Last week, about one week after i released designGrid, i published yet another little project that i’ve been working on. This time i’m trying to solve the problem with textareas, or rather the frustration of using them, especially when you’re going to write a lot of text. See textareas are designed to always have a fixed height and when you’re typing a lot it becomes hard to get a coherent sense of what you’ve written. Of course the scrollbar will eventually appear, but instead of it appearing on the text area itself, it will appear on the page, like it should.
The reason i even made this is of course because i needed it myself, and i’ll probably need it in the future as well. I stumbled in to this problem with text areas when i was working on a web app a while ago, and luckily i found out about Neil Jenkins article “Expanding Textareas made elegant” over at A List Apart, which was the solution i was looking for. So i based autogrow on the code from the article, but made it to be more customizable and reusable.
Last i set out to tackle an issue i had. The issue was that i didn’t really know how to design with fluid grids in a good way. Every since i started designing in a responsive manner, i had almost abandoned grids completely, but sometimes there where a need for order but i didn’t have a tool that could help me out.
Before i used #grid, by the folks at Analog, to make sure my design followed the grid, but then responsive web design and fluid grids came along, and it didn’t work out anymore. I needed something that was more suitable toward responsive designs. This is my attempt. A first step.
My goal was to get something out there as quickly as possible, and worry about optimization and performance later. All in all i spent about a week to get to where i am now, i designed the grid layout and some basic script functionality the first day. Following days was spent on code for generating a baseline grid and columns.
These days, there is a lot of talk about reponsive design and mobile/content first. While i think we can agree on that these strategies isn’t entirely bulletproof (yet!), they have a ceratin appeal and can be fairly easy to implement and use today. I do believe that this approach is better than making a mobile version of a website, but that is probably necessary sometimes.
The issue
I stumbled upon an issue when i was working on a web-application the other day. I had just finished the design in photoshop and then i built the templates in html/css. I should point out that this was the desktop version of the design. Later on i wanted to make it look good on mobile devices as well, so i set up a media query in the stylesheet to cover the design changes for those kinds of devices.
The issue appeared to me at this stage of the process, the mobile devices would need to download the extra set of styles to reset the desktop styles. This is a bit of an issue, since when we talk about mobile, we asume that the device has significantly less bandwith than a desktop computer. That’s not necessarily true all the time but it can be most of the time, if one is on a bus-commute for example.
Mobile-first
So that is where mobile first comes in, the problem however has to do with when one would build templates from a photoshop design that covers the “desktop” version. It is a bit hard to develop with the mobile first approach in this case, since the templates has to match the original design as close as possible (That doesn’t mean it has to be pixel perfect or even look exactly the same in all browsers).
Conclusion
So i tought about this some more… And finally i came to the conclusion that the best way for me was to reset the desktop styles on mobile devices (and narrower viewports), since i wanted to keep them separate from each other (easier to maintain). This means however that mobile devices do indeed get a bit heavier stylesheet than what’s necessary, but on the other hand, there’s no extra http request needed. This certainly isn’t the most perfect solution, but at this stage in the development process it was the best way to do it.
In his latest blog-post, Rob Weychert writes about how he constructed his first responsive design, which is his own website and blog. He goes into detail about how his grid is constructed and scales to different viewports (or even devices).
Jon Tangerine writes about what it means to be a web designer and how sometimes, people will have the wrong idea about what it is you actually do. Every web designer should read this.
This idea came to me when i thought to myself, what if i could just type one command into the terminal, and the folders and documents i needed where there? I immediately got to work and came up with this, it doesn’t look much yet but it is indeed handy and i intend to expand it further than this. Say, maybe get a bunch of files from github?
Okay let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, time will tell if i’ll actually add this. Anyway… This isn’t a groundbreaking new project of mine, it’s just a result of making reality of an idea i had, and it worked. As simple as that.
One of the things that makes designing for the web so appealing, is that it’s either cheap or even free to improve and iterate on a design over time, this is something that doesn’t work in, for example print (for obvious reasons). Unfortunatly this is something that doesn’t always happen when web designers work for clients, but on the other hand, changing a design too much would confuse potential customers. So what it comes down to is figuring out how much of the design can be improved upon.
In my case, i’ve done some iterations on an initial design of this site’s design, which’ve turned in to what you see now.
Initial design concept
This is the first design concept i came up with. Initially i was going to use this for tumblr, but soon i turned back to TextPattern. It has no archive or about page and a small amount of visual elements.
Current design concept
Rather than starting from scratch i added to the already existing design, and you can see that it still shares some basic visual elements as typography and layout. Over time i made the layout responsive, added a navigation and made improvements to the archive page.
Fin
To me this is what makes designing for the web interesting but also challenging and it’s what sets the web apart from other mediums, the ability to constantly iterate and improve upon certain aspects of a website or applications design. This can be both good or bad , but fortunatley it’s easier to righten a misstake.
Noah Stokes touches on a subject that is very common in the web community, the focus on why the tools are so great rather than the focus on solving the clients current issues.
HTML5. CSS3. Responsive Web Design. Sass. Less. Javascript Frameworks. No one cares about this stuff. Let me back up, the people who pay me money to build their sites/apps don’t care about this stuff. Why would they?
Ethan Marcotte’s long awaited book about responsive web design is finally here. To get a sense of what responsive web design is all about, you should check out the article Ethan wrote on the subject over at A List Apart.
Ethan describes a bit what the book is a about in a blog post.
So what’s the book about and stuff I guess,” you ask. Well, Responsive Web Design expands on the ideas I articulated in the original article. It’s a crash course in how you can apply fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries to your own work, but let’s face it: design is so much more than those three ingredients. As a result, I’ve tried to share a few stories I’ve picked up from working on real, live responsive projects: the lessons I’ve learned, the questions that have been raised, the hard choices made. The result is a beautifully designed little book (take a bow, Jason) that contains everything you need to start exploring a more flexible, more responsive approach to designing for the web. And at 150 pages, it won’t overstay its welcome.
I remember thinking “Ah, yes, this is the right way forward” after reading Jeffrey Zeldman’s article To Hell With Bad Browsers over ten years ago. Reading Responsive Web Design gives me that same feeling of wanting to apply what I’ve just read about right away. It could very well turn out to be a classic comparable to Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards.
My name is Carl Räfting and i live on the west coast of Sweden, in a little town called Kungälv to be specific. I’m currently spending my time studying part-time. Prior to my studies i've worked in the web industry, and designing for the web happens to be my main interest in life…
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