Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/apple-watch-series-4-screen-resolutions/

Apple just launched its series 4 watches that, like its predecessors, come in two different sizes. However, unlike series 1, 2 and 3 which come in 38mm and 42mm sizes, the series 4 comes in 40mm and…

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Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/10/the-best-designers-are-taoists-sort-of/

Okay, for the love of any God you prefer, read this bit before you start writing comments…please? I’ve been studying up on philosophical Taoism lately because someone very near and dear to me is a (philosophical) Taoist, and I wanted to understand her better. What I’ve found is that web and UX designers have, by studying the data, come to a lot of the same conclusions as ancient Eastern philosophers.

While the lessons in this article may not be new to most of you, I thought it would be interesting to see how the principles of good design match up with Lao Tzu’s1 principles for good living. The world’s top designers are not, to my knowledge, actual Taoists. Neither am I evangelizing for Taoism. For one, I do not consider myself to be a Taoist, and secondly, evangelism as we know it is largely anathema to the ones I’ve met.

Thirdly, the practitioners of philosophical Taoism I’ve met will get a little annoyed if you call it a religion. Philosophical Taoism is just that: a philosophy, and many people adopt the philosophy alongside any religion they might already have.2

But without getting further into that3, here’s what I’ve found.

1. Don’t Struggle

“Struggle” as a concept, is unavoidable. We struggle so we can eat. But Taoist philosophy says that we should not struggle more than we have to. Take a lioness, for example: she may struggle to hunt down enough food for her cubs and her pride, but she does not struggle to be a lion. That part is instinctual, and she revels in it.

We humans, and designers/developers in particular, are very good at overcomplicating things for ourselves. We struggle not just to design and improve at our jobs, but we often struggle in ways that simply aren’t necessary. If you need examples, I’m just going to refer you back to Zeldman’s article: The Cult of the Complex. Smart designers keep it simple.

Another way good designers embrace this principle is in our love of workarounds and adaptability. While Bruce Lee himself was apparently non-religious, that whole “be like water, my friend” speech is actually one of the most important metaphors in the Tao te Ching. Water doesn’t struggle against obstacles, it goes around them. Nowadays, that sort of adaptability is basically a requirement for getting hired onto any studio or team that know what they’re doing.

2. Don’t Meddle

The Tao te Ching was, like many early self help books—I’m kidding—intended to be read by people in positions of leadership. Much of the advice is geared toward teaching local leaders—referred to in the book as “sages”—how to lead people, and more importantly, how not to. Most of the verses regarding this topic advise the sage against meddling too much in the affairs of their people.

Good designers would advise the same. Give your users a clear and easy path to the end goal, and then let them do their thing. Attempting to meddle with the way people browse will usually just annoy the hell out of them. Think of scroll jacking, modal pop-ups, the old pop-ups, obscure and unnecessarily creative navigation, and that sort of thing.

3. Be Slow to Judge

I know, Jesus said that, too. But the Tao te Ching takes the concept a bit further in suggesting that we should refrain from calling anything, anyone, or any circumstance good or bad until things have truly had a chance to play out. That is, don’t pass judgement until all the data is in4.

Designers these days are increasingly coming to rely on this same principle to inform their work. It’s one thing to “feel” like a big blue button would be better than a small green one, or vice versa. It’s another to know without a doubt that one is working better than another. While A/B testing is not always the best way to make design decisions, the importance of actually following the data to its conclusion cannot be understated.

4. Show, Don’t Tell

Taoists might make good designers, but they’re terrible marketers. I’m kidding again. It’s just that the Taoists I’ve encountered so far place far more importance on showing, rather than telling. Evangelism, as I’ve said, is not something they do. They believe that the only way to truly convince another to follow the Tao is to do it themselves, and let others observe the benefits.

Design is inherently visual, so this comes rather naturally to most of us. Good designers embrace this principle at every level with marketing, tutorials, or app walkthroughs, and of course, with the actual images in our content. After all, seeing is believing. A picture is worth a blah blah blah. We know this one.

5. Do No Harm

Correlating with that “Don’t Struggle” bit, philosophical Taoism encourages people to be themselves, to live how they want, and do what they feel is right, with just one very important caveat: don’t hurt anybody else. Violence is a last resort for self defense, and infringing on the freedom of others is anathema.

What we designers have discovered is that bad designers—the ones using dark patterns, trying to abuse SEO, and injecting two hundred trackers and a Bitcoin miner through ads—make the Internet worse for everyone. As the ecosystem of the Internet tries to defend itself, the bad actors find their gains are short-lived, sites find themselves struggling to make any kind of ad revenue, and the reputation of the whole industry is tarnished.

6. Contribute With no Expectation of Reward

Conversely, Taoism teaches that when we do good, we should do it without expectation of thanks, or reward. People who do this are often (though I’d say not always) given that recognition, and greater access to the community’s resources. Meanwhile, people that do good for recognition are usually found out, and fade into obscurity.

We’ve found this out in our community: the names we recognize in the design world are most often those of people who made our lives as designers easier. The people who wrote tutorials, ran educational podcasts, made videos, and did it all for free. Eventually, many of them did get recognition, and money, and invaluable contacts in the industry, but they had to put in a lot of thankless work first. People like me are design writers. They are design heroes.

 

1 Lao Tzu is the reputed author of the original Tao te Ching: a collection of 81 verses that outline principles for good living and leadership.

2 There is a branch of Taoism that is steeped in a fair amount of mysticism and incense which makes it look, sound, and smell like religion, but even these practitioners may tell you it’s not one. And then there’s another branch that is rather religious, with various gods and so on. There are lots of branches, and it gets complicated.

3 Wikipedia is your friend. Heck, I started my study with Dudeism, a form of Taoism that uses the movie The Big Lebowski as the source of all its symbolism.

4 There is a famous Taoist parable which illustrates this type of indifference and its utility: A farmer has only one horse. When the horse runs away his neighbors say “What bad luck!” The farmer merely says, “Is it?” Days later, the horse returns and brings with it a beautiful wild stallion. His neighbors say “What good luck!” The farmer replies, “Is it?” Enchanted by the new horse, the farmer’s son tries to ride it, but is thrown and badly injured. The neighbors say “What bad luck!” To which the farmer shrugs, “Is it?” Not long afterwards the country is under threat and every able young man is conscripted into the military, but the son cannot go because of his injuries. “What good luck!” the neighbors say. The farmer again only says, “Is it?”

– Benjamin, Oliver. The Tao Te Ching: Annotated Edition (pp. 75-76). Abide University Press. Kindle Edition.

 

Featured image via DepositPhotos.

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Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/10/css-border-radius-can-do-that/

TL/DR: When you use eight values specifying border-radius in CSS, you can create organic looking shapes. WOW. No time to read it all ? — we made a visual tool for you. Find it here.

During this year’s Frontend Conference Zurich Rachel Andrew talked about Unlocking the Power of CSS Grid Layout. At the end of her talk, she mentioned something about an old CSS property that got stuck in my head:

The Image is set round just by using the well-supported border-radius. Don’t forget that old CSS still exists and is useful. You don’t need to use something fancy for every effect.

 — Rachel Andrew

Shortly after I heard this talk, I thought that you certainly could create more than just circles and started to dig deeper into what can be done using border-radius.

Mastering Border-Radius
Single Value

Let’s start with the basics. Hopefully this will not bore you. You are probably familiar with CSS, and you also know border-radius. It has been around for some years now, mostly used with a single value like this: border-radius: 1em and was maybe one of the most discussed/loved CSS3 features back in 2010 when css3please.com was your best friend.

Whenever you only use a single value, all corners are rounded by this value:

As you can see in the example above, next to fixed length values like px, rem or em you can also use percentages. Those are mostly used to create a circle by setting border-radius to 50%. The percentage value is based on the width and height of the given element. So when you use it on a rectangle, you will no longer have symmetrical corners. Here’s an example showing the difference between border-radius: 110px and border-radius: 30% applied to a rectangle.

Notice that the corners on the right side are not symmetrical and keep that in mind. We’ll come back to this later.

Four Different Values

When you use more than one value, you start setting values for each corner, beginning in the top left corner and then moving clockwise. Again you can also use percentages, and you could also mix percentages with fixed-length values.

Eight Values Separated by a Slash (This is Where it Gets Interesting)

I think most of you have already done everything I explained above. Now we get to the exciting part. What happens, if you separate values with a slash and specify up to eight values? Let’s see, what the spec says about that:

If values are given before and after the slash, then the values before the slash set the horizontal radius and the values after the slash set the vertical radius. If there is no slash, then the values set both radii equally.

— W3C

So, values before the slash are responsible for horizontal distances whereas values after the slash define the vertical lengths. But what does that mean? Remember percentage values on rectangular shapes? We had different absolute values for vertical and horizontal distances and asymmetrically rounded corners, and that is precisely what you get when you use the slash syntax.

So when you compare border-radius: 4em 8em to border-radius: 4em / 8em the results are quite different.

The symmetrical corners on the left form quarter of a circle, whereas the asymmetrical corners on the right are part of an ellipsis.

The shapes that you get with this look a little odd, to be honest. But remember the circles you create with border-radius: 50%. You get a circle because both values defining one side add up to 100% (50% + 50% = 100%) and there is no straight line left, that reminds you of the original square. If you apply the same logic to the full eight value border-radius syntax, you can create a shape that looks a little like a plectrum or an organic cell:

In the end it is four overlapping ellipses that build the final shape. Easy ha!

Don’t Panic…We Made a Visual Generator for You

It took me some time to get used to this syntax. Somehow it is not that intuitive. To make things a little easier for you, we built a little tool, that helps you create your very own organic shape.

Do(n’t) Cross The Streams

Now that you know about the 8 values in total, you might feel a little sad, because our border-radius-tool doesn’t give you the option to set each value separately…Sit tight, here is the 8-POINT-FULL-CONTROL version.

If you’re old enough, you might remember this quote from the 1984 Ghostbusters movie:

“Don’t Cross The Streams.” — “Why?” — “It would be bad.”

There is something similar going on here: If you cross the handles on one side, the shape behaves…let’s say unpredictably. But see for yourself, after all, it’s not going to end up in total protonic reversal or something, but don’t say, that I didn’t warn you.

PS. Many Thanks to simurai. Back in 2010, he created some CSS3 BonBon Buttons. Even though they look a little outdated, it is the only place I ever encountered and learned about the slash syntax.

See This Cool Feature in Action

Photos by gratisography.com

See the Pen border-radius by Nils (@enbee81) on CodePen.

 

This article was originally published on Medium, reposted with the author’s permission.

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Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/10/smashingconf-toronto-a11y-performance-audits/

Live Accessibility And Performance Audits At SmashingConf Toronto

Live Accessibility And Performance Audits At SmashingConf Toronto

Markus Seyfferth

2018-10-17T13:20:35+02:00
2018-10-17T14:10:37+00:00

Earlier this year, many of your favorite speakers were featured at SmashingConf Toronto, however, things were quite different this time. The speakers had been asked to present without slides. It was interesting to see the different ways our speakers approached the challenge.

Two of our speakers chose to demonstrate how they audit a site or application live on stage: Marcy Sutton on accessibility, and Tim Kadlec on performance. Watch the videos to see an expert perform these audits, and see if there is anything you can take back to your own testing processes.

To watch all of the videos recorded in Toronto, head on over to our SmashingConf Vimeo channel.

Accessibility: Marcy Sutton

Marcy took two example components, built using React, and walked us through how these components could be made more accessible with some straightforward changes.

Performance: Tim Kadlec

Tim demonstrates how to test the performance of a site, and find bottlenecks leading to poor experiences for visitors. If you have ever wondered how to get started testing for performance, this is a talk you will find incredibly useful.

Enjoyed watching these talks? There are many more videos from SmashingConf Toronto on Vimeo. We’re also getting ready for SmashingConf New York next week — see you there? 😉

(ra, il)

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/dAzA544bs6k/tackle-type-transgressions-with-these-tip-top-tickets

Learning the rules of typography can be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because hey, you can do good typography with thoughtful font pairings and everything!

6 embarrassing examples of bad kerning

And a curse, because as soon as you've digested a few typography tutorials you'll immediately start to spot all the appalling typography that's out there, befouling the world with its terrible kerning, stretched type and Comic Sans.

Even worse, the police just don't want to know about it. But now you can take matters into your own hands with the Uniform Ticket Book, from Hoefler&Co's 100 per cent totally real Typographic Violations Division.

Stamp out crimes against typography!

Billed as standard equipment for the modern design enforcer, the Uniform Ticket Book lists 32 common typographic infractions, from basic selection and composition violations such as poor typeface choice and improper word spacing, through to more serious crimes such as the use of artificial italics or mansplaining Font vs Typeface. Each infraction comes complete with appropriate penalties, and there's a useful Other section at the bottom for more exotic type transgressions.

If you give ’em a good short sharp shock they won’t do it again

The Uniform Ticket Book is designed to provoke maximum anxiety with its searing orange print and ironic use of Helvetica, and it comes with 50 tickets that you could probably tear right through on a walk down the average high street on your lunch hour.

It's available now for just $10 from Hoefler&Co's Design Shop, where it's pointed out that the Uniform Ticket Book is for novelty use only; we're sure they're joking about that bit. Go out and get them, but hey, be careful out there.

Related articles:

The 10 commandments of typographyTypography rules and terms every designer must knowThe 8 biggest typography mistakes designers make