Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/stop-facebook-getting-phone-contacts/
When you first install Facebook Messenger, the app asks if you’d like to sync it with your phone’s contacts as a feature of convenience. However, once you activate this feature, it stays…
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Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2021/03/getting-started-with-inclusive-web-design/
A key part of designing successful websites for clients is making sure that as many end-users as possible can access and enjoy that site.
So, what if you discovered that around 1 billion people couldn’t enjoy your designs? Even if those people manage to click on a link and visit the website that you create, they might not be able to understand what’s being sold or navigate to the checkout page.
According to statistics from the World Bank, there are 1 billion people with disabilities worldwide. That’s 15% of the total population of the globe.
Despite this, many designers fail to consider customers with differing abilities when creating an engaging app or website. Unless your client explicitly tells you that they’re supporting customers with disabilities, you might even not think about those users at all.
Learning how to embrace the concept of inclusive web design means that you deliver better results to your clients; the more customers your clients can reach, the more praise and positive reviews your designs will get.
So, how do you introduce accessibility in your design choices?
What Is Website Accessibility?
In broad terms, inclusivity refers to activities or behaviors that empower marginalized people in society. Designing for inclusivity means making your content more accessible to anyone dealing with a mental or physical issue that may make it harder for them to use a traditional site.
Ultimately, accessibility is one of the main goals of an inclusive design strategy. When you make websites or applications more accessible, you tweak aspects of your UI and code to make the site as approachable and usable as possible to people with certain limitations.
According to the Web Accessibility Initiative, many modern sites and web tools are designed without the needs of those with disabilities in mind. This creates accessibility barriers that make websites almost impossible for some people to use.
Here are just some of the different types of disability that can affect the way end-users interact with a website or app:
Cognitive issues: Affecting understanding and making it harder to navigate sites;
Auditory issues: Preventing customers from listening to videos and audio content;
Neurological issues: Making certain terms and actions more difficult on your site;
Physical issues: Making it hard to swipe or tap certain tools;
Speech problems: A common issue with voice UI designs;
Visual issues: Preventing a positive experience on highly visual sites.
Web accessibility can also be about making life easier for people who encounter problems in particular situations. For instance, those with muscular problems might have a harder time using buttons and links on a small screen.
So, how do you make your designs more accessible?
Know Your Audience
There’s more to inclusive web design than making your fonts a little bigger and hoping for the best. To deliver a truly accessible experience, you need to know the people and groups that your client is targeting. Spending some time going through your customer’s user personas and asking them questions about those with a disability can help you make informed decisions.
For instance, the Microsoft Inclusive Design toolkit asks designers to recognize exclusion, examining the parts of their website that might be inaccessible, and learn from diversity.
Before designing anything, ask yourself whether you can:
Address any unique needs, like sight issues or hearing problems;
Replace traditional solutions with something more unique. For instance, rather than relying on colors to highlight a portion of text, could you use font-weight instead? This might be ideal for someone with color blindness;
Create something that appeals to both customers with and without disabilities.
Design a Clean and Clear Layout
Any website design should be focused on clarity first.
Whether you’re designing for inclusivity or not, the aim should be to deliver as much of a simple and straightforward experience as possible, avoiding any web design sins along the way.
For instance, no-one likes a messy design full of unreasonable navigational signs. You need a site full of understandable links, buttons that are easy to click on any screen, and large fonts that are easy to read.
Whenever you’re creating a new element for a website or app, ask yourself how you can make life easier for customers from all backgrounds. For instance, Parramatta park uses excellent contrast, clear fonts, and ideal element sizing to ensure that its website feels as easy to use as possible for customers.
Notice how the buttons are clear and easy to press. The colors are bright and engaging on any screen, and the navigation is simple to follow too. Remember, when you’re designing an inclusive prototype:
Test navigation options and ensure they’re easy to use;
Don’t overcrowd the screen, remember that less is more when reducing cognitive load;
Make sure that your design remains easy to use on any screen.
Simplify Language
The visual elements on an inclusive website need to be as simple and easy to understand as possible. However, it’s important not to forget about the way that you handle the written word too.
Using simple terms instead of complex industry jargon can make a massive difference to those with reading issues. There’s also typography to think about, from the color and contrast of your words against your chosen background to the font’s clarity.
Remember, suboptimal design with both imagery and language affects those without disabilities too. Following basic rules for simplicity delivers a better experience for anyone that visits your site.
Make sure you:
Underline, bold, or re-size links for visual contrast;
Enforce proper line spacing with around 1.5x the font size;
Enable consistent paragraph spacing;
Use simple language to reduce cognitive load;
Describe abbreviations when using them;
Use clearly-worded headings to structure content logically;
Look at the design choices for text on the Nomensa website, for instance. Plenty of white space makes content easier to read. Simple words are understandable and engaging. Even the font choice mimics the logo while offering readability.
Optimize Web Design Colors
Inclusive web design trends will come and go. However, color and contrast will always be essential to your decisions.
By making sure that your design elements meet the minimum color contrast ratios defined by the WCAG means that you’re supporting readability for visually-impaired users and improving experiences for customers that aren’t visually impaired as well.
For designers who need extra help in this area, tools like Stark help measure color contrast. This tool also offers a range of other tools intended to support accessibility too.
Remember, the minimum ratio you need to access will depend on the element that you’re designing. The WCAG recommends the following guidelines:
3:1 ratio for graphical objects (charts);
3:1 ratio for focus, active states, and hover;
3:1 ratio for clickable items and form components.
While you’re working on your color contrast strategies with apps like Stark, make sure that you consider the needs of users with color blindness too. 4.5% of the world doesn’t see color the same way as everyone else. If you’re finding it difficult to achieve the right contrast while sticking to your customer’s brand guidelines, try underlining and bolding elements too.
Consider Video and Audio Elements
Finally, these days, more companies are opting to embed video and audio content into their sites. These visual and auditory tools can offer useful information about a brand and what it does. However, you could struggle to deliver vital information to some customers through video and audio alone.
Captions for video content could be essential for those with hearing loss. You may need to think about adding transcripts to pre-recorded videos that people with hearing impairments can access. These transcripts and captions are also helpful for anyone who doesn’t have access to audio on smartphones or computers.
Transcripts can also help those with visual impairments by giving a text-to-speech tool something to describe to your user. That way, everyone gains useful information. Look at this captioned video from the University of Washington, for instance. It ensures that everyone can understand what’s going on in the content. If you add transcripts to your website pages for clients, you could also help them benefit from improved SEO too. Transcripts deliver more keyword-ranking opportunities than videos and podcasts on their own.
Design for Accessibility First
For designers to excel at delivering truly inclusive UI environments, they need to become as good at creating websites for people with disabilities as they are at creating interfaces for people like themselves. As designers, we try to be as inclusive as possible, but it’s easy to get caught up thinking about making a website easier to use for us.
If you can step into the shoes of someone that isn’t like you, and think about uncommon needs first, then you may find that you deliver a stronger, more engaging experience for every user.
For instance, rather than designing a website for someone with the same visual needs as you, then thinking about making tweaks for those with color blindness or vision issues, think about the needs of those with disabilities first.
You can learn more about putting uncommon needs first by checking out Vasilis Van Gemert’s blog post on the “Method of Crisis.”
Accessibility is Good for Business
Inclusive web design, or designing for accessibility, is all about maximizing the potential audience that your clients can earn. Whatever situation end-users find themselves in, you should ensure that you’re taking advantage of inclusive design.
If you can prove to your clients that you can deliver for all customers’ needs, you can unlock a much larger audience and many more opportunities.
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p img {display:inline-block; margin-right:10px;}
.alignleft {float:left;}
p.showcase {clear:both;}
body#browserfriendly p, body#podcast p, div#emailbody p{margin:0;}
The post Getting Started With Inclusive Web Design first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Original Source: https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/03/css-auditing-tools/
How large is your CSS? How repetitive is it? What about your CSS specificity score? Can you safely remove some declarations and vendor prefixes, and if so, how do you spot them quickly? Over the last few weeks, we’ve been working on refactoring and cleaning up our CSS, and as a result, we stumbled upon a couple of useful tools that helped us identify duplicates. So let’s review some of them.
More On CSS:
Comprehensive Guide To CSS Layout
Managing CSS Z-Index
How To Align Things In CSS
Things You Can Do With CSS Today
Useful DevTools Tips and Shortcuts
Also, subscribe to our newsletter to not miss the next ones.
CSS Stats
CSS Stats runs a thorough audit of the CSS files requested on a page. Like many similar tools, it provides a dashboard-alike view of rules, selectors, declarations and properties, along with pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements. It also breaks down all styles into groups, from layout and structure to spacing, typography, font stacks and colors.
One of the useful features that CSS Stats provides is the CSS specificity score, showing how unnecessarily specific some of the selectors are. Lower scores and flatter curves are better for maintainability.
It also includes an overview of colors used, printed by declaration order, and a score for Total vs. Unique declarations, along with the comparison charts that can help you identify which properties might be the best candidates for creating abstractions. That’s a great start to understand where the main problems in your CSS lie, and what to focus on.
Yellow Lab Tools
Yellow Lab Tools, is a free tool for auditing web performance, but it also includes some very helpful helpers for measure the complexity of your CSS — and also provides actionable insights into how to resolve these issues.
The tool highlights duplicated selectors and properties, old IE fixes, old vendor prefixes and redundant selectors, along with complex selectors and syntax errors. Obviously, you can dive deep into each of the sections and study which selectors or rules specifically are overwritten or repeated. That’s a great option to discover some of the low-hanging fruits and resolve them quickly.
We can go a bit deeper though. Once you tap into the overview of old vendor prefixes, you can not only check the offenders but also which browsers these prefixes are accommodating for. Then you can head to your Browserslist configuration to double-check if you aren’t serving too many vendor prefixes, and test your configuration on Browsersl.ist or via Terminal.
Project Wallace
Unlike other tools, Project Wallace, created by Bart Veneman, additionally keeps the history of your CSS over time. You can use webhooks to automatically analyze CSS on every push in your CI. The tool tracks the state of your CSS over time by looking into specific CSS-related metrics such as average selector per rule, maximum selectors per rule and declarations per rule, along with a general overview of CSS complexity.
Parker
Katie Fenn’s Parker is a command-line stylesheet analysis tool that runs metrics on your stylesheets and reports on their complexity. It runs on Node.js, and, unlike CSS Stats, you can run it to measure your local files, e.g. as a part of your build process.
DevTools CSS Auditing
Of course, we can also use DevTools’ CSS overview panel. (You can enable it in the “Experimental Settings”). Once you capture a page, it provides an overview of media queries, colors and font declarations, but also highlights unused declarations which you can safely remove.
Also, CSS coverage returns an overview of unused CSS on a page. You could even go a bit further and bulk find unused CSS/JS with Puppeteer.
With “Code coverage” in place, going through a couple of scenarios that include a lot of tapping, tabbing and window resizing, we also export coverage data that DevTools collects as JSON (via the export/download icon). On top of that, you could use Puppeteer that also provides an API to collect coverage.
We’ve highlighted some of the details, and a few further DevTools tips in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge in Useful DevTools Tips And Shortcuts here on Smashing Magazine.
What Tools Are You Using?
Ideally, a CSS auditing tool would provide some insights about how heavily CSS implact rendering performance, and which operations lead to expensive layout recalculations. It could also highlight what properties don’t affect the rendering at all (like Firefox DevTools does it), and perhaps even suggest how to write slightly more efficient CSS selectors.
These are just a few tools that we’ve discovered — we’d love to hear your stories and your tools that work well to identify the bottlenecks and fix CSS issues faster. Please leave a comment and share your story in the comments!
You can also subscribe to our friendly email newsletter to not miss next posts like this one. And, of course, happy CSS auditing and debugging!
Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2021/03/poll-is-it-time-to-merge-browser-engines-into-a-browser-protocol/
We tend not to think about it, but the Internet has a physical dimension. It’s a complex network of wires, cables, servers, and technical odds and ends — if you really want to, you can track it down; doing so is particularly easy on small islands because there tends to be a single cable tethering the region to the wider world.
Those physical cables run all the way to your building, and although an ISP manages them, they are normally rented from public bodies as part of your national infrastructure.
Beyond the physical, international bodies govern protocols like ARP, IEEE, HTTP, NTP, FTP, and others, which control how data is transmitted through the network and keep everything playing nice.
Then, at the other end of the equation, there’s your device. It may be a phone, a tablet, a notebook, a desktop. It’s probably several of these. And because it’s your device, everything on it feels like yours. We tend to think of it as our method of accessing the Internet instead of being part of the Internet — in reality, it’s both.
On your device, the software you use to access the Internet is your browser. For 65% of people, that’s Chrome. Even if you’re reading this on Edge, it’s created with the Blink engine, an extension of Chromium, which is the basis for Chrome. In fact, almost every browser is built using a variation of Chromium, except those on Apple devices that require Apple’s own WebKit to be used instead.
Chromium is ostensibly open-source. WebKit is not, but both are geared towards their primary contributors’ business goals; neither Chromium nor WebKit will make a change that negatively impacts Alphabet or Apple.
Your browser is just a copy of a pre-compiled set of source files sat in a Git repo somewhere. You may have installed a few plugins in your browser. You may have bookmarked a few pages. You’ve probably moved it to your dock or your home screen. Those features are just nice add-ons for the GUI; what really matters is what decisions are made about how to render web technologies.
Imagine a world in which every single car used the same mid-range Ford engine. Add in a stereo, and paint it any color you like, you can even pick your own tires, but under the hood, it has to be that mid-range Ford engine. And the only justification is that it’s too much work to create an alternative.
The 2020s are going to be a time of enormous change. You can smell the panic in traditional banking sectors every time Cryptocurrency is mentioned. Real estate billionaires are desperately trying to get us back into offices we don’t want to return to. And yes, I’m sorry, but the climate crisis is looming, and it will force our hand. The values of a whole generation have been rapidly reassessed. Innovation and the potential for innovation are rife, except, ironically, on the Internet, where we’re still chugging away with the mid-range Ford engine under the hood.
The web has reached the point at which the browser engines we choose define real-world infrastructure. There’s a fork in the road: either browser engines are part of an infrastructure that should be rationalized into a single browser protocol, or alternative browser engines need to be nurtured, encouraged, and accessible by choice.
Featured image via Pexels.
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p img {display:inline-block; margin-right:10px;}
.alignleft {float:left;}
p.showcase {clear:both;}
body#browserfriendly p, body#podcast p, div#emailbody p{margin:0;}
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Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/TDOftuzwhdQ/best-laser-cutters
Find the best laser cutter for perfect cuts and quality engraving.
Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/1hiB2bME0FE/holographic-3d-exploration-roman-haswell-0
Holographic 3D Explorations by Roman Haswell
AoiroStudio03.11.21
I wanted to share these ‘Holographic 3D Illustrations’ by Roman Haswell who is a 3D ? graphic designer based in Novosibirsk, Russian Federation. Hi series is a take on 3D explorations made with a theme surrounding the ‘holographic effect’. With the rise of #NFT, it’s amazing how the community has been taking shape to somehow what we would say entering a new era. We have been supporting the digital space forever and will keep on supporting the community. Share some love!
Check out his Behance profile
Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2021/03/8-domain-name-myths-every-web-designer-should-know/
A domain name is an essential element of every project, product, and company. It’s central to a brand and has a disproportionately large impact on user experience. Not only that, but it also impacts SEO and ultimately revenue.
Domain names are also one of the most commonly retailed elements in web technology, with most designers hoarding a small empire’s worth of domain names “just in case” the right side-project comes along.
Because so much of the information and advice on domain names is provided by companies selling domain names and is therefore not impartial, we wanted to bust some of the myths you’ll encounter.
Myth 1: Anyone Can Own a Domain Name
In fact, almost no one can own a domain name. As demonstrated by the (probably) annual renewal notices you receive, you are merely renting a domain name.
You pay a registrar, who registers the domain with ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) — or an entity to whom ICANN has delegated the responsibility for a particular TLD.
Even when renting a domain, you do not have the right to use it; thousands of UK-based businesses have had .eu domains stripped from them as a result of being removed from the EU.
Myth 2: There’s a Perfect Domain For Every Project
Domains do not have inherent value; they acquire value over time.
25 years ago, if you were building a search engine, the ‘perfect’ domain might have been search.com, find.com, or perhaps look.com — the particularly cynical might have opted for webads.com. You almost certainly wouldn’t have registered google.com because it says nothing about search.
Any domain name can acquire value through longevity, SEO, and branding
google.com acquired its value through a simple, relentless branding strategy and a generous dollop of luck.
Any domain name can acquire value through longevity, SEO, and branding.
Myth 3: Your Domain Name Should Contain Keywords
If you’re at the point of registering a domain name, either your business is new, or your digital strategy is. In either case, you have hopefully carried out keyword research, but without a live site, your keyword research hasn’t been validated. In other words, you don’t know what your keywords are.
Even if you’re confident that you know exactly what your keywords should be at this time, your keywords may change. The pandemic has required most businesses to pivot to some degree. eatoutny.com isn’t much use if legal restrictions have forced you to switch to a delivery business — unless you’ve also registered eatinny.com.
Furthermore, in the area of ecommerce, customers tend to view keyword-heavy domain names as budget options because they are like generic-brand goods. It may be that your business will only ever be a budget option, but it’s not a wise business decision to restrict your options.
There is an SEO benefit to keywords in a domain, but it is minimal and will almost certainly vanish in the next few years — even for EMD (Exact Match Domains) — because it is too close to gaming the system.
Myth 4: You Don’t Need a .com
As frustrating as it may be to seek out a .com you’re happy with, nothing says “late to the party” like a .biz domain.
A .co extension is slightly better in some regions because the .co.** format is commonly used; .co.jp for example. However, .co tends to be typed as .com by users accustomed to the more common format.
nothing says “late to the party” like a .biz domain
It’s possible to opt for pun-based names using regionally specific TLDs like buy.it, or join.in. This kind of strategy will play havoc with your local search strategy because computers don’t understand puns; you’ll potentially do quite well in Italy or India, though.
If you’re registering a domain for a non-profit, then .org is perfectly acceptable. However, carefully consider whether a domain is worth the lost traffic if you can’t also register the .com (because people will type .com).
The one exception is industry-specific TLDs that communicate something about the domain’s contents to a target demographic. For example, .design is a great extension for designers, and .io is fine for an app if it targets developers (i.e., people who understand the joke). You should also register the .com if you can, and if you can’t, carefully consider whom you’re likely to be competing with for SERPs.
This is not to say that anything other than a .com is worthless, just worth less than the .com.
Myth 5: A Trademark Entitles You to Register a Domain
Trademark registration and domain registration are two entirely different processes, and one does not entitle you to the other. This has been legally challenged a few times and fails far more often than it succeeds.
Trademarks are rarely blanket registrations, which means the trademark owner needs to declare the industry in which it will operate; there was no enmity between Apple Inc. and Apple Corp Ltd. until the former moved into music publishing and no one could download the White Album onto their iPod.
There is, however, a limited value in registering a domain that has been trademarked elsewhere. Not least because you will be competing against their SEO, and if they’re big enough to trademark a name, they’ve probably grabbed the .com.
Myth 6: Premium Domains Are a Good Investment
Premium domains are domains that have been speculatively registered in the hope of attracting a huge resale fee. The process is commonly referred to as ‘domain squatting.’
Domain squatters bulk-register domains in the hope that one of them will be valuable to someone. As a result, they are forced to charge exorbitant fees to cover their losses; a premium domain will cost anything from 1000–100,000% of the actual registration cost.
Setting aside the cost — which would be better spent on marketing — premium domains often come with legacy issues, such as a troubled search engine history, that you do not want to inherit.
Myth 7: A Matching Handle Must be Available on Social Media
The business value of a social media account varies from company to company and from platform to platform. Even if it is valuable to you, numerous marketing strategies will accommodate a domain name: prepending with ‘use,’ or ‘get,’ or appending with ‘hq,’ for example.
More importantly, it’s unwise to allow a third-party to define your long-term brand identity; sure, Facebook is huge now, but then so was the T-Rex.
Myth 8: You Need a Domain Name
A domain name is an alias, nothing more. You don’t actually need a domain name — what you need is an IP address, which a domain name makes human-friendly.
Think of domain names as an accessibility issue; humans are less able to read IP addresses than computers, and domains bridge the gap. (See how helpful accessibility is?)
While a domain name is beneficial, question whether a sub-domain or even an IP address would do. Registering a domain is an exciting stage of a project that many people never get past, leaving themselves with a huge collection of domains that they pay an annual fee for, and never actually develop.
What Makes a Good Domain Name
Now we’ve dispelled some of the myths surrounding domain names, let’s look at the key characteristics shared by good domain names:
A Good Domain Name is Brandable
A brandable domain is non-generic. It’s the difference between a sticky-plaster and a band-aid. Unique is good, rare is acceptable, generic is a waste of money.
A Good Domain Name is Flexible
Keep it flexible. Don’t tie yourself to one market or one demographic. Your domain name needs to work now and fifty years in the future.
A Good Domain Name is Musical
Six to 12 characters and two to three syllables is the sweet spot. Names in that range have a musical rhythm our brains find it easier to retain and recall.
A Good Domain Name is Phonetic
There are 44 word sounds in the English language. Other languages have similar totals. If you use a domain name that is pronounced phonetically, it will be easy to communicate.
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p img {display:inline-block; margin-right:10px;}
.alignleft {float:left;}
p.showcase {clear:both;}
body#browserfriendly p, body#podcast p, div#emailbody p{margin:0;}
The post 8 Domain Name Myths Every Web Designer Should Know first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/pTSl7rZdADw/slinky-nostalgia-3d
Slinky Nostalgia in 3D
abduzeedo03.10.21
Slinky Nostalgia is a sparkle of childhood memories. This beautiful 3D animation was created by the super talented, and fellow Brazilian, Frederico Felix, it’s his first NFT of the series available at Foundation.
Stills
Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/1DGRktqklJM/noti-editorial-design
Noti – Editorial Design
abduzeedo03.09.21
Bękarty – shared an inspiring editorial design project titled Noti. Honestly I don’t fully understand the scope of this project, however the typography and the overall editorial design is really good. Hopefully someone can give me more details, not that it will change my mind about how inspiring this project is.
Credits
Cover graphics: Piotr Kuchciński
Cooperation: Piotr Kuchciński, Kamila Woynicz
Font: RT Catalog by Kamil Kurzajewski
Printing on paper: Cuturon X-treme 170g (cover), Pergraphica Natural Rough 120g, IQ Print 70g
Publisher: Noti — www.noti.pl
For more information make sure to check out http://www.bekarty.pl
Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/XXsRA3dluQc/best-website-builder-8133804
Looking for the best website builder? You’ll find it here: choose from both paid-for and free options.
