CSS is usually considered a language for applying styles to webpages. However, in this article Krasimir Tsonev will show you that it is more than that. It is also a handy tool for collecting statistics. What matters in the end is the impact for clients. Are they getting more products sold or are there more visitors for their campaign sites? The final results usually show if your project is successful. Google Analytics is a powerful way to collect data. In this article, you will see a CSS-only approach for tracking UI interactions using Google Analytics.
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As responsive design has evolved, we now more often start with the content and then set breakpoints when the content “breaks.” This means that you might end up with quite a few content-centric breakpoints and no particular devices or form factors on which to test your website. However, we need to continually monitor a design’s performance with real traffic. Content-centric breakpoints are definitely the way to go, but they also mean that monitoring your website to identify when it breaks is more important. In this article, Jon Arne Sæterås and Luca Passani will demonstrate how WURFL.js and Google Analytics can work together to show performance metrics across form factors. No more guessing.
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“Cool” is a rather ambiguous term, and means different things to different people. But when working with data, the term “cool” is often directly juxtaposed with common charts and written off as “boring.” The emphasis on the instant visual appeal of an infographic over the clarity of the presentation of data is a troubling trend that plagues the modern incarnation of the infographic.
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Nathan Yau’s response to Amy’s “Do’s And Don’ts Of Infographic Design” article published a week before. The main point of this post is to show a different perspective at the points mentioned in the original article.
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Infographics iare becoming a powerful tool for disseminating huge amounts of information to the masses. This is why learning how to design a good infographic is a must, and avoiding the common pitfalls of infographic design could mean the difference between landing a big client and losing them entirely.
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There are pros and cons to the wide range of resources available to us, but this tutorial will not explore them all. Instead, we’ll create our graph using a progressively enhanced sprinkling of CSS3 and jQuery.
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A certain category of design gaffes can be boiled down to violations of audience expectations. Websites that don’t work in Internet Explorer are a heck of a nasty surprise for users who, bless their souls, want the same Internet experience as everyone else. Websites that prevent copying, whether through careless text-as-image conversions or those wretched copyright pop-ups from the turn of the century, cripple a feature that works nearly everywhere else on the Internet. Avoiding this category of blunders is crucial to good design, which is why I am upset that one particular pitfall has been overlooked with extreme frequency.
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Data visualizations and infographics can make complex datasets easier to understand and comprehend. By creating a graphical represenatation of data and statistics, complicated concepts and information can make more sense in less time. Many visualizations focus on representing a specific set of data or statistical information. Others focus on less-concrete topics, providing a visual representation of abstract concepts.
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The main goal of data visualization is its ability to visualize data, communicating information clearly and effectivelty. It doesn’t mean that data visualization needs to look boring to be functional or extremely sophisticated to look beautiful. To convey ideas effectively, both aesthetic form and functionality need to go hand in hand, providing insights into a rather sparse and complex data set by communicating its key-aspects in a more intuitive way. Yet designers often tend to discard the balance between design and function, creating gorgeous data visualizations which fail to serve its main purpose — communicate information.
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Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data - tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.
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