What To Expect When You’re Expecting CSS/HTML Handoff
Picture this: You're a designer at Fancy Design Firm, charged with building out a design that another group will implement. You might never meet this group, you don't know how adept they are with buildout, and you're not entirely sure what they'll want to do with your CSS/HTML.
Even worse, maybe you're only delivering a sliver of the site, just one or two pages, and this team will need to finish out the other 90% of the markup. You'll be credited with the buildout or blamed for it, but the final results are out of your hands. What do you do?
Or, imagine that you're a client who's hired Fancy Design Firm to design the site, and you want your Stressed-Out Internal Team to develop it. You need to make sure that S.O.I.T. can correctly implement the stuff you get from F.D.F., and you even want them to expand on it, stretching the design into a full site with new styles.
The trouble? You don't know how F.D.F. codes or what to expect from them. Whatever you get from them will be final - you can't go running back every day until launch and asking them for stylesheet tweaks. You're not a CSS/HTML expert, so you're not sure you'll be able to tell what's good or not. What do you do?
A Bad Place To Be
Both parties are in a spot here: Designers are hoping their work doesn't get mangled, and clients are hoping their deliverable isn't crappy and inflexible, but neither party has a sure-fire way to get what they want.
I've been delivering buildout a lot recently, so I've been reflecting on what works best in this situation. In the interest of helping designers and clients agree on deliverables, I've written this little reference list. This is by no means a "client bill of rights," simply a set of topics clients and designers should discuss when expecting a CSS/HTML deliverable.
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Designing a Custom Flash Player for Brightcove
ABOUT BRIGHTCOVE
Brightcove offers a wide range of players that will plug right into your site. Its players range from a video window with basic controls to players with tabbed navigation, playlists, related videos, and keyword search. These players are easy to build into your site and connect with videos you've uploaded to Brightcove.
Unlike most drop-in players, Brightcove offers a great deal of customization. You can style existing players using a video player editor where you primarily have control over colors. This goes a long way when you're trying to match the look of your player with the look of your site, but you can take this a step further with a proprietary markup language called BEML (Brightcove Experience Markup Language). Think of BEML as HTML for a media player. You add custom images to replace the Brightcove custom elements (like your play or mute button for example). You also have complete control over which Brightcove components you want for your players and even which buttons you want for your player controls (play button, mute button, etc.).
However, even with base color styling and more advanced BEML modifications, you may still run into styling and component limitations. If you want to really customize your player, Brightcove allows you to take things even further with their API. So, with said API, Adobe Flex, and custom UI and visual design up front, that's what Viget did ...
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Take Something New and Make It Old
A design exercise that has been making the rounds lately, one I can't get enough of and have to share with anyone who'll listen, is the re-imagining of modern video games, movies, albums, and so on as worn out, classic book and album covers. It takes a product completely out of its element and reinterprets what makes it memorable in the first place. The result being that oftentimes these "remixes" are more elegant and precise solutions than their original designs. They're also just plain fun. The craze seems to have started earlier this year with Olly Moss's series of video games as book covers inspired by Penguin Classics covers and Saul Bass illustration. Just to show a couple:
Six Snappy Snap Apps for Mac
After much debating about purchasing the recent MacHeist 3 Bundle I broke down in the last 30 minutes of the promotion to order the bundle of software advertised as 14 Mac apps worth around $500 for $49. To be honest I didn't know much about MacHeist or many of the apps they were promoting but the thought of trying out Espresso among the mix of apps appealed greatly. To my delight, it wasn't Espresso that captivated me. Instead, an unassuming screen capturing utility called LittleSnapper caused me to forget the other 13 applications in the set.
There's also been a fair amount of buzz about Skitch lately. The combo of the two got me thinking about what else might be out there for capturing, editing, saving and sharing images. At the urging of Peyton Crump, our fearless Design Director from our Durham, NC office, I took to task comparing the two apps. Soon enough, I realized a comparison among a wider breadth of apps might be useful. Thus, this post was born, a comparison of six screen capturing utilities. From a bare minimum of features to some truly groundbreaking ones, these tools are listed by order of complexity (features not ease of use): Screengrab!, Paparazzi!, Web Snapper, Skitch, LittleSnapper, and Evernote
Please note this less of a comprehensive review of the products than it is a glance at some useful aspects of each.
Advice, Trends, and Resources for People Entering Web Careers in 2009
Many have us have spoken to people who will soon be entering careers in web design related fields this year, and this led us to have discussions with each other about what we thought was important for those people to know. Each of us had different advice to share based on each of our own unique perspectives, so we thought it would be helpful to put it into a blog post. Some of the questions we wanted to respond to were:
- What trends have you noticed in the past year?
- What advice do you have for people entering the field?
- What are some resources to help people get started?
Brian Talbot
Advice: Don’t Grow Up Just Yet
Many of the students I’ve taught and worked with want to hit this field’s ground running, but tend to be confused and overwhelmed by all of the various titles, processes and disciplines involved in working on the web these days. If you’re feeling this way, remember that you don’t have to pick a definitive career path or niche in the web just yet (if ever)! Instead learn about and try all of these disciplines as your work allows. You can always dive deeper into those that really strike a chord. Until then, don’t sweat those fancy terms or titles too much. And here’s a secret, some of the strongest web professionals are “generalists” instead of “specialists” in a particular area.
Advice: Work Smarter
Find ways to automate repetitive tasks for yourself – its usually an enjoyable problem to solve for yourself and will reward you with more efficiency. Finding and tweaking a series of applications and services that help you achieve is crucial. Some of my favorite set-ups include:
- LittleSnapper + Dropbox + A Dedicated Flickr Account = A quick and great way to organize (with tags) design inspiration across multiple computers and to share online.
- TextMate + Some Awesome Bundles + Your own templates + TextMate Projects = The start to a lean and mean front-end development area (for extra points, dive into things like Shell Variables)
- Delicious Subscriptions RSS + Delicious Network RSS + Flickr Design Inspiration Sets and Groups + select blog/site RSS Feeds all in Google Reader or Feedstitch = A good, portable start to having your ear to the ground on what’s happening around you (for extra points, you could add Twitter to this in EventBox.)
Doug Avery
Trend: Tuning Out
I’ve heard more and more designers this year talk about cutting back on blogs, Flickr feeds, and magazine subscriptions, in an attempt to to overcome the noise of “inspiration.” Sometimes, consuming design is a convenient excuse for procrastination, so be careful about how much you’re watching vs. how much you’re doing.
Advice: Try It
You can have a huge stack of Readymades and an RSS reader full of A List Apart articles, but if you’ve never built any of the stuff they’re talking about, you’re missing out. Take some time to play around with new ideas, techniques, or plugins whenever you can. It’s fun, it relieves stress, and you often learn more than you expected to.
Resources: Firebug & Designers Toolbox
For buildout, you should know about Firebug, the smart little tool that makes diagnosing layout woes a snap (and has the muscle to fix much bigger problems down the road). And in general, you should know about Designers Toolbox, a one-stop shop for print sizes, templates, web element PSDs…you name it.
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Making Quicker Interface Decisions With Design Patterns
A Brief Explanation of Design Patterns:
As web design matures and evolves, the collection of web design best practices grows with it. There are best practices for readability, markup, accessibility, usability, on and on and on. As designers, we look to keep our design approaches creative and fresh while at the same time knowing when not to screw with these established practices. These "practices," especially in the realm of user interface design, are often referred to as "design patterns."
A couple of the many definitions for a design pattern:
- A generally repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem.
- An optimal solution to a common problem within a specific context.
Common user interface questions for which design patterns are well established:
- When I want to filter content on a page, what are the most usable approaches I can take?
- If I want to rotate through features, images, or news articles on a page, what are some proven solutions?
- What are the most effective ways to include error messaging in my web forms?
- What are the most common approaches to designing rating systems?
You get the idea. These, and hundreds of questions like them, have been hammered out, time-tested, and answered by many designers, developers, and ultimately, web users. They may get tweaked, and they will improve and evolve, but the most solid current solutions are well documented and readily (and visually) available for your perusing.
Solid Design Pattern Resources:
Fix It Fast: Rapid IE6 CSS Debugging
IE6: We all hate it, and we all have to work with it (well, most of us). The most frustrating phase of buildout is often the final struggle with this Browser From Hell, but maybe (just maybe) we're struggling too much. When I help friends with IE6 bugs, I'm sometimes surprised at how long they've been stuck on a single problem, or how they've painted themselves into a corner with hacks and fixes. Then I remember that I used to be like that, grinding away for hours at simple float issues, or pulling my hair out over list spacing.
Why do we have so much trouble learning to debug for IE6?
We don't know! There are a lot of bugs out there, and it takes a while before you can intuitively spot them. If we can't identify a behavior, it's easy to throw up our hands and say "Augh, it's just BROKEN!"
We don't want help! Many a designer has spent hours on a problem simply because they didn't ask for help or Google it. With a language as straightforward as CSS, you can eventually solve most problems just by blindly changing stuff (over and over), but changing stuff doesn't mean you're learning.
We're not sure how to start! Debugging is a weird process: At any point, you could come across THE SOLUTION, which would be GREAT, and it always seems like it's JUST AROUND THE CORNER. This constant bait-and-switch means that we don't settle into a solid process for debugging, which, in the end, means debugging can take much longer than it should.
So, is there a way to shortcut through some of the hair-pulling and learn good debugging right from the start? MAYBE. The following is my cycle of preventing, catching, and fixing bugs in IE6. If I could, I would email it to myself in 2004, but until I figure out how to do that, posting it here will have to do:
Recent Comments
Hi Doug!
I just want to print this article :) But the print version is yet to be fully polished. I hope you guys spend sometime :) Viget inspire is a really nice resource for me....
- Lance on 'What To Expect When You're Expecting CSS/HTML Handoff'.
- Erik Wallace on 'What To Expect When You're Expecting CSS/HTML Handoff'.
- Jonathan on 'Switching Mindsets: From WordPress to ExpressionEngine'.
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