• Writing, coding: vim (usually MacVim, to my credit as a visual person, thank you)
• E-mail: mutt (I know. But really, my skin has a healthy glow and I do go outside and enjoy the sun)
• IRC: irssi
• RSS: canto
• Twitter: twitvim
• Written documents: LaTeX
• Drupal: drush (Drush rocks.)
• Task management: Taskwarrior

It seems weird, but for me, these types of activities don’t need eye candy, but effectiveness and speed. And these apps provide that. They are also all free to use and work on several platforms. I’m especially happy with mutt and canto. Mail and feeds, in the amounts I consume them, usually take up huge amounts of time. With these apps, I can zip through them relatively quickly.

I’ve been increasingly biting in my reactions to many admittedly fun but practically useless “demos”, “experiments” and other assorted HTML5 and CSS3 nonsense like CSS3 icons. I always get flack for this, and I probably will now.

While these experiments are easily defended—“just wanted to see what was possible”—they are generally non-complex (though they can be tedious; take one look at a CSS3 icon or font). They are, put bluntly, simply a way to show off. And as long as that works, it will continue. But what are these experiments helping, aside from the reputations of those who make them(!)?

Please note that many of these experiments utilize a technique that I and many other art directors and designers have used for ages, which greatly enhances product appeal. It involves simply combining two things you wouldn’t ordinarily expect to be together: CSS and fonts. CSS and icons. HTML and games. Peanut butter and chocolate—Hershey/Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups have used this to their advantage for years. And so forth. The first person to build real beer from Javascript will be speaking at conferences for years to come.

I could say more, but Chris Heilmann said it so well, there is no need:

Right now, we are happily thinking we innovate and push the envelope where in reality we are making each other go “Oooohhhh” while a large chunk of the audience that could benefit from our knowledge is stuck with really poor experiences on the web.

If you haven’t, please take a moment to read his article.

Since I spend about 80% of my computer time in Vim and Opera, and since Opera is my primary browser (and e-mail client), using this functionality instead of a separate app works well for me. I don’t notice any difference in speed compared to Notational Velocity; the way they work is similar, but I like Opera’s integration with the browser, Opera Link and e-mail.

For those not familiar with Notes, I tried my hand at making a screencast.

A quick intro to Opera Notes from Stephen Hay on Vimeo.

The problem is the stigma attached to the term “accessibility”. Now we know that web accessibility achieves more than simply facilitating access to web content. But a lot of government organizations and businesses don’t see the need to even try and conform to accessibility guidelines.

As part of a group of organizations (the advisory group for the Dutch Web Accessibility/Quality Guidelines) concerned with changing this way of thinking, several of us are trying to compile a list of themes/categories/factors which can be considered building blocks of really good websites, or less-obvious benefits of accessible websites. I’m aware of many, but lots of people in this industry are so incredibly smart; it would be such a pity not to ask.

So I’m asking! The idea is to create a list of things like “interoperable”, “search-engine friendly/findability”, “archivable” etc. to help convince government organizations and businesses that there are lots of non-obvious benefits in conforming to web accessibility guidelines. “Cuts down on bandwidth usage” is fine. I’ll parse the list and try to group like-minded suggestions together to come up with some high-level themes. I will post the results and link to any known follow-up usage or derivative of the resulting list.

Even if you can only think up one thing, please add it to the comments! Ask your friends (but don’t spam :) ). Don’t worry too much about accessibility, just quickly note whatever you think makes a great website.

Care to chip in? What constitutes a good website?

You should read the post. Then form an opinion. Mine is that vendor prefixes are no fun and quite annoying, but a necessary evil. At least for now. There’s no need for me to go into why, as Jonathan Snook makes the point well.

My biggest problem with vendor prefixes is the repetition (read: not the amount of typing), and the fact that I’ll one day need (okay, want) to go back and clean prefixed rules up once they’re no longer necessary or when the implementations change, which they can. I just want a clean style sheet.

A few workarounds, or deal-withs, were mentioned in the comments of the aforementioned posts:

1. A single “beta” prefix
2. CSS preprocessors
3. A separate style sheet

I like the last option the most, hat tip to Bridget Stewart for beating me to it. A separate style sheet fits my current practice of giving each element of design language its own file (I know about the performance implications, but there are plenty of solutions to that). So a generic group of style sheets for a given website might look like this:

• layout.css
• type.css
• color-img.css
• vendor.css
• ie[x].css

This is clean. Non-prefixed properties are entered into the normal style sheets, and will (hopefully) be ignored by browsers which don’t understand them. Prefixed properties are placed in vendor.css. And what I would really love is for CSS3, Please! to generate vendor.css for me (That was a hint, guys). Sure, there’s the risk of the spec changing, so it’s up to the designer/developer to be wise in deciding which things should be specified without prefix in the normal style sheets.

Why not the other two?

To be honest, something like -beta- might not be a bad idea, but as of yet, the fact that vendor prefixes are browser-specific is the only useful thing about them. A universal prefix is just that, universal, which could potentially introduce the same problems we would have with no prefixes at all.

I’m not a big fan of CSS preprocessors, or at least I haven’t seen one I’ve liked. We’re talking about CSS; it’s not all that hard to deal with. My problem is not with typing things out three or four times. And I don’t need a preprocessor to do that for me, as prefixes and things like rgba fallbacks are easily accomplished in any decent editor through snippets or scripting. And for those without a decent editor, just use something like CSS3, Please!.

How do you cope?

You only need to subscribe to www-style for about a week before realizing it’s going to take more than three people calling “-beta- prefix!” to get browsers to do it. When you dig down deep enough, there are some very, very smart people who have thought a lot about certain things (and admittedly less about others). It would be a good practice to research or ask why something is as it is, and perhaps participating in www-style and submitting ideas.

You could also try vendor.css. If you hate prefixes, at least you’ve gathered them all together in their own little prefix hell.

How do you deal with vendor prefixes?

I didn’t think much about it until Vasilis van Gemert posted about it and Ian published some stats; at that point in time visitors clicked an average of 23 times per visit. 23 times is a lot of clicking, which means some conditioning and expectation are at work.

As pattern-seeking beings, we tend to follow our conditioning. A button must be there for a reason—let’s click it. It says “sit”, therefore the dog will probably sit, won’t it? 23 clicks on average indicates to me that the average user is not considering whether this is just an image or instead some type of interactive movie. 23 clicks indicates bell/salivate. Button/action-expectation.

Let’s say you have javascript disabled, for whatever reason. You fill out a form. You click the submit button, not knowing that in this case the developer has made a javascript-dependent button (this is common). You might say you have encountered a Defiant Dog: something which doesn’t do as it’s told, or doesn’t react according to expectations.

Ian’s fun experiment confirms two things which many of us know but are always worth repeating:

1. When users expect things to happen on our websites, it’s most likely that we have done something to trigger those expectations
2. Users will almost always think it’s their own fault (and may even click 23 times before deciding it’s not)

It’s been said that without expectation, there is no disappointment. While not a new idea, this take-away from the Defiant Dog is still timely, as you’ll notice anytime you see something you think should be clickable but isn’t. Or when a relationship is falsely implied between multiple UI elements.

Managing expectations is a design problem. It’s up to us as web designers to find the defiant dogs in our websites and applications, and get them to sit.

Flexbox is one of three W3C draft specs (as of this writing) dealing with general layout issues and has its strengths and weaknesses compared to the other two. But as it has already been implemented in Firefox (and I predict there is a good chance it will be implemented in Safari in some form), you might want to play around with it. Even if it doesn’t get implemented in anything other than Firefox, some of the principles regarding flexible available space have already been injected into the other modules. Plus, it’s pretty fun.

The draft describes Flexbox as:

[...] a CSS box model optimized for interface design. It provides an additional layout system alongside the ones already in CSS. [CSS21] In this new box model, the children of a box are laid out either horizontally or vertically, and unused space can be assigned to a particular child or distributed among the children by assignment of “flex” to the children that should expand. Nesting of these boxes (horizontal inside vertical, or vertical inside horizontal) can be used to build layouts in two dimensions. This model is based on the box model in the XUL user-interface language used for the user interface of many Mozilla-based applications (such as Firefox).

This is pretty clear. It implies two important things:

1. No more abusing floats, and no more getting abused by floats
2. We can create true flexible layouts, and the browser will do the calculations for us

Basically, Flexbox is a small part of XUL ported to CSS. Cool as it may be, I remain of the opinion that the power of Flexbox is in the layout of things like UI components (think forms and toolbars and such) rather than in general page layout. So let’s not get carried away and make Flexbox the new float. For general page layout, we need a true grid-based model; I’ll come back to that in the near future. For now, let’s dive in.

Flexbox gives us a new value for the display property (the box value), and eight new properties:

• box-orient
• box-flex
• box-align
• box-direction
• box-flex-group
• box-lines
• box-ordinal-group
• box-pack

Today, we’ll ease into this and just focus on box-orient and box-flex, and tackle the other properties in Part 2.

Let’s say we have three paragraphs, each of which introduces one of three product lines for a client website. Our designer has determined that these teaser paragraphs are to be placed adjacent to one another along a horizontal axis, essentially forming three columns.

<div id="products">
    <p id="phones">First child</p>
    <p id="computers">Second child</p>
    <p id="fast-cars">Third child</p>
</div>

How would you currently tackle this? Most, without thinking, would simply float these paragraphs, perhaps adding overflow:hidden; to the parent in order to clear the floats. Nothing very special. But we could also do it quite easily with Flexbox:

#products { 
    display: box;
    box-orient: horizontal;
    }

In the above code, we’re simply telling the parent to behave according to this (flex)box model, and to lay out all its children along the horizontal axis. No floats. Yay.

box-orient accepts four values, but two of them are important for all intents and purposes: horizontal and vertical. Self-explanatory.

The widths of the children remain as specified (or their inherent width if not specified). This means that if the total widths of all the children is less than the total width of the parent, we’ll get something like this:

But what if you wanted paragraphs one and two to have specific widths and paragraph three to adjust itself depending on the available space within the parent? Flexbox to the rescue:

#products { 
    display: box;
    box-orient: horizontal;
    }
    #fast-cars {
        box-flex: 1;
        }

Here, we’re telling the last child to become flexible, and to take up available space. Since we’ve only allocated space to one element, it will take up all of the available space:

Note that the element only becomes flexible along the orientation axis of the box; in this case the element becomes flexible horizontally.

The value for box-flex is relative. So if we were to make the second and third children flexible:

#products { 
    display: box;
    box-orient: horizontal;
    }
    #computers {
        box-flex: 1;
        }
    #fast-cars {
        box-flex: 1;
        }

These would each take up the same amount of available space, in fact dividing the available space equally between them.

Should we give the last child box-flex: 3;, then it would take three times as much available space as the second child.

Check out the demo (this will only work in Firefox) or download the demo source code (.zip-file, 1kB).

Without even considering the other six properties, there are lots of possibilities here. Although I am not in favor of using this module for page layout, it can be done, as you can see in the demo.

We’ll get back to the other properties at a later date. In the meantime, if you want to play around with this, why not? It will only work in Firefox work in Firefox and (newer) webkit browsers; just prefix the display value and properties with -moz- or -webkit- respectively:

• display: -moz-box;
• -moz-box-orient
• -moz-box-flex
• display: -webkit-box;
• -webkit-box-orient
• -webkit-box-flex

Please be advised: this is meant to be a surface-level introduction to a draft spec. At the time of this writing, most people won’t find this applicable to anything outside of experimentation. There is, however, value in learning about the content of somewhat lesser-known working drafts, if only to be able to compare one to another.

Enjoy!

On content

Content is important. After all, it’s content people who come up with job titles like Content Strategist, which pretty much means One Who Thinks About Content. Which content, for whom, when, where, why, how… It’s absolutely necessary, because clients don’t do it. Not at the level that it should be done.

Paul Rand, one of the most well-respected designers this world has seen, called design “a method of putting form and content together”. If you would agree with this statement (as I do), you can infer the role of the designer as the one who must successfully combine two components: form and content (the designer will first busy herself with the form component). These two are not mutually exclusive. They are separate components which share a common goal and should be developed on a parallel track to one another. This, however, does not mean that they should be reviewed by the client together at every stage.

On clients

Two quick facts about clients:

1. Many don’t know what they want, and when they do, they don’t know how to communicate it
2. Many lack the imagination to “see through” design sketches

These are the reasons we are hired in the first place. But these two facts have paved a dangerous path across the lawn of the creative process. An alarming number of web professionals today seem to advocate making preliminary deliverables mimic the finished product– the more accurate, the better.

This is, well, stupid.

It’s not stupid if don’t track your hours. It’s not stupid if you don’t care if or how much you are paid for your work. It isn’t stupid if you don’t mind doing twice as much work for nothing. Your clients will love you for it, and you’ll be doomed to continue doing it for the rest of your career.

On designing in the browser

When Andy Clarke first started talking about “designing in the browser”, I thought it was a great idea. Then people started misinterpreting this to mean “executing the creative process in the browser”. If Andy really designed in the browser, his designs would be shit. What he was of course referring to was the execution of a design idea in the browser as opposed to a tool like Photoshop, which doesn’t communicate Web Things the way a browser does. He strives for more realism in his deliverables. He’s simply working based on the two Client Truths listed above. And if you’ve ever done designs in Photoshop, you’ll know that applying client changes to those documents is akin to cutting off your own fingers one knuckle at at time. HTML is much easier.

That said, there is certainly a place for Photoshop sketches. It’s possible to put together a quick visual impression of a website in far less time than it would take to work out in HTML. I’m referring to the basic idea of a website, an impression of the design language, intended to gauge if we are on the write track before spending many more hours mocking things up in HTML, which is, in fact, templating. I am not referring to creating finished static design visuals. These are the bane of the web designer’s existence, and should be avoided at all costs. If you really understand your client’s needs, that means you’ve done your homework, and you’ve actually designed before the browser. Otherwise: baby steps.

On communication

Imagine that your job was to drive your client somewhere. They aren’t quite sure where they want to go, but a lot of sun would be nice. And perhaps water. You could drive them to California, but once they hear about Florida, they might prefer that and demand that you drive them there (at your cost, because you’re the one who chose to go ahead and drive to California).

A better way would be to communicate with the client, asking them if they prefer dry heat or humidity, surfing or Spring Break parties, earthquakes or hurricanes. Based on this information, you could show and tell about both places, help them weigh the pros and cons, and help them in their decision. Then drive. Only then.

Making websites is a process. Creativity is a process. Pacing and leading clients is a process. You’re not going to eliminate frustration by trying to come up with real content, a polished design and working browser functionality on the first go. You will lose money, though, and perhaps your sanity.

There’s a reason for storyboards. But wait, shouldn’t Pixar just go ahead and build and render the complete movie so that the studio execs can see how it will really look?. Then, if they like it, it’s done! Yeah, right. Good luck with that.

There’s a reason that advertising teams consist of an art director and a copywriter: design and content. They’re bed buddies. But these teams pitch ideas, and then work them out. That’s why we have wireframes. That’s why we have Photoshop. That’s why we have Lorem Ipsum. And that’s why we have, most importantly, good old pencil and paper.

On balance

Here’s what I think: some web professionals want to focus more on deliverables than on people. But guess what: it’s all about people. We need to help our clients along and communicate with them. If you want good deliverables the first time around, the answer is not to use “real” content and a design which is in fact finished HTML/CSS/Javascript in a real browser. The answer is to ask focused questions, discover the pressing problems, to introduce your client to your potential solutions to those problems. Give them tidbits: here’s an impression of how the site could look visually. Here are some things you might want to consider concerning your content. Work your way up to real content in a real browser. When done right, that point can come quickly.

It’s too much to show a client all these things at once in the very beginning. There are too many factors, and it’s impossible to tell which factors will influence their opinions at that moment, which makes revision a nightmare at best. Of course content and form should each be developed with the other in mind. But consider presenting separately at first. Yes, that could mean that Lorem Ipsum is an option. That could mean that Photoshop is an option. That could mean that a sketch on a napkin, with a good, old-fashioned explanation of how things work, is an option. When you know enough, put form and content together.

On bed buddies

And forget the content versus design war. They need each other. In the words of Paul Rand, “when form predominates, meaning is blunted. but when content predominates, interest lags.”