Things I Like
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As I scroll through my feeds littered with stories of deplorable behavior coming from the tech industry and beyond, I rest assured knowing there’s a massive community of people working on the Web that value honesty, openness, and collaboration.
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I'm with Elliot on the way he talks about Readmill. It was so beautiful and easy to use, I am sad they are shutting down. But I am also so grateful that they have left us with a beautiful reading journal as well as an easy export to take our memories with us.
I’ll miss you Readmill. My home screen will feel empty without you. Oh, and I don’t think you failed at all.
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It's not that responsive design inherently takes longer; we just don’t know as much about the nuances like performance and image sizes and resolution-independent graphics… yet.
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By refusing to let myself screw up, I was screwing up. Much of that style guide is in the garbage bin now. It was so airtight with certainty it was useless as a design document.
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The user sees the world as it is. Our job as builders is to create the world as it could be.
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The good news is that the transition can be made—and a lot of folks are sharing how they’re handling it. Eventually those walls between roles will break down.
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Good taste is a myth. A story our rider creates to serve the needs of the elephant. And the sooner you kill your good taste idol, the sooner you’re going to give yourself a chance to be a better designer.
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The wounds are a gift: with the mask gone, you get to be a person again. You learn how to accept help, and better yet, how to better give it.
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I use the term device-agnostic, now synonymous (to me) with good web design, to distinguish those sites that embrace the inherent variability of the web—which, in itself, is nothing new.
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So what can we do? Study, duh. Change our perspectives by constantly telling ourselves "this is not all about me." The more we study and talk and write about the subject, the quicker and easier it will be to change the idea of accessibility being an afterthought or something to wait to consider until the end "if we have the time and the budget."
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But I do wonder if our collective short-term frustrations leads us to longer-term losses. And seeing the web not as a “platform” but as a “continuum”—a truly fluid, chaotic design medium serving millions of imperfect clients—might help.
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We need to remember that there are many narrative options available to us, not one. Each has its own pros and cons that we as an industry can learn more about and you, as someone interested, can discover your favorite.
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It’s our job to explain how the web works …and how the unevenly-distributed nature of browser capabilities is not a bug, it’s a feature.
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Web sites are now expected to work on a wide array of devices and screen resolutions, but somehow screen readers and magnifiers are never listed as a “device” when speaking about responsive design.
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Our work, our responsibility, does not end when building is complete. Perhaps because the building is never really complete.