Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2020/07/in-memory-of-flash-1996-2020/

We are gathered here today….

Today I write in memory of Adobe Flash (née Macromedia), something that a bunch of people are actually too young to remember. I write this with love, longing, and a palpable sense of relief that it’s all over. I have come to praise Flash, to curse it, and finally to bury it.

We’ve been hearing about the death of Flash for a long time. We know it’s coming. December 2020 has been announced as the official timeframe for removal, but let’s be real about this: it’s dead. It’s super-dead. It’s people-are-selling-Flash-game-archives-on-Steam dead.

That last bit actually makes me happy, because Flash games were a huge part of my childhood, and the archives must be preserved. Before I’d ever heard of video cards, frames per second, and “git gud”, I was whiling away many an hour on disney.com, cartoonnetwork.com, MiniClip, Kongregate, and other sites, looking for games.

I think we’ve established in my previous work that even as a missionary kid, I did not have a social life.

The Internet itself gave me a way to reach out and see beyond my house, my city, and my world, and it was wonderful. Flash was a part of that era when the Internet felt new, fresh, and loaded with potential. Flash never sent anyone abuse, or death threats. Flash was for silly animations, and games that my parent’s computer could just barely handle, after half an hour of downloading.

I even built my first animated navigation menus in Flash, because I didn’t know any better. At all. But those menus looked exactly like the ones I’d designed in Photoshop, so that’s what mattered to me, young as I was.

That was a part of Flash’s charm, really.

What Flash Got Right
Flash Brought Online Multimedia into the Mainstream

Funny story, JavaScript was only about a year old when Flash was released. While HTML5 and JS are the de-facto technologies for getting things done now, Flash was, for many, the better option at launch. JS had inconsistent support across browsers, and didn’t come with a handy application that would let you draw and animate whatever you wanted.

It was (in part) Flash that opened up a world of online business possibilities, that made people realize the Internet had potential rivalling that of television. It brought a wave of financial and social investment that wouldn’t be seen again until the advent of mainstream social networks like MySpace.

The Internet was already big business, but Flash design became an industry unto itself.

Flash Was Responsive

Yeah, Flash websites could be reliably responsive (and still fancy!) before purely HTML-based sites pulled it off. Of course, it was called by other names back then, names like “Liquid Design”, or “Flex Design”. But you could reliably build a website in Flash, and you knew it would look good on everything from 800×600 monitors, to the devastatingly huge 1024×768 screens.

You know, before those darned kids with their “wide screens” took over. Even then, Flash still looked good, even if a bunch of people suddenly had to stop making their sites with a square-ish aspect ratio.

Flash Was Browser-Agnostic

On top of being pseudo-responsive, the plugin-based Flash player was almost guaranteed to work the same in every major browser. Back in a time when Netscape and Internet Explorer didn’t have anything that remotely resembled feature parity, the ability to guarantee a consistent website experience was to be treasured. When FireFox and Chrome came out, with IE lagging further behind, that didn’t change.

While the CSS Working Group and others fought long and hard for the web to become something usable, Flash skated by on its sheer convenience. If your site was built in Flash, you didn’t have to care which browsers supported the <marquee> tag, or whatever other ill-conceived gimmick was new and trendy.

Flash Popularized Streaming Video

Remember when YouTube had a Flash-based video player? Long before YouTube, pretty much every site with video was using Flash to play videos online. It started with some sites I probably shouldn’t mention around the kids, and then everyone was doing it.

Some of my fondest memories are of watching cartoon clips as a teenager. I’d never gotten to watch Gargoyles or Batman: The Animated Series as a young kid, those experience came via the Internet, and yes… Flash. Flash video players brought me Avatar: The Last Airbender, which never ever had a live action adaptation.

Anyway, my point: Flash made online video streaming happen. If you’ve ever loved a Netflix or Prime original show (bring back The Tick!), you can thank Macromedia.

What Flash Got Wrong

Obviously, not everything was rosy and golden. If it was, we’d have never moved on to bigger, better things. Flash had problems that ultimately killed it, giving me the chance, nay, the responsibility of eulogizing one of the Internet’s most important formative technologies.

Firstly, it was buggy and insecure: This is not necessarily a deal-breaker in the tech world, and Microsoft is doing just fine, thank you. Still, as Flash matured and the code-base expanded, the bugs became more pronounced. The fact that it was prone to myriad security issues made it a hard sell to any company that wanted to make money.

Which is, you know, all of them.

Secondly, it was SEO-unfriendly: Here was a more serious problem, sales-wise. While we’re mostly past the era when everyone and their dog was running a shady SEO company, search engines are still the lifeblood of most online businesses. Having a site that Google can’t index is just a no-go. By the time Google had managed to index SWF files, it was already too late.

Thirdly, its performance steadily got worse: With an expanding set of features and code, the Flash plugin just took more and more resources to run. Pair it with Chrome during that browser’s worst RAM-devouring days, and you have a problem.

Then, while desktops were getting more and more powerful just (I assume) to keep up with Flash, Apple went and introduced the iPhone. Flash. Sucked. On. Mobile. Even the vendors that went out of their way to include a Flash implementation on their smartphones almost never did it well.

It was so much of a hassle that when Apple officially dropped Flash support, the entire world said, “Okay, yeah, that’s fair.”

Side note: Flash always sucked on Linux. I’m just saying.

Ashes to Ashes…

Flash was, for its time, a good thing for the Internet as a whole. We’ve outgrown it now, but it would be reckless of us to ignore the good things it brought to the world. Like the creativity of a million amateur animators, and especially that one cartoon called “End of Ze World”.

Goodbye Flash, you sucked. And you were great. Rest in peace. Rest in pieces. Good riddance. I’ll miss you.

Featured image via Fabio Ballasina and Daniel Korpai.

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Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2020/07/the-designers-guide-to-letter-spacing/

Most of the information we consume happens through reading, so it makes a lot of sense to pay attention to the words when designing. There are many aspects to typography, but one of the things that helped improve the quality of my design was letter-spacing.

Letter-spacing is about adding and removing space between letters. Some people confuse it with kerning, but these two are different; letter-spacing affects the whole line of text, whereas kerning adjusts the space between two individual letters at the time. Kerning is best left to type designers, besides which, unlike letter-spacing there is currently no way to control kerning in CSS.

I believe that practice and a lot of observation will change the way you treat letter-spacing in your work as well.

The Purpose of Letter-Spacing

The main purpose of letter-spacing is to improve the legibility and readability of the text. Words act differently depending on their size, color, and the background they are on. By adjusting letter-spacing to the environment you are working with you will help readers consume your information faster, and more efficiently. The fun part is that they won’t even notice it — that’s the whole point of the job.

Bear in mind that typographers think about letter-spacing and kerning when designing a typeface. It means you don’t have to apply it to all your text, but in order to have an understanding when it’s necessary, you should know some basic principles, and use good typefaces.

How Letter-Spacing Affects Legibility and Readability

The legibility and readability of your text depend on things like line-height, paragraph length, font size, typeface choice, letter-spacing, and much more. Regarding letter-spacing, if you are just getting into typography, the best thing you can do is not overuse it. What I mean by that is simply don’t make the distance between letters too big or too small; even if you think it looks good, people will struggle reading it, and that will ruin their experience.

Letter-Spacing Capital Letters

Capital letters are designed with the intention that they will appear at the beginning of a sentence or proper noun, in combination with lowercase letters. When capital letters are next to each other, the space between them is too tight. So in order to achieve better readability, space needs to be increased. This applies to both large and small font sizes.

Letter-Spacing Headlines

If you are using well designed fonts, you can be sure that they are calibrated well, and you won’t need to make any major adjustments to them. However, the problem with headlines is that at larger scales the space between letters looks unbalanced. It can be fixed by increasing or decreasing the letter-spacing value.

There are no strict rules for letter-spacing — there are a lot of typefaces and all of them require an individual approach — but if you look at how big companies like Google and Apple treat their typefaces, you can find a lot of valuable information there.

Let’s take a look at the “Roboto” and “San Francisco” typefaces (the first one is used in Material Design and the second one in Apple’s ecosystem). Headlines from 20 to 48 pixels have either a positive letter-spacing value or none. If the font size is bigger, letter-spacing becomes negative. These exact numbers are not going to work that well for other typefaces, but after trying different approaches I can state that it’s a common pattern.

I’ve tested several guidelines for letter-spacing and the one that was published by Bazen Agency works for a lot of popular typefaces. It will be a good starting point for you, but you can always apply additional adjustments:

H1 — 96px — -1.5%
H2 — 60px — -0.5%
H3 — 48px — 0%
H4 — 34px — 0.25%
H5 — 24px — 0%
H6 — 20px — 0.15%
Subtitle — 16px — 0.15%

If you happen to design a lot of apps or you’re planning to do that, one thing that helps me is using the default Material Design and Apple guidelines for their typefaces. They are well balanced and it saves a lot of time.

Letter-Spacing Body Text

If you ever read anything about letter-spacing, you’ve probably have seen this popular wisdom from typographer Frederic Goudy: “Anyone who would letter-space lowercase would steal sheep”. (There’s an argument that he was only referring to blackletter fonts.) Some designers took it as a hard rule and now never adjust the letter-spacing of lowercase text.

Based on my practice and by looking at the work of designers I can’t agree with Goudy, because sometimes small changes can make a big difference in how your text performs. Let’s take, for example, condensed fonts. At a small size, the letters are too close to each other, which leads to poor legibility. By increasing letter-spacing by 1.5% you will see that the text is now easier to read.

If we look at my previous example, in the guidelines for “Roboto” and “San Francisco” typefaces, letter-spacing is applied to body text; even though San Francisco has a dedicated “SF Pro Display” for headlines and “SF Pro Text” for body text, letter-spacing is still used to refine them.

There are a lot of different typefaces and a single rule doesn’t apply to all of them. Experiment with letter-spacing and do what seems right to you. There are some simple guidelines that will lead you in the right direction, especially when working with body text:

Keep in Mind Line-Height

If you have a line-height greater than 120%, most likely negative letter-spacing will lead to an unbalanced look to the paragraph. To refine it you would need to either keep it at 0% or only slightly increase it.

Light Text on Dark Background

On a dark background, white text looks overexposed and therefore letters appear too tight. To make it more legible, I would suggest you increasing letter-spacing a small amount.

General Values for Body Text

You can use the following guidelines for body text, which I have tested with several typefaces:

Body 1 — 16px — 0.5%
Body 2 — 14px — 0.25%

Letter-Spacing Captions

Unlike headlines and body text, smaller font sizes don’t have many variations in letter-spacing. It’s a common practice when a font size is lower than 13px to increase the space between letters to make it legible. But there are always exceptions (“SF Pro Text” guidelines suggest using positive letter-spacing only when a font size is 11px or below). Make sure you experiment with settings.

You can use the following values as a starting point and then edit them to what seems right to the typeface of your choice:

Caption — 12px — 0.5%
Overline — 10px — 1.5%

Final Tip

One of the things that helped me improve my skills in typography was looking at other designers and especially type foundries. By decoding their work you might notice some nuances of how they treat typography and it will help you in future projects.

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Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/HAfgVBF1SX0/tostitos-logo

There are few things more satisfying than a well-made logo, and especially when that logo contains a clever surprise that conveys a brand's story. Coming to our attention most recently is the Tostitos logo, which contains a brilliant piece of chip-themed imagery.

Tostitos may be more well known in the US, while across the pond in the UK, the brand's sibling Doritos (which comes with its own clever logo) is more familiar. But we wonder how many chip-consumers in either country have noticed the hidden-in-plain-sight image in the Tostitos logo. It's a neat piece of design we can't believe we haven't yet noticed, and a contender for our pick of the best logos.

Take a second to have a good look (below) before we dive in.

What can you see?

The two capital Ts and the i nestled between tell the story – can you see it now? We clocked the chip and then the dip being used to dot the i almost immediately, but it took another few seconds to realise the Ts also double as people. 

It's not only that the design plays with the wordmark to create a visually-witty image, but the brand message being delivered is smart too. The image conveys Tostitos as a party brand – sociable and warm in its two pals' chip-sharing nature.

The design sure brings the party

Tostitos is certainly in good company with its use of hidden imagery, symbolism and meaning in its logo, as this bumper infographic displaying a whopping 50 examples backs up. It's a smart tactic that enables a brand to use its logo to its full effect, and we love spotting them. 

Read more:

This logo contains a delightful hidden surprise6 magnificently minimal logosWhere to find logo design inspiration

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/never-forget-a-todo-comment-with-tickgit-your-repos-project-manager/?utm_source=rss

tickgit is a command-line tool and web application that helps developers do project management in their code, through the use of TODO comments and other plain-text markers. It’s a low-overhead way of managing your backlog without switching contexts.

tickgit scans source code for TODO markers (and HACK, FIXME, XXX, etc.) and presents those code comments as tickets, with a fuller context derived from Git history (who added it, when, where etc.).

I am a solo developer building tickgit and tickgit.com to help software engineers be more productive in their code. I hope you find this project interesting and useful!

Why?

Project management is an essential part of software development, even for solo developers building a side-project. Plenty of existing ticketing and task management systems help teams and individuals track pending work really thoroughly. Sometimes, though, using TODO comments and other markers within a codebase ends up being a more efficient way of keeping tabs on what needs to get done.

Why // TODO Comments?

TODO comments (or FIXME, HACK, OPTIMIZE, XXX, etc.) are a common way developers indicate that an area of code is worth addressing and returning to. The Linux codebase has 4k+ of these types of comments, Kubernetes has 2k+.

If this sort of thing is a familiar sight, you’ve no doubt seen or used them before:

// TODO: Get rid of this condition somehow. Perhaps with a dynamic version
// of the @gate pragma.

TODOs Are Easy

To-dos are easy to add and remove. You don’t need to leave your editor. They’re plaintext. You can include links to additional information. They’re flexible. You can even use emojis ?✏️. You’re not constrained by the field requirements of an external ticketing system. You can be as thorough or succinct as you’d like in describing why you’re annotating an area of code.

No Context Switching

To-dos are right next to the code they’re describing, which means you don’t lose the context of the codebase: the surrounding classes, functions, variables, etc. Using an external ticketing system requires you to either switch focus when trying to understand a ticket and the relevant pieces of code, or do a great deal of context-copying to help clarify your task.

To-dos allow you to maintain your flow when writing code, and are often a lower mental burden than switching to and from tickets in an external system. To-dos, of course, can link back to an existing ticket for additional information if necessary.

Trackable with Your Code

Since TODO comments are part of your code, they’re stored in version control. They can undergo code-review in your PRs. They have a history and can be attributed to authors, versions, and commits. This can enable project management aware reports about burndown, team responsibilities, tech debt, development efficiency, etc.

The Command-line Tool

The tickgit command-line tool is an open-source project that scans a Git codebase for TODO comments. It runs a Git blame and outputs results with references to file paths and line numbers.

It can be used to query ad-hoc for open TODO comments, and supports CSV output for consumption by other tools (spreadsheets, text processors, etc.).

Here’s an example output:

The CLI is currently pretty simple, but with plans to improve to enable more use cases, including:

Customization of phrases to match (don’t match XXX but match @TODO in comments)
Querying and filtering (show me all to-dos added this week, show me only mine, etc.)
Aggregation queries count by author, average age by author, etc.
A CI mode to fail with an error if certain criteria are met (no to-dos in certain branches, max 5 to-dos per author, etc.)
Extract links and customized parsing of comments (extract an assignee, a due date, etc.)

Continue reading
Never Forget a TODO Comment with tickgit, Your Repo’s Project Manager
on SitePoint.

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2020/07/popular-design-news-of-the-week-july-13-2020-july-19-2020/

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Squircley – All You Need to Start Creating Beautiful Squircles

Tabler Icons – 550+ Highly Customizable Free SVG Icons

Puppertino – A CSS Framework Based on Apple’s Design and Human Guidelines

We are Going to Need Bigger Screens

Coronavirus Changed Everything Including these Logo Designs

This Technique was Supposed to Replace Passwords. Turns Out it’s Surprisingly Easy to Hack

The Web Design Hack Hall of Fame

61 UI/UX Resources for Web Designers

Don’t Quit, Create

BF Tiny Hand: A Free Donald Trump’s Handwriting Font

Dunder Mifflin Identity

16 Examples of Large Typography in Web Design

Style Stage

Spaceboard – Pinterest for Markdown Notes

Flowyak – High-converting Webflow Templates for Bootstrapped Startups

The State of Pixel Perfection

The Best Tools for Checking your Website’s Speed

12 Screen Reader Facts for Accessible Web Design

Why You Should Build your Blog on WordPress Vs. Squarespace

127 Websites to Show Off your Design

Modern Web Development on an 8 Year Old Mac – Music, Design and Stories by Nigel Bunner

Website Best Practices Checklist: 9 Web Design Best Practices

Design Ethnography

Minimum Viable UX: A Guide for SaaS Design

How to Think Smart About your Downtime

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

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