Writings
1-15 of 17 in Articles
Discovering Trustworthiness10
by Matt Brown on Mar 10, 2010 in Design
These days, one thing web designers don't have to worry about is how to do something. And by something, I mean just about anything. Read More…
A Common Sense Content Strategy8
by Tiffani Jones on Mar 04, 2010 in Process
Lately, everyone on the web is talking about content. Content strategy has made its way into our collective consciousness and web writing is coming into its own. Read More…
The Future of Wireframes30
by Nishant Kothary on Mar 02, 2010 in Design
As we move into the next decade of web design, it's time for us to reevaluate our understanding of wireframes—a tried and tested user experience staple. Read More…
The Anatomy of Web Design22
by Nishant Kothary on Feb 18, 2010 in Process
We redesigned MIX Online in the Winter of 2009. In this article, I’ll share how we did it. In elaborate detail. Read More…
Web Forms for People25
by Luke Wroblewski on Dec 14, 2009 in Design
As the Web has grown, so has the number of ways people use it. Today, it’s not uncommon for Web users to shop, chat with friends or strangers, manage their bank accounts and exercise routines, share photos or videos, and more. In fact, if it can be done online, it probably already is. Read More…
Microformats Role Play10
by Emily Lewis on Aug 25, 2009 in Web Culture
Microformats have been getting a fair amount of attention these days. Between the new value class pattern, Google's Rich Snippets and the Associated Press's move to create hNews (though, technically not a microformat), not a day goes by that I don't see a blog post or article about microformats. Read More…
The Value Class Pattern9
by Jeremy Keith on Aug 25, 2009 in Development
Microformats are nifty little bits of semantically rich markup. But there have been some concerns about microformats with regard to accessibility and internationalization. With the value class pattern, those concerns are addressed and resolved. Read More…
View source has a posse11
by Chris Messina on Jul 22, 2009 in Web Culture
View Source demands a place in a web application’s interface, equally accessible to developers and hobbyists of all levels of expertise, because it is a feature for everybody — not just for experts. Even if it’s technically advanced, it’s an essential part of the interface as the first entry point for so many people in understanding the way the web works. The tradition of View Source is essential for preserving transparency, spreading knowledge, techniques, and emerging practices for these modern applications built with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Wherever possible, we must intentionally include the facility to view the source of an application. It should be obvious by now: View Source has a posse the size of the entire web. Read More…
Ruby And Your Browser2
by Leon Gersing on Jul 21, 2009 in Development
Moving Ruby from the server to the client opens up a whole new world of possibilities for web developers. In this article, Leon demonstrates a powerful technique enabled by Gestalt: using IronRuby to call a REST-based web service. The rest is up to your imagination. Read More…
The Rise Of jQuery18
by Yehuda Katz on Apr 28, 2009 in Development
jQuery uses the existing, ubiquitous API for interacting with the DOM: CSS selectors. Millions of designers already know how to use CSS. Before jQuery, JavaScript developers crawled the DOM with nightmarish, error-prone code while their designer brethren could simply select some page elements and apply styles. jQuery brings the accessibility of CSS targeting to JavaScript. Read More…
Glimmer: a jQuery Interactive Design Tool42
by Karsten Januszewski on Apr 27, 2009 in Design
Glimmer: a jQuery Interactive Design Tool is a prototype from the Mix Online Labs which makes jQuery accessible through a visual tool. The objective for Glimmer is pretty simple: to enable the power of jQuery through an interactive design surface. If jQuery is the "write less, do more” JavaScript library, then Glimmer is the “write none, do more” jQuery design tool. Glimmer has three core audiences: power users, designers and developers. Read More…
Visualization Trends For The Noosphere13
by Jon Udell on Jan 30, 2009 in Web Culture
Data visualization is an expressive medium. We use it to tell stories that help us make sense of the world. For five hundred years we wrote and illustrated those stories for the printed page. Toward the end of the last century, Edward Tufte showed us how much we had yet to learn about envisioning information using ink on paper. And his lessons will always inform our practice. But with data processing tools, networked software, and digital displays, we enter a new era of data visualization -- and not a moment too soon. Read More…
5 Tips For Building Effective Infographics19
by Joshua Allen on Jan 30, 2009 in Development
Information Visualization is a hot topic. It seems like a new data visualization library or artistic visualization is released every week. As Jon Udell's article shows, we are just beginning to see how software can help us find meaning in data. So, when we set out to create this issue of MIX Online, we decided to focus specifically on interactive infographics, a fascinating application of information visualization that hasn't received much coverage. Read More…
Web Standards: Where the ROI is49
by Molly Holzschlag on Dec 05, 2008 in Web Culture
Editor's Note: Web designers and developers seem to talk a lot about "Web Standards", but what about the people who sign the contracts and pay the bills? Are Web Standards just another tax that businesspeople are being asked to pay, or is there truly sustainable business value in adopting Web Standards? Why is Microsoft investing so heavily in improving Web Standards support in our line of products. We asked Molly to write this article to succinctly explain the business value of Web Standards to business decision makers. Read More…
Web Design from the Gut52
by Nishant Kothary on Dec 05, 2008 in Design
Scour the Web searching for some permutation of the keywords "web", "design", "workflow", "process", "aneurism" - OK, not so much the last one - and, you'll probably find a plethora of literature that delves into five-phase processes that usually start and end with phases "Concept" and "Launch" respectively. Not that there's anything wrong them; in fact, they're generally quite accurate and most of those phases do, in fact, occur. But in my experience, it's far from linear; to the contrary, the process is usually pretty iterative, often random, and frequently characterized by all kinds of obstacles - from ridiculous deadlines to equally ridiculous stakeholders. In this article, we will reflect on the web design process - the real-world process - through the lens of the making of MIX Online. The goal is not to be prescriptive, but to attempt to extrapolate some practical lessons through this experience by explaining it in bold and honest detail. Read More…
