A List Apart Archives
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Fiery Double Issue
October 4, 2011
In Issue No. 336 of A List Apart for people who make websites, Denise Jacobs tells how to get your design mojo back when clients and deadlines get you down: Reigniting Your Creative Spark. And Mandy Brown of Typekit and A Book Apart explains what to do when your site or service fails in Fire Drills: Communications Strategy in a Crisis.
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A Primer on A/B Testing
August 23, 2011
Data is an invaluable tool for web designers making decisions about the user experience. A/B tests, or split tests, are one of the easiest ways to measure the effect of different design, content, or functionality, helping you create high-performing user experience elements to implement across your site. Lara Swanson shows how to make sure you avoid red herrings and reach statistically significant results in Issue No. 333 of A List Apart for people who make websites.
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Making up Stories: Perception, Language, and the Web
August 23, 2011
We learn and retain information through stories because they turn information into more than the sum of its parts. But what makes a story a story, and what does it mean for the digital world we’ve built? Elizabeth McGuane and Randall Snare weave an enchanting tale of attention, comprehension, inference, coherence, and shopping in A List Apart Issue No. 333: Making up Stories: Perception, Language, and the Web.
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Elements of Content Strategy, Basics of CSS Float
March 8, 2011
In Issue No. 325 of A List Apart for people who make websites, we present an excerpt from The Elements of Content Strategy and a primer on how to keep your CSS layouts afloat.
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A List Apart No. 322
January 25, 2011
In Issue No. 322 of A List Apart for people who make websites: Respect the doodle. Use the power of visual thinking to create and share ideas.
In The Miseducation of the Doodle, Sunni Brown shows how doodling sharpens concentration, increases retention, and enhances access to the problem solving unconscious. And in Sketching: the Visual Thinking Power Tool, Mike Rohde outlines the creative and design-selling benefits of the humble loose sketch, surveys sketching tools, and shares ways to become confident with this method of brainstorming, regardless of your level of artistic ability.
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Digital books, client critiques
January 11, 2011
Craig Mod (Flipboard, Art Space Tokyo) comes to grips with the challenges of designing great digital reading experiences and presents the initial release of Bibliotype, an HTML baseline typography library for tablet reading in A Simpler Page. And Cassie McDaniel shows how to let client criticism actually improve your design instead of just watering it [...]
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A List Apart 319: ARIA, Apps, Accessibility
November 30, 2010
Issue No. 319 of A List Apart for people who make websites tackles the intersection between web apps, WAI-ARIA, JavaScript, and accessibility. Enjoy ARIA and Progressive Enhancement by Derek Featherstone, and The Accessibility of WAI-ARIA by Detlev Fischer.
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CSS, Advanced and Refreshing
November 16, 2010
In Issue No. 318 of A List Apart for people who make websites, Noah Stokes (@motherfuton) offers Ye Compleat Refresher Course on CSS Positioning, and we proudly offer an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Dan (@simplebits) Cederholm’s CSS3 for Web Designers (A Book Apart, 2010, published today).
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ALA 314: It’s Formtastic!
September 21, 2010
Issue No. 314 of A List Apart For People Who Make Websites is all about your form.
Ryan Seddon shows how to reduce errors and guide users to success via new methods made possible by HTML5 and CSS3. Harness HTML5 form input types and attributes to set validation constraints to check user input, and use CSS3’s new UI pseudo-classes to style validation states, making form completion quick and effortless.
And Luke Wroblewski explains how accordion forms increase completion rates and user happiness by dynamically showing and hiding sections of related questions as people complete the form—allowing them to focus on what matters and finish quickly. Learn how your smallest design decisions affect completion speed, which design choices make these innovative forms feel familiar and easy—and which make them feel foreign and complex, leading people to make errors.
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A List Apart No. 313
September 7, 2010
In Issue No. 313 of A List Apart for people who make websites: Better content management systems through content strategy, by Jonathan Kahn; typographically beauteous web pages may benefit from hyphenation and justification, by Richard Fink.