As a mobile UI or UX designer, you probably remember the launch of Apple’s first iPhone as if it was yesterday. Among other things, it introduced a completely touchscreen-centered interaction to a individual’s most private and personal device. It was a game-changer.
Today, kids grow up with touchscreen experiences like it’s the most natural thing. Parents are amazed by how fast their children understand how a tablet or smartphone works. This shows that touch and gesture interactions have a lot of potential to make mobile experiences easier and more fun to use.
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When the mockups for the new Financial Times application hit our desks in mid-2012, we knew we had a real challenge on our hands. Many of us on the team (including me) swore that parts of interface would not be possible in HTML5.
Given the product team’s passion for the new UI, we rolled up our sleeves and gave it our best shot. We were tasked with implementing a far more challenging product, without compromising the reliable, performant experience that made the first app so successful.
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Flexible box layout (or flexbox) is a new box model optimized for UI layout. As one of the first CSS modules designed for actual layout (floats were really meant mostly for things such as wrapping text around images), it makes a lot of tasks much easier, or even possible at all.
Flexbox’s repertoire includes the simple centering of elements (both horizontally and vertically), the expansion and contraction of elements to fill available space, and source-code independent layout, among others abilities.
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Everyone is talking about mobile. Some e-commerce websites are venturing into it. Mobile commerce (also known as “m-commerce”) has immense potential, exhibiting a 86% growth rate and hitting $25 billion in 2012 (set to reach $86 billion by 2016, according to eMarketer).
It’s also a whole new platform, with new interaction methods and usage contexts that introduce a host of limitations and pitfalls to watch out for when designing and running an m-commerce website. With few best practices yet established, m-commerce is, to a large degree, unchartered territory when it comes to actual implementation.
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Good typography has always been a defining aspect of effective Web design, and this holds true especially for websites in which the emphasis is on presenting a large amount of content — specifically, articles, news and stories.
Whether for a magazine or international newspaper, the designer of any website that distributes a lot of content has always had to consider typographic details as seriously and thoroughly as a print designer would. In 2009, we conducted a survey of then current typographic practices. Since then, responsive design techniques have clearly gained momentum and established their place in the landscape of CSS layout.
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Now powering over 17% of the Web, WordPress is increasingly becoming the content management system (CMS) of choice for the average user. But what about websites built with an outdated CMS or without a CMS at all? Does moving to WordPress mean starting over and losing all the time, energy and money put into the current website? Nope!
Migrating a website (including the design) over to WordPress is actually easier than you might think. In this guide, we’ll outline the migration process and work through the steps with a sample project. We’ll also cover some of the challenges you might encounter and review the solutions.
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Now and again, I hit the swimming pool. It’s a good way to exercise, but also to relax after a long day in front of my PC. I can do quite a few laps in my front crawl, but only because I don’t use my legs much. I kick steadily to ensure that my legs stay lifted and don’t slow me down. I don’t use my legs much for forward propulsion.
Does this relate to mobile Web development, responsive Web design and server-side device detection? The analogy is a stretch, but yes, it does.
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Storytelling takes many forms. In the past, stories were told orally, with people telling and retelling myths, fables and even histories. As writing technology became more prevalent, we began to record our stories, and we told them in the pages of books.
Now, our society is awash in different devices and technologies, and those traditions of spoken stories and printed stories are blurring. Multi-screen narratives are being told across all kinds of platforms, pages and devices, making for truly immersive experiences. We are watching them, tapping them and learning from them.
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The <picture> element is a new addition to HTML5 that’s being championed by the W3C’s Responsive Images Community Group (RICG). It is intended to provide a declarative, markup-based solution to enable responsive images without the need of JavaScript libraries or complicated server-side detection.
The <picture> element supports a number of different types of fallback content, but the current implementation of these fallbacks is problematic. In this article, we’ll explore how the fallbacks work, how they fail and what can be done about it.
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