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Last week, the W3C released an updated version of its HTML5 differences from HTML4 document. This is the second iteration of the text this year and the seventh overall since first being drafted in January, 2008.

The document is a tremendous resource to front-end web developers as it outlines only those items relevant to authors. If you've ever tried to parse a W3C spec (and lived to tell about it), then you know they are geared toward browser makers and not run-of-the-mill web developers (The Rest of Us™).

I just finished reading over the latest version of the "differences" document and thought it'd be helpful to jot down some thoughts on things I hadn't seen before when reading up on HTML5. For brevity's sake, we'll just cover the changes to markup. There's a truckload of new APIs that I'm hoping to cover in the near-ish future.

Continue reading "Recapping the W3C’s “HTML5 differences from HTML4” document"

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Renaissance: A rebirth or revival; an awakening; a fresh take

Woot... JS libraries, font embedding, CSS3, HTML5, and a heck of a lot of cool stuff is on the table. Designers are laying down some amazing designs, and the strongest stuff seems to have to do with better typography, more custom illustration work, super-elegant interactions and transitions, stronger foundations in user experience, and a return to design fundamentals.

It's awesome. There's huge potential. I'm overwhelmed...

Yep, you talk to a group of designers, and chances are good that a number of us feel we aren't exactly "waking up" with the movement. Somewhere along the way we've stagnated. We're checking out the yellow brick road, ready to dash down it, knowing we've got heart and will, but we feel stiff and rusty. What might have happened?

Continue reading "The Juices and The Flows Have Been Diminished"

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Open letter to design educators and students:

Hopefully this doesn't come across as too much of a rant. OK, OK, it is. But I only want to help. So pretend you're listening to Andy Rooney from 60 Minutes and hear me out. If you don't know who Mr. Rooney is, he's the curmudgeonly guy with wayward eyebrows and long ear hair that comes on in the last few minutes of the show. Now you know. Here's the deal. I've been seeing a lot of portfolios lately through reviews and submissions of intern candidates. It still boggles my mind how many students don't have their work online. This isn't directed just at future web designers. This plea goes out to all future design professionals.

Continue reading "Put Your Portfolio Online"

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Every few weeks, the web design community stirs itself into a tizzy rehashing the same old debates. We were just getting past the "design in the browser" brouhaha when the "designers must code" tweets (and follow-up blog posts like this one) started cropping up again.

If you haven't seen it yet, you're probably holed up in some #snowpocalypse ice hut. The controversial tweet came from Elliot Jay Stocks, a talented designer with over 9,000 followers.

It was exactly the kind of off-the-cuff remark that incites riots and comment wars. It inspired lots of back-and-forth between players large and small. It's hard to articulate any complex ideas within 140 characters, so it's not surprising that most of the responses were shortsighted knee-jerk reactions.

I'm not going to throw around metaphors comparing web designers to architects, TV producers, photographers or musicians. I'm not going to rehash the rehashing of an already played-out debate. Instead, I want to focus on the nature of our arguing. Why is it that designers, who should be open-minded and creative in our thinking, can't seem to see beyond black and white? And why is web design as polarizing as politics these days?

It's another false dilemma, and watching everyone pick sides and lob dodge balls across the fence is getting incredibly boring. Everyone wants to argue about these issues as if there are only two answers. Design everything in the browser (die, Photoshop, die!), or design every last detail in Photoshop. Designers must excel at markup because it's essential to know your medium's limitations or Designers shouldn't learn code because it will tether their creativity.

These choices are not mutually exclusive, and we all know it. Very little of what we do can be labeled as right or wrong. Unless you're a template churner every project, client, and technology requires a slightly different solution. It's part of what makes web design so much fun. So, aside from the traffic generated by rehashing controversial subjects, why are we all arguing about the same thing every few months?

Dichotomous thinking is our brain's way of simplifying an argument down to its basic elements, choosing a side, and moving on. We need to fit everything in our world into a mental category, and it's human nature to reduce these categories down to polar opposites. Good or bad. Easy or hard. iPhone or nothing at all, you might as well use a tin can. We ignore all the less extreme options in between even when those are the ones that make the most sense. It's the easy way out. Pick a side, shout from your soap box, and save the rest of your energy to tweet your thoughts on the next big debate.

And while we're at it, that ultra important side you're picking? Chances are it isn't the one you know to be right, it's the path of least resistance for YOU. If you spent a lot of time learning markup, you probably sided with Elliot and made snarky remarks about the designers who weren't as awesome as you. If you consider markup a waste of time and focus all your energies on more visual aspects of design, you were linking to Mark Boulton's well-crafted retort. But each of us landed on our side of the fence for a number of reasons - not purely because it was "right". When I started learning code, I did it because I'm a control freak. Now I can say I believe in that choice because it makes me a better designer, but it's an easy argument to make since I already did the legwork.

The thing is, we shouldn't forget that we are helping to shape a young industry. We are doing our craft a great disservice by taking mental shortcuts. We should be thinking harder, questioning more, and resisting the urge to jump on any bandwagons. Please, take time to stop and think about all the possibilities - and all the incredibly talented people behind those possibilities - before filling the web with more blanket statements.

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I recently had a chance to implement a custom design for a Shopify storefront. This was my first time using the e-commerce site, but Shopify's known to be easy to customize and work with, so I was excited to dive in and take on the challenge. I was ready for Mount Everest or Iditarod levels of difficulty; Triathalon-hard at least. But luckily, Shopify makes customizing a shop's design very easy even for the less-than code savvy like myself, and its customizing tools make the process as painless as possible.

Continue reading "Conquering Shopify Design"

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From time to time creatives in our field are bound to run low on creative juice. Like many others, I've recently felt my brain needing a good creative spark to get going. I started looking for a couple of outlets that would give me this creative spark with some requirements in mind: something I could do fairly quickly and preferably away from the computer screen. I wanted to get back to the basics of being creative.

As luck would have it, I came across "Caffeine for the Creative Mind: 250 Exercises to Wake Up Your Brain" by by Stefan Mumaw and Wendy Lee Oldfield.

Continue reading "Book Review: Caffeine For The Creative Mind: 250 Exercises to Wake Up Your Brain"

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I've recently been doing a bit of research on real-time, data-driven timelines. Here are a few of the solutions that generally fall into the news/search results category. These are less visual and more functional, but that's what I was after in this case.

Continue reading "Timeline Views of the News"

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