Jeremy Wagner’s “Now THAT’S What I Call Service Worker!” provides innovative techniques to harness the power of Progressive Web Apps with smaller HTML payloads and better performance for repeat visitors.
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Service Worker With A Smile
Category: A List Apart
From pixels to prose, coding to content.
“IN AN INDUSTRY that extols innovation over customer satisfaction, and prefers algorithm to human judgement (forgetting that every algorithm has human bias in its DNA), perhaps it should not surprise us that toolchains have replaced know-how.”
Our addiction to complicated toolchains and overbuilt frameworks is out of control. Web-making has lately become something of a dick-measuring competition. It needn’t stay that way.
If we wish to get back to the business of quietly improving people’s lives one thoughtful interaction at a time, we must rid ourselves of the cult of the complex. For more about why and how, see my new article, “The Cult of the Complex,” in A List Apart, for people who make websites.
Illustration by Kevin Cornell
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Faux Grid Tracks by Eric Meyer
JOIN An Event Apart’s Eric Meyer on a journey through the inner workings of CSS Grid as he tests various techniques to build a tic-tac-toe board filled with content. Hearkening back to the early days of CSS and A List Apart, these playful hacks rekindle a spirit of experimentation.
Faux Grid Tracks by Eric Meyer
Illustration by Dougal MacPherson
TEN great links to launch your weekend:
If you missed Gerry McGovern’s brilliant An Event Apart talk on “Top Task Management,” the video’s here for your pleasure.
If you missed Eric Meyer’s article “Practical CSS Grid: Adding Grid to an Existing Design” in A List Apart, drop what you’re doing and read!
If you missed my chat about design discovery with UX consultant Dan Brown on this week’s Big Web Show, have a listen.
Like it says: “How to Build a Simple and Powerful Lazyload JavaScript Plugin” by Alex Devero in A List Apart: Sidebar.
“Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers” by Gina Trapani in Postlight’s “Track Changes.”
What sex is your font? Many people see typefaces as gendered. All this and much more in “The Font Purchasing Habits Survey Results” by Mary Catherine Pflug.
“The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death” by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker.
Well, there goes *that* startup idea. Facebook starts warning U.S. users when they’re sharing fake news in Macworld.
“The Three-Hour Brand Sprint” (“GV’s Simple Recipe For Getting Started On Your Brand”) by Jake Knapp.
“Why Are Designers Still Expected To Work For Free?” asks Design Observer’s Jessica Helfand in Fast Company’s Co.Design.
Bonus (this one goes to 11): “Jeffrey Zeldman Presents a Math Problem” from Typethos.
ABOUT A YEAR ago, around the time I launched my new design studio, I moved nearly all business-related communications to Basecamp 3, the latest evolution of the web-based project and communications management tool from my Chicago designer friends who used to be called 37signals.
One of Basecamp 3’s nicest features is the ability to set up automatic check-ins, such as asking all team members “What did you work on today?” at 5:00 pm daily.
On the surface, it’s intended as a way of letting everyone know what their teammates are working on, thereby deleting needless meetings from everyone’s schedules. But the feature can go much deeper, as I’ve discovered to my great pleasure. A day at a time, it can build community and help you design your career and your life. It even brings back some of the joy we once derived from the days of the personal web.
What did you work on today?
Over the years, I’ve started or cofounded several web-related businesses. Rather than limit my new studio.zeldman Basecamp exclusively to the designers, developers, and UX specialists who make up my studio, I decided to include everyone from all the businesses I touch.
Naturally, I’m mindful of people’s bandwidth, so anyone who doesn’t wish to participate can opt out or selectively block threads or projects that don’t interest them. I also refrained from inviting two staffers from one of my businesses who, for whatever reason, have just never hit it off with Basecamp. (Evangelizing any tool, however much one personally loves it, is like trying to convince a carnivore to go vegan. It accomplishes nothing, and leaves everyone feeling hurt.)
Save those two folks, with whom I collaborate through other methods, everyone else I work with on a daily or weekly basis, across all my little businesses, has access to a shared Basecamp. And every day at 5:00 pm Eastern Time, Basecamp asks all of us, “What did you work on today?”
The evolution of open sharing
At first, those who chose to participate took the question literally, sharing the work-related tasks we’d accomplished that day. But, over time, we began something sharing else. We began sharing our lives.
As if in a Unitarian church group, or an AA meeting, we share daily joys and sorrows, hopes and aspirations. One of us has a child leaving the nest; another’s child may have had a tough day at school. One of us is writing a book, another has begun physical therapy. Some of us comment on each other’s shares; others use Basecamp’s “applause” feature to indicate that we read and appreciated what was shared. Some folks write essays; others share via bulleted lists.
Hearkening back to the old, personal web
Sharing and reading other people’s posts has become a highlight of my day. Of course it helps me get my work done, but more importantly, it also lets me focus on my life and professional goals—and those of my friends. I love getting to know people this way, and I deeply appreciate how respectful and safe our sharing space feels—partly because Basecamp designed the space well, and partly because I work with people who are not only talented and bright, but also kind and empathetic.
If we all sat together in the same office space, I doubt we would let down our guard as much as we do when responding to Basecamp’s automatic check-in. Indeed, far less personal sharing goes on with the non-remote colleagues in my NYC studio space—probably because we are all there to work.
It reminds me of what life was once like on the old web, where people shared honestly on their personal sites without fear of being harassed. I’m not the only old-timer who misses that old web; in recent years, several of my internet friends who once blogged blithely have switched to opt-in newsletters, sharing only with subscribers. Although I mourn the personal, open-hearted web we once shared, I understand this impulse all too well. Sharing with my colleague/friends on Basecamp restores some of the joy I used to take from sharing and listening on the old open web. You might try it.
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A List Apart Advertising art direction Best practices Brands conferences Content First Content-First Deck, the Fonts Ideas industry Medium Platforms Publications Publishing reportage Standards State of the Web studio.zeldman The Essentials The Profession Themes and Templates Usability User Experience UX Web Design Zeldman
Authoritative, Readable, Branded: Report from Poynter Design Challenge, Part 2
THIS year’s Poynter Digital Newspaper Design Challenge was an attempt by several designers and pundits, working and thinking in parallel, to save real news via design. In Part 1 of my report from Poynter, I discussed the questions driving the challenge, and talked about the design work done in response to it by my colleagues Kat Downs Mulder, Mike Swartz, Lucie Lacava, and Jared Cocken. Here in Part 2, I’ll discuss my own work and the approach we took at my studio. But we begin with a quick look back at the past designs that brought us to this point:
Experiment 1: The Deck
During the past decade and a half, as both a publication designer and a publisher, I watched in horror as our publications became reader-hostile minefields of intrusive ads, overlays, and popups. The first thing I tried to do about this (besides removing the web equivalent of chart junk from my magazine) was to offer an alternative approach to advertising via The Deck, an ad network I cofounded with Jim Coudal of coudal.com and Jason Fried of Basecamp (formerly 37signals). The Deck permitted only one appropriately targeted ad per each page of content viewed. As primary instigator Jim Coudal put it:
A buy in The Deck reaches the creative community on the web in an uncluttered, controlled environment, far more valuable than a standard banner or a single text ad among dozens of others.
Jim, Jason, and I hoped that our cost-per-influence model would replace the CPM race to the bottom, and that our quasi-religious use of whitespace would be widely imitated by the smartest publications online.
But that didn’t happen. Advertising just got more intrusive. The Deck succeeded as a small business supporting a network of interesting small publications, but not at all as a primary influencer on the direction taken by advertising that supports web content.
Experiment 2: Readability
Then about seven years ago, my friend Rich Ziade and his engineers created Readability, an app that sat between you and the ugly site you were trying to read, the way screen readers sit between visual websites and blind web users. Readability grabbed an article page’s primary content, removed the junk, and replaced the cluttered and illegible layout with a clean, readable page inspired by the clarity of iBooks and Kindle, which were just taking off at the time.
Rich released Readability 1.0 as open source; Apple immediately absorbed it into the Safari browser, where it continues to provide Safari’s built-in “reader” mode. (Safari’s “reader” mode was Apple’s first step in decluttering the web and returning it to the people who use it; “content blocking” would be the second step.)
Moreover, Readability 2.0, released by Rich’s then-company Arc90 the following year, added automatic payment for content creators slash publishers, as I explained at the time to anyone who would listen. Had Readability been allowed to continue the experiment, content monetization might have been less of a problem than it is today, and publication brands (the notion that it matters who publishes what we read) would be in exactly the same pickle they’re in anyway—except that readers would get their news in Readability’s attractive and customizable format, instead of from Apple News, Facebook, and the like.
I used to go around the world on lecture tours, warning my fellow designers that if we didn’t figure out how to declutter and compellingly brand sites, apps like Readability would do it for us. I still go around on lecture tours, but I’ve moved on to other issues. As for Readability, it was killed by a digital lynch mob after one powerful blogger, misunderstanding the motivation behind it, issued the digerati equivalent of a fatw?. But that’s another story.
Experiment 3: Big Type Revolution
In 2012, inspired by Readability and frustrated by the industry’s determination to make ever less legible, ever more cluttered sites full of tracking and popups and everything except what readers need, I bet big on large type:
This redesign is a response to ebooks, to web type, to mobile, and to wonderful applications like Instapaper and Readability that address the problem of most websites’ pointlessly cluttered interfaces and content-hostile text layouts by actually removing the designer from the equation. (That’s not all these apps do, but it’s one benefit of using them, and it indicates how pathetic much of our web design is when our visitors increasingly turn to third party applications simply to read our sites’ content. It also suggests that those who don’t design for readers might soon not be designing for anyone.)
Writing in Forbes, Anthony Wing Kosner saw the future in my initially crude experiment:
If you want to know where the web is going, one clue is to look at the personal sites of top-tier web designers. And one trend that just bubbled to the surface is large body type—the kind you don’t have to command-plus to read.
Jeffrey Zeldman…made a particularly strong point about it in his “Web Design Manifesto 2012,” that he published yesterday.
—Large Type: One Web Designer Puts Content First in a Big Way
Not to brag (okay, too late), but he wasn’t wrong. It was the future.
(Also, I’m fairly sure I wasn’t the only designer at the time who reacted against tiny type and cluttered anti-user layouts by stripping pages down to only their most necessary elements, and boosting the type size to enforce a more relaxed reading posture. The idea was in the air.)
The experiment becomes the norm
In any case, soon enough, readable (big type and plenty of whitespace) layouts starting popping up everywhere. At medium.com. In Mike Pick’s redesign of A List Apart. In article pages for The New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, Newsweek, The New Yorker, and, eventually, many other publications.
An uncluttered page focused on the reading experience (reminder: big type and plenty of whitespace) is now the default at several leading news publications. But many smaller publications, struggling just to survive, have not kept up. And so we have a perfect crisis:
Publications that do not encourage reading, loyalty, or repeat visits are struggling to survive at the very moment real news is under attack from an authoritarian president. What to do?
My response to the Poynter Design Challenge
There are many ways to respond to an existential crisis like the one facing most news publications. You can rethink the relationship between reader and publication. Rethink the job of the publication. Make news work more like a lifestyle app. Make it more immersive. My colleagues followed those paths out brilliantly (as described in Part 1).
But I went for the low-hanging fruit. The thing any publisher, no matter how cash-strapped, could do. The thing I had seen working since I started yelling about big type in 2012. I went for a clean, uncluttered, authoritative, branded page. Authoritative because this isn’t fake news. Branded because the source matters.
The easiest, fastest, most readily attainable path to clean, uncluttered, authoritative, branded design is through typography.
Any publication can be readable
Any newspaper, however poor, can afford better typography. Any newspaper with a designer on staff can attain it, if the paper stops treating design as a lackey of marketing or editorial or advertising, and sets designers free to create great reading experiences.
In my work, which is still underway (and will continue for some time), I focused on creating what I call “reader” layouts (and probably other designers call them that too; but I just don’t know). Layouts that are branded, authoritative, clean, uncluttered, and easy to read.
I played with type hierarchies and created simple style guides. Most of my little pages began as Typecast templates that I customized. And then Noël Jackson from my studio cleaned up the HTML and CSS to make it more portable. We put the stuff up on GitHub for whoever wants to play with it.
- Reader layout & readme
- Style guide (from a template by John Martins) & readme
These are only starting points. Any designer can create these kinds of layouts. There’s nothing special about what I did. You can do the same for your paper. (And if you can’t, you can hire us.)
The work I share here is the start of a project that will continue at our studio for a long time. #realnews for the win!
Additional reading
- To Save Real News
- The Year in Design
- Digital Newspaper Design Challenge: A Report from Poynter – Part 1
- Ad Blocking and the Future of the Web
- In Defense of Font Size Widgets
- Publishing Versus Performance: Our Struggle for the Soul of the Web
- The Nation, America’s oldest weekly news magazine, launches responsive, large-type redesign
- “Design doesn’t matter”
- Understanding Web Design
- A List Apart 4.0
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Accessibility Whack-a-Mole
DESIGN is a balancing act—and never more so than when it comes to accessibility (AKA #a11y). So what can you do when an a11y solution you’ve devised for one group creates a fresh a11y dilemma for another?
Through the prism of typeface choice, Eleanor Ratliff relates how she and her team tackled the problem of accessibility whack-a-mole for a rebranding project. In today’s edition of A List Apart, for people who make websites.
I SPENT yesterday with my Swedish friend Pär (“Peyo”) Almqvist, who returned from LA Sunday morning and headed home to Sweden Sunday night. We met in Stockholm in 1999, when Peyo was 19, and have been close ever since. In 2000, Peyo wrote “Fragments of Time” for A List Apart. Reading it, you can see how thoughtful he is as a creative person.
A few years ago, Peyo cofounded OMC Power, a start-up that brought affordable solar power to rural villages in India—profoundly poor villages where, until that time, folks had relied on dirty gasoline-powered generators to get what little electricity they could.
National Geographic TV covered OMC’s work just this week in their special, “Years of Living Dangerously;” in the video clip on their site, you can watch David Letterman interview one of Peyo’s co-founders about what they’ve accomplished so far, and why it matters.
Letterman went to India to cover the threat of climate change and what’s being done to fight it. OMC Power is providing clean energy and a model for India to electrify itself without adding to the pollution that contributes to climate change. OMC started in India because folks in India needed the power and therefore welcomed them; and also because, by working with small rural villages, they encountered less violent opposition from the oil companies than they would have if they had attempted the experiment in Europe or North America. When the power grid fails in the west, folks in India will still have power—an irony of developed nations’ dependence on dirty fossil fuels.
In a time when so many of us feel helpless about climate change, and others, at the behest of corporate masters, cynically deny that it exists, it is good to know people who are making a difference and earning a living in doing so.
While Peyo remains an advisor to OMC Power, he has since co-founded a music startup, which I can’t talk about yet, but which I believe will meet real a need in music and may even change how some music gets made. (Like me, Peyo has a musical background, although, unlike me, as a producer and composer he has had hits in Sweden.)
It was his new music start-up music business that brought Peyo to New York and LA during the past week. I missed the chance to spend the week with him as I was in San Francisco doing the final AEA conference of 2016. It was great to spend a day together in New York, talking about our families, our businesses, and the world.
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Ten Years Ago on the Web
2006 DOESN’T seem forever ago until I remember that we were tracking IE7 bugs, worrying about the RSS feed validator, and viewing Drupal as an accessibility-and-web-standards-positive platform, at the time. Pundits were claiming bad design was good for the web (just as some still do). Joe Clark was critiquing WCAG 2. “An Inconvenient Truth” was playing in theaters, and many folks were surprised to learn that climate change was a thing.
I was writing the second edition of Designing With Web Standards. My daughter, who is about to turn twelve, was about to turn two. My dad suffered a heart attack. (Relax! Ten years later, he is still around and healthy.) A List Apart had just added a job board. “The revolution will be salaried,” we trumpeted.
Preparing for An Event Apart Atlanta, An Event Apart NYC, and An Event Apart Chicago (sponsored by Jewelboxing! RIP) consumed much of my time and energy. Attendees told us these were good shows, and they were, but you would not recognize them as AEA events today—they were much more homespun. “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” we used to joke. “My mom will sew the costumes and my dad will build the sets.” (It’s a quotation from a 1940s Andy Hardy movie, not a reflection of our personal views about gender roles.)
Jim Coudal, Jason Fried and I had just launched The Deck, an experiment in unobtrusive, discreet web advertising. Over the next ten years, the ad industry pointedly ignored our experiment, in favor of user tracking, popups, and other anti-patterns. Not entirely coincidentally, my studio had just redesigned the website of Advertising Age, the leading journal of the advertising profession.
Other sites we designed that year included Dictionary.com and Gnu Foods. We also worked on Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking tool with well-thought-out features like Saved Copies (so you never lost a web page, even if it moved or went offline), Bookmark Ratings, Bookmark Privacy, and Groups. We designed the product for our client and developed many of its features. Rest in peace.
I was reading Adam Greenfield’s Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, a delightfully written text that anticipated and suggested design rules and thinking for our present Internet of Things. It’s a fine book, and one I helped Adam bring to a good publisher. (Clearly, I was itching to break into publishing myself, which I would do with two partners a year or two afterwards.)
In short, it was a year like any other on this wonderful web of ours—full of sound and fury, true, but also rife with innovation and delight.
As part of An Event Apart’s A Decade Apart celebration—commemorating our first ten years as a design and development conference—we asked people we know and love what they were doing professionally ten years ago, in 2006. If you missed parts one, two, three, or four, have a look back.
AS MUCH as I love reading (and writing and publishing) books and articles about design, I’ve never learned as much from a book as I’ve picked up over time while rubbing shoulders with colleagues who share my work space.
It’s why, even though NYC office rents are ludicrously expensive, I opened a shared design studio space in gently trending NoMad, Manhattan in January of 2012. And why, just three short months ago, I leaped at the chance to help launch the Shopify Partners Studio Program—a coworking space and casual mentoring program for exceptionally talented freelance ecommerce designers and developers.
The first six participants included a web developer and social media consultant; a visual experience designer; a freelance web developer and blogger; two freelance designer/developers; and a copywriter/marketing consultant. Three of them sought feedback from me on exciting business and product ideas they’d come up with; two asked me for career guidance and business advice. All taught me more than I taught them, and inspired me to look at my own work and career with fresh eyes.
Most or all of these lovely and talented people will be moving on soon, as the next phase of Shopify Partner Studio begins. Which brings us to you.
Apply now to join the next round of Shopify Partner Studio! If selected for residency, you’ll gain access to a suite of opportunities to kickstart your business, including:
- Free rent and high-speed Internet for three months in my studio on lower Madison Avenue.
- Mentorship from your humble narrator, Shopify executives, and “other industry icons.” (I put the quotations around Shopify’s phrase to not sound like a complete egomaniac.)
- Fast-tracked access to the Shopify Experts Marketplace, where Shopify sends its 243,000 merchants looking for help with store, theme, and app builds.
- A free Shopify store to build your portfolio website.
- A free ticket to Smashing Conference NYC.
So what are you waiting for? Join me and some of your smartest colleagues in an experience that just might help make your career. Apply now to the Shopify Partners Studio Program.
RACHEL ANDREW—longtime web developer and web standards champion, co-founder of the Perch CMS, and author of Get Ready For CSS Grid Layout—is my guest on today’s Big Web Show. We discuss working with CSS Grid Layout, how Grid enables designers to “do something different” with web layout, why designers need to start experimenting with Grid Layout now, how front-end design has morphed into an engineering discipline, learning HTML and CSS versus learning frameworks, and the magic of David Bowie, RIP.
Enjoy Episode ? 141 of The Big Web Show.
Sponsored by A List Apart and An Event Apart.
URLs
rachelandrew.co.uk
Get Ready for CSS Grid Layout
Perch CMS
Writing by Rachel Andrew
Books by Rachel Andrew
@rachelandrew
IN AN IDEAL world, we’d be able to modify a design or graphic for the web while keeping the original intact, all without opening an image editor. We’d save tons of time by not having to manually reprocess graphics whenever we changed stuff. Graphics could be neatly specified, maintained, and manipulated with just a few licks of CSS. Oh. Wait. We can do that! Justin McDowell gives us the lowdown: read Blending Modes Demystified in today’s A List Apart.
Illustration by Brad Colbow
LEGISLATING THE WEB has long been murky ground. When glacial processes, uninformed committees, and international politics meet the individualized culture of the internet, friction ensues. Despite the resulting confusion, it’s our duty to work within the law—and to speak up for a better relationship between governing bodies and web professionals. In the current A List Apart, Heather Burns guides us through the current dilemmas in digital law, and offers a solution: professionalizing our industry to ensure a seat at the table.
? Enjoy The Perfect Storm in Digital Law by Heather Burns.
? And for more on Heather Burns and internet law, listen to The Law is an Ass: Digital Law & Web Design with Heather Burns. It’s Episode ? 137 of The Big Web Show—everything web that matters.
Illustration: Ping Zhu
REGISTERING for school, paying bills, updating government documents—we conduct a significant part of our daily lives through web forms. So when simply typing in your name breaks a form, well, user experience, we have a problem. As our population continues to diversify, we need designs that accommodate a broader range of naming conventions. Aimee Gonzalez shows how cultural assumptions affect what we build on the web—and how fostering awareness and refining our processes can start to change that.
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Reframing Design
ISSUE ? 426 of A List Apart reframes the design process:
The Language of Modular Design
by Alla Kholmatova
Goodbye, pages; hello, systems! When we break things down into atomic units, design elements become more scalable and replaceable, easier to test, and quicker to assemble. Alla Kholmatova emphasizes that a shared vocabulary should be the jumping-off point for teams who want to adopt a modular design approach. Let’s start with language, not interfaces.
Sharing Our Work: Testing and Feedback in Design
by Jessica Harllee
Showing your in-progress designs can be scary, but there’s no better way to keep your product in line with your users’ needs. Research and testing aren’t just boxes to be checked off; they’re methodologies to be integrated into the entire design process—and the more, and the more diverse, the merrier. Jessica Harllee explains how Etsy shares their work with users every step of the way—and the benefits (and surprises) that follow.