Last week was my last of a great ride at Splunk. I have now joined Auth0 working on a new developer-focused offering around Serverless compute, with Webtask. I’ve also started a new blog to discuss more broader topics on tech, startups etc.
Read more on what I am doing now here!
Last week was my last of a great ride at Splunk. I have now joined Auth0 working on a new developer-focused offering around Serverless compute, with Webtask. I’ve also started a new blog to discuss more broader topics on tech, startups etc.
Read more on what I am doing now here!
FitVids.js is still a perfectly workable mini plugin for making videos (or anything) responsive. You need it, or something like it, for sites that have things like YouTube or Vimeo videos, Instagram embeds, or really anything that’s not responsive in the aspect-ratio sense. resize their width/height in an aspect ratio friendly way, // do not.
Reframe.js is kind of a modernized version of FitVids.
require it.While they largely do the same thing, there are some slight differences:
When we tweeted it, there were several responses along the lines of:
Why would you use this when you can just use the padding hack?
Indeed, these both use the padding hack, or “intrinsic ratios”. Wrap a container element around the thing, make it height: 0; padding-top: 56.25%; position: relative; then absolutely position the element within to cover it entirely. But doing it that way means:
Using either of these libraries means:
Both are valuable. I don’t wanna hand-write div wrappers on stuff, I just wanna copy and paste embed code. And not all things are 16:9.
Reframe.js Notes is a post from CSS-Tricks
The US presidential election is right around the corner. While some candidates are leveraging their eccentric personality and their bold attitudes to gain followers, and yes, I’m talking to you Mr. Trump, some of them invest massively in their online presence.
Which brings me to Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff knows exactly how to approach an audience, and they go all in to do so. In every single aspect of her digital campaign, you sometimes see tiny details that contribute on creating actually engaging content. From “God’s” voice (Morgan Freeman) in her bio video, to the awesome and bold logo with the subliminal-ish arrow symbolizing forward thinking, action and progress.
Speaking of small details, you can find the logo even in the source code of her website.
Her digital marketing campaign is hands down, one of the best I’ve seen in a while. Her logo, the quality of her videos, and the methods she used to tackle certain subjects is simply mindblowing. To be honest, I don’t know much about politics, but I can safely assume that she is digitally addressing most of the controversial topics built around her. From the enduring email problem to the Benghazi case and everything in between, Hillary’s staff defended herself with creative and professional copy and compelling visuals.
But enough with the political crap. Let’s cut it to the chase and talk about the things that actually interest us, the designers. Her website’s design.
Right off the bet, the first thing we see on Hillary’s homepage, is a pop-up asking you to agree upon the fact that Donald Trump is one dangerous man. Although the pop-up’s design is rather simple and with a clear and distinguishable Call to Action, some people are not very happy about the straightforwardness of it.
“When I land on the website, I’m immediately met with a popup that wants my email if I disagree with Donald Trump. It doesn’t mention why it wants my email or what it’s going to do with it – it just wants it.” – Max Robinson, Aims Media Web Design, http://www.aimsmedia.co.uk
The reason why Hillary wants your email so badly is obvious. I full heartedly believe in the power of email. I happen to manage Bannersnack’s email marketing campaign and we leveraged email to convert old users, keep in touch with the customers and even run contests and surveys. Now, although they aren’t a Saas product, they are using email marketing exactly the same. They are constantly reminding you to support Hillary and help defeat the dreaded Donald.
Attacking Donald is the smartest marketing campaign and they know that. They are using email, video, and any available channel to bash and emphasize who Donald Trump is and why he would be a bad choice.
Hillary’s website changed a lot in the past months, and man they are really trying everything. It takes just one trip down the memory lane of the internet (Wayback Machine) and see all the changes on her website. The mesmerizing thing is that if you want to see the web design trends from a specific year, just take a peek at how her website used to look like that year.
From 2015 until a few months ago, the Hero image has been a crucial element of her website. Depending on the social-political events, the image kept changing trying to convey the message Hillary believes in and what she stands for, or who stands for her.
A few weeks ago, they ditched the hero image, and went for something more popular, more powerful.
Just like the way they’ve been changing the hero image, the video plays an important role in illustrating certain changes, beliefs and causes she fights for. The thing that surprised me the most is how much they are leveraging the video format in order to convey the right message. While writing this article, in the past three days the main video changed three times and they’ve just redesigned the whole homepage. They’ve ditched any other elements that could distract you from the important items of the website, namely, the video, the donation box and the image of her with the “If you’re with her, chip in to support Hillary now” message.
From a leads perspective, the site does a good job of enabling the capture, the email addresses of visitors. There are at least two form fill pop ups that come up before you can advance to the site. Only when clicking on the small logo on the top left are you able to bypass the first form fill (which populates the entire screen when you first land on the site.) Clearly, the site’s primary purpose is to gather leads. So, that’s well done.
However, there are a few inconveniences that shouldn’t be left unnoticed.
From a user’s perspective, it is a bit off-putting that I can’t just browse the site without being asked for my email address. For the swing voter who is just browsing and doesn’t want to be placed on an email list, this could get them to bounce before they even get to the content.
Another thing that changed drastically is the footer. Every single social media channel was listed on the website’s footer and then a minimalist box emphasizing the “PAID FOR BY HILLARY FOR AMERICA” slogan.
And then this happened…
I’m not saying it’s bad, it is just a bit too much. The call to action is a bit confusing, and the bulky social media text could’ve been easily replaced with some minimalistic icons. On the pros side, placing secondary navigation to less important areas of a website is also a great way to utilize the footer, as it can help declutter the main navigation, which in turn aids usability.
The site’s design is a good mix of visuals and content. It’s clean, photo and video heavy, and easy to navigate. It’s the right site for the audience they’re trying to reach which are voters who want to know what Hillary stands for and what are they going to get if she’s elected president. They’ve done a good job of letting the photos and content drive the site, and not slick design.
Read More at A Few Things Web Designers Can Learn From Hillary Clinton
Creativity rarely comes from nowhere. Inspiration is an important aspect for all graphic and web designers. Get your daily dose of inspiration in the form of photos and colors at Design Seeds. There, you’ll be provided with sophisticated pictures and a fitting color palette every day.
In 2009, Design Seeds was created by Jessica Colaluca, who went freelance as a designer at that time. She turned her passion for colors, flowers, and landscapes into a blog. Her touch with nature and her design-related job are also reflected in the name Design Seeds.
Rose Roses and a Palette With Six Pastel Shades
Usually, she publishes two photos a day, where the colors play a vital role. The pictures vary from vividly colored flowers to impressive landscapes or something very common in our daily lives. The colors are always the primary factor that makes the photos so unique.
The composition of colors for a project is not always an easy task. Which colors harmonize especially well, which do a good job at complementing each other? Every designer has to answer these questions over and over again. Design Seeds provides answers through photos, which always come with a color palette of six colors. Each one is taken from the respective image and represents one of the pictures’s dominant colors.
This way, a spray of roses results in a palette of six pastel colors. In contrast to that, a winter landscape in the mountains leads to a palette with cold blue and gray shades.
Six Cold Blue-Grey Colors Fitting to the Winter Landscape
The color values of each of the palette’s six colors are also provided as a hexadecimal value. This makes it easy to copy them and use them for your design purposes.
Those looking for unusual colors for a particular project aside from the daily photos can also go for a targeted search through Design Seeds. For example, it is possible to find pictures of specific colors. To do that, simply pick a color, and Design Seeds will show you all photos that the color is a part of.
Search for Colors
For instance, this is very helpful when one color is already fixed due to a logo or other client-mandatory asset. You’ll quickly find various harmonious color palettes to choose from.
Alternatively, you can also have photos displayed in collections. For example, Design Seeds can show photos related to each of the seasons, related to nature, or everyday situations.
… or Look for Collections
To not miss a photo, you should become an Instagrammer, as Jessica Colaluca also posts here photos on there. This way, you won’t miss anything, and you’ll automatically receive your daily seed of inspiration. If you prefer Twitter, you can also follow her there.
Design Seeds is a small, but lovely blog that shows you the diversity of colors, and how to properly use and combine them every day.
I’m thrilled to announce a brand new workshop series I’m starting with Val Head about web animation! We’ll be taking two-day workshop around to different cities starting this November, starting with Austin and New York. Whether you’re a beginner or you’ve been diving into animation already, this course won’t just get you started- you’ll leave with all the tools necessary to make subtle and beautiful web animations, and how to pick the right tools for the job.
Val and I both have been speaking and giving workshops around the world, and together we make a venn diagram of strength and knowledge about how to animate on the web. We’ll be covering everything from theory, to technique, to bug fixes and cross-browser stability. We both focus on accessibility and performance. You’ll learn how to make great animation decisions both from a design and technology perspective. We’ll cover working with SVG, CSS, and JavaScript technologies, both native and API. We’ll discuss complex animations, responsive animations, and UX animations, and go over when to use each. You won’t find this much web animation knowledge packed into one workshop anywhere else!
To make sure you get as much out of these workshops as possible we’re keeping the the class sizes small. Each workshop is limited to 40 participants and will include hands-on exercises to get you started.
Direct Link to Article — Permalink
Web Animation Workshops is a post from CSS-Tricks
I managed to get CSS-Tricks publishing to Apple News (example link), Instant Articles (example link), and AMP (example link). The linked up article is a writeup of how that all works, starting with this self-hosted WordPress site.
Feel free to yell at me for promoting walled gardens and ruining the web.
— Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) September 18, 2016
I like the idea of writing on MY site and publishing wherever people will read it.
— Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) September 18, 2016
Not a far cry from an RSS feed. It’s the idea behind IndieWeb:
POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
POSSE is about staying in touch with current friends now, rather than the potential of staying in touch with friends in the future.
Direct Link to Article — Permalink
From WordPress to Apple News, Instant Articles, and AMP is a post from CSS-Tricks
Welcome, readers! It’s time to look at portfolios again, and boy did minimalism make a comeback. Well, it would have, had it really gone anywhere. But where the past month or so have brought us a brutalist, almost post-modern style of web design, I’m seeing other forms come back into play.
It turns out there there are typefaces that aren’t monospaced. Who knew?
We’re seeing a resurgence of some of the more “classic” style of minimalism, but I am also seeing more and more creative layout work. Some of it’s done with animation and JavaScript, some of it’s not. I actually credit this to the brutalist movement. Reducing a design to its barest possible form can inspire people to get creative, and that’s bleeding back over into other design styles.
We start off with Lindsey Bull’s portfolio, a classic example of minimalism in action. The actual portfolio sections are kept wonderfully simple, allowing you to focus on the art, and the art alone.
Continuing that minimalist theme, Eleni Debo’s portfolio showcases her illustrations with a simple masonry-style grid, and little else. But hey, with work like hers, who needs bells and whistles?
The typography is fantastic too.
Imperial Woodpecker embraces the background video when showing off their, well, videos. If you’ve read any of these articles before, you know I’m not a huge fan of sites that feel more like apps than sites, but I have to admit that IW uses this technique well. They even managed to make a three-column layout make sense.
Joyce Wang’s portfolio is one of a small but growing list of sites that actually uses parallax effects in a good way. The extremely minimalist one-column portfolio is made a lot more interesting by the way the project’s titles don’t scroll with the images, and yet kind of do.
Do you like lots of grays and “condensed” typefaces? Well what a coincidence, because George Badea has you covered with this stylish, beautiful, and mostly monochromatic portfolio.
We Like Small combines asymmetry with lots of animation to make their design more eye-catching, and it works. Okay, it works as long as JavaScript is working, but it’s still a beautiful design.
Spark and Craft is one of those sites that I’m featuring for execution over originality. Look at that type! Look at it!
Only: see above. Okay, that’s really lazy, but it’s the truth. The big difference is that this one screams “corporate-elegant” which is actually not that common if you think about it. It’s usually one or the other.
Mood/Wood brings us more minimalism, and a side-scrolling portfolio. It might not be the most user-friendly thing, but it does fit the tone of the site. It also showcases their branding work really well.
It irks me to say this, but the HTML-as-Powerpoint philosophy of portfolio design might work really well in some cases. It’s usually not good UX, but it could be great marketing.
Sean Klassen’s one-page portfolio is a master class on pretty minimalism, dealing with small amounts of text on big screens, and making something look a little post-modern without making it unusable.
I’m including Bruno Imbrizi’s portfolio for its creativity and meticulous aesthetic. It’s beautiful. Usability is another matter that we’re not going to talk about here.
Still, go have a look. It’s like a point-and-click adventure. Just keep clicking until you find the information you want.
Colm McCarthy’s portfolio brings us back to the classic tons-of-white-space-and-thin-type style that we all know and love. Just looking at it is fairly relaxing.
And we bring it back to unusable-but-pretty with Jolien Roos’ portfolio. You should look at it because it’s pretty. You shouldn’t totally hate the navigation because it reminds me of those old web pages where every nav button was planetoid orbiting something or other. You know, like the old Space Jam website.
Bart van Lieshout’s portfolio is… quite yellow, at first. He takes an interesting approach in that his portfolio seems to be a mishmash of case studies and essays about what he does. It’s text-heavy, but if you really want your clients to get to know you, this is one way to do it.
Nachume Miller’s art portfolio is simple, yet extremely well-executed. The decidedly modernist aesthetic of his site happens to be more than aesthetic preference, as his work is decidedly abstract. Ok, the artsy types would probably argue with me on that point, but to me, if I can’t see any recognizable shapes, it’s abstract.
Myk Tongco’s portfolio is yet another that expands upon the use of parallax effects to show off his work effectively. This one-pager combines that with soft colors and distinctive—if occasionally hard to read—type.
Filip Benda’s portfolio makes heavy use of colorful illustrations, and light use of parallax effects, to liven up what would be an otherwise fairly typical portfolio design.
It looks good, it works good. Plus, there’s a 3D model of a Stargate in his portfolio, so he gets extra points from me, just for that.
The Office of Visual Communication is greyscale. It’s typographically stunning. It’s making fantastic use of white space. It has a fantastic name, I mean, really. I wish I’d thought of that.
Just do yourself a favor and go look at it.
Luc van Loon has made one of those risky design decisions that I kind of love. Specifically, his portfolio has no pictures. Just text and an icon. You can either decide the description is interesting enough, or move on.
The subtle animated background pattern is awesome too. It’s actually subtle enough I didn’t pay any attention to it at first, which is impressive. Normally that sort of thing is very distracting.
Lee Buckle’s portfolio might not be too original, but it looks good. Check it out, have a look at the great type, the fantastic use of a vertical timeline, and the excellent use of imagery and subtle backgrounds.
And never, ever do the page loader thing.
Lee Vaughan’s portfolio is fairly typical, but incorporates some stylistic flourishes that definitely set his site apart. From the animated aurora on the home page, to his use of color, to the iconography featured on his blog, it’s the details that will make you remember this one.
Vincent Mazza’s one-pager distinguishes itself with bold colors and some light asymmetry all throughout. Light asymmetry isn’t a real thing that I know of, but if it did exist, this site would define it.
The barely-there contrast in the navigation and contact form labels could make things difficult for some users, but overall, it’s a good-looking, fairly original portfolio.
aughtfive takes an interesting approach that I’m going to call “textured flat design”. It’s not very catchy, but it is accurate. Basically, they brought in some subtle background textures to make their flat design look nice and retro. Combined with good type, illustrations, design flourishes, and a sepia filter, it all works very well.
And no, this doesn’t count as skeuomorphism. Textures alone are not an attempt to emulate real-world objects in a digital interface… so there you go. This site is trend-backlash-compliant. More importantly, it’s beautiful and usable.
Okay, I narrowly managed to avoid making a tasteless Shadow Warrior joke when writing about Joyce Wang’s site above, but come on! This is too much. (I mean, it’s probably pronounced like “boot” or something, but sill…)
That said, he’s a fantastic designer. Just look at that typography, the 2.5D style, the colors. He’s good at this. Heck, he managed to pull off a background pattern in 2016. That’s skill.
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If there is one thing that will stand the test of time, it’s thumb placement on mobile devices. This makes consideration of the “thumb zone”, a term coined in Steven Hoober’s research, an important factor in the design and development of mobile interfaces.
Have you ever interacted with a mobile website or app that simply didn’t play nice with your thumbs? Perhaps you’ve had to stretch to get to an important menu, or swiping turned into a battle with multiple swiping elements. Mishaps such as these reveal poor consideration of the thumb zone.
The post The Thumb Zone: Designing For Mobile Users appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
Over on the Typekit Blog, Tim Brown has written about an exciting development in the world of web fonts: an improvement to the OpenType font file specification.
This might not sound all that exciting at first, but “variable fonts” allows designers and developers to embed a single font file into a webpage and then interpolate the various widths and weights we need from a single file. That means smaller files, fewer requests, and more flexibility for designers. However, this format isn’t available to use in browsers yet. Instead, it shows that there’s a dedicated effort from Google, Microsoft, Apple and Adobe moving forward:
Imagine condensing or extending glyph widths ever so slightly, to accommodate narrow and wide viewports. Imagine raising your favorite font’s x-height just a touch at small sizes. Imagine sharpening or rounding your brand typeface in ways its type designer intended, for the purposes of art direction. Imagine shortening descenders imperceptibly so that headings can be set nice and tight without letters crashing into one another. Imagine this all happening live on the web, as a natural part of responsive design.
If you’re interested in learning more, we wrote about the call for a responsive font format which explains why it’s going to be so darn helpful in the future. John Hudson also wrong a long overview of the whole story.
Direct Link to Article — Permalink
“OpenType Variations Fonts” is a post from CSS-Tricks
