A List Apart: Articles: Elevate Web Design at the University Level
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/elevatewebdesignattheuniversitylevel

Web education is out of date and fragmented. There are good people working hard to change this, but because of the structure of higher education, it will take time. As part of a year-long journey to discover where we are in web education and where we need to go, Leslie Jensen-Inman interviewed 32 web design and development leaders. The consensus: technology moves too fast for college and university curricula to keep up. How, then, can educators create a sustainable foundation for the future?

Sponsor an Educator...sounds like a new nonprofit idea to me.

Web education is out of date and fragmented.

Nuevos horizontes para la educación web

"The Web Standards Project have begun trying to tackle the education issue. Industry experts and veteran educators on the WaSP Education Task Force are currently working to develop the WaSP Curriculum Framework (WCF), a modular curriculum that can be used to improve existing curricula or serve as the foundation for emerging programs. (Disclosure: I’m a member of The Web Standards Project, an educator, and the project lead of the WaSP Curriculum Framework.) The WCF will be released in March of 2009 as a living curriculum that will adapt to changes in the industry so that schools using it can ensure their students are learning the concepts that are relevant to their field of study. The WCF’s first release will contain approximately 14 courses divided into six learning tracks: * Foundations * Front-end Development * Design * Server-side Development * User Science * Professional Practice "

"Building a real relationship between industry and education requires that we answer this question for both parties: 'What’s in it for me?' Whether you’re a practitioner or educator, the answer is the same: graduates who are ready for a career in the web."

Schools that teach web design struggle to keep pace with our industry, and those just starting their curricula often set off in the wrong direction because the breadth and depth of our medium can be daunting.

Brighter Horizons for Web Education by Aarron Walter

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, the graphic arts industry was populated by full-time illustrators, production assistants and compositors. With only composing sticks for laying out type, straight edges for defining grids, a human proofer to catch spelling mistakes and an arsenal of X-acto blades for making edits, these guys lived and breathed detail. Mistakes were costly. It was a trade position that required lengthy apprenticeship; job security depended on getting all of the little things right.

good article on the business qualities that make a great & successful web designer/developer

Good article on being a good designer

Great summary of a Web designer's job...

Some very very good insights here. Particularly about the 1st para and WHY it needs to be different.

"Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking."

The best readers are obstinate. They possess a nearly inexhaustible persistence that drives them to read, regardless of the circumstances they find themselves in

Some interesting web design thoughts - does bloggernacle design lead us to skim instead of read?

videos and other fixed width objects inside the content may upset this fluid layout, but see links for how to solve that.

contemporary practices from ala

more on fluid webdesign

this is a test.

A great article from ALA on how to cultivate an active membership base

A key to running successful "social networking sites" is to remember that they're just communities. All communities, online or off, have one thing in common: members want to belong—to feel like part of something larger than themselves. Communicating effectively, setting clear and specific expectations, mentoring contributors, playing with trends, offering rewards, and praising liberally (but not excessively) can harness your members' innate desires—and nurture great content in the process.

A List Apart: Articles: The Elegance of Imperfection

design aesthetics

Very interesting.

A taxonomy of elegance Jeremy Alexis, of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design, asks us to consider three types of elegance when we face a design problem: logical elegance, systemic elegance, and aesthetic elegance.

Findings from the A LIST APART Survey, 2008

As we did in 2007, A List Apart and you teamed up to shed light on precisely who creates websites. Where do we live? What kind of work do we do? What are our job titles? How well or how poorly are we paid? How satisfied are we, and where do we see ourselves going?

Findings from one of the best non-profit web think-tanks - Stats on working in the web industry.

As we did in 2007, A List Apart and you teamed up to shed light on precisely who creates websites. Where do we live? What kind of work do we do? What are our job titles? How well or how poorly are we paid? How satisfied are we, and where do we see ourselves going? In 2008, 30,055 readers took part in the A List Apart Survey. Once more, data analysts Alan Brickman and Larry Yu crunched numbers this way and that. With a global recession in full swing as of December 2007, we were particularly interested to find out how financially and professionally secure web people felt, and whether there were discernible differences in the way people responded to questions about satisfaction and security in 2008, compared with 2007. This year we also improved our fact-finding on freelance and part-time web personnel. The more things change For 2008, instead of a downloadable (PDF) white paper, we decided to present our findings on the web. Which meant, in addition to compiling and analyzing data and

nice html + css version of graphs.

Some people care about the actual survey, me? I stare at how the tables were structured.

As we did in 2007, A List Apart and you teamed up to shed light on precisely who creates websites. Where do we live? What kind of work do we do? What are our job titles? How well or how poorly are we paid? How satisfied are we, and where do we see ourselves going? In 2008, 30,055 readers took part in the A List Apart Survey. Once more, data analysts Alan Brickman and Larry Yu crunched numbers this way and that. With a global recession in full swing as of December 2007, we were particularly interested to find out how financially and professionally secure web people felt, and whether there were discernible differences in the way people responded to questions about satisfaction and security in 2008, compared with 2007. This year we also improved our fact-finding on freelance and part-time web personnel.

Great article about how good design really works

We’ve all seen arguments in the design community that dismiss the role of beauty in visual interfaces, insisting that good designers base their choices strictly on matters of branding or basic design principles. Lost in these discussions is an understanding of the powerful role aesthetics play in shaping how we come to know, feel, and respond.

For those how make websites.

“la encuesta de la gente que hace sitios” que, con más de 30.000 encuestados

Interesting survey about developers in 2008

y or may not want to reveal themselves as the Seer, a.k.a. Werewolf Enemy Number One). It’s not much to

We kill the quiet ones cause they aren't helping.

This was an amusing, insightful... overall a good read.

Why attractive things work better

The visual aesthetics that frame and define content are much more than simply a “skin” that we can apply or discard without consequence. Users react in fast, profound, and lasting ways to the aesthetics of what they see and use, and research shows that the sophisticated visual content presentation influences user perceptions of usability, trust, and confidence in the web content they view

User interface experts are often suspicious of the role of visual aesthetics in user interfaces—and of designers who insist that graphic emotive impact and careful attention to a site’s visual framework really contribute to measurable success.

I think the notion of content templates will be useful. Both for the Collections overview working group and for the implementation of a CMS at NLA Web.

Accessibility is commonly touted via some text and a small hyperlink that leads to Section 508 at the bottom of a web page, a practice which upholds the spirit of the law. It usually reads something like this: “We are committed to making our site accessible and continue to test and modify the site for accessibility. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any problems accessing any of our content.” Some quick accessibility checks reveal that many site owners and developers consider the second part of that statement a convenient “get out of jail free” card. Developers sometimes think that using standards-based development principles, separating presentation and behavior via external CSS and DOM-based scripting techniques, and applying alt attributes to images creates Section 508 compliance. They don’t want to spend more effort on accessibility until they get feedback from users who have problems with the site.

"In universal design, perceived affordance—that is, the implicit understanding of how to interact with an object—actually coincides with the user’s ability to execute the action. Universal design is, therefore, inherently accessible." - yes!

Designing for your worst client: yourself

It’s time we came to grips with the fact that not every “document” can be a semantic “web page.” Some forms of writing just cannot be expressed in HTML—or they need to be bent and distorted to do so. But for once, XML can help. Joe Clark explains.

e

"The creation myth of the web tells us that Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML as a means of publishing physics research papers. True? It doesn’t matter; it’s a founding legend of the web whose legacy continues to this day. You can gin up as many web applications as you want, but the web is mostly still a place to publish documents."

Our main goals: to attract bigger and better projects—and thereby cement our business, see it through the downturn, and discover excellent growth opportunities. Our aim was not simply to increase inquiries, but to improve the quality of inquiries, and our internal inquiry workflow.

Once a bit player, JavaScript increasingly takes center stage. Its footprint—the space it takes up on our servers and in our development schedules—continues to grow. So how can we make our JavaScript more reusable and easier to maintain? Perhaps MVC will offer some clues. While MVC is a familiar term to those in back-end application development—using frameworks such as Struts, Ruby on Rails, and CakePHP—MVC’s origin in user interface development lends itself to structuring client-side applications. Let’s examine what MVC is, see how we can use it to rework an example project, and consider some existing MVC frameworks.

What’s your role? Are you a designer who needs “real copy” for your comps? Maybe you’re an information architect trying to organize an experience, or a search engine marketer eager to influence your client with keywords they’ll actually use. Whatever your role, a content strategist can help you be more successful.

The Case for Content Strategy—Motown Style

"At a more thematic level, first working through the 'big issues' of content strategy, like communication goals and messaging, can help you hit the mark in your respective deliverables. "

Content strategy thoughts.

by LukeW, author of "Web Forms" from Rosenfeld media

Real-time inline validation can help people complete web forms more quickly and with less effort, fewer errors, and (surprise!) more satisfaction.

....en hoeveel % conversieverbetering het oplevert!

for unlnown items (is this username taken?) validate fields as the user proceeds from one field to the next

intro to HTML 5, input validation, canvas, regular expressions, SVG

With support in Chrome, Firefox 3.5, Opera, and Safari, HTML 5 is coming at you like a runaway train. Here are some suggestions to help you prepare to get on board rather than be left at the platform or tied to the tracks.

none of that will help you understand HTML 5 as much as using the new elements. You can modify part of an existing site or experiment by creating new pages.

a

Here are several tools that can be used with a heuristic evaluation to identify trouble spots

Grey Hoy of Happy Cog describes some common pifalls in the early stages of a new contract and offers some top tips. I like the questionairre suggestion. There is also some good discussion in the forum.

Determining which prospects you want to work with is often considered a luxury. Dont think of it that way. Even if the economy is in the tank and you absolutely need the gig, you should be very critical of the prospects youre considering working with. These are the people who will become part of your immediate and potentially long-term future, and you want to make sure you dont spend that time drinking schnapps to get through the day or grinding your teeth at night.

A List Apart: Articles: Can You Say That in English? Explaining UX Research to Clients

It's hard for clients to understand the true value of user experience research. As much as you'd like to tell your clients to go read The Elements of User Experience and call you back when they’re done, that won’t cut it in a professional services environment. David Sherwin creates a cheat sheet to help you pitch UX research using plain, client-friendly language that focuses on the business value of each exercise.

You Can Get There From Here: Websites for Learners

The Steve Irwin approach to discovery on the web—“I’m going to click this here link…just to see what happens!”

Context

From A List Apart: "Content-rich" is not enough. Most websites are not learner-friendly. As an industry, we haven’t done our best to make our content-rich websites suitable for learning and exploration. Learners require more from us than keywords and killer headlines. They need an environment that is narrative, interactive, and discoverable. Amber Simmons tells how to begin creating rich content sites that invite and repay exploration and discovery.

What we find changes who we become

"But just as important as the narrative consciously built into a website is the narrative readers create for themselves. Readers build their own narrative as they work their way through a website, moving from one content object to another. This narrative emerges from interrelationships between content items and helps readers turn fragmentary pieces of information into knowledge. The more clearly a reader can discern these relationships, the clearer and more meaningful the narrative he’ll be able to construct."

With the floodgates poised to open and the promise of many typefaces being freed up for use on websites, choosing the right face to complement a website’s design will need to become another notch in the designer’s belt. But where do we start?

Now that browsers support real fonts in web pages and we can license complete typefaces for such use, let’s move past the hype of web type and think pragmatically about how to use real fonts in our web projects. Several experiments with the CSS @font-face property, including some preliminary work with the much-anticipated Typekit, have led me to a single, urgent conclusion: I need to know how my type renders on screens, in web browsers. To that end, I created Web Font Specimen, a handy (free) resource web designers and typographers can use to see how typefaces will look on the web.

During a rebuild or development of a new site, content strategy engagement is site-level and long-term. First, the content strategist assesses, analyzes, and recommends high-level steps to create more cohesive content. In practice, this means many working sessions with business owners to define big picture objectives, the mission, and editorial program for the site based on the initial content assessment. Once the site goals are understood from a business and user point of view, the content strategist-as-curator works to reframe the collection by creating an overarching strategy that defines how content be should be organized, positioned, and made relevant (think: exhibition rooms in a museum or gallery). We then look at the spectrum of what is available and desired for publication, identify what is premium (the most unique among competitors, desirable to users, and drives high traffic) and work with the business to agree on site-wide topical areas of strength, focus and breadth.

What can we learn from museums libraries and other institutions that manage collections about effective content strategies.

L’ultimo numero di A List Apart ospita un articolo di Biorn Enki dedicato all’uso di contratti elettronici nell’ambito di una web agency. La seconda parte dell’articolo è tecnica e mostra come creare un modulo da far compilare al cliente usando Adobe Acrobat e un pizzico di PHP. L’aspetto interessante è però anche quello della prima sezione, quello che concerne il lato legale e pratico della questione. Primo punto: quanto conta davvero, in termini di competitività rispetto alla concorrenza, consentire al cliente una forma di relazione così veloce e semplice come quella rappresentata dalla stipula di un contratto via web? L’autore, per esempio, sostiene che è uno dei tanti modi per stare un passo avanti ai concorrenti in tempi di competizione sempre più serrata. Secondo punto, quello legale: emerge che nella legislazione americana anche il semplice cliccare su un pulsante o link di accettazione rende vincolante il contratto. Non c’è pertanto la necessità della tradizionale firma.

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If we, the people who make websites, want the world to know who we are and what we do, it’s up to each of us to stand up and represent. Last year, 30,055 of you did just that, taking time out of your busy day to answer the sometimes detailed and often thought-provoking questions in the second A List Apart Survey.

If we, the people who make websites, want the world to know who we are and what we do, it’s up to each of us to stand up and represent.

** Posted using Viigo: Mobile RSS, Sports, Current Events and more ** If we, the people who make websites, want the world to know who we are and what we do, it's up to each of us to stand up and repre

"This year’s findings paint a clearer picture of the distinctions between full-time and freelance web professionals: how you work, what you earn, and what you love about the job. "

Words that Zing

The internet did not replace television, which did not replace cinema, which did not replace books. E-books aren’t going to replace books either. E-books are books, merely with a different form.

"The bickering is getting old. Here’s what we can do."

"Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web" /by @danielmall via @russmaxdesign http://j.mp/9hRhAB #webstandards #flash

Retour sur les bancs de la FAQ http://bit.ly/cvUxjq

An exploration of the whys and wherefores of website FAQs. (Maybe you shouldn't need one.)

working in the economic downturn , excellent article http://bit.ly/IbXh7 [from http://twitter.com/markedgington/statuses/1257829325]

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February 17, 2009 Filling Your Dance Card in Hard Economic Times by Pepi Ronalds

RT @abookapart: Our bookstore is open - preorder your copy of HTML5 FOR WEB DESIGNERS now. http://books.alistapart.com

First chapter of "HTML5 for Web Developers" from Jeremy Keith.

W3CにおけるHTMLの歴史。

Chapter 1 of the book, “HTML5 for Web Designers” by Jeremy Keith

HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith. Read Chapter 1 online: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/a-brief-history-of-markup/ #html5

Ethan Marcotte schreibt auf A List Apart über verantwortungsvolles Web-Design und seinen Versuch eines Flexible Grids. Umfrangreich, aber lesenswert.

from Event Apart Boston

About creating flexible web layouts that adapt to screen size.

An excellent article by Ethan Marcotte that's very relevant for designing for mobile devices and flexibility ...

Quick and Dirty Remote User Testing (via @AListApart): http://bit.ly/azRGR0 (via @Loop11)

problems of browser specific css

A really good article about how CSS evolved and how it should have evolved. Pretty good read and I agree with the conclusion.

Great article by Eric Meyer on the need of vendor-prefixed CSS properties.

Prefix or Posthack /by @meyerweb via @alistapart http://j.mp/cSR0ty #css #css3 #webdesign

So the next time you find yourself grumbling about declaring the same thing four times, once for each browser, remember that the pain is temporary. It’s a little like a vaccine—the shot hurts now, true, but it’s really not that bad in comparison to the disease it prevents.

problems of browser specific css

A really good article about how CSS evolved and how it should have evolved. Pretty good read and I agree with the conclusion.

Great article by Eric Meyer on the need of vendor-prefixed CSS properties.

So the next time you find yourself grumbling about declaring the same thing four times, once for each browser, remember that the pain is temporary. It’s a little like a vaccine—the shot hurts now, true, but it’s really not that bad in comparison to the disease it prevents.

problems of browser specific css

A really good article about how CSS evolved and how it should have evolved. Pretty good read and I agree with the conclusion.

Great article by Eric Meyer on the need of vendor-prefixed CSS properties.

"Raphaël is a light-weight JavaScript library that renders dynamic SVG graphics including charts, graphs, vector-based animations, and GUI components right into your web pages. Now, you’re probably thinking, I can already do this with jQuery, Google Charts, or even Flash! While this is true, Raphaël reveals new possibilities not currently available with these other technologies. Let’s learn how to create inline scalable vector images that work across browsers and degrade gracefully."

using code to create graphics

Raphaël is a light-weight JavaScript library that renders dynamic SVG graphics including charts, graphs, vector-based animations, and GUI components right into your web pages.

Met name het voorbeeld van de route op de kaart ...

html web etc knowledge

A List Apart wrote up the Raphael library.

Hmm, this looks informative. SVG with a little help from Raphaël, by @briansuda - http://bit.ly/9bOWHB /via @alistapart

A List Apart: Articles: