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Still Life Under Ice
I like the textures in this one but I might prefer it black & white. Hmmm.. undecided.
Originally uploaded by thingsinjars on flickr
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Appreciate the artisans
I know that every professional thinks their bit of the process is more important than people give them credit for. Designer's don't just colour in wireframes handed to them by the Information Architect. IAs don't just draw boxes and arrows. Copy writers don't just copy-and-paste the company brochure over the lorem ipsum.
Now that I've said that, I must now point out: Developers don't get nearly enough credit.
This may be something to do with the odd confusion that is 'web designer vs. web developer'. In some - and possibly the majority of - agencies, the web designer not only designs what the page looks like in Photoshop/Fireworks/Whatever but also produces the HTML templates, CSS and whatever JavaScript they feel comfortable with (the tutorials at jQuery for Designers probably help, too). In these agencies, if there is such a person as a web developer, they are most likely responsible for moving the relevant bits of HTML into template files, adding in any back-end integration and possibly writing some of the trickier JavaScript. The confusion arises in the other kind of agencies. The kind where web designers make Photoshop files and web developers turn them into HTML. The designer doesn't necessarily need to know anything about HTML, semantics or scripting. Not to minimise the importance of this kind of designer - they'll know a lot about typography, and visual relations, probably quite a lot about user experience and the process involved in bridging the gap between what the client wants to say and how the user wants to hear - but it's this kind of web developer I think doesn't get enough credit.
If you're designing a site with a full knowledge of how it could be marked up, you will naturally - even if it's subconsciously - be marking it up in your head. This will influence your design and not necessarily in a bad way. You might ensure the semantics are just that little bit clearer or you might nudge these bits over that way so they can be grouped with those other ones there. If, however, you design with no thought at all about how this is going to be made, you will, most likely, do some things that you wouldn't otherwise. If your front-end developer can take this and turn it into a perfectly semantic, clean-coded masterpiece of HTML and CSS then apply JavaScript to progressively enhance the heck out of it and still keep it looking like you designed, they deserve to be lauded, applauded, praised and thanked. Publicly. The usual outcome of this situation is that the designer gets asked along to the awards ceremonies, puts it on their portfolio, an article in the Drum, happy. The developer gets a pat on the back from the team leader and asked if they could just tidy up how it looks in IE5.5 before they head home for the night, that'd be great, thanks.
Sure, maybe we just need some better awards ceremonies for geeks. The kind of thing that the agency sales team will be able to brag about to potential customers (as that, in essence, seems to be the point of awards ceremonies) but I also think there might need to be a bit of a change of opinion in the industry. Just as designers don't just colour in wireframes, developers don't just open the designs in Photoshop and press 'Save for web...'.
I hope this doesn't sound too ranty. These thoughts were prompted after seeing a few designer and copy writer portfolios which contained sites that either I'd built or one of my team had built. Writers credited, designers credited, developers (who built some awesome stuff on them, by the way) lost in the mists of time.
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Heidi
This probably won't mean much to anyone unless you're familiar with the Japanese Heidi cartoon which was popular in Germany in the 80s.
When I first heard the theme, I thought the intro should have gone like this.
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User style
A few years ago, I made a prediction about the way the web was going and so far it hasn't come true but it's definitely coming closer. To me it seems that the logical extension of us developers separating style and substance – what we've been doing for years with semantic mark-up – is for the general consumer to take that substance and give it their own style. I'm in no way suggesting that everyone become a designer. That would be a terrible, terrible thing. What I mean is that the consumer takes in/reads/experiences whatever it is you're giving to them in the manner that best suits them. There are many examples of what I mean around already but they're still not quite where I think they will end up.
RSS
We (web developers) already provide RSS feeds on our sites. By subscribing to a site's RSS feed, you get the content delivered directly to your RSS reader. As long as the site is providing the full article content (shame on you, if not) the consumer gets to see your content in a design format you have little control over. There is a basic level allowed for RSS formatting but nothing you can rely on. The control for the visual appearance of your content is now in the hands of the designer of the reader and the consumer (by way of choosing which reader they use).
userstyle.css
This was what initially prompted my thoughts on the subject. I've used Opera as my main browser for almost 10 years and I've always liked the Author mode/User mode switch. In essence, you can quickly toggle between seeing a web page as it was intended by the designer or disregarding the original layout and applying your own stylesheets to it. For the most part, this is used to be able to set high contrast for visually impaired users or to test various criteria (showing only images that have missing alt attributes, for example) but they can be used to produce any visual effect achievable with CSS.
User stylesheets can also be assigned on a per-site basis rather than globally which means that you could have your Google results rendered in courier, right-aligned in green on black while your facebook pages can be set in Times in a sepia colourscheme.
As with many things on the web, userstyles became a lot more popular once this functionality was available in Firefox (via the add-on Stylish) and not just Opera. Now there's a growing community of Userstyle developers and a directory of styles. Unfortunately, this is still not quite ready for mainstream use. It requires at least a basic level of technical ability to enable userstyles and to install them.
userscript.js
The userstyles community is, however, dwarfed in comparison to the userscript community. In pretty much exactly the same way that userstyles work, users can execute a specific Javascript file whenever they visit a site. Again, this can be enabled in Opera using site preferences and in Firefox using the Greasemonkey add-on. These scripts can completely change the way a site functions as well as how it looks. Combine them with userstyles (which userscripts can include automatically) and the only thing you can rely on remaining from your original design is the URL. There's a massive database of userscripts available.
Again, though, these are still just that little bit too hard. The standard user isn't going to install the extension, isn't going to browse for scripts and isn't going to run Opera so these are still a bit too far away.
Grab now, read later
There are now quite a few sites where you can save stuff to read later. If you find an interesting article or a funny blog post but don't have time to read it or if it appears on a site with a garish and unusable design, you can send it to Instapaper or Evernote . You can then read it in their interface, on your iPhone, on your Kindle... all separated from your design.
It's not only text that gets this treatment, you can use Ember and LittleSnapper to grab and store visuals for later perusal or use Huffduffer to collect any audio files you find and serve them back to you as your very own personalised podcast. Again, this is your content separated entirely from the way you wanted it seen. And that's a good thing.
For content creators, all this means is that your content can be consumed anywhere, even via sites, tools and delivery mechnisms you've never heard of. Designers, don't despair, users aren't suddenly going to take their content elsewhere and not need you any more – users still want and need things designed well, this just means that if your design works for the user for a particular type of content, they'll use it for any content of that type. I'd much rather watch youtube videos using vimeo's layout than youtube's. Actually, I'd much rather have vimeo's comments, too.
We're still quite a way off the average user being able to see whatever they want however they want it but these technologies and tools are definitely heading that way. I just wish I'd made a bet on it way back when.
