Danny DeBelius

Kevin Quealy :

…no one was really super thrilled with maps as the main conduit for the analysis. Instead, they decided on minimizing the geography and using “bins” for states. (Shan has sort of been obsessed with “bins” since 2008, when his dream of having states magically fall into buckets on election night ultimately didn’t pan out. I personally had to cheer him up after that and it was not pretty.)

Here is another great reminder for map-happy news nerds that sometimes the important patterns of a story are not really geographic in a way that is best conveyed through a choropleth or proportional symbol map. This graphic is brilliant and the process behind it is well worth your time.

(via drewvigal)

Josh Clark (emphasis mine):

Mobile isn’t just ‘mobile’. It’s also the couch, the kitchen, the three-hour layover, all places where we have time and attention to spare. 42 per cent of mobile users say they use it for entertainment when they’re bored. Those aren’t 10-second sessions. That means we shouldn’t design only for stunted sessions or limited use cases.

Say it over and over until you’ve exorcised the mental image of your user typing furiously on her iPhone as she frantically runs down a crowded sidewalk, looking for her next 10-second morsel of information. That user undoubtedly exists, but we have to stop assuming this is the only mobile use case.

Paul Scrivens:

If you have done your time and learned design or coding, then frameworks offer you a great way to take some shortcuts, but only because you know how to tweak your way through them when things get rough. If you are using Bootstrap to quickly get a site out the door, I understand the importance of launching fast and early, but spend a couple of hours making sure your site doesn’t look like the thousand other Bootstrap sites out there.

Nailed it. Bootstrap is an incredible tool that is easily abused by those who see it as a theme. Don’t look at Bootstrap as a coat of paint to slap haphazardly onto your site. See it as a power sprayer that will let you blast through some of the solved problems of front-end code organization so you can focus on the details of the interface.

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.

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.

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

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.