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Andy Rutledge has posted an in depth take on hyperlink style and construction.
Differentiating text links by color and/or decoration is just a fundamental approach. Your decisions for what color or what sort of decoration to use hinges on some important issues that reach beyond considerations of contrast and distinction. So these decisions cannot often be made arbitrarily.
Textual navigation’s entire function is to simplify access to content and to guide the reader to where they need to be. It should invite further participation and fit within the bounds of the design, getting from A to B and back again, without losing the reader in the process.
If your reader cannot cannot distinguish between content and interface, between link or highlight, or simply just how to proceed forward, they likely will not. A failure in anyone’s language, surely.
As previously mentioned I’ve got something cooking, so to speak. Andy has provided a timely reminder for this author of just how important placement and ease of navigation — something that is all-to-often sidelined — plays in overall site design.
Joen, a smart chap whom I read quite diligently perhaps passes the comment of the week:
Usability is not a Jackson Pollock painting.
Whilst Joen argues that Wordpress is the single best blogging platform out there, and to be fair his comments are true to an extent, it does suffer mix of legacy design elements with an assortment of new css-slicing techniques that result in a UI challenged (at best) product.
The interface is, quite frankly, shocking. Traversing the UI isn’t a fun process — and the less spoken of the template engine and it’s propensity to mix structure and presentation, the better. It’s not uncommon to hear the phrase “it should not be this hard” within the community.
The demo Joen points to is a classic example of why the Wordpress developers just don’t seem to “get” the idea of smart UI design — repeated vertical scrolling just to post and or edit an entry isn’t the bastion of great design.
The community has attempted to help out in the past and received little more than passing interest — amusingly whilst there is now some hint of ’shuttle’ in the 2.3.x releases, it’s at best a passing shadow of what could have been. Without a solid commitment to get it right, Wordpress will always be an ungainly and navigationally challenged beast.
Whilst
Habari may have been a haven for ex-Wordpress developers, it’s yet to really gain any traction. One wonders what would have been if the same creative and design flair had been welcomed by the Wordpress project team instead of the litany of excuses reasons why it’s always just too hard.
Chris Cabanillas has written a wonderful and insightful piece on the current frustration that is licensed typography and the web:
“I’d like to show this post to you in FF Meta Serif but I can’t. Foundries would like you to be able to use their fonts on the web but they can’t just give their work away so they must wait for the technology.”
I agree strongly with Chris that technologies like sIFR are — with respect to Shaun and Mike — not a good solution. It doesn’t scale well, and to be blunt removes much of a typeface’s personality in the process of converting it into an image.
I’m simply not a fan of using flash-and-or-java-and-bitmaps to overcome typographical challenges. Irrespective of how brilliant the use of the technology might be. And it shouldn’t have to be this way, as most modern Operating Systems can render font families pretty darn well.
With the advent of Cleartype, even Windows has the ability to do a half-decent job. Yet here we are, still, converting typefaces to poor-quality low resolution images — to avoid breaching any typeface licensing — in order that we may inject some form of typographical colour to an otherwise vanilla-like pallet.
Converting typefaces to bitmap images, then, clearly isn’t the answer and in a way permits the world to embrace a second-best option rather than actually confront what has been traditionally placed into the “too hard” basket. If a fast and efficient methodology allowed for real time vector creation — given it’s wondrously crisp scaling capabilities — then one might be on to something.
But even that is a cop out, to a degree, as it’s still not necessarily rendering a typeface as the designer intended. Right now image replacement is an ugly, inefficient and wasteful process that simply doesn’t have any advantages. The alternative standard means I will have to keep on using Verdana, Palatino Linotype or other open-licensed typefaces.
“But, I think the only way we get there is if a web designer, a typeface designer, and a type developer get together over coffee and hash this out. If we leave it to a committee it may never happen.”
Chris poses some excellent questions and thoughts — if you’ve not subscribed to Restiffbard yet, I highly recommend that you do.
Michael Gartenberg opinions the following on the recent HD DVD pricing plunge:
Notably the fact that we’re seeing HD-DVD players at much lower prices, as low as $99. At that point, it’s not a competition between HD-DVD and Blue-Ray, it’s a competition (correctly so) between HD-DVD and DVD.
The format war is going to be won in the retail sector. The feature count, or potential benefits of one over the other really ceases to gain traction when market forces take over. This will spill over to affect Blue-ray sales if that format can’t deliver similar cost reductions, despite suggestions this is just a HD-DVD versus DVD battle.
Blue-ray may find it’s the next Betamax. A superior format to VHS that simply lost out in the inevitable price war.
Mr Hunt’s comment on my pet hate, the cross platform user interface:
“I'm not against cross-platform libraries, or cross-platform applications. But giving the same UI to every OS isn't a good solution.”
It isn't a good solution, but one often mooted as the 'best' compromise. The downside of that middle ground choice is that it will offset any possible advantages gained by presenting an interface that does not fit it's environment.
Good design separates presentation from engine; web standards are built on that very concept.
If you use OS X, you're used to a certain user interface, just as a Windows or perhaps Gnome-on-Linux user is familiar with theirs. The GUI should be predictable across applications and make a certain logical sense. Cross platform UI breaks that fundimental design concept by introducing a foreign element, which whilst keeping strong brand integrity, fails to keep a reasonable standard of UI integration in return.
Mozilla developers working on Firefox 3 have begun to understand that embracing each Operating System's design does not mandate that the ‘underware’ be different, rather that the clothes Firefox wears under each match the surrounding environment.
“Visual integration with Windows and OS X is our primary objective for the Firefox 3 refresh.”
Of course, views differ and Simen of dailymeh responds:
“All else often isn’t equal, because it’s often a choice between a stripped-down version or no version at all and a slightly sub-optimal solution.”
Which is a very valid point, but falls flat when the tools already exist to make cross platform code happen without enforcing the need for a constant user interface as well. The days of settling for second best or none at all have long since passed. Web based technologies have certainly driven that change, but ‘fat’ application development tools are catching up, fast.
All the brand identity in the world equates to exactly zero if absolutely no-one uses your product due to a confused and unusable cross-platform interface. We’re no longer bound to a narrow range of applications so the old rules of “it’s our way or the highway” don’t fit with the modern world.
Perhaps that is why so many developers continue turning to web based application technologies. Because it does allow for very strong branding yet will still look, at a fundamental level, virtually the same across any number of platforms. The latest Mozilla lab product, Prism, jettisons all but the most rudimentary user interface, leveraging the existing web navigation instead. And that concept is raising eyebrows.
It’s just not the done thing, throwing away the standardised cross platform local user interface. Yet in ever increasing web application cases the local interface, short of basic core controls, becomes entirely redundant.
The future of application development is increasingly cross platform in nature, of that there is no contest. Whether or not that is a wise idea is also no longer a relevant question. In fact I’m all for it — diversity is a strong survival technique and allows for a wider range of tools in return. But for off-line applications to succeed, they will increasingly face direct competition from web based technologies, and experience the exact same growing pains.
Part of that process is separating engine from user interface and treating the two halves, not just the whole. The promising sign is that that is already happening.
I’d like to make a small public announcement.
If you develop code to do anything with web-based images, particularly involving Wordpress or TXP plugins, please do the universe a favour and ensure you follow both XHTML and Usability
guidelines and make sure the ALT= attribute
is included in any URI mark-up.
The W3C
loosly define the ALT […]
Bill Israel notes a salient point about
grid-based design:
I, admittedly, have a soft-spot for the clean, crisp look a grid-based layout provides, and grids can be an excellent way to lay out visually pleasing information, but do all these layouts1 have to look so similar?
There-in lies the inevitable conundrum regarding grid-based content.
At a […]
Wordpress has been a great friend for nearly four years. In that time it has been an amazing teacher, student, adversary and in some ways, confidant.
But of late it’s been getting a lot harder to do simple things. Like aggregate links1 as articles, handle categories and tags2 in a sane-and-useful manner, pull entries out of […]
New website launched - care of the spectacular talents of Mr Greg Storey.
"There’s no reason we can’t have both a great surfing experience on an iPhone as well as one on assistive technologies. I’m just asking for more balance." — whilst it has revolutionised development and the way web apps are built, it shouldn’t be at the expense of standards or accessibility - a little balance isn’t a crazy thing to ask for.
".. recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the work I’ve been doing at Urban Outfitters and what ‘label’ it falls under. It’s also a question I get quite often (what do you do there if it’s not just web design?)" — concise, yet wonderfully descriptive
