The packaging for Tycho’s “Dive” album is gorgeous, which I was completely unaware of having been introduced to the record through Rdio. Currently mourning the slow-moving death of album art at the hands of digital delivery. (Taken with instagram)
At the very least, Hitchens’s antireligious writings carried a whiff of something absent in many of atheism’s less talented apostles — a hint that he was not so much a disbeliever as a rebel, and that his atheism was mostly a political romantic’s attempt to pick a fight with the biggest Tyrant he could find.Ross Douthat
Really enjoyed Bill Frisell’s take on “Strawberry Fields” at today’s Tiny Desk Concert.
Fonts In Use: BostonGlobe.com →
Stephen Coles:
Despite the emphasis on maintaining the newspaper’s identity, BostonGlobe.com is not merely a skeuomorphic replication of the printed paper. Font sizes, column widths, and navigation are informed by best practices in digital media, and specifically “responsive” design, resizing and repositioning text and images for optimal viewing at any window size. Not every window width results in a beautiful page, but overall it’s a much better and more consistent experience from the big screen to the iPhone than most digital newspapers today.
The calculus of brand consistency vs. page weight is critical in making decisions about typography on the web, particularly for a responsive site that will see significant mobile browser use.
This is as complex a case study as you’ll find on the subject, and the insight from Miranda Mulligan, Upstatement and Filament Group is invaluable.
Please let this not be the future of reading on the web →
Rian van der Merwe:
As advertising clickthrough rates continue to drop, the ads become more desperate and invasive, and readers are starting to notice and do something about it. I’m doing the majority of my reading in RSS and Instapaper where I can read in peace without being pummeled by distractions.
The chorus decrying the exodus of readers to quiet alternative reading experiences is growing. My hope is that this exodus will serve as a wake-up call to publishers deluded in their belief that readers have an endless well of patience to endure intrusive advertising and cluttered pages.
Required reading for editorial experience designers.
Responsive Advertising →
Mark Boulton:
Recently at Mark Boulton Design, we’ve been working on a redesign of the global visual language for a large sports network. Like many web sites delivering news and editorial content, they rely on advertising for their revenue — either through multiple ad slots on the page, or from video pre-rolls.
Early on in the project, we discussed Responsive Web Design at length. From an editorial and product perspective, it makes perfect sense. Who wouldn’t want their content adapting to a device their reading it on? Who wants to pinch-zoom again and again? From a business and product perspective, we’ve seen this from multiple clients who want to take advantage of certain interactions on certain devices — swiping for example — for users to better engage with the content in a more native way. All good. And then advertising comes along and things get challenging.
There’s a lot of good thinking in this piece on a topic I’ve been wrestling with since the BostonGlobe.com design started making waves. For sites that rely on display ad revenue, I’m not sure responsive design solves more problems than it creates.
/via Al Shaw
Meaningful Transitions →
Johannes Tonollo:
Meaningful Transitions have the purpose to communicate the process of the interaction and the structure of the user interface. They focus on specific events, or explaining the user’s interaction by animation. All transitions are clustered in 6 categories in order to differentiate the certain field of use. The aim is to present a scaleable collection of existing transitions. The transitions are documented in an abstract visualization to explain their purposes and filled with concrete examples. The close look at a transition offers the field of use, the mental model, the consistency, the cognitive benefit and the illusion.
Great resource.
Clutter is what happens when we fill a page with things the user doesn’t care about. Replace the useless stuff with links, copy, and content the users really want, and the page suddenly becomes uncluttered.Jared Spool
25 Secrets of the Browser Developer Tools →
Andi Smith:
Historically developers have used Firefox’s Firebug add-on to develop and debug their websites, but more recently each browser has developed its own set of tools and each comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. Nowadays it seems hard to imagine ever building a website without one of these handy tools, which are normally accessible by either pressing “F12″ in Windows or “Cmd” ⌘, “Option” ⌥ and “I” on the Mac, or by right clicking on the page and selecting “Inspect Element”.
But are you using the developer tools to their full potential? The biggest positive about the developer tools is that they are incredibly easy to use, but as a result developers often miss out on a large proportion of the functionality provided. Inspired by a video talk by Paul Irish and Pavel Feldman, I’ve compiled a list of “secrets” of the developer console. I’m not expecting every one of these to be unknown to you, but hopefully some of these will help you to become an even better web developer.
My favorite Chrome trick is clicking to flip through the various methods of describing a color.
There are a lot of people I dislike in the world. I mean, a lot. I don’t follow any of them on Twitter.John Gruber
