Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Creating a Responsive HTML Email Newsletter for Codecademy. This is interesting. Email is so far behind the state of the art – or maybe not.
Paul Irish: Fast performance CSS on mobile is a video from Adobe TV.
Here’s a useful infographic explaining what Creative Commons licenses allow you to do.
Shelley Powers posted an explanation of the uses of alt, figcaption and longdesc on Google+ that is worth a read.
Screenreaders at a crossroads is from the NCSU accessibility blog. Lots of test results and comparisons of screenreaders.
The popularity behind Professor blogs today – explained is from .eduguru.
When a big event occurs, Twitter has become the go-to source for up to date information. I see two problems with relying on Twitter in such situations.
There is always someone who feels obliged to monitor other people’s tweets for “sensitivity” to an event. Often someone will berate a tweeter for tweeting something that is unrelated to the hot topic of the day as if it was a social gaffe.
It’s as if a news event is the only thing anyone can be thinking about. Bombings, explosions, tornadoes, shootings, deaths, protests – yes, those things are important. There are people who hang on to TV news, read every tweet, and generally dwell for hours inside the drama during an event. And they tweet and retweet everything they see about the news of the day.
The problem is when they demand that everyone else do exactly the same thing.
A culture has grown around this phenomenon of single-mindedness during a breaking news event. That culture dictates that you shouldn’t show an interest in anything but the event or you will be branded insensitive, unaware, uncool, and out of touch. People respond to this social ostracism by shutting down scheduled tweets, keeping silent about whatever normal life they are living in deference to the news, and not tweeting except retweets of the day’s news.
I think this culture of “sensitivity” is a problem. Sometimes the news is so painful (for example, the Newtown shootings) that even thinking about it, much less obsessively tweeting and retweeting about it, is damaging to the soul. Tuning out and attending to normal life is a defense against the pain. People should be allowed to respond to horrific events this way, and should not be labeled idiots for tweeting about something unrelated. There’s no one right way to react to news.
It’s human to be interested in dramatic events. On Twitter, it’s human to retweet things that relate to an ongoing event.
We end up with a flood of tweets, many unverified and unchecked, that spread misinformation with the remarkable power of the retweet.
I’m not suggesting that people on the scene with real information should not tweet. I’m not suggesting that early reports such as “there was an explosion during the Boston Marathon” should not be retweeted. I am suggesting that retweeting everything without evaluating whether or not it is true is a problem.
Indiscriminate retweeting overwhelms people who are trying to sift out the truth from a flood of rumors, errors, and misinformation. Even worse, rumors and errors get picked up by major media – TV and radio news mention these things as if they were actual news. Granted, major media is acting no better that a Twitter user who retweets without vetting information in this situation. There may be thousands of tweets per second during big news events. Think of the manpower needed by a news organization or police department to sift through all those tweets trying to verify the truth, or find the right lead.
What I am suggesting is that concentrating exclusively on dramatic news events creates issues with an overwhelming flood of bad information among the valuable information.
If you don’t really know what’s going on, why retweet as if you do? Why not keep silent about the event instead? Why not (gasp) tweet about your normal life even in the midst of the media circus?
The Twitter culture of framing anyone who isn’t “sensitive” to the news as an idiot or a fool needs to stop. Judging others is akin to bullying and isn’t the business of the Twitter culture police.
How to Keep Up To Date on Front End Technologies is a new site with suggestions for Twitter lists and websites that can help keep you up to date.
Web pages that respond to the device is now a mantra in the web dev world. How about radio broadcasts that respond to the user’s situation and location? Check out The BBC shows off “perceptive radio” that can alter scripts. Here’s a working demo, which they suggest works best in Chrome from locations inside the UK.
In a similar vein to the BBC experiments, I am here to sing the praises of the Syfy app. I’m a fan of several shows on the Syfy channel, including the currently running Defiance and Warehouse 13. With a sync feature, the app pings you periodically with information about what’s happening on the screen – simple things like the name of a song in the background or something about the scene or actors. Here’s the really cool part. If you record the show to watch at a different time from the original air time, the app still knows where you are in the story and the information it feeds to you matches your personal viewing schedule.
As a graphic or web designer designer, are you a jack of all trades or do you specialize in a specific niche? The former has the ability to take on a wide variety of work; however, the latter has the ability to charge top rates for a much narrower scope of work. In the professional world, expertise is valuable, so clients are willing to pay more for specialized services than they are for a designer who can design a little of everything. If you want to make more money as a graphic designer, it’s important to carve out your own niche.
A niche, or a narrow area of expertise, makes you more marketable. It allows you to focus your marketing efforts, so you’re getting the most bang for your buck. It lets you learn everything there is to know about a specific design medium, which in turn makes you a more valuable graphic designer. All together, these attributes mean you’ll be a better paid designer – you’ll make more money doing less (and faster) work by adopting a niche.
But what niche is best? It’s important to enter a niche you enjoy and you’re skilled at, that there is good demand for, that there is relatively little competition for, and that clients are willing to pay top dollar for. To help get you started, here are five enormously profitable graphic or web design niches you can consider.
Anyone can design an attractive landing page, sure; but not everyone can design a landing page that sells. Take the time to learn how design motivates customers to “buy now,” and you’ll be able to craft compelling landing pages that boost conversion rates. When you can do this, internet marketers will pay you top dollar to design their landing pages.
Many websites today place a premium on usability and user interface design. The reason is that the easier a website is to use, the more likely it is to be used. And, the more complicated the site, the more there is a need for excellent usability and UI design. Study what makes for a user-friendly website, and you can make yourself a valuable and highly sought web designer.
Today more than ever, companies understand how important it is to get their identity right. Establish yourself as a premier expert in the field of identity design, and you’ll be able to charge premium fees. In a world where even small businesses pay $5,000 to $10,000 to have their companies named, you can make far more by designing logos, letterhead, business cards and more branded marketing materials.
Just like landing pages, understanding how to apply the right design elements to motivate purchasing decisions is critical to direct-mail marketing success. Learn how to properly design a direct-mail postcard, catalog, envelope, sales letter or full sales mailer, and you’ll be a highly valued graphic designer for direct mail companies.
Billboards, large-format stickers and banners, and unique outdoor advertising campaigns require intelligent, clever, and calculated design in order to be successful. All of these are “big investment” campaigns, which mean many companies are willing to pay top dollar to an expert outdoor marketing designer in order to ensure they enjoy the highest possible return on investment.
What other lucrative design niches are available? Let us know in the comments!
Author’s Bio: Brian Morris writes for the PsPrint Design & Printing Blog. PsPrint is an online commercial printing company. Follow PsPrint on Twitter @PsPrint and Facebook.
Drupalcon Keynote by Karen McGrane with Video, Slides, and transcript. One of many worthwhile ideas she discusses:
I’ve gotten the reputation of being the president of the WYSIWYG Haters Club, which is true, and if you don’t buy into my rationale here today…
I’m going have to continue my graffiti crime spree. People assume I must be some kind of markdown evangelist. The problem isn’t the toolbar. Truth is, I don’t care if users make headings and bulleted lists with a toolbar or markdown codes. The problem with WYSIWYG is that we are allowing content creators to treat the web like it’s print.
Where do you think WYSIWYG came from?
It came from XEROX. Xerox PARC. Because they invented the laser printer.
How to Use Adobe Edge Web Fonts on Your Site from Design Shack is a good look at how to make the new Adobe Edge Web Fonts work for you. Both the problems and the benefits are outlined along with step by step instructions.
The W3C released the first working draft of HTML Imports. HTML Imports are a way to include and reuse HTML documents in other HTML documents.
I urge all my students to use Chris Pederick’s Web Developer Toolbar. Recently Cynthia Says, which the toolbar uses for a number of tests, added CAPTCHA. Here’s an article that tells you how to replace Cynthia Says with the WAVE tool in the Web Developer Toolbar. Since WAVE is a far better tool than Cynthia Says, this is a good idea for everyone anyway, even if Cynthia Says hadn’t suddenly rendered itself inaccessible.
Pinterest for Designers has tips for getting started with Pinterest and using it to support your brand. The part of the article I found most interesting was the list of boards to follow for ideas about typography, print design, web design, package design, color, logos, and general inspiration.
Responsive Images – Interim Report from Bruce Lawson lays out the current state of things.
Understanding WCAG Level from Karl Groves can help you come to grips with WCAG priority levels.