Author
ALA Staff
The staff of A List Apart has great hair.
Also from this author
Selfless editor and colleague Carolyn Wood has run into a medical emergency and needs the community’s help. Over the years, she has given us immense gifts without ever asking for anything in return. Let’s pull together and give back.
Practicing kickflips. Standing still. Drawing. Learning JavaScript (finally). Messing around with Arduino. Reading and writing books. Jumping into CSS Grid Layout. Sunbathing with cats. We asked some of our smartest friends in the web design and development communities what new focuses they planned to bring to their lives and work in 2016. Their answers fell into four categories—design, insight, tools, and work—but one idea cropped up over and over: sometimes you need to take a step back in order to move forward.
What grabbed our attention this week? We’re glad you asked. We’re digging the new design standards being shared by 18F and USDS; reading up on accessibility in design (and the notorious PDF!); learning to run better meetings; noodling around with responsive typefaces; and championing better ways to read the comments. Also, somebody likes raccoons. We think. We think that's what they meant.
What the ALA staff has found around the web lately: how we can support Ahmed Mohamed and other young makers; reading the comments (no, really!) on the Coral Project; a plain-language guide to Amazon developer tools; the life and times of a type design legend; icon fonts vs. SVGs, revisited; learning to think first, challenge later; and a robot riding a unicorn (come on, who doesn’t need to see that?).
The tools we use as designers are changing rapidly. With responses from thousands of designers around the world, Khoi Vinh's recent survey showcases some surprising trends in the new (and old-school) tools we use for brainstorming, interface design, version control, and many other aspects of our work.
On our radar these days: Google rebrands. A web animation expert refuses to speak at your conference if it doesn’t have a code of conduct. Preload hints can help you load your web fonts faster. A new site launches that hopes to bridge the gender gap in communication design. Your weekend reading awaits!
Between bots and blogging, newsrooms are getting into Slack in some very cool ways (take some inspiration and apply for a Knight-Mozilla Fellowship!). Plus more recommended reading: revisiting Cameron’s World; the joy of generalists; the finer points of faving; and one really excellent gif of cats.
In our recommended reading this week: saying adieu to the Ada Initiative, which did so much work for conference codes of conduct and women in tech; project budget-setting (who wants to see some spreadsheets!); speaking up in the type community; and smartphones, smartwatches, and smart gifs (er, maybe we need to cool our Wet Hot American Summer binge).
The dog days are upon us—but instead of giving up in the summer swelter, take heart! We’ve got an extra-special reading list of bright, insightful brainfood. ALA’s third annual summer reader explores what's been on the web industry’s mind lately, from accessibility to performance, from CSS techniques to web type, from mentorship to more collaborative approaches. It’s a list as cool and fancy as a watermelon-basil popsicle. Yeah, that does sound good, doesn’t it? Kick back, chill out, and get to reading.
This week's recommended reading list has bad news for icon fonts: we learn from Seren Davies' presentation that they present accessibility issues for people with dyslexia. Plus: our favorite tech TinyLetter, the NYSE computer glitch, an animal gif, and more.
There are plenty of links and a minimum of one (1) gif awaiting you, as always, in this week's On Our Radar. But first, we want to talk about someone who has inspired all of us: Molly Holzschlag, an influential web standards champion and dear friend.
Time for another roundup: this week the A List Apart staff is tuned in to topics like project management, healthcare design, advice on hiring juniors, and more. There's plenty to read that's shiny and chrome.
The staff of A List Apart presents their biweekly recommended-reading list, chock-full of goodies about progressive enhancement, lettershapes, hamburger menus, and our favorite moving picture (at least until the next cat-squeezed-into-a-tiny-box gif).
If you were too buried in work this week to read the internet, don’t worry: the staff of A List Apart read it for you. Catch up with this week’s On Our Radar, featuring our new favorite Instagram account, Mozilla’s latest mission, Twitter bots, and more.
15 years have passed since we published John Allsopp's “A Dao of Web Design.” Join us as we take a look back at John's piece and consider what it means for the web today.
It's all about us this week at ALA. From steps to sleep to social activities, we're counting every kind of personal data you can think of. But what's all that data add up to? How could we look at it—and ourselves—differently? In this week's On Our Radar, we ask ourselves—and our self—the tough questions.
The future is here, for better or for worse—and this week, the ALA staff has been thinking about what that means: for our code (the impending arrival of HTTP/2), our content (publishing on Medium), and the cost of constant noise.
This week, the ALA staff is thinking about color accessibility, the process of building a vocabulary, the current state of web typography, and the lessons we can learn from skater culture. In other words: it's all about inclusion.
It’s a new kind of blog post: straight from our brains to your hearts, we’re sharing what we think is neat on the web. This week: thoughts on Flipboard, diversity in tech, and advice for organizing conferences.
After 200 issues—yes, two hundred—Kevin Cornell is retiring from his post as A List Apart’s staff illustrator. Tomorrow’s issue will be the last one featuring new illustrations from him.
Presenting the second annual ALA Summer Reading Issue—a deep pool of editor’s picks from the recent archives of A List Apart, sprinkled with some of our favorite outside links. This summer’s picks are arranged in clusters that echo the design process, and like all good summer reading, they travel light. (This issue is also available as a Readlist, suitable for reading on Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Readmill, or other ebook reader.) Dive in!
At A List Apart, we are perpetually and ever more deeply curious about the lives and livings of people who make websites. It is a curiosity many of you share. Each year, when we post our Survey For People Who Make Websites, thousands of you take time to complete it. The resulting data presents a living picture of the businesses, backgrounds, and aspirations of professional web workers most everywhere. Presenting the findings of the 2011 survey. Dive in boldly, find out how your situation compares to others’, and keep building respect for this most elegant of professions.
Presenting the ALA Summer Reading Issue—our favorite articles from 355 issues of A List Apart. You can also read them all as an epub on your Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Readmill, or other e-book reader.
The profession that dares not speak its name needs you. Digital design is the wonder of the world. But the world hasn't bothered to stop and wonder about web workers, the designers, developers, project managers, information architects slash UX folk, content strategists, writers, editors, marketers, educators, and other professionals who make the web what it is. That's where you come in. Take the survey!
For the fourth year in a row, we’re proud to present the findings from the survey for people who make websites. Once again, we have crunched the data this way and that, figured out what the numbers were telling us, and assembled the sliced and diced data-bytes into nifty charts and graphs for your edification and pleasure. As in years past, what emerges is the true picture of the profession of web design as it is practiced by men and women of all ages, across all continents, in corporations, agencies, non-profits, and freelance configurations.
Nobody has ever compiled even the most basic data about the salaries, titles, educational background, and so on of people who make websites—nobody, that is, but the readers of A List Apart. Other surveys compile helpful data about which software packages web designers use to do their work, and which technologies they’re keen on, but only the A List Apart survey gets down to the business of business. It’s time once again to let your voice be (anonymously) heard. As you have each year since 2007, please take a few minutes to complete the survey for people who make websites.
The findings are in from the survey for people who make websites. Once again, we have crunched the data this way and that, figured out what the numbers were telling us, and assembled the sliced and diced data-bytes into nifty charts and graphs for your edification and pleasure. As in years past, what emerges is the first true picture of the profession of web design as it is practiced by men and women of all ages, across all continents, in corporations, agencies, non-profits, and freelance configurations.
For the third year in a row, good citizens of the web, we ask that you take a few minutes to tell us about your professional skills, educational background, career prospects, job benefits, and more.
If we, the people who make websites, want the world to know who we are and what we do, it's up to each of us to stand up and represent. This year, 30,055 of you did just that, taking time out of your busy work day to answer the detailed questions in the second A List Apart Survey. Find out what we learned about our profession and ourselves.
Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.
Tell us how you overcome isolation, distractions, and temptation. How you deal with kids and deadlines. How you walk the blurry line between work and home. Share your best practices on working from home so we can present them in an upcoming issue of A List Apart.
In April 2007, A List Apart and An Event Apart conducted a survey of people who make websites. Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey’s 37 questions, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide.
Working with statisticians, we spent the next months crunching raw data into meaningful findings. Here we present what we have learned about our powerful yet little-studied profession.
People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Let's do something to change that. Presenting A List Apart's first annual Web Design Survey.
