WordPress is getting ready to disrupt itself, with six major releases in the past two years they are getting ready to release their greatest update yet. The update comes from the struggle faced during the reboot with the MP6 project and the version 3.8 release not providing much of an improvement to the platform. The ability to work without JavaScript is one of the things that makes strong, stable, powerful, but it is also one of its major drawbacks. For a platform running 25% of the world’s websites, this is can be very limiting. For a majority of open sourced project are left with two option, fading away into irrelevancy or go through a major update.
“What would we build if we were starting from scratch today, knowing all we’ve learned over the past 13 years of building WordPress?” -Matt Mullenweg, CEO of WordPress
Matt Mullenweg, CEO of WordPress announced today that it was time for something big, something new, something with codename Calypso. With more than 127 contributors, in the form of talented engineers and designers, working together for over 20 months, Calypso is set to bring a multitude of improvements. Below of some of the benefits and a before and after comparison between the new and the old WordPress.com
The updated platform hope to bring on another quarter of the web onto its open source system. Mullenweg acknowledges this is a huge undertaking and is incredibly proud of the team of contributors that continue to work hard. He promises this is just the beginning with a whole set of updates for plugins, extensibility, contributions, Windows and Linux releases, API speed, localization, and harmonizing the WordPress.com API and WP-API that will be required in order to work with the new WordPress.com.
After nearly 6 years in operation, Fontdeck is retiring. The professional webfont service allowed designers the unique capability to preview fonts in their web design and therefore “test” the font before having to commit to a purchase. They were influential in the support of web foundries such as Fontsmith, Colophon, Jeremy Tankard and A2-Type, by showing type designers there was a new marketplace for their work on the web.
Fontdeck is a joint venture between Clearleft and OmniTI, as of right now neither companies have the resources to move Fontdeck forward. They have decided to retire the company to avoid withering away amongst designer’s current needs and demands.
“More speed, more tailoring of fonts, case-by-case subsetting, specifying OpenType features, hinting only where necessary, WOFF2, flexible pricing options, and more besides. As a webfont service we felt it was incumbent upon us to be providing all this to our paying customers, and as web designers we felt this was the kind of service we should be receiving.”
The company expressed in their blog their effort to “do the right thing’ by continuing to serve fonts until 1 December 2016, giving everyone 12 month to find other sources of their fonts. As of December 2015 they will no longer accept new accounts, project upgrades, or font purchases.
Google is encouraging Star Wars fans to “Awaken The Force Within” with their new promotional interface. The Google’s Star Wars promotional rebrand that transform the design theme across all your Google applications.The design theme is dependent on which side you choose, Light or Dark.
Depending which side you choose, the design theme will be applied across different Google experiences like Chromecast, Gmail, Google Maps, and more. Google assures it does not affect the functionality of its products.
What if you picked the wrong side to fight for? You can change your side at google.com/starwars. The clever UI lets you drag your avatar to the side you prefer and then click “Join” to follow your new path.
By now, users are more than familiar with infinite scrolling — the design technique that relentlessly keeps refreshing a page when you scroll down it. Ostensibly designed to replace pagination, infinite scrolling has been hailed as friendlier to the user experience and more convenient, but is it really?
Sometimes, conventional wisdom is simply dead wrong, as it is in infinite scrolling’s case. When everyone thinks that a specific technique is the greatest thing since sliced bread, then that’s usually an indicator of how overdone it is. That’s exactly what’s going on with infinite scrolling.
Page performance takes a bruising
On the web, page-loading speed is everything. Studies have shownthat slow load times result in people leaving your client’s site anda downward spiral in conversion rates in general. Your client’s customers and site visitors don’t care about how cool your site looks and whether it’s got fancy graphics or not.
visitors don’t care about how cool your site looks and whether it’s got fancy graphics or not…[they] care about…page-loading times
What they do care about more than anything else is page-loading times. And that’s bad news for those with an infinite-scrolling site.
You see, the more users infinitely scroll down a page, more content has to inevitably load on the same page. As a result, the page performance will increasingly slow down, causing a more aggravating user experience for people trying to read said content on the page.
This doesn’t necessarily apply to all long-scrolling pages, of course, but, any time a page has more work to do when it needs to load more content, it’s going to run into performance issues—especially if the page is very long.
Google Plus relies on infinite scroll, and it’s not always the best idea. OnSony’s Google Plus page, users are greeted with a ton of content in the form of updates from the company. If they, for instance, want to go back a few months to check out older posts, they have to infinite-scroll for a while, which means that more and more content is loaded on this page. As a result, after awhile, it can take several seconds for new posts to load after every section refresh.
Scroll position is forgotten
Perhaps the biggest pet peeve of users who’ve dealt with infinite scrolling, is the point at which you stop scrolling on an infinite-scrolling page isn’t recorded as fixed by your browser. This leads to particular frustrations when you click on a link from a certain spot on a long-scrolling page and head to the next page or website in the same tab. When you try to go back by clicking the back arrow, you’ll never, ever end up in the same place!
Once back on the original page, you’ll have to start from the very beginning of the infinite scroll to get to the same spot, which wastes a lot of time and can be quite disheartening for some users. That’s because infinite-scrolling pages typically reset the scroll to the very beginning once users leave.
A great example of this notorious problem can be found onCreative Cruise’s long-scrolling page. A very unique example of web design, it features a storytelling motif that tracks the cruise’s route from west to east. So when you scroll down the page—you’re really scrolling to the right.
Let’s say you’re scrolling the page, and you make it to Herengracht 506, which is the fifth pick-up point on the cruise. You’re almost done learning about all pick-up points since this spot is the second from the last. However, suddenly, you want to learn more about this cruise because the interesting design has piqued your imagination.
Oh! There’s the “About the Cruise” link right up top on the horizontal navigation, so you click on it to learn more. After spending a short time reading about the cruise, you decide to hit the back button to try to resume from pick-up point five—Herengracht 506—yet you’ve disappointingly discovered that the infinite scroll has reset the entire page, and you have to start from the beginning again, scrolling through all pick-up points to get to the same spot.
Frustrating! It’s almost like being penalized on a level in a video game by being made to start the journey all over again from the beginning.
Footers are hard (or downright impossible) to use
Footers typically contain important info for site visitors, such as the About, Contact and even Privacy links of a site. Users have come to expect that such info is readily clickable, should they have any concerns or just want extra details. Unfortunately for these users, infinite scrolling sometimes makes it next to impossible to successfully click on these footer links.
For something as ubiquitous and seemingly popular as infinite scrolling, it’s far from perfect
As soon as you think you have a shot at clicking on a link in the footer after scrolling down to a certain point, guess what happens? Infinite scrolling automatically takes over, revealing the next layer of content and…pushing the footer farther down. This creates a vicious cycle of scrolling down, seeing the footer, trying to click on it in vain, and then having it pushed farther down. That’s not very satisfying!
TakeBing Images, for instance. For this search for “candy,” you get a seemingly endless supply of pictures showing this sugary treat. When you click on “See more images” after your initial search, the footer will keep getting pushed down.
The footer contains links like “Learn More” and “Help,” but you’re not going to be able to actually click on any of these useful links until the page stops infinite-scrolling, which takes a while. This makes for an annoying time trying to catch up to the footer.
Still needs work
For something as ubiquitous and seemingly popular as infinite scrolling, it’s far from perfect and needs improvement in these key areas before designers should be comfortable implementing this design technique for their clients. Just goes to show you that something that’s been widely adopted isn’t proof of its usefulness.
Yes, infinite scrolling is an alternative to delays of reaching content that pagination causes, but it creates its own problems, too.
Designers should weigh the pros and cons of infinite scrolling before jumping on its long-scrolling bandwagon. After all, your client’s site visitors deserve better than suffering long page-load times due to excessive content, scroll positions that aren’t fixed, and footers that are always out of reach.
Fresh free WordPress themes raise the blood pressure of any user of the world’s most popular CMS. Content feels to be delivered much better from a new design. Let’s not deny it, choosing a new WordPress theme is like choosing a new lover – lots of emotion involved. That’s why we bring you the best free WordPress themes in a monthly roundup. All of the following themes are free and responsive on any screen. Need we still mention that?
WpGumby is a theme in modern flat design and is suitable for multiple purposes. With 13 page templates, five widget areas and four template layouts WpGumby delivers a solid foundation for blogs, portfolios and even online shops as it is prepared to work flawlessly with WooCommerce.
Created by: ShopitPress.com
License: free to use for personal as well as commercial projects | GNU General Public License
BeFit has been developed for the fitness industry but is as well usable for other purposes. Think of photography, businesses, personal websites, just about any topic desired to be presented in a dark layout will fit.
Created by: SKTThemes
License: free to use for personal as well as commercial projects | GNU General Public License
As you might have guessed from its name, WpF Flaty also sports the flat design approach. This one would be great for blogs and portfolios. It comes with two sidebars and a template without sidebars as well as different coloring.
Created by: WPFreeware
License: free to use for personal as well as commercial projects | GNU General Public License
Novellite is a simple, yet attractive theme for a lot of use cases, among them businesses and portfolios. It can easily be configured through a Theme Options area in the backend. You can change the logo, the background and more.
Created by: themehunk
License: free to use for personal as well as commercial projects | GNU General Public License
Photo Perfect is a dedicated theme for photographers and photobloggers as it has been developed with images in mind. Backgrounds and color schemes can be changed. Unfortunately, Exif is not what this theme is able to read. Seems to be not that perfect after all, but still a very attractive option.
Created by: WEN Themes
License: free to use for personal as well as commercial projects | GNU General Public License
SKT Girlie focuses female bloggers. This does not block out male users, however. Each man that wants to please the girlie in him is welcome to use it, too. Girlie is open for all possible use cases but explicitly recommendable for online shops as it comes prepared for WooCommerce.
Created by: SKT Themes
License: free to use for personal as well as commercial projects | GNU General Public License
Resi is the last theme any minimalist needs. Its strength lies in the presentation of images which makes it a valid choice for photographers and photo bloggers. Customize the backgrounds and the color scheme as you see fit.
Created by: modernthemesnet
License: free to use for personal as well as commercial projects | GNU General Public License
Colinear is made by Automattic, the inventors of WordPress. That always comes with the promise of great code, perfect compatibility and proper utilization of the internal powers of the WordPress core. Colinear is a pure blogging theme and comes with two sidebars. Throw in your own backgrounds, colors, and headers to customize it.
Created by: Automattic
License: free to use for personal as well as commercial projects | GNU General Public License
fYeah is another classic blogging theme, inspired by Tumblr. It supports all the different post formats, comes with an exchangeable logo, individual backgrounds and lets you customize colors as well as add your own fonts.
Created by: David Chandra Purnama
License: free to use for personal as well as commercial projects | GNU General Public License
Hitchcock is a theme for designers, photographers and just about any other creative worker out there. The only prerequisite needed is your wish to present your work in an elegant and clean way. Hitchcock likes social media, lets you change accentuation colors, is prepared for Jetpack’s Infinite Scroll and doesn’t prevent you from changing backgrounds and headers.
Created by: Anders Norén
License: free to use for personal as well as commercial projects | GNU General Public License
I’m sure most of you would have heard about the new Apple Pencil by now. Unless you have used it before, you might not have known about this beautiful little feature.
Because the Pencil is round-barreled and has no clip on the cap, I was worried that it would roll around (and eventually, off) a table top. But it’s actually weighted inside, sort of like a Weeble Wobble, so unless it’s on a sloped surface, it won’t roll more than an inch or so before settling in place. In hand, I can’t tell that it’s weighted like this.
Most of designers or engineers would have added a clip, cap, or even a little nipple to prevent the pen from rolling off the table. I know I would.
But Apple is not like us. They took the hard route.
They decided it was vital to maintain the purity of the round-barreled body. So they somehow weighted the Pencil internally, and while doing so, they also created a delightful user experience.
The surprise factor (if pleasant) plays a part for sure. If you dig around the Apple Pencil page, you will find no mention of this feature. In fact there is no marketing by Apple on this at all.
This is why Apple will continue to be a leader in Design. And the rest of the world will continue to play catch up. I’m sure in reality the pen may still roll quite a bit, but in this case it’s the thought that counts, and they took the effort to do so.
A year ago, I went on a personal quest to find the best way to use the powers of CSS pre-processors to manage breakpoints and write media queries in my projects. The outcome was include-media, a library that promises “simple, elegant and maintainable” media queries in Sass. But how did that work out for me?
The first two adjectives above are actually quite subjective, since simplicity and elegance eventually boil down to personal preference — there’s no point in talking about those. Instead, I’d like to share with you my personal experience of using the library for a year on commercial projects, and how it particularly helped me with the third aspect: maintainability.
Back to the basics
The need for something like include-media comes from a problem that developers absolutely hate: repeating code. Until element queries become a thing and we start thinking of responsive design at a component level, we’re stuck with media queries that respond to changes in the global viewport, not in the context of the element.
As a result, developers often define “global breakpoints”, which are really just arbitrary viewport sizes at which elements in a page may change form. Even though that’s a simple concept that can be easily implemented in vanilla CSS, there’s an immediate advantage that a pre-processor can bring to the table: the ability to define these breakpoints dynamically as variables, allowing developers to declare them just once and reference them everywhere.
Over the last year, I’ve been focusing on taking that principle even further, by making these breakpoint declarations available in different contexts.
Enter JavaScript
It’s not uncommon to reference the window width within a JavaScript routine. For example, you might be executing a piece of code that changes the behaviour of a certain element in the page, but that element might only be displayed on large viewports anyway. In that case, it could be sensible to skip the execution completely if the window is smaller than a certain value.
.foo {
display: none;
// Oh, this is cool. We're referencing the name
// of the breakpoint, not the actual value
@include media('>=large') {
display: block;
}
}
function doStuff() {
// Bollocks, we're referencing the value here!
if (window.innerWidth < 1200) {
return;
}
doHeavyStuff();
}
But there we are again — that “certain value” is one of the breakpoints we so proudly defined just once in our style sheets, but we’re now redeclaring its value since the name large won’t mean anything in JavaScript. So much for keeping things DRY.
To get around that, there’s a plugin called include-media-export, a combination of a SCSS routine that writes information about the breakpoints to the DOM, and a small JavaScript utility to read and process it. With the plugin, I can rewrite the function above without redeclaring the breakpoint, so all is good if someone decides to change its value down the line.
function doStuff() {
// Yay, we're DRY again!
if (im.lessThan('large')) {
return;
}
doHeavyStuff();
}
The im object exposes the name of the current active breakpoint through im.getActive, while im.greaterThan and im.lessThan determine whether the window is wider or narrower than a certain breakpoint.
This is not a new concept, and many others wrote about it in the past (namely Les James and Mike Herchel). The idea here is to tie everything together in the same ecosystem, making the experience seamless for the developer.
There’s also layout
I don’t use any grid systems per se, but I find it convenient to have some classes purely for layout purposes. When applied to an element, these classes will define its width, instead of manually setting it on individual selectors — this keeps the style sheet organised and makes the markup a bit more semantic.
After reading Harry Robert’s piece about BEMIT, I became really interested in his responsive suffixes approach. He suggests including a class with the name of a breakpoint to describe the state of an element at that screen size (e.g. .class-name@breakpoint). That idea led to include-media-columns, a plugin that generates column classes based on the breakpoints defined in include-media, following BEMIT’s naming convention.
Let’s take the list of breakpoints we defined before and imagine a user profile component that must:
Use the full width of its container on small viewports
Take half the width on medium viewports
Take a third of the width on large viewports
user-profile element changing based on the viewport
I can define that behaviour simply by giving the element the right classes in the HTML, without having to write any media queries or even touch CSS at all. It comes with the huge bonus of getting extremely semantic and meaningful markup.
<div class="user-profile col col--1-1 col--1-2@medium col--1-3@large">
<!-- User profile -->
</div>
The suffix has been intentionally left out on col--1-1 as part of a mobile-first approach, making it the “default state” of the component. If you care about supporting old browsers and don’t want them to get the mobile view, the $im-media-support flag described in this post will get you sorted.
Making it part of the workflow
This is all nice and everything, but how easy is it to integrate this part of your workflow? It sort of defeats the purpose of trying to improve maintainability if this is a pain to install and update. Both include-media and the plugins are semver versioned and available as both Bower and NPM packages, so I simply include them as normal dependencies when I start a project.
The Export plugin doesn’t require any additional configuration, whereas Columns requires you to specify how many subdivisions of the page you want to generate classes for.
// I want to be able to divide the page in halves, thirds and fifths
@include im-columns(2, 3, 5);
Wrapping up
All the breakpoints are now defined in a single centralised place, and any changes or additions will be propagated and made available to the scripts and to the layout — I think this leaves my DRY pet peeve at ease.
I’m not trying to sell you this workflow, and I’m certainly not claiming credit for any breakthrough idea. All this stuff existed before, but I wanted to give developers tools that tie everything together and makes development easier.
I can’t wait for element queries, CSS variables, CSS Grid Layout and other modern APIs to make everything described in this article completely obsolete — but until then, I’m happy with what a year (and 460 GitHub stars!) of include-media and its contributors have brought to my development workflow.
State of Web Design: Chile | NOUPE
In our series on the state of web design in countries throughout the globe, we are proud to present you the design industry of Chile today.
Church converted into web design office
The firm BBVH converted the worn out structure into offices for the web design firm acato as well as two apartments.
Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.
The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.
Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.
I Turned Off Javascript for a Week and it was Glorious
Designing the Perfect Ecommerce Website: 45 Stunning Examples to Inspire You
Design Guru Don Norman: Microsoft is Beating Apple at Design
Dear Adobe, your iPad Apps are a Mess…
Massive Windows 10 Update has Three Nasty Surprises
iPhone 6s Plus Retro – A Limited Run of 25
The Average Website
Why is your Style Guide Someone Else’s Style Guide
Science of Typography
Cerberus: Responsive HTML Email
Save “Save for Web”
Introducing the New Google+
Mixing Color for the Web with Sass
Introducing Envato Sites
Candy: A Visual Way to Organize the Best Things from the Web
Case Study: How Google+ Went Fully Responsive
Former Apple Designers Say the Company has Lost ‘The Fundamental Principles of Good Design’
Windows Turns 30: A Visual History
Niume – The Collaborative Blogging Platform
Photos NASA Picked to Explain Our World to Aliens
Visual Studio Code is Now Open-Source
The Making of an Icon: How the “Peace for Paris” Sign Spread Around the World
Mailchimp’s Holiday Marketing Tips
Interview with Jony Ive About Apple Pencil
Design Leadership: What’s Next?
Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.
Have you ever noticed that people tend to actually get angry when you ask them critical things, such as if they think they can really handle the project in size and quality? What is the reason behind that behavior? I hope that it’s not what today’s cartoon depicts, though I wouldn’t say it couldn’t be – since I took notice of this study.
![Cartoon: If Web Designers Were Sculptors… [006]](http://www.noupe.com/wp-content/plugins/contextual-related-posts-2.0.1/timthumb/timthumb.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.noupe.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F02%2Fnoupe_cartoon_teaser_220215.png&w=250&h=200&zc=1&q=75 "Cartoon: If Web Designers Were Sculptors… [006]")
![Cartoon: If Web Designers Were Pizza Boys [005]](http://www.noupe.com/wp-content/plugins/contextual-related-posts-2.0.1/timthumb/timthumb.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.noupe.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F02%2Fcartoonteaser_noupe.png&w=250&h=200&zc=1&q=75 "Cartoon: If Web Designers Were Pizza Boys [005]")
![Cartoon: If Web Designers Were Butchers… [008]](http://www.noupe.com/wp-content/plugins/contextual-related-posts-2.0.1/timthumb/timthumb.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.noupe.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F03%2Fteaser_noupe_butcher.png&w=250&h=200&zc=1&q=75 "Cartoon: If Web Designers Were Butchers… [008]")
![Cartoon: If Web Designers Were … [#001]](http://www.noupe.com/wp-content/plugins/contextual-related-posts-2.0.1/timthumb/timthumb.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.noupe.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F01%2Fcartoon-series-standardimage_noupe.png&w=250&h=200&zc=1&q=75 "Cartoon: If Web Designers Were … [#001]")
