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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“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…”

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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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“Here are ten tips on how you can turn visitors into customers and improve your conversion rates by employing simple design techniques.”

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“For designers and bloggers utlizing this same cms, allow us to introduce to you, a collection of free drupal themes to accessorize and design your blog.”

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A list of some of the usability pitfalls that can drag your site down, and how you can solve these issues.

  

If you work as part of an in-house Web team, you have my sympathy. If that in-house team is within a large organization, then doubly so. Being part of an in-house Web team sucks. Trust me, I know. I worked at IBM for three years and now spend most of my days working alongside battle-weary internal teams.

It's hardly surprising that most in-house teams are worn down and depressed. They face almost insurmountable challenges. Too often, a website becomes a battleground for pre-existing departmental conflicts. Political power plays can manifest themselves in fights over home page real estate or conflicts over website ownership. After all, is the website an IT function or a marketing tool?

Squarefour is a web development agency based in New Orleans.

Their site is attractive and makes great use of both textures and typography. The slightly graphical dividing lines are a nice touch as well.

This design was featured on the 6th 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.