In this week’s web design and development roundup, you’ll learn about a tech ethics case study, find out how to improve non-text color contrast, discover why CSS logical properties are useful properties, and more.
If you’re new to my blog, each Friday I publish a post highlighting my favorite user experience, accessibility, WordPress, CSS, and HTML posts I’ve read in the past week.
Hope you find the resources helpful in your work or projects!
Want more resources like these on a daily basis? Follow me @redcrew on Twitter.
Tweet of the Week
Picard management tip: Don’t assume anything is possible or impossible until you’ve asked the people who will be doing the work.
— Picard Tips (@PicardTips) July 20, 2022
User Experience
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Our planetary crisis has arrived, says Angelos Arnis. And the time to act has passed. In his hopeful and long designing for the last earth essay, Arnis challenges designers to transition into a profession to design through disruptions.
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Join UX Research & Strategy on August 9, 2022 when they host Rapid UX Research to Empower Your Teams. You’ll learn how to use rapid research to gather and share customer insights and leave the talk with a new approach to your research requests. The event is online and free; preregistration is required.
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Can’t say I agree with claims that we appear to be heading toward a recession, but there’s nothing wrong with preparing for the possibility of a job layoff. Ellen Glover offers ways for a designer to survive during economic uncertainty.
At times, design teams can be islands unto themselves. But now is the time to reach across the aisle to areas like sales and finance to see how your design work can add value.
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I’m a longtime fan of Growth. Design case studies. In this week’s case study of The Guardian, they take a closer look at tech ethics: if cookie consents were honest. My thoughts: if The Guardian wanted to be honest, their notice would be “We want to sell your information to everyone.”
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Using icons in addition to text improves scannability dramatically, yet 81% of sites don’t. Based on their testing, Baymard Institute recommends having an icon-based dashboard for accounts and self-service UX.
Accessibility
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Last week’s release of NASA’s Webb stunning images of the universe caught everyone’s attention. But that wasn’t the only thing that captured our attention: the unexpected star of NASA’s Webb images were the alternative text descriptions.
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Color contrast affects more than typography.
👀 Did you know that contrast is about more than just typography?
— Tregg 🤘 (@Treggify) July 20, 2022
Seriously, the WCAG talks about even more than what I cover here 👇
In this video I use @getstarkco to fix some contrast issues right in @figma pic.twitter.com/euwZsImKT4 -
Following up on Tregg Frank’s tweet and video, learn more about color contrast in Minnesota IT Services’ how to improve non-text contrast: color schemes and interface components. David Miller discusses how following basic color rules can improve color contrast in user interface components.
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In his learning styles and inclusion article, Denis Boudreau highlights how your own preferences don’t matter when it comes to inclusive communication. Focusing on the three learning styles: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic allows us to keep our audience engaged.
WordPress
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Finally! Some good news from WordPress.com announcing changes to our pricing plans, which brings back the previous pricing plans.
Including paid plans with no ads.
For the past few months, there’s been a lot of negative feedback about the pricing plans announced earlier this year. Including complaining (rightfully so!) about getting ads in a paid plan.
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Congrats to the 2022 Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship recipients: Margherita Pelonara, Simona Simionato, and Pooja Derashri. All three women will be attending WordCamp US 2022 in San Diego, California September 9-11, 2022.
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For both classic and block themes, you can now view pattern previews in the WordPress themes directory. You’ll see a grid of patterns underneath the theme description and tags. Note: it’s in beta, so you may encounter some display issues.
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If you use Local, you’ll be interested in Nick Schäferhoff‘s tutorial on how to import and export websites in Local. I appreciate his helpful screenshots.
CSS and HTML
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Exciting to see the change! CanIUse has rearranged their browser order; Internet Explorer is no longer the first column. It’s been moved to the end for desktop browsers. (Which makes sense, because Internet Explorer has been retired.)
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A reminder to every front-end developer and designer:
Your periodic reminder that accessible web interfaces start with semantic HTML
— Stephanie Eckles (@5t3ph) July 20, 2022 -
I enjoyed reading Geoff Graham’s roundup of recent document outline chatter. I only caught a few of the references via my feed reader and Twitter.
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Following up on Graham’s roundup, I want to highlight Steve Faulkner’s subheadings, subtitles, alternative titles, and taglines in HTML. Speaking for myself (and probably a few other folks), I would be glad to see the return of
hgroup. -
Michelle Barker discusses why logical properties are useful properties, sharing code examples for implementing the
padding-inlineproperty. -
When did people start using the word “breakpoints” to describe layout adaptations? Even Ethan Marcotte, who first coined the term “responsive layout” in 2010 isn’t sure, as he explains in points, break.
What I Found Interesting
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Depending on your type of Google account, there’s a change in how Google Workspace users can live stream Google Meet events publicly via YouTube. Rollout began July 21, 2022. Note: availability info at the end highlights which Google accounts will have access.
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While Abhinav Pandey’s an approach to continuous learning post is directed toward developers, the tips apply across every field.
Make time for reviewing your path once in a while.
To check where you’re investing time and if there are any changes you can make to make it more effective.
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Wondering how to get more people to read your blog? Darren Rowse of ProBlogger explains why nobody reads your content. Rowse shares10 techniques for what you can do about it. First thing to test: is your blog scannable?
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