In this tutorial, we’re going to learn how to draw the Chrome logo in Adobe Illustrator.

Download Adobe Illustrator.

Read More at Draw Chrome Logo in Illustrator

Okay developers, it’s your turn. People have ranted on and on for years about whether or not designers should learn to code. Heck, I’ve ranted about it. I still contend that… no. No no… This is about you devs, now.

Should people who primarily code the back end of web products learn to design the front end? Here’s my opinion:

Unless they actually want to be a designer/developer, learning a whole new field — a whole new industry, even — just isn’t worth the pain. It’s part of the reason I don’t do any programming. The other reason is that I’m bad at it. And HTML and CSS don’t count.

But they should at least learn the basics. They should learn the fundamental principles behind usability and UX design. They should learn the terminology. There have been times when I’ve struggled to explain my design decisions to developers, and had to resort to the same sort of explanations that I give to clients. It’s frustrating to have to do that with someone who’s on your team, but is not on the same page.

What’s more, I’ve worked with developers who could program like nobody’s business, but got lost in the HTML and CSS. I’m serious. These guys couldn’t nest elements properly, kept asking me how to do stuff in CSS, and more. They didn’t know about browser limitations and quirks (and this was back when IE was still a big problem), and even the box model was new territory.

That’s not criticism. Everyone has to start somewhere, sometime. But did things get a lot easier when they mastered the basics? Yes, yes they did.

Well, dear reader, now it’s your turn:

The Fantastic Snow Text Generator – only $7!

Source

As people working in front of a screen all day, we often struggle to find the right balance. I’m not talking about work-life balance alone here, but of how our life that is completely virtual during the day often causes us to not take real life into account.

We tend to forget that our bodies need something else than coding all day. And we need to take care of our fellow human beings in real life as well. Just think about this number: The average US person will spend over 9 hours in front of a screen today. Time to become more aware of how we can keep the balance between the virtual and the real world.

The post Web Development Reading List #155: On JSPerf, Client Hints, And Keeping The Balance appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

You’ve used WordPress to create a fantastic website that exactly meets your client’s needs, and paid attention to all desires and requests. However, there is a hazard: your customer does not want the website to go live before he has seen it. Other customers ought to see the progress on the site on a regular basis. Either way, a proper method of presentation is needed.

In Advance: Check All Important Factors

There are multiple factors to consider when it comes to keeping your customers up to date the best way possible. For example:

• How much time will it take the client to check the website?
• Will the customer conduct a purely visual or in-depth test?
• For how long should the preview be available? The longer you allow the client to test, the more comments, wishes, and requests you will receive.
• How long will your method of presentation take?
• Can you match the schedule with your client and set up an extended live demonstration?

There are many ways to approach and solve this issue. The final choice depends on the customer, your preferences, the workflow, and the purpose of the presentation. In this article, we focus on three methods that you could choose for the display.

Method 1: Keep the Website Local and Present it Live

The easiest and best method when your client doesn’t have a lot of time, and only wants to gain a quick overview. Just keep your website on your computer and start a presentation using a tool like Teamviewer or Google Hangouts, for example. Now, your client can see how you present the website on their computer.

Of course, you can also meet up with your client. This lets you show him the website directly on your notebook, allowing him to test it first hand.

A personal meet up should be a good choice when it comes to approving the website.

Method 2: Put the Website Online and Protect it Via Password

A live presentation is not always the optimal way for every client. Another obvious option would be the migration of the website to a web server. The website can then be protected from unauthorized access via password. The site can only be viewed after entering the access information.

However, to do so, a hosting method needs to be found first. Of course, it is possible to host the website on your server for a short time to assure a presentation. That wouldn’t be clever, though. The smarter solution will be hosting it directly on the client’s server if he happens to own a website already.

If the client does not have a website yet, he also needs to own a server or web hosting package to be able to host the website you created. Thus, the preview site should be hosted using that. You could directly set up the site with a sub-domain of the future live website.

Afterward, add a password protection to make your client happy. However, you should prevent the search engine from indexing the preview website. To do that, move into “Settings > Reading” in the WordPress admin panel and place the according checkmark.

The majority of customers will love this type of presentation. That’s because it allows them to look at the website when they have the time to do so. They don’t have to agree on an appointment at a time that could’ve possibly been used more effectively. On top of that, it also has the advantage that the client can test the website on different devices.

The Bad News:

The client could easily put all of his free time into checking your website and might end up pelting you with suggestions and requests. Additionally, change requests could occur even after a previously defined testing period.

The Solution:

If you end up choosing this method, agree on a very precise period of time in which the website is available to the customer. Afterwards, the website will either be removed, or the password will be changed.

Adding Password Protection to Websites:

There are many WordPress plugins that are capable of blocking a website, and equipping it with an access protection. Two examples of them are Maintenance and Maintenance Mode. Both plugins are in active development.

Method 3: Install the Website on a USB Stick

When your client wants to take his time for an in-depth site test, but an online demo is out of the question, this option might be the one for you. All you need to do is install a local server on a USB stick, and subsequently, migrate the website.

After that, all that’s left to do is hand the stick to your client, alongside a guide on how to start the server, and how the website is accessed. Sounds complicated? It’s not. By now, there are good solutions to this problem, and you could use Xampp or Instant WordPress, for example.

If you were to use Xampp, make sure to not use the installer during installation, but instead, only copy the unzipped packages onto the stick.

You are not sure whether it is a good idea to give the customer the preview option via USB stick?

Here Are the Pros:

• The website is completely offline, and there is no way to accidently make it accessible to the public.
• The security: you client can’t change anything about the website. If he were to play with the stick, no real damage could be dealt.
• Customer friendly: you customer can take a look at the website at any time. He is not bound to appointments, and able to take all the time necessary to review the website.

Of Course, There Are Cons as Well:

• Out of all three methods, this is the most complicated one. It takes time to realize, as not only does the website have to be migrated, but it is also necessary to install a local web server on the stick.
• There is no solution for Apple. Thus, both you and your client require access to a Windows computer.
• The solution is not suitable for every customer. Customers with a little bit of technological knowledge would be needed.
• You give away every bit of control over an appropriate testing period.

Conclusion

Choosing the right method of giving the client a control option is complicated. There are too many things to consider, and every customer is different. However, it is generally advantageous when the choosen method contains a very clear testing period, and guarantees you qualified feedback afterward.

(dpe)

eBay, the giant auction site, has just launched a new site specifically for people looking for furniture and other complementary products and items for the home. eBay Collective, to be sure, is a site that’s aimed more at the high-end crowd, as it features items like antiques, fine art, contemporary design, and other unique items. However, what makes it stand out is its visual search engine that puts a new twist on searching on the web.

The visual search engine is Corrigon, which eBay purchased earlier this year for just under $30 million. Though Corrigon has been around for almost a decade — since 2006, to be exact — it’s only now on eBay Collective that this visual search engine is really being allowed to showcase what it can do. Corrigon works in a unique fashion to help shoppers get a good user experience when they’re looking for the right items with which to decorate their homes.

Corrigon is used in a “Shop the Room” feature on eBay’s new site. This feature allows you to hover over an image of a fully designed area of a home. Then, the search engine will search throughout eBay’s inventory to find items that are similar to the section of the image shoppers indicate.

Corrigon’s search technology was developed to help users both find and then identify an object within a bigger image. Then, users are able to match that discovery with additional images or links to items. Within a larger image, users on eBay Collective can now hover over a particular section of the image while Corrigon can see the item in that section. It then matches it with other items.

Overall, the design of the new site is very image-rich, which makes sense since products need to be showcased to shoppers trying to make buying decisions online. This new site is eBay’s newest try at better serving its user base of active shoppers, which totals 164 million. Curating the site in this unique way with the new visual search engine is aimed at providing a much better UX to all shoppers.

LAST DAY: MOTOPRESS – Drag and Drop Editor for WP (unlimited license) – $29!

Source

Something that has been on my mind lately is how we talk about the deliverables we work on as designers and developers. There are plenty of times when we want feedback on our projects and turn to our friends, co-workers, colleagues, Twitter, and all kinds of other people for their honest opinions about the quality of our work.

But this can be problematic. The feedback we get is often not what we hoped for. In some cases, it can feel personal, which is almost never what we hope for.

Managing the way we seek, request, and respond to feedback can have major implications on the end result of our work. This post will cover some tips and tricks for having those dialogues.

Let’s Set the Scene

Here’s a common work scenario:

1. A project is assigned to you
2. You work on said project
3. You turn project in to the person who requested it

Pretty standard, right? Sometimes we’re tasked with an über-large project that takes weeks to complete. Other times, it’s something simple that we can churn out in a few hours. The thing all projects share in common is that they’re ultimately going to be turned into someone who will either be happy or not-so-happy with what we did.

Getting a positive reaction to our work is ideal. That’s what we’re aiming for at the end of the day. Getting a negative reaction can strike nerves in the best of us, especially with work we’ve invested personal time and energy into.

Not all feedback is equal

The truth is that not all feedback is the same and should not be treated as such. I recently read the book Discussing Design as part of a team exercise and really loved the way that authors Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry distinguish between different types of feedback. Here’s a comparison of the three types that were mentioned:

• Reactive feedback: “Ugh, that’s gross!”
• Direction-based Feedback: “I would have made all the text two pixels larger across the board.”
• Critique: “If the objective is to make the content of an article easy to read in a leisurely setting, then perhaps we ought to consider a larger font size that allows readers to sit further from the screen because they will otherwise have to lean in to read the words.”

Reactive feedback has been the most toxic type of feedback in my personal experience. Even positive reactions leave me with a sorta empty feeling that I dodged a bullet and turned my work in on a day the person looking at it just so happens to be in a good mood. It’s nice to hear it, but may not help me know or understand what I did well, or if I even did well at all.

It’s worth noting that reactive feedback is sometimes exactly what we want. I know I’ve worked on projects where I truly want someone’s primitive, guttural reaction to my work, particularly where moods and emotions are part of the project objectives.

Direction-based feedback reminds me of this old Tumblr collection of hovering art directors. Go ahead and look at the photos because I’m sure you’ll have a laugh having been in the exact same situation where your boss or team is huddled right over your shoulder and calling out edits to your work as if you were a real-life Siri capable of making those changes in real time.

I will say there is a time and place for direction-based feedback and I have certainly benefited from having wise and experienced folks mentoring me on projects. That’s not really the point of this post though, rather simply to point out that it is a type of feedback.

Critique is somewhat the Holy Grail of feedback. Where the other two types might be tinged with emotions or personal preferences, critique recognizes the objectives our work is supposed to solve and tries to align our work to them.

Critique takes work and that’s sometimes a luxury, especially for projects with tight deadlines. Critique is also a skill unto itself that requires the effort of both the person seeking it and the person providing it. Discussing Design really does a nice job of diving into the practice and art of critique and is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in digging further in.

For the purposes of this post, let’s go over some tips — and yes, tricks — for getting the right type of feedback when we need it.

Knowing who to ask for feedback

This is pretty straightforward for a project that only has one stakeholder (i.e. the client) but the reality is that projects often have multiple stakeholders who have a shared and vested interest in the work being done.

The key is to pair the type of feedback you need with the right people during the project life cycle. For example, I have a rule of thumb to not show work to anyone signing off on the project before I am completely comfortable receiving a reaction. I have found that showing work to stakeholders while I’m still making decisions on my execution leads to premature assessments of the work as a whole and does the work I’ve put into the project so far a huge injustice.

That means friends and colleagues can be a better sounding board for early opinions. This might be font pairings in a design, class names in CSS, deciding between frameworks, or just about any early decision you might be making, regardless of the project.

The times I feel most compelled to reach out to a stakeholder ahead of formal feedback are when I need more clarification on the project’s objectives. An example of this might be a performance consideration that was never mentioned in the project requirements and you need the stakeholder’s opinion on whether or not solving for it is within the scope of work.

Knowing what to ask

I would be lying if I said I have never sent an email to a client to the effect of:

Hey, I’m all done with Project XYZ – let me know what you think!

This is where the poop usually hits the fan.

For one, how fair is that to the client? Not only have I provided no context for what’s being turned in, but I haven’t even formed the request for feedback into a valid question. Seriously, I’ve done this before and it’s rarely (if ever) yielded a helpful response. Instead, it provides my client with a blank check to say and respond in any way they want. You know the old adage of garbage in, garbage out? Well, getting garbage feedback should be expected from a garbage request like that.

Constructive feedback is more likely to occur if you take the initiative to frame the conversation when seeking it. Here is a handful of questions I’ve seen before when I’m asked for feedback with examples of how they can be framed for more effective dialogue.

Common Question	Better Question
What do you think about the colors I used for the buttons?	The project objective is to ensure users have a clear call to action to purchase an item but only if they have not already purchased the item being viewed. Are the active and inactive color states of the button clear enough? Do they conflict with each other for any reason?
Does the background image of the header look alright to you?	The project wants to evoke a feeling of excitement and trust. Does this image convey those qualities when you see it? The project also requires a responsive layout, so does the image still convey those qualities even when it gets cropped on smaller screens?
Did you notice the animation when the form submits? Awesome, right?	The project requires that we use CSS animations so the site feels modern. I decided to animate the submission button of the contact form so that it becomes a confirmation on submission. Does this animation feel modern while still informing the user whether the information has been received?
Does this CSS look clean?	This is a really big project with over a dozen unique templates and hundreds of different components and the code needs to be organized for team collaboration. I split the CSS up into Sass partials and used an BEM naming convention to keep things organized. Is the rest of the team familiar with those standards and, if so, ready to inherit them?

Notice what all good questions have in common? It boils down to four traits: (1) isolating the question to a particular aspect of the project, (2) aligning the question to the project’s objectives, (3) providing context for the decision that was made and, lastly, asking the question itself.

This is the grand trick to getting solid and constructive feedback for any project. It allows the person receiving the question to recall what’s being solved, get in your head space and make a comment from there. If you provide a well-though, well-constructed request for feedback and still get a garbage reactive reply, then that’s where you can point back to the question and redirect the stakeholder to provide a reply that’s on topic.

Knowing how to set expectations

Now that we know who to ask for opinions on our work and how to ask questions that lead to constructive dialogue, the next trick in our pocket is setting good expectations. What I mean by this is making sure that everyone — including ourselves — is on the same page as far as what’s being worked on, what is going to be discussed, and what actions will be taken once the feedback has been received so that the conversation can continue and (hopefully) lead to approved work that everyone is confident releasing.

Many of you reading this are likely well familiar with the concept of delivering rounds on a project. If rounds are a new concept to you, the basic idea is turning in a first “draft” of your work for feedback, making changes in a second “round” of work, and repeating the process until a final iteration is approved.

I really like this process whether I’m working in design or code (or both!) but it can easily get out of hand if we’ve neglected to set expectations for what is going to be worked on in each round, combined with the tricks we’ve learned up to this point in knowing who to ask for feedback and how to ask questions that lead to good feedback.

My trick is that I tend to break my work up in rounds with each one focused on a specific aspect of the project. For example, a typical website project might look like this:

• Round 1: Wireframe and layout
• Round 2: Design patterns and interface components
• Round 3: Colors and styles

I like to break projects up into rounds like this because it not only allows me to focus on a specific task of the project at a time, but it also acts as a meeting agenda with stakeholders. Everyone knows what is being worked on and what will be discussed when work is delivered.

Going back to the example of an email I have admittedly written to clients before when delivering my work:

Hey, I’m all done with Project XYZ — let me know what you think!

Applying our new trick of setting expectations would allow me to say something more helpful:

Hey, I’m all done with the first round of Project XYZ. You might remember that this round is specifically focused on the wireframe and layout of the page templates. I believe this meets all of the objectives we discussed, but here are a few questions I have for you to keep in mind and answer for specifically as you review the work.

Hopefully that sets the stage for an awesome round of feedback. If the client has changes, you’ll know that they were at least aligned to the objectives of the project. If the client has no changes, you can continue to push for more feedback if there are other considerations you think ought to addressed before moving to the next round. Regardless, my rule of thumb is to stay on a round until all of the feedback and action points for it have been fully addressed.

Another trick: use a subject line that clearly identifies which round is being discussed, whether it’s over email, your project management system, an internal memo, or what have you. Continue using that subject line until the round has been fully discussed and approved, then move to a new subject line for the next round in a fresh chain of responses. This keeps all the feedback you receive together and continues to set good expectations for what’s being discussed.

Resources

• Discussing Design by Adam Connor and Aaron Irazarry is the book that got me thinking about these concepts and is highly recommended for anyone who works with clients or a team environment.
• Project timeline template by Brad Frost. This is super helpful if you’re interested in the concept of breaking a project up into rounds because it can serve as a way to visualize those rounds and serve them in a central location that everyone can refer to at any time.
• The 20-Second Gut Check is an excellent way to request and control reactive feedback.
• Five Second Test is another excellent tool for reactive feedback.
• The CSS-Tricks forums are available around the clock and are chock-full of folks willing to provide reactive, direction-based and critical feedback.

Wrapping up

The work we do is hard.

What’s harder is following through on our work. Doing the work is only one aspect of what we need to do to be effective in our jobs. There’s a reason that good communication skills are listed in nearly every job description I have ever seen and that’s because our work requires it to follow through to completion. Failing to follow through with good communication is no different than a baseball player failing to swing the bat through a pitch just because contact has already been made in the middle. Without follow-through, our work is more of a bunt than a clean hit.

What we covered in this post are tricks specific to the follow-through of our work. Keep doing the awesome work you do and supplement it with these ideas to take things to the next level. That’s what good feedback does: it takes what we’re doing right and elevates it to even higher places. Hopefully these “tricks” will kickstart great conversations that improve your work, lead to new tricks, bring clarity to the project management process, and allow you to build awesome and collaborative relationships with others along the way.

---

The Challenge of Constructive Criticism and How to Get It is a post from CSS-Tricks

With the advancement of technology, sometimes it is good to move forward quickly, but sometimes it is good to connect with the past and use trusted precedents for print. With Letterpress Business Cards you get an old style printing method that has evolved from functionality into an art form. At Jukebox Print we understand that human creativity, just like the human body is constantly surpassing itself and raising the bar to new heights. By surpassing ourselves in Letterpress, we tested our skills and perfected the art and the result is the ability create unique things never seen before.

While we understand that looking at a picture of a Letterpress Business Card might not warm your soul quite like looking at a painting by Matisse does. Even still, we hope our work inspires you. Maybe after this, you will think Letterpress Business Cards are as cool as we do.

Circular Business Card

These 2? Circular Business Cards were produced in fine detail with 15 colors of Letterpress. The final touch is exquisite pastel pink Painted Edges.

Jean Jullien Business Card

These unique die cut cards were produced for the Parisian designer Jean Jullien. Finished off with painted edges.

Lion Business Card

We took the challenge from designer Ksyu Deniska to create this intricate card with eleven colors of Letterpress and strokes as thin as .02 mm!

Don’t Try Studio Business Card

3ply Layered Business Cards with 5 colors of Letterpress made for Parisian designer Monge Quentin.

ABSOLUT Business Card

Letterpress is the perfect complement to other specialty print processes such as foil, as shown here with the beautiful black ABSOLUT card.

Ribbon Business Card

This cute ribbon-shaped card is the perfect design for an event planner.

Pillow Texture Business Card

This luxurious business card features a 3D embossed pillow texture with letterpress, making this one of the most expensive business cards around.

Deer Embossed Business Card

Wonderful 3D embossed card with a subtle touch of letterpress.

Bloom Creative Business Card

Combining creativity with functionality these cards feature 9 colors of letterpress with a deep impression, white foil stamping, and 3-ply layering. Each card has a unique color backing.

Vintage Business Card

This vintage Letterpress project was produced on paper from the late 1800’s! These cards were produced for Setback and Jukebox will soon provide the ability for people to order cards on real, vintage 100-year-old paper. These will truly be the most unique and original cards. The old style of printing combined with the antique paper makes this piece uniquely special. You can feel and smell the history of these cards and they are the perfect cards for any vintage selling company.

Ice Cream Business Card

This cute ice cream business card was generated with seven colors of letterpress. The color in the design is the result of immense details and pulls of a great retro look.

Pineapple Business Card

The cutest business card, a custom die cut in a pineapple shape with letterpress and gold foil.

Leather Business Card

Letterpress and real leather, a perfect combination. A multi-use as a hang tag that can double as a business card as well.

Seashell Business Card

3D embossed to the shape of a seashell with simple letterpress type. This card may look cute but is very difficult to execute!

Paint Swatches Business Card

T

his simple, colorful business card doesn’t seem so simple once you realize it was created with 19 different colors of letterpress!

Foxyards Business Card

Another stunning combination of Letterpress and 3D embossing.

Typewriter Business Card

This custom die cut typewriter is the perfect card for an old school writing enthusiast.

---

Read More at 17 Great Letterpress Business Cards That Define Past and Present Craftsmanship

The printed word is never naked.

In fact, there is a complete fashion industry around it and we like to call it Typography. Just like our fashion industry, in typography, there are lots of trends, must haves, and of course, fashion statements.

The text you are reading right now, on WebDesignLedger, is dressed in a lovely Helvetica, about 12px large. Although this font looks amazing, there is a different font that I want to talk to you about.

Comic Sans

You probably hate it, and some would agree that you are entitled to do so. Usually, the people who advocate for destroying this font, once and for all, are all the angry designers out there.

Now, every font is different in its own way. Some typefaces have serifs and some don’t. Some are intriguingly neutral, while others are just silly or plain ugly. But there is one typeface that is so silly and so ugly, yet so surprisingly popular, that it has arguably become the most hated font of all time.

I’m not talking about the dreaded “Papyrus” (although that’s a pretty close one). I’m talking about the famous Comic Sans.

The cringy font used to be the only thing people complained about more than they complained about Justin Bieber, but less frequently than they did about airlines.
Objectively speaking, Comic Sans isn’t really that well-designed, according to the fundamentals of type design. However, most people don’t know the full story behind it, so the font is a little bit misunderstood. You see, Comic Sans was designed with a specific purpose in mind; for a well-defined audience. And it certainly wasn’t supposed to be this popular. In a way, I can safely assume that most people don’t know that much about the font. So I took it upon myself to defend it and present to you three reasons why you shouldn’t hate it.

---

Purpose

In 1994, Vincent Connare was working for Microsoft as a Typographic Engineer.
This happened right before the release of Windows 95 (still the best, if you ask me.) Microsoft Bob was one of the coolest features Windows 95 had. It was basically a user-friendly cartoon character for a word processor and some other programs. Bob spoke in speech bubbles. Rumor has it that Melinda Gates herself asked Connare to design a font for the cartoon dog, Microsoft Bob. So he did. Inspired by Marvel comics and by the “Dark Knight Returns”, he found Times New Roman inappropriate and unsuited. Thus, he made a font which better resembled its purpose and looked better in a speech bubble.

“When I designed Comic Sans, there was no expectation of including the font in applications other than those intended for children… Comic Sans was NOT designed as a typeface but as a solution to a problem with the often overlooked part of a computer program’s interface, the typeface used to communicate the message. There was no intention to include the font in other applications other than those designed for children when I designed Comic Sans. The inspiration came at the shock of seeing Times New Roman used in an inappropriate way.”
Read more…

HTTP/2 is a new way of making your website load much faster by eliminating many inefficiencies associated with the current version of HTTP. The greatest thing about it? You don’t have to go to much effort to get it up and running.

Or do you?

What is HTTP/2?

When HTTP1 and HTTP1.1 were originally developed, the web was very different to what it is today. Websites had fewer resources (JavaScript files, CSS files, images) than today. Connections to the internet weren’t very fast, and users were not very picky with website loading speed.

You were happy that a website loaded full stop. You might have secretly complained that loading was slow. But you couldn’t really do much about it. That’s because the slow loading time was typically coming from factors which were independent of the web server and technology you were using. Mostly it was the actual internet connection which was the major limiting factor.

Fast forward to today. Great website loading times are measured in milliseconds rather than seconds. Users start to get itchy fingers when a site takes longer than 3 seconds to show a response. In this kind of situation, inefficiencies counted in milliseconds associated with the original versions of HTTP start to make a real difference. That’s why you get so many articles discussing how to make your website faster. Because milliseconds matter.

The new version of HTTP, known as HTTP/2 addresses specific known problems of HTTP. Its goals are to address a number of problems which have become more pronounced as the web has evolved to larger and larger websites with many more CSS, JS and image files than originally anticipated.

But what is wrong with HTTP1.x, and why do we spend so much effort making it faster?

The problems of HTTP1.x

HTTP1.x has a number of inherent problems. Actually, let’s refrain from calling them problems. HTTP1.x has a number of ways in which it can be more efficient.

1. HTTP 1.x is text based: originally the idea was that HTTP1.x should be humanly-readable so it was fully text based. By definition all text based protocols have inefficiencies associated with them such as whitespace, link breaks, capitalization, etc.
2. Only one file is in transfer at any one time: this is one of the biggest problems with the 1.x versions of HTTP. Just imagine being a deliveryman who is only able to deliver one package at a time. They have to go back to base every time they need to deliver the next package.
3. Hundreds of requests are required for today’s websites: having more sophisticated themes means that the size of the websites and the number of resources grows. And so does the time it takes to load each resource. Remember our “deliveryman” has to go back to base every time, they are not able to transfer more than one file at a time.
4. Each connection is a heavy technical operation: Since hundreds of connections are required, it starts to accumulate serious overhead. With loading time being measured in milliseconds, the combined time required to create a connection for hundreds of resources starts to become very significant.

Many times web designers had to implement specific measures to reduce these inefficiencies. Workarounds such as CSS sprites, minification, and the combining of files are meant to overcome issues with loading web sites.

These are — in essence — workarounds rather than fixes.

How HTTP/2 solves the problems of HTTP1.x

HTTP/2 is designed and evolved from SPDY, a protocol designed at Google aimed at making the web 2x faster. It addresses HTTP problems in the following way

1. HTTP/2 is intended for consumption by machines (your web browser and your website’s web server) rather than humans. It is binary rather than text based making it inherently more efficient. Transfer and parsing of the data is faster using binary protocols.
2. Multiple files can be transferred simultaneously on the same connection. Fixes were implemented such that you can pipeline resources on the same connection. Rather than having to open a new connection each time (our deliveryman going back to base), all of the resources can be carried on the same connection (our deliveryman dumps everything in a van and takes everything in a single trip).
3. Server push to send files which will be required by browser. In HTTP1.x it is the web browser who asks the web server for the resources it requires. HTTP Server Push (implemented as part of HTTP/2) allows the server to start sending resources that it knows the web browser will need. For example, you can instruct the server not to wait for the browser to ask for the CSS, JS and other resources files which the browser is going to need anyway.
4. HTTP packet Header and other optimizations – these are technical improvements which are designed to improve the actual efficiency of transfers

What is required to enable HTTP2?

Back at the very beginning of the article we said that not much effort is required from your end to enable HTTP/2. Enabling HTTP/2 is something which needs to be done at web server level. Most web servers such as Apache, Nginx, IIS, and other major web servers already have support for HTTP/2.

If you run your own web server, you just need to install and enable the HTTP/2 libraries. If your website is hosted with a hosting company, check with the company whether the web server is already enabled for HTTP/2.

The catch? Secure Certificates

Maybe things were too good to be true. We have just discussed how web servers already fully support HTTP/2.

Most major web browsers also fully support HTTP/2. However, they have also chosen to only support HTTP/2 in encrypted mode. The reason for this is that there has been a strong movement to enable HTTPS (encryption) all over the web. Such initiatives as HTTPS Everywhere strongly push the need for HTTPS on all websites.

By not supporting HTTP/2 over unencrypted connections, website owners are being strong armed into implementing HTTPs for their website.

Of course this is not necessarily a bad thing. Implementing HTTPS has significant security and privacy advantages. With companies coming together to form a Certificate Authority called Let’s Encrypt to allow free secure certificates, the overall cost to actually acquire a certificate and implements HTTPS becomes much cheaper. This was relatively expensive up until some time ago.

Implementing HTTPS is not something you ought to do without give it the necessary due thought. You may probably want to discuss this with your trusted website developer or somebody with enough technical expertise. Most times, your hosting company should be able to guide you through this.

Of course, it’s strongly recommended that you implement HTTPS. Besides the additional security, you’re going to get the ability to enable HTTP/2 and make your website faster. That’s what we call a win-win situation.

Are other optimization techniques still necessary?

Yes and no.

Certain optimizations aimed at reducing web requests become superfluous. If your site is incurring computation time to “combine” JS, CSS and other files, this has actually become an overhead cost. Any time “wasted” addressing the above mentioned inefficiencies is no longer necessary.

On the other hand such optimizations such as caching, reduction of the size of resources, delivering content over a CDN, choosing a great hosting server, and other optimizations which address different types of inefficiencies should stay in place.

The great thing about HTTP/2 is that not only does it make your website load faster, it’s also pushing you to make your website more secure. There’s no arguing that there are advantages to both of these. HTTP/2 is the next step in making all of the web faster. Let’s all be part of the it and make it happen.

LAST DAY: MOTOPRESS – Drag and Drop Editor for WP (unlimited license) – $29!

Source

Icons are an essential part of many user interfaces, visually expressing objects, actions and ideas. When done correctly, they communicate the core idea and intent of a product or action, and they bring a lot of nice benefits to user interfaces, such as saving screen real estate and enhancing aesthetic appeal. Last but not least, most apps and websites have icons. It’s a design pattern that is familiar to users.

Despite these advantages, icons can cause usability problems when designers hide functionality behind icons that are hard to recognize. An icon’s first job is to guide users to where they need to go, and in this article we’ll see what it takes to make that possible. If you want to take a go at creating your own icons, you can download and test Adobe’s Experience Design CC for free and get started right away.

The post Icons As Part Of A Great User Experience appeared first on Smashing Magazine.