In a time when everyone seems to have a tablet, which makes it possible to consume everything digitally, and the only real paper we use is bathroom tissue, it might seem odd to write about the long-forgotten habit of printing a Web page. Nevertheless, as odd as it might seem to visionaries and tablet manufacturers, we’re still far from the reality of a paperless world.
In fact, tons of paper float out of printers worldwide every day, because not everyone has a tablet yet and a computer isn’t always in reach. Moreover, many of us feel that written text is just better consumed offline. Because I love to cook, sometimes I print recipes at home, or emails and screenshots at work, even though I do so as rarely as possible out of consideration for the environment.
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If you’re a plugin developer and you just love to write code, then writing a readme.txt file for a plugin in WordPress’ repository might be your idea of hell. When you’ve written all of that lovely code, why must you spend time writing about how to use it?
Unfortunately, some plugin developers view writing a readme.txt file as the least important part of their job. So, we end up with things like the following.
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The Web is just starting to use animation well. For years, animated GIFs and Flash ruled. Text moved and flashed, but it was never seamless. Animations had boxes around them like YouTube videos. HTML5 canvas changes everything about Web animation.
The canvas element makes it possible to integrate drawings and animations with the rest of your page. You can combine them with text and make animations interactive. This drawing mechanism is powerful, but very low-level. Animations get more power and need less coding when you combine the canvas tag with higher-level libraries such as Paper.js. This article introduces HTML5 animation and walks you through creating an animation of dandelion seeds blowing in the wind.
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Congratulations. You’ve just completed a pixel-perfect mock-up of an app, and you’ve gotten the nod from everyone on the team. All that’s left to do is save the tens, hundreds or maybe even thousands of production assets required to bring it to life.
It’s probably the least interesting part of designing software, usually entailing hours of grinding. Saving images to multiple scales — as required by iOS and other platforms — adds complication to the process. But there are ways to streamline or automate the exporting process.
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Right there in the center of my boilerplate for design proposals is a section that I glare at with more resentment each time I complete it. It’s called “Deliverables,” and it’s there because clients expect it: a list of things I’ll deliver for the amount of money that I specify further down in the document. Essentially, it distills a design project down to a goods-and-services agreement: you pay me a bunch of money and I’ll give you this collection of stuff. But that isn’t what I signed up for as a designer. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about deliverables. And neither should you.
Case in point: for months now, I’ve worked consistently with a particular client for whom I do almost no work on actual design artifacts (wireframes, prototypes, etc.). Rather, I hold frequent calls with the main designer and developer to go over what they’ve done with the product (i.e. poke holes in it) and what they should do next (i.e. help prioritize). Some days, they hand me wireframes; sometimes, a set of comps; other days, live pages. Whatever the artifact, our purpose is always to assess what we have now versus where we need to get to.
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Much of the excitement we’ve seen so far about HTML5 has been for the new APIs: local storage, application cache, Web workers, 2-D drawing and the like. But let’s not overlook that HTML5 brings us 30 new elements to mark up documents and applications, boosting the total number of elements available to us to over 100. Sexy yet hollow demos aside, even the most JavaScript-astic Web 2.0-alicious application will likely have textual content that needs to be marked up sensibly, so let’s look at some of the new elements to make sure that your next project is as semantic as it is interactive.
To keep this article from turning into a book, we won’t look at each in depth. Instead, this is a taster menu: you can see what’s available, and there are links that I’ve vetted for when you want to learn more. Along the way, we’ll see that HTML5 semantics are carefully designed to extend the current capabilities of HTML, while always enabling users of older browsers to access the content. We’ll also see that semantic markup is not “nice to have,” but is rather a cornerstone of Web development, because it is what enhances accessibility, searchability, internationalization and interoperability.
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Multisite is a powerful new feature that arrived with the release of WordPress 3.0. It allows website managers to host multiple independent websites with a single installation of WordPress. Although each “website” in a network is independent, there are many ways to share settings, code and content throughout the entire network.
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been developing themes and plugins for a WordPress Multisite-powered content network. During that time I’ve learned many powerful tips and tricks unique to Multisite. This guide will introduce you to a few Multisite-specific functions, along with real-world programming examples that you can begin using today. Hopefully, it will open your eyes to a few of the new possibilities available in Multisite.
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Have you read Where the Wild Things Are? The storybook has fluidity of content and design figured out. It goes that one night, protagonist Max “wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind or another.” He hammers nails into walls, pesters a small dog. Author Maurice Sendak doesn’t explain these hijinks textually for the reader. The mischievous acts are illustrated on the right-hand pages. Readers make the narrative connections for themselves.
The words and pictures depend on each other for completeness. Web designers can employ the same complementary dependence of graphic and text in their own work. It encourages a sense of belonging and can create strong first impressions, which are often essential to effective Web design.
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