by admin | Mar 18, 2015 | Design, Dev, Rants, Web |
Code and Design Are two vastly different disciplines. So I see a lot of people talking about how designers should code. How it makes sense for frontend code to be produced in the design phase. Now, to a point, I agree. I definitely agree that being able to write code will help a web designer better understand the medium they are designing for. However does that make coding a prerequisite for designing in the digital space? No. No. No. As an analogy, in photography people always talked about the need to know about the developing process to truly master taking a picture – and yet we find ourselves now I’m the digital age, where a vast number of photographers have NO concept of how a digital print is produced. Many of these photographers produce great photography. Writing code is not a pre-requisite for good design. Web is the same: you don’t actually have to write code to design great web sites or user experiences. I will grant that the understanding will probably help, but it is by no means a prerequisite. Obviously, if you don’t implement your own designs, you will need to rely on a developer to do this for you, which leaves you open to the stereotypical “it’s technically impossible” issue, where the dev just can’t be bothered to implement it. However, this is a process issue and has very little to do with your design. Compartmentalisation is sometimes necessary for creativity. As a designer and developer, I have to try very, very hard to compartmentalise when I design, so that my visual creativity is not limited...
by Alex Holt | May 25, 2012 | Dev, Rants, Web |
So, this week I’ve been teaching web design at Shillington College in Sydney. Today we had an interesting discussion about <section> vs <div> for marking up regions on a page in HTML5 – in our case: particularly the main content region (which previously we style as <div id=”content”>. The debate stemmed from the (somewhat obsessive) idea that <div>’s are evil. The evil part of the <div> tag has more to do with the sloppy, messy usage that has become rife with the advent of WYSIWYG software that invariably writes terrible HTML. What people seem to not understand – or be reluctant to accept is that <div> is still a perfectly acceptable element in HTML5. Furthermore, I would suggest that there is no more semantic meaning in the use of <section> than <div>. As far as I see it, neither of them carries any intrinsic meaning. The other new HTML5 elements all have embedded meaning.. but section is really no more meaningful than <div> or <span> or any of our other un-semantic tags. The issue here stems from the seemingly conflicting messaging in the spec. on one hand we are being told to avoid the <div> tag, while on the other hand we are told to use it instead of section to markup a region: Note: The section element is not a generic container element. When an element is needed for styling purposes or as a convenience for scripting, authors are encouraged to use the div element instead. A general rule is that the section element is appropriate only if the element’s contents would be listed explicitly in the document’s outline So, while I understand the...
by Alex Holt | Aug 28, 2009 | Rants, UI/UX, Web |
Adding a target=”_blank” attribute to an A tag has long been seen as a way to keep users on your site. This logic is fatally flawed (i was under the impression that this was commonly agreed upon, however i’ve had to argue the point with a few people recently). Firstly, what does target=”_blank” do? this attribute makes a link open in a new window (or new tab in some more modern browsers) – the thinking used to be that the user was therefore STILL on your site as well. However this concept breaks the standard usability in the browser: the back button stops working – often times leaving the user confused. Furthermore, advanced users will automatically use CTRL/APPLE click to open links in new tabs anyway, so this functionality has no real purpose. Keeping a copy of your site open as well as the link that your user wants to see was often seen as leading to longer visit times on your site – however this statistic means nothing if there is a window in front of your site that is showing the user different content. Also, if a user clicks on an external link from your site and they don’t want to come back and keep reading your content, then you having sneakily left a copy of your site open behind the link they clicked is more likely to irritate them than help them – and the last thing you want to do is irritate your audience. So don’t target links to...
by Alex Holt | Oct 1, 2008 | Rants, Web |
In my first job, the majority of front end development time was spent trying to get horrible nested table layouts to render in both IE and Netscape 4. Thankfully the browser world (and more importantly the standards world) have progressed since then (at least a little). Browsers have taken a role reversal, with IE now dragging the chain in place of good old nutscrape. However despite the leaps and bounds that have been made towards standardising the web, the development environment really hasn’t changed that much. We’ve gone from placing invisible pixels inside nested tables to juggling CSS hacks – all to maintain a consistent look and feel across the range of browsers. So despite my feeling that our CSS tableless layouts are slightly more elegant (and less code heavy) I can’t help but wonder why we haven’t already achieved standardisation – and the only explanation I can come up with is that some goon in suit at Redmond doesn’t want it for some reason. But that’s not all there is to it, standardisation is something that rarely comes about through conscious intent, and usually comes to pass for the wrong reasons (take qwerty keyboards.. There are more effective options you know..) I’ve heard people suggest that the non-compliance of browsers kept the entry-level of the industry higher, however this is absurd. The quality of web design is really a combination if interface design, information design -and lastly, aesthetic. Whoever said “content is king” was onto the right idea. So where are our web standards heading? Hopefully to a standardised place (wishful thinking, I hear you say) where we can focus all our design...
by Alex Holt | Jun 27, 2008 | Rants |
Disclaimer: my girlfriend is a photographer / photo editor who has worked at photo libraries and also for magazines.. so I have some bias in this department. Background: what am I ranting about now? I used to work at a web firm that was responsible for the web site of Sun Microsystems in Australia/NZ, and part of the process we provided was to source high quality stock photos from Getty images to feature on the Sun home page. These images were quite cheap – back in the day. Since then many stock websites that are far cheaper have cropped up, providing (again in my opinion) lower and lower quality control and cheapening the photographer’s work. Photography is an artform that I have dabbled in at as hobby for years. I love good photography. BUT I know that I am not a professional, at best I am a hobbyist. Further to that, I love great photography in advertising and media. More than just giving me something to analyse and think about while i’m moving around the city, good use of photography is (in my opinion) an imperative part of most advertising and publication creative work. How the creative community is cheapening photography Why is it that we, the creative community, are actively cheapening photography? (i know also that this goes on in all facets of creative work, but today we’re just focussing on photography). Websites like istockphoto cheapen photography to a degree that the only way a photographer could possibly earn what they are worth for the creation of an image is if that image were used in SO many campaigns that it would lose all it’s creative...
