Smashing Magazine

  

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. With the advent of mobile, new modes of browsing websites and reading text have emerged.

Online publications have had to reevaluate how their content is presented on mobile devices. Web typography is as rich, versatile and accessible as ever before. Yet new opportunities introduce new complexity; and with new implementation challenges, we are all spurred to reconsider our practices.

Now, three years later, we’ve reviewed the original study and explored how Web typography has changed over these years. We spent countless hours between February and April of this year collecting new data and exploring common developments and trends in Web typography.

How Did We Conduct The Study?

We have compiled relevant data from over 50 well-respected websites to address these questions. For this study, we selected a wide variety of international newspapers, magazines and blogs, all of whose typographic choices should have been carefully and thoroughly weighed. We chose publications and organizations that have a very large readership (such as The Boston Globe and The Financial Times) as well as specialized magazines with smaller yet often more demanding readerships (such as A List Apart and UX Booth).

These websites focus primarily on text-based content rather than on generic environments such as Instapaper and Readability. As such, they need to be highly legible in order to ensure that users continue visiting and reading on their websites. Because readability of content is (or rather should be) the main design goal of these publications, the techniques they follow could be considered good practices. However, the results presented in this study should be taken with a grain of salt.

Issues We Were Interested In

The questions asked in our first study nearly four year ago remain relevant but need to be complemented by questions about the challenges of mobile devices. How widely has responsive design been adopted by publications, if at all? Has there been any change in the typographic choices of big and small publications? How many weights of a large font family should we deliver to mobile devices? How large should the font size of body copy be? How should the font size change on a responsive website? Optimizing readability could require changing the font’s style, size and spacing according to the viewport’s width and height.

The second article in this series will address the growing diversity of eBook readers and mobile apps whose purpose is to give users a pleasant, improved or enhanced reading experience — from desktop readers down to smartphone readers. We were curious about the specifics of design and typographic choices that make reading articles in these applications more pleasing than reading on the original websites.

Note: For the sake of continuity, we have stayed close to the format of the original study from 2009. This article is meant to update the data, and hopefully detect new trends and reach new conclusions.

Typography In Online Publications

After carefully analyzing the style sheets in the publications in this study, we compiled a comprehensive spreadsheet of typographic points and collected the relevant data. You can view a spreadsheet of the raw data, which contains more data than was pertinent to this article.

Not limiting ourselves to the questions in the original study, we will broach issues that have arisen since then as a result of responsive design techniques, and we’ll examine whether such techniques are being applied at all. This led us to the following questions:

1. How popular are serif and sans-serif typefaces in body copy and headlines?
2. Which fonts are used most frequently?
3. What is the average font size (on narrow, mid-sized and large screens)?
4. What is the average ratio of the font sizes of headlines to the font sizes of body copy?
5. What is the average line height of body copy?
6. What is the average ratio of line height to font size in body copy?
7. What is the average ratio of line height to line length in body copy?
8. What is the average amount of space between paragraphs?
9. What is the average ratio of paragraph spacing to line height in body copy?
10. How are links styled?
11. How many characters per line are common in body copy?
12. How often are links underlined?
13. How often are font fallbacks used?
14. How often are responsive design techniques implemented?
15. Which ratios of display sizes are discernible?
16. How do websites deal with the performance of Web fonts?

To answer these questions, we collected more than 40 data points, all of which can be found in the aforementioned spreadsheet. We can extract several rules of thumb from this data. We wouldn’t recommend acting on the data from this study blindly; the statistical data, however, will no doubt yield useful insights.

Popular Serif And Sans-Serif Fonts

“Which typeface to use?” Obviously, this is one of the most important questions a designer has to answer when considering Web typography. The typeface will set the tone for the entire website, and a poor choice could send the wrong message or thwart the intended atmosphere. The argument for either serif or sans-serif hasn’t been won yet. Interestingly, looking back to the results of the 2009 study, sans-serif typefaces seemed to be more popular in body copy and headlines. The last four years have seen a tiny shift away from that.

Serif and sans-serif are almost equally popular in headlines.

The motivations of designers likely haven’t changed much. Serif fonts apparently stand out in headlines, but arguments have been made for serifs’ ability to guide the reader and for its readable structure in body copy as well. Still, contrasting a serif body with a sans-serif headline or vice versa can improve the overall visual appeal and readability of a website.

The data suggests that serifs have gained in popularity in recent years, leading almost to a reversal in common usage in the last four years, at least where body copy is concerned.

Serifs have strongly gained in popularity in body copy.

• Half of the websites analyzed use serifs in their headlines, the other half sans-serifs. The two most popular typefaces are Georgia — used on such websites as The Guardian and the Financial Times — and Arial — found on Zeit.de and the BBC’s website.
• Only 37% use a sans-serif typeface for body copy.
• The most popular serif typefaces for headlines are Georgia (14%) and Chaparral Pro (6%).
• The most popular serif typefaces for body copy are Georgia (20%) and Chaparral Pro (4%).
• The most popular sans-serif typefaces for headlines are Arial (10%) and Freight Sans Pro (4%).
• The most popular sans-serif typefaces for body copy are Arial (14%) and Helvetica (6%).
• However, 66% of headline typefaces and 39% of body copy typefaces are found in only one instance.

So, in summary we can state that nearly two thirds of the websites analyzed use serifs for body copy, and Georgia and Arial are still the most common primary typefaces. However, our most surprising find is that a majority of websites use non-standard fonts as their primary typeface — 39% of body copy and 66% of headlines. This development is truly interesting, because it shows that typography has become an important element in establishing brand identity and character. These numbers indicate growing typographic diversity on the Web — which we should probably expect anyway.

A majority of websites use non-standard fonts as their primary typeface.

The growth of “bulletproof” font-delivery services such as Typekit and Fontdeck likely explains the increasing variety of primary typefaces. Fallback typefaces are predominantly standard core Web fonts. Times, Times New Roman, Georgia, Helvetica and Arial are most often used in CSS font stacks. Mobile platform fonts such as Droid Sans, Palatino and Cambria are almost never used.

Ironically, a consequence of the resurgence in serif typefaces is that Times and Times New Roman, which had almost been written off as too old-fashioned in the last study, have made kind of a comeback as the two most popular fallbacks. Roughly 11% of headline and body copy fallbacks have Times, and another 11% have Times New Roman.

There is much literature on typography in Web design, most of which discusses the applications of serif or sans-serif typefaces. Increasingly, the argument for better readability combined with artistic value supports a judicious use of both styles. Douglas Bonneville discusses the benefits and best practices of combining serifs and sans-serifs, and Simon Pascal Klein discusses the intricacies of font families and makes further typographic considerations in his article “Achieving Good Legibility and Readability on the Web.”

The Great Discontent combines both the Stratum and Meta Serif Web Pro fonts to generate a dynamic yet respectable feel.

Compared to the previous study’s results, Verdana and Lucida Grande are the big losers. Verdana is used only twice as a primary font, and neither is used more than once as a fallback font. Chaparral Pro and Helvetica have risen in prominence. The increasing diversity and individuality in design is due to both the increased use of font foundries and the wider range of Web fonts.

One discovery of the previous study, that “alternative” fonts are more common among headline typefaces, is still proving accurate. No doubt, the general belief that experimentation is best applied to small details still stands. The look and feel of a page can be adjusted just enough by changes to the font family of headings, rather than by drastic changes to body copy. However, the overall use of alternative fonts for body copy has increased dramatically, creating a much richer and more diverse typographic landscape on the Web.

Light Or Dark Background?

The previous study concluded that a large majority of websites favored dark on light color schemes. Not much has changed, although the websites surveyed this time are more varied in their light background tones.

An Event Apart demonstrates the readability of a subdued color scheme.

Several websites have a less aggressive contrast of an off-white or even beige background with dark-gray text. The off-white is often chosen to lower contrast. The designers in this case have clearly opted for a comfortable, lengthy reading experience.

Black text on a white background is a common pattern for body copy. The contrast is easy on the eyes and is, at least among these websites, the status quo.

Average Font Size For Headlines

Generally, the font size of headlines is chosen according to the typeface of the body copy. Still, it’s interesting to see what common ranges designers prefer for body copy and headlines. In this study, the headlines for large display sizes average at roughly 38 pixels. Of course, we made sure that the text always displayed at the actual size, without any zoom.

The most popular sizes range from 20 to 32 pixels.

You can easily notice the increase in font size since the last study. Not only did the average increase by more than 10 pixels (!), but the range of headline sizes starts further up, at 20 pixels, and tops out at an impressive 212 pixels in the case of The Great Discontent. This publication is an exception, with its magazine-like headlines and smaller font sizes for headings.

We’re going further up. The Great Discontent shows an impressive 212 pixels font size.

Average Font Size For Body Copy

With readability as the determining criterion, the average pixel size of body copy has increased in four years as well. Back then, most of the websites were between 12 and 14 pixels in font size. Now, 14 pixels is as popular as 16 pixels; each is used on 13 websites.

14 pixels is also The Verge’s font size. While some websites offset the first paragraph of an article with a larger font size, many, like The Verge, follow a uniform size.

Ratio Of Headline to Body Font Size

We’ve updated our rule of thumb based on the current average ratio between headline and body font size. Don’t follow this rule blindly; rather, just keep it in mind as you make decisions in your projects.

Headline ÷ Body Copy = 2.5

According to our study, on average, the ratio between the headline and the body copy is around 2.5. The traditional scale (6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18, 21, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72) and the Fibonacci sequence (16, 24, 40, 64, 104) are still relevant, of course, and represent a more naturalistic approach. The golden ratio (1.618) might also yield an organic effect, too.

Optimal Line Height For Body Copy

Leading (or line-height in CSS) will always depend on your font size and measure (or line length). But in general, the longer the measure, the longer the leading should be. Therefore, presenting a chart of the most popular leading values in pixel units wouldn’t make sense here. More appropriate for you would be to use a relative unit, such as an em or percentage value, that determines the ratio between leading and measure and between leading and font size.

This latest study reveals the following:

• line height (pixels) ÷ body copy font size (pixels) = 1.46
  Classic typography books recommend 1.5, a value backed up by this and our last study. Very few websites use anything less than that. The number of websites that go above 1.48 decreases as you get further from this value.
• line length (pixels) ÷ line height (pixels) = 24.9
  The average line length (570 pixels, excluding margins and padding) has grown comparatively less than font size and line height have since 2009 (the latter averaging 22.9 pixels). The average line lengthened by approximatively 5% (from 538,64 pixels in 2009), while the average line height has increased from 12 pixels in 2009 to 13 pixels in 2013.
• space between paragraphs (pixels) ÷ line height (pixels) = 1.39
  In the first study, it turned out that paragraph spacing (i.e. the space between the last line of one paragraph and the first line of the next) rarely equaled the leading (which would be the main characteristic of a perfect vertical rhythm). According to our results, paragraph spacing is around 1.39 × the paragraph leading. Paragraphs are more clearly delineated with this increased ratio, thus increasing readability.

Multiplying the value of your body’s font size by 1.46 would give you the optimal line height, which you could then adapt to your font style. Multiplying this new value by 24.9 should give you the optimal line length. Note that the layout would also need gutters, margins and padding to let the body copy breathe.

Characters Per Line

As explained by Robert Bringhurst, the classic rules of Web typography dictate that the optimal number of characters per line is 55 to 75. Our data shows that at their actual size (i.e. with no zoom and at the default font size), most websites average 83.9 characters per line at a widescreen resolution (in our case, a browser width of 1100 pixels).

While this average fluctuates quite significantly when the browser is at various other widths — between 83 and 86 characters per line at display widths of 700, 950 and 1600 pixels — only in smaller views of 500 pixels this average comes close to the classic rule. At that width, the average lies around 77 characters per line.

This is most likely the result of an attempt among designers to balance the font size with the amount of text displayed on narrow screens. With more characters displayed per line, the font size would have to become small, making the reading experience a bit more difficult on the eyes.

The highest number is, of course, much higher, but in general most designers stay in the range of 75 to 90 characters. In the most extreme cases, SB Nation has 55 characters per line, and Polygon averages 118 for the introductory paragraph. A more exact average could be derived by averaging several lines. But such an in-depth analysis probably would not vary greatly from the average that we calculated here. Still, the discrepancy between the number of characters at different widths is peculiar.

Polygon displays more characters per line in the introductory paragraph than in the rest of the article. However, the font size of that paragraph is larger as well.

Web Typography And Responsive Design

A burning issue we wanted to explore was the impact of of responsive design in Web typography today. The results were surprising: 22 out of 52 (i.e. 42%) of the websites we analyzed show (minor or major) changes when the browser size changes. Considering that responsive design has been around for two years, that number is quite impressive. We calculated the number of characters per line, the body font size and the headline font size at five browser widths (and experimented with the height as well): 500, 700, 950, 1100 and 1600 pixels. The font sizes for those three metrics do not differ greatly across the screen sizes — except at the 500-pixel view.

Unexpected, though, were the visual changes that occurred as we resized the browser. Changes in layout, image scaling, content and font size were evident to varying degrees on 22 websites. The changes are as minimal as images being scaled down to suit the display width. In some cases, however, the websites display other minor and expected changes. At the 500-pixel view, for example, the menu is often replaced by an icon; design components are moved from a multi-column layout to a single column; and both images and fonts are scaled.

No sign of responsive design was evident on 30 websites, including major publications such as The Financial Times and The Economist. At least some, if not all, of these websites seem to opt for a separate mobile website or application. The Financial Times immediately invites mobile visitors to use its FT app. At the moment, large online publications seem to prefer to invest in an app than in responsive design. If this trend continues, then the question becomes, how much will users be annoyed by being prompted to download an app for every single publication they’re interested in.

Despite this, we were happy to find that the layouts of the large majority of websites do not break when being zoomed in.

Some Numbers on the Implementation of Responsive Design

42% of websites implement responsive design changes, including for layout, image scale, content and font size.

At a display width of 500 pixels:

• Average line height: 28 pixels
• Average font size of body: 15 pixels
• Average number of characters per line: 77

At a display width of 700 pixels:

• Average font size of headlines: 36 pixels
• Average font size of body: 15.6 pixels
• Average number of characters per line: 82.7

At a display width of 950 pixels:

• Average font size of headlines: 37.9 pixels
• Average font size of body: 16.1 pixels
• Average number of characters per line: 84.8

At a display width of 1600 pixels:

• Average font size of headlines: 40.7 pixels
• Average font size of body: 16.2 pixels
• Average number of characters per line: 86.8

These averages might be somewhat skewed because of the mixture of responsive and non-responsive websites. But they show how little the body font size and characters per line change over varying widths. The only exception is the 500-pixel width, which have a lower number of characters per line.

Performance Considerations

While embedded fonts are slowly becoming a de facto standard in Web design, they also introduce overhead in performance because, well, they have to be loaded. Chris Coyier recently discussed the idea of loading Web fonts only on large screens to avoid the performance hit. You could also load Web fonts into AppCache or LocalStorage first and show them on subsequent page loads.

Moreover, you could use Google’s WebFont Loader to ensure that the content is displayed in fallback fonts even before the Web fonts have loaded, and then switch to the Web fonts once they have completely loaded (this is what we’re implementing in this very moment).

Our study shows that Web fonts are indeed a heavy bottleneck in performance, with 5.7 font files being loaded on average, totalling an average of 133.5 KB of extra bandwidth. In cases such as a page being loaded on a slow mobile connection, the user would initially see no text other than the underlining of links (apparently due to the use of the border-bottom property). Only once the fonts have loaded would the text be visible — and even then, elements would appear one by one (headings, then subheadings, then body copy). We can avoid this suboptimal experience by properly adjusting the CSS font stack, as Richard Rutter explains in his talk “Responsive Web Fonts” (slidedeck).

Other Findings

• 45% of websites underline the links in body copy. The others do so only on hover or not at all.
• 71% of websites highlight links with color. The rest do not or only on hover.
• 99% of websites left-align text.
• No website uses hyphenation.
• 84% of websites use the same fonts in the print and standard style sheets.
• The loading weight of home pages averages around 1.346 MB. Article pages are marginally less, at around 1.146 MB.
• The websites average 119 HTTP requests!

Conclusion

This study has revealed a set of common practices in Web typography. These results should not be interpreted as law. They should not be interpreted as “best” practices; rather, just as rough guidelines that we encountered in current Web design.

For example, the performance hit introduced by Web fonts and the (huge) number of HTTP requests should be reduced as far as it’s possible, while the content-out approach in responsive design would dictate how the font size would need to adjust depending on the settings in which it’s used. These findings are no doubt just a snapshot of current trends and may very well be outdated in a year’s time.

• Serif fonts are more popular than sans-serifs for both headlines and body copy. There is, however, a trend to mix sans-serifs and serifs to contrasting effect.
• The most common fonts for headlines are Georgia, Arial and Chaparral Pro. But the majority of websites are individualized and use less common fonts.
• The most common fonts for body copy are Georgia, Arial and Helvetica. But, again, the majority of websites are individualized and use less common fonts.
• The most popular font size for headlines is between 29 and 32 pixels.
• The most popular font size for body copy is between 14 and 16 pixels.
• headline font size ÷ body copy font size = 2.4
• line height (pixels) ÷ body copy font size (pixels) = 1.47
• line length (pixels) ÷ line height (pixels) = 24.8
• space between paragraphs (pixels) ÷ line height (pixels) = 1.43
• The optimal number of characters per line is between 55 and 75, but 75 to 90 is more popular.
• Body text is left-aligned. Hyphenation is not used at line endings. And links are underlined and/or highlighted with bold or color, sometimes only on hover.
• Mobile devices are mostly adapted to via responsive design, although some publications opt for a dedicated app.

The decision of whether to modify any typographic element always lies with the designer. Most of the results shown in these websites are likely the outcome of much trial and error. When designing a new website, you might want to stay close to these parameters, but with adjustments to suit your layout. Feel free to review the study’s spreadsheet for the raw data.

As we mentioned at the beginning, the second article in this series will deal with the intricacies of eBook readers and mobile apps. We don’t necessarily expect very different results. However, apps do offer more interactivity to the user. It will be interesting to see how much developers take advantage of the range of possibilities in mobile apps. Because there is not yet an inordinate number of readers on the market, we’ll accumulate data on as many readers as possible.

More Studies On Smashing Magazine?

Interested in more studies? Let us know what you’re interested in, and we’ll see what we can do!

What kind of studies would you like to see on Smashing Magazine?

(al)

© Jan Constantin for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

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.

About This Guide

Before we get to work, let’s establish some context. First, this guide was written primarily with beginners in mind and will be most helpful for basic websites. Some of you will likely encounter advanced aspects of WordPress migration, but they are beyond the scope of this guide. If you’re tackling an advanced migration and get stuck, feel free to share your difficulty in the comments below.

Objectives

The objective of this guide is to help you with the following:

• Plan an effective migration to WordPress.
• Walk through the technical steps involved in migrating.
• Get ideas and resources to solve common migration challenges.

Assumptions

I assume you have basic familiarity with WordPress. Previous development experience with WordPress would be helpful, but not necessary. I also assume you have an existing website and design that you want to migrate to WordPress.

Basic Steps

Here are the basic steps that I recommend you follow for a typical WordPress migration:

1. Evaluate website.
   Work carefully through the pages on your existing website, identifying all of the types of content (standard pages, photo galleries, resource pages, etc.) and noting any areas that need special attention.
2. Set up environment.
   Set up WordPress and get ready to import.
3. Import content.
   Bring over and organize your content, whether via an importing tool, manual entry (for a small amount, when no tool is available) or a custom importing process.
4. Migrate design.
   Incorporate your existing design into a custom WordPress theme.
5. Review website, go live.
   Carefully review the import, making adjustments where needed, set up any URL redirects, and then go live.

With this outline in mind, let’s work through each step in detail.

Start With A Plan

The key to a successful migration is to carefully evaluate your current website. You need to figure out how to import and structure the content in WordPress before carrying over the design.

While the principles are the same across migration projects, the details often vary. So, below are two lists of questions to ask as you work out a plan.

Imported Content

• How much content needs to be imported (number of pages, number of images, etc.)?
• Is the volume low enough to be imported manually, or do you need a tool?
• If you need a tool, does one already exist?
• Can the content be categorized into the standard “posts” and “pages,” or does it call for custom post types?
• Does extra content need to be stored for certain pages (custom fields, taxonomies, etc.)?
• Will the URL structure change? If so, will the old URLs need to be redirected?

Existing Functionality

• Does the website integrate any third-party services (data collection, reservations, etc.)?
• Do any forms need to be migrated (contact forms, application forms, etc.)?
• Is access to any content restricted (such as members-only content)?
• Does the website sell products (digital or physical)?
• Do any administrative tools need to be carried over (such as custom CMS functionality)?

A Working Example

My brother, Joshua Wold, has volunteered a website to serve as an example; it’s for a side project of his in which he sells posters and postcards of a Vegan Food Pyramid. He built the website in plain HTML, with some basic PHP includes for the header and footer. Below is a screencast of me evaluating the website to give you a sense of how the process will work. Enjoy!

Set Up WordPress

Before importing the content, we need to get WordPress ready to go. If you’re just experimenting or if you prefer offline development, start with a local installation of WordPress. Otherwise, the next step is to install WordPress with your current hosting provider; or you could use the migration process as a great opportunity to move to a new host.

Once WordPress is up and running, you’re ready for action!

For our example, we’ve installed WordPress with the same host, setting it up in a /wp directory for the duration of the migration process.

Settings and Plugins

With WordPress installed, we’ll make a few minor adjustments:

• Update permalinks.
  Go to Settings → Permalinks to make changes. In most cases, I’ll switch to “postname”-style permalinks.
• Update users.
  I create an admin-level account for myself and any admin or editor accounts that are needed for clients and collaborators. I also remove the default “admin” user name if it exists (a basic but wise step for WordPress security).

Depending on the needs of the project, we might have to preinstall plugins. Here are the major categories of plugins:

• Form management
  Migrating a form “as is” is usually a mess; simply recreating it using a forms plugin is usually easier. My current favorite is Gravity Forms ($39+ per license). Other options are Formidable (with free and pro versions) and Contact Form 7 (entirely free).
• SEO management
  Search engine optimization (SEO) is a touchy subject. My philosophy is to build content for people, not for search engines. That being said, there is a common-sense approach to SEO that is solidly supported by the WordPress plugin ecosystem. And if your old website includes custom meta descriptions, giving them a new home during the importing process is important. I recommend WordPress SEO (free).
• Multiple languages
  If your old website supports multiple languages, WordPress has you covered. My plugin of choice is WPML ($79 per license, free for non-profits). Another option is qTranslate (free).
• Security
  WordPress security is a topic near and dear to me. The increasing popularity of WordPress has made it a target for security attacks. WordPress itself is rarely the problem; a poorly secured hosting environment or an outdated or poorly developed plugin usually is. I use managed WordPress hosting for the majority of my projects, which offers a good foundation for solid WordPress security. Options include WPEngine, ZippyKid, Pagely and Synthesis. In addition to managed hosting (and especially if you opt for a non-managed host), consider installing a security plugin, such as Better WP Security (free) or Wordfence (also free). Last but not least, review the “Hardening WordPress” guide in the Codex.
• Backups
  If you opt for managed hosting, backups are usually included (make sure, though). If you’re managing backups yourself or you want an extra layer of data protection, great options are available, including VaultPress ($15+ a month), CodeGuard ($5+ a month), BackupBuddy ($75+ per license) and BackWPup (free).

Import Content

With WordPress up and running, it’s time to bring over all of your content.

If your old website has a CMS, an importing tool might be available. Start by viewing the list of content-importing scripts in the Codex. If there’s a match, great! Follow the instructions and get to work. If all goes well, you’ll have migrated the content over without any trouble.

If your old CMS is not in the list or you don’t have a CMS at all and you’ve got fewer than 100 pages, then manual migration is probably the way to go. Copy and paste the contents, noting the old URLs as you go (tracking the migration in a spreadsheet is a good idea).

If you’ve got a custom CMS or a database of records without an importing tool and a high volume of content, then you might want to bring in a specialist to move the content over before continuing. The higher the volume of content, the higher the chance of human error and the more important automating it becomes.

For our project, I’ve migrated the content manually and replaced the existing navigation with a WordPress menu. You can watch the process in this next screencast:

Bring Over The Design

With our content in WordPress, it’s time to bring over the design. Incidentally, if you’re considering a new design, then now is a great time to look at the many excellent WordPress themes out there, both in the official repository and in third-party marketplaces such as ThemeForest and Creative Market. For our purpose, I’ll assume that you’re happy with your design.

Evaluating A Design

Evaluate the source code of a prospective design as best you can before tackling the migration. If the code is table-based or more complex than you’re comfortable with, then migrating the design might not be worth the effort. While anything is possible (I’ve migrated some complex table-based designs in my time), not everything is practical.

Working With Source Code

In my experience, the easiest way to migrate is to work directly with the source code in the browser. While having access to the original hosting environment can be helpful (especially when working with a lot of images and downloadable files), the ways that websites are built vary so widely that you’ll often have to reverse-engineer the original architecture in order to derive anything useful.

Going directly to the source code in your browser of choice will save a lot of time and, barring any important “behind the scenes” functionality, give you everything you need. Google Chrome is currently my browser of choice, and I’ve pulled our source-code samples directly from the browser. (In Chrome, go to Menu → Tools → View Source, or just right-click to bring up the contextual menu.)

Create A Custom Theme

If you’re new to them, learn about using themes in the Codex. For the migration process, you can either build a new WordPress theme from the ground up or modify an existing theme to meet your needs. I recommend the latter.

Most of my migration projects have started with the latest version of WordPress’ default theme (currently Twenty Twelve). Recently, I stripped down the default theme to create my own migration starter theme, which I’ll use in our example and which you’re welcome to use yourself. (Feel free to suggest improvements!) Let’s get to work.

Download a copy (ZIP) of the migration starter theme or follow along in your own theme of choice as we work through the relevant theme files.

1. Style Sheet

Our first step is to bring over the styles from the old website. In most cases, this is as simple as searching the source code for references to .css and then copying and pasting the contents from those style sheet(s) into our own style.css. Let’s get to it.

1. Open up style.css.
2. Replace the details of the theme (“Name,” “URI,” “Description,” etc.) with your own.
3. Paste in the styles from the old website.

A Note About Images

As you migrate the style sheet(s), search for and update any references to images. In general, I like to keep all images in an /images/ folder within the theme’s directory. More often than not, changing the locations of images referenced in the original CSS is necessary, and I make sure to update all references in the style sheet and templates accordingly.

2. Header

The next step is to create the header for our new theme. Our objective here is to merge the structure of the current code base with WordPress’ templates. Here’s what we’re going to do:

• Replicate the HTML structure of the old website.
• Replace the static menu with a WordPress-powered menu.
• Use WordPress’ title tag and leave the wp_head hook in place.
• Merge any other relevant tags from the old header.

Let’s get into the code!

Original HTML <!DOCTYPE HTML> <html> <head> <title>Vegan Food Pyramid posters, postcards and wallpapers</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <meta name="google-site-verification" content="PO3bWDpUEh4O6XXwnmfyfxrKRDf8JsRrNIcGdzv3POs" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" media="screen" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.veganfoodpyramid.com/favicon.ico?v=2" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="//use.typekit.net/tty6xpj.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript">try{Typekit.load();}catch(e){}</script> </head> <body> <a href="http://veganfoodpyramid.com"><h1 id="logo">Vegan Food Pyramid</h1></a> <ul class="menu"> <li><a class="active" href="http://veganfoodpyramid.com">Products</a></li> <li><a href="http://veganfoodpyramid.com/wallpaper.php">Wallpaper</a></li> <li><a href="http://veganfoodpyramid.com/about.php">About</a></li> <li><a href="http://veganfoodpyramid.com/contact.php">Contact</a></li> </ul> Merged Header (header.php) <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title><?php wp_title( '|', true, 'right' ); ?></title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <meta name="google-site-verification" content="PO3bWDpUEh4O6XXwnmfyfxrKRDf8JsRrNIcGdzv3POs" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.veganfoodpyramid.com/favicon.ico?v=2" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="//use.typekit.net/tty6xpj.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript">try{Typekit.load();}catch(e){}</script> <?php wp_head(); ?> </head> <body <?php body_class(); ?>> <header> <a href="http://veganfoodpyramid.com"><h1 id="logo">Vegan Food Pyramid</h1></a> <?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'primary', 'container' => false, 'menu_class' => 'menu' ) ); ?> </header> Explanation

One of the challenges of migration is deciding whether to improve code as you go along. Our project has a few areas that could be improved, but Joshua and I agreed to leave them as is. Most of you will be tackling the migration of a design that hasn’t been coded to current best practices (although, in fairness to the original coder, they may have been best practices at the time).

If time and opportunity allow, I encourage you to improve on the code. Otherwise, take comfort in the fact that, with the website now on WordPress, improvements will be a whole lot easier down the road.

Let’s work through the changes we’ve made!

• Doctype
  Make sure to carry over the same doctype. In this case, the original HTML already has an HTML5 doctype (a relatively rare occurrence on old websites). Using a modern doctype in a code base written for an older specification (such as XHTML or HTML4) could break the layout (especially in old browsers).
• Meta tags
  I usually bring over the majority of meta tags as is, replacing them in WordPress. The exception in our case is the reference to the style sheet, which is being inserted automatically via wp_enqueue_style in the functions.php file.
• Scripts
  Scripts can be tricky. If a script belongs on every page (such as a tracking script or font script), then putting it directly in the header (or footer) file is fine. If it needs to appear only on certain pages, then a conditional tag will do the trick. As a best practice, register all scripts and add them to the header (or footer) via wp_enqueue_script. If you’re up for the challenge, I recommend doing it this way. (Check out a tutorial on enqueuing TypeKit the right way.)
• wp_head
  Leave <?php wp_head(); ?> at the bottom of the </head> tag in the merged header file. WordPress uses wp_head, among other things, to enqueue scripts and style sheets that are referenced in the theme (usually in functions.php) and in plugins that you’ve installed. Without wp_head in place, most front-end plugins won’t work.
• body_class
  Notice our use of the <?php body_class(); ?> tag. WordPress uses this to provide a series of helpful classes to the <body> tag depending on the page being viewed. In our example, the <body> classes weren’t being used. Yours might have unique IDs or classes on each page, in which case you can create a custom function using conditional tags to add the appropriate classes to the corresponding pages. Have a look at the Codex for some examples.
• WordPress menus
  Switching to a WordPress-powered menu is one of the more complex tasks in most basic migrations. It will be fairly straightforward for us. We have a menu with simple markup that uses an active class (generated via PHP) to indicate which page the visitor is viewing. The wp_nav_menu function is highly flexible and offers built-in functionality to handle the current state of an element in the menu. I’ve updated the references in the style sheet to the active class and changed them to use the equivalent generated by wp_nav_menu, which is current-menu-item. Watch the screencast on importing content to see how I’ve set up the menu for our example.

And that’s a wrap! Let’s move on to the next piece.

3. Footer

The footer is usually the most uneventful template in the migration process. As with the header, our objective is to merge the relevant parts of the original source code. Let’s get to it!

Original HTML <div id="footer"><p>© 2013 VeganFoodPyramid.com</p></div> <script type="text/javascript"> var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); </script> <script type="text/javascript"> try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-6992755-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}</script> </body> </html> Merged Footer (footer.php) <div id="footer"><p>© <?php echo date('Y'); ?> VeganFoodPyramid.com</p></div> <script type="text/javascript"> var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); </script> <script type="text/javascript"> try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-6992755-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}</script> <?php wp_footer(); ?> </body> </html> Explanation

Some footers are hard to migrate (such as ones with complex menus and widgets), but most are simple. In this case, we’ve merged the HTML with our footer template, making sure to preserve our reference to the wp_footer hook. We’ve also changed the date reference to use PHP, ensuring that it updates with each year.

4. Home Page

One of the challenges of a migration is that there are so many different ways to get the job done. The home page is a good illustration of this because it tends to be the most different from the rest of the website. Adopting the simplest method is usually best. I’ve opted to put all of the home page’s content directly in the template. Changes will be rare and can easily be made by editing the template.

Let’s look at the code, excluding the header and footer, which we’ve already covered.

Original HTML <div id="content"> <div id="poster"> <a href="http://veganfoodpyramid.com/images/Vegan-Food-Pyramid-New.jpg"><img class="product-img" src="http://veganfoodpyramid.com/images/Vegan-Food-Pyramid-New.jpg" /></a> <div class="description"> <h2>Poster</h2> <p>A 30×20-inch poster illustrating over 125 vegan food items as an alternative to the traditional food pyramid. This poster will catch people’s attention and serve as a suggestion for food ideas.</p> <h3>$30 each</h3> <p>Includes free shipping worldwide</p> <a class="button" href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=2FKQT879CXYYG">Buy</a> </div> </div> <div id="postcard"> <a href="http://veganfoodpyramid.com/images/Vegan-Food-Pyramid-New.jpg"><img class="product-img" src="http://veganfoodpyramid.com/images/postcard-splash.jpg" alt="Postcard Splash" /></a> <div class="description"> <h2>Postcards</h2> <p>Beautiful 4×6 postcards that can be mailed and shared with friends and family. Hand them out at events. Post them on walls. Share the vegan love!</p> <h3>$50 for 50</h3> <p>Includes free shipping worldwide</p> <a class="button" href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=EN387WHNSSFMW">Buy</a> </div> </div> </div> <!-- end content --> Merged Home Page (/page-templates/front-page.php) <?php /** * Template Name: Front Page Template */ get_header(); ?> <div id="content"> <div id="poster"> <a href="<?php echo get_stylesheet_directory_uri(); ?>/images/Vegan-Food-Pyramid-New.jpg"><img class="product-img" src="<?php echo get_stylesheet_directory_uri(); ?>/images/Vegan-Food-Pyramid-New.jpg" /></a> <div class="description"> <h2>Poster</h2> <p>A 30×20-inch poster illustrating over 125 vegan food items as an alternative to the traditional food pyramid. This poster will catch people’s attention and serve as a suggestion for food ideas.</p> <h3>$30 each</h3> <p>Includes free shipping worldwide</p> <a class="button" href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=2FKQT879CXYYG">Buy</a> </div> </div> <div id="postcard"> <a href="<?php echo get_stylesheet_directory_uri(); ?>/images/Vegan-Food-Pyramid-New.jpg"><img class="product-img" src="<?php echo get_stylesheet_directory_uri(); ?>/images/postcard-splash.jpg" alt="Postcard Splash" /></a> <div class="description"> <h2>Postcards</h2> <p>Beautiful 4×6 postcards that can be mailed and shared with friends and family. Hand them out at events. Post them on walls. Share the vegan love!</p> <h3>$50 for 50</h3> <p>Includes free shipping worldwide</p> <a class="button" href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=EN387WHNSSFMW">Buy</a> </div> </div> </div> <!-- end #content --> <?php get_footer(); ?> Explanation

The front-page.php template begins and ends with a reference to the header and footer that we’ve just prepared. In between, we’ll merge the rest of the HTML, and we’ll use the get_stylesheet_directory_uri function, which will dynamically generate references to the images folder in our new theme.

5. Standard Page Template

With the header and footer done, the standard templates are usually quite easy. For brevity’s sake, we’ll go directly to the merged templates.

Merged Template (page.php) <?php /** * The template for displaying all pages. */ get_header(); ?> <div id="content"> <?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?> <?php get_template_part( 'content', 'page' ); ?> <?php endwhile; ?> </div> <?php get_footer(); ?> Content Template (content-page.php) <?php /** * The template used for displaying page content in page.php */ ?> <article <?php post_class(); ?>> <?php the_content(); ?> </article> Explanation

There are several items to point out here:

• The loop
  If you’re new to WordPress or programming in general, this piece of code in the #content container might look intimidating. The “loop” is code used by WordPress to display a post’s content. You can learn more about the loop in the Codex. Meanwhile, just make sure that it’s in there, or else the content you save in WordPress won’t show up.
• get_template_part
  Our page template here employs the handy get_template_part function, which is a great way to keep content organized, especially in complex projects. Our website is simple enough not to warrant it, but I left it in just to show you.
• post_class
  I also added a reference to <article> (with the corresponding post_class function) to make further customization of the design easier.

5. Full-Width Template (full-width.php)

Although not illustrated in the screencast, the design includes a full-width template for use on the “Wallpaper” page, while the standard page template is changed to a narrow width.

Let’s have a look.

Merged Template (templates/full-width.php) <?php /** * Template Name: Full-Width Template */ get_header(); ?> <div id="content" class="full-width"> <?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?> <?php get_template_part( 'content', 'page' ); ?> <?php endwhile; ?> </div> <?php get_footer(); ?> Explanation

With the template created, all that remains is to assign it to a page. From the “Edit Page” interface, find the “Page Attributes” box (usually right below the “Publish” box) and select “Full-Width Template” from the “Templates” dropdown menu.

6. Extras

Now let’s tackle some of the “extras” that sometimes come up as challenges during a WordPress migration.

• Breadcrumbs
  Breadcrumbs are relatively common on websites. The easiest way to reproduce them is with a plugin. My current favorite is Breadcrumb NavXT (free). WordPress SEO also offers built-in breadcrumbs.
• Widgets
  If the design you’re migrating has a sidebar, you could either reproduce it as is (the migration theme has a sample sidebar in place) or integrate WordPress widgets to allow for a dynamically managed sidebar. The folks at Automattic have prepared a handy guide to widgetizing themes. Start there.
• Restricted content
  In case some content needs to be restricted, WordPress offers basic password protection by default. If you want more control, use a plugin. For basic role management and content permissions, I recommend Members (free). For more advanced control (especially if payment is involved), consider Membership (which has basic and premium versions), s2Member (also free and premium) and WP-Members (free).
• Custom Post Types
  Some migrations, especially ones with a lot of different types of content, call for “custom post types.” You can learn about custom post types in the Codex. To set them up, I recommend using a plugin. Two good choices are Custom Post Type UI and Types (both free).

Review Website

Now that we’ve wrapped up work on the theme, it’s time for a review. Work carefully through the pages on the migrated website. For a large website, focus on the different templates. As you review, here are some things to watch out for:

1. Broken links
   Make sure all links work as they should. If you have only a few pages, you can check manually. For an automated check, use Integrity (free, for Mac) or Xenu’s Link Sleuth (free, for Windows).
2. Broken styles
   Occasionally, for one reason or another, a design element of your website might have broken during the migration. Carefully compare the old HTML to the new to make sure you haven’t missed any important code and that the corresponding style sheet rules have been carried over. If all else fails, a quick rebuild of the design element on the new website might be in order.
3. Broken functionality
   Test any functionality that you’ve migrated over, such as “Buy now” buttons, contact forms, newsletter opt-ins, “members-only” content, embedded maps, media players, etc.
4. Temporary links
   Depending on how you’ve carried out the migration, temporary links to a subfolder or testing domain might appear in your content or theme. You’ll want to update these before going live. Use the Search and Replace plugin (free) to check for and update links in your content.

Setting Up Redirects

If your link structure has changed (and it usually will, even if only slightly), make sure that visitors are redirected from the old pages to the new. For small amounts of content, one of the easiest ways to set up redirects is by adding them to the .htaccess file.

Open the .htaccess file in the WordPress directory. If you don’t see it, set your FTP client to show hidden files. Now, create redirect rules for each of the old pages. Be sure to put these rules after WordPress’ block of rules.

Here are the rewrite rules for our links:

Redirect 301 /wallpaper.php http://veganfoodpyramid.com/wallpaper/ Redirect 301 /about.php http://veganfoodpyramid.com/about/ Redirect 301 /contact.php http://veganfoodpyramid.com/contact/ Redirect 301 /contactthanks.php http://veganfoodpyramid.com/contact/thanks/

If editing your .htaccess file is not an option or if you’re dealing with a lot of redirects, then have a look at Redirection (free).

Advanced tip: If the volume of redirects is very high (which is likely with a large-scale migration and a custom importing process), then consider building a function that hooks into template_redirect, compares a generated list of cases, and then uses the wp_redirect function to redirect any matches.

Going Live

Going live with a website usually involves one of two tasks:

1. Relocate WordPress from the development folder to the root directory.
2. Point the domain name from the old server to the new WordPress server.

Relocating WordPress

If you set up WordPress in a subfolder (as we did), then going live involves a few simple steps. Follow the guide to using a pre-existing subdirectory installation.

Once you’ve made the change, check immediately for any broken links that you may have missed in the final review.

Pointing to a New Server

If you set up WordPress on a new server, then you probably used a temporary domain. Accordingly, remove references to the temporary domain before pointing the domain to the new server.

Also, if you’re planning to update the name servers for your domain, then first resolve any dependencies in the current DNS records (such as hosted email and third-party services). I usually go live with a domain by updating the A records, leaving the name servers in place.

Conclusion

And there you have it! A successful WordPress migration is all about the details, and while this guide is by no means comprehensive, you now have a good outline of the process and a sense of some of the challenges you’ll encounter, along with ideas for solving them. If you run into challenges along the way, share them in the comments below. Now get migrating!

(al)

© Jonathan Wold for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

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. An instructor once explained to me that legs can definitely help with propulsion in the front crawl, but only at the cost of much higher energy consumption.

He also explained that champions use their legs a lot. Their hearts are powerful, and they can happily sacrifice the extra effort for the small yet significant gain in speed. People with modest competitive ambitions are typically better off with moderate leg usage.

Does this relate to mobile Web development, responsive Web design and server-side device detection?

The analogy is a stretch, but yes, it does. As the inventor of WURFL, I used to live in a world where mobile devices were so limited in capabilities that there was no way a commercial website and its corresponding mobile website could be supported through a unique set of HTML pages without the support of some server-side logic. Strategies to detect and tweak content for mobile devices varied from simple detection scripts to the adoption of full-fledged device description repositories (DDR) such as WURFL.

Today, things have, to a large extent, changed. Many still have a feature phone, but the majority of users who care about accessing the Internet from their mobile devices will have a smartphone. A 2013 smartphone means the following: a fast connection, a great WebKit-based browser, a 320-pixel wide (or wider) touchscreen and a great operating system that allows for the installation of apps.

This evolution has turned the mobile Internet into a swimming pool available to every webmaster. Programming strategies such as progressive enhancement (PE) and responsive Web design (RWD) enable everyone to make their full websites usable enough on smartphones from a single set of HTML pages — i.e. with no need for server-side device detection. This is awesome. Webmasters can now make their websites more mobile-friendly without introducing a significant amount of extra complexity. Yet, just like in my initial analogy, the saving is only achieved at the cost of sacrificing certain aspects of the mobile UX that “champions” would not be OK with sacrificing.

In a previous article by Ronan Cremin and me, “Server-Side Device Detection: History, Benefits and How-To,” we explored the different aspects of client-side approaches versus server-side approaches, and we concluded that server-side strategies still offer a lot to mobile Web developers. I won’t repeat it here; rather, I will go one step further and explain how the two worlds can happily coexist for everyone’s benefit.

Client-Side Vs. Server-Side: A False Dichotomy

Most IT people are familiar with the saying, “When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” This is perfectly applicable to mobile development, where, in my experience, developers with a JavaScript and CSS background tend to favor client-side solutions to the problem of device diversity, while developers with traditional system development skills find server-side approaches more natural.

Unsurprisingly, there are pros and cons to both approaches, and, more importantly, the two approaches are not mutually exclusive and can be made to work together. After all, for any organization that offers a website, the ultimate purpose is to create the greatest user experience possible for its users within the constraints of the project’s timeline and budget.

Best Of Both Worlds

When it comes to building a strategy for a website that is friendly to mobile users, there is a whole range of possibilities. At one extreme, a designer might adopt a purely responsive website because they cannot afford to maintain a server-side detection component (or simply because they do not find enough value in the extra complexity). At the other extreme are large companies whose websites (and mobile websites) address particular quirks of popular devices. This approach requires an investment and dedicated team so large that typically only major Internet companies (think Facebook, Yahoo and Google) would go for it.

Most other companies will find the optimum point somewhere between the two extremes by segmenting the world of connected users in ways that make the most sense in their markets. Such segmentation will need to rely on some form of server-side detection.

One way to put it is that one should adopt a “best of both worlds” hybrid approach. In this article, I will show an example of this.

Every software project is one-off. The Web is no exception. Nor is mobile Web development, where the super-rapid progress of mobile devices is constantly turning best practices into moving targets. For this article, I figured that nothing could make the point better than a real example with real code.

My example is a cross-browser and cross-device slideshow. I will show how server-side and client-side detection can be made to work together to deliver a great UX on a variety of clients.

Segmentation (Good Ol’ Divide And Conquer)

The slideshow will be made available to the following classes of HTTP clients:

• non-smartphones (or feature phones),
• smartphones,
• tablets and desktops.

I have always called these “segments,” and I have referred to the splitting up into segments as “segmentation.” The key point is that each segment will be provided with a fundamentally different UI structure. Such segmentation will be supported through server-side detection.

Within each segment, there will still be space for further optimization of the UX. Such optimizations will happen with RWD and device detection. Notably, this approach will be used to obtain pictures in different sizes and to address the bandwidth problem, particularly for mobile devices.

Let’s start by sketching the different UIs for the different classes of HTTP clients (i.e. segments).

Non-Smartphones

Non-smartphones are commonly referred to as feature phones in the industry. There is no standard definition of what a smartphone is, but a device that possesses the following features would likely be called a smartphone by most:

• touchscreen;
• a screen that is 240-pixels wide or wider;
• Android 2.2, iOS, Windows Phone 7.5 or higher, RIM OS 7 or higher, Symbian Belle or higher, Nokia N9 WebKit-based browser;
• not a tablet.

This is a totally arbitrary definition, but good enough for the purpose of this article.

Devices that do not support one or more of the above features will be considered feature phones.

Because no assumption can be made for non-smartphones, we will assume a small screen, no touchscreen and limited bandwidth (which entails the need to minimize the number of HTTP requests required to download all of the content).

Please note that the lack of a touchscreen might require users to click the “down” button multiple times to get to the icon they wish to select.

The following wireframe nicely illustrates what we are getting at:

Feature phones (i.e. non-smartphones) have relatively small screens (typically narrower than 240 pixels). The presence of a touchscreen should not be assumed for devices in this segment.

Smartphones

Smartphones have a large screen, and users don’t have to click their way through icons to get to the one they want. They simply touch it. Because of this, a UI such as the following is better suited to them:

Smartphones have large screens (240 pixels or wider). The presence of a touchscreen and of basic media queries for changes in orientation may be safely assumed.

Tablets and Desktops

In the case of tablet and desktop browsers, we can safely assume that a large screen is available. In this case, consolidating the two views (i.e. the navigation and the actual picture) into a single screen makes sense:

A screen 700 pixels wide (or wider) may be assumed.

Of course, I created a single segment for tablets and desktops for illustrative purposes, but a real project might segment differently, based on the business model of the organization and the traffic it sees from different classes of devices.

Before delving into the code to implement this, I should discuss a few aspects of mobile development.

Important Note About Mobile Bandwidth: Speed Isn’t Everything

US carriers (i.e. network operators) boast in their advertising about their increasingly faster 4G networks and the blazing download speeds that their customers can get. My experience (and the experience of others) is that those figures are sometimes truthful under good network conditions, as in the case of a large single download or of video streaming. In practice, things are a bit more complicated. The overhead of establishing an HTTP connection in mobile is high.

Many browsers and devices open only one or two concurrent connections with the server (partly because of what the HTTP specification says, and partly because of hardware limitations). Keep-alives cannot be assumed to always work as one would expect in mobile, because of strategies that the devices follow to save battery power.

The problem is at the lower levels and is rooted in the fact that mobile networks and TCP/IP were not built to play well together to begin with.

Techniques such as “domain sharding” (i.e. fooling the browser into believing it’s talking to different servers) help to increase the number of concurrent connections. However, if you want to increase the download speed (both real and perceived) of a website, limiting the overall number of HTTP connections is your best bet.

May Your Days Be Merry And Your URLs Unique

People share links on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and a lot of other services these days. This is good, but it has also exposed a shortcoming with a popular approach to managing the mobile channel — i.e. creating a separate mobile website (with separate URLs to the mobile view of the content). In short, a user will share http://m.coolsite.com on Twitter, and users on desktops and tablets will be offered a sucky UI. Having http://www.coolsite.com serve both the Web and mobile experience would effectively solve the problem.

As my last article explains, there are ways to have a single URL “multi-serve” content for different media. Of course, this requires a bit more design and work from the service architect as compared to purely client-side approaches.

In the case of PE and RWD, the “uniqueness” of the URL comes free of charge. In the case of server-side detection, a strategy to multi-serve content from a unique URL needs to be designed into the system. We will see one way to achieve this in the code discussed further down.

Content = Content + Presentation? A Little (But Important) Aside

Ethan Marcotte, arguably the inventor of RWD, correctly identifies the URL issue in his book Responsive Web Design:

“I do think fragmenting our content across different “device-optimized” experiences is a losing proposition, or at least an unsustainable one.”

This sentence has been quoted endlessly, and it seems hard to disagree with. Yet, it contains an ambiguity that makes it very debatable, to say the least. What Ethan calls “content” has historically been referred to as “presentation” by most. In fact, I could easily argue that separation of content and presentation is the foundation of a plethora of Web programming frameworks, such as model-view-controller (MVC), but also Windows DNA in the late ’90s.

While I am aware that designers will argue that the difference between content and presentation is blurry (advertising is the best example of this), such a differentiation has been very helpful to Web programmers in multiple ways over the past 15 years. In general, professionals are much better off preserving this separation, rather than blurring the difference between the two.

Software architects should obviously not fragment the content managed by their system. At the same time, they should be ready to multi-serve the presentation of the same data to users of different media and different devices in the name of an optimal UX. I would go so far as to argue that PE and RWD are also about providing multiple presentations of the same content, inasmuch as the clever use of grids and media queries allows developers to confine the “multi-serving framework” to a single page.

End of the aside.

Getting back to URL uniqueness, it is obvious that, in the case of server-side detection, a URL strategy must be designed with extra use of resources. Of course, webmasters have managed similar issues all their careers. Internationalizing a website presents the same challenges: one could have content served in multiple languages from the same URL (or even JSP or PHP page) or simply provide sibling websites, one for each supported language. Support for the potential lack of JavaScript presents a similar issue, as does the fact that an international content provider may wish to offer different (i.e. more relevant) content to visitors from different geographic regions, even where the language is the same. Supporting this means extra effort and cost. Typically, after the cost versus benefit equation is solved, some companies will go for the benefit in spite of the cost.

After so many words, let us see how the following code implements everything we’ve illustrated above.

The Code

Everything that has been discussed so far is illustrated in practice with a self-contained example that I built (along with my friend Steve Kamerman, COO at ScientiaMobile) to reinforce the points in this article. Be aware that, for the sake of clarity, the example hardwires many of the resources that would normally be isolated in separate databases or configuration elements.

Here is a list of the main components in the code:

• a DDR;
• an MVC framework;
• a controller with the segmentation logic;
• a server-side image-resizing framework;
• the views — feature phone, smartphone and tablet/desktop, in our case.

Let’s discuss each of them.

Device Description Repository

A DDR is a software framework that enables an application to associate an HTTP request with the properties of the client (Web browser, mobile device, Internet-enabled wristwatch, etc.). In our example, I will be using ScientiaMobile’s DDR, WURFL Cloud, because it’s the easiest to install on all platforms and also comes with a free offering for those who want to play around with it.

Of course, any other DDR could be used in place of WURFL Cloud, including AGPL-licensed WURFL or other open-source frameworks based on user-agent string analysis through regular expressions.

For the purpose of this article, here is the core bit of code that explains how to use the DDR (in the index.php file):

: require_once dirname(__FILE__).'/lib/WurflCloudClient/Client/Client.php'; : // Disable caching for testing $cache_enabled = false; $wurfl_config = new WurflCloud_Client_Config(); $wurfl_config->api_key = 'XXXXX:YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY'; : if ($cache_enabled) { $wurfl = new WurflCloud_Client_Client($wurfl_config); } else { $wurfl = new WurflCloud_Client_Client($wurfl_config, new WurflCloud_Cache_Null()); header("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate"); header("Expires: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT"); } $wurfl->detectDevice();

Note: The cache is disabled because this is handy for testing purposes. But you’ll want to enable it on a production website, or else every HTTP request from your users will be a request to the cloud.

Once this code has run, you will be able to look up device capabilities on your server, without any need to interact with the client through JavaScript or the like, as simply as this:

$wurfl->getDeviceCapability('is_tablet')

All of the magic of looking up the HTTP request and recovering a profile for the device is happening under the hood.

Model-View-Controller Framework

MVC is a popular programming pattern among Java developers that over the years has made inroads among programmers of other languages (including PHP). In short, the MVC framework analyzes an incoming HTTP request and “dispatches” the actual handling to a different PHP page that has been deemed to be more apt for the job. In our case, the framework will route the HTTP request to the PHP page that would implement the best UI for that “segment.”

For the record, the MVC framework we’re using in our example is homemade, but Steve explains that it was inspired by a micro-framework named Silex.

The framework itself is implemented in the lib/SimpleApp.php file:

require_once dirname(__FILE__).'/lib/SimpleApp.php'; : $app = new SimpleApp();

Once the MVC framework is included, dispatching an HTTP request to the right view (see below) is as simple as this:

$app->render('image/smartphone.php', $view_data);

The interesting part is that the URL will not be affected by this. Users will only see the index.php page that responded to the request. This effectively solves the problem of URL uniqueness that we discussed above.

Controller

The controller (the “C” in MVC) is in charge of segmentation (i.e. deciding the view to which a certain HTTP client should be directed based on its profile). Here is the core of the controller (in index.php):

if ($wurfl->getDeviceCapability('is_smartphone')) { $app->render('index/smartphone.php', $view_data); } else if ($wurfl->getDeviceCapability('is_mobile') && !$wurfl->getDeviceCapability('is_tablet')) { $app->render('index/featurephone.php', $view_data); } else { $app->render('index/desktop.php', $view_data); }

In light of what we have explained, this part should be rather self-explanatory: smartphone.php handles smartphones, featurephone.php handles feature phones, and everything else (including tablets) is handled by desktop.php. There are actually two sets of views, one that manages the discovery page (i.e. the thumbnails with pictures) and one that represents the single picture.

The is_smartphone capability is a so-called “virtual capability” — i.e. a computed property that relies on other capabilities and that represents ScientiaMobile’s understanding of what a smartphone is. A lot of people find this handy. Of course, nothing prevents a WURFL user from choosing the capabilities and rolling a particular segmentation that make the most sense for their business model.

Image Resizing (RESS)

RESS stands for “responsive images and server-side components,” making it the most screwed-up abbreviation I have ever seen in my life. Because it is now common, though, I will use it, too. The premise of RESS is fairly reasonable: RWD is cool, but sending 500 KB pictures to a mobile device is not a good idea for a variety of reasons. This is why even the most inveterate RWD promoters will concede that resizing pictures on the server in order to speed up downloading and rendering on mobile devices is still a good idea. Of course, CSS and JavaScript files are also resources that you’ll want to make as light as possible. These also fall under the RESS umbrella.

Users of WURFL Cloud also have access to a service called Image Resizer. In short, Image Resizer enables you to create a URL that piggybacks the following bits onto itself:

• the URL of the original picture,
• a combination of parameters that specify how the picture should be resized and manipulated.

Requesting the URL will result in a picture with the desired features being obtained. For the record, other services of this kind are around, such as Sencha.io Src and the up-and-coming WhateverWeb, which promises to go beyond simple image resizing. Call me a romantic, but I prefer that we eat our own dog food for this example.

A photographer also graciously gave me some pictures of Chicago for this article, which I’ve hosted at http://cto.scientiamobile.com/chicago/ (i.e. in a place where Image Resizer can pick them up):

Let’s see how Image Resizer is used in practice (see views/index/smartphone.php):

// Compute the size of the image thumbnails $thumb_width = 95; $thumb_height = 95; $rszr_tumbnail = "http://rszr1.wurflcloud.com/234341/w_$thumb_width/ h_$thumb_height/m_cropbox/"; : <div style="width: 100%; float: left; margin: 5px;"> <?php foreach ($images as $id => $image) { ?> <div style="float: left; margin: 5px;"> <a href="<?php echo $app->getUriPrefix().'/image/'.$id; ?>"> : <img alt="" src="<?php echo $rszr_tumbnail.$image['src']; ?>" /> </a> </div> <?php } ?> </div>

This will generate markup like the following snippet:

<div style="float: left; margin: 5px;"><a href="/smash/image/1"><img alt="" src="http://rszr1.wurflcloud.com/234341/w_95/ h_95/m_cropbox/http://cto.scientiamobile.com/chicago/chicago2.jpg" /></a></div>

In reality, I’ve cheated a bit. I cut some interesting bits from the code above. In particular, I’ve removed a trick to use a really important technique called the data URI scheme, which enables developers to nest pictures in the HTML itself in the form of ASCII Base64 garbage. As you can imagine, not all devices support the feature (although smartphones usually do). This is where WURFL’s image_inlining capability, along with the ability of the image resizer to provide the picture already in Base64 format, comes in handy. The image_inlining will tell you whether the data URI scheme is supported:

$image_inlining = $wurfl->getDeviceCapability('image_inlining'); if ($image_inlining) { $rszr_tumbnail = "http://rszr1.wurflcloud.com/234341/w_$thumb_width/ h_$thumb_height/m_cropbox/in_true/"; } else { $rszr_tumbnail = "http://rszr1.wurflcloud.com/234341/w_$thumb_width/ h_$thumb_height/m_cropbox/"; } : <div style="width: 100%; float: left; margin: 5px;"< <?php foreach ($images as $id => $image) { ?> <div style="float: left; margin: 5px;"> <a href="<?php echo $app->getUriPrefix().'/image/'.$id; ?>"> <?php if ($image_inlining) { ?> <img alt="" src="<?php echo file_get_contents($rszr_tumbnail.$image['src']); ?>"/> <?php } else { ?> <img alt="" src="<?php echo $rszr_tumbnail.$image['src'];?>"/> <?php } ?> </a></div> <?php } ?> </div>

In the case of a device that supports image inlining, the code above will produce the following:

<div style="float: left; margin: 5px;"> <a href="/smash/image/1"> <img alt="" src="data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQAAAQABAAD//gA7Q1JFQVRPUjogZ2QtanBlZ.. : AUhMQYSQVEHYXETIjKBCBRCkaGxwQkjM1LwFWJy0QoWJDThJfEXGBkaJicoKSo1Njc4OTpDREVGR0hJSlN : cH14z9RXHTc6jb6dWdM3GmrdT//Z" /> </a> </div>

As we discussed earlier, this is particularly crucial because of the importance of minimizing the number of HTTP requests demanded by a mobile device to download a page, an aspect that is simply not worth optimizing in classic Web programming: too much extra work for way too little gain.

Of course, the data URI scheme will greatly increase the perceived download speed on smartphones and non-smartphones alike.

The Views: Feature Phone, Smartphone and Desktop/Tablet

The three segments we initially defined map one to one with our three views (feature phone, smartphone and tablet/desktop), according to the MVC paradigm. Each view offers a user experience that is best suited to the respective class of devices and browsers.

It goes without saying that adopters of a DDR still retain control over the UX of a deployed application simply by configuring a device to access a given view (for example, by downgrading a misbehaving smartphone to the feature-phone view).

The feature-phone view is particularly interesting because you’ll want to serve XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML MP) as a markup to those devices. Developers who approach mobile today might get away with ignoring XHTML MP, but for years XHTML MP has been the standard mobile Web markup. Still today, smartphones will immediately recognize a website created in XHTML MP as being a mobile website, even when no viewport meta tag is available. Be aware that XHTML MP is typically better served with a different MIME type than text/html.

Note: Covering XHTML MP is beyond the scope of this article. If you are curious about the world of mobile programming on feature phones, my document “Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web” enjoyed some popularity for some time. Most people find it very informative still today.

The following screenshots visualize what the different UIs mean in practice:

The view on feature phones.

The view on smartphones.

The view on tablets and desktop. Above: The page on an iPad.

Here is the same page on the Xbox 360 (IE 10).

Of course, this example is just a proof of concept. Nothing prevents a programmer from making the desktop view even more responsive than it already is, or from adopting something like the good PhotoSwipe to provide interactive slideshows on smartphones and tablets (but not on older phones, where they would be unlikely to work). Divide and conquer.

Conclusion

Purely client-side approaches such as RWD and PE can make Web pages accessible on smartphones. For companies and organizations, this means that supporting mobile devices could be cheaper now than it was a couple of years back. Yet, these savings come at the cost of sacrificing certain aspects of a full-fledged cross-channel Web offering.

Large organizations may still want to adopt server-side device detection in some form to deliver a great UX to everyone who accesses their websites. While RWD and PE strategies can (and should) be adopted by companies, a hybrid client- and server-side approach is the most likely to deliver a great service to desktop, tablet and mobile users alike.

We’ve discussed an instance of such a hybrid approach by showing how segmentation, server-side resized images and the data URI scheme are key components to a great user experience across devices and browsers.

Have a look at the demo app.

(al) (ea)

© Luca Passani for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

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. They immerse us in the storyteller’s world. This article outlines what I believe are the five essentials of telling multi-screen stories.

How I Fell In Love With Interactive Storytelling

First, a little background. My childhood was spent in Nigeria, West Africa. I am a member of the Tiv tribe, a group of about 6 million people clustered in Nigeria’s Benue River Valley. As a child, I heard a lot of Nigerian folktales, about animals, humans and even magic. In Nigerian narrative tradition, stories are often told orally, in front of a gathered audience. During festivals and cultural events, men even dress up in elaborate costumes and perform stories for the crowds. I have vivid memories of these stories and have always been curious about how they could be translated into something digital and interactive.

The Kwagh Hir, or Thing of Magic, my tribe’s largest cultural festival (Image: Naptu2)

Those fables are a piece of my cultural inheritance. They always seemed to contain essential truths about humans. Take the story of the Ear and the Mosquito. One day, the Ear steals food from the Mosquito and refuses to pay it back. In anger, the Mosquito visits the Ear every evening, demanding the food to be returned, annoying Ear all night with his buzzing. It’s an old tale, with many versions, but the moral is consistent: don’t steal from your friends.

Creating modern, interactive versions of these stories is possible, but how exactly do we do that? Let’s begin by talking about what I mean by the word “multi-screen.”

A Bit About Context And Screens

When speaking about multi-screen storytelling, remember that screens have different contexts, not only different capabilities. The same screen on which you carelessly watch videos at home becomes a closely guarded viewport when you’re watching a movie on a crowded train. The context in which people view stories is more important than the device’s specifications. When we tell interactive stories, we need to be aware of this, and embrace it.

I like to focus on the following screens:

• Sensors (Twine, GPS, Arduino, motion detectors, etc.)
• Mobiles and tablets (phones, tablets, laptops and everything in between)
• Flat-screens (desktops, TVs, etc.)
• Public and immersive displays (store kiosks, large stadium screens, projectors, Kinects, etc.)

Not all of these need to be used at the same time, because they won’t all be appropriate to the story you are telling. Context is extremely important.

Now, as promised, here are the five essentials of multi-screen storytelling.

1. Divide Your Story Into Separate Content Blocks

When we create multi-screen narratives, we need to find natural breakpoints in the story, places where the visual or narrative content can easily be separated. This enables us to deliver different segments to different devices, in different contexts.

Kolobok is a Slavic children’s story about the adventures of a round yellow cake. For the Moscow International Festival, a large team of designers and animators from SilaSveta Studio incorporated it into a truly fascinating demonstration of storytelling. Before the show, the team set up a large touchscreen at the children’s height. With their hands, the kids could manipulate parts of the animation by adding movement and color.

A public display for children to play with

For the show itself, the full story was projected onto the facade of a large building, allowing the crowd of adults and their children to watch the narrative unfold. Along with sound, it made for another discrete content block, one that closely resembled a 3-D movie.

The full animated story in front of a large festival crowd

While the touchscreen and the movie were different views of the same content, they could exist as independent pieces and did not have to appear next to each other. The SilaSveta team found the natural breakpoints in its story and created two separate visual experiences to match them.

Questions to Ask

• Where are the breakpoints in the story? Divide your content so that it makes sense in context. The practice of responsive design gives us numerous guidelines on how to do this.
• Can those content blocks exist independently? Sometimes, the answer is no, but it depends on the story. In the Kolobok example above, they can. In other interactive stories, such as Snow Fall from the New York Times, the blocks are chapters in a single story and should be kept together.

2. Offer People Multiple Perspectives

Bear 71 is an award-winning multi-screen experience created by Jeremy Mendes and Leanne Allison. The creators tell the story of a bear living in Banff National Park in Canada. It feels like a cross between a role-playing game and a TV documentary, and as a linear narrative with a non-linear interface, it works beautifully.

The Bear 71 story is told in a highly abstracted interface.

Multiple viewpoints are accessible. Online, you roam in a stylized landscape, watch crittercam footage from the forest, and otherwise live as bears do — freely. Even though it may look like a game interface, you are not so much “playing” as you are participating in a story. Watching real crittercam footage, you see what the forest silently sees. You also have the option to turn on your webcam (“stealth mode”) to see other users around the world, all watching the same story online.

During shows and installations, the team responsible for Bear 71 set up augmented-reality applications and motion-detection cameras, so that visitors could experience what it’s like to have their pictures taken with one. By playing with the augmented-reality apps and the motion-detection cameras at the installations, users got a bit of the same physical experience that the bears had.

Questions to Ask

• Does the narrative change when viewed from a different perspective? A variety of perspectives can make a narrative much more fascinating. Bear 71 forces us to see the world first from the bear’s perspective and to sympathize with its loss of habitat, but other viewpoints take a slightly different angle. The voyeurism common in our digital sharing culture takes on a different meaning when used for animal surveillance.
• What data sets can be used in the narrative? Bear 71 cleverly combines crittercam video, GPS data, cell tower data, augmented reality, and topographical data. The photographs of visitors to the installation provide an additional emotional layer of data. The data we bring into our stories helps to define additional viewpoints and characters.

3. Redefine A Tradition

As Western culture has moved more deeply into Nigeria, Nigeria’s traditions are weakening. I wanted to take a piece of my culture and put it in the cloud, instead of leaving it locked in the heads of our oral storytellers. That meant redefining how the stories are relayed, how they are saved and, most importantly, what messages they convey to the audience.

In 2011, I started a project named Pixel Fable in which I take those traditional stories and reinterpret them online. In essence, I’m creating an interactive archive of Nigerian stories. As mentioned earlier, the oral histories of Nigerians are rich, but capturing them and translating them into digital stories means they will reach a wider audience. About 25% of my website’s visitors come from the US, while another 25% come from Japan. Canada, France and Germany also send a fair amount of traffic.

Pixel Fable uses responsive websites, iOS apps and augmented-reality animations to reinterpret Nigeria’s oral history.

An introductory screen from “Cricket and Mud Brick,” a new Pixel Fable story built with the Tapestry app

I’ve relied on two primary contexts to reinterpret the old Nigerian storytelling tradition. The first is people on their tablets and phones, clicking on and reading the stories. The spread of mobile devices makes this inevitable — why not tell African fables in a more accessible context? The second is my attempt to update the moral lessons for our modern age. While the original story of the Ear and the Mosquito may be a funny tale about annoying insects, the lesson can be updated to speak about how mosquitoes spread malaria in Nigeria. There’s room to redefine our old myths for the 21st century.

Questions to Ask

• Will people love or hate the reimagined version? Not every fable or myth can (or should) be recreated digitally. However, if people have an emotional reaction to a story that you have designed and pushed out to multiple screens, that is usually a good sign.
• If people talk about your narrative, will it bring about change in society? Each Pixel Fable story has a message. Most fables do. Some revolve around love triangles, others around the wisdom of elders, and there’s even one about why you shouldn’t get angry at your friends. They are small messages, but put together, they force us to reconsider how we treat the narrative history of people in Nigeria and West Africa.

4. Immerse People In The Narrative

The Walking Dead, the famous comic and now TV show, used a polling Web app (AMC’s Story Sync, if you like marketing-speak) to ask viewers questions and show related content as an episode was being broadcast on TV. While the app was simply timed to each scene, it was an experiment in multi-screen storytelling that invited audience participation, not just audience attention. Polling has a gimmicky feel to it, but that probably came about as a result of Hollywood pressure and doesn’t reflect the value of the concept in general.

Polling and syncing apps extend narratives from the TV to the couch.

The creators also added mobile gaming to the mix, bringing viewers “into” the story in a completely different way, in different contexts.

All of these facets of each story’s arc enabled people to immerse themselves in this apocalyptic narrative. Jason Spero of Google notes the need for a seamless experience as users move between devices. Other people, however, say that a second-screen experience can be extremely distracting, forcing viewers to miss key parts of the TV show. It is the opposite of an immersive experience, they say, and is confusing to use. In my opinion, each content block should work independently to avoid putting users in this position.

Questions to Ask

• Will people forget where they are? I’ll be the first to admit that this is not always a good thing. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve almost missed my train stop because my head was buried in my phone. Context, not only device capability, is key. Do you want users to get lost in the story or just engage in a manageable chunk?
• Do the screens you have chosen feel natural? By this, I’m not referring to pixel density. That is simply impossible to control, and if the story if good, it won’t matter anyway. The screens that people choose will depend a lot on the tasks they want to complete, so make your story feel natural for whatever content block they are interacting with.

5. Design Contextual Interactions

Recently, a number of storytelling apps have relied on location to serve additional content, much in the same way that Foursquare or Google Maps do. The Silent History is a dystopian science-fiction story about children who do not speak. The iPad app contains the whole story, but by visiting certain geo-tagged locations, users can access additional content.

For a novel about children all over the US, inviting readers to physically go to where the story’s kids are makes perfect sense. The additional contextual interaction makes the story more layered and thought-provoking, in a way that a simple app would not be.

We use map data every day, to look for restaurants, check the weather, see road conditions and even check for public transit delays. Other contextual interactions make sense when creating digital stories: taking photographs, texting, sharing and saving information, even body motion. Use these, along with your UI and UX skill sets, to devise new storytelling methods.

Questions to Ask

• Does the device matter? With the rise of responsive design workflows, our content should not be device-dependent. Some things, however, such as camera or GPS functionality, may be integral to a part of your story, and so the device would need to be factored in.
• Should the interface be designed as a seamless part of the narrative? As people who work on the Web, we really have a strength here. If we choose to make the interface part of the story, then we can rely on our experience in building websites and content management systems.
• Will your story “remember” anything? As a child, I folded over the top corner of the page when I had to put a book down. It was a simple way to keep my place. With a narrative split across multiple devices, it might be necessary to design an interaction that flags where you’ve gotten to and then returns you there when you visit again. That all depends on the content, but the question does need to be asked. Everyone hates losing their place on the Internet and having to navigate back, so perhaps we should enable a memory in our stories as well.

Conclusion

We have conceptualized different uses of multiple screens to tell stories. All of us, from every corner of the globe, have intensely rich cultures filled with stories and fables. Using them to create interactive narratives is another way to explore the power of the Web, to wow people and to record our cultural history.

I would love to see what you come up with, or hear about other examples of clever digital storytelling.

(al) (ea)

© Senongo Akpem for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

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.

The <picture> Element And Fallback Content

Like <video> and <audio>, <picture> uses <source> elements to provide a set of images that the browser can choose from. The <source> elements may optionally contain type and media attributes to let the browser know the file type and media type of the source, respectively. Given the information in the attributes, the browser should render the first <source> with a supported file type and matching media query. For example:

<picture> <source src="landscape.webp" type="image/webp" media="screen and (min-width: 20em) and (orientation: landscape)" /> <source src="landscape.jpg" type="image/jpg" media="screen and (min-width: 20em) and (orientation: landscape)" /> <source src="portrait.webp" type="image/webp" media="screen and (max-width: 20em) and (orientation: portrait)" /> <source src="portrait.jpg" type="image/jpg" media="screen and (max-width: 20em) and (orientation: portrait)" /> </picture>

For situations in which a browser doesn’t know how to deal with <picture> (or <video> or <audio>) or cannot render any of the <source> elements, a developer can include fallback content. This fallback content is often either an image or descriptive text; if the fallback content is an <img>, then a further fallback is provided in the alt attribute (or longdesc), as normal.

<picture> <source type="image/webp" src="image.webp" /> <source type="image/vnd.ms-photo" src="image.jxr" /> <img src="fallback.jpg" alt="fancy pants"> </picture>

The <picture> element differs from <video> and <audio> in that it also allows srcset. The srcset attribute enables a developer to specify different images based on a device’s pixel density. When creating a responsive image using both <picture> and srcset, we might expect something like the following:

<picture> <source srcset="big.jpg 1x, big-2x.jpg 2x, big-3x.jpg 3x" type="image/jpeg" media="(min-width: 40em)" /> <source srcset="med.jpg 1x, med-2x.jpg 2x, med-3x.jpg 3x" type="image/jpeg" /> <img src="fallback.jpg" alt="fancy pants" /> </picture>

The idea behind a <picture> example like this is that exactly one image should be downloaded, according to the user’s context:

• Users with <picture> support and a viewport at least 40 ems wide should get the big image.
• Users with <picture> support and a viewport narrower than 40 ems should get the med image.
• Users without <picture> support should get the fallback image.

If the browser chooses to display the big or med source, it can choose an image at an appropriate resolution based on the srcset attribute:

• A browser on a low-resolution device (such as an iMac) should show the 1x image.
• A browser on a higher-resolution device (such as an iPhone with a Retina display) should show the 2x image.
• A browser on a next-generation device with even higher resolution should show the 3x image.

The benefit to the user is that only one image file is downloaded, regardless of feature support, viewport dimensions or screen density.

The <picture> element also has the ability to use non-image fallbacks, which should be great for accessibility: if no image can be displayed or if a user needs a description of an image, then a <p> or <span> or <table> or any other element may be included as a fallback. This allows for more robust and content-appropriate fallbacks than a simple alt attribute.

The Fallback Problem

Right now, the <picture> element is not supported in any shipped browsers. Developers who want to use <picture> can use Scott Jehl’s Picturefill polyfill. Also, Yoav Weiss has created a Chromium-based prototype reference implementation that has partial support for <picture>. This Chromium build not only shows that browser support for <picture> is technically possible, but also enables us to check functionality and behavior against our expectations.

When testing examples like the above in his Chromium build, Yoav spotted a problem: even though <picture> is supported, and even though one of the first two <source> elements was being loaded, the fallback <img> was also loaded. Two images were being downloaded, even though only one was being used.

This happens because browsers “look ahead” as HTML is being downloaded and immediately start downloading images. As Yoav explains:

“When the parser encounters an img tag it creates an HTMLImageElement node and adds its attributes to it. When the attributes are added, the node is not aware of its parents, and when an ‘src’ attribute is added, an image download is immediately triggered.”

This kind of “look ahead” parsing works great most of the time because the browser can start downloading images even before it has finished downloading all of the HTML. But in cases where an img element is a child of <picture> (or <video> or <audio>), the browser wouldn’t (currently) care about the parent element: it would just see an img and start downloading. The problem also occurs if we forget about the parent element and just consider an <img> that has both the src and srcset attributes: the parser would download the src image before choosing and downloading a resource from srcset.

<picture> <source srcset="big.jpg 1x, big-2x.jpg 2x, big-3x.jpg 3x" media="(min-width: 40em)" /> <source srcset="med.jpg 1x, med-2x.jpg 2x, med-3x.jpg 3x" /> <img src="fallback.jpg" alt="fancy pants" /> <!-- fallback.jpg is *always* downloaded --> </picture> <img src="fallback.jpg" srcset="med.jpg 1x, med-2x.jpg 2x, med-3x.jpg 3x" alt="fancy pants" /> <!-- fallback.jpg is *always* downloaded --> <video> <source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4" /> <source src="video.webm" type="video/webm" /> <source src="video.ogv" type="video/ogg" /> <img src="fallback.jpg" alt="fancy pants" /> <!-- fallback.jpg is *always* downloaded --> </video>

In all of these cases, we would have multiple images being downloaded instead of just the one being displayed. But who cares? Well, your users who are downloading extra content and wasting time and money would care, especially the ones with bandwidth caps and slow connections. And maybe you, too, if you’re paying for the bandwidth you serve.

A Potential Solution

This problem needs both short- and long-term solutions.

In the long term, we need to make sure that browser implementations of <picture> (and <video> and <audio>) can overcome this bug. For example, Robin Berjon has suggested that it might be possible to treat the contents of <picture> as inert, like the contents of <template>, and to use the Shadow DOM (see, for example, “HTML5’s New Template Tag: Standardizing Client-Side Templating”). Yoav has suggested using an attribute on <img> to indicate that the browser should wait to download the src.

While changing the way the parser works is technically possible, it would make the implementation more complicated. Changing the parser could also affect JavaScript code and libraries that assume a download has been triggered as soon as a src attribute is added to an <img>. These long-term changes would require cooperation from browser vendors, JavaScript library creators and developers.

In the short term, we need a working solution that avoids wasted bandwidth when experimenting with <picture> and srcset, and when using <video> and <audio> with <img> fallbacks. Because of the difficulty and time involved in updating specifications and browsers, a short-term solution would need to rely on existing tools and browser behaviors.

So, what is currently available to us that solves this in the short term? Our old friends <object> and <embed>, both of which can be used to display images. If you load an image using these tags, it will display properly in the appropriate fallback conditions, but it won’t otherwise be downloaded.

Different browsers behave differently according to whether we use <object>, <embed> or both. To find the best solution, I tested (using a slightly modified version of this gist) in:

• Android browser 528.5+/4.0/525.20.1 on Android 1.6 (using a virtualized Sony Xperia X10 on BrowserStack)
• Android browser 533.1/4.0/533.1 on Android 2.3.3 (using a virtualized Samsung Galaxy S II on BrowserStack)
• Android browser 534.30/4.0/534.30 on Android 4.2 (using a virtualized LG Nexus 4 on BrowserStack)
• Chrome 25.0.1364.160 on OS X 10.8.2
• Chromium 25.0.1336.0 (169465) (RICG Build) on OS X 10.8.2
• Firefox 19.0.2 on OS X 10.8.2
• Internet Explorer 6.0.3790.1830 on Windows XP (using BrowserStack)
• Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13 on Windows XP (using BrowserStack)
• Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.19222 on Windows 7 (using BrowserStack)
• Internet Explorer 9.0.8112.16421 on Windows 7 (using BrowserStack)
• Internet Explorer 10.0.9200.16384 (desktop) on Windows 8 (using BrowserStack)
• Opera 12.14 build 1738 on OS X 10.8.2
• Opera Mobile 9.80/2.11.355/12.10 on Android 2.3.7 (using a virtualized Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 on Opera Mobile Emulator for Mac)
• Safari 6.0.2 (8536.26.17) on OS X 10.8.2
• Safari (Mobile) 536.26/6.0/10B144/8536.25 on iOS 6.1 (10B144) (using an iPhone 4)
• Safari (Mobile) 536.26/6.0/10B144/8536.25 on iOS 6.1 (10B141) (using an iPad 2)

I ran five tests:

1. <picture> falls back to <object>
2. <picture> falls back to <embed>
3. <picture> falls back to <object>, which falls back to <embed>
4. <picture> falls back to <object>, which falls back to <img>
5. <picture> falls back to <img>

I found the following support:

What the user sees Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5 Android 1.6 fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image Android 2.3 fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image Android 4.2 fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image Chrome 25 fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image Chromium 25 (RICG) picture/source image picture/source image picture/source image picture/source image picture/source image Firefox 19 fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image IE 6 no image no image no image no image fallback image IE 7 no image no image no image no image fallback image IE 8 fallback image no image fallback image fallback image fallback image IE 9 fallback image fallback image (cropped and scrollable) fallback image fallback image fallback image IE 10 fallback image fallback image (cropped and scrollable) fallback image fallback image fallback image Opera 12.1 fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image Opera Mobile 12.1 fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image Safari 6 fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image Safari iOS 6 (iPad) fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image Safari iOS 6 (iPhone) fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image fallback image HTTP requests Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5 Android 1.6 1 GET 1 GET 1 GET 2 GETs 1 GET Android 2.3 1 GET 1 GET 1 GET 2 GETs 1 GET Android 4.2 1 GET 1 GET 1 GET 2 GETs 1 GET Chrome 25 1 GET 1 GET 1 GET 2 GETs 1 GET Chromium 25 (RICG) 1 GET 1 GET 1 GET 2 GETs 2 GETs Firefox 19 1 GET 1 GET 2 GETs 2 GETs 1 GET IE 6 1 GET none 1 GET 1 GET 1 GET IE 7 1 GET none 1 GET 1 GET 1 GET IE 8 1 GET none 1 GET 1 GET 1 GET IE 9 1 HEAD, 1 GET 1 GET 1 HEAD, 1 GET 1 HEAD, 2 GETs 1 GET IE 10 1 HEAD, 1 GET 1 GET 1 HEAD, 1 GET 1 HEAD, 2 GETs 1 GET Opera 12.1 1 GET 1 GET 1 GET 2 GETs 1 GET Opera Mobile 12.1 1 GET 1 GET 1 GET 2 GETs 1 GET Safari 6 1 GET 1 GET 1 GET 2 GETs 1 GET Safari iOS 6 (iPad) 1 GET 1 GET 1 GET 2 GETs 1 GET Safari iOS 6 (iPhone) 1 GET 1 GET 1 GET 2 GETs 1 GET Image-aware context menu Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5 Android 1.6 yes yes yes yes yes Android 2.3 yes yes yes yes yes Android 4.2 yes yes yes yes yes Chrome 25 no no no no yes Chromium 25 (RICG) no no no no no Firefox 19 yes yes yes yes yes IE 6 no no no no yes IE 7 no no no no yes IE 8 yes no yes yes yes IE 9 yes yes yes yes yes IE 10 yes yes yes yes yes Opera 12.1 yes yes yes yes yes Opera Mobile 12.1 yes no yes yes yes Safari 6 no no no no yes Safari iOS 6 (iPad) no no no no yes Safari iOS 6 (iPhone) no no no no yes Making Sure The Content Is Accessible

Although the specifics of how to provide fallback content for <picture> are still being debated (see also this thread), I wanted to test how Apple’s VoiceOver performed with different elements. For these experiments, I checked whether VoiceOver read alt attributes in various places, as well as fallback <span> elements. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to test using other screen readers or assistive technology, although I’d love to hear about your experiences.

Read by VoiceOver alt on picture alt on source (picture → source) alt on object (picture → object) alt on embed (picture → embed) alt on embed (picture → object → embed) Chrome 25 no no yes yes no Chromium 25 (RICG) yes no no no no Firefox 19 no no yes yes no Opera 12.1 no no no no no Safari 6 no no yes yes no Safari iOS 6 (iPad) no no yes yes no Safari iOS 6 (iPhone) no no yes yes no Read by VoiceOver alt on img (picture → object → img) alt on img (picture → img) span (picture → span) span (picture → object → span) Chrome 25 no yes yes no Chromium 25 (RICG) no no no no Firefox 19 no yes yes no Opera 12.1 no no yes no Safari 6 no yes yes no Safari iOS 6 (iPad) no yes yes no Safari iOS 6 (iPhone) no yes yes no Bulletproof Syntax

Based on these data, I’ve come up with the following “bulletproof” solution:

<picture alt="fancy pants"> <!-- loaded by browsers that support picture and that support one of the sources --> <source srcset="big.jpg 1x, big-2x.jpg 2x, big-3x.jpg" type="image/jpeg" media="(min-width: 40em)" /> <source srcset="med.jpg 1x, med-2x.jpg 2x, big-3x.jpg" type="image/jpeg" /> <!-- loaded by IE 8+, non-IE browsers that don’t support picture, and browsers that support picture but cannot find an appropriate source --> <![if gte IE 8]> <object data="fallback.jpg" type="image/jpeg"></object> <span class="fake-alt">fancy pants</span> <![endif]> <!-- loaded by IE 6 and 7 --> <!--[if lt IE 8]> <img src="fallback.jpg" alt="fancy pants" /> <![endif]--> </picture> .fake-alt { border: 0; clip: rect(0 0 0 0); height: 1px; margin: -1px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0; position: absolute; width: 1px; }

Here we have a <picture> element, two sources to choose from for browsers that support <picture>, a fallback for most other browsers using <object> and a <span> (see note just below), and a separate <img> fallback for IE 7 and below. The empty alt prevents the actual image from being announced to screen readers, and the <span> is hidden using CSS (which is equivalent to HTML5 Boilerplate’s .visuallyhidden class) but still available to screen readers. The <embed> element is not needed.

(Note: The use of the <span> as a fake alt is necessary so that VoiceOver reads the text in Opera. Even though Opera has a relatively small footprint, and even though it’s in the process of being switched to WebKit, I still think it’s worth our consideration. However, if you don’t care about supporting that particular browser, you could get rid of the <span> and use an alt on the <object> instead (even though that isn’t strictly allowed by the specification). This is assuming that the <span> and alt have the same content. If you have a richer fallback element, such as a <table>, using both it and a non-empty alt attribute might be desirable.)

A similar solution should also work with <audio>, although <img> fallbacks for that element are, admittedly, rare. When dealing with <video>, the problem goes away if our fallback image is the same as our poster image. If these may be the same, then the “bulletproof” syntax for <video> would be this:

<video poster="fallback.jpg"> <!-- loaded by browsers that support video and that support one of the sources --> <source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4" /> <source src="video.webm" type="video/webm" /> <source src="video.ogv" type="video/ogg" /> <!-- loaded by browsers that don't support video, and browsers that support video but cannot find an appropriate source --> <img src="fallback.jpg" alt="fancy pants" /> </video>

However, if your <video> needs a separate fallback and poster image, then you might want to consider using the same structure as the <picture> solution above.

Note that <video> and <audio> don’t have alt attributes, and even if you add them, they will be ignored by VoiceOver. For accessible video, you might want to look into the work being done with Web Video Text Tracks (WebVTT).

Unfortunately, extensive testing with <video> and <audio> elements is beyond the scope of this article, so let us know in the comments if you find anything interesting with these.

How Good (Or Bad) Is This Solution?

Let’s get the bad out of the way first, shall we? This solution is hacky. It’s obviously not workable as a real, long-term solution. It is crazy verbose; no one in their right mind wants to code all of this just to put an image on a page.

Also, semantically, we really should use an <img> element to display an image, not an <object>. That’s what <img> is for.

And there are some practical issues:

• Chrome and Safari won’t show proper context menus for the images, meaning that users won’t be able to open or save them easily.
• IE 9 and 10 send an extra HEAD request along with the GET request.
• Using a <span> as a fake alt is pretty sketchy, and although it worked for my tests in VoiceOver, it could potentially cause other accessibility problems.

All that being said, as a short-term solution, it’s not too bad. We get these benefits:

• A visible image in every browser is tested (<picture> and <source> when supported, and the fallback otherwise).
• Only one HTTP GET request in every browser is tested (and the extra HEAD request and response in IE are tiny).
• VoiceOver is supported (and is hopefully supported with other screen readers).
<!-- show screenshot of network pane here -->

The semantics of the solution, while not ideal, are not horrible either: the HTML5 specification states that an <object> “element can represent an external resource, which, depending on the type of the resource, will either be treated as an image, as a nested browsing context, or as an external resource to be processed by a plugin” (emphasis mine).

And although the <span> is not as nice as a real alt attribute, using a visually hidden element for accessibility is not uncommon. Consider, for example, “Skip to content” links that are visibly hidden but available to screen readers.

Next Steps

The best part about this solution, though, is that it highlights how bad the current situation is. This is a real problem, and it deserves a better solution than the monstrosity I’ve proposed.

We need discussion and participation from both developers and browser vendors on this. Getting support from browser makers is crucial; a specification can be written for any old thing, but it doesn’t become real until it is implemented in browsers. Support from developers is needed to make sure that the solution is good enough to get used in the real world. This consensus-based approach is what was used to add the <main> element to the specification recently; Steve Faulkner discusses this process a bit in his excellent interview with HTML5 Doctor.

If you’re interested in helping to solve this problem, please consider joining the discussion:

• Join the RICG, and participate in the #respimg IRC channel and the public-respimg mailing list.
• Check out the RICG on GitHub, and consider adding your voice to the discussion on this issue.
• Join the W3C public-html mailing list and the WHATWG mailing list to follow and contribute to discussions about the specifications.
• Help fix problems with current implementations by reviewing, patching, commenting on and filing bugs for WebKit, Mozilla and Internet Explorer.

The next step towards a long-term solution is to achieve consensus among developers and browser vendors on how this should work. Don’t get left out of the conversation.

Thanks to fellow RICG members Yoav Weiss, Marcos Cáceres and Mat Marquis for providing feedback on this article.

(al)

© David Newton for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

WordPress is built by volunteers. People from all over the world collaborate to create the core software, write the documentation, provide support, translate WordPress, organize events and generally keep the project running. Individuals work on WordPress in their free time, and companies ask their employees to get involved.

Part of WordPress’ success is that the community consists not only of developers, but of designers, user experience experts, support volunteers, writers, users, accessibility experts and enthusiasts. This diverse input strengthens the project. It also means you have more space to get involved. Whatever your skill set, the WordPress community has room for you.

A bunch of WordPress contributors.

In this article, we’ll talk about the different contributor groups and how you can take part. I spoke with the current team reps and project leads, who have offered advice on how to get started with their contributor groups. But first, why should you get involved with WordPress?

Why Get Involved?

I had a chat with Matt Mullenweg, one of the founding developers of WordPress, about contributing to the project. We started off talking about the mix of people who contribute to WordPress. There are contributors who are sponsored by businesses that use WordPress, such as Automattic, Dreamhost and 10up, and then there are passionate individuals who dedicate their own time to the project.

“People who use WordPress are passionate about open source, want to democratize publishing and like to learn. I would say that’s the number-one biggest characteristic, because contributing to open source, and particularly the WordPress project, is probably one of the best learning opportunities on the Internet.”

Matt chats about the future of WordPress at the WordPress Community Summit 2012. (Image: konsobe)

For Matt, this is the greatest benefit you will get from contributing. You get to be part of a large, supportive community that has an impact on the lives of millions and millions of people. Something you do in an afternoon can have an effect on people all over the world.

“You can’t knock on the door at Google and say, “Hey, do you mind if I help you out with your home page? I have some ideas for you.” But you could come to us and say, “Hey, I have some ideas for your dashboard, and here are some patches.””

A number of challenges face the WordPress project:

• Contributor balance
  Currently, the number of contributors is skewed towards people involved with code. Plenty of opportunities lie in other areas — support, documentation and marketing, for example — but not so many people are getting involved.
• Mobile
  Not enough people are getting involved with mobile. Most of the people involved with mobile are currently sponsored by Automattic. Because mobile is fast becoming the way that people interact with the Internet, this is a crucial group and currently has a dearth of contributors.

With that in mind, let’s look at the ways you can get involved with WordPress.

Core

Mark Jaquith is an independent developer and one of the lead developers of WordPress. These days, he is a jack of all trades in the project, working closely with younger and newer developers, helping to point them in the right direction. He was also the release lead for the 3.6 release cycle. The core team comprises all sorts of developers and designers — PHP and JavaScript developers and front-end developers and designers. These are the people who build the WordPress that you install on your server.

Being a lead WordPress developer makes Mark Jaquith happy. (Image: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine)

I asked Mark how the the core contributor team works. He describes it as a set of concentric rings:

“You have the leads in the inner sanctum, and then you have the people with permanent commit access, and then you have the people to whom we give temporary commit access for release, and then there are the people whose patches are implicitly trusted and go in without too much inspection. It just keeps going out from there. Those are very fluid boundaries, so people flow between them.”

Challenges

As much as possible, the core team tries to work by consensus. Issues are discussed, publicly if possible, although anything contentious may be addressed in private discussion.

One of the biggest challenges facing WordPress is that not everyone is on the project full time. Even Automattic employees have other responsibilities within Automattic. This means that people can contribute varying amounts of time. If a lot of people see a dip in their free time, this can cause problems for the project. The core team tries to mitigate this by having more contributors and more people who can commit. However, a balance has to be struck because if there are too many committers, no one would know what’s going on.

Get Involved

You can start getting involved in a number of ways:

• Live chats
  Tap into the weekly live chats (Wednesdays 21:00 UTC, irc.freenode.net, #wordpress-dev). Before diving in, you should gauge at what point in the release cycle the project is at:
  • Early stages
    Planning the next release.
  • Middle stages
    Guiding the features and checking on progress.
  • Final stages
    Bug scrubs.
  • After a release
    Mostly an open forum, a good time to ask for advice on moving your ticket forward.
• Firehose
  You can subscribe to trac notifications and get notified of every comment in every ticket. It’s a lot of data to process, but you should get an idea of how the project works, various people’s roles, how much authority they have, and best practices.
• Ideas
  If you have an idea for a feature or anything else WordPress-related, a good place to start is to write a blog post about it. There is an ideas forum, but it’s not very well used. If you have a concrete idea, with a vision of how to implement it, a blog post may well get you more traction. It will give you space to flesh out the idea and provide an opportunity for other community members to comment on it.

Ready to get involved with WordPress core? Other than development skills, I asked Mark what skills someone should have:

“The number one skill you need for just about any job, but specifically working on open source, is communication skills. You need to have clarity, consistency, compassion, relatability, a little bit of a thick skin and a decent sense of humor.”

User Interface

In recent history, the UI group has been separate to core, but there has been discussion about merging it into the core group. UI handles WordPress’ user interface, user experience, and other elements related to quality, accessibility and graphic design.

The UI group talks UI in Georgia. (Image: konsobe)

Helen Hou-Sandi is the lead user interface developer at 10up, and is also involved in WordPress’ core with a focus on UI. She outlined six areas that the UI group currently focuses on:

• Graphic design
  This is only occasional work.
• UX design
  Including wireframes, storyboards and concepts.
• User testing
  Dave Martin from Automattic has been running a lot of user tests recently to help identify issues.
• Front-end development
  The HTML and particularly CSS to create the admin interface.
• Quality assurance
  While this is within the purview of the UI group, Helen noted that improvements could be made in this area.
• Accessibility
  This has its own group, but the UI group also tries to ensure that accessibility gets the attention it deserves.

The UI group has a number of different challenges. A particular problem for contributors can be that the CSS is huge. Jumping into them can be scary for some people.

I asked Helen what she gets out of contributing to WordPress:

“I love the community, and I think that the basic premise that WordPress is built on — democratizing publishing for everybody — is a really important one.… The premise that it’s making content management and creation easier and more accessible for more people was something that I loved, and altruism wins out.”

Get Involved

There are a number of ways to get involved:

• IRC
  Stop by the UI chat (Tuesdays at 19:00 UTC) or the chat room and introduce yourself, although doing it outside of meeting hours is usually best.
• Make blog
  Stop by the Make blog and introduce yourself. Offer to get involved with projects that are starting up.

Those are the two official places to get involved, but Helen said that she doesn’t mind someone reaching out on Twitter or even chatting about getting involved at WordCamps.

The UI group needs people with a lot of different skills, including CSS and PHP development. What the group really needs right now are JavaScript developers. Anyone who’s comfortable with things like Backbone.js or TinyMCE would be a huge asset.

UX designers are extremely valuable to the team because they are focused on the user’s perspective, rather than the designer’s perspective. Of particular value are people with a good sense of how an interface and workflow should work. As with all of the groups, being able to function as part of a team is important:

“Good communication skills are pretty important. They should be willing to chase something for a while, because things get lost all the time. We forget or we drop the ball, so somebody who’s willing to almost nag in a way and is confident enough to ask, “Hey, what’s going on with this?” is really good to have on board. To watch someone develop that kind of confidence is a really good thing to see.”

Mobile

The mobile group builds apps for six different platforms: iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia, Windows, WebOS. It also helps to expand the API and XML-RPC layer, and it investigates new APIs and ways of tackling mobile. Its rep is Isaac Keyet, a mobile designer at Automattic. The mobile group isn’t currently involved in the move towards responsiveness in WordPress core, but Isaac would like to see the team becoming more involved in it in the future.

Isaac Keyet leads the WordPress mobile group. (Image Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine)

Given that mobile is growing exponentially, it’s crucial that more people volunteer for the WordPress mobile group. In addition to Isaac, only six developers are in the group. If you’re a mobile developer and you’d like to be involved in an open-source project, then WordPress is a great place to start.

Challenges

A number of technical issues affect development of the native apps. This is particularly true when dealing with XML-RPC or the API. Any plugin or theme can add to or modify the XML-RPC layer. This means that the app has to deal with malfunctions and improper responses in the XML-RPC layer and in the responses that are returned from the blog.

To deal with this, the team is using client-side clean-up libraries, which take the responses and clean them up. But the XML-RPC layer can fail in so many different ways that the libraries are not complete. This makes it a constant struggle to ensure that everything works in all possible instances.

Get Involved

As with the other groups, there are two ports of call for getting involved:

• Make WordPress Mobile
• The WordPress Mobile IRC Chat: 16:00 UTC on freenode, #wordpress-mobile

It’s no surprise that WordPress attracts PHP developers, and it’s not a place that mobile developers would instinctively think to look. The mobile apps are written in:

• Java: BlackBerry and Android
• Objective-C: iOS
• C#: Windows

Contributors with coding skills in any of these languages are extremely welcome. And there is a particular need for Windows Phone developers right now. This is the fastest-growing app at the moment; so, if you’re a C# developer, visit the weekly chat and see how you can help out.

Another skill that the group currently needs is graphic design. Isaac is the only person currently working on graphic design for the group. As he is overloaded with work, which means that designs can’t be escalated as quickly as the group would like.

If you really want to make a difference to the future of WordPress, the mobile group is a great place to start.

Polyglots

The polyglots team is responsible for translating WordPress and for wider global outreach. It is led by Zé Fontainhas, a Portuguese WordPress consultant who speaks countless languages and is very active in the global community.

Zé Fontainhas speaks all of the languages. (Image: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine)

Zé identifies three major areas that the Polyglots team is responsible for:

• Translations
  The team translates WordPress core, as well as a number of plugins, such as BuddyPress and the import/export plugins.
• GlotPress
  GlotPress is the translation tool that makes collaborating on a translation of WordPress possible. It is open source, just like WordPress. Developers and designers are needed to test patches, suggest features and fix bugs.
• Community
  The global team will be a new branch of the polyglots team, focusing on increasing WordPress’ visibility worldwide and on connecting people from worldwide communities.

Challenges

Many of the challenges facing the polyglots team have to do with raising awareness and managing perceptions. Around 40% of all downloads of WordPress are not for the English language version, yet WordPress continues to be very US-centric.

“The proof of that is that we are talking about “international” as if it were an objective concept. It isn’t; it’s meaning really depends on where you’re looking from. So, when someone in the US says “international,” it means the world outside of the States, but when I say it, “rest of the world” includes the US. We need to first stop using that term. It means different things to different people.”

Other challenges include ensuring that developers prepare their code for translation. This means implementing proper practices for plugins, themes and even core code to be ready for translation.

Of course, things will always get lost in translation:

“The “Howdy” of the dashboard screen is untranslatable for mostly everybody in another language because the spirit gets lost. There’s no real translation for that.”

Get Involved

All you need to get involved is a WordPress.org user name. Then think about what you’d like to do:

• Translation
  Check whether a team is translating into your chosen language. Get in touch with them to see how you can help out. [find list of teams/contacts]
• GlotPress
  Head to GlotPress trac to see what tickets you feel you can help out with.
• Community
  Keep an eye out for the new global blog, which will be launching soon.

Essential skills for translating WordPress are pretty obvious: language skills and knowledge of how to translate. You have to understand context, and you have to understand English. With the community, you need to have an awareness of how communities work and how they can better interact with each other.

Support

Support forum volunteers are the backbone of WordPress. They patiently answer questions like “OMG my site is broken! Can you fix it?” in WordPress.org’s support forum. The team is currently led by Mika Epstein, the in-house WordPress expert at Dreamhost. Mika also reviews plugins for the plugin repository — she’s one busy lady!

For Mika Epstein, support never stops. (Image: konsobe)

Around 30 moderators are currently in the WordPress.org support forums. Only about 12 of the moderators are active, answering queries every day. About 200 people actively answer questions.

WordPress’ support volunteers focus on the following areas:

• WordPress.org support forums
  This is often the first port of call for people looking for WordPress support. Volunteers help people with things ranging from forming their request correctly to writing code. There’s room for volunteers at every level of the WordPress experience.
• IRC Chatroom
  Some people prefer to request support via the chatroom. If you want to instantly give feedback to people, you could start hanging out in the IRC chatroom on freenode at #wordpress.
• WordPress Stack Exchange
  Questions that used to show up on the wp-hackers mailing list have now found a home on WordPress Stack Exchange. If you’re keen to answer more advanced questions, you could dive in here.

Since the Community Summit, there has been discussion on how to create training courses on different aspects of WordPress. This now comes under the purview of the support group. The material will be available to anyone who wants to use it for teaching or training, but also anyone who wants to learn from it. Both online and offline training material will be created. These are intended to help people do more with WordPress and make it easier for them to contribute.

Challenges

The biggest challenge facing the support team is the signal-to-noise ratio. Many more people are asking questions than answering them. People get impatient and start bumping their threads or getting snarky. They expect fast responses, or they want a phone number to call. When people get irate, it’s easy for a supporter to get irate, too. After all, the volunteer is spending their own free time helping.

Another issue is that people think they don’t have enough knowledge to sufficiently answer questions. But, as Mika says:

“It’s hard to know everything. And that actually scares a lot of people off. They think, “Well, I don’t know everything, so I can’t answer anything.” No, no, no. Just answer the one thing. That would make us really happy.”

Get Involved

The first step is to create an account and dig around the support forums.

“It’s always scary when you’re trying to join a new community. You feel like you’re in high school all over again. You’re this itty bitty freshman, and everybody else is a great huge, hulking senior. They’re adults. They know what they’re doing. And you’re like, “There is no way I can ever be that cool.””

If you remember high school, four years go by, and all of a sudden you were the cool guy. You were the great person. Everybody looked up to you. You have to remember that you don’t start out being an expert. None of us did.

Just look around and see if there are discussions you could get involved in. If a discussion is more than a couple of months old, just leave it alone because the person who made the request has probably moved on.

If you want to do more than poke around the forums and you want to be really useful, go to the forums and click the “No Replies” link.

Be super-helpful by answering unanswered questions.

Some supporters just go to the last page of queries with no replies and work their way up.

Another way to be helpful is to flag posts as spam, or to alert a moderator when someone double-posts a lot. On the right side of the post, you’ll see a section called “Tags.” Just add the tag “ModLook” (all one word), and a moderator will know to look at it.

To get involved in the new training initiative, stop by the post “Training Group, Team Reps, and Growing the Team” in the support section.

Theme Review

The theme review team sets guidelines for the quality of themes hosted in WordPress’ Theme Directory. It reviews every submitted theme against those guidelines and, if it meets the standard, pushes it to the repository.

Chip Bennett talks about theme review. (Image: konsobe)

The representative of the theme review team is Chip Bennett, the developer behind the Oenology theme. I chatted with him recently about how the theme review process works:

1. A developer submits a theme on WordPress.org, using the “Theme Authors” link. The uploader runs the theme through a script, unpacks it and puts it through a bunch of tests. If it passes the tests, the theme is repacked and stored in a special subversion repository for themes. It then generates a ticket in the Theme Trac.
2. The ticket goes into a queue. The queue is prioritized based on whether the theme is currently approved, whether it has been reviewed before, and how long it has been in the queue.
3. A reviewer will take on the highest priority theme. They review the ticket, which includes a link to the ZIP file, or a link to a diff file if the theme has been previously submitted.
4. In reviewing the theme against the guidelines, the reviewer looks for the following things:
   • code quality,
   • theme files,
   • front-end tests,
   • theme unit test data.
5. If the theme passes the review criteria, then the ticket is closed and resolved as “Approved.”
6. If the theme doesn’t pass, the reviewer posts comments on the ticket, explaining the issues and what is required and perhaps making some recommendations.

The longest theme reviews take around two to three hours, the whole way through. If there are major issues, the review will be stopped early, and the reviewer will note the issues for the developer to address.

Currently, about 70 to 80 people can close tickets. Around 10 people have reviewed more than 50 or 100 tickets. This means that participation is wide but shallow. The goal is to not leave a ticket in the queue for longer than a few days. On average, 10 tickets are submitted per day.

Challenges

A major challenge for the theme review team is the sheer volume of submissions, making reviews take longer than they would like. There are also occasional challenges to the review guidelines, although that has lessened in the past two years.

“Hopefully people have seen the benefits that the improved theme review guidelines have brought to the directory and overall code themes, so we don’t get a whole lot of challenges on the theme review guidelines themselves.”

We constantly have to review them as WordPress changes. Each release cycle, we have to look at them, find out what needs to change and understand how the various changes to core will impact themes to make sure we incorporate those.

Get Involved

The first place to start is the Make WordPress Themes blog, which is becoming the hub of activity for the theme review team. You’ll find a link to the reviewers mailing list, where a lot of the communication happens.

If you’re just starting out, you won’t have trac privileges to close tickets, so you’ll need to request a ticket to be assigned to you. To do this, post a comment on the “Trac Ticket Request Queue” page with your trac user name, and then one of the admins will assign the next ticket to you. Once you’ve done a few, you’ll get review privileges and be able to do it on your own.

You may also want to get involved in discussions about guidelines:

“We always welcome more people to contribute by reviewing themes, submitting themes and taking part in the discussion. The more developers we have participating in discussion about the guidelines and the process, it can only make it better.”

Plugin Directory

The plugin directory team is a relatively small group that is responsible for WordPress’ Plugin Directory. Its current rep is Scott Rielly.

Scott Reilly helps to secure and monitor WordPress’ plugin directory. (Image: konsobe)

The team does the following:

• Processes all incoming plugin submissions. There could be more than 40 submissions in a day. Each plugin is reviewed for guideline violations and coding best practices. If there is a problem with the plugin and it isn’t malicious, the team works with the author to fix the issue.
• Deals with support requests sent to plugins@wordpress.org.
• Monitors and curates the plugin directory, including looking for guideline violations and security exploits.
• Monitors the security-exploit database and announcements for anything relating to plugins.

Challenges

The biggest challenge facing the team, says Scott, is not having enough time in the day.

“Given the volume of newly submitted plugins each day, the constant updates by plugin developers and the support emails, it’s a constant effort to stay on top of everything — particularly because we’ll all just volunteers to the team. But we’ve been working to remedy this with enhanced admin tools and, eventually, additional team members.”

Another challenge is that spammers always try to game the system. The plugin directory is a target for people who want to inject spam into the websites of WordPress users. “In many ways, it’s an arms race,” says Scott. “They keep trying new stuff, and we keep shutting them down once we become aware of it”

Get Involved

The first way to help out with the plugin directory is to check out plugins and evaluate code. If you find any guideline violations or malicious code, send an email plugins@wordpress.org. Include the name of the plugin and a link to its page, as well as a list of the issues. The team will get in touch with the plugin’s author and get the issues fixed.

The team isn’t currently set up to accept many new people in an official capacity, Scott says:

“Part of it is getting internal tools and documentation organized in order to facilitate a larger team, and part of it is that we need to be selective of candidates since full membership grants capabilities that require adequate vetting.”

But the team is on the lookout for new members. Recently, Pippin Williamson was brought on board. The team keeps an eye out for potential team members amongst WordPress contributors who have demonstrated their ability through “code, competence and trustworthiness.” If you want to be invited to join the plugin directory team, help out across the community, showing off your technical expertise. Anyone who wants to get involved with reviewing plugins will need a deep knowledge of WordPress, of PHP and its best practices and of the plugin guidelines. Security expertise and the ability to understand other developers’ code are also desired. “Not just to understand what it does and what it’s supposed to do, but also how it may be wayward or exploitable in its implementation.”

Documentation

Often, when people think about WordPress documentation, the first thing they think of is the Codex. While the Codex is the cornerstone of WordPress documentation, it’s one element of a wider drive towards improving documentation. I’m currently the acting rep for documentation, which means that I’m responsible for reporting back to the community on the week’s activities.

Me, telling people they should use fewer words. (Image: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine)

As with getting involved in any aspect of WordPress, contributing to documentation will improve your WordPress skills, not to mention your technical writing skills. It’s also a great way to give back to the community. Currently, there are a few ways to get involved:

• Codex
  The Codex always needs updating to maintain it as a useful resource for users. There’s always a flurry of activity around a new WordPress release as the Codex is updated to reflect any changes. Anyone can edit the Codex; all you need is a WordPress.org account. Lorelle VanFossen has listed all of the tasks in the Codex that currently need completing.
• Handbooks
  The handbooks are a collection of guides that teach people how to contribute to WordPress. There will also be handbooks for theme development and plugin development. This project will be active over the coming year.

We are also discussing the possibility of conducting a review of the inline help tabs, and looking at other ways that we can generally be helpful with documentation.

Challenges

A major challenge for the documentation team is to keep everything updated. WordPress has a fast release cycle, so the docs team has to be quick to stay on top of updating the Codex. Another challenge is that the Codex itself is such a huge resource. Keeping abreast of what needs to be done can be hard. A lot of functions lack practical examples, which people would find very useful for learning.

Also, sometimes the problem is that people don’t realize they can edit the Codex — you can, and you definitely should!

Get Involved

The easiest way to help out with documentation is to go to the Codex and log in with your WordPress.org user name. Once you’re logged in, you’ll see an “Edit” link at the top of the right sidebar. Click that button and you’re editing the Codex!

Editing the Codex is easy — go try it!

Even fixing a typo improves the documentation. If you’re using the Codex and you see an issue, fix it. If you have had to go elsewhere to find a solution, add that solution to the Codex so that others will benefit from it.

You could also stop by the Make WordPress Documentation blog, where you can say hello and get involved with the docs team. There is currently a major push to get the handbooks together, but you’ll find other projects that you can get involved with on the blog. We also have a weekly chat with the support team. This takes place on Thursdays at 9:00 pm UTC in the freenode IRC channel #wordpress-sfd.

Events

WordCamps and meetups are events at which WordPress users can get together to share knowledge, learn and socialize. One of the current reps for the Events blog is Andrea Middleton. She works on the WordCamp program, reviewing applications and providing a point of contact for organizing teams. The events contributor group consists of people who have organized WordCamps and meetups.

Events organizers have to deal with a lot of people standing around, staring at stuff. (Image: konsobe)

Challenges

Organizing an event has many challenges — you’ve got to get good speakers who will engage the audience, find sponsors and a venue, sort out catering, arrange AV, manage a budget, organize a team of volunteers. You’ve got to get a lot of details right in order to organize a successful event. Once you’ve been through the baptism of fire, you’ll be an experienced event organizer, which is a great time to get involved with the events contributor group.

Get Involved

Having experience as an organizer of meetups or any volunteer-run event is a great asset if you want to get involved with the events group. Having good accounting and communication skills also helps. As Andrea says:

“I think anyone looking to get involved with an ongoing open-source project, from whatever area of contribution, should come bearing humility, tolerance, patience, respect and a healthy sense of humor. We’re a meritocracy, and we value civil discourse.”

If you want to organize a WordCamp but don’t have a local community, start with a meetup. These will get people out of their house and talking about WordPress. WordCamps are most successful in regions that have vibrant WordPress communities. WordCamps are great, but they are just once a year — meetups happen every month and, as Andrea points out, they “sometimes have a more persistent effect on people’s lives and how they interact with WordPress.”

To get involved with the events group, stop by the blog and say hi.

Accessibility

The accessibility group was created to support core developers with issues regarding accessibility. Its rep is currently Mel Pedley. I asked Mel about the motivation for creating the group:

“Because a11y [accessibility] isn’t a binary subject but one based on experience, best practice, judgement and balance, the core devs were being hit with conflicting opinions that just caused even more confusion. They needed one point of contact with regard to tackling a11y problems — hence, the group.”

The group comprises technical developers and assistive-technology users. The group looks at issues and figure out solutions, passing answers back to the core developers.

The team is in the process of expanding to cover themes and plugins, and one day it would like to cover everything that falls under WordPress.org.

Challenges

Mel identified three major challenges facing the accessibility group. First:

“Wrangling any group of a11y experts is always a challenge. Put four of them in a room and you’ll get five opinions. :-) It’s also quite slow, in my experience, to create real change. Things tend to change very slowly. So, keeping momentum is a major issue. I hope that we can address this by throwing a wider net — publishing best practice support documents and getting involved in outlying a11y projects — like Joseph O’Connor’s “Cites” project, which involves teams in cities across the world each developing an accessible theme.”

Secondly, the teams needs to get users with a greater range of assistive technology involved. There are screen reader users, but Mel is keen to get VR, braille and switch users involved, as well as dyslexics, so that there is a pan-disability user group. Successful accessibility is all about getting the right mix of people.

The third challenge is to convince the large community that accessibility doesn’t mean boring design or ugly UIs. You can have beautiful, graphically rich and accessible designs. Mel has been involved in Accessites.org to prove this point, and she wants to showcase what was learned there on WordPress.

Get Involved

To get involved, start following the Make WordPress Accessibility/ blog. You can also get in touch with Mel. The group is happy to hear from anyone interested in promoting accessibility and making WordPress more accessible.

There are two distinct streams for getting involved:

• Users
  This includes anyone who uses assistive technologies to access the Web. The group would value your feedback on existing issues and solutions.
• Technical
  This is any WordPress developer. You can translate users’ needs into practical solutions.

And a note to any WordPress developers:

“If you want to develop more accessible themes or plugins but aren’t sure where to start or how to tackle a particular problem, we’re here to help.”

Community

The community builders group was set up after the WordPress Community Summit to focus on outreach, mentorship programs and contributor engagement. The group’s current reps are Jane Wells and Andrea Rennick. Some of the things that the community group will be tackling are mentorship programs, college outreach, diversity, school programs, WordPress.org improvements, and finding new contributors at events.

Andrea likes hugging people. (Image: Andrea Rennick)

I asked Andrea what the group will be doing:

“Mostly it involves finding new members in the community who want to contribute and directing them to where they need to go. It also means answering a lot of questions. This requires a broad understanding of how each of the current groups works and what each group entails.”

Challenges

I asked Andrea about what challenges she thinks the group will face:

“At the minute, there’s no one spot where people can go to with their questions about getting involved with WordPress. Also, there are issues around dissemination, which really needs to be improved. The new Make WordPress.org Updates blog is an example of attempts to improve communication. Reps will post weekly updates so that everyone stays informed of what’s going on across the groups.”

But those aren’t the only challenges:

“Other sticky spots I can see being a challenge are things that are present in any large group of passionate people; things can be misinterpreted, feelings are hurt, tempers flare, and sometimes someone is needed to help smooth things over.”

Get Involved

Because the group is currently being formed, there are plenty of opportunities to get involved. People of any skill level are needed — even if your limit is installing WordPress and navigating the admin area, you still have enough skill to help others. Stop by the Make WordPress Community blog, leave your name in the comments, and say how you would like to help out.

BuddyPress and bbPress

BuddyPress and bbPress are the younger siblings of WordPress. If you get excited about social networking, communities and forums, they could be the places to get your feet wet. BuddyPress is “social networking in a box.” You can use it to build a community around WordPress. bbPress is a forum plugin for WordPress.

The lead developer of BuddyPress and bbPress is John James Jacoby (aka JJJ or J-Trip). JJJ manages the overall direction of the project, gets more contributors involved and helps out with development. The role he focuses on the most is building an active contributor community so that everyone can make the most of their unique skills and abilities.

JJJ leads the BuddyPress and bbPress projects. (Image: Andrea Rennick)

BuddyPress and bbPress are like microcosms of WordPress itself, with contributors needed in many of the same areas, just on a smaller scale. There are a lot of ways to get involved with the plugins: refactoring code, helping in the support forums, developing new features and functionality, working on user experience and design, helping with the codices, and writing plugins.

Challenges

The biggest challenge facing bbPress has been maintaining momentum. There isn’t always a lot of focus on it, and other distractions come up for developers. This is frustrating for JJJ because people assume that the project is dead when it is still active.

The biggest challenge with BuddyPress is that the code has changed so much since it was launched. Its direction has changed, and the code has been adapted. This means that a bunch of code is hanging around that they want to get rid of but can’t because doing so would break everyone’s installation.

“I like the house to be presentable when I have visitors come over. And when I know the house is not very clean, even though people might not really see it, we feel like we can do a better job with it. That might just be me. But for the project as a whole, because we have so much code, our release cycles are not as quick as we’d like them to be. We always have to fix a bunch of things, or we linger in beta for too long, or we don’t get to beta fast enough.”

Get Involved

The easiest way to get involved is to help out in the BuddyPress and bbPress support forums.

“Having someone’s experience of the forums be a rewarding, fun thing is the easiest way to be helpful. If you think you know anything, you probably know more than somebody else, and sharing that knowledge goes a long way for someone who’s looking for help.”

Help is also needed on both of the codices. As JJJ points out, this often feels like a thankless job because writing and formatting take so much time. But it’s a really useful place to get involved, especially because so few people are doing it.

If you’re interested in getting involved with development, join #buddypress-dev on Wednesdays at 19:00 UTC, or #bbpress on Wednesdays at 21:00 UTC. Contributors are always hanging around outside those hours.

What’s In It For You?

I asked all of my interviewees about what contributors get out of being involved in WordPress. There were commonalities across all of their responses: the joy of being part of a community, the thrill of creating something used by millions of people across the world, the rate at which you learn, and the pleasure of being involved in democratizing publishing. While the responses were varied, Mark Jaquith’s response sums them all up:

“I consider it part of my continuing education. I mean, tech is such a fast-moving industry that if you stand back and, say, just focus on the planning board and aren’t involved in the process and the technologies and the new skills, you’ll be left behind in a few months. It’s just part of the upkeep for me — that’s number one.”

Number two is because I enjoy it. I enjoy making things. I enjoy working on software that’s used by tens of millions of people. It’s a fairly powerful and rewarding feeling. And the other thing is that it raises your status inside the community, which is helpful, because it’s a very tight-knit community, and a lot of your business links are going to come from the community. A lot of your potential partners on ventures and projects are going to come from within the community. And by contributing and staying close to that tight knit group, you keep those connections alive.

Tips For Getting Involved

Now that you’re excited about contributing to WordPress, and you’ve found a contributor group that fits, here are some tips:

• Before diving in, do a bit or research and see how the group operates and what’s currently on the agenda. This will help you figure out where you fit in and whether your ideas have been discussed before. Reading though the P2s will usually suffice.
• Stop by the P2 for the group you’re interested in and say “Hi.”
• If you’re not sure what to get involved with, stop by the #wordpress-contribute IRC chatroom on freenode. Some people should be around to help you get started.
• Read through the P2, mailing lists or trac. Check that your ideas haven’t been proposed before, and if they have, see what the reasons were for refusing them.
• Go to WordCamps and Meetups! My involvement in WordPress has increased massively since I started meeting people in person.
• Reach out to people on Twitter or, if they publicize their address, via email.

Some Final Advice

A few pieces of advice didn’t fit neatly anywhere else in this article but are too valuable to be discarded. First of all, Matt has some words on starting out with contributing to WordPress:

“Remember that everyone who’s involved at WordPress started where the people who are reading this article are today, including myself. It looks big and scary. The first time someone said to me “You should patch that and put a diff on SourceForge,” I was like, “I don’t know what half the words in that sentence mean.” I had to figure out patches, I had to figure out what a diff is, I has to figure out what SourceForge is. We all started there. You’ve just got to dive in.”

And Mika has some words on the value of every WordPress contributor.

“Don’t ever feel that just because you don’t know how to code like Nacin and Otto that you’re not just as valuable as they are. Because without us, too, WordPress would fall apart. A healthy community is healthy on all levels, and everybody does know that.”

Contributor Information Make WordPress Blogs

Here are the discussion blogs where the different groups carry on discussion and post updates:

• Master List
• Updates
  regular updates from the reps of every team
• Core
• Support
• Plugins
• Themes
  including Theme Review
• UI
• Mobile
• Polyglots
• Documentation
• Community
• Changes to WordPress.org

Chat Schedule

WordPress has a number of rooms on the freenode IRC channel. This is where the weekly chats take place. Remember that the chats are for getting things done, not just for saying hi, but they are a great time to find out how things work. People also usually hang out in the chat rooms throughout the day, which tends to be a better time to introduce yourself. Don’t be upset if people don’t respond — there are time-zone differences to take into account, and many WordPress people leave IRC on throughout the day, even if they’re not at their computer.

If you’re confused, the Codex has some information on IRC

• Tuesday: UI
  19:00 UTC in #wordpress-ui
• Wednesday: Mobile
  16:00 UTC in #wordpress-mobile
• Wednesday: BuddyPress
  19:00 UTC in #buddypress-dev
• Wednesday: bbPress
  20:00 UTC in #bbpress
• Wednesday: Core
  21:00 UTC in #wordpress-dev
• Thursday: Support and docs
  21:00 UTC in #wordpress-sfd

If you want help getting started, don’t forget that you can stop by #wordpress-contribute, where people are on hand to help.

(al) (il)

© Siobhan McKeown for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

Android is huge: 480 million people currently use Android devices, and 1 million new devices are activated daily. This means that every three weeks, the number of people who activate new Android devices is equal to the entire population of Australia. (Recent studies by Nielsen show that more Android devices are on the market than iOS devices.)

Popular apps that become available on Android experience huge growth. For example, Instagram grew by 10 million users with the launch of its Android app — in just 10 days.

Despite this unprecedented expansion of the platform, the majority of Android apps are… well, not great. Fewer quality apps are in Google Play than in the iTunes Store. Part of the reason for this is that Android has been going through puberty in the past few years. It was disorganized and erratic, and many designers avoided it — even hated it — and naturally gravitated towards iOS.

Some of Android’s problems no longer exist, and others have been blown out of proportion. For the ones that do exist, we’ll provide guidance on how to deal with them and how to start designing your first great Android app.

Symptoms Of Puberty

Many Android apps underperformed because the platform wasn’t mature enough to allow great apps to emerge. Though a powerful laboratory — it offered manufacturers and developers the freedom and openness to create whatever they wanted — not many wanted to work in a sandbox environment every day. But that sandbox has since coalesced into a foundation for great design.

The points below are what you might remember about Android — and possibly what curbed your desire to give it a try — but these issues have also been eliminated or improved. If your concerns appear in this list, then the next section will demonstrate how they’ve been resolved with Android’s maturation and how you can design a better app as a result.

Lack of Consistency in Google’s Own Apps

Not long ago, almost all of Google’s own Android apps looked different from each other.

Google took more than a year to start following its own advice. The action bar design pattern was presented in 2010 but wasn’t implemented until October 2011, with Android OS 4.0.

Lack of a User-Centric Design Culture in the Android Community

Google’s failure to set an example for other developers (because of its own inconsistencies) and the lack of consistent design guidelines and patterns contributed to another bigger problem: poor user experience. Good design starts with people; it leverages technology to help users accomplish their goals. Google wasn’t communicating this to developers clearly enough (unlike Apple).

Dramatically Inconsistent Experience Between Devices and OS Versions

Manufacturers often customize the system’s UI and hardware buttons. This contributed to fragmentation, made testing and quality control much harder and made consistency in app design nearly impossible.

Manufacturers used to put hardware buttons in different orders. Switching between devices was a pain.

Properly testing apps in the changing and fast-growing market was difficult for developers. Thus, a majority of apps didn’t function as they should have or were poorly designed.

Those apps are still there, but yours doesn’t have to be one of them. Android has since improved, enabling you to create a better and more consistent experience for your users.

Android Has Matured

The Android user experience today is more robust than ever before, making it easier for app designers and developers to deliver great apps. While some of the earlier problems still exist, most have become more manageable — and many more have been solved altogether.

One fundamental problem remains, however: there aren’t enough great apps. But with an improved and mature Android platform, designers and developers can solve this problem. All we have to do is give Android another chance.

The areas below are what the mature Android has to offer.

Better App Discovery

Previously, the discovery process was limited to searching by keyword and then trying out all of the results. The new Google Play store offers better discovery through featured apps and staff picks.

The new Google Play store offers more ways to discover cool new apps than its predecessor, Android Market.

Proper Android Design Guidelines

Until recently, no direction was provided for the basic elements that every app requires. Google has since created design guidelines, which remove the burden of small design decisions from app designers and developers. We can finally focus on the core value of the apps we’re creating and ensure a consistent experience across devices.

Example of a grid and a 48 density-independent pixel (DP) rhythm, taken from the “Metrics and Grids” section of the guidelines.

Menu and Search Hardware Buttons Are Gone

Google has started removing hardware buttons from its devices, uniting the hardware and software and making Android devices more elegant and easier to use.

The Nexus 4 is an instance of Google’s new approach to hardware buttons. They are always there, always in the same order. And gone are the search and menu buttons.

A variety of Android device types still exist (for example, LG still produces devices with Android 4.0 and hard menu buttons), yet this diversity is one of the main reasons why Android apps are able to excel.

Fragmentation Isn’t All Bad

Fragmentation may be the biggest remaining challenge facing designers and developers, and it’s built into Android’s DNA — a permanent part of the Android experience. This diversity offers designers an opportunity to reach an unprecedented number of people globally.

Learning to work within this fragmentation will make you a better designer or developer overall, with broader knowledge and an improved skill set. Given the rewards, the challenge is worthwhile to pursue. And to succeed in this pursuit, here are a few things to keep in mind when creating your Android app.

Tips For Creating A Successful Android App Get to Know Android

To understand Android, you should learn how to use it and get to know its users. The best way to do this is by buying several devices from different manufacturers, with different screen sizes and maybe even OS versions. This will help you not only to understand user diversity but also to test your app.

To choose the best devices for your app, check the latest statistics from Google and select a device with your desired specifications. Independent studies, such as OpenSignal’s August 2012 report, can also help you select devices.

Something to keep in mind is that Android updates are controlled by service providers and, as a result, usually arrive earlier on devices that are created in collaboration with Google, such as the Nexus series. Picking up the latest Nexus devices will keep you on the cutting edge of platform releases. You can save money by buying a used device, but make sure it runs the version of Android that you need before purchasing it (many old devices are no longer updated).

Talk to your Android-using friends about how they use their devices and what they are happy and unhappy about. That will help you get to know the environment and bring you into the culture.

Follow the Guidelines

Following the guidelines will help you create an app that feels native to any device. But that’s just one of many reasons why following them is worthwhile. They can also help you achieve the following:

• Create an app fit for virtually any device,
• Make the app feel true to Android,
• Provide a UI that is familiar to users,
• Make the app easier to develop and support,
• Increase the app’s chances of being featured in Google Play.

Keeping Android navigation patterns in mind and using elements that are native to the platform will also help you create a consistent experience across devices.

When bringing an iPhone design (left) to Android (right), use elements that are native to the platform: this table view is styled for Android; the buttons for searching and adding contacts are moved to the split action bar at the bottom; and switching between data views is done through the view control.

Custom apps are more difficult not only to support, but also to design when ensuring operability across devices. New Android apps look great thanks to the new design guidelines; they are also very different from apps created before Android 4.0.

Understand Android’s Look and Feel

Google has invested a lot of effort in bringing a consistent visual experience to all of its products, including Android. Android 4.0 introduced its own style: simple, plain, clean — more about function than form.

Although this provides great freedom in styling, you still have to consider the subtlety of Android’s visual style: saying more with less. Simply copying the styles and elements from an iOS app might not work. And releasing a new app with old styles or with elements that look like they belong on another platform could make users react negatively — which happened to Microsoft.

Browsing Android Niceties is a great way to grasp Android’s style and to find inspiration.

Google’s Search app is a great instance of Android’s look and feel.

A good way to distinguish your app is through its icon. App icons for Android can take any shape or form. Users love great-looking icons and will gladly put your app on their home screen even if they don’t use it often. For tips on designing your icon, read the “Iconography” section in the guidelines.

App icons for Android can take any shape and form you want.

Build for Different Hardware Types

When designing your app, ensure that it will run properly on most devices. Keep in mind not only different screen sizes and aspect ratios, but also screens with low brightness or poor contrast and color, as well as slow, weak hardware.

For example, less-expensive devices might have smaller displays with lower contrast, so text that appears big enough on new devices with large screens might appear illegible there. Low contrast of text and visual elements might compromise the user experience as well.

Designs created according to the guidelines will easily scale to fit virtually any screen.

A few more things to keep in mind:

• Use contrasting colors for text and elements. For example, don’t use white on gray for important elements; they’ll just blend together on bad displays.
• Check your design on several devices with different brightness settings (low, high, auto) and in different lighting conditions.
• Even when using standard sizes, make sure your text and UI elements appear big enough on small screens (i.e. screens with a DPI lower than 240). You might want to adjust these elements specifically for small devices.

For a great example of designing for diversity, read Sebastiaan de With describe the process of creating the Alarm app.

Use Density-Independent Pixels to Define Layout

Part of providing a consistent experience is ensuring that UI elements stay roughly the same size across Android devices with varying pixels per inch (PPI). This doesn’t have to be a laborious task of calculating the number of pixels a button or font should contain in order to look great on a particular screen size. You can make the device do the work for you.

The recommended size for buttons in the action bar is 48 DP, which will result in different pixel sizes on different screens, but you don’t have to worry about that.

By defining sizes with density-independent pixels (DPs), you ensure that elements will appear at about the same physical size on any screen. Text will remain readable, and buttons will be comfortable to tap on any Android device, regardless of screen size or DPI. (See the section “Use Density-Independent Pixels” in the guidelines for more.)

In our practice, giving developers guidelines on sizes of elements and fonts has proven useful.

6. Create Assets for All Densities

Four sets of assets are required to accommodate all Android devices and to make the interface crisp: low density (LDPI), medium density (MDPI), high density (HDPI) and extra-high density (XHDPI). Start with a 640 × 960 screen for XHDPI assets, and then scale them down for other densities.

Start with XHDPI, and then scale down to other densities. Compare the actual sizes of these assets.

MDPI and XHDPI resolutions are exactly the same as the iPhone’s regular and Retina screens. So, if you have an iPhone design, you can use it to style the Android counterparts, or you could even test your designs on iPhone or iPod screens. But don’t forget about Android’s unique look and feel.

An XXHDPI bucket has been added to support the next generation of mobile devices, those with approximately 480 DPI screens. Although no such devices exist yet, the XXHDPI bucket is used today for launcher icons on XHDPI 10-inch tablets, such as the Nexus 10. (Because these devices are so large, the launcher icons are scaled up using the XHDPI assets.) To accommodate the next generation of screens, all you’ll need to do is scale your HDPI assets up by 200%.

Consider Different Versions Of The OS

Many Android devices will never be updated to the latest OS; it takes a couple of years for new versions to dominate the market. But users with newer devices won’t be pleased with apps whose looks or controls are outdated (as demonstrated by Microsoft’s Outlook app, mentioned earlier). So, deliver the most up to date experience possible. If you intend for the app to run on older platforms, create a separate version of the app for those devices.

Expand Your App With Widgets and Live Wallpapers

Take advantage of Android’s engaging features, such as widgets, live wallpapers and notifications. Widgets enable users to receive updates without running the app, and notifications are improving with each version of Android. Google is providing great support for designers and developers on how to notify users.

Widgets are a convenient way to peek into an app without opening it. This enables you to focus a user’s attention on a small portion of information, which would then expand within the app.

Widgets may have buttons and scrollable areas. Think of them as advanced app icons.

Gmail’s widget offers a sneak peek into the mailbox and enables users to compose mail right from the home screen. Chrome’s grid-view widget displays favorites or history.

Android users love to customize their devices and make them personal, and these items give them greater flexibility to do so.

Properly Test on Devices You Support

One of the most common reasons for negative reviews in the Play store is an app not functioning as promised. Target your design to the most popular devices, and release only for the ones you have tested; otherwise, you’ll end up with bad reviews from people frustrated by your app not working properly.

The highly successful Dead Space game receives most of its one-star reviews because the game doesn’t run on certain devices.

Design for Tablets, Too

Although several great Android tablets are on the market, they are not as popular as competitors such as the iPad. But if your goal is to build a truly universal Android app, then you need to consider tablets as well. The guidelines advise designers to use multi-pane layouts for tablet UIs and to build their interface using fragments.

Tablets use the same graphical assets as phones, but consider the context in which tablets are used. For instance, people usually hold tablets further away from their eyes than phones and, thus, are less precise in their tapping. So, the UI will require larger fonts, bigger buttons and more white space around elements.

Don’t forget to run your app through the “Tablet App Quality Checklist” as well.

Give Android A Chance

Designing for Android might be challenging in the beginning — it’s not as simple as it looks — but by following these 10 steps, you’ll have a head start on delivering a fantastic user experience and building a truly great app.

Give Android a chance. Designing for this newly matured platform is an interesting and educational process, and you’ll deliver a great-looking app while obtaining a new set of skills. You might find the experience to be very rewarding.

Update: While we were writing this article, case study has been published by The Verge about the Facebook Home application — next big thing for Facebook. But this isn’t about Facebook anymore. Thought this particular application is quite controversial, with limited device support and experience far from perfect, Fb designers have proven that with enough effort 100% of your ideas can be implemented and delivered on Android with no compromise. They have revealed a great opportunity and may even have marked the beginning of a new trend of creating greater presence on Android.

Examples of Great Android Apps for Inspiration

• The Verge
• doubleTwist Alarm
• Skype
• Evernote
• Foursquare
• Tumblr
• New York Times
• Path
• Endomondo
• Expedia

(al) (ea)

© A. Komarov, N. Yermolayev for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

Editorial work at Smashing Magazine is a difficult, challenging process. It requires patience, focus and thoroughness. Our readers have high expectations, and our authors expect sophisticated editorial guidance. That’s what we are known for, and that’s where we could use your help. We’re looking for a hard-working editor with technical experience to support and complement our team.

Such an editor can’t be found on any of the innumerable job boards out there. Because the position is one of the most important to our publication, we are looking for the best editor from our community — someone who truly understands Smashing Magazine and what it stands for. We would never otherwise publish a job opening on our front page — in this case, we made an exception.

Where? Freiburg, Germany.

We’d love to welcome you onto our team in Freiburg, Germany (Google map). In addition to enjoying the beauty of this student city, with its medieval city center, lovely vineyards and proximity to the Black Forest, you’ll also have France and the Swiss Alps just around the corner. Of course, you’ll also enjoy the playful spirit and open-mindedness of Smashing Magazine’s international team members, who like to work as hard as they party.

(Image: Björn Freiberg)

Your Responsibilities

We prefer that our team members focus on a few important tasks and do them well. Here are some of the tasks and responsibilities you will have:

• Continually acquire and communicate with authors, in accordance with our editorial process and publishing policy.
• Plan, edit, perform quality control on and publish articles on Smashing Magazine.
• Shape and contribute to the editorial direction of the magazine.
• Refine the content strategies for existing and future content.

What We’re Looking For

We are looking for professionals who know exactly what they’re doing. Here’s what we expect from you:

• A strong sense of craftsmanship in your work — whether in writing, editing, communication or simple HTML.
• Be curious to experiment and get creative with new forms of content and with design- and coding-related topics.
• Know and understand what it takes to make high-quality content for the Web.
• Be familiar with the Web design community and the industry in general.
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• Have excellent written and verbal communication skills in English. We’d love for you to have solid experience in copywriting as well, but that’s not necessary.
• Knowledge of Web design is necessary, both technical and non-technical, but we don’t expect you to be a ninja in all of it — a jack of all trades is just fine!

How to Apply

Interested? Fantastic! Please send your cover letter, résumé, work samples and URLs of relevant websites to me, Vitaly Friedman, at the following email address:

vitaly [at] smashingmagazine.com

We have a lot of exciting ideas for the magazine — we just need people who we would love to work with and who we can trust to make these ideas a reality. With your help, we can make this magazine even better and richer than it has ever been.

We look forward to your application.

(al)

© Vitaly Friedman for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

Nearly half a year ago, we introduced our eBook subscription model, also known as the Smashing Library. We knew we were onto something good, realizing that the Smashing Library was the next step in offering quality content — at a price you’ll still be able to afford all of the coffee you need to stay up long enough to read the entire library and, of course, the free eBooks.

A subscription to the Smashing Library is only $99 a year.

A subscription to the Smashing Library grants you unlimited access to all of the previously published Smashing eBooks, as well as a guaranteed 24 new eBooks throughout the year. This includes all digital versions of the Smashing Book series, including the The Mobile Book and the upcoming Smashing Book #4.

And our library is getting even more smashing. We didn’t want to limit the library to just our own content, so we are now including a growing number of industry-related eBooks. These books are by authors who aren’t necessarily affiliated with Smashing Magazine but who produce great content. In addition to saving more than half off the regular bundle prices, as a subscriber to the Smashing Library, you will get the opportunity to vote on what we publish next and what new eBook downloads will be automatically available in your Smashing Shop dashboard.

Download the “Smashing Library Catalog” (PDF, 2.8 MB) and get started today!

The Smashing Editor’s Choice

To give you a taste of what to expect from the eBooks in the Smashing Library, we are happy to present you with The Smashing Editor’s Choice: A Smashing Library Treat — a free eBook that contains a wide range of topics, including new coding techniques, user experience strategies, responsive design and mobile solutions by some incredibly prolific and knowledgeable authors. Well-known names such as Lea Verou, Christian Heilmann and Dmitry Fadeyev have contributed fascinating chapters on various subjects.

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What Subscribers Think of the Smashing Library

Coming up with the subscription library model took meticulous planning and careful editorial work. Adding eBooks on a monthly basis and keeping up with industry trends take passion. Luckily, we have a lot of that. From the beginning, we had a feeling that the library would be popular, and with the surprisingly positive launch, you proved us right:

“A perfect resource for a full-service Web-dev company. I own and operate a Web development company. This provides a vast store of wisdom for daily operations across the board.”
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We try to make the Smashing Library worthwhile by adding new content regularly and by giving you, the subscriber, the choice of what we publish next. All downloads, eBook polls and news are accessible through your personal Smashing Shop dashboard. Have a look at what the library looks like when you’re logged in:

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Thank you all for your support over the years, everyone! You’ve been truly smashing!

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© The Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

This article is about design consultancy. It’s about wrangling that client who uses empty sentences like, “We want a snappy, simple experience,” or, “It should be on brand and should really pop.” It’s about commanding the room and setting a vision before moving on to wireframes and pixels.

While I’ll talk in terms of consultation, these ideas can be applied to the design phase of any new project.

Banned Words

I start every consultation with this list on the whiteboard:

• Clean
• Simple
• Fast
• Snappy
• Some
• Most
• Nice

These words are banned. If anyone in the room says any of these words, it means we’ve lost our focus or forgotten that we’re in the room to solve problems. We stop, reframe the conversation, then move on.

Any whiteboard is a weapon if you hold it right.

Here are three steps I take to ensure that the words above are never uttered in the first place.

1. Set A Vision

The design process can get derailed right at the start by focusing on questions like, “What’s the best thing about our product?” or, “What differentiates our service from the competition?”

Why This Is a Bad Idea

• Real users have families, jobs and tax bills and are quite possibly drunk when they first experience your brand. Put bluntly, people don’t care about your product — yet.
• Real people experience your idea on their terms, not yours.
• Dumb mass marketing doesn’t work anymore; we’ve raised a generation of marketing-proofed humans. (Thanks, Coke.)

Instead, let your audience define the project by explaining their needs to a friend, remembering that your brand is not what you say it is. Your brand is what people tell their friends it is.

“As a ____, I need to ____, so that I can ____.”

Let’s assume we’re selling ACME Dragon-Slayer Swords. Our audience might say:

“As a white knight, I need to slay the dragon, so that I can save the princess.”

Your brand is not what you say it is, but what your audience says it is.

This is useful because it describes our audience’s impetus and why it’s important to them. However, our user is not yet textured, nor specific enough. We can do better.

2. Narrow It Down

Let’s start with some experiential texture:

“As an inexperienced knight, I need to slay my first dragon so that I can prove my worth to the father of the princess.”

Better. We’ve textured our knight, with corresponding depth to his reasoning. Experiment with different textures — such as technical nouns, age, income and geography.

It’s easy to get lost in our idea and forget how it applies to the larger stage, so let’s delve further in time, before and after our idea:

“As an inexperienced knight on my first quest, I need to impress the king, so that I might marry his daughter and live happily ever after.”

In doing this, we’re taking our user from his real-world impetus, through our brand and back into real life again. We’ve realized that the dragon-slaying itself wouldn’t actually help a real knight achieve their goals. Might we consider selling ACME Dragon-Slayer Swords by how impressive they are to kings?

Describe the brand from multiple viewpoints. For example, our princess may find dragon-slaying presumptuous. If we discover that she’s a more interesting audience, then put her center stage instead.

Dragon-slaying princesses are DIY champions.

3. Stick To Your Vision

Once a scope is defined, remaining within its constraints is important. Thinking back to our banned words, let’s look at the scope-destroyers:

• Some
• Most
• Nice

The sentence, “It would be nice if some users could X” is almost as dangerous as, “Most of the time our users will Y.” This kind of thinking frays the edges of a good idea until it’s unrecognizable.

That way madness lies. Remove all but undebatable assumptions:

• Narrow down “some users” until you can say “every user.”
• If the client says “most times,” remove fuzzy options until they can say “all of the time.”
• Don’t waste time on “it would be nice” issues if you can fix a “we absolutely must” problem.

For example, earlier we defined our knight as inexperienced.

If anyone starts talking about experienced knights, we’d ask them to rephrase in terms of our defined audience. If we get sidetracked by knights who don’t want to impress kings, we’d jot that down on a “nice to have” list and forget about it entirely.

In The Real World

Here are some practical examples from real-world projects that I’ve led:

• Clarity.io
  “As a young adult, I want to donate to charity with my Facebook account so that I can share my charitable identity with friends.”
• The Fitzroy Academy of Getting Shit Done
  “I’ve lost faith in university education. I want an intense, condensed way to skill up and be industry-ready so that I can get out into the workforce soon.”
• OurSay
  “Australian citizens need direct access to people in power so that they can have an impact on their political system.”
• The Promo Bay
  “The Pirate Bay needs a way to centralize and sift through artists so that it can decide who to promote on the home page of The Pirate Bay.”

While we’re thinking “real world,” let’s look at the consultation session itself.

Sleight of Hand

When performing, stage magicians use props and well-practiced patter to better engage the audience. As a consultant, the magic lies in your command of design, while some nuanced expression can transform a banal experience into an engaging one.

One tablet makes you bigger, one tablet makes you smaller.

Practically Speaking

• Keep the vision written at the top of the whiteboard at all times. If anyone gets sidetracked, point at it meaningfully until they quiet down.
• If you feel you personally don’t have the authority to command the room, explain the consultative process up front. People sometimes prefer to trust a well-explained process, especially if they’re older or smarter than you.
• If a client uses terms like “drop-down” or “radio button,” ask them to rephrase without using those words. It’s also a good excuse to assert that the consultation is not about pixels and wireframes.
• Build a personal library of real-world metaphors that explain UX situations. For example, a website that logs you back in without asking is a lot like an automatic door. An HTML prototype is like a car without the engine. Physical examples ground people in reality.
• Your whiteboard marker is a conductor’s baton. This lizard-brain reaction harkens back to teachers in grade school. Note on the board something that a person says that you agree with, and people will suddenly speak on your terms just so you write down what they say.
• Once a vision is established, ask every person in the room whether they agree with it. Put a big tick next to it for each person, in turn. It’s now set in stone, and you can use it as the “bad guy” to settle disputes later.
• Pacing is one of the most important parts of consultation. Set time limits, and don’t be afraid to say, “OK, back to the process.” Consider having a clock in the room.
• Use a banned word, then catch yourself and apologize profusely. It proves you are beholden to the same rules as the client.

Always remember to keep your audience’s impetus in mind.

Further Reading And Experience

I’ve straddled the shoulders of two giants in writing this.

Reading

• The “As a ____, I need to ____, so that I can ____” technique is a simplification of a behaviour-driven development tool. See Bryan Helmkamp’s practical example over on SlideShare.
• I highly recommend watching the “Feedback Without Frustration” video and accompanying article, “How to Run a Design Critique,” by Scott Berkun.
• It may be old school, but a solid understanding of “Cognitive Walkthroughs” in Task-Centered User Interface Design is a good reference point for sticking to a vision.
• The “your brand is what your users tell their friends” idea comes from brand tribalism, another ’90s idea recently popularized by Seth Godin. See his TED talk on the subject.

Experience

You needn’t score a top-dollar client to learn how to deliver solid consultation services. We use these same techniques at work for all of our internal projects.

Try starting your next design sans-Photoshop. Instead, run a two-hour consultation with a coworker. Try again later with a really annoying person who hates your designs. Mixed experiences will help you find your own method in the madness.

Charm is a learned skill.

In Conclusion, re. Applicability

This style of consultation isn’t so great for fixing large broken systems. It’s better for new projects, with a small audience. It also works for small, distinct portions of a larger problem.

Extending the vision should happen after launch and testing, once you’ve won everyone’s heart.

Or:

“As the design lead of a new project, I need some consultative tricks to keep my clients in line and to craft a concise vision.”

(al) (ea)

© Will Dayble for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

Responsive design is about more than just layout; it’s about designing for the Web, which means, mostly, for people with browsers. And that’s just about everything we know about the people who visit our websites: they are probably using a browser. All the rest we just don’t know.

Up until not so long ago, we used to base our designs on some rather general assumptions about screen size and input type. With the rise of devices with various screen sizes and alternative ways to interact, these assumptions have turned out to be unreliable. We need to upgrade the defaults that we use when we start designing our websites.

A Closer Look

People keep saying that the Web has changed. But has it really? Let’s take a look at all of the things that have actually changed.

Screen Sizes

In the 1990s, the Web was 640 pixels wide. In the early 2000s, it grew to 800 pixels. A few years later, we decided it should be 1024 pixels. But five years ago, all of a sudden, something strange happened. A device with a very small screen entered the market. Suddenly, our ideas about the size of the Web did not work anymore. Later on, tablets entered the market. People hold these things however they want. Today, the height of the viewport could be bigger than the width! But is that new? Not really.

Screen sizes, shown in a non-flexible medium. (Photo and work: Aram Bartholl)

We never really knew what size the window of our visitors would be. We just assumed it was at least the random pixel width that we felt comfortable with. These numbers were always arbitrary, and there were always people who could not see the entire website. We simply ignored them.

“Everyone Has a Mouse”

We’ve always assumed that everyone uses a mouse. Even though we knew that this was not always true, most designs completely ignored alternative ways of interacting. People who had to use a keyboard, for whatever reason, had a very hard time interacting with our websites.

But because most people did use a mouse, and because back then many designers thought that designing only for the majority was OK, we created websites that were unusable for a lot of people. And this turned out to be a growing number. Many mouseover interactions are completely dysfunctional on a touch device. Because people love these devices, and even managers and designers use them, they are harder to ignore.

“Everyone Has Broadband Internet”

Another thing we always assumed was that everyone had a super-fast Internet connection, at least as fast as our own. And if they didn’t already have it, they’d have it soon. This was again mostly true; speeds were increasing. But today, more and more people use crappy, unreliable 3G connections all the time. If you’ve ever travelled on a train in The Netherlands, you know what I mean. And if you’ve ever had to rely on the mythical “free hotel Wi-Fi,” then you know for sure that the assumption about the ever-increasing speed of our Internet connections is just not true. This is a big change in our thinking; we really should consider these users. This will have a major impact on what our designs look like.

“Everyone’s Computer Gets Faster Every Year”

It used to be true that computers would get faster and faster. If you waited half a year before buying a computer, you would get one that was twice as fast, for the same price. This was true of new desktop computers, but mobile devices have priorities other than processor speed. The most important thing for a phone, for instance, is battery life: you really don’t want to have to charge it after every phone call.

And there’s another trend: instead of creating ever-faster devices, many manufacturers are starting to sell ever-cheaper devices. Many people care about price and battery life more than about processor speed. This is also not new: what happened to your old computers? You probably sold them or gave them away. People keep using old stuff. Not everyone has the same hardware as we designers do.

“All Monitors Are Calibrated”

Well, we always knew this to be untrue, right? Only the monitors of visual professionals are calibrated. Most other monitors don’t display colors accurately, and many monitors are downright crappy. Most mobile phones that I’ve tested have pretty decent screens, until you start using them outside, in the sunshine. If you’re lucky, you can read the content, but you definitely cannot see the subtle gradients in low-contrast designs.

I haven’t even mentioned “modern” black and white screens. These, too, are not new. People have always used crappy monitors, and people with bad eyesight have always visited your websites. It’s just that more and more people are seeing a subpar color palette. Instead of buying a state of the art monitor, buying a cheap monitor and several low-end devices to test your work on might be a better investment.

All of these things are not new. In 2002, John Allsopp wrote the monumental article “A Dao of Web Design.” People such as Jeremy Keith and Roger Johansson have written about all of these facts for years and years. And yet, somehow, we’ve always managed to actively ignore them. But we really can’t anymore. The Web actually did change in the last five years, with new devices, new browsers and many, many cool new features. We need new defaults. The old ways of creating websites just don’t work anymore.

This Is Responsive, the excellent resource about responsive design by Brad Frost.

In the past few years, we’ve been actively researching new ways to deal with all of these different screen sizes. But apart from responsive design, there are many more challenges in today’s ever-growing pile of devices. We have to find new patterns of interaction: we need interfaces that work on any device. Maybe we have to reconsider that enormous photo carousel on the home page, now that we know that not everyone has a cheap and fast connection. New defaults are emerging, and I’ve collected a few for you here.

The things in this article are not new. Many clever people have written about them in many articles and many books. But these ideas, like all good stories, have to be repeated many times so that people understand and remember them.

New Default: Activate

I initially titled this section “New Default: Touch.” But I came to realize that “touch” has a different meaning for everyone. Some people, like me, think of a single tap when we hear the word. Others think about swiping and complex gestures. That’s why I settled on the heading “New Defaults: Activate.” All devices, no matter what kind of input they offer, let the user activate something in some way.

With a mouse, it’s a click; with a touch device, it’s a tap; on a keyboard, it’s the “Enter” key. There are ways to activate things by voice, and by waving your arms in the air. And many devices offer more than one way to interact. The only thing that all of these devices have in common is the action of activating. Most of them are capable of doing many other things, too, but all of them can activate stuff.

Only recently have we really started thinking about alternative methods of user input. We used to assume that everyone uses a mouse. Hiding content and showing it on mouseover was considered to be a decent design pattern. And it used to work for most people — until all of these wonderful touch devices entered the market. What should a device without a mouse do when content can be revealed only with a mouse? Different devices have different solutions. Let’s look at a simple drop-down menu.

See a live example of this navigation pattern.

When you hover over a menu item, a submenu appears. But apart from hovering over an item, you can also simply click on it to follow the link. Now, what should happen when you tap on the item with a touch device? Should the submenus appear, or should the link activate? Or both? Or should something else happen? On iOS, something else happens. The first time you tap a link like that, the submenu appears; in other words, the hover event fires. You have to tap a second time to actually follow the link. This is confusing, and not many people will tap a second time. On Android, the submenu appears and the link is followed simultaneously. I don’t have to explain to you that this is confusing.

It’s very well possible to think of complex solutions whereby you define different interactions for different input devices. But the better solution, I think, is to make sure that the default interaction, the activate event, just works for everybody. If you really need to, you could choose to enhance this default experience for certain users.

For instance, if you are certain that someone is using a mouse, you could enable some mouseover interactions. Or if you’re sure that someone has fat fingers, you could make small buttons a bit bigger. But only do so in addition to the default activate interaction, and only if there’s no doubt about it, and only if the enhancement would really make things better. Those are quite a few ifs, and some of them, such as the mouse usage, are very hard to detect — especially on devices that offer more than one way to interact, such as a laptop with an optional mouse, touch pad, camera, microphone, keyboard and touchscreen. Give it some serious thought. Do you really need to optimize for a mouse?

New Default: Small Screens

Growing is easy. Most things grow. Babies grow, trees grow, curious minds grow. They don’t grow by themselves, but you don’t need much energy to make things bigger. This is just what things do when they live. While shrinking things is definitely possible, it’s also much harder. You could, for instance, compress a car to a fraction of its original size. A compressed car does have a certain aesthetic appeal to it, but it is definitely not as useful as it was before. The same goes for websites. Shrinking a desktop website does not always result in a pleasant experience on a small screen.

Cedro di Versailles by Italian artist Giuseppe Penone clearly shows that things grow. On the other hand, the work Papalote Goliad by American artist John Chamberlain shows that shrinking can be aesthetically appealing but may result in less useful results.

To build a responsive website that works on all kinds of screens, designing for a small screen first is easiest. It forces you to focus on what’s really important: if it doesn’t fit in this small square, it is probably not terribly important. It forces you to think better about hierarchy, about the right order of components on the page.

The same principle that we follow for interactions — whereby we design the activate event first and enhance it later — applies to graphic design. We should start designing the things that we know everyone will see. That’s the content. No matter how big or small a screen is and no matter how minimal the feature set of a browser, it will be able to show letters. Because this is about the only thing we know for certain — since color is absent on most Kindles, most of the latest CSS doesn’t work on old browsers, and layout is of minor importance on small screens — starting with the text is logical.

I wrote an in-depth article about defining breakpoints on the basis of typography, so I won’t repeat every detail here. But the basic idea is that you start by designing the relationship between the different font sizes. Almost everyone, no matter what device they have, will be able to see this. When the typography is done, you would start designing the layout for bigger screens; you can think of this as an enhancement for people with bigger screens. And after that, when the different layouts are done, you could add the paint. And by paint, I mean color, gradients, borders, etc.

I’ve presented this as a very strict way of working; in real life, of course, things are not as rigid. I’m not talking about “activate only” or “small screen only.” When I say to start with typography, I don’t mean that you aren’t allowed to think about paint at the same time. Rather, I’m trying to find the things that all of these different devices, with all of their different screen sizes and all of their different features, have in common. It just seems logical to first design this shared core thoroughly. The strange thing is that this core is often overlooked: Web professionals tend to view their own creations with top-of-the-line devices with up-to-date browsers. They see only the enhancements. The shared core with the basic experience is often invisible.

New Default: Content

The way we designed our websites until recently was by putting a header with the logo and navigation at the top, putting the subnavigation on the left, putting some widgets on the right, and putting the footer at the bottom. When all of that was done, we’d cram the content into the little space that was left in the middle. All of the things we created first — the navigation, the widgets, the footer — they all helped the visitor to leave the page. But the visitor probably wanted to be there! That was weird. It was as if we were not so confident in our own content and tried our best to come up with something else that our guests might like.

But rather than pollute the page with all kinds of links to get people out of there, we should really focus on that thing in the middle. Make sure it works. Make sure it looks good. Make sure it’s readable. Make sure people will understand it and find it useful. Perhaps even delight them with it!

Once you’re done with the content, you can start to ask yourself whether this content needs a header. Or a logo. Or subnavigation. Does it need navigation at all? And does it really need all of those widgets? The answer to that last question is “No.” I’ve never understood what those widgets are for. I have never seen a useful widget. I have never seen a widget that’s better than white space.

Compare a typical news website’s attention to widgets with Medium’s complete focus on content.

By starting with the content first, you can come up with some very interesting solutions. For instance, does the logo really need to be at the top of every page? It could very well go in the footer on many websites; such as in digital style guides or on pages for registered users. Many links that we used to put in the subnavigation might work better in relevant spots in the main content.

For instance, the option to add extra luggage to a flight booking might be most effective right there in the overview of the flight, instead of in the middle of a list of links somewhere on the left of the page. And when looking at the hierarchy of a page, does the main navigation look more important than the main content? Most of the time it shouldn’t be, and I usually consider the navigation to be footer content. A simple “skip” link at the top of the page could either take the visitor to the navigation or fetch the navigation and show it at the top of the page.

In this era of responsive Web design, we need many new clever solutions. As we’ve seen here, our old defaults don’t work anymore. We need to reconsider how we work with interaction, how we approach design and how we shape our content. But we need to think about one other very important thing, and that is where our content comes from.

New Default: The API

Luke Wroblewski wrote a fantastic article about designing an application for the command line first, and then enhancing it for different needs. This is not just a nerdy idea, but a very practical idea, too. If you are able to design and develop your own application, you could test the functionality relatively easily before even starting to think about what it will look like on different devices. This requires designers to work with developers to design a feature that at first works only from the command line. If the feature does not work as expected, then you merely have to change the API, rather than also a bunch of visual designs. Once the API works as you want it to, enhancing it for all of the devices and screen sizes that you want to support becomes easier.

Most of the time, you wouldn’t design the entire API of the application that you’re building. Most companies would choose a content management system (CMS) of sorts or a specialized tool to help them achieve what they want to do. I’ve always been amazed that CMSes are so often chosen only by technical people and business people. This causes many problems during the design process.

Developers and business people have different goals than designers. Developers want stuff that is easy to develop on. Business people want stuff that’s cheap. But designers want to make the best and most beautiful things possible. These goals can easily conflict.

I’m not saying that designers alone should choose the system, but they should definitely be a part of the decision-making process. I’m convinced that the selection of CMSes will improve. And I’m convinced that CMS makers will start to improve their products once designers get involved. Right now, all CMSes I know of deliver hostile cruft unless you tweak them extensively.

But it works the other way around, too. If designers are involved in the selection process, they will have a say in the choice of tool and will understand how it works, what’s possible, what’s easy and what’s hard. This will result in designs that are based in part on the tool, not just on imagination. This is an important part of the design process that has not yet been optimized. Right now, the command line and the systems that deliver the content we design for are the domain of the developers, and designers have nothing to do with them. That is a pity. Just as you would want to take advantage of the knowledge of developers in the design process, you would want to take advantage of the knowledge of designers in the development process.

Progressive Enhancement

If you review the sections above, you’ll see that what I’ve described is nothing other than progressive enhancement. You start with the content, then design the content and optimize it for different screen sizes and devices, and after that you can further optimize for very specific features such as mouse usage and fat fingers. Many Web developers build websites according to this principle. They transform the beautiful Photoshop documents that they receive into all of the different layers described above.

This can work out fine if the developer has a good sense of design and a delicate attention to detail. But if they don’t — which is often the case — this can easily result in crappy usability and ugly details. I’m not saying that designers shouldn’t use Photoshop anymore. If that’s your tool, go ahead and use it. But do remember that you’re designing the layers of the Web, not the layers in Photoshop. There’s much more to the Web than a single beautiful image. People will see our creations in innumerable ways. We design for all of these people — remember that. We don’t just design for the CEO with a laptop. We also design for the people on the train and the people with “free hotel Wi-Fi.”

Tools

I’ve mentioned Photoshop a few times because it’s still widely misused for designing websites. One reason we have a hard time with progressive enhancement in the design process is due to a lack of good Web design tools. The tools we use are built to wow; they mostly help you to create the “paint,” not to design the core. Fortunately, more tools are popping up with very specific functions in the design process. These are micro-tools such as the International Measure Slider, which helps you to define breakpoints in your grid; tools such as Gridset, which helps you to create grids for different screen sizes; and excellent tools that help you to define typography. By incorporating these tools into our design workflow, we might start making better stuff.

Conclusion

The Web has always been a weird, borderless, flexible medium. In the last couple of years, we’ve started to realize that designing for this medium is fundamentally different from the design work we’ve done previously. The fixed dimensions and the singular ways of interacting that formed the basis of all types of media that we’ve worked with for centuries just don’t work on the Web. This truly is a unique medium.

We have to find new defaults, new starting points for our design process. I’ve explained some of these new defaults here, but of course there are many more. The way we work with forms, for instance, could probably use a whole series of articles by itself. Some new starting points are well established by now, but I’m sure many more will be invented in the near future. I am curious to hear about new patterns and new defaults that you have discovered and have used successfully in your projects.

(al)

© Vasilis van Gemert for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

Welcome to another interview in the series called “How I Work.” These interviews revolve around how leading thinkers and creators in the Web world design, code and create. The goal is not to get into the specific nuances of their craft (as that information already exists online), but rather step back and learn a bit about their habits, philosophies and workflow for producing great work.

You might want to have a look at the first interview as well, which features Doug Crockford, Yahoo’s JavaScript evangelist.

Today we’ll talk to Duane Bray from IDEO, a firm that is consistently listed as one of the world’s most innovative companies due to its uncanny ability to constantly come up with great ideas for its clients. Duane Bray is a partner at IDEO and heads up the firm’s digital business from its New York City office.

Duane Bray at IDEO’s New York City office.

Like all IDEOers you meet, Duane Bray is unfailingly nice, with a soft, well-spoken voice. He reminds you of the kid in the back of algebra class doodling away during lecture and still acing the tests.

We recently sat down with Duane over a couple sessions to get his thoughts on Agile development, how you too can gather great user insights, tips for prototyping digital projects with clients and why he still sketches interfaces out on paper.

Q: What has you excited about digital work these days?

Duane: I’m particularly excited about the movement away from standards-based specifications towards real stuff. For us, we’ve been doing a lot more experimentation around Agile development processes and pairing up designers and developers side by side throughout the process from day one. The last thing you want to do is hire a designer who is really talented at conceptual thinking and say, “Okay, now you’re going to spend six weeks documenting everything with InDesign for the thing you did.”

What’s funny though, is when you have a designer working with a developer on weekly builds, all that stuff still gets done. But from the designer’s perspective, they are constantly making. We’ve found our teams to be super excited to be working in this way.

Certainly we’re not the first to discover Agile, but it’s made a big difference in our culture because we want people to get their ideas as real and tangible as soon as possible.

Q: How does IDEO go about getting big, breakthrough insights?

Duane: Well, for a lot of our clients, they come to us with these sort of vague questions, and they want us to help them figure that out. So, we want to start off by making sure we’re a bit exploratory — and that involves going out and being inspired by behaviors.

For example, there might be a question around new forms of video consumption online. We want to go out and find people that are representative of some extreme form of behavior. This helps us get inspired and further shapes our strategy.

One woman we found has two computers at work. One is displaying her work and the other one is displaying reality television. She needs both streams to do her job. The interesting thing is you can almost hit pause and ask her what’s going with the show and with her work and she can answer both.

So it starts to suggest, what are some of the interesting forms of literacy that are coming through our digital tools? And how might we design for this? Are there new mental models we haven’t thought about before, rather than going with industry standards?

A brainstorming session at IDEO.

Q: IDEO is famous for “thinking with your hands” via prototypes — how do you transfer this over to digital?

Duane: For me I don’t see any distinction in how IDEO designs digital products compared to our other products. We’re still going to get out there and be inspired by what’s going on in the world.

We always start our projects with some sort of investigation into what are people doing and how it impacts how they’re going to engage. And we get tangible quickly — and it’s not so very different from any other prototyping process. We do group sessions to generate ideas, we sketch together, we might have someone make a mock-up on a phone or tablet to test out a behavior. What’s most important for a prototype is to choose the right fidelity for the question you’re seeking to answer.

Q: What’s this discovery process look like?

Duane: Sometimes we’ll prototype something in the browser or on mobile to test some of these concepts out. We’ll also play around with paper prototypes because it’s an appropriate way to get client input.

But I like to find ways to disrupt the conversation when we’re talking with consumers.

For example, if something is very polished, consumers will feel they have to say they like it because it’s polished. So sometimes having hand-sketches, along with something on an iPad, we’re able to get very nice conversations going.

Prototyping is about blending that low-fidelity and high-fidelity process and blending our thinking as we go along.

Q: How would you make a case to a Smashing Magazine reader for adopting a prototyping process with their clients?

Duane: Well, the client is going to be in a better position to make more informed decisions because they are seeing things that are real. I would also argue that it isn’t a massive investment anyway and there is a better payoff down the road because you’re getting more real (tangible) early on — which means you’re going to get better input from users.

Imagine not going through that process: doing a bunch of sketches, building out a spec document, a developer builds it, you test it and people hate it.

At that point there has been such a huge investment in producing that thing. So there is actually a lot of emotional attachment now and it’s either going to be financially impossible to correct it or people will be too wedded to the idea and it’s going to be impossible to change.

Q: How do you show these prototypes?

Duane: We do a lot of live work. We’ll recruit a panel of end users. Particularly in the early stages when we’re looking for inspiration, we’ll want to be in their (the users’) context. So instead of bringing them into a focus group, we might go into their homes or offices and observe them. We’ll also put stuff up on the web and blast out an SMS message and ask people to interact so we can get a more broad approach as well.

Sometimes we’ll do a hybrid of both and have our developers do quick builds and mock-ups and then go back out into the field to get more insights with a select group.

We want to know less about what percentage of people clicked on this or dropped off and more about their process of going through and using that experience. What are the specific things that are barriers and why?

At some point, when we have a much more robust build, then we’ll push it out to more people. So there is definitely an interim phase. We tend to start high touch and stay that way for a while. We’re looking for finding the emotions around why people engage or why they don’t. If we understand those, it becomes a lot more powerful in how we tune the tools.

Q: What’s your experience been with Agile Development processes?

Duane: One of the things we’ve found when we’re working in an Agile process is that we can actually be incredibly fast.

An iPhone app that IDEO created for Lincoln Center.

To give you an example, we did a project here in New York for Lincoln Center, which was their first iPhone app, and we ran it as an Agile process. We went from kick-off to an app in the iTunes store in eight weeks. That’s concept, design and build (and I wouldn’t want to claim we can do every project on that timeline). But we had an amazing client that was able to make decisions very quickly, so we had a fast turnaround time there.

But again, it was because we were getting very real, very fast.

Q: Can you give us a step-by-step breakdown for creating this app in only eight weeks using Agile?

Duane: Sure. First, we spent half a day with our designers and developers at Lincoln Center’s campus, and in advance we created briefs about what an app could look like around different themes. We broke up into teams and every group had to go and interview people at Lincoln Center and talk to them about the theme and do a tour themselves.

We had clipboards of iPhone screen printouts, and they (the teams) had to sketch an experience and get feedback — all in four hours. It was a great way to get immersed: we talked to security guards, out-of-town tourists, locals who would hang out there, people at the information desk and we got a ton of insights.

So, we had all these amazing stories to go back and work with for honing our hypothesis on what this experience should be and we started building it. We did a detailed sketch session, prioritized the feature set, mapped out the flow, did some wireframes and then did a planning session with our development team (from Pivotal Labs). The project was so fast; there were literally just screenshots on the iPhone to simulate the flow. We were sharing it with people quickly and got to the stage where there was a build a week.

Screenshots of the iPhone app that IDEO created for Lincoln Center.

But the reality about that process is that you couldn’t do waterfall in eight weeks. I would say it’s more efficient than an old-fashioned step process.

Agile has been around for 20+ years, and we’re certainly not the first to discover it but now it’s finally getting traction. Designers and developers want to spend time making stuff and getting it out there and this process is all about that.

Q: What habits or hang-ups do you see in great web designers and developers?

Duane: Well, one of the things I think that is probably the most challenging for working in this more iterative, rapid-fire way is the ability to be more open and transparent with the work that you’re doing. Sometimes as designers we want to spend some time crafting, hiding in a corner and sketching and then do the “ta-da!” But some of this new way of working requires us to move beyond that.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about is how do you encourage greater transparency of work that’s in progress? We’ve been prototyping with tools like Flowdock that allows for conversation to sit around the workflow. That is particularly important, if we’re talking about getting stuff out there really early. These are the certain things that aren’t to the nature to how a designer is trained.

There is also this thing about great developers having curiosity. Being curious about the end user you’re designing for and involving the developers in that process for insights. Being able to imagine if they’ll use the thing you’re making.

Some folks are really natural at that, and in other cases it takes a lot of work. But I think that’s where we’re going — working off of blended teams with people of different skill sets.

Q: Any tips on how a small shop can get similar disruptive insights like IDEO does?

Duane: As designers it’s easy to get blinders on because we know what we know and it’s easy to get caught up in it. So, take some time to start over like you’ve never done this before. Sign up for some new tools and track your progress and behavior as an end user. There is something about just getting out to find inspiration. Look for stuff going on, whether it’s a related conference or just inviting in some experts to talk over wine and cheese at your office.

Even a small shop can reach out to friends of friends and watch them interact with some early prototypes or simply have a conversation. Say you’ll buy them drinks every other week and just show them stuff and see what you can learn from building that into your process.

One thing I do is have a screen on my phone that is just apps I would never normally download. So, we might be doing a project around, say, video, and I’ll go try every app out there and use this as a great way to learn. Projects are often an opportunity to dive deeper into a subject area you’re not necessarily interested in but you could be super-inspired by it.

Q: Now how do you capture those inspirations?

Duane: I usually have my notebook open as I’m using all these apps and I’m sketching out ideas and patterns. You start to get a feel for trends and think about different ways to accomplish the same task.

Sketchnotes in Duane Bray’s notebook.

Q: Where and how do you do your best work and not get burned out?

Duane: I usually get away from my desk. I’ll go sit up front on the couch with my laptop and my sketchbook. I force myself to move around. If you just sit at your desk you’re inclined to get into bad habits because everything is sitting around you. Some people have the zero inbox but I have 35,000 messages, so I just use the search box in email.

I’m someone who runs on intuition and not organizational processes. I have a thousand sticky notes on my desk.

But I’m pretty rigid about taking weekends off. I wasn’t always this way but I’ve learned that by being open to being inspired by stuff that has nothing to do with what I’m working on is really important.

Otherwise, you’re not grounded enough to bring something original to the table.

(cp) (ea)

© Jacob Cook for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

Infinite scrolling promises a better experience for users. However, the good is often accompanied by the bad and the ugly. Once we understand the strengths and weaknesses of infinite scrolling, we can begin to use it to enhance our interfaces.

Human nature demands hierarchy and structures that are easy to navigate. But infinite scrolling sometimes leaves users feeling disoriented as they travel down a page that never ends.

The Good

Long lists are not new, but the way in which we scroll these lists has fundamentally changed since the arrival of mobile interfaces. Due to the narrowness of mobile screens, list items are arranged vertically, requiring frequent scrolling.

Infinite scrolling is highly trending as an interaction behavior on pages and lists. The basic functionality is that, as the user scrolls through content, more content is loaded automatically. With the popularity of social media, massive amounts of data are being consumed; infinite scrolling offers an efficient way to browse that ocean of information, without having to wait for pages to preload. Rather, the user enjoys a truly responsive experience, whatever device they’re using.

Pagination versus infinite scrolling (Large version)

Websites with lots of user-generated content today are using infinite scrolling to handle content that is being generated every second. By unspoken agreement, users are aware that they won’t get to see everything on these websites, because the content is updated too frequently. With infinite scrolling, social websites are doing their best to expose as much information as possible to the user.

Twitter integrates infinite scrolling effectively. Its feed fits the criteria: a large amount of data (tweets) and a real-time platform. From the perspective of the user, all tweets are equally relevant, meaning that they have the same potential to be interesting or uninteresting; so, users will often scroll through all of the tweets in their feed. Being a real-time platform, Twitter is constantly being updated, even if the user leaves their feed unattended. Infinite scrolling seems to have been created especially for websites like Twitter, which successfully employs the technology.

Infinite scrolling appears to have found its niche on the Web. However, there are also drawbacks that must be considered before assessing its value.

The Bad And The Ugly

With so much data to browse, users must stay focused on the information they are searching for. (Remember about being goal-oriented?) Do users always want a never-ending stream of data? Analytics show that when users search for information on Google, only 6% advance to the second page. So, 94% of users are satisfied with receiving only 10 results, which suggests that users find Google’s ranking of results to be relevant.

To Click or Not to Click

Google has implemented infinite scrolling for image search results but has yet to implement it for its general results. Doing so would eliminate the need for users to click to reach the second page. Google will probably maintain pagination because this pattern is quite symbolic for its brand. If it does switch to infinite scrolling, when would users typically stop scrolling? After 20 results? 50? When does an easy browsing experience become more complicated?

Looking for the best search result could take a second or an hour, depending on your research. But when you decide to stop searching in Google’s current format, you know the exact number of search results. You can make an informed decision about where to stop or how many results to peruse because you know where the end is. According to studies conducted in the field of human-computer interaction, reaching an end point provides a sense of control; you know that you have received all relevant results, and you know whether the one you are looking for is there or not. Knowing the number of results available provides a sense of control and helps the user make a more informed decision, rather than be left to scour an infinitely scrolling list.

Pagination is a barrier of clicks. (Large version)

When items are distributed across Web pages, they are framed and indexed and have a start and end point. The information is presented clearly and orderly. If we select an item from a paginated list and are taken from that page, we know that clicking “Back” will return us to that page (probably to the same scroll position). Our Web search will continue right where it left off.

If you scroll the same list of results with infinite scrolling, you are left without that sense of control because you are scrolling through a list that is conceptually infinite. Let’s say you count yourself among the 94% who stop reading after the first page (i.e. 10 results) of a Google search. When the list scrolls infinitely, there is essentially no end to the first page. Rather than look for the end of the page, which doesn’t exist anyway, you decide to stop scrolling at the 10th item. This poses a problem with infinite scrolling, because the 11th item is directly in sight. With a paginated list, on which you wouldn’t see the 11th result, deciding not to continue browsing is easier. However, when the next results are already there, you’d probably just keep on scrolling and scrolling.

As Dmitry Fadeyev points out:

“People will want to go back to the list of search results to check out the items they’ve just seen, comparing them to what else they’ve discovered somewhere else down the list. Having a paginated interface lets the user keep a mental location of the item. They may not necessarily know the exact page number, but they will remember roughly what it was, and the paginated links will let them get there easier.

Not only does the infinite scroll break this dynamic, it also makes it difficult to move up and down the list, especially when you return to the page at another time and find yourself back at the top, being forced to scroll down the list once again and wait for the results to load. In this way the infinite scroll interface is actually slower than the paginated one.”

— Dmitry Fadeyev, When Infinite Scroll Doesn’t Work

When Infinite Scrolling Fails

The best companies are constantly testing and studying new interactions with their users. Increasing numbers of these studies are showing that infinite scrolling does not resonate with users if it does not support their goal on the website.

Temptation

When you’re looking for that perfect search result and are tempted to continue scrolling into a wasteland of irrelevant results, time is wasted. Chances are that the best result will appear in the first 10 items. Therefore, infinite scrolling merely tempts you to continue reading, wasting time and decreasing productivity in the process.

Optimism

Even more annoying is that scroll bars do not reflect the actual amount of data available. You’ll scroll down happily assuming you are close to the bottom, which by itself tempts you to scroll that little bit more, only to find that the results have just doubled by the time you get there.

Exhaustion

Infinite scrolling overwhelms users with stimuli. Like playing a game that you can never win, no matter how far you scroll, you feel like you’ll never get to the end. The combination of temptation and optimism play a big role in exhausting the user.

Pogosticking

Infinite scrolling often causes your position on the page to get lost. “Pogosticking” happens when you click away from an infinitely scrolling list and, when you return by clicking “Back,” are brought to the top of the previous page, instead of to the point where you left off. This happens because the scroll position is lost when you navigate away from an infinitely scrolling page, forcing you to scroll back down each time.

Loss of Control

Infinite scrolling leaves you with the feeling that you might be missing out on information. You continue scrolling because the results are right there, but you feel overwhelmed because you’re losing control over the amount of data being shown. There is something nice about defined pages on which the amount of content is quantified, where you can comfortably choose whether to click to view more or to stop. With infinite scrolling, you don’t have control over the amount of data on the page, which becomes overwhelming.

Distracting

Etsy, the vintage e-commerce marketplace, implemented infinite scrolling, only to find that it led to fewer clicks from its users. Infinite scrolling was unsuccessful because users felt lost in the data and had difficulty sorting between relevant and irrelevant information. While infinite scrolling provided faster and more results, users were less willing to click on them, defeating its very purpose.

Etsy’s home page (Large version)

Unreachable

Have you tried reaching the footer of Facebook lately? The footer block exists below the news feed, but because the feed scrolls infinitely, more data gets loaded as soon as you reach the bottom, pushing the footer out of view every time. Footers exist for a reason: they contain content that the user sometimes needs. In Facebook’s case, the user can’t reach it. The links are repeated elsewhere but are harder to find. Infinite scrolling impedes the user by making important information inaccessible.

Facebook’s auto-loading news feed makes the footer unreachable. (Large version)

Footers serve as a last resort. If users can’t find something or they have questions or want more information or explanation, they often go there. If they don’t find it there, they might leave the website altogether. Companies that implement infinite scrolling should either make the footer accessible by making it sticky or relocate the links to a sidebar.

Not Exclusive

Pinterest does not have a footer at all, which makes sense given the problem we just saw with Facebook. Through infinite scrolling, Pinterest emphasizes its profusion of data, an endless sea of inspiration taken from all over the Web.

Pinterest’s ocean of pins (Large version)

Images are faster and easier to scroll than text, so Pinterest and Google Images succeed with infinite scrolling to an extent. However, billions of images are on the Web, and users would prefer to see only the best of them. There is something to be said for exclusivity, which seems to be lacking in Pinterest’s layout.

Limiting the number of images on Pinterest’s home page, with an “Editor’s picks” or “Most popular” list, might make the website more appealing. How exclusive can a pin be when a ton of other similar pins are next to it?

Pinterest’s tactic of using infinite scrolling for its plethora of data suffers because it overwhelms users. The collection looks bottomless, but its immensity is somewhat daunting, and browsing it might seem a waste of time. Ultimately, Pinterest is trying to expose users to infinite inspiration, but that actually undermines the human need for control. The amount of data becomes intimidating, and users are left with mixed feelings.

When Usability Wins

As mentioned earlier, Twitter integrates infinite scrolling effectively. The user sees an infinitely growing list of tweets and can comfortably click on a tweet to expand it in place, preventing the page from refreshing and, as a result, maintaining their scroll position.

Twitter’s torn feed (Large version)

On its mobile version, Twitter even adds a “torn paper” marker, indicating to the user where to resume reading. This subtle and simple solution enables the user to scroll up and down the list, while having a recognizable point to return to. Psychologically, that marker reassures the reader by dividing read and unread content. Such markers give the user a sense of control and a better perception of the content’s depth and how far they’ve gotten into it.

Twitter is not the only one. Discourse, an emerging discussion platform, also has infinite scrolling that empowers the user. The company considered the importance of infinite scrolling to its user experience and implemented an intriguing and unique progress indicator. The indicator appears when needed and remains in view (without interfering) while the user reads the content. The indicator numbers the item currently being viewed out of the total number of items. This is a great way to make the user feel in control, even with a lot of data.

The smart progress indicator on Discourse (Large version)

Go Hybrid

A hybrid of infinite scrolling and pagination is also a good option in many cases. With this solution, you would show a “load more” button at the end of a preloaded list, which, when clicked, loads another batch of items onto the list. The same behavior that infinite scroll does automatically, this button does on demand. The interface gains some of the advantages of infinite scrolling, without some of its drawbacks.

Because infinite scrolling requires the website to fetch so much content, the hybrid solution is used at times to control the data load. In Facebook’s news feed and Google’s image search, the infinite scrolling is automatic at first but becomes on-demand once a certain number of items have loaded. This maintains the interface while limiting the load on the server.

Hybrid infinite pagination on Google Images (Large version)

Infinite Pages

Infinite pages take the concept of infinite scrolling to a new level. Websites that employ this concept are “one-pagers.” To remove the barrier of clicking to the next page, the designer turns the entire website into one long scrollable page. Examples are Unfold and Lost World’s Fairs.

On these one-page websites, the sections are spread vertically, one after another. This makes the whole website less comprehensible — hence, less accessible. These websites might not have infinite scrolling, but the user might still have that feeling of a never-ending page.

On infinite pages, the height of each section will vary according to its contents. Although the approach can make for some creative interactions, it can leave users disoriented and unsure where to scroll for the next piece of information. The scroll bar is hidden on many such pages, leaving users feeling lost as they unconsciously look for the scroll position to track their progress. Hidden scroll bars deprive users of that chance for rescue. Users shouldn’t be left helpless; the interface should clearly show them how to navigate the page.

Not knowing where they stand can leave the users disoriented.

UX engineers need to take extra care when designing infinite pages. They must take into account accessibility; tell users where they stand by showing the length of the page and how much they’ve viewed. Solutions could include a fixed menu, a map of the page or a scroll progress bar.

Another trick is the parallax effect, whereby different layers on the page move at different speeds according to the user’s scrolling, creating the illusion of depth (as seen on Andrew McCarthy’s website). While it can help to create beautiful and innovative experiences, it is sometimes heavily overused, and users can get confused by how much they need to scroll for more content. When the parallax effect is combined with animation, the user can get confused about whether the page is being scrolled by their movement or is moving autonomously. It’s wise to use the technique to enhance content, not as the content itself.

Let’s Get To The Bottom Of This

Infinite scrolling can be an innovative feature that greatly improves an interface by exposing content and making performance more efficient. But it needs to be used correctly.

Avoid the following sinkholes to achieve a strong infinite scrolling experience:

• Users want immediate access to exclusive data.
  Users don’t want to be left to explore all of a website’s data on their own. When implementing infinite scrolling, identify what data is exclusive to your website and elevate it to the top of the page, and filter less relevant information.
• Users want to feel in control.
  Infinite scrolling sabotages that feeling of control. Add a smart progress indicator, a fixed menu or a map.
• Users often look for landmarks when scrolling.
  When scrolling through long lists, users expect to be able to easily distinguish between new and viewed data. Add landmarks along the interface to keep users oriented.
• Consider conventional pagination or a hybrid solution.
  Good old pagination is always an alternative to infinite scrolling. And if that doesn’t fit the context, then a hybrid solution, using a “load more” button, could greatly enhance the interface.
• Provide interesting content without an ambiguous interface.
  Having to traverse a never-ending list is logical only if the user leaves feeling that it was worthwhile.
• Users often expect a footer.
  If footer-type information is functional to the interface, then it should appear at the bottom of the page. A fixed footer is usually the way to go with infinite scrolling.
• An infinite list is still a list.
  Infinite scrolling still needs to meet common interface standards. Whether users take their eyes off the screen for a moment or click a link and then click “Back,” they expect to return to the exact point where they left off. Whatever your interface, make sure it meets users’ expectations.
• Effects are nice to have but not a must.
  Many infinitely scrolling interfaces have various effects to show more data (whether by sliding in new content or another method). Be mindful not to focus more on effects than on presenting data in the most effective way possible.

Use It Correctly

Users are goal-oriented and find satisfaction in reaching the end of their exploration. To be effective, infinite scrolling has to account for this. Nothing is really infinite, not even these infinitely scrolling lists we’ve looked at. Users should always know where they stand, even when the content has not finished loading. They should know what the total amount of data is and be able to easily navigate the list. Infinite scrolling has to be implemented in the best possible way so that users can always find their way.

(al)

© Yogev Ahuvia for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

I’ll come right out and say it. I think the grid is the unsung hero of a good design. It gives structure and lets the design fall perfectly into place on the canvas. With a grid, adapting and building something new into your design is easy. Think of it like a house’s foundation. With a solid foundation, the house is stable, and building on it is easy. With a solid grid, your design can easily be adapted to accommodate whatever changes come along.

Today, we’ll share iOS Grid System, which I’ve been using when designing apps in Adobe Fireworks. The extension is free for both personal and commercial use, and it works with all iOS devices as of March 2013.

Installing and using the iOS grid extension in Fireworks is pretty easy. We’ll explain the process in detail, but you can jump to the download section and try the extension right away.

Why Are Grids Useful?

Before we continue, a bit about grids.

I like consistency. It helps me feel like I can trust whatever I’m using at the moment. At a deeper level, users appreciate consistency because it builds trust — trust that you aren’t going to pull the rug out from under them in the middle of whatever they’re doing. They know what they’re going to get, and they’ll be more comfortable with you if everything lines up just right, rather than if elements look like spaghetti thrown against a wall. In the end, consistency improves trust and credibility through better design quality, and it improves usability by making a website or application more understandable, predictable and findable.

As a designer, I like figuring out a system that makes updating easy for me. Grids help here because I don’t always have to worry about how a particular element should align with another; I’ve thought ahead and done that work already.

Learning about grids helps you put out better designs. Grids — specifically, how to apply them so that a design can be consistent and grow into itself — are an essential topic for designers.

Actually, they’re only essential if you want an interface that is:

• consistent,
• easy to update,
• polished even after you’ve finished working on the interface. (I guess we needed to make that clear first.)

Whether you work with clients or are on an internal team, grids are especially useful when those last-minute “Hey, can you just add this little button in somewhere? It’ll take only a second, I swear!” changes come in. Accommodating that request becomes much less trouble simply because a good grid is in place. Just pick the appropriate column (or columns), and boom — you’re done. Happy client, happy you!

I like what Khoi Vinh has to say about grids in this short (but great) interview:

“Khoi Vinh: On the Grid,” from The Color Machine

“The grid is a tool for me to impose order and logic and law. There’s a framework. If you remove all subjectivity, then you get some essential truth, some core idea that’s not clouded by inaccuracies or approximations or subjective feelings.”

Why Make An iOS Grid Extension For Adobe Fireworks?

The easy answer is that most of my designs these days are for iOS, and a grid system is essential to every design I craft. I start using it early on in the design process, and having a solid grid in place when I design makes sense for me.

I decided to build it after noticing how much time I spent making decisions that I could have easily automated. With this extension, I don’t have to spend time tediously clicking and dragging around to make sure my grid’s shapes and guides are pixel-perfect. This extension allows me spend more time on other important parts of the process (such as how the design works and looks).

Now, I just open Adobe Fireworks, create a new project, and then select what iOS device I’ll be designing for and the number of columns I’ll need. Then, the grid appears on my canvas, along with some nicely sized gutters, which help my design breathe a little easier.

Here’s what it looks like (notice the green overlay):

The iOS grid in practice. (Large version)

About The iOS Grid Extension

The extension is made for Adobe Fireworks and is optimized to help you create designs for all of Apple’s mobile devices (in both portrait and landscape modes) as of March 2013. It will be updated as new iOS devices and resolutions arrive.

iOS Grid System will build your grid automatically on any page in Adobe Fireworks. (Large version)

Here’s what’s included in the extension package:

• Non-Retina iPhone (3GS) grid command
  Grid size: 320 × 480 pixels
• Retina iPhone (4, 4S) grid command
  Grid size: 640 × 960 pixels
• Retina iPhone (5) grid command
  Grid size: 640 × 1136 pixels
• Non-Retina iPad (1, 2, Mini (2012)) grid command
  Grid size: 1024 × 768 pixels
• Retina iPad (3, 4) grid command
  Grid size: 2048 × 1536 pixels

Note: Apple doesn’t allow designers to specifically target the screen of the iPad Mini. To work on a design for iPad Mini, you can simply use the non-Retina iPad resolution, which is 1024 × 768 pixels.

You’ll notice that all of these grids have a few things in common:

• Both the landscape and portrait versions of the grid for each device share the same column and gutter widths.
• On each side of the grid is a mini-column that helps your layout align with the leftmost and rightmost icons in the status bar. What good is a grid if everything doesn’t align properly, right?

For the iPhone, each column is 30 pixels wide, with a 10-pixel gutter (the Retina iPhone is 60 and 20 pixels, respectively). The iPad versions use 44-pixel-wide columns with a 20-pixel gutter (the Retina iPad is 88 and 40 pixels, respectively).

These exact dimensions make it easy for you to have adequate space between each column, while giving you flexibility in structuring the design. This is the best combination I’ve found from experimenting with different column and gutter sizes, because I’m able to keep the same dimensions while adding or subtracting columns as I change device orientations.

How iOS Grid System Works

When a command from iOS Grid System is run, it automatically creates two things: “guides” and “shapes.”

Here’s how to access the iOS Grid System commands from the “Commands” menu.

1. Guides

A set of guides will be placed directly on the page.

You can lock them (in the menu, View → Guides → Lock Guides); you can activate snap-to-guides (View → Guides → Snap to Guides), which can make moving and resizing objects on the page easier; and you can temporarily hide or show the guides (View → Guides → Show Guides).

2. Grid Layer

The shapes (which will serve as columns) will be placed on their own locked layer in the page, named “Grid,” and combined into one symbol. Because the shapes are added as a symbol, reusing them anywhere else in the document is easy, if that’s your thing.

After you run a command from iOS Grid System, in the Layers panel you’ll notice that a new layer with the grid on it (contained within a single symbol) has been added. The “Grid” layer is initially locked, to prevent you from accidentally making changes to it.

The columns in the “Grid” layer have 33% transparency, and objects in your design placed on layers underneath it will be visible. But you can move the “Grid” layer to the bottom of the stack, if you prefer.

And when you don’t need the “Grid” layer to be visible, simply toggle its visibility in the Layers panel.

Further Notes Can the Commands Be Run on Pages With Existing Content?

Yes, absolutely!

When the extension is used on a page with existing content, it will create a new “Grid” layer, move it to the top of the layers stack, lock it automatically, and then return focus to the original layer on which you were working. Smart!

It will also resize the canvas automatically (read more about that in the next section).

Size of Canvas and Cropping of Objects

Here’s another thing to keep in mind. When running a command from the set on a page that already has some objects placed on the canvas, and if the canvas is larger than the iOS device you are designing for, then some of the objects may be cropped or deleted when the canvas is made smaller. This won’t happen in all cases, though, because in Fireworks there’s a setting (in Edit → Preferences → Edit) that controls the behavior of canvas cropping:

• If “Delete objects when cropping” is checked, then the objects will be cropped with the canvas.
• If “Delete objects when cropping” is unchecked, then all objects will be preserved when cropping the canvas.

The “Delete objects when cropping” preference can be toggled on and off by going to Edit → Preferences → Edit.

When you run the command on a page with some existing artwork on it, this preference is important to remember!

Running the Commands Multiple Times

You can use any of these commands multiple times in one document. Just create a new page and select the command you wish to run, and a new set of guides and grids will be created.

(Just be careful when you try to run them multiple times on the same page. This is not recommended — things can get weird.)

Download, Install And Use iOS Grid System

Want to try iOS Grid System for yourself? Follow these simple steps:

1. Download the iOS Grid System extension (the ZIP contains an MXP file and is around 20 KB). Alternatively, you can download it from its GitHub page, because this project is also maintained there, if you’re that kind of geek.
2. Unzip and then run the MXP file, and it’ll launch Adobe Extension Manager. Follow the on-screen instructions, and you’ll be ready to use it in Fireworks! (For general information on installing and working with extensions in Fireworks, I highly recommend the article “Optimizing the Design Workflow With Extensions”.)
3. Open Fireworks and create a new document. As mentioned, the size of the canvas doesn’t matter, because the command will resize the canvas automatically.
4. Go to Commands → iOS Grid System and select an iOS device. Then, iOS Grid System will go to work building your grid!

Alternatively, you can apply the extension to existing pages as well. But keep in mind that, while existing artwork won’t be touched, the canvas will be resized (unless, of course, you run a command that matches the dimensions of the current page).

Roadmap And Final Thoughts

You’ve probably already figured out that I love grids and find them very useful. If you use Adobe Fireworks for iOS design, I hope that this grid system will help your design grow as you maintain it.

I’m also curious to see how and where you use it. Share a link to your app or mobile website. We’d love to see it in action!

Now let’s open it up to your suggestions for improvements. This idea has existed (mostly) in a vacuum up until now, and these kinds of things always benefit from other people’s suggestions. For example, I’m curious if anyone would prefer to use templates, instead of commands that run on a per-page basis. Or perhaps you’ve found a bug somewhere.

I would greatly appreciate all kinds of feedback!

Of course, any questions about how to use this extension are welcome, too. Just leave a comment — I’d be happy to help.

Further Reading

• “Interview With Khoi Vinh,” The Grid System
• “Grid,” Thinking With Type, Ellen Lupton
  We didn’t talk about typography here, but this is great resource to learn more about the fundamentals of good typography, too!
• “Design Cutting-Edge iOS Apps With Adobe Fireworks,” Ivo Mynttinen, Smashing Magazine
• “Optimizing the Design Workflow With Extensions,” Ashish Bogawat, Smashing Magazine
• “Creating a Pattern Library With Evernote and Fireworks,” Kris Niles, Smashing Magazine

(mb al)

© Joshua Mauldin for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

A lightbox is one of those tools that work great on the desktop but often fail on small mobile devices. These days, finding a plugin that is responsive and that displays content right away is hard. For this reason, I created Magnific Popup, an open-source lightbox plugin focused on performance.

In this article, I’ll share the techniques I employed in creating this plugin, techniques that can make your lightbox much faster and easier to use, whatever the device being used.

1. Speed

We might not be able to speed up the loading time of an image with this lightbox plugin, but we can create the perception of a faster loading time.

Progressive Loading of Images

The majority of lightbox plugins will fully preload an image before displaying it. This is done to figure out the original size of the image and to center it with JavaScript. Because Magnific Popup centers the content with CSS, we can avoid preloading and instead display the image right away to take advantage of progressive image loading. It will render and show the image while the data is being received.

You can speed this up even more by progressively rendering the JPEG. It is rendered not from top to bottom, but from low quality to full quality, so the user can discern the image even faster. The type of rendering to use is strictly a matter of preference.

CSS-Based Resizing

The CSS-only approach makes this lightbox extremely flexible. You can specify sizes in relative units such as ems, resize popups in media queries, and update popup content dynamically without having to worry about how it will be resized and centered. Try to avoid, or at least reduce, the number of resizing properties in a window’s resize event, because it will look much slower than resizing with just pure CSS.

Vertically centering an element with unknown dimensions is probably the most horrifying topic in CSS layout. The main goal for me was to prevent the size of the content area from dynamically updating the contents of the lightbox, and to make it work in IE 8 and above.

Following the principle of progressive enhancement, I decided to drop the vertical centering feature in IE 7 completely, because the only way to implement it was to use slow CSS expressions, which kill performance in old browsers. In contrast to modern browsers, the resolution of monitors on which IE 7 is being run is unusually easy to predict. We’d know that the user would be on an old PC, which typically has a resolution of somewhere between 800 × 600 and 1280 × 1024 pixels; so, we can just set a fixed margin from the top: .lightbox-image { margin-top: 10%; }. Alternatively, instead of opening the lightbox, you can just link directly to the content. In Magnific Popup, you can do this like so:

$('.popup-link').magnificPopup(function() { disableOn: function() { // Detect IE 7 or lower with your preferred method // and return false if you want to trigger the default action return isIE7 ? false: true; } });

Centering an HTML block

Here are the criteria:

1. The size of the block is unknown and could be changed at any time.
2. Block should be centered both horizontally and vertically.
3. If the height of the popup is bigger than the viewport, then the scrollbar should appear, and the popup should automatically align to the top.

The one reliable technique to vertically center an element of unknown height that I’ve found uses a helper inline-block element with a setting of vertical-align: middle and height: 100%. Chris Coyier has written a superb article covering this technique. It works perfectly and meets all three requirements.

Centering an image with a caption

In addition to the requirements of an HTML block, the image should also meet these requirements:

• It should fit the area both horizontally and vertically.
• Its maximum height should equal the height of the original image.
• The caption should be positioned directly below the image, and the text may flow up to two lines.

Here is the structure of the image’s lightbox:

<div class="container"> <img src="image.jpg"/> <div class="description">Caption</div> </div>

Implementing this just for an image and with support for IE 8 and above is not hard. The problem comes when you try to position elements near to the image (such as a caption or related icon).

I was not able to find the solution for such a layout without using JavaScript, so I used a technique that applies a max-height to the image. Check the example on CodePen to see how it works.

Centering an iframe

Iframes in Magnific Popup are resized using the popular and effective technique introduced by Thierry Koblentz in his article “Creating Intrinsic Ratios for Video” on A List Apart. All you need to do to force any element’s height to scale according to its width is to put it in a container and apply top padding as a percentage:

.iframe-container { width: 100%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; /* element ratio is 4:3 (3/4 * 100) */ padding-top: 75%; } .iframe-container iframe { position: absolute; width: 100%; height: 100%; top: 0; left: 0; }

Window height on iPhone

Mobile Safari on iPhone and iPod has a nasty bug: the height of the window is always reduced by the height of the navigation bar, whether the bar is present or not, so the popup won’t center correctly. When researching this issue, I found two ways to fix it:

1. Just add 60 pixels to the height of the window. This solution doesn’t work with iOS 6’s full-screen mode, and it’s not future-friendly.
2. Use window.innerHeight instead of document.documentElement.clientHeight, which returns the correct value, but only when the window is not zoomed in.

But I’ve figured out a third way to implement this (for more details on this technique, check my answer on Stack Overflow):

var getIphoneWindowHeight = function() { // Get zoom level of mobile Safari // Such zoom detection might not work correctly on other platforms // var zoomLevel = document.documentElement.clientWidth / window.innerWidth; // window.innerHeight returns height of the visible area. // We multiply it by zoom and get our real height. return window.innerHeight * zoomLevel; };

If you know of a better way to position elements than what’s suggested here, we’d be hugely grateful to hear!

Preload Adjacent Images in Gallery

Preloading images in a gallery is essential and vastly increases browsing speed. The average modern browser accepts about six connections per host name, whereas IE 7 accepts only two.

After the lightbox gallery is opened, it should start loading not one, but a group of images (the number of items in a group should depend on the size of the images and on how likely your visitor will navigate to the next one — test it!). Don’t even think about waiting to load the next image until after the current one has completely loaded; otherwise, it will reduce browsing speed significantly.

In Magnific Popup, you can set the number of images to preload before and after the current one, and these two values will automatically switch according to the direction in which the user is navigating.

Inaccurate comparison between parallel and one-by-one loading.

High-DPI Display Support

Magnific Popup’s default controls are made with pure CSS, without any external resources. Thus, the controls are not only light, but also ready for high-DPI (i.e. Retina) displays. But in this section of the article I’d like to talk about serving images for displays with high pixel density.

It’s not hard to change the path, as the image in lightbox is loaded dynamically. The main problem is that the image should be scaled by half (for 2x device pixel ratio). It rises the question: how to get the image size via JavaScript without waiting until it is completely loaded to keep progressive loading?

While researching, I’ve found that the image naturalWidth is defined exactly after browser gets its size. So we just fire an interval that checks if the image object has defined naturalWidth, after it has it we scale the image by applying max-width that equals image.naturalWidth / window.devicePixelRatio. Here is simplified version of how the image loading is implemented:

var interval, hasSize, onHasSize = function() { if(hasSize) return; // we ignore browsers that don't support naturalWidth var naturalWidth = img[0].naturalWidth; if(window.devicePixelRatio > 1 && naturalWidth > 0) { img.css('max-width', naturalWidth / window.devicePixelRatio); } clearInterval(interval); hasSize = true; }, onLoaded = function() { onHasSize(); }, onError = function() { onHasSize(); }, checkSize = function() { if(img[0].naturalWidth > 0) { onHasSize(); } }, img = $('<img />') .on('load', onLoaded) .on('error', onError) // hd-image.jpg is optimized for the current pixel density .attr('src', 'hd-image.jpg') .appendTo(someContainer); interval = setInterval(checkSize, 100); checkSize();

There is a very common assumption that the image optimized for Retina display weighs two times or more than the normal one, but it’s not always true. As the image will be scaled down, JPEG quality can be reduced without any notable visual difference. From my experience, saving an image for 2x pixel ratio with 25% JPEG quality produces a good-looking result and the file size is only about 1.4x times larger than the regular one. Daan Jobsis has a great article that covers this technique.

What image to serve on what screen size is a topic for another article. I just want to emphasize that for many users mobile is the only way to access the internet. If you serve smaller images for mobile and there is a chance that user will need full-sized ones — provide an alternative way to get it.

Avoid Extra HTTP Requests for Controls

Preload all controls (i.e. the arrows, the closing icon, the preloader) before the popup has opened in order to load the actual content faster. This can be implemented in three ways:

• Create all controls with CSS only (as Magnific Popup does by default).
• Include the control graphics in the main CSS sprite of your website, or preload them with CSS before the popup has opened.
• Use the Data URI scheme to embed base64-encoded images directly in the CSS (supported by IE 8 and above).

2. Accessibility

Content that has opened in the lightbox should be easily zoomable and scrollable, no matter what the device. The contents and controls of the popup should be accessible with the tab key for keyboard users.

Conditional Lightbox

This relatively new technique, introduced by Brad Frost, disables the lightbox entirely on devices with a small screen, substituting an alternative more appropriate to mobile use. Here are some examples:

• Open maps and videos as a separate page. Many mobile browsers will recognize such links and open a dedicated app that is much easier to use.
• Simply open images in a new page for easier zooming and panning.
• Open long text-based popups in a new page. In Magnific Popup, you can do this by adding the source of the popup inside a data attribute and linking to a mobile-friendly page in the href attribute. For example: <a href="separate-mobile-friendly-page.html" data-mfp-src="popup-content.html">Open popup</a>

  Here is the popup initialization (with an option that disables the popup and just opens the link when the window is narrower than 500 pixels):

  $('.popup-link').magnificPopup(function() { disableOn: function() { // Detect here whether you want to show the popup // return true if you want if($(window).width() < 500) { return false; } return true; } });

Progressive Enhancement

Build the markup as if there were no JavaScript at all, and make the button that opens the content-oriented lightbox link to the content. Not only is this an enhancement for users without JavaScript, but it allows you to open the content in a new window, and it makes it completely SEO-friendly. Images will be perfectly indexed by search engines, and the anchor text will work as an alt attribute in the img tag.

<!-- Correct: --> <a href="image.jpg">Description of the image</a> <!-- Incorrect: --> <a href="#" data-src="image.jpg">Description of the image</a> <!-- Correct: --> <a href="large-image.jpg"> <img src="thumbail.jpg" alt="Description of the image" /> </a> <!-- Incorrect: --> <img src="thumbail.jpg" data-src="large-image.jpg" alt="Description of the image" /> Selectable Image

Users should be able to select and copy an image that is opened in a popup. This is one of the few ways to bookmark, save or share it.

Presently, fully overlaying a lightbox image with left and right navigation arrows is very common. The screenshots below show context menus above the image (the one on the right is overlaid with a transparent div, making any kind of interaction with the image virtually impossible).

position: fixed and overflow: scroll

Zooming a fixed-positioned element looks unnatural and confusing in the majority of mobile browsers. I suggest avoiding this property entirely on devices on which content is likely to be zoomed.

Exactly the same problem happens when you apply overflow: scroll to a popup’s wrapper. In this case, the problem is an unnatural scroll:

• Once the user has reached the end of the scroll, the main window starts scrolling behind the popup.
• Scrolling momentum is missing. On iOS 5+, this issue can be fixed with -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch, but what about other devices?

Magnific Popup automatically disables these properties on mobile devices. Instead of using a fixed positon, it adds a huge dark overlay to the whole page that equals the height of the document and that positions the content area using position: absolute and with a top that equals the scrollTop of the window.

Keyboard Focus

Upon loading, the focus should be set on the popup itself or on the first input (if it is a form). When tabbing, focus should be confined to the lightbox and its controls. After the popup has closed, focus should return to its original location. This can be implemented very simply:

// Save current focused element var lastFocusedElement = document.activeElement; // Set focus on some element in lightbox $('#input').focus(); // After lightbox is closed, put it back if(lastFocusedElement) $(lastFocusedElement).focus();

Roger Johansson’s great article “Lightboxes and Keyboard Accessibility” discusses this topic and the overall keyboard accessibility of lightboxes.

Touch Swipe Support

The main problem with the swipe gesture on touch devices is that it requires blocking the default behavior of the touchmove event (e.preventDefault()), which blocks the zooming and panning gesture.

There are just two ways to enable swiping and zooming at once:

1. Emulate zooming behavior with help of JavaScript touch events by changing the transform property of the content’s container. But this requires recalculating the content’s size, which breaks our CSS-based resizing technique and is not reliable when there are interactive elements such as iframes. Without a doubt, the library that implements such zooming and panning the best is iScroll by Matteo Spinelli.
2. Don’t inhibit the default behavior of browser zooming when two touch pointers are detected. But finding the difference between panning and swiping is very hard because detection of the browser’s zoom level is unreliable.

By design, the main purpose of a lightbox is to show enlarged versions of images. So, we would conclude that natural zooming is much more important than swiping. That is why Magnific Popup does not have swiping support. Navigation between gallery items is implemented simply by tapping on arrows with a large hit area.

But if you really need swiping, there are some ways to implement it:

• If you don’t need a dragging effect, use something like the TouchSwipe plugin.
• If you need touch navigation with a dragging effect, open in the popup some slideshow plugin with touch support, such as FlexSlider or (mine) RoyalSlider.
• Use a conditional lightbox technique and create a separate mobile-friendly page that has just a list of stacked images.

If we disable the swiping gesture, we should at least make tap navigation faster. Mobile browsers wait about 300 milliseconds before firing a click event in case they detect a double-tap event. This can be fixed with the popular “fast click” technique, which fires a click on touchend. Ryan Fioravanti of Google has a complete guide on it.

3. User Interface

Some devices allow multiple types of input at once (such as touching and mousing). We conclude that we cannot require mouseovers (:hover) for important UI elements, and we cannot neglect mouse events if touch support is present.

Apple’s “Human Interface Guidelines” for iOS state that a comfortable size for a tappable UI element is at least 44 × 44 pixels. Assuming that any device with any screen size may have touch support, we’ll apply as large a hit area as possible by default.

Red rectangles show the hit area for the controls. (Image: JJ Harrison)

Now let’s talk about actual implementation. First of all, buttons are rendered as <button> elements. Here is why:

• A button can have a title attribute, which we can use to describe what the button does and its keyboard shortcut.
• Buttons, unlike <a> elements, do not require hacks such as href="#" and href="javascript:void()". When the cursor hovers over a link, many browsers will show the contents of the href attribute in the bottom-left corner of the browser window; displaying javascript:void() would look quite illogical.
• Buttons are the most semantically correct approach for such controls.

I recommend reading Nicholas Zakas’ article “You Can’t Create a Button,” which offers a few more arguments in favor of using <button> elements.

The Close Button

The closing icon is just a math multiplication sign (×) rendered in Arial. I strongly recommend avoiding specifying multiple fonts (like font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif) because the position and size of the multiplication sign is very inconsistent across fonts.

The multiplication sign in different fonts: Arial, Georgia, Lucida Grande, Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, Roboto.

Next and Previous Buttons

The main requirement for default arrow icons is that they should be visible on any background. At first glance, the best option is to use Unicode triangles with shadow, but it turns out that there are no equally sized left and right triangles.

The only remaining option is to use two nested triangles with different colors. Here is how that’s done:

.double-triangle { width: 90px; height: 110px; } .double-triangle:before, .double-triangle:after { display: block; width: 0; height: 0; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; margin-top: 35px; margin-left: 35px; } .double-triangle:after { content: ''; border-top: 12px solid transparent; border-bottom: 12px solid transparent; border-right: 12px solid black; top: 8px; left: 5px; } .double-triangle:before { content: ''; border-top: 20px solid transparent; border-bottom: 20px solid transparent; border-right: 20px solid white; }

Because of pseudo-elements, such an implementation will not work in IE 7. Navigation buttons are an important part of the UI, so I decided to write a small polyfill to make it work in IE 7, too. We just add two elements inside the button and apply the same styles as the :before and :after elements.

var button = $('<button class="double-triangle"></button>'); if(ie7) { button.append('<span class="ie-before"></span><span class="ie-after"></span>'); }

Here’s the CSS:

.double-triangle:before, .dobule-triangle .ie-before { /* styles ... */ } Cursors

I am a big fan of custom cursors; they are a lovely addition to an interface. The zoom-in and zoom-out cursors make very clear that content may be enlarged or reduced, while the progress cursor is an excellent loading indicator of AJAX-based popups. Sadly, zoom cursors are still not supported by IE 10.

.zoom-in-cur { cursor: -webkit-zoom-in; cursor: -moz-zoom-in; cursor: zoom-in; } .zoom-out-cur { cursor: -webkit-zoom-out; cursor: -moz-zoom-out; cursor: zoom-out; } .progress-cur { cursor: progress; } Animation

The main rule of in and out animation for a lightbox is make sure you need it. If you do, at least keep it short (shorter than 300 milliseconds). Avoid animation if you anticipate a large image or a huge block of HTML in a lightbox.

Magnific Popup does not use JavaScript animation at all. Instead, it uses light and fast CSS transitions. Browsers that don’t support transitions are most likely slow, and thus JavaScript animation would look choppy in them.

One more important point: As I said before, Magnific Popup automatically disables position: fixed on mobile devices and creates a tall dark overlay on the page. Animating such a block might cause mobile devices to lag, so I suggest forcing position: fixed for the background and keeping position: absolute for the content itself.

And here’s a pro tip: To make your sliding animation a little smoother, Paul Irish suggests animating the translateY property, instead of top or margin-top.

In Summary

A responsive lightbox is not one that scales down proportionally when the screen’s size changes. It’s the one that provides fully accessible content, whatever the device.

No matter what script you use, it should support these standards:

• Escape key to close the popup.
• Left and right arrow keys to navigate the gallery.
• Tab key to navigate the contents of the popup.
• If there is a single image, the lightbox should close when any part of the image is clicked.
• If it is a gallery, clicking on the current image should advance to the next image. Check out the discussion on UX Stack Exchange for more information.
• A gallery should be clearly indicated: “1 of 10” counters, arrows, bullets, thumbnails, or any combination of these.

Useful Related Resources

• “The Usability of ‘Lightbox UIs’,” UX Stack Exchange
• “Should We Keep Image Popup After Page Refresh?” UX Stack Exchange
• “Are Lightboxes Good UX?,” Quora
• Lightbox 2, Lokesh Dhakar
  The original lightbox plugin
• “Image Optimization, Part 1: The Importance of Images,” Stoyan Stefanov
• “Improving UX Through Front-End Performance,” Lara Swanson, A List Apart

I hope this article and script will be useful to some. For more techniques, dig into the code of Magnific Popup in the GitHub repository.

(al) (ea)

© Dmitry Semenov for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And as designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one—desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd.

This creativity mission has been going on for over five years now, and we are very thankful to all the designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for May 2013. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper!

Please note that:

• All images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper,
• You can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our Desktop Wallpaper Calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?
• You can also download the wallpapers for Windows 7/8.

The Green Bear

Designed by Pedro Rolo from Portugal.

• preview
• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 2560×1440

Power

Designed by Elise Vanoorbeek from Belgium.

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• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Quote Of The Day

Designed by Eloise Ha from Malaysia.

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• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Winter Is Over

Designed by Uxue Goikoetxea from Spain.

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• with calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Raring Ringtail

Designed by Vlad Studio from Russia.

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• with calendar: 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440

Get Caught Reading Month

Designed by Jill Hamilton from Canada.

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• with calendar: 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Full Of Spirit

Designed by Ushuk Maria from USA.

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• with calendar: 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900,
  1600×1200 (currently missing),
  1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

World’s Labor Day

Designed by debobrata debnath from India.

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• with calendar: 1024×1024, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1024×1024, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

April Showers Bring May Flowers

Designed by Morgan Newnham from USA.

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• with calendar: 320×480 (currently missing),
  1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Octopus: The Master Of Disguise

Designed by Sasha Endoh from Canada.

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• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

The Arabian Stud

Designed by Atelier Pall from Romania.

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• with calendar: 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 2560×1440

A Better Summer

Designed by Joeri Claes from Belgium.

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• with calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200

May I Love You

Designed by Julien Savoldi from Belgium.

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• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Game Boy

Designed by Sander Geenen from Belgium.

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• with calendar: 1024×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Mental Health Awareness Day

Designed by Kay Karremans from Belgium.

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• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×1024, 1280×720, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×1024, 1280×720, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Old vs. New

Designed by Wannes De ROy from Belgium.

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• with calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Museum Day

Designed by cheloveche.ru from Russia.

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• with calendar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Blooming

Designed by Alexandru Nastase from Romania.

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• with calendar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200

Ethnic Snake

Designed by Katerina Bobkova from Ukraine.

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• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080

Maypole Animals

Designed by Charlotte Blatchford from UK.

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• with calendar: 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

May Fiesta

Designed by Pat Buenaobra from Philippines.

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• with calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

“He Who Sings…”

Designed by Yiannis Kranidiotis from Greece.

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• with calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1680×1200, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440

Awaiting Rebirth

Designed by Kristof Van Espen from Belgium.

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• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1920×1080, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1920×1080, 2560×1440

Splash!

Designed by Ajan Navaratnasingam from London, UK.

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• with calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 2560×1440

Mondriaan

Designed by Siemon Donvil from Belgium.

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• with calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1920×1080, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1920×1080, 2560×1440

Praise The Workers On Labor Day

Designed by N. Baeten from Belgium.

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• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200

Daydream

Designed by Maarten Wydooghe from Belgium.

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• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

May Around the World

Designed by dangerbrain from USA.

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• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440

Mothers Day

Designed by Kim Janssens from Belgium.

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• with calendar: 320×480, 1366×768, 1024×1024, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 2560×1440

Savanna May

Designed by Brian Jonah Obara from Kenya.

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• with calendar: 320×480 (currently missing), 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440
• without calendar: 320×480, 640×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1024×1024, 1152×864, 1280×720, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1400×1050, 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1680×1050, 1920×1080, 1920×1200, 1920×1440, 2560×1440

Puppet Show

Designed by Pietje Precies from The Netherlands.

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• with calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200
• without calendar: 320×480, 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×1024, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1920×1200

Join In Next Month!

Please note that we respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. This is why we give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works. This is also why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves.

A big thank you to all the designers for their participation. Join in next month!

What’s Your Favorite?

What’s your favorite theme or wallpaper for this month? Please let us know in the comment section below.

© The Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

“Content matters!” “Comp with real copy!” “Have a plan!” By now, you’ve probably heard the refrain: making mobile work is hard if you don’t consider your content. But content knowledge isn’t just about ditching lorem ipsum in a couple of comps.

Countless organizations now have a decade or two’s worth of Web content — content that’s shoved somewhere underneath their redesigned-nine-times home page. Content that’s stuck in the crannies of some sub-sub-subnavigation. Content that’s clogging up a CMS with WYSIWYG-generated markup.

Messy, right? Well, not as messy as it will be — because legacy content is the thing that loves to rear its ugly head late in the game, “breaking” your design and becoming the bane of your existence.

But when you take the time to understand the content that already exists, not only will you be able to ensure that it’s supported in the new design, but you’ll actually make the entire design stronger because you’ll have realistic scenarios to design with and for — not to mention an opportunity to clean out the bad outdated muck before it obscures your sparkly new design.

Today, we’re going to make existing content work for you, not against you.

What You Don’t Know Will Hurt You

When you’re working on something new and fun, ignoring the deep recesses of content is tempting. After all, you’ve got a lot to think about already: designing for touch, dealing with ever-changing screen sizes, adding geolocation features, maybe even blinging things out with a few badges.

But if content parity matters to you (and it damn well should if you care one whit about the “large and growing minority of Internet users” who always or mostly access the Web on a mobile device), then at some point you’ll have to deal with the unruly content lurking underneath your website’s neat surface.

Why? Because chances are there’ll be stuff out there that you’ve never thought about, much less designed for. And all that stuff has to go somewhere — too often, shoehorned into a layout it was never meant to inhabit, or perhaps not even migrated into a new template but instead left to wither in an outdated, mobile-unfriendly design.

Take navigation. As Brad Frost has written, designing small-screen navigation for small websites is simply tricky, any way you slice it.

Hard as it already is, it becomes downright impossible if you haven’t dealt with your legacy assets first. You’re sure to end up with problems, like a navigation system that only works for two levels of content when you actually have four levels to contend with, making all of that deeper information accessible only with hard to manage (and find) text links — or, worse, making it completely inaccessible except through search.

There’s a better way.

In The Belly Of The Beast

Mark Boulton has written eloquently on content-out design — the concept of determining how your design should shift for varying displays by focusing not on screen sizes, but on where your content naturally breaks down. It’s excellent advice.

But if you’re trying to work with a website with thousands of URLs — or anything more than a few dozen, really — you have to ask: Which content do I design with? Unless you’re relying on infinite monkeys designing infinite layouts to create custom solutions for every single page, you’re going to have to rely on representative content: a set of content that demonstrates the variety of information that the experience needs to support.

So, how do you know what’s representative? You get your arms around the size, scope, structure and substance of your content.

Yup. It’s time for the content audit.

People have been talking about content audits and inventories for more than a decade — in fact, Jeffrey Veen wrote about them on Adaptive Path back in 2002, calling them a “mind-numbingly detailed odyssey through your web site.” At the time, people were starting to yank their websites from static hand-coded pages and pull them into content management systems, and someone needed to sit down and sort it all out.

More than a decade later, I’d say content audits are more useful than ever — but in a slightly different way. Today, a content audit isn’t just an odyssey through your website; it’s a window into your content’s nature.

What To Look For

You could audit content for all kinds of things, depending on what you want to learn and be able to do with the information. Some audits focus on brand and voice consistency, others on assessing quality or identifying ROT.

There’s nothing wrong — and quite a lot right — with these priorities. But if you want to ready your content to be more flexible and adaptable, then you can’t just look at each page individually. You need to start finding patterns in the content.

It’s a simple question, really: What are we publishing? If your first answer is “a page,” look again. What’s the shape of this content? What is this content most essentially? Is it an interview, a feature story, a product, a bio, a recipe, an erotic poem, a manifesto? Asking these questions will help you see the natural pieces and parts that make up the content.

When you do, you’ll have a structural model for the content that matches your users’ mental model — i.e. the way they perceive what they’re looking at and how they understand what it means.

For example, I recently worked with a large publicly traded company whose website dates back to the early aughts. After a couple of responsive microsites, they’ve caught the bug and want to update everything. Problem is, the existing website’s a mess of subdomains, redirects and thousands of pages that are nowhere near ready for flexible layouts.

Our first step was to dig deep, like a geologist — except that instead of unearthing strata of shale and sandstone marking bygone eras, we identified and documented all of the forgotten templates, lost content and abandoned initiatives we could.

We ended up with a dozen or so content types that fit pretty much anything the company was producing. Sure, we still ended up with some general “pages.” But more often than not, our audit revealed something more specific — and useful — about the content’s nature. When it didn’t, that was often a sign that the content wasn’t serving a purpose — which put it on the fast track to retirement.

Once you’ve taken stock of what you have, gotten rid of the garbage and identified the patterns, you’ll also need to decide which attributes each content type needs to include: Do articles have date stamps? Does this need a byline? What about images? Features? Benefits? Timelines? Ingredients? Pull quotes? This will enable you to turn all of those old shapeless pages — “blobs,” as Karen McGrane has so affectionately labeled them — into a system of content that’s defined and interconnected:

This content model shows attributes for the “recipe” content type, and how recipes fit into a broader system.

Each bit of structure you add gives you options: new abilities to control how and where content should be presented to best support its meaning and purpose.

Regardless of what you want to do with your content — launch a responsive website, publish to multiple websites simultaneously, extract snippets of content for the home page, reuse the content in an app, mash it up with a third party’s content — this sort of structure will make it possible, because it enables you to pick and choose which bits should go where, when.

Tools for Auditing Content

The content audit may not be new, but some tools to help you get started are. Lately, I’ve been running initial reports with the Content Analysis Tool (CAT), which, for a few bucks, produces a detailed report of every single page of content that its spiders can find across your website.

Using CAT’s Web interface, you can sift through the report and see details such as page types, titles, descriptions, images and even the content in <h1> tags — super-useful if you’re assessing content of murky origin, because a headline often gives you at least a glimmer of what a page is about.

Here’s an excerpt of what it found for Smashing Magazine’s own “Guidelines for Mobile Web Development” page:

The CAT report shows a thumbnail of the page, as well as some data about its content. See the full screenshot for more.

While features such as screenshots of all pages and lists of links are useful for individual analysis, I prefer to export CAT’s reports into a big ol’ CSV file, where the raw data looks like this, with each row of the spreadsheet representing a single URL:

CAT also spits out detailed CSVs chockfull of raw data about all pages of a website. See the full screenshot for all of the fields.

It’s not perfect. For example, if content’s been abandoned and removed from navigation but left floating out there in the tubes, CAT typically won’t pick it up either. And if a website’s headlines aren’t marked up using <h1> (like Smashing Magazine, which uses <h2>s), then it won’t scrape them either.

What it is great for, though, is getting a quick snapshot of an entire website. From here, I usually do the following:

• Add fields for my own needs, such as qualitative rankings or keep/delete notations;
• Set up filtering and sorting so that I can slice the data by whichever field I want, such as according to the section where it’s located;
• Assess and rank each page according to whatever qualitative attributes we’ve settled on;
• Note any patterns in the content types and structures used, as well as relationships to other content;
• Define suggested meta-data types and tags that the content should have;
• Use pivot tables, which summarize and sort data across multiple dimensions, to identify trends in the content.

With this, I now have both the detailed information to drive specific page-level changes and the high-level patterns to inform structural recommendations, CMS updates, meta-data schema and other efforts to improve content portability and flexibility.

I like using CAT because it was designed by and for content strategists — and improved features are rolling out all the time — but you can also use a similar tool from SEOmoz (although it tends to sell you on fancy-pants reporting features), or even grab a report from your CMS (depending on which one you use and how it collects information).

Any of these tools will help you quickly collect raw data. But remember that they’re just a head start. Nothing replaces putting your eyes — and brain — on the content.

The Secret To Scale

You don’t have to love auditing content. You certainly don’t need to develop a sick addiction to pivot tables (but it’s totally OK if you do). What you will love, I promise, is what a deep knowledge of content enables you to do: create an extensible design system that doesn’t devolve at scale.

For example, let’s look at some of the larger websites that have started using responsive design. There’s higher education, of course, where early adopters such as the University of Notre Dame were quickly followed by a rash of college websites.

What do most of these websites have in common? Two things: a lot of complex content and a responsive system that carries through to only a handful of pages, like the UCLA’s website, where the home page and a few key pages are responsive, but the deeper content is not:

UCLA’s home page is responsive, but most of the website, like this landing page, is not. Larger view.

Why doesn’t that design go deeper? I’d bet it’s because making a responsive website scale takes work, as Nishant Kothary summed up brilliantly in his story of Microsoft’s new responsive home page from late 2012:

“The Microsoft.com team built tools, guidelines, and processes to help localize everything from responsive images to responsive content into approximately 100 different markets… They adapted their CMS to allow Content Strategists to program content on the site.”

In other words, a home page isn’t just a home page. You have to change both your content and the jobs of the people who manage it to make it happen.

But one industry has had some luck in building responsively at scale: the media — including massive enterprises such as Time, People and, of course, the Boston Globe. These organizations manage as much or even more content than Microsoft and universities, but as publishers with a long history of creating professional, planned, organized content, they have a huge leg up: they know what they publish, whether it’s editorials or features or profiles or news briefs. Because of this, everything they publish fits into a system — making it much easier to apply responsive design patterns across all of their content.

Making Tough Choices

When you start breaking down your big, messy blobs of content and understanding how they really operate, you’ll realize there’s always more you could do: add more structure, more editing, more CMS customization. It never ends.

That’s OK.

When you understand the realities of what you’re dealing with, you’re better equipped to prioritize what you do — and what you choose not to do. You can make smart trade-offs — like deciding how much time you’re willing to invest now in order to have the flexibility to do more later, or what level of process change the current staff can handle versus the amount of flexibility you could use in the content.

There are no right answers. All we can do is find the right balance for each project, team and audience — and recognize that some structure is going to serve us a whole lot longer than none will.

Everyone’s Job

I get it. Going through endless reams of content ain’t your thing. You’re a designer, a developer, a project manager, damn it. You just want to get on with it, right?

We all do. But the more you seek to understand your content, the better your other work will be. The less often your project will go off the rails right around the time it’s supposed to launch. The fewer problems you’ll have with designs that “break” when real content gets inputted. The more the organization will be able to keep things in order after launch.

Best of all, the more your users will get the content they need — wherever and however they want it.

Thanks and credits go to Ricardo Gimenes, for preparing the front page image.

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© Sara Wachter-Boettcher for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

The beauty of typography has no borders. While most of us work with the familiar Latin alphabet, international projects usually require quite extensive knowledge of less familiar writing systems from around the world. The aesthetics and structure of such designs can be strongly related to the shape and legibility of the letterforms, so learning about international writing systems will certainly help you to create more attractive and engaging Web designs.

Today we’ll explore the art and craft of Arabic typography with Dr. Nadine Chahine, who lives in Bad Homburg, Germany. She is an Arabic Specialist at Monotype GmbH and is an award-winning type designer who has created typefaces that are being sold worldwide.

Q: Where does your love of typography come from?

Nadine: It’s something I discovered during my graphic design education. I was fascinated by the contrast of the black and white, and the tension between angles and curves. Type is a design ingredient of immense power and it feeds into our collective memory. Its expressive power, its ability to convey both mood and identity, and the many different forms that it can take lead to a very rich field to play in. It is one that is dangerously addictive. The more one learns about type, the more drawn in one is. Very willingly, of course!

Q: How did you come to design type?

Nadine: I started playing around with type in the second year of the graphic design course, and got into things in earnest in the final year. It was then that I decided that I want to pursue this as a career and joined the MA course at The University of Reading, UK. The course really put me on the right career track and provided the kind of educational setting that supported both practical and theoretical typographic explorations. It’s been 15 years now since I drew my first letters, and I still wake up every day with the desire to draw some more.

Q: According to your blog, you joined Monotype in 2005 (known as “Linotype” at the time). Can you summarize your current role at the company?

Nadine: I am the Arabic Specialist for Monotype (as we have rebranded in March 2013). I am responsible for our Arabic projects, and that involves designing typefaces for the library and custom ones for our clients. I am also involved when externals design for us. Last year we collaborated with the MIT Age Lab on legibility research into the effect of typeface style on driver distraction, and I was part of the team. As it is exactly aligned with the PhD research that I completed in October, I’m very happy that I am now involved in legibility research as well as in type design.

Closeup of the early sketches of Zapfino Arabic.

Q: What is the biggest challenge in designing an Arabic typeface?

Nadine: There are design challenges in drawing letterforms that, when put together, appear as one continuous pen stroke. There are also challenges that are more existential in nature, such as the face of modern Arabic typography and how closely tied it is to calligraphic references. We have so few well-designed typefaces that it is often the case that the typeface one is working on presents a design problem that has never been addressed to date. There is also a lot of freedom in that, so it’s not too daunting.

Q: How do you design? What does your design process look like?

Nadine: It starts with a vague idea that I try to formulate on paper or, usually, on computer. It takes a while for what I draw to match what I want the typeface to do. That usually involves generating many versions of the font, testing it out in sample texts, making modifications, and repeating the process until the typeface becomes itself. I know that sounds a bit funny, but a typeface goes through adolescence and eventually grows into the best that it can possibly be.

Hermann Zapf’s corrections to Zapfino Arabic.

Q: From the initial idea to the finished product, how long does it take for a new typeface to be born?

Nadine: Sometimes it takes years and sometimes it is a matter of weeks. Some designs are simply more complex and need a long time to mature. Others are straightforward, and if you’ve designed in that style before and the client is in a hurry, they can be finished quite quickly. It used to take much longer when I first started out. Every time I made a few changes, I’d need to test immediately, and then would agonize endlessly over which version is better. These days it is, of course, easier, and the ability to control a curve gets better with practice. There are still styles that are hard to design and require a lot of effort. The more complex and organic the curve, the more attention it requires.

Q: Frutiger Arabic, Neue Helvetica Arabic, Univers Next Arabic, Palatino and Palatino Sans Arabic, Koufiya, Janna, Badiya, or BigVesta Arabic. Do you have a personal favorite?

Nadine: Koufiya is special because I drew both the Latin and Arabic, and the concept is fully mine. Some of my typefaces I prefer to others, but I try not to tell. :-)

Q: Where do you get your inspiration from?

Nadine: It is always the streets of Beirut. Not the way my city is now, but how I wish it to be. When I studied graphic design in Beirut, I was always frustrated by the low quality of available Arabic fonts. It felt as if this is a reflection of a much larger state of being, of everything that is not OK in our part of the world. And that was a state of affairs that was intolerable, and so I set about trying to make my environment look better, one letter at a time.

Simulation of how the eye moves across a line of text and the pattern of fixations.

Q: What is your favorite part about designing type? Do you also have a least favorite part?

Nadine: There is an “A-ha” moment, when all the pieces suddenly fit together. That is the most gratifying moment, when the vague idea suddenly becomes a reality. For the least favorite, it’s designing the numerals. That is my punishment.

Q: In your opinion, what makes a great typeface?

Nadine: A typeface has a function, and the greatness lies in the balance of achieving that function with the pure aesthetic value of the curves themselves. Adrian Frutiger wrote that a typeface is like a beautiful group of people, rather than a group of beautiful people. He has designed some of the greatest typefaces that we know, and very likely redefined what a sans-serif typeface is supposed to look like. When you see his work, the kind of designs that are meant to become part of our lives, the curves that he draws, the elegance of movement and interplay of black and white, you know that you are in the presence of greatness.

Q: What are you working on at the moment?

Nadine: Zapfino Arabic! It’s the most challenging typeface that I have ever tackled. Both exciting and scary!

Q: What have been your biggest achievements so far?

Nadine: There are the design collaborations with Adrian Frutiger, Professor Hermann Zapf and Gerard Unger, and the design awards. The typefaces, of course, are my babies, but I am especially happy with my PhD. I did my research on the side of a very busy work schedule. It took five years of working six days a week and barely any holidays to get it done, and I still cannot believe that I managed it!

Specimens of Nadine’s typefaces.

Q: Arabic Web fonts are still at a disadvantage because some typefaces do not display correctly in certain browsers and devices. Why is this the case? What needs to happen for this to change?

Nadine: Current desktop browser support has resolved this problem, but we still need the public to upgrade to the latest versions. The devices are a different story and still far from where we need them to be.

Q: We recently ran an article on Helvetica on Smashing Magazine. As the creator of Neue Helvetica Arabic, what is your opinion on the issue?

Nadine: Helvetica is a divisive typeface and passions run high when discussing it, as you can see in the comments. The important thing to keep in mind is, Helvetica came to light in a set of circumstances that might never repeat. In other words, the stars were aligned and this propelled it to the place it is now. I’m not sure we will ever have a typeface that comes close to what Helvetica is. This has to do not with the design of the typeface, but with the role that this typeface played in our lives 50 years ago and has played till today.

Gebran2005, designed for An-Nahar newspaper in Lebanon.

Q: How do you see the type industry evolving in the next 10 years?

Nadine: There is a very big push today in the direction of non-Latin type design. I expect this to continue to grow, and I do hope that we evolve into a more global approach to the design of letterforms and visual communication.

Q: What advice would you give to young readers out there who are interested in becoming type designers?

Nadine: Get into it! It is a very fulfilling design practice, and one that is highly addictive and enjoyable. My advice would be to attend one of the many type design conferences that take place regularly and to talk to other designers to see what the work is actually like. There are many resources online about type design, and starting there to get an overview is also helpful.

Early sketches of Zapfino Arabic.

Q: How can readers find out what conferences you’ll be speaking at or attending, and workshops you’ll be organizing throughout 2013?

I usually mention these on Twitter, and sometimes on Facebook and my blog.

Thank you for your time, Nadine! We sincerely appreciate it.

(il) (al)

© Iris Lj. for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

This article is packed with a number of quirks and issues you should be aware of when working with CSS3 transitions. Please note that I’m not showing any workarounds or giving advice on how to circumvent the issues discussed. Alex MacCaw has already written a very insightful and thorough article on “All You Need to Know About CSS Transitions.”

Whereas Alex wrote about achieving particular effects, I’m going to talk about the technical background, especially the JavaScript-facing side. Pitfalls — this article is all about pitfalls.

Table of Contents

• Specifying a transition
• When a transition is complete
• Transitionable properties
• Transition property priority
• Transitioning from and to auto
• Implicit transitions
• Transitions and pseudo-elements
• Background tabs
• Invisible elements
• Transitioning before the DOM is ready
• Rendering quirks
• Specification recommendations
• Use the delay, Luke
• Conclusion

Separation of concerns is nothing new — we’ve been using template engines for years to accomplish exactly that, separating our HTML from whatever scripting language we were using. A website has three major concerns: structure (HTML), layout and style (CSS), and behavior (JavaScript). CSS crossed the line and became behavioral quite a while ago, but that’s a whole different discussion.

A couple of weeks ago, I was tasked with developing a JavaScript module that would allow for the use of CSS transitions in a way that the JavaScript side would know nothing about the transitions taking place. The actual problem is the asynchronousity of transitions. After writing a bunch of tests, I gave up on the task. It cannot be done with a reasonable amount of code and initialization time. My test results are what this article is all about.

Before getting started with transitions, we have to talk about a little, frequently used, helper function. getComputedStyle() is a JavaScript method that returns a CSS property’s value as the browser interprets it. This API goes back to “DOM Level 2: getComputedStyle()” and “CSS Level 2: Computed Values” — which basically specify that a computed style is an absolute value.

This is fine for properties such as font-size, which take only one argument and are reliably converted to pixel values. However, it doesn’t cover how browsers should handle shorthand properties, such as margin — some browsers return nothing, others something semi-useful. Then there are properties with different but equivalent values to consider, such as font-weight’s bold and 700. WebKit also has a bug that extracts the computed value of properties from pseudo-elements.

The quirks described here were identified in January 2013 using Firefox 18 (Gecko), Opera 12.12 (Presto), Internet Explorer 10 (Trident), Safari 6.0.2 (WebKit), Chrome 23 (WebKit), as well as Gecko’s and WebKit’s nightly build channels.

Without further ado, let’s dive into the specifications and implementations, a world riddled with misconceptions. Please note that in order to be concise, I’ve omitted vendor prefixes from the examples.

Not knowing is difficult to handle. It’s easier to assume.

– Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

… But assumptions are often wrong. I discovered the information in this article by creating a CSS3 Transitions Test Suite.

Specifying A Transition

Besides the shorthand transition property, the CSS3 transition specification defines the following four CSS properties for specifying an animated change of state:

• transition-property,
• transition-duration,
• transition-delay,
• transition-timing-function.

CSS Properties to Transition

The transition-property property defines the property (or properties) to animate. The default is all, meaning that all properties a browser can transition will be animated on change (if there’s a transition-duration greater than 0s). The property accepts one value or a list of comma-separated values (like all other transition-* properties).

The specification states that a browser should accept and preserve any property it doesn’t recognize. So, the following example would still run a transition on padding lasting 2 seconds:

transition-property: foobar, padding; transition-duration: 1s, 2s;

Contrary to the specification, WebKit parses the above to transition-property: all. Firefox and Opera parse it to transition-property: all, padding.

Duration of a Transition

The transition-duration property defines the amount of time a transition should take to get from the initial state to the target state. It accepts a <time> value in seconds or milliseconds (for example, 2.3s and 2300ms both specify 2.3 seconds).

While the specification makes it clear that values must be a positive number, Opera also accepts -5s — at least for getComputedStyle(). Opera and Internet Explorer (IE) do not accept values lower than 10ms, although the specification mentions no such limitation. In all fairness, you wouldn’t notice a transition lasting 9 milliseconds anyways. WebKit (except for the current WebKit nightly) has a bug in its getComputedStyle() implementation, returning values such as 0.009999999776482582s instead of 0.01s. At least all browsers agree on returning second-based values.

Delay of a Transition

The transition-delay property defines the time to wait before executing a transition, also using <time> values. The delay may be a negative value, which will start the transition immediately and make it appear as though the transition had started at the given offset in time — essentially starting with a jump.

As with transition-duration, IE and Opera don’t accept values between -10ms and 10ms. WebKit’s floating point issues appear here, too.

Timing Functions

The transition-timing-function property defines the mathematical function used to calculate a property’s value at time t. There are three basic types: cubic-bezier(x1, y1, x2, y2), step(<number>, start|end), and keywords that map to predefined cubic bezier curves. Most likely, you already know the keywords linear, ease, ease-in, ease-out and ease-in-out. The math behind cubic beziers gets ridiculously unimportant when using Lea Verou’s charming little Cubic Bezier Editor. While cubic bezier curves make smooth transitions, the step() functions don’t. They instead jump to the next value (i.e. the next step) at a regular interval. This allows for frame-by-frame animations; see “Pure CSS3 Typing Animation With steps()” for an example.

The computed value of linear is usually represented as cubic-bezier(0, 0, 1, 1) — except for WebKit, which actually returns linear. But not to worry: WebKit will still return cubic-bezier(0.25, 0.1, 0.25, 1) instead of ease. The current WebKit nightly returns the keyword for all defined keywords, though. Looking on the bright side, in a couple of months WebKit won’t be inconsistent with itself — only with the rest of the browser world.

The specification stipulates that the x values must be between 0 and 1, while the y values may exceed that range. Contrary to the specification, WebKit allows x to exceed the bounds, at least computationally. At the time of writing, the Android browser (version 4.0) mixes up ranges for x and y, essentially disallowing “bounce” effects.

When A Transition Is Complete

I already mentioned that CSS transitions run asynchronously. The specification provides the TransitionEnd event to allow JavaScript to synchronize with the end of a transition. Sadly, the specification isn’t very specific about this event. In fact, it simply states that an event is to be fired for every property that has undergone a transition. If you need a single word to describe the situation, “nightmare” isn’t far off.

While the specification says that shorthand properties (such as padding) should run transitions for all properties that it covers (padding-top, padding-right, etc.), it doesn’t say which property should be named in a TransitionEnd event. While Gecko, Trident and Presto agree on triggering events for the longhand sub-properties (such as padding-top), even if a transition was defined for a shorthand property (such as padding), WebKit would take the opportunity to screw things up. WebKit would trigger an event for padding if (and only if) you specified transition-property: padding, but transition-property: all would trigger the event for padding-left et al. For some reason, iPhone 6.0.1’s Safari browser might also triggers events for font-size and line-height when padding is being transitioned. Confused yet?

.example { padding: 1px; transition-property: padding; transition-duration: 1s; } .example:hover { padding: 10px; }

The above CSS will trigger different TransitionEnd events across browsers:

Gecko, Trident, Presto

padding-top, padding-right, padding-bottom, padding-left

WebKit

padding

.example { padding: 1px; transition-property: all, padding; transition-duration: 1s; } .example:hover { padding: 10px; }

The CSS above will trigger different TransitionEnd events across browsers:

Gecko, Trident, Presto, WebKit

padding-top, padding-right, padding-bottom, padding-left

Safari 6.0.1 on iPhone (not iPad, mind you!)

padding-top, padding-right, padding-bottom, padding-left, font-size, line-height

I said that you could specify a negative transition-delay to “jumpstart” your transition. But what happens for transition-duration: 1s; transition-delay: -1s;? Gecko and WebKit immediately jump to the target value and trigger an event. Trident and Presto won’t trigger any events.

That floating point issue that WebKit experiences in getComputedStyle() is also present in TransitionEnd.elapsedTime — consistently in all browsers. Math.round(event.elapsedTime * 1000) / 1000 will “fix” that for you.

WebKit and IE have implemented an unspecified extension to background-position that causes them to trigger TransitionEnd events for background-position-x and background-position-y, instead of background-position.

So, even if you knew that a transition was taking place, you wouldn’t be able to rely on the TransitionEnd.propertyName that you’re given. While you could write loads of JavaScript to equalize the behavior, you wouldn’t be able to do this in a future-proof way without doing proper feature detection for every single property. And this could include properties you might not even know are animatable.

Transitionable Properties

The specification lists a number of CSS properties that a browser is supposed to support animated transition for. This list contains properties of CSS2.1. Any of the newer properties will be marked as animatable in their respective specifications — as order of the Flexible Box Layout shows.

The property’s value type is an important factor. The property margin-top accepts <length> and <percentage> values, but according to the list of transitionable CSS properties, only <length> is to be animated. But that didn’t keep browser vendors from implementing transitions for <percentage> values anyway. The word-spacing property is a different story, though. The specification includes <percentage> values, but at the time of writing, no browser is able to animate that.

Ignoring the (inherently unreliable) TransitionEnd events, a property is transitioned from value A to value B if its getComputedStyle() value is different from A and B at a given time during the transition. Because there is no such thing as a “CSS property value changed” event, you’re left with polling the DOM. setTimeout()’s resolution is not good enough to do this for fast transitions (a duration of less than a few hundred milliseconds). requestAnimationFrame() is your friend for this. The browser will call you before it repaints to screen, allowing you to grab a couple of intermediate values during transitions. Except for Opera, all engines have this feature already.

Instead of bloating this article with a full compatibility table, I’ve sent my results to Oli Studholme (@boblet), who has updated his list of “CSS Animatable Properties” accordingly.

Priority of Transition Properties

The specification on the transition-property property states that we’re allowed to define a property multiple times:

If a property is specified multiple times in the value of ‘transition-property’ (either on its own, via a shorthand that contains it, or via the ‘all’ value), then the transition that starts uses the duration, delay, and timing function at the index corresponding to the last item in the value of ‘transition-property’ that calls for animating that property.

So, we can make padding transition for 1 second, while making padding-left take 2 seconds; or define a default transition style using transition-property: all and overwrite that for particular properties.

In Firefox and IE, this works fine. Opera mixes up the priority order, though. Instead of simply using the last applicable property in the list, it treats padding-left as more specific than padding and all.

The real problem is WebKit. It’s somehow managed to execute a transition multiple times if a property is specified multiple times. To really freak out WebKit, try running a transition for transition-property: padding, padding-left with the very small transition-duration: 0.1s (warning: this is not a good idea for epileptics). WebKit will render the transition at least twice. But the real beauty is the TransitionEnd events, of which you could receive up to hundreds for a single transition.

Transitioning From And To auto

The CSS property value auto translates to “Dear browser, please calculate some reasonable value for this.” Paragraphs (<p>) and any block-level elements will be as wide as their parent if they have width: auto. There are times when you’ll change from width: auto to a specific width — and want to transition that change. The specification neither enforces nor denies the use of auto values for transitionable properties.

Firefox, IE and Opera cannot transition from or to auto values. IE makes a little exception for z-index, but that’s it. WebKit, on the other hand, is capable of transitioning from and to pretty much any CSS property that accepts the auto value. WebKit doesn’t like clip too much; for that property, it will only trigger a TransitionEnd event, without generating or showing any intermediate values or states during the transition.

For the other properties, such as width and height, WebKit’s behavior is not quite what you’d expect. If width: auto translated to a calculated width of 300px and you transitioned that to 100px, then your transition would not shrink from 300 to 100 pixels. Instead, it would grow from 0 to 100 pixels.

For a full compatibility table, have a look at “CSS Animatable Properties.”

Implicit Transitions

An “implicit transition” happens when a change to one property causes another property to be transitioned — or if you change a property on a parent element and cause a child to transition either the inherited property or a dependent property. Confused? Consider font-size: 18px; padding: 2em; — the padding is calculated as 2 × font-size, because that’s what em does, giving us 36 pixels.

There are various relative value types: <percentage>, <length>, em, rem, vh, vw, etc. Using a relative value, such as padding: 2em, makes the browser recalculate the property’s getComputedValue() every time its depending value (such as font-size) changes. That in turn triggers a transition for padding because the computed style has changed. This transition is considered to be “implicit” because the padding property was not modified explicitly.

Most browsers run these implicit transitions. The exception is IE 10, which runs them only for the line-height property. WebKit runs implicit transitions for all applicable properties except vertical-align. Besides font-relative property values, there are width-relative property values (usually <percentage>), viewport-relative property values (such as vh and vw), default initial values (such as column-gap: 1em in Opera), and then currentColor. All of these might — or might not — trigger implicit transitions.

In Firefox, these implicit transitions get particularly interesting when both the depending and the dependent properties are transitioned but their transition-duration or transition-delay do not match. While WebKit and Opera produce transitions that make sense visually, Firefox garbles things a bit. In IE, this is a non-issue because it doesn’t do implicit transitions.

Don’t forget about inheritance within the cascade. A font-size on a DOM element will be inherited by its children, as long as it’s not overwritten, potentially causing implicit transitions.

Transitions And Pseudo-Elements

Pseudo-elements (:before and :after) were introduced with CSS2 generated content. Read “Learning to Use the :before and :after Pseudo-Elements in CSS” if you’re not yet familiar with generated content. While CSS3 content defines additional pseudo-elements (::alternate, ::outside), they are not (yet) supported. All animatable CSS properties should also be animatable for pseudo-elements.

Firefox and IE 10 will transition properties on pseudo-elements. Opera, Chrome and Safari will not. WebKit added support in January 2013 — which you can already check out in WebKit nightly and Chrome Canary.

Transitions of generated content bring their own set of funky issues. TransitionEnd events aren’t fired at all. At some point in the future, they’re supposed to be triggered on the owner element and provide their pseudo-element through TransitionEnd.pseudoElement. But even the “Transition Events” section of the “CSS Transitions” editor’s draft doesn’t specify that properly yet.

There was a time when we would change the value of the content property so that IE 8 would re-render that element in certain circumstances (like when entering a :hover state). It turns out that this fix for old IE interferes with this ability for all other browsers. So, when trying to transition a property on a pseudo-element, make sure the content is not changed.

IE 10 will not run a transition for a pseudo-element’s :hover state if the owner element doesn’t have a :hover state as well:

.some-selector:before { content: "hello"; color: red; transition: all 1s linear 0s; } .some-selector:hover:before { color: green; } /* This next rule is necessary for IE 10 to transition :before on hover */ .some-selector:hover {}

The weird thing about this issue isn’t that you need a (possibly empty) :hover state on the owner element. It’s that if you don’t have one, IE 10 will interpret the :hover as :active (i.e. active when you mousedown on the element). The even weirder part is that the :active state persists even after mouseup and is removed only by another click on the document.

Background Tabs

At the time of writing, IE 10 is the only browser that responds to a tab being in the background or foreground. While it will finish a running transition if the tab is pushed to the background, it won’t start any new transitions there. IE 10 will wait until the tab is pulled into the foreground before starting any new transitions. Fortunately, IE 10 already supports the Page Visibility API, allowing developers to respond to this behavior.

We can expect similar things to happen with other browsers as they continue putting background tabs to sleep.

“Invisible” Elements

So, are transitions executed for DOM elements that are not attached to the DOM? Nope, not a single browser does that — why should they? Well, then, what about hidden elements? Most browsers have figured out that there’s no need to run a transition on an invisible (i.e. not painted) element. Opera thinks differently about this — it’ll run a transition regardless of whether it is painted or not.

Transitioning Before The DOM Is Ready?

The DOMContentLoaded event is triggered when the document leaves parsing mode. If you’re into jQuery, we’re talking about jQuery.ready() right now. Transitions can be run before this event happens.

Rendering Quirks

The issues I’ve described up to this point were found by testing against the specification. The tests were run automatically. But as it turns out, quite a few more problems are visible to the eye. The following quirks have been found by various other developers and could affect your meddling with transitions just as much.

At this time, transitioning a background from gradient to gradient is not possible. Transitioning from gradient to solid color is possible — with a big caveat. If a gradient is in play, then the color transition will happen from white to the target color, appearing to quickly flash white at the beginning of the transition. This can be observed in all current browsers.

Firefox seems to be using a different algorithm for rendering (or smoothing) images as they’re being animated (see an example). Apparently, Gecko sacrifies quality for performance during animation. Note that this occurs if a low enough transform: scale() is in play.

Firefox won’t properly animate from a:visited to a:hover or vice versa. Instead, it will jump from a:visited to a:link and then transition to a:hover, as you can see in this example. This is mentioned somewhat in “Privacy and the :visited Selector” on the Mozilla Developer Network. While IE 10 agrees with Chrome, Safari and Opera on the proper transition, it also runs the transition from a:link to a:visited on page load.

Transitioning multiple properties is not synchronized in Firefox and Webkit. You can see in this example how making the border smaller by the same amount that the padding increases (and vice versa) causes the following content to shake a bit. IE 10 and Opera get this right.

Firefox won’t animate an element’s properties if one of its parent’s position is changed, as you can see. Webkit, Opera and IE 10 behave correctly.

Recommendations For The Specification

Having read the specification from top to bottom and actually tested all of the features, I think a few changes would help:

• Introduce a TransitionsEnd (notice the plural), triggered once all transitions for an element have completed. It could provide a list of properties that have been animated — but I don’t see the use case for knowing what has transitioned, as long as I’m informed when all animations are done.
• Introduce a TransitionStart event, triggered for every property about to be transitioned. Because DOM events don’t come cheap and the JavaScript event loop and the rendering thread are not necessarily blocking each other, a single event TransitionsStart (there is that plural again) might be the better solution. I don’t see why I should be able to cancel the event, so this would be a “fire and forget” kind of thing.
• Make it clear what TransitionEnd is supposed to be triggered for. That padding versus padding-left issue in WebKit is rather annoying.
• Clearly specify how “implicit transitions,” such as line-height: 1em for transition-property: font-size, are to be handled.
• Add a ::transitioning pseudo-class that allows you to define pointer-events: none to prevent accidental hover states (among other things). The trick here is to prevent the application of styles that themselves would trigger a new transition or that would alter an already running transition.

In addition to these suggestions, we should be able to accomplish a number of common (simple) things without having to throw a lot of JavaScript at the problem:

• Every once in a while, you’ll want to completely mute all transitions — for example, because you’re changing the layout and need to calculate dimensions and positions before unleashing your beautiful transitions upon the visitor.
• Sometimes you’ll want to remove an object from the DOM and want that to be animated. Right now, you’d add a class, wait for the TransitionEnd event and then remove the element.
• Just as with removing things, you’ll want to add a new element and animate its appearance. Right now, you have to insert the element, set some “invisible style,” force a repaint and then revert to the new element’s actual style.
• Reordering, hiding and showing elements are common for any Web application. Giving that task a little style currently requires us to run utilities such as Isotope. A vanilla CSS solution could shave off some bytes.

Use The delay, Luke!

Imagine a number of elements packed together tightly. Imagine that the styles of those elements change on hover. Imagine moving your cursor (moderately quickly) over that group. What happens? Exactly: you’ll see the styles of those elements flash.

By adding a relatively short delay to your transitions, you can mitigate that effect; 20 milliseconds is undetectable to the human eye, but it’s enough for the mouse cursor to pass over small elements. The transitions won’t appear to lag because of this, and the visual distraction you might have caused just disappears. Simple trick, I know.

Conclusion

• Be very careful when using transition-property: all. You will get TransitionEnd events for properties that you didn’t expect to ever transition.
• Be careful when using shorthand properties, because the number of triggered events varies between browsers.
• Opera and IE don’t trigger events when a negative delay cancels out the duration.
• WebKit has real issues with the priority of properties such as transition-property: margin, margin-left. Avoid this for now.
• IE doesn’t support implicit transitions — for example, triggered for padding: 2em when font-size changes.
• Firefox and Opera cannot parse transition-property: all, width.
• Opera mixes up the priority of properties.
• Transitions on pseudo-elements do not trigger TransitionEnd events.
• IE 10 has a weird :hover bug when transitioning pseudo-elements.
• The specification leaves a lot of room for improvement.

Related Content

If you’re interested in transitions and animations — and how to use them wisely — have a look at these fantastic resources:

• “Dynamic Visual Effects With CSS3 Transitions,” Mike Sierra, Web Platform Docs
• “All You Need to Know About CSS Transitions,” Alex MacCaw
• Meaningful Transitions
• “Transitionable Interfaces,” Pasquale D’Silva, Medium
• Animatable (showcase of transitions), Lea Verou
• “CSS Animatable Properties,” Oli Studholme

Thanks go to Oli Studholme for taking the time to review this article, and Peter Linss for walking me through the CSS Working Group’s testing infrastructure.

(al)

© Rodney Rehm for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

  

One of the issues we need to be concerned with in responsive design is how to maintain hierarchy as elements on the screen are resized and reflowed. Trent Walton first called attention to the issue with his post “Content Choreography,” which showed how visual hierarchy gets lost when columns are dropped below one another.

While techniques exist to help with part of the problem, the solution also requires conscious thought in how you structure blocks of content in your HTML. You need to think about how you’ll want to rearrange blocks of content as your design moves from single to multiple columns.

What Is Content Choreography?

As a layout changes from a widescreen to a tablet to a smartphone, the number of columns is usually reduced from three or four down to one. The typical and easiest solution is to drop the columns one by one and stack them on top of each other.

The figure above shows three columns of content. The lines below the two right columns indicate that each will drop below the main content as the screen’s width decreases.

Once you’re down to a single column, the layout is constrained by the source order of the content blocks in the HTML. Whichever column comes first in the HTML is displayed at the top; whichever column is next in the HTML goes right below; and so on down the stack.

Unfortunately, this means that information that is highly visible at the top of the page when multiple columns are present ends up being far down the page as one column drops below another. If content is important enough to show at the top of the page when viewed on a widescreen browser, do we want to bury it on a smartphone screen?

All of the information in your sidebar column probably isn’t as important as all of the information in your main content column, but some of the sidebar content is likely more important than some of the main content.

The left side of the figure above shows a single column layout, where each column drops in its entirety below the previous one. The right side shows elements from each column mixing with other elements.

The left side of the image above shows the typical column drop. As the design is reduced to a single column, the content inside each container or column is dropped below all of the content in another container.

Ideally, the visual hierarchy would be maintained, and the content in different columns would intermix as the design moves from three columns to two to one. We’d also like more control over the display order of content, beyond the HTML source order. Both scenarios are illustrated on the right side of the image above.

This greater control over the blocks inside containers is what’s considered content choreography. I assume Trent chose the word “choreography” as a metaphor for how we’d like to orchestrate the movement of blocks of content as our layout changes.

Our current development practices don’t make this choreography easy. What they do make easy is dropping entire columns one below the other, which means that everything inside one column must always end up in its entirety above or below everything in another column.

Two Problems in One

What I’ve described above are really two separate problems:

• Source order
  In a single-column layout, blocks of content will display in the same order as they’re located in the HTML structure. Unfortunately, the best source order for one layout isn’t necessarily the best source order for another.
• Intermixing content
  Instead of having to drop entire columns of content below one another, we’d like to mix blocks of content from the different columns in the single-column layout.

The first issue has some technical solutions on the way, one of which is just about here. The second issue will require that we change our thinking in how we develop layouts.

Solving The Source-Order Problem

In time, there will be several solutions to the source-order issue, in the form of new CSS specifications. Depending on which browsers you need to support and what you’re willing to do to support them, one of those specifications may already be here.

Three specifications that we’ll likely find ourselves using in the future are:

• “Flexbox,”
• “Regions,”
• “Grid Layout.”

The second and third of these specifications have almost no support in current browsers. Surprisingly, Internet Explorer is leading the way with both. IE 10 supports regions and grid layouts with the -ms vendor prefix. No other browser offers any support at the moment, so we’ll have to wait on these specs a bit longer.

Flexbox, however, has pretty good support. The spec has undergone some changes, and two versions are currently supported by browsers. If you don’t mind mixing the old and new syntaxes, you can get flexbox to work in the current versions of almost all browsers.

Opera mini and IE below version 10 don’t support any flexbox syntax. However, you can use the Flexie polyfill to add support for IE. Flexie uses the old flexbox syntax, but it does support IE as far back as version 6. Flexbox deserves its own article to be explained in detail, so I’ll point you to some articles I’ve written showing the old syntax and the new syntax, as well as one that walks you through the new syntax to set up a responsive layout that overcomes the issue of source order.

Suffice it to say that with a single CSS property, we can essentially tell our documents to display blocks of content in a different order than how the source code orders the blocks in the HTML. Jordan Moore has also written about flexbox and content choreography, and he’s created a demo to illustrate.

What you should take away from this section is that solutions to the source-order problem are coming soon — one of them very soon. It won’t be long before we can easily rearrange blocks inside a single container. However, rearranging blocks inside one container isn’t the same as rearranging them across several containers.

Solving The Intermixing Content Problem

Unlike the source-order problem, the issue of intermixing content across columns doesn’t have a technical solution. It’s up to us, and, ultimately, it means we need to wrap content in fewer HTML containers.

We’ll have to dig a little deeper into the problem to understand why this is so.

CSS Visual Formatting Models

CSS offers several visual formatting models, such as the normal document flow, floated elements and positioned elements. Flexbox is part of another, the flexible box layout model. In all of these models, elements are located relative to a containing element.

We can make it look as though elements are not bound by their containers, but they still are. For example, you could float an element that’s inside one column and give it a negative margin so large that it appears to be located in another column, however, elements in that other column won’t reorient themselves. To these elements, the floated element is still in the first column.

Other elements in the first column may relocate themselves to fill the now vacated space, but elements in the second column won’t. Even positioned elements are positioned relative to some parent, although that parent might be the html element itself. When you absolutely position an element and move it somewhere on the screen, other elements won’t get out of the way. We need them to get out of the way, though, if we’re going to intermix page elements.

With a little thought and CSS, you can usually figure out some way to rearrange elements inside one container however you like. With a little more thought, you can even make elements in one container appear to be located inside another, although you’ll usually have to position the elements in that other container with more complex CSS and with what Harry Roberts refers to as “magic numbers.”

If the term is new to you, magic numbers are those numbers we use to make something work in a single particular instance. They typically stop working as soon as some other value changes, and, given the nature of responsive design, other values are always changing. Magic numbers in CSS are best avoided.

We Need to Give Up Containers

For the last few years, whenever we’ve wanted to move a group of adjacent elements to a certain part of a layout, we’d wrap those elements in a container and write CSS to display the container somewhere in the design. I’m sure you’ve used CSS selectors like #wrapper and #container more than once.

We need fewer of these HTML containers and more CSS virtual container classes that we can apply to different elements as needed.

In other words, instead of this…

<div id="container"> <div>Content here</div> <div>Content here</div> <div>Content here</div> </div>

… we need more of this:

<div class="container">Content here</div> <div class="container">Content here</div> <div class="container">Content here</div>

In the latter block, each division might have a different class name or perhaps different additional classes applied. This allows for greater flexibility in rearranging them in the layout. In the first block of code, the three content divisions will always reside inside their parent container.

I’m not suggesting that the first block of HTML above should never be used. There will absolutely be times when wrapping several divisions of content with a container makes sense. However, if you want some of those blocks to intermix with elements in other columns, then you’ll have to think more in terms of the second block of HTML above.

With CSS, we have the ability to rearrange blocks inside a container. We don’t have the ability to break content out of one container and move it inside another container. If you want more mixing of blocks, then you’ll need fewer containers.

Examples

While there are currently far more instances of websites that are dropping columns wholesale, there are certainly websites that mix content in one column with content in another column.

Let me first offer a detailed look at my own website, since I’m most familiar with it. I’ll follow this up with a few other websites that intermix content in slightly different ways.

A Personal Example

Around the time that Trent coined the term “content choreography,” I was working on a redesign of my website and was trying to figure out how to mix content blocks as the layout changed.

The image below shows the top of a typical blog post on my website when the browser is wide enough to accommodate two columns. Click the image to see the live post.

Meta information such as my name and the publication date are in a column to the left, while the article’s title, main text, images, headings and so on are in a column to the right.

My website when the browser is wide enough to accommodate two columns.

Seeing the layout, you might instinctively think each “column” is wrapped in its own container and that I’ve floated both columns left or right; it’s how I would have developed this layout a few years ago. But doing that leads to the problem of one of the columns being forced to drop below the other on small screens.

Below is the same page as a single column on a narrower screen. The meta information from the left column sits below the article’s title from the right column but above everything else in that right column. Both “columns” of content have actually been inside the same container all along.

My website as a single column on a narrower screen.

The image below presents a more abstract view of what’s going on. On the left, you see the layout as it appears when displayed as a single column. On the right is the two-column version of the layout.

Every element is its own unique block and serves as its own container. The page’s main heading is its own contained block. All of the meta information is inside another container directly below it. After that, every paragraph, subheading and image is also its own self-contained block of content. The same goes for anything else that might end up in a post, such as a block quote or code block.

A more abstract view of what’s going on.

On small screens, all of the blocks display in the source order. On wider screens, I shift this entire single “column” to the right by adding a left margin to each individual block. In the CSS, I have a long list of selectors with a single line of declarations. When I want something to appear in the “left column,” I float it left and reset its margin to zero.

The solution is hardly perfect. Blocks pulled into the virtual left column won’t slide up or down. They simply move to the left. This solution doesn’t enable me to display something from the bottom of the article at the top of the left column. But, hopefully, this illustrates how rethinking containers can help us intermix content from different columns into a single column.

The Next Web

The Next Web mostly drops columns down as it rearranges from three columns to one, but it does intermix elements at the top of the page.

The image above shows the website displayed as two columns (on the left) and a single column (on the right). The blue outline shows the container around elements at the top of the page. You can see that the secondary stories to the right of the top story drop below it but remain above the other stories, due to the way the containers have been set up.

In the single column, the images in all of the first three stories are now physically the same size, so the hierarchy has changed. However, the second and third stories are still seen as “less important” because they come after the top story.

This intermixing is achieved by thinking in advance of which elements will shift columns and by placing elements that need to be rearranged in the same container, separate from other containers of content.

Time

Time magazine intermixes content across columns and containers. Notice how the “Latest Headlines” section (in the green container) moves from the right column at the top to just below the main image and story links in the single column.

While not shown in the image above, the row of four images on the left follows the “Latest Headlines” in the single column. The remaining content in the right column drops much further down. You can see this by viewing the website directly.

The website achieves this intermixing by ignoring most of what I’ve said in this post about using fewer containers. Instead, it uses JavaScript to rewrite the HTML, moving elements in and out of different containers as the layout changes. It is another solution to this issue, although better planning up front is preferable.

Enoch’s Fish & Chips

The navigation on Enoch’s Fish & Chips’ website integrates with the logo and company blurb when the layout is a single column:

The navigation (and the tagline further down) moves to the right column when the browser is wide enough to accommodate multiple columns.

The website rearranges these elements similar to the way I rearrange elements on my own website; the logo, navigation, blurb and tagline are each a separate container. To move them around, the website uses positioning instead of floats, but otherwise, the principle is the same.

Closing Thoughts

Many of us have, understandably, been taking the easy way out with responsive layouts. When the width of a screen cannot accommodate a column, we’ve been dropping the column in its entirety below other columns. In some cases, this is perfectly fine. In others, it breaks the carefully designed hierarchy.

We face two issues in maintaining the hierarchy. The first is having to follow the HTML source order when the layout is a single column. The solution to this problem is a technical one and is coming in the form of new CSS specs that will allow the display order and the HTML source order to be different.

The second problem is less technical and more a challenge to how we think about structuring our HTML, particularly to how we use containers. Elements can’t move from one container to the next. We can fake it with complex CSS, or we can rewrite the HTML with JavaScript; but, ultimately, if we want to intermix elements, we’re best of using fewer HTML containers to create columns. Instead, we should leave more of our content blocks in their own containers and use CSS to create virtual columns in the layout.

This solution doesn’t confine our elements to structural containers and instead enables us to more easily rearrange the elements in different layouts.

(al)

© Steven Bradley for Smashing Magazine, 2013.