Nielsen is wrong on mobile
netmagazine.comStripping out content from a mobile website is like a book author stripping out chapters from a paperback just because it's smaller. We use our phones for everything now; there's no such thing as "this is mobile content, and this is not."
Estimated reading time: 29 min
Oliver Reichenstein on design
netmagazine.comThe incredible access to information we have does not lead to an overflow of information. But it doesn't lead lead to more clarity. It leads away from the 'either or' ideologies that claim to know for certain which principles human knowledge must follow. The nostalgic trend is in essence postmodern. That everything you say describes a human perspective, not a divine cosm. I used to make fun of the word postmodern; I still dislike it, because the essence of postmodernism is exactly that it is not an -ism, that it has no global belief.
Estimated reading time: 14 min
Get rid of the line between design and development
netmagazine.comLet's throw our egos over board and move closer together! We need to focus our skills on the things we want to create instead of following obsolete study programs based on long-gone job descriptions. New ideas and better products will inevitably stem from this global approach.
Estimated reading time: 4 min
The Readlists debate: ebook repackaging splits industry
netmagazine.comIt's not just about cleaning up crap, but also empowering users to do things with content. 'Curation' is too big and too imprecise a word for a lot of this activity, but something is definitely happening with content and the ways we consume, create, and share it. Readlists is simply a next step – a next experiment – in this evolution of how readers interact with the web content they love.
Estimated reading time: 6 min
Save the planet through sustainable web design
netmagazine.comDesign is where the environmental drag of the internet originates, and where it can be fixed. You don’t have to be a coder or a site engineer for your decisions to affect the sustainability of the internet. Your initial work directly controls how energy-hungry the final page will be. Your choices in layout, imagery, and interactive behavior implicitly determine the toxic downstream effects.
Estimated reading time: 21 min
Jeffrey Zeldman on his Web Design Manifesto 2012
netmagazine.comFinally, the web is no longer 'underground', no longer 'the wild west'. It isn't the province of a few crazy rebels. It's filled with professionally professional professionals who follow widely endorsed best practices and standards. That's very good in a lot of ways, but it tends to create an environment where there is less experimentation.
Estimated reading time: 6 min
Designing in the browser
netmagazine.comThe basics of the web are to create HTML documents and have them be viewable almost everywhere on almost anything. By default the web has no optimal width, optimal height, optimal font-sizes or optimal anything really. Designing in the browser gives us responsiveness for free. It also, just as importantly, centers our design thinking around the fluidness of the web.
Estimated reading time: 4 min
Responsive web design is boring!
netmagazine.comI'm worried that in our quest for modular, gridded and responsive nirvana we've lost the spark. Case in point: the much talked about Boston Globe refresh. From a technical and UI perspective it really is fantastic and forward thinking. But it's almost like it lost its soul to get there. Where's the character? Where's the personality?
Estimated reading time: 4 min
Paul Heger recommended this story.
Designing better customer support
netmagazine.comA happy and passionate customer base is vital to any business that has one or more products.
Estimated reading time: 6 min
Sebastian Waters recommended this story.
15 top web design and development trends for 2012
netmagazine.comBut for entertainment sites, Flash is – and will remain – the predominant tool of choice to create engaging experiences. And that’s because those sites act as an extension of a movie’s universe, not only existing to serve cold information.
Estimated reading time: 11 min
Jan Weiss recommended this story.
The rock star myth
netmagazine.comWe have to accept that we aren’t superhuman. Too many designers pride themselves in hand-crafting everything that they produce.
Estimated reading time: 3 min
Paul Heger recommended this story.
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