Art direction has been part of advertising and print design for over 100 years, but on the web art direction is rare and there have been few meaningful conversations about it. Art Direction for the Web by Andy Clarke changes that and explains art direction, what it means, why it matters, and who can do it. Jump to table of contents or pre-order the book right away. This is a book about why art direction matters and how you can art-direct compelling and effective experiences across devices and platforms.
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When we combine the nature of fallbacks, we can start to see how they might help us gather feedback. Feedback is the key to understanding whether what you’ve created is valuable or not. In order to have successful products, we need to understand our users and implement great feedback loops so that we can make good decisions and build great products. Today, Ben Christine will dive into some examples from the wild in which feedback loops are missing from popular fallbacks. Then, he will follow up with ideas of how that feedback loop might look and work in those fallbacks.
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There are a good number of benefits in being able to write SVG by hand, such as optimizing SVGs in ways a tool can’t (turning a path into a simpler path or shape), or by simply understanding how libraries like D3 or Greensock work. In this article, Bryan Rasmussen will show you how to turn SVG circles into paths which you can use in animation and text paths, as well as how to turn paths into circles. Once you’ve figured out how it all works, you’ll be able to achieve some quite practical effects. Let’s dig in.
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Voice Assistants are on their way into people’s homes, wrists, and pockets. That means that some of our content will be spoken out loud with the help of digital speech synthesis. The web isn’t just passive text on a screen anymore. Web editors and UX designers have to get accustomed to making content and services that should be spoken out loud. In this tutorial, Knut Malvær will show you how to make a What You Get Is What You Hear (WYGIWYH) editor for speech synthesis using Sanity.io’s editor for Portable Text.
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In Part 1, Alvin explained the basics of how to design a virtual reality model. In Part 2, he showed how to implement the game’s core logic. In this final part of his tutorial, the finishing touches will be added such as the “Start” and “Game Over” menus as well as a synchronization of game states between mobile and desktop clients. This paves the way for concepts in building multiplayer games. To get started, you will need Internet access, a Glitch project completed from part 2 of this tutorial, and a virtual reality headset.
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IE8 was released a decade ago today. In this article, Chris Ashton tries it out against the modern web, and considers how we can build our sites to last. He will show you how to use the web under various constraints, representing a given demographic of user. We hope to raise the profile of difficulties faced by real people, which are avoidable if we design and develop in a way that is sympathetic to their needs.
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Many people are currently looking for alternatives to WordPress. In this article, Leonardo Losoviz compares WordPress to the arguably similar yet more modern October CMS on a wide arrange of both technical and non-technical topics, by exposing the important concerns that need to be kept in mind when looking for a suitable CMS for your projects. The goal of the article is not to convince people to stick to WordPress or to switch to October CMS, but simply to demonstrate what aspects must be taken into account before concluding the move to a different platform. The same comparison could (and should) also be done with other platforms before making a sensible decision.
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Staying on top of what’s happening in the web community can be hard with so much going on. Anselm’s monthly reading list gives you an overview of the most important news and articles.
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Slack has done a lot to bring teams and partners together online. It’s also done a lot to empower developers to build their own custom apps for it. Until recently, however, developers were limited by how much they could do to customize the design of those apps. That’s changing today with Block Kit. Today, Suzanne Scacca is going to talk about Block Kit, Slack’s contribution to building a better collaboration UI.
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If you’ve ever wondered how games with keyboard-less support for VR headsets are built, then this tutorial explains just what you’re looking for. Here’s how you too can bring a basic, functioning VR game to life. In this part, Alvin Wan will implement the game’s core logic and utilize more advanced A-Frame environment manipulations to build the “game” part of this application. By the end, you will have a functioning virtual reality game with a real challenge.
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