I INTERVIEW Michael Surtees, founding partner and creative director at Gesture Theory, co-creator of Deckpub (“the future of publishing on iPad”), and author of Design notes in in
Episode No. 63 of The Big Web Show, my weekly podcast on “everything web that matters.”

We discuss managing a small, nimble design practice; getting clients; balancing client services work with product development and blogging; Michael’s journey from employee to entrepreneur; avoiding static comps and wireframes; and much more.

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The Big Web Show features special guests and topics like web publishing, art direction, content strategy, typography, web technology, and more.

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ISSUE NO. 344 of A List Apart for people who make websites asks the musical question, “Webkit monoculture: threat or menace?”

The Vendor Prefix Predicament: ALA’s Eric Meyer Interviews Tantek Çelik

by ERIC MEYER, TANTEK ÇELIK

During a public meeting of the W3C CSS Working Group, Mozilla web standards lead Tantek Çelik precipitated a crisis in Web Standards Land when he complained about developers who misunderstand and abuse vendor prefixes by only supporting WebKit’s, thereby creating a browser monoculture. Tantek’s proposed solution—having Mozilla pretend to be WebKit—inflamed many in the standards community, especially when representatives from Opera and Microsoft immediately agreed about the problem and announced similar plans to Mozilla’s. To get to the bottom of the new big brouhaha, exclusively for A List Apart, our Eric Meyer interviews Tantek on Mozilla’s controversial plan to support -webkit- prefixed properties.

Every Time You Call a Proprietary Feature “CSS3,” a Kitten Dies

by LEA VEROU

Any -webkit- feature that doesn’t exist in a specification (not even an Editor’s draft) is not CSS3. Yes, they are commonly evangelized as such, but they are not part of CSS at all. This distinction is not nitpicking. It’s important because it encourages certain vendors to circumvent the standards process, implement whatever they come up with in WebKit, then evangelize it to developers as the best thing since sliced bread. In our eagerness to use the new bling, we often forget how many people fought in the past decade to enable us to write code without forks and hacks and expect it to work interoperably. Lea Verou explains why single-vendor solutions are not the same as standards and not healthy for your professional practice or the future of the web.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart.

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IN THIS presentation, live at An Event Apart, Kristina Halvorson teaches you to identify your key business messages, understand how they inform your content strategy, and learn how they impact multi-channel content development and design.

Kristina Halvorson – Message and Medium: Better Content by Design.

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AUTHOR KRISTOFER LAYON (@klayon) joins me to discuss his book, Mobilizing Web Sites: Strategies for Mobile Web Implementation in
Episode No. 62 of The Big Web Show, my weekly podcast on “everything web that matters.”

In a lively hour-long discussion, we learn why “standards-based layouts are already responsive;” discuss the Kano Model and how it helps designers create satisfying mobile experiences; talk about Kris’s road from teacher and developer to conference founder to Peachpit author; and much more.

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IN MAKING the move to responsive web design, one of the potential hurdles is the rather awkward maths for calculating the percentage-based widths necessary for fluid layouts. If, for example, you’re designing with a 960px grid in Photoshop and you have six columns, each 140px wide, you divide 140 by 960 to get your percentage-based width: 14.583333%. Now, I don’t know about you, but numbers like that look a little scary. It doesn’t matter that there are great calculation tools built into TextMate to do the maths for you; the point is that the final figure looks like an arbitrary number with no immediate relation to either the container’s pixel width (960) or the element’s pixel width (140).”

“Compare that to a container that has a width of 1000px. 1000 is a nice, easy, round number. Dividing by 1000 results in clean percentages and better still, dividing by 1000 is something we can do in our heads: just remove the zero. A 140px column inside a 1000px container is 14%. A 500px column in a 1000px container is 50%. 320px is 32%. Easy!”

A better Photoshop grid for responsive web design » Blog » Elliot Jay Stocks.

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ONE of the most frequent questions we get asked about the mobile web is ‘Where do I go to learn about all this stuff?’ So here’s an extensive list of helpful tools and resources that can help you create great mobile web experiences.”

Mobile Web Resources | Mobile Web Best Practices.

Filed under: links, mobile, Web Design, Web Design History

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LUKE WROBLEWSKI’S notes on most of the sessions from An Event Apart Atlanta, 2012, Feb. 6–8, 2012. Thanks, buddy!

• Properties of Intuitive Web Pages — February 7, 2012
• An Event Apart: The Future of CSS — February 7, 2012
• An Event Apart: CSS Best Practices — February 7, 2012
• An Event Apart: Buttons are a Hack — February 7, 2012
• An Event Apart: Content First — February 6, 2012
• An Event Apart: Inclusive Design — February 6, 2012
• An Event Apart: Handcrafted Patterns — February 6, 2012
• An Event Apart: Hacking Users Brains — February 6, 2012
• An Event Apart: Adaptive Web Content — February 6, 2012
• An Event Apart: Rolling Up Our Responsive Sleeves — February 6, 2012

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IF YOU’VE spent any time building responsive websites with fluid grids, you will have encountered the shock of seeing your beautiful portrait layout distort when viewed in landscape mode (or vice-versa.)

This happens because whilst the layout and embedded content (images, video etc) are sized in relation to the pixel width of the viewport, the typography is not. And whilst it isn’t too difficult to design with enough affordance for the variation caused by the iPad’s 4:3 aspect ratio – most (if not all) Android tablets have 16:9 displays. These screens make the orientation difference even more pronounced.

Responsive News – Fluid grids, orientation & resolution independence.

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TRYING A NEW breakfast place. I tell the cashier, “Extra crispy bacon.”

“Extra bacon,” she says.

“No, not extra bacon. Extra crispy bacon,” I say.

A fast-paced volley of shouted Spanish follows, between the cook, the cashier, and the server. A customer in line behind me chimes in. He is either describing my order to the cashier or telling her about a dream he had involving velvet chickens. I’ve got to learn Spanish.

The cashier turns her green gaze back to me.

“Extra bacon,” she says.

“Um, no,” I say.

“No bacon,” she says.

“Yes, bacon,” I say. “Spinach mushroom omelette, bacon — no toast, no potatoes.”

I will never be able to make it up to her, or to the other customers in line behind me. Or to the pig, quite frankly.

“Extra bacon,” she announces.

I say, “Thank you” and leave a tip in the jar.

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TODAY, TWO invaluable contributors to A List Apart move on, and a new member joins our ranks:

Aaron Gustafson (@aarongustafson), author of Adaptive Web Design (the clearest, most beautiful explanation of progressive enhancement I’ve ever read) and nearly a dozen brilliant A List Apart articles, has been a technical editor at A List Apart for six exciting and formative years.

Daniel Mall (@danielmall) has written three great ALA articles and served as A List Apart technical editor almost as long as Aaron.

Both gentlemen have had a profound and lasting impact on the nature and quality of A List Apart’s content. With the publication of today’s ALA issue, both gentlemen move on.

Aaron is the founder of Web Standards Sherpa (“journeying towards best web practices”) and Easy Designs LLC; co-founder of Retreats 4 Geeks; and manager of The Web Standards Project.

Dan is a former interactive designer for Happy Cog’s Philadelphia studio, former design director at Big Spaceship in Brooklyn, co-founder of Typedia and swfIR, and singer/keyboard player for contemporary-Christian band Four24. I can’t tell you what he is doing next — he has sworn me to secrecy — but trust me, it will be awesome.

Over a long career marked by extraordinary collaborators, Aaron and Dan are two of the smartest, and most talented people I’ve had the pleasure to work with. They are also friends. This isn’t goodbye, fellas.

JOINING US today as technical editor is Mat Marquis (@wilto). He marks his entrance into A List Apart’s world via this morning’s stunning article, Responsive Images: How They Almost Worked and What We Need.

Mat is a designer-slash-developer working at Filament Group in Boston. Mat is a member of the jQuery Mobile team, an active member of the open source community, and enjoys a complicated relationship with the now-defunct HTML5 “dialog” tag.

Welcome, Wilto!

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