Jeffrey Zeldman:
How can we tell which sites should be faster, and which should be slower? It’s easy. If the content is delivered for the good of the general public, the presentation must facilitate slow, careful reading. If it’s designed to promote our business or help a customer get an answer to her question, it must be designed for speed of relevancy.
Jeffrey Zeldman:
Good communication strives for clarity. Design is its most brilliant when it appears most obvious—most simple. The question for web designers should never be how complex can we make it. But that’s what it has become. Just as, in pursuit of “delight,” we forget the true joy reliable, invisible interfaces can bring, so too, in chasing job security, do we pile on the platform requirements, forgetting that design is about solving business and customer problems … and that baseline skills never go out of fashion.
Adam Silver:
The best way to make pages fast, is to have less stuff in them. You’d be forgiven for wanting to punch me in the face as this is obvious. And yet web pages keep getting fatter and fatter.
Aaron Gustafson:
Last week, two events reminded us, yet again, of how right Douglas Crockford was when he declared the web “the most hostile software engineering environment imaginable.” Both were serious enough to take down an entire site—actually hundreds of entire sites, as it turned out. And both were avoidable.
Start simply. Code defensively. User-test the heck out of it. Recognize the chaos. Embrace it. And build resilient web experiences that will work no matter what the internet throws at them.
Frank Chimero:
I find that the more input I have in the content and strategy of the project, the less burden I place on the aesthetics. Perhaps this is because I believe the aesthetic of the work should be an extention of its objectives, so if you get the strategy right, the look follows. Since I like to tackle problems sideways, I must risk being plain and rely on direct visuals to keep the work comprehensible.
Jen Simmons introduces the concept of Intrinsic Web Design. It’s a bold idea that brings together all recent advances in CSS layout. It really feels like a paradigm shift — I love it.
Jeremy Keith’s notes are a good companion to the slides, and code examples can be found in Jen’s CodePen.
Update: a video of the talk is now available.
Mark Brown demystifies something I’ve long considered to be a dark art: puzzle game design.
How do you make something that leaves a player stumped and scratching their head, and then makes them feel very smart when they finally figure out the answer? What makes a puzzle too hard, Or too easy?
The conversation around video game difficulty and accessibility is noticeably evolving in a positive way.