Jordan Moore@jordanmoore RSS Membership19th April 2013
One of the nicer solutions to the responsive multi-level menu problem. The animations help inform that you have went a level higher or lower and provide a good sense of awareness in a confined space.
(Via Brad Frost)
19th April 2013
I want write-once, use-anywhere—that’s what modular code is.
Media queries are not that. They’re write-everywhere. They’re relative to your screen, so every time you write a media query for max-width or min-width, you’re connecting the appearance of your module to the width of the entire canvas—exactly what you were trying to avoid.
After reading Tab Atkins’ post on Element Queries and the problems with circularity I’m not sure we’ll see a native solution any time soon.
17th April 2013
There is no safe native typographic foundation on today’s web.
During the making of Tinytype I realised a few disappointing truths about fallback fonts on today’s web. Web fonts provide consistency but incur a performance cost.
17th April 2013
Tab Atkins details the problems with circular dependencies and potential shortcomings where element queries are concerned.
14th April 2013
Pasquale D’Silva on the role of animation and how it helps the brain connect the dots:
Animation leverages an overlooked dimension — time! An invisible fabric which stitches space together. … It feels more natural, because we have the contextual hook of space — mirroring the way you’d add something to a stack of things in real life!
14th April 2013
The gentleman I was chatting with on LinkedIn mentioned that for mobile users, he intended to share about 50 percent less content and reduce the steps in their checkout process to make it more efficient.
I think that’s a great idea, but I don’t think it should be limited to the mobile site.
If 50 percent less information is the right amount of information people need to complete their tasks, then you should only provide that 50 percent on all devices. And if visitors on laptops could use that additional information, why wouldn’t someone on a smaller screen want access to it, too?
Amen. There is no right amount of information for mobile users, there is no right amount of information for other users, there is only the right amount of information.
I think this misconception has lingered in the public consciousness like a bad hangover from the early internet-capable mobile devices that spawned WAP-friendly websites — simplified versions of their desktop counterparts that provided a diluted experience. Most m-dot websites carried (and continue to carry) on this tradition. For a while, this was ok because navigating on feature phones was a frustrating experience. Keep in mind though this was during a period when the mobile browser was an afterthought and providing the user an interface for interacting with the browser surely wouldn’t have been high on phone manufacturer’s agenda at the time.
That is until around mid 2007 when the iPhone was released and disrupted the mobile browser landscape. The rest is history, my point is that using a mobile browser is no longer a cumbersome experience. It doesn’t make sense to dumb down for mobiles anymore, there was a time when it did, but that time has been and gone — separate sites are old hat.
12th April 2013
Steve Fisher is the responsive process guy. If I ever have a question about process, I refer to his work. He has a knack for making tricky subjects accessible, like his latest thoughts on process:
Unless I am designing for a specific device, it is essential that I stop thinking about devices and start thinking about experiences.
I am so guilty of subconsciously thinking about device capabilities at the wrong time in the process. It’s not enough to simply say you are device-agnostic when thinking about media query values alone, this thinking should apply for everything else in-between — the experience as Steve describes so eloquently.
10th April 2013
…the things we build rarely take one shape these days, it’s key to keep in mind that our processes and teams probably shouldn’t either
Trent Walton does a great job of explaining how the traditional assembly line approach to web projects doesn’t quite fit a responsive approach. Traditional project lifecycle stages that mirror traditional project skills and roles can be costly to responsive projects and perhaps silo team members rather than allow the sharing of knowledge and foster rapid prototyping. What a great side-effect of responsive web design — by critically evaluating the shape of our teams, our processes and our overall structure we see how we can work in better synergy with each other rather than in isolation.
10th April 2013
Viljami Salminen’s responsive nav plugin takes a lot of the pain out of building an elegant responsive navigation solution. I would recommend it over my own Top Drawer approach. Top Drawer relies on FastClick by FT Labs to remove the 300ms delay on press whereas Responsive Nav does this out of the box in a neat standalone script without any library dependenices.
Read Viljami’s presentation on Smashing Magazine which includes a vast list of the compatible platforms for Responsive Nav.
10th April 2013
I agree with Brad Frost’s comments on this:
Awesome to see Etsy wear their performance improvements as a badge of honor.
It’s a welcome sight to see impressive performance boosts like this when the modern web page is getting heavier. Etsy credits the improvements with their use of serving static content over CDNs, caching and other methods to reduce requests and latency.
(Via Brad Frost)
