Topic: General
Picking the Perfect Palette
I recently visited a friend who was having some rooms painted. The walls of the living room looked like a patchwork quilt with daubs of various paint colors all over the wall. "I can't make up my mind," my friend said in response to the giant grin on my face.
My friend's dilemma is typical when starting a new project. Whether you're painting a room or designing a website, it can be a challenge to select the perfect color combination. Rather than getting into the process of color selection, I'm going to focus on some resources and techniques that can help make the job a little easier.
Question Your Best Practices
Starting at Viget a little over a month ago inspired me to take stock of the best practices that I’d developed over the years. From whole workflows to the smallest code snippet, I decided it was time to upend everything that I thought was perfect and bomb–proof to see what still made sense. The result was that I uncovered a few IE6 cockroaches hiding in the corners as well as a few other things that I had lazily relied on, without question, for years.
What did I find?
I discovered one surprising, and embarrassing, theme: forward–compatibility can make us, as front–end developers, complacent.
Tried and true techniques that worked in IE6 will, not surprisingly, still work in IE9 (and every other modern browser) — and that’s not necessarily a good thing. As browser development marches on and we stop supporting older versions we also need to re–evaluate the techniques we had been using to support those browsers.
Dropping support shouldn’t just mean not firing it up in a virtual machine to see how things look and work. It gives us the opportunity to clear out the cruft and move forward.
For Example
Look at the good old Suckerfish dropdown menu technique. I’ve been thoughtlessly, but successfully, using JavaScript to aid dropdown navigation and other hover interactions for years. Why? Because IE6 didn’t recognize the :hover pseudo class on elements other than links and JavaScript intervention was necessary. When you take IE6 out of the equation (and we all should) things get much simpler and you can use pure CSS.
So why was I still using this antiquated technique? Because browsers happily run whatever error–free code we give them — even when it could be better, or more modern. Quite simply: it worked. It has always worked and always will work and no browser is ever going to complain about it. Talk about a smooth–running bomber technique — and a perfect example of something that had to go.
We’ve all done it
By now you’re thinking “duh, Jeremy, I haven’t used JavaScript in my dropdowns for years”. Good for you! But I bet you’ve got something else hiding in the attic. Care to share one?
Moving Forward
So where’s the impetus to change when there’s virtually no friction? Refactoring code and removing unnecessary parts makes it simpler, smaller, more easily maintainable and less error prone. I think we can all agree that those are good things.
But there’s something more — it’s about being actively engaged in our craft. The speed of progress can cause us to hide behind best practices like a shelter from the storm of blog posts touting the newest thing. The key is finding a balance between stability and progression — or maybe you just need to upend everything once in a while.
Think about your favorite code snippet. If you had to rebuild it today, wouldn’t it be better? What’s your technique for keeping things current while still maintaining standards that speed up your day–to–day work?
Designers: Are You Asking Questions About UX?
A few weeks ago I posted a tweet to designers saying, "If you're not asking questions about the UX that gets handed to you, you're not doing your job." Responses varied from general agreement to my favorite sarcastic remark, "If you're not asking questions about the UX handed 2 u, you're not doing your job MY BEST FRIEND" (by UXer @malhinha)," and "If you get handed UX at all, you're luckier than most designers" (by @simonmeek).
The Case for UX
If you don't have wireframes and other UX deliverables to work with, I empathize with you, because I've been in your shoes. It's not fun! It's time-consuming and limits your ability to do your best work. Many designers are often left wearing the UX hat because UX is the new design...anybody can do it, right? I was guilty of thinking this until I started working with great UXers who are incredibly skilled at their craft. We don't treat our UX team as a luxury, but rather as a necessity. The value that they provide to project teams and clients can be measured in time, money, conversion rates, innovation ... The list goes on.
Continue reading "Designers: Are You Asking Questions About UX?"
Mood Boards: Dressing For Different Occasions
For designers at Viget, Mood Boards are consistently among our favorite topics to discuss and deliverables to create. I wanted to shed a little more light on the subject to talk about some variations of the practice and how we look at them at Viget. Essentially, mood boards aren't a one-size-fits-all kind of thing and we have different approaches to them. Ultimately, we always have the same goal in mind – to start broad in efforts to get early feedback that will allow us to narrow our focus as we begin to work on the details of a design. I originally approached this subject back in 2008 looking at two variations of mood boards. Since then, our two variations have morphed into three. Here are some examples that illustrate what we mean.
Continue reading "Mood Boards: Dressing For Different Occasions"
Post-Implementation, Pre-Launch: A Crucial Checkpoint
There's a certain type of project we find ourselves working on every now and then that can turn me into a puddle of stress until (and often after) the site launches.
It goes something like this:
The client has an internal web team and/or budget is tight -- so UX and design get full attention, but build-out is minimal. Our front end devs might build 2-3 pages, a basic elements page, or nothing at all. The client's internal web team is tasked with absorbing a set of PSDs and deconstructing the visual system. They need to create mark-up for the comps we've given them, and they need to extend the design and mark-up considerably to cover a large site. Oh, and they also have to port all of this into some type of CMS templating system. Usually under a hard deadline. Easy-peasey, right?
On top of all that, we often don't get to meet the people that are going to carry out this work. This means there is no opportunity to explain our vision or establish trust in either direction. As Doug points out in his excellent post about planning for hand-off, this can be a scary prospect for both teams.
So how do we do right by our clients and make sure our designs don't degrade?
Continue reading "Post-Implementation, Pre-Launch: A Crucial Checkpoint"
Become a Photoshop Layers Ninja
I'm always looking for ways to use Photoshop more efficiently. My recent obsession has been finding keyboard shortcuts to work with layers. Claiming that you'll be a layers ninja after reading this might be a stretch. But try these tricks while your fellow designers are watching, and your stealthy sleight of hand will probably blow their minds.
Dynamic Diagonals
The team here was recently checking out the Diesel Denim site. Pretty cool, and it's diagonal.
This reminded me of a few things:
- Diagonals are dynamic (said in wise professor voice).
- I don't use them much. More perhaps?
- Diagonals are very much in play on the web. We're way beyond Flash and background tiles.
- I should see what's out there.
Here's a handful that we dug up...
Print:
2012