When writing CSS3 properties, the modern wisdom is to list the “real” property last and the vendor prefixes first:

.not-a-square { -webkit-border-radius: 10px; -moz-border-radius: 10px; border-radius: 10px; }

Why is this method of ordering properties so commonly taught? Here is what it would look like “the wrong way”:

.not-a-square { border-radius: 10px; -moz-border-radius: 10px; -webkit-border-radius: 10px; }

Even doing it “the wrong way”, won’t the border radius be the same no matter what, forever? A quick investigation might lead you to conclude that it will, and this ordering of properties is rather nonsense.

1. The Long Long Ago: None of the properties are supported, order doesn’t matter.
2. The Past: Only vendor prefixes are supported, order doesn’t matter.
3. The Now: Both vendor prefixes and actual property are supported. If prefix is last, it will override actual property, but both are the same anyway.
4. The Future: Only actual property is supported, order doesn’t matter.

Here’s a simple chart with this concept at work.

Woah there, Cowboy

The fact is, the ordering of CSS3 properties is important, and the above is fundamentally flawed. “The Now” is exactly the problem. We are at a crucial juncture in browser history where some browsers are supporting both the vendor prefixed version and the actual CSS3 property. Right now it’s specifically WebKit that is doing this, and the way they have implemented it is that if you list the vendor prefix after the actual property, the vendor prefix will override and be the property that renders.

Why does that matter? In the simple border-radius example we saw above, either way, the corners on that element will have a border-radius of 10px. There is no difference in how the vendor prefix and “real” property handle rounded corners when you set only one value. The problem is that there is a difference between the implementations of the properties when passing more than one value.

.not-a-square { /* These do totally different things */ border-radius: 30px 10px; -webkit-border-radius: 30px 10px; }

The spec or “real” version will render the top left and bottom right corners at 30px and the top right and bottom left corners at 10px. The vendor prefix will render all four corners with elliptical corners 30px wide and 10px tall.

So if you’ve been blinding including the real border-radius at the end of your property lists using identical values, and then switch from Safari 4 to Safari 5, you’d see a dramatic change in how the above code was styling your boxes.

See here

You could fix this up by fiddling with the values to make sure they do the same thing… but if you are going to fiddle with anything, you might as well fiddle with the real property as that will be supported version in the future. Listing the real property last is definitely the way to go. Because it will be based entirely on the spec, it will match other browsers implementations, and will be the only supported version as time goes on and vendor prefixes are removed.

Border radius isn’t the only example here. Note the dramaticly different syntaxes for background-image gradients. Now there is no “real” spec version of these values yet, but when there is, the implementation will be different than what we are using now. That should be listed last in the ordering of the properties to future proof that as well.

Thanks to @mattwiebe and @snookca for helping me understand this better.

Surely I’m late to the game with this (as usual these days), but this is possibly the greatest music video ever conceived. Speaking as a former marching band geek of course. (Hat tip Hannah Donovan)

Last week we looked at part one of our two part series on designing better presentations. We learned practical tips on using photography, typography, color and more to create stunning results.

Today we’ll wrap things up with tips six through ten and teach you how simplifying your designs can lead to drastically improved results. Let’s get started!

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#6 Simpler is Better

This is a major stumbling block for non-designers. The problem stems from a basic misunderstanding of what a presentation slide should be. In most cases, the slide should not be the ultimate source of content and information. Instead, the speaker is what makes the presentation valuable. The speaker should provide the vast majority of the content, information, insight, bad jokes, etc.

After all, if the presentation slides contain all the information begin conveyed, then why would the audience even need a speaker? You could just provide everyone with a download link and bid them a good day.

I’ve seen far too many people give presentations with slides that look like the one below:

You might think I’m being facetious with my design but trust me I’ve seen slides that were far worse. Presentation slides are not to be confused with magazines. You can’t cram this much content onto a slide without completely losing the functionality. Even if you organize all of the information nicely and create a beautiful slide, you’ve still missed the mark.

Again, remember that your speech is the reason you’re up in front of people. The presentation should serve as a drastically simplified visual aid that, when flipped through, would present a rough outline of your speech.

Use your slides to grab and hold the audience’s attention through attractive visuals. People get bored easily listening to speeches and having something pretty to look at helps us focus.

Keeping your slide contents simple also discourages you from simply reading your speech from the slide. It’s a cliche example but I have in fact seen multiple presenters place every word of their speech on the slide and then simply read it off. As boring as normal speeches are, hearing someone read to you for twenty minutes is even worse!

Notice how the slide below pulls you in with an incomplete statement. The graphic no doubt reinforces the answer but we won’t know unless we actually listen to the speech to see what the answer is! This is an excellent example of using a slide as a visual aid that strengthens your presentation rather than serving as a giant printout of your speech.

#7 Avoid the Bullet Point Plague

Several presenters have become aware of the “reading from your slide” problem and pompously proclaim that they just can’t stand it when people do such a thing, which is why they use bullet points.

Bullet points are magical (marketing folks freaking love bullet points). They are a great way to say everything you need to say in a convenient list form. All of the most complex ideas ever composed by mankind can be placed into a bulleted list and even the dullest of individuals will suddenly see the light… right? Not quite.

Bullet points are in fact a great tool to convey the most important parts of your speech. It’s a familiar format that clearly separates ideas and is easy to digest. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that, like any good tool, bullet points can be abused. Presenters often get carried away and begin to repeat the mistakes of the previous tip only in bullet form.

Placing forty-two points on a single slide is exactly like using multiple paragraphs; doing so kills the usefulness of the slide. Remember that bullet points are supposed to convey the important information. To do that effectively you must actually make a decision on what you think is important vs. what should just be left to the speech.

Check out how the slide below uses three bullet points to convey factual statistics. Numbers are particularly hard to take in and remember unless you see it written down so using these as bullet points is a great place to start.

Keep it simple and remember that even the bullets don’t have to be self-explanatory. Again, that’s what you’re there for.

#8 Create Clear Focal Points

No matter what you’re designing, it’s important to consider how you want to direct the viewer’s attention. Don’t leave it up to chance, instead structure the experience in the way that you believe best facilitates the message.

Notice how the slide below used color to direct your attention to specific areas. The words in yellow stand out considerably from the rest of the content and therefore tend to draw your attention more.

With text you can use color, size, typeface style or boldness to create clear focal points. Keep in mind that it’s a good idea to have one primary focal point (like the word “share” above) followed up by one or two secondary focal points that aren’t quite as strong.

Note that text isn’t the only way to create strong focal points. Photographs and illustrations are also great ways to bring the viewer’s attention to a given area. Notice how the child’s eyes in the slide below really catch your attention and then gradually bring you down the headline as you move on.

For more information on designing with faces, check out our complete guide.

Ultimately, remember that the lack of clear focal points can cause a viewer to quickly lose interest. When something is designed well it gives people a clear idea of where you want them to look, even if only on a subconscious level.

#9 Create a Captivating Cover

The cover slide is often either skipped entirely or shown for only a second in many presentations. However, a good cover design is a great way to set the tone for the entire presentation.

Until that slide is shown, the audience has no idea what to expect from your visual aid. Creating a beautiful cover and leaving it up while you introduce yourself and your speech can really start things off on a positive note and give the audience a psychological heads up to pay attention because they’re about to see some awesome slides.

Creating an attractive cover also provides you with the start of a visual theme that you can carry on throughout the rest of the presentation. This helps the presentation seem cohesive and professionally done rather than the random and scattered feel of seeing a completely different design on every slide.

As an example, check out the beautiful cover design above by Fabio Sasso at Abduzeedo and then look at the sample content slide below to see how he applies this dirty grunge theme to the rest of the presentation.

It’s often a good idea to design a cover along with a few different blank content slides that you can use throughout the entire presentation. You can then carry out a unified design and save yourself a lot of design work by having two to three blanks to pull from.

If you’re not a designer, then it can be intimidating to try to create a beautiful cover. In these circumstances, refer to tips #2 and #4 from part one and let professional photography in conjunction with simple typography handle all the work for you.

#10 Make ‘em Laugh

Every good speaker knows that one of the single best ways to keep your audience interested is through the use of humor. Unfortunately, not everyone can make an audience bust a gut like Bill Cosby or Brian Regan.

Whether you suck at delivering witty one liners or are a natural born comedian, it helps ease the pressure to let your slides handle some or all of the humor. This way you can be perceived as funny without worrying about screwing up the punch line.

Remember that your goal doesn’t have to be audible laughter from the entire room. Even the occasional smile from a few audience members goes a long way because it shows that they’re actually paying attention!

My best advice in this area is to try not to pour the humor on too thick. The audience will notice if you seem to be trying too hard. Find the most boring or complicated parts of your speech and break them up with a funny slide or two.

Be sure to always consider your audience carefully when deciding what sort of humor is appropriate. Offending the audience is far worse than boring them.

If you find that you’re not a particularly clever person with either pictures or words, try inserting a simple comic that illustrates your point effectively. Just make sure the comic is a quick, near instant read and not something with lots of dialog spread across four panels.

Again, notice how the example above is effective in setting a lighthearted tone to the presentation even though it is unlikely to actually make anyone actually burst into laughter.

Conclusion

To sum up, let’s take a quick look at all ten tips for designing presentations that don’t suck from both articles.

• 1. Don’t Use a Built-In Theme
• 2. Use Quality Photography
• 3. Solid Colors Rock
• 4. Typography Speaks Volumes
• 5. Watch Your Readability
• 6. Simpler is Better
• 7. Avoid the Bullet Point Plague
• 8. Create Clear Focal Points
• 9. Create a Captivating Cover
• 10. Make ‘em Laugh

I hope you’ve found these tips practical and easily implementable. Ultimately the goal here was to show you that you don’t necessarily have to be a professional designer to create great looking and effective presentations. Leave a comment below if you want to join the discussion and share your own tips and tricks for better slide design.

The Geolocation Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Geolocation API Specification. The Geolocation API defines a high-level interface to location information associated only with the device hosting the implementation, such as latitude and longitude. The API itself... W3C Staff

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of XMLHttpRequest Level 2. The XMLHttpRequest Level 2 specification enhances the XMLHttpRequest object with new features, such as cross-origin requests, progress events, and the handling of byte streams for both... W3C Staff

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of The Widget Interface. This specification defines an application programming interface (API) for widgets that provides, amongst other things, functionality for accessing a widget's metadata and persistently storing... W3C Staff

The Device APIs and Policy Working Group has updated a Group Note of Device API Access Control Use Cases and Requirements. This document examines the question of managing sensitive information that can become available through device APIs (e.g., position information).... W3C Staff

W3C today extended speech on the Web to an enormous new market by improving support for Asian languages and multi-lingual voice applications. The Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML 1.1) Recommendation provides control over voice selection as well as speech characteristics... W3C Staff

“Since so many of us find this tool in our design arsenals, we thought we would put together a post that would have you get the most out of this dynamic imaging program.”

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“Instead of a quick, one-size-fits-all solution to becoming a great designer, this article will present a threefold response that arises from viewing design through three necessarily different perspectives: the designer, the client and the user.”

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Everyone is always looking for interesting and effective ways to organize their website and allow users to move about and find things. But there’s a fine line between unexpected and unusable. Three points to consider in any navigation scheme are consistency, user expectations and contextual clues.

If page is long and provides different levels of navigation, will users be able to find their way through the site and use proper navigation quickly? Forcing visitors to use certain keystrokes to navigate, rather than what they're used to, might be novel, but is that effective if you have to explain instructions prominently on your home page? Here are some examples for your reading pleasure.

In Issue No. 313 of A List Apart for people who make websites: Better content management systems start with content strategy; typographically beauteous web pages may benefit from hyphenation and justification.

Strategic Content Management

by JONATHAN KAHN

Any web project more complex than a blog requires custom CMS design work. It’s tempting to use familiar tools and try to shoehorn content in—but we can’t select the appropriate tool until we’ve figured out the project’s specific needs. So what should a CMS give us, apart from a bunch of features? How can we choose and customize a CMS to fit a project’s needs? How can content strategy help us understand what those needs really are? And what happens a day, a week, or a year after we’ve installed and customized the CMS?

Published in: Content Strategy

The Look That Says Book

by RICHARD FINK

Hyphenation and justification: It’s not just for print any more. Armed with good taste, a special unicode font character called the soft hyphen, and a bit o’ JavaScript jiggery, you can justify and hyphenate web pages with the best of them. Master the zero width space. Use the Hyphenator.js library to bottle fame, brew glory, and put a stopper in death. Create web pages that hyphenate and justify on the fly, even when the layout reflows in response to changes in viewport size.

Published in: Layout, Typography

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart

Hyphenation and justification: It’s not just for print any more. Armed with good taste, a special unicode font character called the soft hyphen, and a bit o’ JavaScript jiggery, you can justify and hyphenate web pages with the best of them. Master the zero width space. Use the Hyphenator.js library to bottle fame, brew glory, and put a stopper in death. Create web pages that hyphenate and justify on the fly, even when the layout reflows in response to changes in viewport size.

Any web project more complex than a blog requires custom CMS design work. It’s tempting to use familiar tools and try to shoehorn content in—but we can’t select the appropriate tool until we’ve figured out the project’s specific needs. So what should a CMS give us, apart from a bunch of features? How can we choose and customize a CMS to fit a project’s needs? How can content strategy help us understand what those needs really are? And what happens a day, a week, or a year after we’ve installed and customized the CMS?

This site features a beautiful classic art theme interestingly mixed with a dollar bill motif.

The illustrations, colors, texture and typography are all simply excellent. Be sure to stop by the site to see it in all its glory.

This design was featured on the 7th September 2010 . It falls under the category of Design, and has a layout style of Other.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

Insrpiredology is an awesome blog with an awesome new design.

The header illustration is stellar and is both humorous and quite impressive. Also, the post format is really clean and easy to follow and the footer is quite well done.

This design was featured on the 7th September 2010 . It falls under the category of Blog, and has a layout style of Two Column.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

  

Lately, Apple Keynote has been gaining popularity among designers as a wireframing and prototyping tool. Features like multiple slide masters, styles, grouping, animation and hyperlinks make it ideal for crafting interactive prototypes and UI narratives. Today's freebie, Keynotopia, is a free set of interface elements for Keynote that makes it possible for anyone to create these prototypes in minutes. All elements are hand-crafted in Apple Keynote, and organized in nested groups for easier manipulation and customization. The templates can be used in Keynote 09 and 08 and are designed by Amir Khella.

Start with a blank presentation, and create a new slide for each application screen. Then copy/paste elements from the wireframe templates into your slides, and edit their labels, sizes and colors. To save time, group elements together, and use master slides to share common interface and navigation components across multiple screens. Finally, add hyperlinks to enable user interaction, and use slide transitions to create cool interface animations.

When I hold workshops on accessibility I am often asked how to detect screen readers. The answer is that you can’t, at least not in a reliable way.

The main reason is that screen readers run alongside (or on top of, if you prefer) regular web browsers and do not have a user agent string of their own that you can sniff.

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Posted in Accessibility, Quick Tips.

“This tutorial is based on a simple animated experiment that showcases just one of the amazing things you can create using CSS. I’ve used no images and no scripting; everything’s done using HTML and CSS.”

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