engine is broken and what Google must do to fix it‘. Aral found the biggest problems while using App Engine as a web application platform; I wouldn’t recommend using it as such either (at least for now) but for our purposes as a CDN for static files, it’s much more worthy. Still, App Engine has two shortcomings you should be aware of. The first is that you can’t host a file larger than one megabyte. If you want to use App Engine to host that 4.3MB download for your latest-and-greatest desktop software, you’re out of luck. The only solution is to stick to smaller files. The second problem is the quota system. Google’s own documentation says you’re allowed 650,000 requests a day and 10,000 megabytes of bandwidth in and out (20,000 megabytes in total), which should be plenty for most sites. But people have seen sites shut down temporarily for breaching quotas — in some cases after inexplicable jumps in Google’s server CPU usage. Aral, who’s seen it happen to his own sites, seemed genuinely frustrated by this, and if you measure your hits in the hundreds of thousands and don’t want to worry about uptime, App Engine isn’t for you. That said, for most of us, App Engine offers a fantastic resource: the ability to host files on Google’s own content delivery network, at no charge. Conclusion If you’ve come this far, you’ve seen how to create a Google App Engine project and host your own files on Google’s CDN. You’ve seen the great advantages App Engine offers — an excellent content delivery network, the ability to update your site with a single command, multiple authors, simple version control, and the use of your own domain — and you’ve come across some of its weaknesses — most importantly the limit on file sizes and the quota system. All that’s left to do is upload those applications — but not before you’ve finished your Christmas shopping.",2008,Matt Riggott,mattriggott,2008-12-06T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2008/using-google-app-engine-as-your-own-cdn/,process 112,User Styling,"During the recent US elections, Twitter decided to add an ‘election bar’ as part of their site design. You could close it if it annoyed you, but the action wasn’t persistent and the bar would always come back like a bad penny. The solution to common browsing problems like this is CSS. ‘User styling’ (or the creepy ‘skinning’) is the creation of CSS rules to customise and personalise a particular domain. Aside from hiding adverts and other annoyances, there are many reasons for taking the time and effort to do it: Improving personal readability by changing text size and colour Personalising the look of a web app like GMail to look less insipid Revealing microformats Sport! My dreams of site skinning tennis are not yet fully realised, but it’ll be all the rage by next Christmas, believe me. Hopefully you’re now asking “But how? HOW?!”. The process of creating a site skin is roughly as follows: See something you want to change Find out what it’s called, and if any rules already apply to it Write CSS rule(s) to override and/or enhance it. Apply the rules So let’s get stuck in… See something Let’s start small with Multimap.com. Look at that big header – it takes up an awful lot of screen space doesn’t it? No matter, we can fix it. Tools Now we need to find out where that big assed header is in the DOM, and make overriding CSS rules. The best tool I’ve found yet is the Mac OS X app, CSS Edit. It utilises a slick ‘override stylesheets’ function and DOM Inspector. Rather than give you all the usual DOM inspection tools, CSS Edit’s is solely concerned with style. Go into ‘X-Ray’ mode, click an element, and look at the inspector window to see every style rule governing it. Click the selector to be taken to where it lives in the CSS. It really is a user styling dream app. Having said all that, you can achieve all this with free, cross platform tools – namely Firefox with the Firebug and Stylish extensions. We’ll be using them for these examples, so make sure you have them installed if you want to follow along. Using Firebug, we can see that the page is very helpfully marked up, and that whole top area is simply a div with an ID of header. Change Something When you installed Stylish, it added a page and brush icon to your status bar. Click on that, and choose Write Style > for Multimap.com. The other options allow you to only create a style for a particular part of a website or URL, but we want this to apply to the whole of Multimap: The ‘Add Style’ window then pops up, with the @-moz-document query at the top: @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml); @-moz-document domain(""multimap.com"") { } All you need to do is add the CSS to hide the header, in between the curly brackets. @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml); @-moz-document domain(""multimap.com"") { #header {display: none;} } A click of the preview button shows us that it’s worked! Now the map appears further up the page. The ethics of hiding adverts is a discussion for another time, but let’s face it, when did you last whoop at the sight of a banner? Make Something Better If we’re happy with our modifications, all we need to do is give it a name and save. Whenever you visit Multimap.com, the style will be available. Stylish also allows you to toggle a style on/off via the status bar menu. If you feel you want to share this style with the world, then userstyles.org is the place to do it. It’s a grand repository of customisations that Stylish connects with. Whenever you visit a site, you can see if anyone else has written a style for it, again, via the status bar menu “Find Styles for this Page”. Selecting this with “BBC News” shows that there are plenty of options, ranging from small layout tweaks to redesigns: What’s more, whenever a style is updated, Stylish will notify you, and offer a one-click process to update it. This does only work in Firefox and Flock, so I’ll cover ways of applying site styles to other browsers later. Specific Techniques Important! In the Multimap example there wasn’t a display specified on that element, but it isn’t always going to be that easy. You may have spent most of your CSS life being a good designer and not resorting to adding !important to give your rule priority. There’s no way to avoid this in user styling – if you’re overriding an existing rule it’s a necessity! Be prepared to be typing !important a lot. Star Selector The Universal Selector is a particularly useful way to start a style. For example, if we want to make Flickr use Helvetica before Arial (as they should’ve done!), we can cover all occurrences with just one rule: * {font-family: ""Helvetica Neue"", Helvetica, sans-serif !important;} You can also use it to select ‘everything within an element’, by placing it after the element name: #content * {font-family: ""Helvetica Neue"", Helvetica, sans-serif !important;} Swapping Images If you’re changing something a little more complex, such as Google Reader, then at some point you’ll probably want to change anand its cite attribute.With more than one person speaking, you need to establish a temporal order for the conversation. Once again, the element to do just that is already there in XHTML; the humble ordered list.This project will use XHTML1.0 Strict, CSS2.1 and all that malarkey.
Adding a new note is as simple as adding a new item to list, and if you prefer to add more information to each note, such as the date or time that the note was written, go right ahead. Place your note list at the bottom of the source order of your document, right before the closing tag. One advantage of this approach over using conventional comments in your code is that all the notes are unobtrusive and are grouped together in one place, rather than being spread throughout your document. Basic CSS styling For the first stage you are going to add some basic styling to the notes area, starting with the ordered list. For this design I am basing the look and feel on an instant messenger window. ol#notes { width : 300px; height : 320px; padding : .5em 0; background : url(im.png) repeat; border : 1px solid #333; border-bottom-width : 2px; -moz-border-radius : 6px; /* Will not validate */ color : #000; overflow : auto; } ol#notes li { margin : .5em; padding : 10px 0 5px; background-color : #fff; border : 1px solid #666; -moz-border-radius : 6px; /* Will not validate */ } ol#notes blockquote { margin : 0; padding : 0; } ol#notes p { margin : 0 20px .75em; padding : 0; } ol#notes p.date { font-size : 92%; color : #666; text-transform : uppercase; } Take a gander at the first example. You could stop right there, but without seeing who has left the note, there is little context. So next, extract the name of the commenter from the
This project will use XHTML1.0 Strict, CSS2.1 and all that malarkey.
Those bits are simple and bulletproof.
’s cite attribute and display it before each note by using generated content. ol#notes blockquote:before { content : "" ""attr(cite)"" said: ""; margin-left : 20px; font-weight : bold; } Fun with more detailed styling Now, with all of the information and basic styling in place, it’s time to have some fun with some more detailed styling to spruce up your notes. Let’s start by adding an icon for each person, once again based on their cite. First, all of the first paragraphs of a’s that includes a cite attribute are given common styles. ol#notes blockquote[cite] p:first-child { min-height : 34px; padding-left : 40px; } Followed by an individual background-image. ol#notes blockquote[cite=""Andy""] p:first-child { background : url(malarkey.png) no-repeat 5px 5px; } If you prefer a little more interactivity, add a :hover state to eachand perhaps highlight the most recent comment. ol#notes blockquote:hover { background-color : #faf8eb; border-top : 1px solid #fff; border-bottom : 1px solid #333; } ol#notes li:last-child blockquote { background-color : #f1efe2; } You could also adjust the style for each comment based on the department that the person works in, for example:This project will use XHTML1.0 Strict, CSS2.1 and all that malarkey.
ol#notes blockquote.designer { border-color : #600; } Take a look at the results of the second stage. Show and hide the notes using CSS positioning With your notes now dressed in their finest, it is time to tuck them away above the top of your working XHTML/CSS prototype so that you can reveal them when you need them, no JavaScript required. Start by moving the ordered list of notes off the top of the viewport leaving only a few pixels in view. It is also a good idea to make them semi-transparent by using the opacity property for browsers that have implemented it. ol#notes { position : absolute; opacity : .25; z-index : 2000; top : -305px; left : 20px; } Your last step is to add :hover and :focus dynamic pseudo-classes to reposition the list at the top of the viewport and restore full opacity to display them in their full glory when needed. ol#notes:hover, ol#notes:focus { top : 0; opacity : 1; } Now it’s time to sit back, pour yourself a long drink and bask in the glory of the final result. Your notes are all stored in one handy place at the bottom of your document rather than being spread around your code. When your templates are complete, simply dive straight to the bottom and pull out the notes. A Message To You, Rudy Thank-you to everybody for making this a really great year for web standards. Have a wonderful holiday season. Buy Andy Clarke’s book Transcending CSS from Amazon.com",2006,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2006-12-15T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2006/css-production-notes/,process 123,Fast and Simple Usability Testing,"Everyone knows by now that they should test the usability of their applications, but still hardly anybody actually does it. In this article I’ll share some tips I’ve picked up for doing usability tests quickly and effectively. Relatively recent tools like Django and Ruby on Rails allow us to develop projects faster and to make significant changes later in the project timeline. Usability testing methods should now be adapted to fit this modern approach to development. When to test In an ideal world usability tests would be carried out frequently from an early stage of the project. Time and budget constraints lead this to be impractical; usability is often the first thing to get dropped from the project plan. If you can only test at one stage in the project, whatever the size, the most valuable time is before your first public beta — leaving long enough to fix issues and not so late that you can’t rethink your scope. There are three main categories of usability test: Testing design mockups Testing a new working application Testing established applications Each category requires a slightly different approach. For small modern web projects you are most likely to be testing a new working application. You will of course have already done functional tests so you won’t be worried about the user breaking things. The main differences between the categories apply in how you word The Script. Testing an established application is the most fun in my opinion. Humans are remarkably adaptable and rapidly develop coping strategies to work around usability issues in software they are forced to use. Uncovering these strategies may lead you to understand previously unspoken needs of your users. Often small changes to the application will have a dramatic affect on their everyday lives. Who to test When you have built a project to scratch your own itch, your intended audience will be people just like you. Test subjects in this case should be easy to find – friends, co-workers etc. This is not always the case; your users may not be like you at all. When they are not, it’s all the more important to run usability tests. Testing on friends, family and co-workers is better than not doing usability tests at all, but it can’t be compared to testing on actual samples of your intended audience. People who would use the system will provide more genuine feedback and deeper insight. Never let your test subjects put themselves in the shoes of your ‘actual’ users. For example, you should discourage comments like “Well, I would do this BUT if I was a bus driver I’d do that”. Users are not qualified to put themselves in the position of others. Inaccurate data is often worse than no data. Aim for five or six test subjects: any more and you probably won’t learn anything new; any less and you’re likely to be overwhelmed by issues stemming from people’s individual personalities. The Script The Script is a single side of A4 (or letter) paper, consisting of questions for your testers and reminders for yourself. Have a balance of task-based questions and expectation analysis. This helps maintain consistency across tests. Expectation analysis is more important for testing designs and new applications: “Where would you find X?”, “What would you expect to happen if you clicked on Y?”. In an established system users will probably know where these things are though it can still be illuminating to ask these questions though phrased slightly differently. Task-based questions involve providing a task for the user to complete. If you are testing an established system it is a good idea to ask users to bring in tasks that they would normally perform. This is because the user will be more invested in the outcome of the task and will behave in a more realistic fashion. When designing tasks for new systems and designs ensure you only provide loose task details for the same reason. Don’t tell testers to enter “Chantelle”; have them use their own name instead. Avoid introducing bias with the way questions are phrased. It’s a good idea to ask for users’ first impressions at the beginning of the test, especially when testing design mockups. “What are the main elements on the page?” or “What strikes you first?”. You script should run for a maximum of 45 minutes. 30-35 minutes is better; after this you are likely to lose their attention. Tests on established systems can take longer as there is more to learn from them. When scheduling the test you will need to leave yourself 5 minutes between each one to collate your notes and prepare for the next. Be sure to run through the script beforehand. Your script should be flexible. It is possible that during the test a trend will come to light that opens up whole new avenues of possible questioning. For example, during one initial test of an established system I noticed that the test subject had been printing off items from the application and placing them in a folder in date order (the system ordered alphabetically). I changed the script to ask future participants in that run, if they ever used external tools to help them with tasks within the system. This revealed a number of interesting issues that otherwise would not have been found. Running the tests Treat your test subjects like hedgehogs. Depending on your target audience they probably feel a little nervous and perhaps even scared of you. So make them a little nest out of straw, stroke their prickles and give them some cat food. Alternatively, reassure them that you are testing the system and that they can’t give a wrong answer. Reward them with a doughnut or jam tart at the end. Try to ensure the test environment is relaxed and quiet, but also as close as possible to the situation where they would actually use the system. Have your subjects talk out loud is very important as you can’t read their minds, but it is a very unnatural process. To loosen up your subjects and get them talking in the way you want them to, try the Stapler Trick. Give them a stapler or similar item and ask them to open it, take the staples out, replace them, shut the stapler and staple some paper – talking all the time about what they see, what they expect to happen, what actually happens and how that matches up. Make them laugh at you. Say how long the test will take up front, and tell your subject why you are doing it. After the test has been completed, conclude by thanking them for their time and assuring them that they were very useful. Then give them the sugary treat. What to look for Primarily, you should look out for incidents where the user stops concentrating on her tasks and starts thinking about the tool and how she is going to use it. For example, when you are hammering in a nail you don’t think about how to use a hammer; good software should be the same. Words like ‘it’ and ‘the system’ and are good indications that the test subject has stopped thinking about the task in hand. Note questioning words, especially where testers question their own judgement, “why can’t I find …”, “I expected to see …” etc. as this indicates that the work flow for the task may have broken down. Also keep an eye on occasions where the user completely fails to do a task. They may need some prompting to unstick them, but you should be careful not to bias the test. These should be the highest priority issues for you to fix. If users recover from getting stuck, make a note of how they recovered. Prolonged periods of silence from the test subject may also require prompting as they should be talking all the time. Ask them what they are thinking or looking for but avoid words like ‘try’ (e.g. ‘what are you trying to do?’) as this implies that they are currently failing. Be wary of users’ opinions on aesthetics and be prepared to bring them back to the script if they get side-tracked. Writing it up Even if you are the only developer it’s important to summarise the key issues that emerged during testing: your notes won’t make much sense to you a week or so after the test. If you are writing for other people, include a summary no longer than two pages; this can consist of a list or table of the issues including recommendations and their priorities. Remember to anonymise the users in the report. In team situations, you may be surprised at how many people are interested in the results of the usability test even if it doesn’t relate directly to something that they can fix. To conclude… Some usability testing is better than none at all, even for small projects or those with strict deadlines. Make the most of the time and resources available. Choose your users carefully, make them comfortable, summarise your report and don’t forget to leave a doughnut for yourself!",2006,Natalie Downe,nataliedowne,2006-12-16T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2006/fast-and-simple-usability-testing/,process 130,Faster Development with CSS Constants,"Anyone even slightly familiar with a programming language will have come across the concept of constants – a fixed value that can be used through your code. For example, in a PHP script I might have a constant which is the email address that all emails generated by my application get sent to. $adminEmail = 'info@example.com'; I could then use $adminEmail in my script whenever I wanted an email to go to that address. The benefit of this is that when the client decides they want the email to go to a different address, I only need change it in one place – the place where I initially set the constant. I could also quite easily make this value user defined and enable the administrator to update the email address. Unfortunately CSS doesn’t support constants. It would be really useful to be able to define certain values initially and then use them throughout a CSS file, so in this article I’m going to take a look at some of the methods we do have available and provide pointers to more in depth commentary on each. If you have a different method, or tip to share please add it to the comments. So what options do we have? One way to get round the lack of constants is to create some definitions at the top of your CSS file in comments, to define ‘constants’. A common use for this is to create a ‘color glossary’. This means that you have a quick reference to the colors used in the site to avoid using alternates by mistake and, if you need to change the colors, you have a quick list to go down and do a search and replace. In the below example, if I decide I want to change the mid grey to #999999, all I need to do is search and replace #666666 with #999999 – assuming I’ve remember to always use that value for things which are mid grey. /* Dark grey (text): #333333 Dark Blue (headings, links) #000066 Mid Blue (header) #333399 Light blue (top navigation) #CCCCFF Mid grey: #666666 */ This is a fairly low-tech method, but if used throughout the development of the CSS files can make changes far simpler and help to ensure consistency in your color scheme. I’ve seen this method used by many designers however Garrett Dimon documents the method, with more ideas in the comments. Going server-side To truly achieve constants you will need to use something other than CSS to process the file before it is sent to the browser. You can use any scripting language – PHP, ASP, ColdFusion etc. to parse a CSS file in which you have entered constants. So that in a constants section of the CSS file you would have: $darkgrey = '#333333'; $darkblue = '#000066'; The rest of the CSS file is as normal except that when you come to use the constant value you would use the constant name instead of adding the color: p { color: $darkgrey; } Your server-side script could then parse the CSS file, replace the constant names with the constant values and serve a valid CSS file to the browser. Christian Heilmann has done just this for PHP however this could be adapted for any language you might have available on your server. Shaun Inman came up with another way of doing this that removes the need to link to a PHP script and also enables the adding of constants using the syntax of at-rules . This method is again using PHP and will require you to edit an .htaccess file. A further method is to generate static CSS files either using a script locally – if the constants are just to enable speed of development – or as part of the web application itself. Storing a template stylesheet with constant names in place of the values you will want to update means that your script can simply open the template, replace the variables and save the result as a new stylesheet file. While CSS constants are a real help to developers, they can also be used to add new functionality to your applications. As with the email address example that I used at the beginning of this article, using a combination of CSS and server-side scripting you could enable a site administrator to select the colours for a new theme to be used on a page of a content managed site. By using constants you need only give them the option to change certain parts of the CSS and not upload a whole different CSS file, which could lead to some interesting results! As we are unlikely to find real CSS constants under the tree this Christmas the above methods are some possibilities for better management of your stylesheets. However if you have better methods, CSS Constant horror stories or any other suggestions, add your comments below.",2006,Rachel Andrew,rachelandrew,2006-12-02T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2006/faster-development-with-css-constants/,process 154,Diagnostic Styling,"We’re all used to using CSS to make our designs live and breathe, but there’s another way to use CSS: to find out where our markup might be choking on missing accessibility features, targetless links, and just plain missing content. Note: the techniques discussed here mostly work in Firefox, Safari, and Opera, but not Internet Explorer. I’ll explain why that’s not really a problem near the end of the article — and no, the reason is not “everyone should just ignore IE anyway”. Basic Diagnostics To pick a simple example, suppose you want to call out all holdover font and center elements in a site. Simple: you just add the following to your styles. font, center {outline: 5px solid red;} You could take it further and add in a nice lime background or some such, but big thick red outlines should suffice. Now you’ll be able to see the offenders wherever as you move through the site. (Of course, if you do this on your public server, everyone else will see the outlines too. So this is probably best done on a development server or local copy of the site.) Not everyone may be familiar with outlines, which were introduced in CSS2, so a word on those before we move on. Outlines are much like borders, except outlines don’t affect layout. Eh? Here’s a comparison. On the left, you have a border. On the right, an outline. The border takes up layout space, pushing other content around and generally being a nuisance. The outline, on the other hand, just draws into quietly into place. In most current browsers, it will overdraw any content already onscreen, and will be overdrawn by any content placed later — which is why it overlaps the images above it, and is overlapped by those below it. Okay, so we can outline deprecated elements like font and center. Is that all? Oh no. Attribution Let’s suppose you also want to find any instances of inline style — that is, use of the style attribute on elements in the markup. This is generally discouraged (outside of HTML e-mails, which I’m not going to get anywhere near), as it’s just another side of the same coin of using font: baking the presentation into the document structure instead of putting it somewhere more manageable. So: *[style], font, center {outline: 5px solid red;} Adding that attribute selector to the rule’s grouped selector means that we’ll now be outlining any element with a style attribute. There’s a lot more that attribute selectors will let use diagnose. For example, we can highlight any images that have empty alt or title text. img[alt=""""] {border: 3px dotted red;} img[title=""""] {outline: 3px dotted fuchsia;} Now, you may wonder why one of these rules calls for a border, and the other for an outline. That’s because I want them to “add together” — that is, if I have an image which possesses both alt and title, and the values of both are empty, then I want it to be doubly marked. See how the middle image there has both red and fuchsia dots running around it? (And am I the only one who sorely misses the actual circular dots drawn by IE5/Mac?) That’s due to its markup, which we can see here in a fragment showing the whole table row. Those bits are simple and bulletproof.
Right, that’s all well and good, but it misses a rather more serious situation: the selector img[alt=""""] won’t match an img element that doesn’t even have an alt attribute. How to tackle this problem? Not a Problem Well, if you want to select something based on a negative, you need a negative selector. img:not([alt]) {border: 5px solid red;} This is really quite a break from the rest of CSS selection, which is all positive: “select anything that has these characteristics”. With :not(), we have the ability to say (in supporting browsers) “select anything that hasn’t these characteristics”. In the above example, only img elements that do not have an alt attribute will be selected. So we expand our list of image-related rules to read: img[alt=""""] {border: 3px dotted red;} img[title=""""] {outline: 3px dotted fuchsia;} img:not([alt]) {border: 5px solid red;} img:not([title]) {outline: 5px solid fuchsia;} With the following results: We could expand this general idea to pick up tables who lack a summary, or have an empty summary attribute. table[summary=""""] {outline: 3px dotted red;} table:not([summary]) {outline: 5px solid red;} When it comes to selecting header cells that lack the proper scope, however, we have a trickier situation. Finding headers with no scope attribute is easy enough, but what about those that have a scope attribute with an incorrect value? In this case, we actually need to pull an on-off maneuver. This has us setting all th elements to have a highlight style, and then turn it off for the elements that meet our criteria. th {border: 2px solid red;} th[scope=""col""], th[scope=""row""] {border: none;} This was necessary because of the way CSS selectors work. For example, consider this: th:not([scope=""col""]), th:not([scope=""row""]) {border: 2px solid red;} That would select…all th elements, regardless of their attrributes. That’s because every th element doesn’t have a scope of col, doesn’t have a scope of row, or doesn’t have either. There’s no escaping this selector o’ doom! This limitation arises because :not() is limited to containing a single “thing” within its parentheses. You can’t, for example, say “select all elements except those that are images which descend from list items”. Reportedly, this limitation was imposed to make browser implementation of :not() easier. Still, we can make good use of :not() in the service of further diagnosing. Calling out links in trouble is a breeze: a[href]:not([title]) {border: 5px solid red;} a[title=""""] {outline: 3px dotted red;} a[href=""#""] {background: lime;} a[href=""""] {background: fuchsia;} Here we have a set that will call our attention to links missing title information, as well as links that have no valid target, whether through a missing URL or a JavaScript-driven page where there are no link fallbacks in the case of missing or disabled JavaScript (href=""#""). And What About IE? As I said at the beginning, much of what I covered here doesn’t work in Internet Explorer, most particularly :not() and outline. (Oh, so basically everything? -Ed.) I can’t do much about the latter. For the former, however, it’s possible to hack your way around the problem by doing some layered on-off stuff. For example, for images, you replace the previously-shown rules with the following: img {border: 5px solid red;} img[alt][title] {border-width: 0;} img[alt] {border-color: fuchsia;} img[alt], img[title] {border-style: double;} img[alt=""""][title], img[alt][title=""""] {border-width: 3px;} img[alt=""""][title=""""] {border-style: dotted;} It won’t have exactly the same set of effects, given the inability to use both borders and outlines, but will still highlight troublesome images. It’s also the case that IE6 and earlier lack support for even attribute selectors, whereas IE7 added pretty much all the attribute selector types there are, so the previous code block won’t have any effect previous to IE7. In a broader sense, though, these kinds of styles probably aren’t going to be used in the wild, as it were. Diagnostic styles are something only you see as you work on a site, so you can make sure to use a browser that supports outlines and :not() when you’re diagnosing. The fact that IE users won’t see these styles is irrelevant since users of any browser probably won’t be seeing these styles. Personally, I always develop in Firefox anyway, thanks to its ability to become a full-featured IDE through the addition of extensions like Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar. Yeah, About That… It’s true that much of what I describe in this article is available in the WDT. I feel there are two advantages to writing your own set of diagnostic styles. When you write your own styles, you can define exactly what the visual results will be, and how they will interact. The WDT doesn’t let you make its outlines thicker or change their colors. You can combine a bunch of diagnostics into a single set of rules and add it to your site’s style sheet during the diagnostic portion, thus ensuring they persist as you surf around. This can be done in the WDT, but it isn’t as easy (and, at least for me, not as reliable). It’s also true that a markup validator will catch many of the errors I mentioned, such as missing alt and summary attributes. For some, that’s sufficient. But it won’t catch everything diagnostic styles can, like empty alt values or untargeted links, which are perfectly valid, syntactically speaking. Diagnosis Complete? I hope this has been a fun look at the concept of diagnostic styling as well as a quick introduction into possibly new concepts like :not() and outlines. This isn’t all there is to say, of course: there is plenty more that could be added to a diagnostic style sheet. And everyone’s diagnostics will be different, tuned to meet each person’s unique situation. Mostly, though, I hope this small exploration triggers some creative thinking about the use of CSS to do more than just lay out pages and colorize text. Given the familiarity we acquire with CSS, it only makes sense to use it wherever it might be useful, and setting up visible diagnostic flags is just one more place for it to help us.",2007,Eric Meyer,ericmeyer,2007-12-20T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2007/diagnostic-styling/,process 155,Minification: A Christmas Diet,"The festive season is generally more about gorging ourselves than staying thin but we’re going to change all that with a quick introduction to minification. Performance has been a hot topic this last year. We’re building more complex sites and applications but at the same time trying to make then load faster and behave more responsively. What is a discerning web developer to do? Minification is the process of make something smaller, in the case of web site performance we’re talking about reducing the size of files we send to the browser. The primary front-end components of any website are HTML, CSS, Javascript and a sprinkling of images. Let’s find some tools to trim the fat and speed up our sites. For those that want to play along at home you can download the various utilities for Mac or Windows. You’ll want to be familiar with running apps on the command line too. HTMLTidy HTMLTidy optimises and strips white space from HTML documents. It also has a pretty good go at correcting any invalid markup while it’s at it. tidy -m page.html CSSTidy CSSTidy takes your CSS file, optimises individual rules (for instance transforming padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; to padding: 10px 0;) and strips unneeded white space. csstidy style.css style-min.css JSMin JSMin takes your javascript and makes it more compact. With more and more websites using javascript to power (progressive) enhancements this can be a real bandwidth hog. Look out for pre-minified versions of libraries and frameworks too. jsmin empty title script-min.js Remember to run JSLint before you run JSMin to catch some common problems. OptiPNG Images can be a real bandwidth hog and making all of them smaller with OptiPNG should speed up your site. optipng image.png All of these tools have an often bewildering array of options and generally good documentation included as part of the package. A little experimentation will get you even more bang for your buck. For larger projects you likely won’t want to be manually minifying all your files. The best approach here is to integrate these tools into your build process and have your live website come out the other side smaller than it went in. You can also do things on the server to speed things up; GZIP compression for instance or compilation of resources to reduce the number of HTTP requests. If you’re interested in performance a good starting point is the Exceptional Performance section on the Yahoo Developer Network and remember to install the YSlow Firebug extension while you’re at it.",2007,Gareth Rushgrove,garethrushgrove,2007-12-06T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2007/minification-a-christmas-diet/,process 185,Make Your Mockup in Markup,"We aren’t designing copies of web pages, we’re designing web pages. Andy Clarke, via Quotes on Design The old way I used to think the best place to design a website was in an image editor. I’d create a pixel-perfect PSD filled with generic content, send it off to the client, go through several rounds of revisions, and eventually create the markup. Does this process sound familiar? You’re not alone. In a very scientific and official survey I conducted, close to 90% of respondents said they design in Photoshop before the browser. That process is whack, yo! Recently, thanks in large part to the influence of design hero Dan Cederholm, I’ve come to the conclusion that a website’s design should begin where it’s going to live: in the browser. Die Photoshop, die Some of you may be wondering, “what’s so bad about using Photoshop for the bulk of my design?” Well, any seasoned designer will tell you that working in Photoshop is akin to working in a minefield: you never know when it’s going to blow up in your face. The application Adobe Photoshop CS4 has unexpectedly ruined your day. Photoshop’s propensity to crash at crucial moments is a running joke in the industry, as is its barely usable interface. And don’t even get me started on the hot, steaming pile of crap that is text rendering. Text rendered in Photoshop (left) versus Safari (right). Crashing and text rendering issues suck, but we’ve learned to live with them. The real issue with using Photoshop for mockups is the expectations you’re setting for a client. When you send the client a static image of the design, you’re not giving them the whole picture — they can’t see how a fluid grid would function, how the design will look in a variety of browsers, basic interactions like :hover effects, or JavaScript behaviors. For more on the disadvantages to showing clients designs as images rather than websites, check out Andy Clarke’s Time to stop showing clients static design visuals. A necessary evil? In the past we’ve put up with Photoshop because it was vital to achieving our beloved rounded corners, drop shadows, outer glows, and gradients. However, with the recent adaptation of CSS3 in major browsers, and the slow, joyous death of IE6, browsers can render mockups that are just as beautiful as those created in an image editor. With the power of RGBA, text-shadow, box-shadow, border-radius, transparent PNGs, and @font-face combined, you can create a prototype that radiates shiny awesomeness right in the browser. If you can see this epic article through to the end, I’ll show you step by step how to create a gorgeous mockup using mostly markup. Get started by getting naked Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration. Jeffrey Zeldman In the beginning, don’t even think about style. Instead, start with the foundation: the content. Lay the groundwork for your markup order, and ensure that your design will be useable with styles and images turned off. This is great for prioritizing the content, and puts you on the right path for accessibility and search engine optimization. Not a bad place to start, amirite? An example of unstyled content, in all its naked glory. View it large. Flush out the layout The next step is to structure the content in a usable way. With CSS, making basic layout changes is as easy as switching up a float, so experiment to see what structure suits the content best. The mockup with basic layout work done. Got your grids covered There are a variety of tools that allow you to layer a grid over your browser window. For Mac users I recommend using Slammer, and PC users can check out one of the bookmarklets that are available, such as 960 Gridder. The mockup with a grid applied using Slammer. Once you’ve found a layout that works well for the content, pass it along to the client for review. This keeps them involved in the design process, and gives them an idea of how the site will be structured when it’s live. Start your styling Now for the fun part: begin applying the presentation layer. Let usability considerations drive your decisions about color and typography; use highlighted colors and contrasting typefaces on elements you wish to emphasize. RGBA? More like RGByay! Introducing color is easy with RGBA. I like to start with the page’s main color, then use white at varying opacities to empasize content sections. In the example mockup the body background is set to rgba(203,111,21), the content containers are set to rgba(255,255,255,0.7), and a few elements are highlighted with rgba(255,255,255,0.1) If you’re not sure how RGBA works, check out Drew McLellan’s super helpful 24ways article. Laying down type Just like with color, you can use typography to evoke a feeling and direct a user’s attention. Have contrasting typefaces (like serif headlines and sans-serif body text) to group the content into meaningful sections. In a recent A List Apart article, the Master of Web Typography™ Jason Santa Maria offers excellent advice on how to choose your typefaces: Write down a general description of the qualities of the message you are trying to convey, and then look for typefaces that embody those qualities. Sounds pretty straightforward. I wanted to give my design a classic feel with a hint of nostalgia, so I used Georgia for the headlines, and incorporated the ornate ampersand from Baskerville into the header. A closeup on the site’s header. Let’s get sexy The design doesn’t look too bad as it is, but it’s still pretty flat. We can do better, and after mixing in some CSS3 and a couple of PNGs, it’s going to get downright steamy in here. Give it some glow Objects in the natural world reflect light, so to make your design feel tangible and organic, give it some glow. In the example design I achieved this by creating two white to transparent gradients of varying opacities. Both have a solid white border across their top, which gives edges a double border effect and makes them look sharper. Using CSS3’s text-shadow on headlines and box-shadow on content modules is another quick way to add depth. A wide and closeup view of the design with gradients, text-shadow and box-shadow added. For information on how to implement text-shadow and box-shadow using RGBA, check out the article I wrote on it last week. 37 pieces of flair Okay, maybe you don’t need that much flair, but it couldn’t hurt to add a little; it’s the details that will set your design apart. Work in imagery and texture, using PNGs with an alpha channel so you can layer images and still tweak the color later on. The design with grungy textures, a noisy diagonal stripe pattern, and some old transportation images layered behind the text. Because the colors are rendered using RGBA, these images bleed through the content, giving the design a layered feel. Best viewed large. Send it off Hey, look at that. You’ve got a detailed, well structured mockup for the client to review. Best of all, your markup is complete too. If the client approves the design at this stage, your template is practically finished. Bust out the party hats! Not so fast, Buster! So I don’t know about you, but I’ve never gotten a design past the client’s keen eye for criticism on the first go. Let’s review some hypothetical feedback (none of which is too outlandish, in my experience), and see how we’d make the requested changes in the browser. Updating the typography My ex-girlfriend loved Georgia, so I never want to see it again. Can we get rid of it? I want to use a font that’s chunky and loud, just like my stupid ex-girlfriend. Fakey McClient Yikes! Thankfully with CSS, removing Georgia is as easy as running a find and replace on the stylesheet. In my revised mockup, I used @font-face and League Gothic on the headlines to give the typography the, um, unique feel the client is looking for. The same mockup, using @font-face on the headlines. If you’re unfamiliar with implementing @font-face, check out Nice Web Type‘s helpful article. Adding rounded corners I’m not sure if I’ll like it, but I want to see what it’d look like with rounded corners. My cousin, a Web 2.0 marketing guru, says they’re trendy right now. Fakey McClient Switching to rounded corners is a nightmare if you’re doing your mockup in Photoshop, since it means recreating most of the shapes and UI elements in the design. Thankfully, with CSS border-radius comes to our rescue! By applying this gem of a style to a handful of classes, you’ll be rounded out in no time. The mockup with rounded corners, created using border-radius. If you’re not sure how to implement border-radius, check out CSS3.info‘s quick how-to. Making changes to the color The design is too dark, it’s depressing! They call it ‘the blues’ for a reason, dummy. Can you try using a brighter color? I want orange, like Zeldman uses. Fakey McClient Making color changes is another groan-inducing task when working in Photoshop. Finding and updating every background layer, every drop shadow, and every link can take forever in a complex PSD. However, if you’ve done your mockup in markup with RGBA and semi-transparent PNGs, making changes to your color is as easy as updating the body background and a few font colors. The mockup with an orange color scheme. Best viewed large. Ahem, what about Internet Explorer? Gee, thanks for reminding me, buzzkill. Several of the CSS features I’ve suggested you use, such as RGBA, text-shadow and box-shadow, and border-radius, are not supported in Internet Explorer. I know, it makes me sad too. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t try these techniques out in your markup based mockups. The point here is to get your mockups done as efficiently as possible, and to keep the emphasis on markup from the very beginning. Once the design is approved, you and the client have to decide if you can live with the design looking different in different browsers. Is it so bad if some users get to see drop shadows and some don’t? Or if the rounded corners are missing for a portion of your audience? The design won’t be broken for IE people, they’re just missing out on a few visual treats that other users will see. The idea of rewarding users who choose modern browsers is not a new concept; Dan covers it thoroughly in Handcrafted CSS, and it’s been written about in the past by Aaron Gustafson and Andy Clarke on several occasions. I believe we shouldn’t have to design for the lowest common denominator (cough, IE6 users, cough); instead we should create designs that are beautiful in modern browsers, but still degrade nicely for the other guy. However, some clients just aren’t that progressive, and in that case you can always use background images for drop shadows and rounded corners, as you have in the past. Closing thoughts With the advent of CSS3, browsers are just as capable of giving us beautiful, detailed mockups as Photoshop, and in half the time. I’m not the only one to make an argument for this revised process; in his article Time to stop showing clients static design visuals, and in his presentation Walls Come Tumbling Down, Andy Clarke makes a fantastic case for creating your mockups in markup. So I guess my challenge to you for 2010 is to get out of Photoshop and into the code. Even if the arguments for designing in the browser aren’t enough to make you change your process permanently, it’s worthwhile to give it a try. Look at the New Year as a time to experiment; applying constraints and evaluating old processes can do wonders for improving your efficiency and creativity.",2009,Meagan Fisher,meaganfisher,2009-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/make-your-mockup-in-markup/,process 190,Self-Testing Pages with JavaScript,"Working at an agency I am involved more and more on projects in which client side code is developed internally then sent out to a separate team for implementation. You provide static HTML, CSS and JavaScript which then get placed into the CMS and brought to life as an actual website. As you can imagine this can sometimes lead to frustrations. However many safeguards you include, handing over your code to someone else is always a difficult thing to do effectively. In this article I will show you how you can create a JavaScript implementation checker and that will give you more time for drink based activity as your web site and apps are launched quicker and with less unwanted drama! An all too frequent occurrence You’ve been working on a project for weeks, fixed all your bugs and send it to be implemented. You hear nothing and assume all is going well then a few days before it’s meant to launch you get an email from the implementation team informing you of bugs in your code that you need to urgently fix. The 24ways website with a misspelt ID for the years menu Being paranoid you trawl through the preview URL, check they have the latest files, check your code for errors then notice that a required HTML attribute has been omitted from the build and therefore CSS or JavaScript you’ve hooked onto that particular attribute isn’t being applied and that’s what is causing the “bug”. It takes you seconds drafting an email informing them of this, it takes then seconds putting the required attribute in and low and behold the bug is fixed, everyone is happy but you’ve lost a good few hours of your life – this time could have been better spent in the pub. I’m going to show you a way that these kind of errors can be alerted immediately during implementation of your code and ensure that when you are contacted you know that there actually is a bug to fix. You probably already know the things that could be omitted from a build and look like bugs so you’ll soon be creating tests to look for these and alert when they are not found on the rendered page. The error is reported directly to those who need to know about it and fix it. Less errant bug reports and less frantic emails ahoy! A page with an implementation issue and instant feedback on the problem JavaScript selector engines to the rescue Whether you’re using a library or indeed tapping into the loveliness of the new JavaScript Selector APIs looking for particular HTML elements in JavaScript is fairly trivial now. For instance this is how you look for a div element with the id attribute of year (the missing attribute from top image) using jQuery (the library I’ll be coding my examples in): if ($(‘div#year’).length) { alert(‘win’); } Using this logic you can probably imagine how you can write up a quick method to check for the existence of a particular element and alert when it’s not present — but assuming you have a complex page you’re going to be repeating yourself a fair bit and we don’t want to be doing that. Test scripts If you’ve got a lot of complex HTML patterns that need testing across a number of different pages it makes sense to keep your tests out of production code. Chances are you’ve already got a load of heavy JavaScript assets, and when it comes to file size saving every little helps. I don’t think that tests should contain code inside of them so keep mine externally as JSON. This also means that you can use the one set of tests in multiple places. We already know that it’s a good idea to keep our CSS and JavaScript separate so lets continue along those lines here. The test script for this example looks like this: { ""title"": ""JS tabs implementation test"", ""description"": ""Check that the correct HTML patterns has been used"", ""author"": ""Ross Bruniges"", ""created"": ""20th July 2009"", ""tests"": [ { ""name"": ""JS tabs elements"", ""description"": ""Checking that correct HTML elements including class/IDs are used on the page for the JS to progressively enhance"", ""selector"": ""div.tabbed_content"", ""message"": ""We couldn't find VAR on the page - it's required for our JavaScript to function correctly"", ""check_for"": { ""contains"": { ""elements"": [ ""div.tab_content"", ""h2"" ], ""message"": ""We've noticed some missing HTML:
- VAR
please refer to the examples sent for reference"" } } } ] } The first four lines are just a little bit of meta data so we remember what this test was all about when we look at it again in the future, or indeed if it ever breaks. The tests are the really cool parts and firstly you’ll notice that it’s an array – we’re only going to show one example test here but there is no reason why you can’t place in as many as you want. I’ll explain what each of the lines in the example test means: name – short test name, I use this in pass/fail messaging later description – meta data for future reference selector – the root HTML element from which your HTML will be searched message – what the app will alert if the initial selector isn’t found check_for – a wrapper to hold inner tests – those run if the initial selector does match contains – the type of check, we’re checking that the selector contains specified elements elements – the HTML elements we are searching for message – a message for when these don’t match (VAR is substituted when it’s appended to the page with the name of any elements that don’t exist) It’s very important to pass the function valid JSON (JSONLint is a great tool for this) otherwise you might get a console showing no tests have even been run. The JavaScript that makes this helpful Again, this code should never hit a production server so I’ve kept it external. This also means that the only thing that’s needed to be done by the implementation team when they are ready to build is that they delete this code. “View the full JavaScript:/examples/self-testing-pages-with-javascript/js/tests/test_suite.js The init function appends the test console to the page and inserts the CSS file required to style it (you don’t need to use pictures of me when tests pass and fail though I see no reason why you shouldn’t), goes and grabs the JSON file referenced and parses it. The methods to pass (tests_pass) and fail (haz_fail) the test I hope are pretty self-explanatory as is the one which creates the test summary once everything has been run (create_summary). The two interesting functions are init_tests and confirm_html. init_tests init_tests:function(i,obj) { var $master_elm = $(obj.selector); sleuth.test_page.$logger.append(""
""); var $container = $('#test_' + i); if (!$master_elm.length) { var err_sum = obj.message.replace(/VAR/gi, obj.selector); sleuth.test_page.haz_failed(err_sum, $container); return; } if (obj.check_for) { $.each(obj.check_for,function(key, value){ sleuth.test_page.assign_checks($master_elm, $container, key, value); }); } else { sleuth.test_page.tests_passed($container); return; } } The function gets sent the number of the current iteration (used to create a unique id for its test summary) and the current object that contains the data we’re testing against as parameters. We grab a reference to the root element and this is used (pretty much in the example shown right at the start of this article) and its length is checked. If the length is positive we know we can continue to the inner tests (if they exist) but if not we fail the test and don’t go any further. We append the error to the test console for everyone to see. If we pass the initial check we send the reference to the root element, message contains and the inner object to a function that in this example sends us on to confirm_html (if we had a more complex test suite it would do a lot more). confirm_html confirm_html:function(target_selector, error_elm, obj) { var missing_elms = []; $.each(obj.elements, function(i, val) { if (!target_selector.find(val).length) { missing_elms.push(val); } }); if (missing_elms.length) { var file_list = missing_elms.join(''); var err_sum = obj.message.replace(/VAR/gi, file_list); sleuth.test_page.haz_failed(err_sum, error_elm); return; } sleuth.test_page.tests_passed(error_elm); return; } We’re again using an array to check for a passed or failed test and checking its length but this time we push in a reference to each missing element we find. If the test does fail we’re providing even more useful feedback by informing what elements have been missed out. All the implementation team need do is look for them in the files we’ve sent and include them as expected. No more silly implementation bugs! Here is an example of a successful implementation. Here are some examples of failed implementations – one which fails at finding the root node and one that has the correct root node but none of the inner HTML tests pass. Is this all we can check for? Certainly not! JavaScript provides pretty easy ways to check for attributes, included files (if the files being checked for are being referenced correctly and not 404ing) and even applied CSS. Want to check that those ARIA attributes are being implemented correctly or that all images contain an alt attribute well this simple test suite can be extended to include tests for this – the sky is pretty much up to your imagination.",2009,Ross Bruniges,rossbruniges,2009-12-12T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/self-testing-pages-with-javascript/,process 194,Design Systems and Hybrids,"The other day on Twitter, I saw a thread started by Dorian Taylor about why design systems are so hot right now. In the thread, he made the case that they’ve been around for ages and some folks were just slow to catch up. It was an interesting thread, and not the first time I’ve seen folks discuss this. “Design systems are so hot right now” was even used recently in this very publication. And yes it’s true that they’ve been around for ages. Design artefact collectors’ obsession with reprints of old graphic standards manuals of the past are a reminder. Sometimes old things become new again, either through a rediscovery or awakening (wow, that sounds really deep). But I think that’s definitely what happened here. Some very opinionated answers that come to mind for me are: The need for them has increased with the needs of software development. With the increasing number of devices (phones, tablets, watches, etc.), scaling design has required the need to double down on systems thinking and processes. Investments with huge cost-saving returns. The time investment it takes to onboard new people as you staff up large teams (and the time it takes to fix bugs and inconsistencies) could be better spent building up a system that lets you ship at a faster pace. It also gives you more time to focus on the bigger picture instead of what color a button border is. If you do have to onboard new designers, the design system is a great educational resource to get up to speed quickly on your organization’s design principles, materials/tools, and methods. “Here’s the simple truth: you can’t innovate on products without first innovating the way you build them.” — Alex Schleifer, The Way We Build These are just some of the reasons. But there is another answer, and a personal conclusion that I’ve reached. It relates to the way I work and what I love working on, but I don’t see it talked about much. Hybrids Have a Home I’m a hybrid designer. I code in HTML & CSS (with a preference for Sass). But I don’t call myself a frontend developer. I used to back in the day (I was a UI frontend developer at Apple over a decade ago, but all I wrote was HTML & CSS). I identify with designer because that’s my training and interest, but the ideas of what a frontend developer can do has changed quite a ton over the years. Setting things up in build tools and processes are not my skill. And I know a lot of designers who share this experience with me. There are also hybrid developers who identify as developers, but have excellent design skills. Buddies like my pal Brandon Ferrua who was on my team at Salesforce is a great example of this. And we worked fantastically together. Sometimes, companies don’t know how to deal with hybrids. I’ve been told to choose a side, and have even been made to join a development team simply because I could code my designs (and then when I couldn’t deliver the same type of code my teammates could, and I felt like I wasn’t able to use my talents in the most effective way). There are a lot more folks out there I know of who identify as a hybrid, and many have found ourselves working on design systems. Una Kravets recently had a thread discussing this as well. At Clarity, this came up a lot in hallway conversations, breaks, and the after parties. I think that this job is a haven for folks who often find themselves in the middle. For companies that get it, these people find joy in getting to use a wider variety of skills and being bridges; advocates that can speak to designers and developers, helping bring unity to an organization. They can wireframe, throw together a prototype, create color systems, architect naming conventions for design tokens. Design systems are their perfect home. I think this has contributed to the uptick in discussions and interest on this subject (in addition to the team- and company-focused reasons). Keep Design Systems Teams Cross-Functional Speaking of teams, something some larger companies fall prey to is creating walls and silos where they need not be. If you place all your visual designers in one place, all your coders in another, and so on, you’re not doing yourselves any favors. Meanwhile, your hybrids are caught in the middle not knowing exactly where they belong. Design systems teams should have representatives (whether on a core team, or a virtual/federated team) that bring different skillsets. Design, code, writing, accessibility, product management, and so on. You’ll have a stronger vision on where to take your design system and to make it succeed. Siloing defeats the whole purpose of what design systems are meant for. Happy holidays, and may the force be with you. Further Reading Why Design Systems Fail Design Systems are for People Design Systems Handbook",2017,Jina Anne,jina,2017-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/design-systems-and-hybrids/,process 199,Knowing the Future - Tips for a Happy Launch Day,"You’ve chosen your frameworks and libraries. You’ve learned how to write code which satisfies the buzzword and performance gods. Now you need to serve it to a global audience, and make things easy to preview, to test, to sign-off, and to evolve. But infrastructure design is difficult and boring for most of us. We just want to get our work out into the wild. If only we had tools which would let us go, “Oh yeah! It all deploys perfectly every time” and shout, “You need another release? BAM! What’s next?” A truth that can be hard to admit is that very often, the production environment and its associated deployment processes are poorly defined until late into a project. This can be a problem. It makes my palms sweaty just thinking about it. If like me, you have spent time building things for clients, you’ll probably have found yourself working with a variety of technical partners and customers who bring different constraints and opportunities to your projects. Knowing and proving the environments and the deployment processes is often very difficult, but can be a factor which profoundly impacts our ability to deliver what we promised. To say nothing of our ability to sleep at night or leave our fingernails un-chewed. Let’s look at this a little, and see if we can’t set you up for a good night’s sleep, with dry palms and tidy fingernails. A familiar problem You’ve been here too, right? The project development was tough, but you’re pleased with what you are running in your local development environments. Now you need to get the client to see and approve your build, and hopefully indicate with a cheery thumbs up that it can “go live”. Chances are that we have a staging environment where the client can see the build. But be honest, is this exactly the same as the production environment? It should be, but often it’s not. Often the staging environment is nothing more than a visible server with none of the optimisations, security, load balancing, caching, and other vital bits of machinery that we’ll need (and need to test) in “prod”. Often the production environment is still being “set up” and you’ll have to wait and see. In development, “wait and see” is the enemy. Instead of waiting to see, we need to make the provisioning of, and deployment to our different environments one of the very first jobs of our project. I’ve often needed to be the unpopular voice in the room who makes a big fuss when this is delayed. I’ve described it as being a “critical blocker” during project meetings and suggested that everything should halt until it is fixed. It is that important. Clients don’t often like hearing a wary, disruptive voice saying “whoa there Nelly!”, because the development should be able to continue while the production environment gets sorted out, right? Sure. But if it is not seen as a blocker, it is seen as something that can just happen later. And if it happens later, all the ugly surprises and unknowns surface later too. And later is when we’ll need to be thinking about other things. Not the plumbing. Trust me, it pays to face up to the issue right away rather than press on optimistically. The client will thank you later. Attitudes and expectations We should, I think, exhibit these four attitudes towards production deployment: Make it scripted Make it automated Make it real Make it first Make it scripted Let’s face it, we are going to need to deploy more than once over the course of the project. We are not going to get things perfect on our first shot. Nor should we expect to. And if we are going to repeat something, we want to be able to do it identically and predictably every time without needing to rely on our memories. Developers are great at scripting things which they would otherwise need to repeat. It makes us faster and it also helps us keep track of the steps we need to take. I’m not crazy enough to try suggest the best technology to script your builds or deployments (holy wars lie down that path). A lot will depend on your languages and your tastes. Some will like Fabric, others will prefer Gulp, you might prefer Make or NPM. It doesn’t really matter as long as you can script the process of building, packaging and deploying your project. Wait. Won’t we need to know everything about the build from the start in order to do this? Aren’t our dependencies likely to change over time? Yes. That would be ideal. But it’s ok. Like our code, our deployment script will evolve over the life of a project. So evolve it. Start by scripting what is needed to support the first iteration of the project, and then maintain that script. It will become a valuable “source of truth”, providing a form of documentation of what your project needs for a successful deployment. Another bonus. Make it automated If we have a scripted deployment which we can run by executing a single command, then we are in great shape to automate that process by triggering the build and deployment via suitable events. Again, I prefer not to offer one single suggestion of when this should occur. That will depend on your approach to the project, how your development team is organised, and how your QA team operate. You can tune this to suit. For one project I worked on, we chose to trigger the build and deployment to our production environment every time we used Git to tag the master branch of our version control repository. There were a few moving parts, and we needed to do some upfront work to get everything working, but that upfront effort was repaid many fold as we deployed time and time again, and exposed some issues with our environment long before we got to “launch day”. With a scripted and automated process, we can make deployments “cheap”. This is our goal. When there are minimal cognitive or time overheads associated with deploying, we’re likely to do it all the more often and become more confident that it will behave as expected. Make it real Alright, we have written scripts to build and deploy our projects. Anyone tagging our repo will trigger things to happen as if by magic, but where are we pushing things to? We need to target a real environment if this is to have any value. A useful pattern is to have all activity on our develop branch trigger deployments to our staging server. Meanwhile tagging master will deploy a version to the production environment. How we organise this will depend on our git branching approach. (I’ve seen as many ways of approaching Git Flow as I have seen ways of approaching “Agile”). It’s vital though, that we ensure that we are deploying to, and testing against, our real infrastructure. We want to see real results. That’s the best way to learn real lessons. Make it first Building our site to run in an environment not yet fully defined or available to test is like climbing without ropes – it’s possible, but we put ourselves at risk. And the higher we climb the greater the risk. So it is important to do this as early as we possibly can. Don’t have a certificate for our HTTPS yet? Fine, but let’s still deploy to this evolving production environment and introduce HTTPS as soon as we can. Before we know it we’ll be proving that this is set up correctly and we’ll not be surprised by mixed security alerts or other nasties further down the line. Mailchimp perfectly capture the anxiety of sending emails to gazillions of people for a campaign. But we’re lucky. Launching a site doesn’t need to be like performing a mailshot. We can do things to banish that sweaty hand. Doing preparation work upfront means that by the time we need to launch the site into the wild, we have exercised the deployment mechanics, and tested the production environment so rigorously that this task will be boring. (It won’t be boring. Launching should always be exciting because the world will finally get to see our beautiful, painstaking work. But nor should it be terrifying. Especially as a result of not knowing for certain if our processes and environments are going to work or burst into flames on the big day.) What tools exist? Well this all sounds lovely. But how should we tackle this? Where are the tools for us to use? As it happens, there are many service and tools that we can use to work this way. Hosting All of the big players like Amazon, Azure and Google offer tools which can help us here. Google for example, can host multiple deployed versions of your project in parallel and you can manage them via their App Engine console. Each build receives its own URL which you can use to access any deployed version of your site. Having immutable deployments which stick around in perpetuity (or until you bin them) is a key feature which unlocks the ability to confidently direct your traffic to any version of your site. With that comes the capacity to test any version or feature in its real environment, and then promote a version, or rollback to a previous version whenever you want. A liberating power to have. Continuous integration In order to create all of those different versions, we’ll need somewhere to run our build and deployment scripts. Jenkins has been a popular Continuous Integration (CI) option for some time, and can be configured to perform all sorts of tasks, giving you extensive control over your deployment pipeline. You need to host Jenkins yourself, but it provides some simple ways to do that. The landscape for CI is getting richer and richer. With many hosted services like Circle CI providing this kind of automation up in the cloud. One stop shop Netlify combines both hosting and continuous integration services. It monitors your git repositories and automatically runs your build in a container on its servers when it finds changes. Each branch and pull request in your git repository will result in an immutable version of your site with its own URL. Netlify is unlike Google Cloud, AWS or Azure in that it cannot host a dynamic server-side application for you. Instead it specialises in hosting static, or so called JAMstack sites. Personally, I find that its simplicity makes it an approachable option, and a good place to learn and adopt some of these valuable habits. Full disclosure: I’m a Netlify employee. But before I was, I was an avid customer, and it was through using Netlify that I first encountered some of these principles in practice. Conclusion. It’s all about the approach No matter what tools or services you use (and there are many which can support these practices), the most important thing is to adopt an approach which lets you prove your environments as quickly as possible. Front-loading this effort will cast light onto the issues that you’ll need to address early and often, leaving no infrastructure surprises to spoil things for you on launch day. Automating the process will mean that when you do find things that you need to fix or to improve later (and you will), issuing another release will be trivial. It is a lovely feeling when you have confidence that releasing v1.0.0 will be no more stressful v0.0.1. In fact it should actually be less stressful, as you’ll have been down this road many times by then. Fixing the potholes and smoothing the way as you went. From here, it should be a smooth ride.",2017,Phil Hawksworth,philhawksworth,2017-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/knowing-the-future/,process 200,Care and Feeding of Burnout,"You’ve been doing too much for too long. And it’s broken you. You’re burned out. You’re done. Illustration by Kate Holden Occupational burnout is a long-documented effect of stretching yourself further than the limits of your mental and physical health can carry you. And when it finally catches up with you, it can feel like the end of the world. But things can get better. With focused self care, reworking your priorities and lots of time, you can slog through burnout. What is burnout? The Tl;dr linkdump tour In this article, we’ll be looking at what you can do when you’re burned out. We’ll be skipping past a lot of information on what burnout is, what causes it and how it impacts the tech industry. We’re able to skip past this because many technologists have already created valuable content targeted to our industry. The videos and writing below may be helpful for readers who are less familiar with burnout. A Wikipedia article may be a great starting point for learning about occupational burnout. Understanding burnout: Brandon West This conference talk by Brandon West covers a lot of burnout 101, from the perspective of a developer relations/community professional. April Wensel writes about the need for the tech industry to move from the Valley’s burnout culture to a more sustainable model. Catching Burnout [as] early [as possible] One of the most challenging things about burnout is that it develops slowly and gradually. Many impacted don’t notice the water warming around them until it’s been brought to a boil, causing a crisis that can’t be overlooked. Catching burnout and taking steps to deal with it as early as possible can help limit the length and severity of your burnout. Getting in the habit of checking in with yourself regularly about your stress and energy levels can be an effective habit for assessing burnout and for general wellness. The Mayo Clinic recommends asking yourself the following questions to determine if you might be suffering from burnout. Have you become cynical or critical at work? Do you drag yourself to work and have trouble getting started once you arrive? Have you become irritable or impatient with co-workers, customers or clients? Do you lack the energy to be consistently productive? Do you lack satisfaction from your achievements? Do you feel disillusioned about your job? Are you using food, drugs or alcohol to feel better or to simply not feel? Have your sleep habits or appetite changed? Are you troubled by unexplained headaches, backaches or other physical complaints? According to the Mayo Clinic, answering yes to more than one of these questions can be a sign that you need to take corrective action. We’ll look in more detail about the corrective actions you can take in the rest of this article. Do less. Now. To start getting things back on track, you’ll need to start doing less. Less work, less stress, less everything. Many technologists impacted by burnout have written or spoken on taking months or even years off work to give themselves time to recover. This can be a fantastic route back to wellness for those fortunate enough to have the professional and financial security to allow them to take large stretches of time off work. For the much larger group of burned out workers that need to balance earning a paycheck with their wellness, this can be more challenging. For those of us who need to stay in the cycle of work to fund our daily needs, finding ways to do less can feel like adding another daunting task to the pile. To properly assess where and how you can cut back on your commitments, you’ll need to find a short stretch of time clear of stressors and responsibilities to take stock of what can be scaled back. A long weekend, weekend or even a few hours of time dedicated to looking only at how you can cut back on work and stress can be an effective way to take stock of your responsibilities. Make a list of stressors and activities to begin to triage. Anything that would damage or seriously disrupt your life if not attended to (doing your taxes, showing up at work, paying rent) should be marked as essential. Grade other activities in your life, marking the ones that aren’t essential and working to temporarily reduce these or remove them from your life. It can feel difficult to let go of things while recovering from burnout. This process can benefit from a second opinion, if you’re working with a coach, therapist or trusted friend to manage your burnout. Reducing your workload and stressors can let you begin to recover from burnout. You can reintroduce things back into your schedule and life. Reintroduce stressors and activities back into your life slowly, to minimize risk of relapse. Keeping a journal will let you keep tabs on how different activities are impacting your energy levels and state of mind. Remove toxicity Toxic people or settings can drain you faster than overwork alone can. While you work to reduce your workload and stress, coworkers, friends, family or bosses who are toxic influences can act as a multiplier for the stressors that remain. Identifying these people and limiting your interactions with them during your recovery can help you get back on track faster and happier. A journal can be an important tool in tracking how interactions with different people impact your wellness and state of mind. If the toxic presence in your life is someone you can avoid or cut out without penalty, burnout is a great reason to finally replace them with healthier relationships. If you can’t remove them from your life, minimizing the impact toxic people have on your wellness is vital. Work to identify what aspect of the relationship is draining or damaging and create interventions around damaging interactions. While a chronically complaining coworker’s negativity can be stopped short with setting firm conversational boundaries and redirection, a combative boss can be a harder challenge. Seeking allies and advice can make you feel less alone in your battles and provide healthy emotional support. Ask for help Trying to find your way back to health and wellness after burning out can be a daunting task. Seeking help from health care professionals, trusted peers or both can give you backup on your journey back to feeling better. With symptoms that can mirror those of depression, burnout can be the precursor to a number of mental and physical ailments. Talk to your doctor immediately if you’re experiencing symptoms of depression or any other health concerns. Being open with your trusted friends about burnout can let you access valuable support and help explain why you may need extra care and consideration while you recover. Many suffering from burnout report finding maintaining relationships a challenge. Letting your loved ones know what you’re going through and why you may be less available invites them to be more understanding of cancelled plans or other issues while you’re recovering. Burnout can impact memory and cognitive function. Letting your support network assist in decision making during burnout can help add perspective to counterbalance these deficits. Talking to your friends and peers about your health and needs can offer valuable support. But those who are pushed to a mental or physical health crisis by burnout should work with healthcare professionals to plan their recovery. Sufferers of mild to moderate burnout can also benefit from planning their return to wellness with an experienced practitioner. Medical or counseling professionals may prescribe medicines, talk therapy, group sessions or other therapeutic intervention. Go easy on yourself Recovering from burnout is a process that takes energy, time and compassion for yourself. In the same way that toxic people or workplaces can set you back, negative repetitive thoughts will harm your recovery. Recognizing that burnout’s impact on you is a temporary state that isn’t your fault can help you begin to manage your feelings and expectations for yourself. Sufferers often report feeling stupid, lazy or that they lack the skills to do their job. This is natural, as burnout can severely limit your cognitive function, your energy levels and resilience while dramatically increasing your cognitive load. Working with a counselor may help if you’re finding it difficult to be patient with your progress back to health or are troubled by persistent intrusive thoughts. Burnout can seriously limit the amount of energy you have. Spend as little of the energy you have left beating yourself up as possible. You’re going to be ok. It’s all going to be ok. This article doesn’t offer one-size-fits all fixes for burnout or overwork, but aims to provide a framework with points to consider that may help shape your wellness. No article can act as a substitute for professionally administered healthcare or robust self care.",2017,Jessica Rose,jessicarose,2017-12-16T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/care-and-feeding-of-burnout/,process 205,Why Design Systems Fail,"Design systems are so hot right now, and for good reason. They promote a modular approach to building a product, and ensure organizational unity and stability via reusable code snippets and utility styles. They make prototyping a breeze, and provide a common language for both designers and developers. A design system is a culmination of several individual components, which can include any or all of the following (and more): Style guide or visual pattern library Design tooling (e.g. Sketch Library) Component library (where the components live in code) Code usage guidelines and documentation Design usage documentation Voice and tone guideline Animation language guideline Design systems are standalone (internal or external) products, and have proven to be very effective means of design-driven development. However, in order for a design system to succeed, everyone needs to get on board. I’d like to go over a few considerations to ensure design system success and what could hinder that success. Organizational Support Put simply, any product, including internal products, needs support. Something as cross-functional as a design system, which spans every vertical project team, needs support from the top and bottom levels of your organization. What I mean by that is that there needs to be top-level support from project managers up through VP’s to see the value of a design system, to provide resources for its implementation, and advocate for its use company-wide. This is especially important in companies where such systems are being put in place on top of existing, crufty codebases, because it may mean there needs to be some time and effort put in the calendar for refactoring work. Support from the bottom-up means that designers and engineers of all levels also need to support this system and feel responsibility for it. A design system is an organization’s product, and everyone should feel confident contributing to it. If your design system supports external clients as well (such as contractors), they too can become valuable teammates. A design system needs support and love to be nurtured and to grow. It also needs investment. Investment To have a successful design system, you need to make a continuous effort to invest resources into it. I like to compare this to working out. You can work out intensely for 3 months and see some gains, but once you stop working out, those will slowly fade away. If you continue to work out, even if its less often than the initial investment, you’ll see yourself maintaining your fitness level at a much higher rate than if you stopped completely. If you invest once in a design system (say, 3 months of overhauling it) but neglect to keep it up, you’ll face the same situation. You’ll see immediate impact, but that impact will fade as it gets out of sync with new designs and you’ll end up with strange, floating bits of code that nobody is using. Your engineers will stop using it as the patterns become outdated, and then you’ll find yourself in for another round of large investment (while dreading going through the process since its fallen so far out of shape). With design systems, small incremental investments over time lead to big gains overall. With this point, I also want to note that because of how they scale, design systems can really make a large impact across the platform, making it extremely important to really invest in things like accessibility and solid architecture from the start. You don’t want to scale a brittle system that’s not easy to use. Take care of your design systems, and keep working on them to ensure their effectiveness. One way to ensure this is to have a dedicated team working on this design system, managing tickets and styling updates that trickle out to the rest of your company. Responsibility With some kind of team to act as an owner of a design system, whether it be the design team, engineering team, or a new team made of both designers and engineers (the best option), your company is more likely to keep a relevant, up-to-date system that doesn’t break. This team is responsible for a few things: Helping others get set up on the system (support) Designing and building components (development) Advocating for overall UI consistency and adherence (evangelism) Creating a rollout plan and update system (product management) As you can see, these are a lot of roles, so it helps to have multiple people on this team, at least part of the time, if you can. One thing I’ve found to be effective in the past is to hold office hours for coworkers to book slots within to help them get set up and to answer any questions about using the system. Having an open Slack channel also helps for this sort of thing, as well as for bringing up bugs/issues/ideas and being an channel for announcements like new releases. Communication Once you have resources and a plan to invest in a design system, its really important that this person or team acts as a bridge between design and engineering. Continuous communication is really important here, and the way you communicate is even more important. Remember that nobody wants to be told what to do or prescribed a solution, especially developers, who are used to a lot of autonomy (usually they get to choose their own tools at work). Despite how much control the other engineers have on the process, they need to feel like they have input, and feel heard. This can be challenging, especially since ultimately, some party needs to be making a final decision on direction and execution. Because it’s a hard balance to strike, having open communication channels and being as transparent as possible as early as possible is a good start. Buy-in For all of the reasons we’ve just looked over, good communication is really important for getting buy-in from your users (the engineers and designers), as well as from product management. Building and maintaining a design system is surprisingly a lot of people-ops work. To get buy-in where you don’t have a previous concensus that this is the right direction to take, you need to make people want to use your design system. A really good way to get someone to want to use a product is to make it the path of least resistance, to show its value. Gather examples and usage wins, because showing is much more powerful than telling. If you can, have developers use your product in a low-stakes situation where it provides clear benefits. Hackathons are a great place to debut your design system. Having a hackathon internally at DigitalOcean was a perfect opportunity to: Evangelize for the design system See what people were using the component library for and what they were struggling with (excellent user testing there) Get user feedback afterward on how to improve it in future iterations Let people experience the benefits of using it themselves These kinds of moments, where people explore on their own are where you can really get people on your side and using the design system, because they can get their hands on it and draw their own conclusions (and if they don’t love it — listen to them on how to improve it so that they do). We don’t always get so lucky as to have this sort of instantaneous user feedback from our direct users. Architecture I briefly mentioned the scalable nature of design systems. This is exactly why it’s important to develop a solid architecture early on in the process. Build your design system with growth and scalability in mind. What happens if your company acquires a new product? What happens when it develops a new market segment? How can you make sure there’s room for customization and growth? A few things we’ve found helpful include: Namespacing Use namespacing to ensure that the system doesn’t collide with existing styles if applying it to an existing codebase. This means prefixing every element in the system to indicate that this class is a part of the design system. To ensure that you don’t break parts of the existing build (which may have styled base elements), you can namespace the entire system inside of a parent class. Sass makes this easy with its nested structure. This kind of namespacing wouldn’t be necessary per se on new projects, but it is definitely useful when integrating new and old styles. Semantic Versioning I’ve used Semantic Versioning on all of the design systems I’ve ever worked on. Semantic versioning uses a system of Major.Minor.Patch for any updates. You can then tag released on Github with versioned updates and ensure that someone’s app won’t break unintentionally when there is an update, if they are anchored to a specific version (which they should be). We also use this semantic versioning as a link with our design system assets at DigitalOcean (i.e. Sketch library) to keep them in sync, with the same version number corresponding to both Sketch and code. Our design system is served as a node module, but is also provided as a series of built assets using our CDN for quick prototyping and one-off projects. For these built assets, we run a deploy script that automatically creates folders for each release, as well as a latest folder if someone wanted the always-up-to-date version of the design system. So, semantic versioning for the system I’m currently building is what links our design system node module assets, sketch library assets, and statically built file assets. The reason we have so many ways of consuming our design system is to make adoption easier and to reduce friction. Friction A while ago, I posed the question of why design systems become outdated and unused, and a major conclusion I drew from the conversation was: “If it’s harder for people to use than their current system, people just won’t use it” You have to make your design system the path of least resistance, lowering cognitive overhead of development, not adding to it. This is vital. A design system is intended to make development much more efficient, enforce a consistent style across sites, and allow for the developer to not worry as much about small decisions like naming and HTML semantics. These are already sorted out for them, meaning they can focus on building product. But if your design system is complicated and over-engineered, they may find it frustrating to use and go back to what they know, even if its not the best solution. If you’re a Sass expert, and base your system on complex mixins and functions, you better hope your user (the developer) is also a Sass expert, or wants to learn. This is often not the case, however. You need to talk to your audience. With the DigitalOcean design system, we provide a few options: Option 1 Users can implement the component library into a development environment and use Sass, select just the components they want to include, and extend the system using a hook-based system. This is the most performant and extensible output. Only the components that are called upon are included, and they can be easily extended using mixins. But as noted earlier, not everyone wants to work this way (including Sass a dependency and potentially needing to set up a build system for it and learn a new syntax). There is also the user who just wants to throw a link onto their page and have it look nice, and thats where our versioned built assets come in. Option 2 With Option 2, users pull in links that are served via a CDN that contain JS, CSS, and our SVG icon library. The code is a bit bigger than the completely customized version, but often this isn’t the aim when people are using Option 2. Reducing friction for adoption should be a major goal of your design system rollout. Conclusion Having a design system is really beneficial to any product, especially as it grows. In order to have an effective system, it’s important to primarily always keep your user in mind and garner support from your entire company. Once you have support and acceptance, this system will flourish and grow. Make sure someone is responsible for it, and make sure its built with a solid foundation from the start which will be carefully maintained toward the future. Good luck, and happy holidays!",2017,Una Kravets,unakravets,2017-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/why-design-systems-fail/,process 207,Want to Break Out of Comparison Syndrome? Do a Media Detox,"“Comparison is the thief of joy.” —Theodore Roosevelt I grew up in an environment of perpetual creativity and inventiveness. My father Dennis built and flew experimental aircraft as a hobby. During my entire childhood, there was an airplane fuselage in the garage instead of a car. My mother Deloria was a self-taught master artisan who could quickly acquire any skills that it took to work with fabric and weaving. She could sew any garment she desired, and was able to weave intricate wall hangings just by looking at a black and white photos in magazines. My older sister Diane blossomed into a consummate fine artist who drew portraits with uncanny likeness, painted murals, and studied art and architecture. In addition, she loved good food and had a genius for cooking and baking, which converged in her creating remarkable art pieces out of cake that were incredibly delicious to boot. Yes. This was the household in which I grew up. While there were countless positives to being surrounded by people who were compelled to create, there was also a downside to it. I incessantly compared myself to my parents and older sister and always found myself lacking. It wasn’t a fair comparison, but tell that to a sensitive kid who wanted to fit in to her family by being creative as well. From my early years throughout my teens, I convinced myself that I would never understand how to build an airplane or at least be as proficient with tools as my father, the aeronautical engineer. Even though my sister was six years older than I was, I lamented that I would never be as good a visual artist as she was. And I marveled at my mother’s seemingly magical ability to make and tailor clothes and was certain that I would never attain her level of mastery. This habit of comparing myself to others grew over the years, continuing to subtly and effectively undermine my sense of self. I had almost reached an uneasy truce with my comparison habit when social media happened. As an early adopter of Twitter, I loved staying connected to people I met at tech conferences. However, as I began to realize my aspirations of being an author and a speaker, Twitter became a dreaded hall of mirrors where I only saw distorted reflections of my lack of achievement in other people’s success. Every person announcing a publishing deal caused me to drown under waves of envy over the imagined size of her or his book advance as I struggled to pay my mortgage. Every announcement I read of someone speaking at a conference led to thoughts of, “I wish I were speaking at that conference – I must not be good enough to be invited.” Twitter was fertile ground for my Inner Critic to run rampant. One day in 2011, my comparisons to people who I didn’t even know rose to a fever pitch. I saw a series of tweets that sparked a wave of self-loathing so profound that I spent the day sobbing and despondent, as I chastised myself for being a failure. I had fallen into the deep pit of Comparison Syndrome, and to return to anything close to being productive took a day or two of painstakingly clawing my way out. Comparison Syndrome Takes Deficiency Anxiety to Eleven Do any of these scenarios ring true? You frequently feel like a failure when viewing the success of others. You feel dispirited and paralyzed in moving forward with your own work because it will never measure up to what others have done. You discount your ideas because you fear that they aren’t as good as those of your colleagues or industry peers. Are you making yourself miserable by thinking thoughts like these? “I’m surrounded by people who are so good at what they do, how can I possibly measure up?” “Compared to my partner, my musical ability is childish – and music is no longer fun.” “Why haven’t I accomplished more by now? My peers are so much more successful than I am.” Unenviable Envy Many people use the terms envy and jealousy interchangeably, but they are two distinct emotions. Jealousy is the fear of losing someone to a perceived rival: a threat to an important relationship and the parts of the self that are served by that relationship. Jealousy is always about the relationship between three people. Envy is wanting what another has because of a perceived shortcoming on your part. Envy is always based on a social comparison to another.1 Envy is a reaction to the feeling of lacking something. Envy always reflects something we feel about ourselves, about how we are somehow deficient in qualities, possessions, or success.2 It’s based on a scarcity mentality: the idea that there is only so much to go around, and another person got something that should rightfully be yours.3 A syndrome is a condition characterized by a set of associated symptoms. I call it Comparison Syndrome because a perceived deficiency of some sort – in talent, accomplishments, success, skills, etc. – is what initially sparks it. While at the beginning you may merely feel inadequate, the onset of the syndrome will bring additional symptoms. Lack of self-trust and feelings of low self-worth will fuel increased thoughts of not-enoughness and blindness to your unique brilliance. If left unchecked, Deficiency Anxieties can escalate to full-blown Comparison Syndrome: a form of the Inner Critic in which we experience despair from envy and define ourselves as failures in light of another’s success. The irony is that when we focus so much on what we lack, we can’t see what we have in abundance that the other person doesn’t have. And in doing so, we block what is our birthright: our creative expression. Envy shackles our creativity, keeps us trapped in place, and prevents forward movement. The Inner Critic in the form of Comparison Syndrome caused by envy blocks us from utilizing our gifts, seeing our path clearly, and reveling in our creative power. In order to keep a grip on reality and not fall into the abyss of Comparison Syndrome, we’ll quell the compulsion to compare before it happens: we will free the mental bandwidth to turn our focus inward so we can start to see ourselves clearly. Break the Compulsion to Compare “Why compare yourself with others? No one in the entire world can do a better job of being you than you.” — Krystal Volney, poet and author At some point in time, many of us succumb to moments of feeling that we are lacking and comparing ourselves unfavorably to others. As social animals, much of our self-definition comes from comparison with others. This is how our personalities develop. We learn this behavior as children, and we grow up being compared to siblings, peers, and kids in the media. Because of this, the belief that somehow, someway, we aren’t good enough becomes deeply ingrained. The problem is that whenever we deem ourselves to be “less than,” our self-esteem suffers. This creates a negative feedback loop where negative thoughts produce strong emotions that result in self-defeating behaviors that beget more negative thoughts. Couple this cycle with the messages we get from society that only “gifted” people are creative, and it’s no wonder that many of us will fall down the rabbit hole of Comparison Syndrome like I did on that fated day while reading tweets. Comparing ourselves to others is worse than a zero-sum game, it’s a negative-sum game. No one wins, our self-esteem deteriorates, and our creative spark dies out. With effort, we can break the compulsion to compare and stop the decline into Comparison Syndrome by turning the focus of comparison inward to ourselves and appreciating who we’ve become. But first, we need to remove some of the instances that trigger our comparisons in the first place. Arrest: Stop the Triggers “Right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but in the habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable activities.” — Bertrand Russell, philosopher After my Twitter post meltdown, I knew had to make a change. While bolstering my sense of self was clearly a priority, I also knew that my ingrained comparison habit was too strong to resist and that I needed to instill discipline. I decided then and there to establish boundaries with social media. First, to maintain my sanity, I took this on as my mantra: “I will not compare myself to strangers on the Internet or acquaintances on Facebook.” If you find yourself sliding down the slippery slope of social media comparison, you can do the same: repeat this mantra to yourself to help put on the brakes. Second, in order to reduce my triggers, I stopped reading the tweets of the people I followed. However, I continued to be active on Twitter through sharing information, responding to mentions, crowdsourcing, and direct messaging people. It worked! The only time I’d start to slip into darkness were the rare instances when I would break my rules and look at my Twitstream. But we can do even more than calm ourselves with helpful mantras. Just like my example of modifying my use of Twitter, and more recently, of separating myself from Facebook, you can get some distance from the media that activates your comparison reflex and start creating the space for other habits that are more supportive to your being to take its place. Creative Dose: Trigger-free and Happy Purpose: To stop comparison triggers in their tracks Mindfulness is a wonderful tool, but sometimes you have to get hardcore and do as much as you can to eliminate distractions so that you can first hear your own thoughts in order to know which ones you need to focus on. Here are four steps to becoming trigger-free and happier. Step 1: Make a List Pay attention when you get the most triggered and hooked. Is it on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat? Is it YouTube, TV shows, or magazines? Make list of your top triggers. My primary trigger is:______________________________________ My second trigger is:______________________________________ My third trigger is:______________________________________ Now that you have your list, you need to get an idea just how often you’re getting triggered. Step 2: Monitor It’s easy to think that we should track our activity on the computer, but these days, it’s no longer our computer use that is the culprit: most of us access social media and news from our phones. Fortunately, there are apps that will track the usage for both. Seeing just how much you consume media from either or both will show you how much of an accomplice the use of devices is to your comparison syndrome, and how much you need to modify your behavior accordingly. For tracking both computer use and tablet use, this app works great: RescueTime.com tracks app usage and sends a productivity report at the end of the week via email. For your phone, there are many for either platform.4 Although I recommend fully researching what is available and will work for you best, here are a few recommendations: For both platforms: Offtime, Breakfree, Checky For Android only: Flipd, AppDetox, QualityTime, Stay On Task For iOS only: Moment Install your app of choice, and see what you find. How much time are you spending on sites or apps that compel you to compare? Step 3: Just Say No Now that you know what your triggers are and how much you’re exposing yourself to them, it’s time to say No. Put yourself on a partial social media and/or media detox for a specified period of time; consider even going for a full media detox.5 I recommend starting with one month. To help you to fully commit, I recommend writing this down and posting it where you can see it. I, ___________________, commit to avoiding my comparison triggers of ___________________, ___________________, and ___________________ for the period of ___________________, starting on ___________________ and ending on ___________________ . To help you out, I’ve created a social media detox commitment sheet for you. Step 4: Block When I decided to reduce my use of Twitter and Facebook to break my comparison habit, initially I tried to rely solely on self-discipline, which was only moderately successful. Then I realized that I could use the power of technology to help. Don’t think you have to rely upon sheer willpower to block, or at least limit, your exposure to known triggers. If your primary access to the items that cause you to compare yourself to others is via computers and other digitalia, use these devices to help maintain your mental equilibrium. Here are some apps and browser extensions that you can use during your media detox to help keep yourself sane and stay away from sites that could throw you into a comparison tailspin. These apps are installed onto your computer: RescueTime.com works on both computer and mobile devices, and does a lot more than just prevent you from going to sites that will ruin your concentration, it will also track your apps usage and give you a productivity report at the end of the week. Focus and SelfControl (Mac-only) To go right to the source and prevent you from visiting sites through your browser, there are browser extensions. Not only can you put in the list of the URLs that are your points of weakness, but you can also usually set the times of the day you need the self-control the most. Google Chrome: StayFocusd, Strict Workflow, and Website Blocker Firefox: Idderall and Leechblock Safari: WasteNoTime and MindfulBrowsing Edge (or Explorer): Unfortunately, there are currently no website blocking extensions for these browsers. I currently use a browser extension to block me from using Facebook between 9:00am – 6:00pm. It’s been a boon for my sanity: I compare tons less. A bonus is that it’s been terrific for my productivity as well. Which tool will you use for your media detox time? Explore them all and then settle upon the one(s) that will work the best for you. Install it and put it to work. Despite the tool, you will still need to exercise discipline. Resist the urge to browse Instagram or Facebook while waiting for your morning train. You can do it! Step 5: Relax Instead of panicking from FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), take comfort from this thought: what you don’t know won’t affect you. Start embracing JOMO (Joy of Missing Out), and the process of rebuilding and maintaining your sanity. What will you do instead of consuming the media that compels you to compare? Here are some ideas: Read a book Go for a walk Have dinner with a friend Go watch a movie Learn how to play the harmonica Take an improv class Really, you could do anything. And depending on how much of your time and attention you’ve devoted to media, you could be recapturing a lot of lost moments, minutes, hours, and days. Step 6: Reconnect Use your recovered time and attention to focus on your life and reconnect with your true value-driven goals, higher aspirations, and activities that you’ve always wanted to do. This article is an excerpt from the book Banish Your Inner Critic by Denise Jacobs, and has been reprinted with permission. If you’d like to read more, you can find the book on Amazon. Shane Parrish, “Mental Model: Bias from Envy and Jealousy,” Farnam Street, accessed February 9, 2017. ↩ Parrish, “Mental Model: Bias from Envy and Jealousy.” ↩ Henrik Edberg, “How to Overcome Envy: 5 Effective Tips,” Practical Happiness Advice That Works | The Positivity Blog, accessed February 9, 2017. ↩ Jeremy Golden, “6 Apps to Stop Your Smartphone Addiction,” Inc.com, accessed February 10, 2017. ↩ Emily Nickerson, “How to Silence the Voice of Doubt,” The Muse, accessed February 8, 2017. ↩",2017,Denise Jacobs,denisejacobs,2017-12-19T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/do-a-media-detox/,process 218,Put Yourself in a Corner,"Some backstory, and a shameful confession For the first couple years of high school I was one of those jerks who made only the minimal required effort in school. Strangely enough, how badly I behaved in a class was always in direct proportion to how skilled I was in the subject matter. In the subjects where I was confident that I could pass without trying too hard, I would give myself added freedom to goof off in class. Because I was a closeted lit-nerd, I was most skilled in English class. I’d devour and annotate required reading over the weekend, I knew my biblical and mythological allusions up and down, and I could give you a postmodern interpretation of a text like nobody’s business. But in class, I’d sit in the back and gossip with my friends, nap, or scribble patterns in the margins of my textbooks. I was nonchalant during discussion, I pretended not to listen during lectures. I secretly knew my stuff, so I did well enough on tests, quizzes, and essays. But I acted like an ass, and wasn’t getting the most I could out of my education. The day of humiliation, but also epiphany One day in Ms. Kaney’s AP English Lit class, I was sitting in the back doodling. An earbud was dangling under my sweater hood, attached to the CD player (remember those?) sitting in my desk. Because of this auditory distraction, the first time Ms. Kaney called my name, I barely noticed. I definitely heard her the second time, when she didn’t call my name so much as roar it. I can still remember her five feet frame stomping across the room and grabbing an empty desk. It screamed across the worn tile as she slammed it next to hers. She said, “This is where you sit now.” My face gets hot just thinking about it. I gathered my things, including the CD player (which was now impossible to conceal), and made my way up to the newly appointed Seat of Shame. There I sat, with my back to the class, eye-to-eye with Ms. Kaney. From my new vantage point I couldn’t see my friends, or the clock, or the window. All I saw were Ms. Kaney’s eyes, peering at me over her reading glasses while I worked. In addition to this punishment, I was told that from now on, not only would I participate in class discussions, but I would serve detention with her once a week until an undetermined point in the future. During these detentions, Ms. Kaney would give me new books to read, outside the curriculum, and added on to my normal homework. They ranged from classics to modern novels, and she read over my notes on each book. We’d discuss them at length after class, and I grew to value not only our private discussions, but the ones in class as well. After a few weeks, there wasn’t even a question of this being punishment. It was heaven, and I was more productive than ever. To the point Please excuse this sentimental story. It’s not just about honoring a teacher who cared enough to change my life, it’s really about sharing a lesson. The most valuable education Ms. Kaney gave me had nothing to do with literature. She taught me that I (and perhaps other people who share my special brand of crazy) need to be put in a corner to flourish. When we have physical and mental constraints applied, we accomplish our best work. For those of you still reading, now seems like a good time to insert a pre-emptive word of mediation. Many of you, maybe all of you, are self-disciplined enough that you don’t require the rigorous restrictions I use to maximize productivity. Also, I know many people who operate best in a stimulating and open environment. I would advise everyone to seek and execute techniques that work best for them. But, for those of you who share my inclination towards daydreams and digressions, perhaps you’ll find something useful in the advice to follow. In which I pretend to be Special Agent Olivia Dunham Now that I’m an adult, and no longer have Ms. Kaney to reign me in, I have to find ways to put myself in the corner. By rejecting distraction and shaping an environment designed for intense focus, I’m able to achieve improved productivity. Lately I’ve been obsessed with the TV show Fringe, a sci-fi series about an FBI agent and her team of genius scientists who save the world (no, YOU’RE a nerd). There’s a scene in the show where the primary character has to delve into her subconscious to do extraordinary things, and she accomplishes this by immersing herself in a sensory deprivation tank. The premise is this: when enclosed in a space devoid of sound, smell, or light, she will enter a new plane of consciousness wherein she can tap into new levels of perception. This might sound a little nuts, but to me this premise has some real-world application. When I am isolated from distraction, and limited to only the task at hand, I’m able to be productive on a whole new level. Since I can’t actually work in an airtight iron enclosure devoid of input, I find practical ways to create an interruption-free environment. Since I work from home, many of my methods for coping with distractions wouldn’t be necessary for my office-bound counterpart. However for some of you 9-to-5-ers, the principles will still apply. Consider your visual input First, I have to limit my scope to the world I can (and need to) affect. In the largest sense, this means closing my curtains to the chaotic scene of traffic, birds, the post office, a convenience store, and generally lovely weather that waits outside my window. When the curtains are drawn and I’m no longer surrounded by this view, my sphere is reduced to my desk, my TV, and my cat. Sometimes this step alone is enough to allow me to focus. But, my visual input can be whittled down further still. For example, the desk where I usually keep my laptop is littered with twelve owl figurines, a globe, four books, a three-pound weight, and various nerdy paraphernalia (hard drives, Wacom tablets, unnecessary bluetooth accessories, and so on). It’s not so much a desk as a dumping ground for wacky flea market finds and impulse technology buys. Therefore, in addition to this Official Desk, I have an adult version of Ms. Kaney’s Seat of Shame. It’s a rusty old student’s desk I picked up at the Salvation Army, almost an exact replica of the model Ms. Kaney dragged across the classroom all those years ago. This tiny reproduction Seat of Shame is literally in a corner, where my only view is a blank wall. When I truly need to focus, this is where I take refuge, with only a notebook and a pencil (and occasionally an iPad). Find out what works for your ears Even from my limited sample size of two people, I know there are lots of different ways to cope with auditory distraction. I prefer silence when focused on independent work, and usually employ some form of a white noise generator. I’ve yet to opt for the fancy ‘real’ white noise machines; instead, I use a desktop fan or our allergy filter machine. This is usually sufficient to block out the sounds of the dishwasher and the cat, which allows me to think only about the task of hand. My boyfriend, the other half of my extensive survey, swears by another method. He calls it The Wall of Sound, and it’s basically an intense blast of raucous music streamed directly into his head. The outcome of his technique is really the same as mine; he’s blocking out unexpected auditory input. If you can handle the grating sounds of noisy music while working, I suggest you give The Wall of Sound a try. Don’t count the minutes When I sat in the original Seat of Shame in lit class, I could no longer see the big classroom clock slowly ticking away the seconds until lunch. Without the marker of time, the class period often flew by. The same is true now when I work; the less aware of time I am, the less it feels like time is passing too quickly or slowly, and the more I can focus on the task (not how long it takes). Nowadays, to assist in my effort to forget the passing of time, I sometimes put a sticky note over the clock on my monitor. If I’m writing, I’ll use an app like WriteRoom, which blocks out everything but a simple text editor. There are situations when it’s not advisable to completely lose track of time. If I’m working on a project with an hourly rate and a tight scope, or if I need to be on time to a meeting or call, I don’t want to lose myself in the expanse of the day. In these cases, I’ll set an alarm that lets me know it’s time to reign myself back in (or on some days, take a shower). Put yourself in a mental corner, too When Ms. Kaney took action and forced me to step up my game, she had the insight to not just change things physically, but to challenge me mentally as well. She assigned me reading material outside the normal coursework, then upped the pressure by requiring detailed reports of the material. While this additional stress was sometimes uncomfortable, it pushed me to work harder than I would have had there been less of a demand. Just as there can be freedom in the limitations of a distraction-free environment, I’d argue there is liberty in added mental constraints as well. Deadlines as a constraint Much has been written about the role of deadlines in the creative process, and they seem to serve different functions in different cases. I find that deadlines usually act as an important constraint and, without them, it would be nearly impossible for me to ever consider a project finished. There are usually limitless ways to improve upon the work I do and, if there’s no imperative for me to be done at a certain point, I will revise ad infinitum. (Hence, the personal site redesign that will never end – Coming Soon, Forever!). But if I have a clear deadline in mind, there’s a point when the obsessive tweaking has to stop. I reach a stage where I have to gather up the nerve to launch the thing. Putting the pro in procrastination Sometimes I’ve found that my tendency to procrastinate can help my productivity. (Ducks, as half the internet throws things at her.) I understand the reasons why procrastination can be harmful, and why it’s usually a good idea to work diligently and evenly towards a goal. I try to divide my projects up in a practical way, and sometimes I even pull it off. But for those tasks where you work aimlessly and no focus comes, or you find that every other to-do item is more appealing, sometimes you’re forced to bring it together at the last moment. And sometimes, this environment of stress is a formula for magic. Often when I’m down to the wire and have no choice but to produce, my mind shifts towards a new level of clarity. There’s no time to endlessly browse for inspiration, or experiment with convoluted solutions that lead nowhere. Obviously a life lived perpetually on the edge of a deadline would be a rather stressful one, so it’s not a state of being I’d advocate for everyone, all the time. But every now and then, the work done when I’m down to the wire is my best. Keep one toe outside your comfort zone When I’m choosing new projects to take on, I often seek out work that involves an element of challenge. Whether it’s a design problem that will require some creative thinking, or a coding project that lends itself to using new technology like HTML5, I find a manageable level of difficulty to be an added bonus. The tension that comes from learning a new skill or rethinking an old standby is a useful constraint, as it keeps the work interesting, and ensures that I continue learning. There you have it Well, I think I’ve spilled most of my crazy secrets for forcing my easily distracted brain to focus. As with everything we web workers do, there are an infinite number of ways to encourage productivity. I hope you’ve found a few of these to be helpful, and please share your personal techniques in the comments. Have a happy and productive new year!",2010,Meagan Fisher,meaganfisher,2010-12-20T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/put-yourself-in-a-corner/,process 225,Good Ideas Grow on Paper,"Great designers have one thing in common: their design process is centred on ideas; ideas that are more often than not developed on paper. Though it’s often tempting to take the path of least resistance, turning to the computer in the headlong rush to complete a project (often in the face of formidable client pressure), resist the urge and – for a truly great idea – start first on paper. The path of least resistance is often characterised by cliché and overused techniques – one per cent noise, border-radius, text-shadow – the usual suspects – techniques that are ten-a-penny at the gallery sites. Whilst all are useful, and technique and craft are important, great design isn’t about technique alone – it’s about technique in the service of good ideas. But how do we generate those ideas? Inspiration can certainly come to you out of the blue. When working as a designer in a role which often consists of incubating good ideas, however, idly waiting for the time-honoured lightbulb to appear above your head just isn’t good enough. We need to establish an environment where we tip the odds of getting good ideas in our favour. So, when faced with the blank canvas, what do we do to unlock the proverbial tidal wave of creativity? Fear not. We’re about to share with you a couple of stalwart techniques that will stand you in good stead when you need that good idea, in the face of the pressure of yet another looming deadline. Get the process right Where do ideas come from? In many cases they come from anywhere but the screen. Hence, our first commandment is to close the lid of your computer and, for a change, work on paper. It might seem strange, it might also seem like a distraction, but – trust us – the time invested here will more than pay off. Idea generation should be a process of rapid iteration, sketching and thinking aloud, all processes best undertaken in more fast paced, analogue media. Our tool of choice is the Sharpie and Flip Chart Combo©, intentionally low resolution to encourage lo-fi idea generation. In short, your tools should be designed not to be precious, but to quickly process your thoughts. Ideas can be expressed with a thick line marker or by drawing with a stick in the sand; it’s the ideas that matter, not the medium. Input > Synthesise > Output Ideas don’t materialise in a vacuum. Without constant input, the outputs will inevitably remain the same. As such, it’s essential to maintain an inquisitive mind, ensuring a steady flow of new triggers and stimuli that enable your thinking to evolve. What every designer brings to the table is their prior experience and unique knowledge. It should come as no surprise to discover that a tried and tested method of increasing that knowledge is, believe it or not, to read – often and widely. The best and most nuanced ideas come after many years of priming the brain with an array of diverse material, a point made recently in Jessica Hische’s aptly named Why You Should Know Your Shit. One of the best ways of synthesising the knowledge you accumulate is to write. The act of writing facilitates your thinking and stores the pieces of the jigsaw you’ll one day return to. You don’t have to write a book or a well-articulated article; a scribbled note in the margin will suffice in facilitating the process of digestion. As with writing, we implore you to make sketching an essential part of your digestion process. More immediate than writing, sketching has the power to put yet unformed ideas down on paper, giving you an insight into the fantastic conceptions you’re more often than not still incubating. Our second commandment is a practical one: always carry a sketchbook and a pen. Although it seems that the very best ideas are scribbled on the back of a beer mat or a wine-stained napkin, always carrying your ‘thinking utensils’ should be as natural as not leaving the house without your phone, wallet, keys or pants. Further, the more you use your sketchbook, the less precious you’ll find yourself becoming. Sketching isn’t about being an excellent draughtsman, it’s about synthesising and processing your thoughts and ideas, as Jason Santa Maria summarises nicely in his article Pretty Sketchy: Sketchbooks are not about being a good artist, they’re about being a good thinker. Jason Santa Maria The sketchbook and pen should become your trusted tools in your task to constantly survey the world around you. As Paul Smith says, You Can Find Inspiration in Anything; close the lid, look beyond the computer; there’s a whole world of inspiration out there. Learn to love old dusty buildings So, how do you learn? How do you push beyond the predictable world pre-filtered by Mr Google? The answer lies in establishing a habit of exploring the wonderful worlds of museums and libraries, dusty old buildings that repay repeated visits. Once the primary repositories of thought and endless sources of inspiration, these institutions are now often passed over for the quick fix of a Google search or Wikipedia by you, the designer, chained to a desk and manacled to a MacBook. Whilst others might frown, we urge you to get away from your desk and take an eye-opening stroll through the knowledge-filled corridors of yore (and don’t forget to bring your sketchbook). Here you’ll find ideas aplenty, ideas that will set you apart from your peers, who remain ever-reliant on the same old digital sources. The idea generation toolbox Now that we’ve established the importance of getting the process and the context right, it’s time to meet the idea generation toolbox: a series of tools and techniques that can be applied singularly or in combination to solve the perennial problem of the blank canvas. The clean sheet of paper, numbing in its emptiness, can prove an insurmountable barrier to many a project, but the route beyond it involves just a few, well-considered steps. The route to a good idea lies in widening your pool of inspiration at the project outset. Let go and generate ideas quickly; it’s critical to diverge before you converge – but how do we do this and what exactly do we mean by this? The temptation is to pull something out of your well-worn box of tricks, something that you know from experience will do the job. We urge you, however, not to fall prey to this desire. You can do better; better still, a few of you putting your minds together can do a lot better. By avoiding the path of least resistance, you can create something extraordinary. Culturally, we value logical, linear thinking. Since the days of Plato and Aristotle, critical thinking, deduction and the pursuit of truth have been rewarded. To generate creative ideas, however, we need to start thinking sideways, making connections that don’t necessarily follow logically. Lateral thinking, a phrase coined by Edward de Bono in 1967, aptly describes this very process: With logic you start out with certain ingredients, just as in playing chess you start out with given pieces – lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces. Edward de Bono One of the easiest ways to start thinking laterally is to start with a mind map, a perfect tool for widening the scope of a project beyond the predictable and an ideal one for getting the context right for discovery. Making connections Mind maps can be used to generate, visualise and structure ideas. Arranged intuitively and classified around groupings, mind maps allow chance connections to be drawn across related groups of information, and are perfect for exposing alogical associations and unexpected relationships. Get a number of people together in a room, equipped with the Sharpie and Flip Chart Combo©. Give yourself a limited amount of time – half an hour should prove more than enough – and you’ll be surprised at the results a few well-chosen people can generate in a very short space of time. The key is to work fast, diverge and not inhibit thinking. We’ve been embracing Tony Buzan’s methods in our teaching for over a decade. His ideas on the power of radiant thinking and how this can be applied to mind maps, uncover the real power which lies in the human brain’s ability to spot connections across a mapped out body of diverse knowledge. Frank Chimero wrote about this recently in How to Have an Idea, which beautifully illustrates Mr Buzan’s theories, articulating the importance of the brain’s ability to make abstract connections, finding unexpected pairings when a concept is mapped out on paper. Once a topic is surveyed and a rich set of stimuli articulated, the next stage is to draw connections, pulling from opposite sides of the mind map. It’s at this point, when defining alogical connections, that the truly interesting and unexpected ideas are often uncovered. The curve ball If you’ve followed our instructions so far, all being well, you should have a number of ideas. Good news: we have one last technique to throw into the mix. We like to call it ‘the curve ball’, that last minute ‘something’ that forces you to rethink and encourages you to address a problem from a different direction. There are a number of ways of throwing in a curve ball – a short, sharp, unexpected impetus – but we have a firm favourite we think you’ll appreciate. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies – subtitled ‘Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas’ – are the perfect creative tool for throwing in a spot of unpredictability. As Eno and Schmidt put it: The Oblique Strategies can be used as a pack (a set of possibilities being continuously reviewed in the mind) or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear. They are not final, as new ideas will present themselves, and others will become self-evident. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt Simply pick a card and apply the strategy to the problem at hand. The key here, as with de Bono’s techniques, is to embrace randomness and provocation to inspire lateral creative approaches. To assist this process, you might wish to consult one of the many virtual decks of Oblique Strategies online. Wrapping up To summarise, it’s tempting to see the route to the fastest satisfactory conclusion in a computer when, in reality, that’s the last place you should start. The tools we’ve introduced, far from time-consuming, are hyper-efficient, always at hand and, if you factor them into your workflow, the key to unlocking the ideas that set the great designers apart. We wish you well on your quest in search of the perfect idea, now armed with the knowledge that the quest begins on paper.",2010,The Standardistas,thestandardistas,2010-12-13T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/good-ideas-grow-on-paper/,process 226,Documentation-Driven Design for APIs,"Documentation is like gift wrapping. It seems like superfluous fluff, but your family tends to be rather disappointed when their presents arrive in supermarket carrier bags, so you have to feign some sort of attempt at making your gift look enticing. Documentation doesn’t have to be all hard work and sellotaping yourself to a table – you can make it useful and relevant. Documentation gets a pretty rough deal. It tends to get left until the end of a project, when some poor developer is assigned the ‘document project’ ticket and wades through each feature of Whizzy New API 3.0 and needs to recall exactly what each method is meant to do. That’s assuming any time is left for documentation at all. The more common outcome resembles last minute homework scribbled on a post-it note, where just the bare bones of what’s available are put out for your users, and you hope that you’ll spot the inconsistencies and mistakes before they do. Wouldn’t it be nicer for everyone if you could make documentation not only outstanding for your users, but also a valuable tool for your development team – so much so that you couldn’t imagine writing a line of code before you’d documented it? Documentation needs to have three main features: It should have total coverage and document all the features of your project. Private methods should be documented for your developers, and public features need to be available to your users. It should be consistent – a user should know what to expect from your documentation, and terminology should be accurate to your language. It should be current – and that means staying accurate as new versions of your code base are released. But you can also get these bonuses: Act as a suggested specification – a guide that will aid a developer in making something consistent and usable. It can test your API quality. It can enhance the communication skills within your development team. So how do we get our documentation to be rich and full of features, instead of a little worn out like Boxing Day leftovers? Write your documentation first When I say first, I mean first. Not after you’ve started writing the code. Not even after you’ve started writing your unit tests. First. You may or may not have been provided with a decent specification, but the first job should be to turn your requirements for a feature into documentation. It works best when it takes the form of in-code comments. It works even better when your in-code comments take a standard documentation format that you can later use to generate published documentation for your users. This has the benefit of immediately making your docs as version controlled as your code-base, and it saves having to rewrite, copy or otherwise harass your docs into something legible later on. Almost all languages have a self-documentation format these days. My choice of format for JavaScript is JSDocToolkit, and the sort of things I look for are the ability to specify private and public methods, full options object statements (opts as Opts only is a no-no), and the ability to include good examples. So, our example for today will be a new festive feature for a JavaScript API. We’ve been asked to specify a sled for Santa to get around the world to give out toys: Santa needs to be able to travel around the world in one night to deliver toys to children, and he’ll need some reindeer to pull his sled. As documentation, it would look like: /** @name Sled @extends Vehicle @constructor @description Create a new sled to send Santa around the world to deliver toys to good kids. @param {Object} [opts] Options @param {number} [opts.capacity='50'] Set the capacity of the sled @param {string} [opts.pilot='santa'] The pilot of the sled. @example // Create a sled and specify some reindeer. new Sled().reindeer(['Dasher', 'Dancer', 'Prancer', 'Vixen', 'Comet', 'Cupid']); */ By breaking it down as documentation, you can, for example, hand this over to another developer without the need to explain the feature in much depth, and they’ll develop something that has to match this piece of documentation. It specifies everything that is important to this feature – its default values and types, and where it inherits other features from. We know that we need to specify some way of setting reindeer to pull the sled and also some toys to give, and so we can quickly specify extra methods for the sled: /* @name vehicle.Sled#reindeer @function @description Set the reindeer that will pull Santa's sled. @param {string[]} reindeer A list of the reindeer. @example // specifying some reindeer Sled().reindeer(['Dasher', 'Dancer', 'Rudolph', 'Vixen']); */ /* @name vehicle.Sled#toys @function @description Add a list of toys and recipients to the Sled. @param {Object[]} toys A list of toys and who will receive them. @example // Adding toys to the sled Sled().toys([ {name:'Brian', toy:'Fire Engine'}, {name:'Drew', toy:'Roller-skates'}, {name:'Anna', toy:'Play-doh'}, ... ]); */ Job done! You’ve got a specification to share with your team and something useful for your users in the form of full examples, and you didn’t even have to open another text editor. Use your documentation to share knowledge Documentation isn’t just for users. It’s also used by internal developers to explain what they’ve written and how it works. This is especially valuable where the team is large or the code-base sprawling. So, returning to our example, the next step would be to share with the rest of the team (or at least a selection of the team if yours is large) what the documentation looks like. This is useful for two main reasons: They can see if they understand what the documentation says the feature will do. It’s best if they haven’t seen the requirement before. If your fellow developers can’t work out what ‘MagicMethodX’ is going to return from the docs, neither can your users. They can check that the feature accomplishes everything that they expect to, and that it’s consistent with the rest of the functionality. On previous projects, we’ve taken to referring to this stage of the development process as the ‘bun fight’. It’s a chance for everyone to have an honest say and throw a few pies without actually causing anyone to have to rewrite any code. If you can identify at this stage that a feature is over-complicated, lacking or just plain useless, you’ll all be much happier to throw out a few lines of documentation than you may have been to throw out a partial, or even complete, piece of functionality. Documentation has your back The final benefit to working in this way is that your documentation not only remains accurate, it’s always as accurate as your latest release. It can’t fall behind. You can increase the likelihood that your docs will remain up to date by unit testing your examples. Returning to the previous example, we can add a QUnit unit test to the expected output with ease during the build process – we know exactly how the code will look and, with the @example tag, we can identify easily where to find the bits that need testing. If it’s tested it’ll definitely work as you expect it to when a user copy and pastes it. You’re ensuring quality from idea to implementation. As an extra bauble, the best thing about a system like JSDocToolkit is that it’ll take your inline comments and turn them into beautiful sites, as good systems will allow for customised output templates. You’ll be producing full-featured sites for your projects and plugins with almost no extra effort, but all the benefits.",2010,Frances Berriman,francesberriman,2010-12-11T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/documentation-driven-design-for-apis/,process 230,The Articulate Web Designer of Tomorrow,"You could say that we design to communicate, and that we seek emotive responses. It sounds straightforward, and it can be, but leaving it to chance isn’t wise. Many wander into web design without formal training, and whilst that certainly isn’t essential, we owe it to ourselves to draw on wider influences, learn from the past, and think smarter. What knowledge can we ourselves explore in order to become better designers? In addition, how can we take this knowledge, investigate it through our unique discipline, and in turn speak more eloquently about what we do on the web? Below, I outline a number of things that I personally believe all designers should be using and exploring collectively. Taking stock Where we’re at is good. Finding clarity through web standards, we’ve ended up quite modernist in our approach, pursuing function, elegance and reduction. However, we’re not great at articulating our own design processes and principles to outsiders. Equally, we rely heavily on our instincts when deciding if something is or isn’t good. That’s fine, but we can better understand why things are the way they are by looking a little deeper, thereby helping us articulate what goes on in our design brains to our peers, our clients and to normal humans. As designers we use ideas, concepts, text and images. We apply our ideas and experience, imposing order and structure to content, hoping to ease the communication of an idea to the largest possible audience or to a specific audience. We consciously manipulate most of what is available to us, but not all. There is something else we can use. I often think that brilliant work demands a keen understanding of the magical visual language that informs design. Embracing an established visual language This is a language whose alphabet is shapes, structures, colours, lines and rhythms. When effective, it is somewhat invisible, subliminally enforcing messages and evoking meaning, using methods solidly rooted in a grammar perceptible in virtually all extraordinary creative work. The syntax for art, architecture, film, and furniture, industrial and graphic design (think Bauhaus and the Swiss style perhaps), this language urges us to become fluent if we aim for a more powerful dialogue with our audience. Figure 1: Structures (clockwise from top-left): Informal; Formal; Active; Visible. The greatest creative minds our world has produced could understand some or all of this language. Line and point, form and shape. Abstract objects. Formal and informal structures. Visual distribution. Balance, composition and the multitudinous approaches to symmetry. Patterns and texture. Movement and paths. Repetition, rhythm and frequency. Colour theory. Whitespace and the pause. The list goes on. The genius we perceive in our creative heroes is often a composite of experience, trial and error, conviction, intuition – even accident – but rarely does great work arise without an initial understanding of the nuts and bolts that help communicate an idea or emotion. Our world of interactivity As web designers, our connection with this language is most evident in graphic design. With more technological ease and power comes the responsibility to understand, wisely use, and be able to justify many of our decisions. We have moved beyond the scope of print into a world of interactivity, but we shouldn’t let go of any established principles without good reason. Figure 2: Understanding movement of objects in any direction along a defined path. For example, immersion in this visual language can improve our implementation of CSS3 and JavaScript behaviour. With CSS3, we’ve seen a resurgence in CSS experimentation, some of which has been wonderful, but much of it has appeared clumsy. In the race to make something spin, twist, flip or fly from one corner to another, the designer sometimes fails to think about the true movement they seek to emulate. What forces are supposedly affecting this movement? What is the expected path of this transition and is it being respected? Stopping to think about what is really supposed to be happening on the page compels us to use complex animations, diagrams and rotations more carefully. It helps us to better understand paths and movement. Figure 3: Repetition can occur through variations in colour, shape, direction, and so on. It can only be of greater benefit to be mindful of symmetries, depth, affordance, juxtaposition, balance, economy and reduction. A deeper understanding of basic structures can help us to say more with sketches, wireframes, layouts and composition. We’ve all experimented with grids and rhythm but, to truly benefit from these long-established principles, we are duty-bound to understand their possibilities more than we will by simply leveraging a free framework or borrowing some CSS. Design is not a science, but… Threading through all of this is what we have learned from science, and what it teaches us of the human brain. This visual language matters because technology changes but, for the most part, people don’t. For centuries, we humans have received and interpreted information in much the same way. Understanding more of how we perceive meaning can help designers make smarter decisions, and call on visual language to underpin these decisions. It is our responsibility as designers to be aware of mental models, mapping, semiotics, sensory experience and human emotion. Design itself is not a science, but the appropriate use of visual language and scientific understanding exposes the line between effective and awkward, between communicative and mute. By strengthening our mental and analytical approach to what is often done arbitrarily or “because it feels right”, we simply become better designers. A visual language for the web So, I’ve outlined numerous starting points and areas worthy of deeper investigation, and hopefully you’re eager to do some research. However, I’ve mostly discussed established ideas and principles that we as web designers can learn from. It’s my belief that our community has a shared responsibility to expand this visual language as it applies to the ebb and flow of the web. Indulge me as I conclude with a related tangent. In defining a visual language specifically for the web, we must continue to mature. The old powerfully influences the new, but we must intelligently expand the visual language of masterful work and articulate what is uniquely ours. For example, phrases like Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design aren’t merely elegant, they describe a new way of thinking and working, of communicating about designs and interaction patterns. These phrases broaden our vocabulary and are immediately adopted by designers worldwide, in both conversation and execution. Our legacy Our new definitions should flex and not be tied to specific devices or methods which fade away or morph with time. Our legacy is perhaps more about robust and flexible patterns and systems than it is about specific devices or programming languages. Figure 4: As web designers, we should think about systems, not pages. The established principles we adopt and whatever new ways of thinking we define should slip neatly into a wider philosophy about our approach to web design. We’re called, as a community, to define what is distinctive about the visual language of the web, create this vocabulary, this dialect that resonates with us and moves us forward as we tackle each day’s work. Let’s give it some thought. Further reading This is my immediate “go-to” list of books that I bullishly believe all web designers should own, but there is so much more out there to read. Sadly, many great texts relating to this stuff are often out of print. Feel free to share your recommendations. Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things Christian Leborg, Visual Grammar Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics David Crow, Visible Signs William Lidwell and Katrina Holden, Universal Principles of Design",2010,Simon Collison,simoncollison,2010-12-16T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/the-articulate-web-designer-of-tomorrow/,process 232,Optimize Your Web Design Workflow,"I’m not sure about you, but I still favour using Photoshop to create my designs for the web. I agree that this application, even with its never-ending feature set, is not the perfect environment to design websites in. The ideal application doesn’t exist yet, however, so until it does it’s maybe not such a bad idea to investigate ways to optimize our workflow. Why use Photoshop? It will probably not come as a surprise if I say that Photoshop and Illustrator are the applications that I know best and feel most comfortable and creative in. Some people prefer Fireworks for web design. Even though I understand people’s motivations, I still prefer Photoshop personally. On the occasions that I gave Fireworks a try, I ended up just using the application to export my images as slices, or to prepare a dummy for the client. For some reason, I’ve never been able to find my way in that app. There were always certain things missing that could only be done in either Photoshop or Illustrator, which bothered me. Why not start in the browser? These days, with CSS3 styling emerging, there are people who find it more efficient to design in the browser. I agree that at a certain point, once the basic design is all set and defined, you can jump right into the code and go from there. But the actual creative part, at least for me, needs to be done in an application such as Photoshop. As a designer I need to be able to create and experiment with shapes on the fly, draw things, move them around, change colours, gradients, effects, and so on. I can’t see me doing this with code. I’m sure if I switch to markup too quickly, I might end up with a rather boxy and less interesting design. Once I start playing with markup, I leave my typical ‘design zone’. My brain starts thinking differently – more rational and practical, if you know what I mean; I start to structure and analyse how to mark up my design in the most efficient semantic way. When I design, I tend to let that go for a bit. I think more freely and not so much about the limitations, as it might hinder my creativity. Now that you know my motivations to stick with Photoshop for the time being, let’s see how we can optimize this beast. Optimize your Photoshop workspace In Photoshop CS5 you have a few default workspace options to choose from which can be found at the top right in the Application Bar (Window > Application Bar). You can set up your panels and palettes the way you want, starting from the ‘Design’ workspace option, and save this workspace for future web work. Here is how I have set up things for when I work on a website design: I have the layers palette open, and I keep the other palettes collapsed. Sometimes, when space permits, I open them all. For designers who work both on print and web, I think it’s worthwhile to save a workspace for both, or for when you’re doing photo retouching. Set up a grid When you work a lot with Shape Layers like I do, it’s really helpful to enable the Grid (View > Show > Grid) in combination with Snap to Grid (View > Snap To > Grid). This way, your vector-based work will be pixel-sharp, as it will always snap to the grid, and so you don’t end up with blurry borders. To set up your preferred grid, go to Preferences > Guides, Grids and Slices. A good setting is to use ‘Gridline Every 10 pixels’ and ‘Subdivision 10’. You can switch it on and off at any time using the shortcut Cmd/Ctrl + ’. It might also help to turn on Smart Guides (View > Show > Smart Guides). Another important tip for making sure your Shape Layer boxes and other shapes are perfectly aligned to the pixel grid when you draw them is to enable Snap to Pixels. This option can be enabled in the Application bar in the Geometry options dropdown menu when you select one of the shape tools from the toolbox. Use Shape Layers To keep your design as flexible as possible, it’s a good thing to use Shape Layers wherever you can as they are scalable. I use them when I design for the iPhone. All my icons, buttons, backgrounds, illustrative graphics – they are all either Smart Objects placed from Illustrator, or Shape Layers. This way, the design is scalable for the retina display. Use Smart Objects Among the things I like a lot in Photoshop are Smart Objects. Smart Objects preserve an image’s source content with all its original characteristics, enabling you to perform non-destructive editing to the layer. For me, this is the ideal way of making my design flexible. For example, a lot of elements are created in Illustrator and are purely vector-based. Placing these elements in Photoshop as Smart Objects (via copy and paste, or dragging from Illustrator into Photoshop) will keep them vector-based and scalable at all times without loss of quality. Another way you could use Smart Objects is whenever you have repeating elements; for example, if you have a stream or list of repeating items. You could, for instance, create one, two or three different items (for the sake of randomness), make each one a Smart Object, and repeat them to create the list. Then, when you have to update, you need only change the Smart Object, and the update will be automatically applied in all its linked instances. Turning photos into Smart Objects before you resize them is also worth considering – you never know when you’ll need that same photo just a bit bigger. It keeps things more flexible, as you leave room to resize the image at a later stage. I use this in combination with the Smart Filters a lot, as it gives me such great flexibility. I usually use Smart Objects as well for the main sections of a web page, which are repeated across different pages of a site. So, for elements such as the header, footer and sidebar, it can be handy for bigger projects that are constantly evolving, where you have to create a lot of different pages in Photoshop. You could save a template page that has the main sections set up as Smart Objects, always in their latest version. Each time you need to create new page, you can start from that template file. If you need to update an existing page because the footer (or sidebar, or header) has been updated, you can drag the updated Smart Object into this page. Although, do I wish Photoshop made it possible to have Smart Objects live as separate files, which are then linked to my different pages. Then, whenever I update the Smart Object, the pages are automatically updated next time I open the file. This is how linked files work in InDesign and Illustrator when you place a external image. Use Layer Comps In some situations, using Layer Comps can come in handy. I try to use them when the design consists of different states; for example, if there are hidden and show states of certain content, such as when content is shown after clicking a certain button. It can be useful to create a Layer Comp for each state. So, when you switch between the two Layer Comps, you’re switching between the two states. It’s OK to move or hide content in each of these states, as well as apply different layer styles. I find this particularly useful when I need to save separate JPEG versions of each state to show to the client, instead of going over all the eye icons in the layers palette to turn the layers’ visibility on or off. Create a set of custom colour swatches I tend to use a distinct colour Swatches palette for each project I work on, by saving a separate Swatches palette in project’s folder (as an .ase file). You can do this through the palette’s dropdown menu, choosing Save Swatches for Exchange. Selecting this option gives you the flexibility to load this palette in other Adobe applications like Illustrator, InDesign or Fireworks. This way, you have the colours of any particular project at hand. I name each colour, using the hexadecimal values. Loading, saving or changing the view of the Swatches palette can be done via the palette’s dropdown menu. My preferred view is ‘Small List’ so I can see the hexadecimal values or other info I have added in the description. I do wish Photoshop had the option of loading several different Styles palettes, so I could have two or more of them open at the same time, but each as a separate palette. This would be handy whenever I switch to another project, as I’m usually working on more than one project in a day. At the moment, you can only add a set of colours to the palette that is already open, which is frustrating and inefficient if you need to update the palette of a project separately. Create a set of custom Styles Just like saving a Swatches palette, I also always save the styles I apply in the Styles palette as a separate Styles file in the project’s folder when I work on a website design or design for iPhone/iPad. During the design process, I can save it each time styles are added. Again, though, it would be great if we could have different Styles palettes open at the same time. Use a scratch file What I also find particularly timesaving, when working on a large project, is using some kind of scratch file. By that, I mean a file that has elements in place that you reuse a lot in the general design. Think of buttons, icons and so on, that you need in every page or screen design. This is great for both web design work and iPad/iPhone work. Use the slice tool This might not be something you think of at first, because you probably associate this way of working with ‘old-school’ table-based techniques. Still, you can apply your slice any way you want, keeping your way of working in mind. Just think about it for a second. If you use the slice tool, and you give each slice its proper filename, you don’t have to worry about it when you need to do updates on the slice or image. Photoshop will remember what the image of that slice is called and which ‘Save for Web’ export settings you’ve used for it. You can also export multiple slices all at once, or export only the ones you need using ‘Save selected slices’. I hope this list of optimization tips was useful, and that they will help you improve and enjoy your time in Photoshop. That is, until the ultimate web design application makes its appearance. Somebody is building this as we speak, right?",2010,Veerle Pieters,veerlepieters,2010-12-10T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/optimize-your-web-design-workflow/,process 236,Extreme Design,"Recently, I set out with twelve other designers and developers for a 19th century fortress on the Channel Island of Alderney. We were going to /dev/fort, a sort of band camp for geeks. Our cohort’s mission: to think up, build and finish something – without readily available internet access. Alderney runway, photo by Chris Govias Wait, no internet? Well, pretty much. As the creators of /dev/fort James Aylett and Mark Norman Francis put it: “Imagine a place with no distractions – no IM, no Twitter”. But also no way to quickly look up a design pattern, code sample or source material. Like packing for camping, /dev/fort means bringing everything you’ll need on your back or your hard drive: from long johns to your favourite icon set. We got to work the first night discussing ideas for what we wanted to build. By the time breakfast was cleared up the next morning, we’d settled on Russ’s idea to make the Apollo 13 (PDF) transcript accessible. Days two and three were spent collaboratively planning (KJ style) what features we wanted to build, and unravelling the larger UX challenges of the project. The next five days were spent building it. Within 36 hours of touchdown at Southampton Airport, we launched our creation: spacelog.org The weather was cold, the coal fire less than ideal, food and supplies a hike away, and the process lightning-fast. A week of designing under extreme circumstances called for an extreme process. Some of this was driven by James’s and Norm’s experience running these things, but a lot of it materialised while we were there – especially for our three-strong design team (myself, Gavin O’ Carroll and Chris Govias) who, though we knew each other, had never worked together as a group in this kind of scenario before. The outcome was a pretty spectacular process, with a some key takeaways useful for any small group trying to build something quickly. What it’s like inside the fort /dev/fort has the pressure and pace of a hack day without being a hack day – primarily, no workshops or interruptions‚ but also a different mentality. While hack days are typically developer-driven with a ‘hack first, design later (if at all)’ attitude, James was quick to tell the team to hold off from writing any code until we had a plan. This put a healthy pressure on the design and product folks to slash through the UX problems before we started building. While the fort had definitely more of a hack day feel, all of us were familiar with Agile methods, so we borrowed a few useful techniques such as morning stand-ups and an emphasis on teamwork. We cut some really good features to make our launch date, and chunked the work based on user goals, iterating as we went. What made this design process work? A golden ratio of teams My personal experience both professionally and in free-form situations like this, is a tendency to get/hire a designer. Leaders of businesses, founders of start-ups, organisers of events: one designer is not enough! Finding one ace-blooded designer who can ‘do everything’ will always result in bottleneck and burnout. Like the nuances between different development languages, design is a multifaceted discipline, and very few can claim to be equally strong in every aspect. Overlap in skill set will result in a stronger, more robust interface. More importantly, however, having lots of designers to go around meant that we all had the opportunity to pair with developers, polishing the details that don’t usually get polished. As soon as we launched, the public reception of the design and UX was overwhelmingly positive (proof!). But also, a lot of people asked us who the designer was, attributing it to one person. While it’s important to note that everyone in our team was multitalented (and could easily shift between roles, helping us all stay unblocked), the golden ratio James and Norm devised was two product/developer folks, three interaction designers and eight developers. photo by Ben Firshman Equality inside the fortress walls Something magical about the fort is how everyone leaves the outside world on the drawbridge. Job titles, professional status, Twitter followers, and so on. Like scout camp, a mutual respect and trust is expected of all the participants. Like extreme programming, extreme design requires us all to be equal partners in a collaborative team. I think this is especially worth noting for designers; our past is filled with the clear hierarchy of the traditional studio system which, however important for taste and style, seems less compatible with modern web/software development methods. Being equal doesn’t mean being the same, however. We established clear roles and teams for ourselves on the second day, deferring to that person when a decision needed to be made. As the interface coalesced, the designers and developers took ownership over certain parts to ensure the details got looked after, while staying open to ideas and revisions from the rest of the cohort. Create a space where everyone who enters is equal, but be sure to establish clear roles. Even if it’s just for a short while, the environment will be beneficial. photo by Ben Firshman Hang your heraldry from the rafters Forts and castles are full of lore: coats of arms; paintings of battles; suits of armour. It’s impossible not to be surrounded by these stories, words and ways of thinking. Like the whiteboards on the walls, putting organisational lore in your physical surroundings makes it impossible not to see. Ryan Alexander brought some of those static-cling whiteboard sheets which were quickly filled with use cases; IA; team roles; and, most importantly, a glossary. As soon as we started working on the project, we realised we needed to get clear on what certain words meant: what was a logline, a range, a phase, a key moment? Were the back-end people using these words in the same way design and product was? Quickly writing up a glossary of terms meant everyone was instantly speaking the same language. There was no “Ah, I misunderstood because in the data structure x means y” or, even worse, accidental seepage of technical language into the user interface copy. Put a glossary of your internal terminology somewhere big and fat on the wall. Stand around it and argue until you agree on what it says. Leave it up; don’t underestimate the power of ambient communication and physical reference. Plan more, download less While internet is forbidden inside the fort, we did go on downloading expeditions: NASA photography; code documentation; and so on. The project wouldn’t have been possible without a few trips to the web. We had two lists on the wall: groceries and supplies; internets – “loo roll; Tom Stafford photo“. This changed our usual design process, forcing us to plan carefully and think of what we needed ahead of time. Getting to the internet was a thirty-minute hike up a snow covered cliff to the town airport, so you really had to need it, too. The path to the internet For the visual design, especially, this resulted in more focus up front, and communication between the designers on what assets we required. It made us make decisions earlier and stick with them, creating less distraction and churn later in the process. Try it at home: unplug once you’ve got the things you need. As an artist, it’s easier to let your inner voice shine through if you’re not looking at other people’s work while creating. Social design Finally, our design team experimented with a collaborative approach to wireframing. Once we had collectively nailed down use cases, IA, user journeys and other critical artefacts, we tried a pairing approach. One person drew in Illustrator in real time as the other two articulated what to draw. (This would work equally well with two people, but with three it meant that one of us could jump up and consult the lore on the walls or clarify a technical detail.) The result: we ended up considering more alternatives and quickly rallying around one solution, and resolved difficult problems more quickly. At a certain stage we discovered it was more efficient for one person to take over – this happened around the time when the basic wireframes existed in Illustrator and we’d collectively run through the use cases, making sure that everything was accounted for in a broad sense. At this point, take a break, go have a beer, and give yourself a pat on the back. Put the files somewhere accessible so everyone can use them as their base, and divide up the more detailed UI problems, screens or journeys. At this level of detail it’s better to have your personal headspace. Gavin called this ‘social design’. Chatting and drawing in real time turned what was normally a rather solitary act into a very social process, with some really promising results. I’d tried something like this before with product or developer folks, and it can work – but there’s something really beautiful about switching places and everyone involved being equally quick at drawing. That’s not something you get with non-designers, and frequent swapping of the ‘driver’ and ‘observer’ roles is a key aspect to pairing. Tackle the forest collectively and the trees individually – it will make your framework more robust and your details more polished. Win/win. The return home Grateful to see a 3G signal on our phones again, our flight off the island was delayed, allowing for a flurry of domain name look-ups, Twitter catch-up, and e-mails to loved ones. A week in an isolated fort really made me appreciate continuous connectivity, but also just how unique some of these processes might be. You just never know what crazy place you might be designing from next.",2010,Hannah Donovan,hannahdonovan,2010-12-09T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/extreme-design/,process 237,Circles of Confusion,"Long before I worked on the web, I specialised in training photographers how to use large format, 5×4″ and 10×8″ view cameras – film cameras with swing and tilt movements, bellows and upside down, back to front images viewed on dim, ground glass screens. It’s been fifteen years since I clicked a shutter on a view camera, but some things have stayed with me from those years. In photography, even the best lenses don’t focus light onto a point (infinitely small in size) but onto ‘spots’ or circles in the ‘film/image plane’. These circles of light have dimensions, despite being microscopically small. They’re known as ‘circles of confusion’. As circles of light become larger, the more unsharp parts of a photograph appear. On the flip side, when circles are smaller, an image looks sharper and more in focus. This is the basis for photographic depth of field and with that comes the knowledge that no photograph can be perfectly focused, never truly sharp. Instead, photographs can only be ‘acceptably unsharp’. Acceptable unsharpness is now a concept that’s relevant to the work we make for the web, because often – unless we compromise – websites cannot look or be experienced exactly the same across browsers, devices or platforms. Accepting that fact, and learning to look upon these natural differences as creative opportunities instead of imperfections, can be tough. Deciding which aspects of a design must remain consistent and, therefore, possibly require more time, effort or compromises can be tougher. Circles of confusion can help us, our bosses and our customers make better, more informed decisions. Acceptable unsharpness Many clients still demand that every aspect of a design should be ‘sharp’ – that every user must see rounded boxes, gradients and shadows – without regard for the implications. I believe that this stems largely from the fact that they have previously been shown designs – and asked for sign-off – using static images. It’s also true that in the past, organisations have invested heavily in style guides which, while maybe still useful in offline media, have a strictness that often fails to allow for the flexibility that we need to create experiences that are appropriate to a user’s browser or device capabilities. We live in an era where web browsers and devices have wide-ranging capabilities, and websites can rarely look or be experienced exactly the same across them. Is a particular typeface vital to a user’s experience of a brand? How important are gradients or shadows? Are rounded corners really that necessary? These decisions determine how ‘sharp’ an element should be across browsers with different capabilities and, therefore, how much time, effort or extra code and images we devote to achieving consistency between them. To help our clients make those decisions, we can use circles of confusion. Circles of confusion Using circles of confusion involves plotting aspects of a visual design into a series of concentric circles, starting at the centre with elements that demand the most consistency. Then, work outwards, placing elements in order of their priority so that they become progressively ‘softer’, more defocused as they’re plotted into outer rings. If layout and typography must remain consistent, place them in the centre circle as they’re aspects of a design that must remain ‘sharp’. When gradients are important – but not vital – to a user’s experience of a brand, plot them close to, but not in the centre. This makes everyone aware that to achieve consistency, you’ll need to carve out extra images for browsers that don’t support CSS gradients. If achieving rounded corners or shadows in all browsers isn’t important, place them into outer circles, allowing you to save time by not creating images or employing JavaScript workarounds. I’ve found plotting aspects of a visual design into circles of confusion is a useful technique when explaining the natural differences between browsers to clients. It sets more realistic expectations and creates an environment for more meaningful discussions about progressive and emerging technologies. Best of all, it enables everyone to make better and more informed decisions about design implementation priorities. Involving clients allows the implications of the decisions they make more transparent. For me, this has sometimes meant shifting deadlines or it has allowed me to more easily justify an increase in fees. Most important of all, circles of confusion have helped the people that I work with move beyond yesterday’s one-size-fits-all thinking about visual design, towards accepting the rich diversity of today’s web.",2010,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2010-12-23T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/circles-of-confusion/,process 259,Designing Your Future,"I’ve had the pleasure of working for a variety of clients – both large and small – over the last 25 years. In addition to my work as a design consultant, I’ve worked as an educator, leading the Interaction Design team at Belfast School of Art, for the last 15 years. In July, 2018 – frustrated with formal education, not least the ever-present hand of ‘austerity’ that has ravaged universities in the UK for almost a decade – I formally reduced my teaching commitment, moving from a full-time role to a half-time role. Making the move from a (healthy!) monthly salary towards a position as a freelance consultant is not without its challenges: one month your salary’s arriving in your bank account (and promptly disappearing to pay all of your bills); the next month, that salary’s been drastically reduced. That can be a shock to the system. In this article, I’ll explore the challenges encountered when taking a life-changing leap of faith. To help you confront ‘the fear’ – the nervousness, the sleepless nights and the ever-present worry about paying the bills – I’ll provide a set of tools that will enable you to take a leap of faith and pursue what deep down drives you. In short: I’ll bare my soul and share everything I’m currently working on to – once and for all – make a final bid for freedom. This isn’t easy. I’m sharing my innermost hopes and aspirations, and I might open myself up to ridicule, but I believe that by doing so, I might help others, by providing them with tools to help them make their own leap of faith. The power of visualisation As designers we have skills that we use day in, day out to imagine future possibilities, which we then give form. In our day-to-day work, we use those abilities to design products and services, but I also believe we can use those skills to design something every bit as important: ourselves. In this article I’ll explore three tools that you can use to design your future: Product DNA Artefacts From the Future Tomorrow Clients Each of these tools is designed to help you visualise your future. By giving that future form, and providing a concrete goal to aim for, you put the pieces in place to make that future a reality. Brian Eno – the noted musician, producer and thinker – states, “Humans are capable of a unique trick: creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in their minds.” Eno helpfully provides a powerful example: When Martin Luther King said, “I have a dream,” he was inviting others to dream that dream with him. Once a dream becomes shared in that way, current reality gets measured against it and then modified towards it. The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward. By this process it starts to come true. The act of imagining something makes it real. When you imagine your future – designing an alternate, imagined reality in your mind – you begin the process of making that future real. Product DNA The first tool, which I use regularly – for myself and for client work – is a tool called Product DNA. The intention of this tool is to identify beacons from which you can learn, helping you to visualise your future. We all have heroes – individuals or organisations – that we look up to. Ask yourself, “Who are your heroes?” If you had to pick three, who would they be and what could you learn from them? (You probably have more than three, but distilling down to three is an exercise in itself.) Earlier this year, when I was putting the pieces in place for a change in career direction, I started with my heroes. I chose three individuals that inspired me: Alan Moore: the author of ‘Do Design: Why Beauty is Key to Everything’; Mark Shayler: the founder of Ape, a strategic consultancy; and Seth Godin: a writer and educator I’ve admired and followed for many years. Looking at each of these individuals, I ‘borrowed’ a little DNA from each of them. That DNA helped me to paint a picture of the kind of work I wanted to do and the direction I wanted to travel. Moore’s book - ‘Do Design’ – had a powerful influence on me, but the primary inspiration I drew from him was the sense of gravitas he conveyed in his work. Moore’s mission is an important one and he conveys that with an appropriate weight of expression. Shayler’s work appealed to me for its focus on equipping big businesses with a startup mindset. As he puts it: “I believe that you can do the things that you do better.” That sense – of helping others to be their best selves – appealed to me. Finally, the words Godin uses to describe himself – “An Author, Entrepreneur and Most of All, a Teacher” – resonated with me. The way he positions himself, as, “most of all, a teacher,” gave me the belief I needed that I could work as an educator, but beyond the ivory tower of academia. I’ve been exploring each of these individuals in depth, learning from them and applying what I learn to my practice. They don’t all know it, but they are all ‘mentors from afar’. In a moment of serendipity – and largely, I believe, because I’d used this tool to explore his work – I was recently invited by Alan Moore to help him develop a leadership programme built around his book. The key lesson here is that not only has this exercise helped me to design my future and give it tangible form, it’s also led to a fantastic opportunity to work with Alan Moore, a thinker who I respect greatly. Artefacts From the Future The second tool, which I also use regularly, is a tool called ‘Artefacts From the Future’. These artefacts – especially when designed as ‘finished’ pieces – are useful for creating provocations to help you see the future more clearly. ‘Artefacts From the Future’ can take many forms: they might be imagined magazine articles, news items, or other manifestations of success. By imagining these end points and giving them form, you clarify your goals, establishing something concrete to aim for. Earlier this year I revisited this tool to create a provocation for myself. I’d just finished Alla Kholmatova’s excellent book on ‘Design Systems’, which I would recommend highly. The book wasn’t just filled with valuable insights, it was also beautifully designed. Once I’d finished reading Kholmatova’s book, I started thinking: “Perhaps it’s time for me to write a new book?” Using the magic of ‘Inspect Element’, I created a fictitious page for a new book I wanted to write: ‘Designing Delightful Experiences’. I wrote a description for the book, considering how I’d pitch it. This imagined page was just what I needed to paint a picture in my mind of a possible new book. I contacted the team at Smashing Magazine and pitched the idea to them. I’m happy to say that I’m now working on that book, which is due to be published in 2019. Without this fictional promotional page from the future, the book would have remained as an idea – loosely defined – rolling around my mind. By spending some time, turning that idea into something ‘real’, I had everything I needed to tell the story of the book, sharing it with the publishing team at Smashing Magazine. Of course, they could have politely informed me that they weren’t interested, but I’d have lost nothing – truly – in the process. As designers, creating these imaginary ‘Artefacts From the Future’ is firmly within our grasp. All we need to do is let go a little and allow our imaginations to wander. In my experience, working with clients and – to a lesser extent, students – it’s the ‘letting go’ part that’s the hard part. It can be difficult to let down your guard and share a weighty goal, but I’d encourage you to do so. At the end of the day, you have nothing to lose. The key lesson here is that your ‘Artefacts From the Future’ will focus your mind. They’ll transform your unformed ideas into ‘tangible evidence’ of future possibilities, which you can use as discussion points and provocations, helping you to shape your future reality. Tomorrow Clients The third tool, which I developed more recently, is a tool called ‘Tomorrow Clients’. This tool is designed to help you identify a list of clients that you aspire to work with. The goal is to pinpoint who you would like to work with – in an ideal world – and define how you’d position yourself to win them over. Again, this involves ‘letting go’ and allowing your mind to imagine the possibilities, asking, “What if…?” Before I embarked upon the design of my new website, I put together a ‘soul searching’ document that acted as a focal point for my thinking. I contacted a number of designers for a second opinion to see if my thinking was sound. One of my graduates – Chris Armstrong, the founder of Niice – replied with the following: “Might it be useful to consider five to ten companies you’d love to work for, and consider how you’d pitch yourself to them?” This was just the provocation I needed. To add a little focus, I reduced the list to three, asking: “Who would my top three clients be?” By distilling the list down I focused on who I’d like to work for and how I’d position myself to entice them to work with me. My list included: IDEO, Adobe and IBM. All are companies I admire and I believed each would be interesting to work for. This exercise might – on the surface – appear a little like indulging in fantasy, but I believe it helps you to clarify exactly what it is you are good at and, just as importantly, put that in to words. For each company, I wrote a short pitch outlining why I admired them and what I thought I could add to their already existing skillset. Focusing first on Adobe, I suggested establishing an emphasis on educational resources, designed to help those using Adobe’s creative tools to get the most out of them. A few weeks ago, I signed a contract with the team working on Adobe XD to create a series of ‘capsule courses’, focused on UX design. The first of these courses – exploring UI design – will be out in 2019. I believe that Armstrong’s provocation – asking me to shift my focus from clients I have worked for in the past to clients I aspire to work for in the future – made all the difference. The key lesson here is that this exercise encouraged me to raise the bar and look to the future, not the past. In short, it enabled me to proactively design my future. In closing… I hope these three tools will prove a welcome addition to your toolset. I use them when working with clients, I also use them when working with myself. I passionately believe that you can design your future. I also firmly believe that you’re more likely to make that future a reality if you put some thought into defining what it looks like. As I say to my students and the clients I work with: It’s not enough to want to be a success, the word ‘success’ is too vague to be a destination. A far better approach is to define exactly what success looks like. The secret is to visualise your future in as much detail as possible. With that future vision in hand as a map, you give yourself something tangible to translate into a reality.",2018,Christopher Murphy,christophermurphy,2018-12-15T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2018/designing-your-future/,process 261,Surviving—and Thriving—as a Remote Worker,"Remote work is hot right now. Many people even say that remote work is the future. Why should a company limit itself to hiring from a specific geographic location when there’s an entire world of talent out there? I’ve been working remotely, full-time, for five and a half years. I’ve reached the point where I can’t even fathom working in an office. The idea of having to wake up at a specific time and commute into an office, work for eight hours, and then commute home, feels weirdly anachronistic. I’ve grown attached to my current level of freedom and flexibility. However, it took me a lot of trial and error to reach success as a remote worker — and sometimes even now, I slip up. Working remotely requires a great amount of discipline, independence, and communication. It can feel isolating, especially if you lean towards the more extroverted side of the social spectrum. Remote working isn’t for everyone, but most people, with enough effort, can make it work — or even thrive. Here’s what I’ve learned in over five years of working remotely. Experiment with your environment As a remote worker, you have almost unprecedented control of your environment. You can often control the specific desk and chair you use, how you accessorize your home office space — whether that’s a dedicated office, a corner of your bedroom, or your kitchen table. (Ideally, not your couch… but I’ve been there.) Hate fluorescent lights? Change your lightbulbs. Cover your work area in potted plants. Put up blackout curtains and work in the dark like a vampire. Whatever makes you feel most comfortable and productive, and doesn’t completely destroy your eyesight. Working remotely doesn’t always mean working from home. If you don’t have a specific reason you need to work from home (like specialized equipment), try working from other environments (which is especially helpful it you have roommates, or children). Cafes are the quintessential remote worker hotspot, but don’t just limit yourself to your favorite local haunt. More cities worldwide are embracing co-working spaces, where you can rent either a roaming spot or a dedicated desk. If you’re a social person, this is a great way to build community in your work environment. Most have phone rooms, so you can still take calls. Co-working spaces can be expensive, and not everyone has either the extra income, or work-provided stipend, to work from one. Local libraries are also a great work location. They’re quiet, usually have free wi-fi, and you have the added bonus of being able to check out books after work instead of, ahem, spending too much money on Kindle books. (I know most libraries let you check out ebooks, but reader, I am impulsive and impatient person. When I want a book now, I mean now.) Just be polite — make sure your headphones don’t leak, and don’t work from a library if you have a day full of calls. Remember, too, that you don’t have to stay in the same spot all day. It’s okay to go out for lunch and then resume work from a different location. If you find yourself getting restless, take a walk. Wash some dishes while you mull through a problem. Don’t force yourself to sit at your desk for eight hours if that doesn’t work for you. Set boundaries If you’re a workaholic, working remotely can be a challenge. It’s incredibly easy to just… work. All the time. My work computer is almost always with me. If I remember at 11pm that I wanted to do something, there’s nothing but my own willpower keeping me from opening up my laptop and working until 2am. Some people are naturally disciplined. Some have discipline instilled in them as children. And then some, like me, are undisciplined disasters that realize as adults that wow, I guess it’s time to figure this out, eh? Learning how to set boundaries is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned working remotely. (And honestly, it’s something I still struggle with). For a long time, I had a bad habit of waking up, checking my phone for new Slack messages, seeing something I need to react to, and then rolling over to my couch with my computer. Suddenly, it’s noon, I’m unwashed, unfed, starting to get a headache, and wondering why suddenly I hate all of my coworkers. Even when I finally tear myself from my computer to shower, get dressed, and eat, the damage is done. The rest of my day is pretty much shot. I recently had a conversation with a coworker, in which she remarked that she used to fill her empty time with work. Wake up? Scroll through Slack and email before getting out of bed. Waiting in line for lunch? Check work. Hanging out on her couch in the evening? You get the drift. She was only able to break the habit after taking a three month sabbatical, where she had no contact with work the entire time. I too had just returned from my own sabbatical. I took her advice, and no longer have work Slack on my phone, unless I need it for an event. After the event, I delete it. I also find it too easy to fill empty time with work. Now, I might wake up and procrastinate by scrolling through other apps, but I can’t get sucked into work before I’m even dressed. I’ve gotten pretty good at forbidding myself from working until I’m ready, but building any new habit requires intentionality. Something else I experimented with for a while was creating a separate account on my computer for social tasks, so if I wanted to hang out on my computer in the evening, I wouldn’t get distracted by work. It worked exceptionally well. The only problems I encountered were technical, like app licensing and some of my work proxy configurations. I’ve heard other coworkers have figured out ways to work through these technical issues, so I’m hoping to give it another try soon. You might noticed that a lot of these ideas are just hacks for making myself not work outside of my designated work times. It’s true! If you’re a more disciplined person, you might not need any of these coping mechanisms. If you’re struggling, finding ways to subvert your own bad habits can be the difference between thriving or burning out. Create intentional transition time I know it’s a stereotype that people who work from home stay in their pajamas all day, but… sometimes, it’s very easy to do. I’ve found that in order to reach peak focus, I need to create intentional transition time. The most obvious step is changing into different clothing than I woke up in. Ideally, this means getting dressed in real human clothing. I might decide that it’s cold and gross out and I want to work in joggers and a hoody all day, but first, I need to change out of my pajamas, put on a bra, and then succumb to the lure of comfort. I’ve found it helpful to take similar steps at the end of my day. If I’ve spent the day working from home, I try to end my day with something that occupies my body, while letting my mind unwind. Often, this is doing some light cleaning or dinner prep. If I try to go straight into another mentally heavy task without allowing myself this transition time, I find it hard to context switch. This is another reason working from outside your home is advantageous. Commutes, even if it’s a ten minute walk down the road, are great transition time. Lunch is a great transition time. You can decompress between tasks by going out for lunch, or cooking and eating lunch in your kitchen — not next to your computer. Embrace async If you’re used to working in an office, you’ve probably gotten pretty used to being able to pop over to a colleague’s desk if you need to ask a question. They’re pretty much forced to engage with you at that point. When you’re working remotely, your coworkers might not be in the same timezone as you. They might take an hour to finish up a task before responding to you, or you might not get an answer for your entire day because dangit Gary’s in Australia and it’s 3am there right now. For many remote workers, that’s part of the package. When you’re not co-located, you have to build up some patience and tolerance around waiting. You need to intentionally plan extra time into your schedule for waiting on answers. Asynchronous communication is great. Not everyone can be present for every meeting or office conversation — and the same goes for working remotely. However, when you’re remote, you can read through your intranet messages later or scroll back a couple hours in Slack. My company has a bunch of internal blogs (“p2s”) where we record major decisions and hold asynchronous conversations. I feel like even if I missed a meeting, or something big happened while I was asleep, I can catch up later. We have a phrase — “p2 or it didn’t happen.” Working remotely has made me a better communicator largely because I’ve gotten into the habit of making written updates. I’ve also trained myself to wait before responding, which allows me to distance myself from what could potentially be an emotional reaction. (On the internet, no one can see you making that face.) Having the added space that comes from not being in the same physical location with somebody else creates an opportunity to rein myself in and take the time to craft an appropriate response, without having the pressure of needing to reply right meow. Lean into it! (That said, if you’re stuck, sometimes the best course of action is to hop on a video call with someone and hash out the details. Use the tools most appropriate for the problem. They invented Zoom for a reason.) Seek out social opportunities Even introverts can feel lonely or isolated. When you work remotely, there isn’t a built-in community you’re surrounded by every day. You have to intentionally seek out social opportunities that an office would normally provide. I have a couple private Slack channels where I can joke around with work friends. Having that kind of safe space to socialize helps me feel less alone. (And, if the channels get too noisy, I can mute them for a couple hours.) Every now and then, I’ll also hop on a video call with some work friends and just hang out for a little while. It feels great to actually see someone laugh. If you work from a co-working space, that space likely has events. My co-working space hosts social hours, holiday parties, and sometimes even lunch-and-learns. These events are great opportunities for making new friends and forging professional connections outside of work. If you don’t have access to a co-working space, your town or city likely has meetups. Create a Meetup.com account and search for something that piques your interest. If you’ve been stuck inside your house for days, heads-down on a hard deadline, celebrate by getting out of the house. Get coffee or drinks with friends. See a show. Go to a religious service. Take a cooking class. Try yoga. Find excuses to be around someone other than your cats. When you can’t fall back on your work to provide community, you need to build your own. These are tips that I’ve found help me, but not everyone works the same way. Remember that it’s okay to experiment — just because you’ve worked one way, doesn’t mean that’s the best way for you. Check in with yourself every now and then. Are you happy with your work environment? Are you feeling lonely, down, or exhausted? Try switching up your routine for a couple weeks and jot down how you feel at the end of each day. Look for patterns. You deserve to have a comfortable and productive work environment! Hope to see you all online soon 🙌",2018,Mel Choyce,melchoyce,2018-12-09T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2018/thriving-as-a-remote-worker/,process 265,Designing for Perfection,"Hello, 24 ways readers. I hope you’re having a nice run up to Christmas. This holiday season I thought I’d share a few things with you that have been particularly meaningful in my work over the last year or so. They may not make you wet your santa pants with new-idea-excitement, but in the context of 24 ways I think they may serve as a nice lesson and a useful seasonal reminder going into the New Year. Enjoy! Story Despite being a largely scruffy individual for most of my life, I had some interesting experiences regarding kitchen tidiness during my third year at university. As a kid, my room had always been pretty tidy, and as a teenager I used to enjoy reordering my CDs regularly (by artist, label, colour of spine – you get the picture); but by the time I was twenty I’d left most of these traits behind me, mainly due to a fear that I was turning into my mother. The one remaining anally retentive part of me that remained however, lived in the kitchen. For some reason, I couldn’t let all the pots and crockery be strewn across the surfaces after cooking. I didn’t care if they were washed up or not, I just needed them tidied. The surfaces needed to be continually free of grated cheese, breadcrumbs and ketchup spills. Also, the sink always needed to be clear. Always. Even a lone teabag, discarded casually into the sink hours previously, would give me what I used to refer to as “kitchen rage”. Whilst this behaviour didn’t cause any direct conflicts, it did often create weirdness. We would be happily enjoying a few pre-night out beverages (Jack Daniels and Red Bull – nice) when I’d notice the state of the kitchen following our round of customized 49p Tesco pizzas. Kitchen rage would ensue, and I’d have to blitz the kitchen, which usually resulted in me having to catch everyone up at the bar afterwards. One evening as we were just about to go out, I was stood there, in front of the shithole that was our kitchen with the intention of cleaning it all up, when a realization popped into my head. In hindsight, it was a pretty obvious one, but it went along the lines of “What the fuck are you doing? Sort your life out”. I sodded the washing up, rolled out with my friends, and had a badass evening of partying. After this point, whenever I got the urge to clean the kitchen, I repeated that same realization in my head. My tidy kitchen obsession strived for a level of perfection that my housemates just didn’t share, so it was ultimately pointless. It didn’t make me feel that good, either; it was like having a cigarette after months of restraint – initially joyous but soon slightly shameful. Lesson Now, around seven years later, I’m a designer on the web and my life is chaotic. It features no planning for significant events, no day-to-day routine or structure, no thought about anything remotely long-term, and I like to think I do precisely what I want. It seems my days at striving for something ordered and tidy, in most parts of my life, are long gone. For much of my time as a designer, though, it’s been a different story. I relished industry-standard terms such as ‘pixel perfection’ and ‘polished PSDs’, taking them into my stride as I strove to design everything that was put on my plate perfectly. Even down to grids and guidelines, all design elements would be painstakingly aligned to a five-pixel grid. There were no seven-pixel margins or gutters to be found in my design work, that’s for sure. I put too much pride and, inadvertently, too much ego into my work. Things took too long to create, and because of the amount of effort put into the work, significant changes, based on client feedback for example, were more difficult to stomach. Over the last eighteen months I’ve made a conscious effort to change the way I approach designing for the web. Working on applications has probably helped with this; they seem to have a more organic development than rigid content-based websites. Mostly though, a realization similar to my kitchen rage one came about when I had to make significant changes to a painstakingly crafted Photoshop document I had created. The changes shouldn’t have been difficult or time-consuming to implement, but they were turning out to be. One day, frustrated with how long it was taking, the refrain “What the fuck are you doing? Sort your life out” again entered my head. I blazed the rest of the work, not rushing or doing scruffy work, but just not adhering to the insane levels of perfection I had previously set for myself. When the changes were presented, everything went down swimmingly. The client in this case (and I’d argue most cases) cared more about the ideas than the perfect way in which they had been implemented. I had taken myself and my ego out of the creative side of the work, and it had been easier to succeed. Argument I know many other designers who work on the web share such aspirations to perfection. I think it’s a common part of the designer DNA, but I’m not sure it really has a place when designing for the web. First, there’s the environment. The landscape in which we work is continually shifting and evolving. The inherent imperfection of the medium itself makes attempts to create perfect work for it redundant. Whether you consider it a positive or negative point, the products we make are never complete. They’re always scaling and changing. Like many aspects of web design, this striving for perfection in our design work is a way of thinking borrowed from other design industries where it’s more suited. A physical product cannot be as easily altered or developed after it has been manufactured, so the need to achieve perfection when designing is more apt. Designers who can relate to anything I’ve talked about can easily let go of that anal retentiveness if given the right reasons to do so. Striving for perfection isn’t a bad thing, but I simply don’t think it can be achieved in such a fast-moving, unique industry. I think design for the web works better when it begins with quick and simple, followed by iteration and polish over time. To let go of ego and to publish something that you’re not completely happy with is perhaps the most difficult part of the job for designers like us, but it’s followed by a satisfaction of knowing your product is alive and breathing, whereas others (possibly even competitors) may still be sitting in Photoshop, agonizing over whether a margin should be twenty or forty pixels. I keep telling myself to stop sitting on those two hundred ideas that are all half-finished. Publish them, clean them up and iterate over time. I’ve been telling myself this for months and, hopefully, writing this article will give me the kick in the arse I need. Hopefully, it will also give someone else the same kick.",2011,Greg Wood,gregwood,2011-12-17T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/designing-for-perfection/,process 272,Crafting the Front-end,"Much has been spoken and written recently about the virtues of craftsmanship in the context of web design and development. It seems that we as fabricators of the web are finally tiring of seeking out parallels between ourselves and architects, and are turning instead to the fabled specialist artisans. Identifying oneself as a craftsman or craftswoman (let’s just say craftsperson from here onward) will likely be a trend of early 2012. In this pre-emptive strike, I’d like to expound on this movement as I feel it pertains to front-end development, and encourage care and understanding of the true qualities of craftsmanship (craftspersonship). The core values I’ll begin by defining craftspersonship. What distinguishes a craftsperson from a technician? Dictionaries tend to define a craftsperson as one who possesses great skill in a chosen field. The badge of a craftsperson for me, though, is a very special label that should be revered and used sparingly, only where it is truly deserved. A genuine craftsperson encompasses a few other key traits, far beyond raw skill, each of which must be learned and mastered. A craftsperson has: An appreciation of good work, in both the work of others and their own. And not just good as in ‘hey, that’s pretty neat’, I mean a goodness like a shining purity – the kind of good that feels right when you see it. A belief in quality at every level: every facet of the craftsperson’s product is as crucial as any other, without exception, even those normally hidden from view. Vision: an ability to visualize their path ahead, pre-empting the obstacles that may be encountered to plan a route around them. A preference for simplicity: an almost Bauhausesque devotion to undecorated functionality, with no unjustifiable parts included. Sincerity: producing work that speaks directly to its purpose with flawless clarity. Only when you become a custodian of such values in your work can you consider calling yourself a craftsperson. Now let’s take a look at some steps we front-end developers can take on our journey of enlightenment toward craftspersonhood. Speaking of the craftsman’s journey, be sure to watch out for the video of The Standardistas’ stellar talk at the Build 2011 conference titled The Journey, which should be online sometime soon. Building your own toolbox My grandfather was a carpenter and trained as a young apprentice under a master. After observing and practising the many foundation theories, principles and techniques of carpentry, he was tasked with creating his own set of woodworking tools, which he would use and maintain throughout his career. By going through the process of having to create his own tools, he would be connected at the most direct level with every piece of wood he touched, his tools being his own creations and extensions of his own skilled hands. The depth of his knowledge of these tools must have surpassed the intricate as he fathered, used, cleaned and repaired them, day in and day out over many years. And so it should be, ideally, with all crafts. We must understand our tools right down to the most fundamental level. I firmly believe that a level of true craftsmanship cannot be reached while there exists a layer that remains not wholly understood between a creator and his canvas. Of course, our tools as front-end developers are somewhat more complex than those of other crafts – it may seem reasonable to require that a carpenter create his or her own set of chisels, but somewhat less so to ask a front-end developer to code their own CSS preprocessor, or design their own computer. However, it is still vitally important that you understand how your tools work. This is particularly critical when it comes to things like preprocessors, libraries and frameworks which aim to save you time by automating common processes and functions. For the most part, anything that saves you time is a Good Thing™ but it cannot be stressed enough that using tools like these in earnest should be avoided until you understand exactly what they are doing for you (and, to an extent, how they are doing it). In particular, you must understand any drawbacks to using your tools, and any shortcuts they may be taking on your behalf. I’m not suggesting that you steer clear of paid work until you’ve studied each of jQuery’s 9,266 lines of JavaScript source code but, all levity aside, it will further you on your journey to look at interesting or relevant bits of jQuery, and any other libraries you might want to use. Such libraries often directly link to corresponding sections of their source code on sites like GitHub from their official documentation. Better yet, they’re almost always written in high level languages (easy to read), so there’s no excuse not to don your pith helmet and go on something of an exploration. Any kind of tangential learning like this will drive you further toward becoming a true craftsperson, so keep an open mind and always be ready to step out of your comfort zone. Downtime and tool honing With any craft, it is essential to keep your tools in good condition, and a good idea to stay up-to-date with the latest equipment. This is especially true on the web, which, as we like to tell anyone who is still awake more than a minute after asking what it is that we do, advances at a phenomenal pace. A tool or technique that could be considered best practice this week might be the subject of haughty derision in a comment thread within six months. I have little doubt that you already spend a chunk of time each day keeping up with the latest material from our industry’s finest Interblogs and Twittertubes, but do you honestly put aside time to collect bookmarks and code snippets from things you read into a slowly evolving toolbox? At @media in 2009, Simon Collison delivered a candid talk on his ‘Ultimate Package’. Those of us who didn’t flee the room anticipating a newfound and unwelcome intimacy with the contents of his trousers were shown how he maintained his own toolkit – a collection of files and folders all set up and ready to go for a new project. By maintaining a toolkit in this way, he has consistency across projects and a dependable base upon which to learn and improve. The assembly and maintenance of such a personalized and familiar toolkit is probably as close as we will get to emulating the tool making stage of more traditional craft trades. Keep a master copy of your toolkit somewhere safe, making copies of it for new projects. When you learn of a way in which part of it can be improved, make changes to the master copy. Simplicity through modularity I believe that the user interfaces of all web applications should be thought of as being made up primarily of modular components. Modules in this context are patterns in design that appear repeatedly throughout the app. These can be small collections of elements, like a user profile summary box (profile picture, username, meta data), as well as atomic elements such as headings and list items. Well-crafted front-end architectures have the ability to support this kind of repeating pattern as modules, with as close to no repetition of CSS (or JavaScript) as possible, and as close to no variations in HTML between instances as possible. One of the most fundamental and well known tenets of software engineering is the DRY rule – don’t repeat yourself. It requires that “every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.” As craftspeople, we must hold this rule dear and apply it to the modules we have identified in our site designs. The moment you commit a second style definition for a module, the quality of your output (the front-end code) takes a huge hit. There should only ever be one base style definition for each distinct module or component. Keep these in a separate, sacred place in your CSS. I use a _modules.scss Sass include file, imported near the top of my main CSS files. Be sure, of course, to avoid making changes to this file lightly, as the smallest adjustment can affect multiple pages (hint: keep a structure list of which modules are used on which pages). Avoid the inevitable temptation to duplicate code late in the project. Sticking to this rule becomes more important the more complex the codebase becomes. If you can stick to this rule, using sensible class names and consistent HTML, you can reach a joyous, self-fulfilling plateau stage in each project where you are assembling each interface from your own set of carefully crafted building blocks. Old school markup Let’s take a step back. Before we fret about creating a divinely pure modular CSS framework, we need to know the site’s design and what it is made of. The best way to gain this knowledge is to go old school. Print out every comp, mockup, wireframe, sketch or whatever you have. If there are sections of pages that are hidden until some user action takes place, or if the page has multiple states, be sure that you have everything that could become visible to the user on paper. Once you have your wedge of paper designs, lay out all the pages on the floor, or stick them to the wall if you can, arranging them logically according to the site hierarchy, by user journey, or whatever guidelines make most sense to you. Once you have the site laid out before you, study it for a while, familiarizing yourself with every part of every interface. This will eliminate nasty surprises late in the project when you realize you’ve duplicated something, or left an interface on the drawing board altogether. Now that you know the site like it’s your best friend, get out your pens or pencils of choice and attack it. Mark it up like there’s no tomorrow. Pretend you’re a spy trying to identify communications from an enemy network hiding their messages in newspapers. Look for patterns and similarities, drawing circles around them. These are your modules. Start also highlighting the differences between each instance of these modules, working out which is the most basic or common type that will become the base definition from which all other representations are extended. This simple but empowering exercise will equip you for your task of actually crafting, instead of just building, the front-end. Without the knowledge gained from this kind of research phase, you will be blundering forward, improvising as best you can, but ultimately making quality-compromising mistakes that could have been avoided. For more on this theme, read Anna Debenham’s Front-end Style Guides which recommends a similar process, and the sublime idea of extending this into a guide to refer to during development and beyond. Design homogeneity Moving forward again, you now have your modules defined and things are looking good. I mentioned that many instances of these modules will carry minor differences. These differences must be given significant thinking time, and discussion time with your designer(s). It should be common knowledge by now that successful software projects are not the product of distinct design and build phases with little or no bidirectional feedback. The crucial nature of the designer-developer relationship has been covered in depth this year by Paul Robert Lloyd, and a joint effort from both teams throughout the project lifecycle is pivotal to your ability to craft and ship successful products. This relationship comes into play when you’re well into the development of the site, and you start noticing these differences between instances of modules (they’ll start to stand out very clearly to you and your carefully regimented modular CSS system). Before you start overriding your base styles, question the differences with the designer to work out why they exist. Perhaps they are required and are important to their context, but perhaps they were oversights from earlier design revisions, or simple mistakes. The craftsperson’s gland As you grow towards the levels of expertise and experience where you can proudly and honestly consider yourself a craftsperson, you will find that you steadily develop what initially feels like a kind of sixth sense. I think of it more as a new hormonal gland, secreting into your bloodstream a powerful messenger chemical that can either reward or punish your brain. This gland is connected directly to your core understanding of what good quality work looks and feels like, an understanding that itself improves with experience. This gland will make itself known to you in two ways. First, when you solve a problem in a beautifully elegant way with clean and unobtrusive code that looks good and just feels right, your craftsperson’s gland will ooze something delicious that makes your brain and soul glow from the inside out. You will beam triumphantly at the succinct lines of code on your computer display before bounding outside with a spring in your step to swim up glittering rainbows and kiss soft fluffy puppies. The second way that you may become aware of your craftsperson’s gland, though, is somewhat less pleasurable. In an alternate reality, your parallel self is faced with the same problem, but decides to take a shortcut and get around it by some dubious means – the kind of technical method that the words hack, kludge and bodge are reserved for. As soon as you have done this, or even as you are doing it, your craftsperson’s gland will damn well let you know that you took the wrong fork in the road. As your craftsperson’s gland begins to secrete a toxic pus, you will at first become entranced into a vacant stare at the monstrous mess you are considering unleashing upon your site’s visitors, before writhing in the horrible agony of an itch that can never be scratched, and a feeling of being coated with the devil’s own deep and penetrating filth that no shower will ever cleanse. Perhaps I exaggerate slightly, but it is no overstatement to suggest that you will find yourself being guided by proverbial angels and demons perched on opposite shoulders, or a whispering voice inside your head. If you harness this sense, sharpening it as if it were another tool in your kit and letting it guide or at least advise your decision making, you will transcend the rocky realm of random trial and error when faced with problems, and tend toward the right answers instinctively. This gland can also empower your ability to assess your own work, becoming a judge before whom all your work is cross-examined. A good craftsperson regularly takes a step back from their work, and questions every facet of their product for its precise alignment with their core values of quality and sincerity, and even the very necessity of each component. The wrapping By now, you may be thinking that I take this kind of thing far too seriously, but to terrify you further, I haven’t even shared the half of it. Hopefully, though, this gives you an idea of the kind of levels of professionalism and dedication that it should take to get you on your way to becoming a craftsperson. It’s a level of accomplishment and ability toward which we all should strive, both for our personal fulfilment and the betterment of the products we use daily. I look forward to seeing your finely crafted work throughout 2012.",2011,Ben Bodien,benbodien,2011-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/crafting-the-front-end/,process 282,Front-end Style Guides,"We all know that feeling: some time after we launch a site, new designers and developers come in and make adjustments. They add styles that don’t fit with the content, use typefaces that make us cringe, or chuck in bloated code. But if we didn’t leave behind any documentation, we can’t really blame them for messing up our hard work. To counter this problem, graphic designers are often commissioned to produce style guides as part of a rebranding project. A style guide provides details such as how much white space should surround a logo, which typefaces and colours a brand uses, along with when and where it is appropriate to use them. Design guidelines Some design guidelines focus on visual branding and identity. The UK National Health Service (NHS) refer to theirs as “brand guidelines”. They help any designer create something such as a trustworthy leaflet for an NHS doctor’s surgery. Similarly, Transport for London’s “design standards” ensure the correct logos and typefaces are used in communications, and that they comply with the Disability Discrimination Act. Some guidelines go further, encompassing a whole experience, from the visual branding to the messaging, and the icon sets used. The BBC calls its guidelines a “Global Experience Language” or GEL. It’s essential for maintaining coherence across multiple sites under the same BBC brand. The BBC’s Global Experience Language. Design guidelines may be brief and loose to promote creativity, like Mozilla’s “brand toolkit”, or be precise and run to many pages to encourage greater conformity, such as Apple’s “Human Interface Guidelines”. Whatever name or form they’re given, documenting reusable styles is invaluable when maintaining a brand identity over time, particularly when more than one person (who may not be a designer) is producing material. Code standards documents We can make a similar argument for code. For example, in open source projects, where hundreds of developers are submitting code, it makes sense to set some standards. Drupal and Wordpress have written standards that make editing code less confusing for users, and more maintainable for contributors. Each community has nuances: Drupal requests that developers indent with two spaces, while Wordpress stipulates a tab. Whatever the rules, good code standards documents also explain why they make their recommendations. The front-end developer’s style guide Design style guides and code standards documents have been a successful way of ensuring brand and code consistency, but in between the code and the design examples, web-based style guides are emerging. These are maintained by front-end developers, and are more dynamic than visual design guidelines, documenting every component and its code on the site in one place. Here are a few examples I’ve seen in the wild: Natalie Downe’s pattern portfolio Natalie created the pattern portfolio system while working at Clearleft. The phrase describes a single HTML page containing all the site’s components and styles that can act as a deliverable. Pattern portfolio by Natalie Downe for St Paul’s School, kept up to date when new components are added. The entire page is about four times the length shown. Each different item within a pattern portfolio is a building block or module. The components are decoupled from the layout, and linearized so they can slot into anywhere on a page. The pattern portfolio expresses every component and layout structure in the smallest number of documents. It sets out how the markup and CSS should be, and is used to illustrate the project’s shared vocabulary. Natalie Downe By developing a system, rather than individual pages, the result is flexible when the client wants to add more pages later on. Paul Lloyd’s style guide Paul Lloyd has written an extremely comprehensive style guide for his site. Not only does it feature every plausible element, but it also explains in detail when it’s appropriate to use each one. Paul’s style guide is also great educational material for people learning to write code. Oli Studholme’s style guide Even though Oli’s style guide is specific to his site, he’s written it as though it’s for someone else. It’s exhaustive and gives justifications for all his decisions. In some places, he links to browser bug tickets and makes recommendations for cross-browser compatibility. Oli has released his style guide under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license, and encourages others to create their own versions. Jeremy Keith’s pattern primer Front-end style guides may have comments written in the code, annotations that appear on the page, or they may list components alongside their code, like Jeremy’s pattern primer. You can watch or fork Jeremy’s pattern primer on Github. Linearizing components like this resembles a kind of mobile first approach to development, which Jeremy talks about on the 5by5 podcast: The Web Ahead 3. The benefits of maintaining a front-end style guide If you still need convincing that producing documentation like this for every project is worth the effort, here are a few nice side-effects to working this way: Easier to test A unified style guide makes it easier to spot where your design breaks. It’s simple to check how components adapt to different screen widths, test for browser bugs and develop print style sheets when everything is on the same page. When I worked with Natalie, she’d resize the browser window and bump the text size up and down during development to see if anything would break. Better workflow The approach also forces you to think how something works in relation to the whole site, rather than just a specific page, making it easier to add more pages later on. Starting development by creating a style guide makes a lot more sense than developing on a page-by-page basis. Shared vocabulary Natalie’s pattern portfolio in particular creates a shared vocabulary of names for components (teaser, global navigation, carousel…), so a team can refer to different regions of the site and have a shared understanding of its meaning. Useful reference A combined style guide also helps designers and writers to see the elements that will be incorporated in the site and, therefore, which need to be designed or populated. A boilerplate list of components for every project can act as a reminder of things that may get missed in the design, such as button states or error messages. Creating your front-end style guide As you’ve seen, there are plenty of variations on the web style guide. Which method is best depends on your project and workflow. Let’s say you want to show your content team how blockquotes and asides look, when it’s appropriate to use them, and how to create them within the CMS. In this case, a combination of Jeremy’s pattern primer and Paul’s descriptive style guide – with the styled component alongside a code snippet and a description of when to use it – may be ideal. Start work on your style guide as soon as you can, preferably during the design stage: Simply presenting flat image comps is by no means enough - it’s only the start… As layouts become more adaptable, flexible and context-specific, so individual components will become the focus of our design. It is therefore essential to get the foundational aspects of our designs right, and style guides allow us to do that. Paul Lloyd on Style guides for the Web Print out the designs and label the unique elements and components you’ll need to add to your style guide. Make a note of the purpose of each component. While you’re doing this, identify the main colours used for things like links, headings and buttons. I draw over the print-outs on to tracing paper so I can make more annotations. Here, I’ve started annotating the widths from the designer’s mockup so I can translate these into percentages. Start developing your style guide with base styles that target core elements: headings, links, tables, blockquotes, ordered lists, unordered lists and forms. For these elements, you could maintain a standard document to reuse for every project. Next, add the components that override the base styles, like search boxes, breadcrumbs, feedback messages and blog comments. Include interaction styles, such as hover, focus and visited state on links, and hover, focus and active states on buttons. Now start adding layout and begin slotting the components into place. You may want to present each layout as a separate document, or you could have them all on the same page stacked beneath one another. Document code practices Code can look messy when people use different conventions, so note down a standard approach alongside your style guide. For example, Paul Stanton has documented how he writes CSS. The gift wrapping Presenting this documentation to your client may be a little overwhelming so, to be really helpful, create a simple page that links together all your files and explains what each of them do. This is an example of a contents page that Clearleft produce for their clients. They’ve added date stamps, subversion revision numbers and written notes for each file. Encourage participation There’s always a risk that the person you’re writing the style guide for will ignore it completely, so make your documentation as user-friendly as possible. Justify why you do things a certain way to make it more approachable and encourage similar behaviour. As always, good communication helps. Working with the designer to put together this document will improve the site. It’s often not practical for designers to provide a style for everything, so drafting a web style guide and asking for feedback gives designers a chance to make sure any default styles fit in. If you work in a team with other developers, documenting your code and development decisions will not only be useful as a deliverable, but will also force you to think about why you do things a certain way. Future-friendly The roles of designer and developer are increasingly blurred, yet all too often we work in isolation. Working side-by-side with designers on web style guides can vastly improve the quality of our work, and the collaborative approach can spark discussions like “how would this work on a smaller screen?” Sometimes we can be so focused on getting the site ready and live, that we lose sight of what happens after it’s launched, and how it’s going to be maintained. A simple web style guide can make all the difference. If you make your own style guide, I’d love to add it to my stash of examples so please share a link to it in the comments.",2011,Anna Debenham,annadebenham,2011-12-07T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/front-end-style-guides/,process 286,Defending the Perimeter Against Web Widgets,"On July 14, 1789, citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille, igniting a revolution that toppled the French monarchy. On July 14 of this year, there was a less dramatic (though more tweeted) takedown: The Deck network, which delivers advertising to some of the most popular web design and culture destinations, was down for about thirty minutes. During this period, most partner sites running ads from The Deck could not be viewed as result. A few partners were unaffected (aside from not having an ad to display). Fortunately, Dribbble, was one of them. In this article, I’ll discuss outages like this and how to defend against them. But first, a few qualifiers: The Deck has been rock solid – this is the only downtime we’ve witnessed since joining in June. More importantly, the issues in play are applicable to any web widget you might add to your site to display third-party content. Down and out Your defense is only as good as its weakest link. Web pages are filled with links, some of which threaten the ability of your page to load quickly and correctly. If you want your site to work when external resources fail, you need to identify the weak links on your site. In this article, we’ll talk about web widgets as a point of failure and defensive JavaScript techniques for handling them. Widgets 101 Imagine a widget that prints out a Pun of the Day on your site. A simple technique for both widget provider and consumer is for the provider to expose a URL: http://widgetjonesdiary.com/punoftheday.js which returns a JavaScript file like this: document.write("" The Pun of the Day
Where do frogs go for beers after work? Hoppy hour!
""); The call to document.write() injects the string passed into the document where it is called. So to display the widget on your page, simply add an external script tag where you want it to appear:This approach is incredibly easy for both provider and consumer. But there are implications… document.write()… or wrong? As in the example above, scripts may perform a document.write() to inject HTML. Page rendering halts while a script is processed so any output can be inlined into the document. Therefore, page rendering speed depends on how fast the script returns the data. If an external JavaScript widget hangs, so does the page content that follows. It was this scenario that briefly stalled partner sites of The Deck last summer. The elegant solution To make our web widget more robust, calls to document.write() should be avoided. This can be achieved with a technique called JSONP (AKA JSON with padding). In our example, instead of writing inline with document.write(), a JSONP script passes content to a callback function: publishPun(""Pun of the Day
Where do frogs go for beers after work? Hoppy hour!
""); Then, it’s up to the widget consumer to implement a callback function responsible for displaying the content. Here’s a simple example where our callback uses jQuery to write the content into a target: …The ‘loading-dock’
function publishPun(content) { $(‘.punoftheday’).html(content); // Writes content display location
}
View Example 1 Even if the widget content appears at the top of the page, our script can be included at the bottom so it’s non-blocking: a slow response leaves page rendering unaffected. It simply invokes the callback which, in turn, writes the widget content to its display destination. The hack But what to do if your provider doesn’t support JSONP? This was our case with The Deck. Returning to our example, I’m reminded of computer scientist David Wheeler’s statement, “All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection… Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection.” In our case, the indirection is to move the widget content into position after writing it to the page. This allows us to place the widgetPun of the Day
Where do frogs go for beers after work? Hoppy hour!
now includes the widget content, albeit hidden from view (if we’ve styled the ‘hidden’ class with display: none). There’s just one more step: move the content to its display destination. This line of jQuery (from above) does the trick: $('.punoftheday').append($('.loading-dock').children(':gt(0)')); This selects all child elements in the ‘loading-doc’except the first – the widget