AEA Minneapolis Sketchnotes 10 Aug 2011, 10:39 pm

AEA Minneapolis Sketchnotes by Mike Rohde.

An Event Apart Minneapolis 2011: The Flickr Photo Pool 10 Aug 2011, 10:27 pm

Jared Spool Dances to Beyonce! Photo by John Morrison. As seen in An Event Apart Minneapolis 2011 Flickr group pool.

An Event Apart: Design Principles 10 Aug 2011, 6:20 pm

LUKE WROBLEWSKI: “In his Design Principles presentation at An Event Apart in Minneapolis, MN 2011, Jeremy Keith outlined the design principles behind the World Wide Web and how they continue to shape its future. Here are my notes from his talk:” LukeW | An Event Apart: Design Principles.

Web Governance: Becoming an Agent of Change – A List Apart 10 Aug 2011, 2:41 pm

SHIPPING IS EASY, making real change is hard. To do meaningful web work, we need to educate clients on how their websites influence their business and the legal, regulatory, brand, and financial risks they face without strong web governance. Learn why web governance is important to us as web professionals and how to influence your clients to think carefully about how to align their websites to their business strategy. A List Apart: Articles: Web Governance: Becoming an Agent of Change.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart.

Designing Fun – A List Apart 10 Aug 2011, 2:34 pm

HOW DO YOU DEFINE FUN on the web? Fun means different things to different people. Debra Levin Gelman says that to create fun, we need to allow users to create, play, and explore. Learn how to help your client define fun, rank its importance on their site, and user test it to create a delightful experience, regardless of whether you’re designing for suits and ties or the sandbox crowd: A List Apart: Articles: Designing Fun.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart.

CSS Best Practices – An Event Apart 10 Aug 2011, 2:30 pm

LUKE WROBLEWSKI: “In her ‘Our Best Practices Are Killing Us’ presentation at An Event Apart in Minneapolis MN, Nicole Sullivan walked through common CSS best practices that have outlived their usefulness and what we can do instead to improve CSS performance and maintenance long term. Here’s my notes from her talk:” LukeW | An Event Apart: CSS Best Practices.

10K Apart – Responsive Edition 4 Aug 2011, 1:37 am

AS THE TITLE indicates, this year’s 10K contest requires that your applications be “reasonably responsive” (yes, it’s vague by design). The Responsive Design movement Ethan pioneered is still learning how to walk in the real world. We felt it best to leave some wiggle room to encourage new discoveries.

• Visit the contest.
• Read more about it.

Two Years Ago: HTML5 SuperFriends Meet in New York 3 Aug 2011, 4:05 pm

IMG_4991.JPG | Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

Downtime at Disney World 26 Jul 2011, 7:38 pm

DAY TWO, mid-day, taking a breather in our hotel room. Listening to my daughter play with her tiny new Disney figurines. In the distance, the gull-like shrieks of children in the hotel pool.

My week on narcotics 22 Jul 2011, 6:01 pm

THE DREAMS YOU HAVE when you’re withdrawing from narcotics make David Lynch look like an After School Special hack. How I got on narcotics was outpatient, noninvasive surgery on a double hernia. I got the double hernia from a mistake I made in the gym, or maybe I slipped in the bath and caught myself funny and ripped open my abdominal wall in two places without knowing it.

Doctors dump all this useless data on you and tell you nothing you need to know. Before the surgery I was given a 40 page disclaimer about my privacy rights and how hospitals use and share my medical information. I reckon I was given this because someone sued someone else once. Flash to the medical community: I want you to share my info. That’s what databases and XML and the internet are for. If I fall down a staircase in Katmandu, I want the emergency medical team that rescues me to know I’m allergic to penicillin, and I want the doctor who attends me to know what medicines I take. Thank you for the lovely 40 page disclaimer.

And no thank you for what I left the hospital with: a prescription and nothing else. After all that upfront paperwork, the hospital didn’t even bother giving me my surgeon’s name and phone number. (I had to look them up on the web when my painkiller prescription ran out.)

Here’s some information the hospital could have given me: your peas and carrots are going to swell up and look more like eggplants and cauliflower. That’s normal and you don’t need to call in. For at least five days, you’ll feel like someone just cut you open with a street knife. That’s normal and you don’t need to call in. Your sleep will be fitful, with wild dreams. You’ll wake up at 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM, unable to sleep. If you take the prescription pain killers, your sleep will be even more disrupted. The pain killers don’t so much take away the pain as move it slightly off-camera. You’ll want to take more than we give you and your digestive system will resemble that of a hardcore junkie within two days. All of this is normal. After five days, we cut off the pain killers and provide no way for you to get more. But you’ll still be in terrible pain. This is normal.

If they had told me that in the hospital and written it down somewhere, I wouldn’t have worried so much when parts of my body started resembling clubbed baby seals and seemed to be undergoing racial transmutation. While they were at it, they could have left me a card with my surgeon’s phone number and asked me to call in after four days for an evaluation.

They wanted to evaluate me next week, but I’m taking my daughter to Disney World next week, so instead they’ll see me when the surgeon returns from vacation on August 15. Meantime, I guess I muddle through.

I’m not on narcotics today and the pain is bad but manageable with Advil. I haven’t had that shit or any shit in my system for nearly 20 years, and I don’t like how close it brings me to the old days. I can get my prescription refilled by begging the surgeon’s answering service until eventually he calls the pharmacy, but I think maybe I’ll stick with Advil.

A Book Apart Photo Pool on Flickr 10 Jul 2011, 6:56 pm

LET YOUR NERD FLAG FLY! Now there is a Flickr group for A Book Apart readers. Come one, come all. Share beauty shots of your A Book Apart collection. Share unboxing photos. Share pictures of your fine self interacting with our awesome books. If you love reading our brief books for people who make websites, we want to see and hear from you.

Flickr: The A Book Apart Pool.

Essential iPhone Photo Apps 10 Jul 2011, 4:51 pm

“EVER SINCE the iPhone 3GS, the iPhone has become my primary camera. Aside from its terrific image quality, it’s the abundance of photo apps that make it shine. I get asked a lot about what apps I use, which are good, etc. Here’s my list.”—Jim Barraud

Essential iPhone Photography Apps

How could I refuse? 8 Jul 2011, 4:19 pm

Message:

To Whom it may Concern,

I recently discovered your “Home” page here:

http://www.zeldman.com/2010/10/17/ipad-as-the-new-flash/

Would you please consider adding a link to my website called Job-Applications.com? It is a resource that provides hundreds of printable and online applications for retail stores, department stores, pharmacies, grocery stores, restaurants, shops, etc. Its a great way for people to find part time and full time work quickly.

If you think it would be of use to your visitors, would you please consider adding a link to my website on your page here:

http://www.zeldman.com/2010/10/17/ipad-as-the-new-flash/

Here is the HTML link you could add: Job-Applications.com – Find hundreds of online applications and printable job forms.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks!

[Name withheld]

Responsive Design. I don’t think that word means what you think it means. 6 Jul 2011, 9:06 pm

ON 25 MAY 2010, when Ethan Marcotte coined the phrase “responsive web design,” he defined it as using fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries to deliver elegant visual experiences (e.g. layouts and type treatments) that accommodate the reality of our post-iPhone, post-Android, post-iPad digital landscape:

Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience. We can design for an optimal viewing experience, but embed standards-based technologies into our designs to make them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to the media that renders them.

Ethan expanded his vision in Responsive Web Design, a book I consider so important I published it. I and many others think it is a landmark book, an evolutionary milestone in the development of web and interaction design as a practice and as an industry.

But I also think it may be an even bigger idea than we initially realized—an idea too big to be limited to a single, technical approach to the problem of multiple, disparate viewing environments.

I understand well why Ethan favors his fluid grid/flexible image approach. When you see a fully responsive design at work, it often seems magical.

But the purpose behind “responsive design”—the concept of what it strives to achieve—should be separated from the specific techniques used to achieve it. As the worldwide community embraces his idea (and as new methods of CSS layout become practical), the techniques of responsive design will continue to improve and, dare I say it, adapt. (See flexbox, etc.) Along the same lines, “adaptive layout,” a practice that combines the benefits of fixed-width design with the realities of multiple screen sizes, is no longer an alternative to responsive design; instead, it becomes a form of responsive design, albeit a less robust one than the fully responsive (fluid) method Ethan describes in his book.

Our understanding of “responsive design” should be broadened to cover any approach that delivers elegant visual experiences regardless of the size of the user’s display and the limitations or capabilities of the device.

RFPs and Proposals, Oh, My! 5 Jul 2011, 4:04 pm

ISSUE NO. 330 of A List Apart for people who make websites tackles the thorny problem of using paper or PDF to convince potential clients you’re the right team for the job.

RFPs: The Least Creative Way to Hire People

by Greg Hoy

If you work in any kind of service industry you’ve undoubtedly come across the Request For Proposal, or “RFP.” Alas, in practice, RFPs are the least creative way to hire creative people. The rigidity of the process, and the lack of meaningful dialogue makes this little more than a game of roulette. How can we successfully navigate the heartburn-inducing RFP process? And what can we as an industry do to turn RFPs into the exception rather than the default means of hiring an agency?

A Modest Proposal

by Nathan Peretic

Comedy is easy, proposals are hard. A compelling proposal requires more than a jumble of clichés and a nervous estimate of costs. It needs structure, organization, and joie de vivre. Learn the key questions every client needs answered—and how to use them as the basis of a proposal that convinces your client you’re the right team for the job.