Journal tags: ala

I can’t resist bookshelves.

If I’m shown into someone’s home and left alone while the host goes and does something, you can bet I’m going to peruse their bookshelves.

I don’t know why. Maybe I’m looking for points of commonality. “Oh, you read this book too?” Or maybe it’s the opposite, and I’m looking for something new and—pardon the pun—novel. “Oh, that book sounds interesting!”

I like it when people have a kind of bookshelf on their website.

• Mandy’s reading list is always worth browsing.
• Remy has a comprehensive record of his reading history.
• Maggie has her library and her anti-library.
• Molly White has one shelf for fiction and another shelf for non-fiction.

Here’s my ad-hoc bookshelf, which is manually mirrored on Bookshop.org.

I like having an overview of what I’ve been reading. One of the reasons I started keeping track was so that I could try to have a nice balance of fiction and non-fiction.

I always get a little sad when I see someone’s online reading list and it only consists of non-fiction books that are deemed somehow useful, rather than simply pleasurable. Cameron wrote about when he used to do this:

I felt like reading needed to have some clear purpose. The topic of any book I read needed to directly contribute to being an “adult”. So I started to read non-fiction – stuff that reflected what was happening in my career. Books on management, books on finance, books on economics, books on the creative process. And for many years this diet of dry, literary roughage felt wholesome … but joyless. Each passage I highlited in yellow marker was a point for the scoreboard, not a memory to be treasured.

Now he’s redressing the imbalance and rediscovering the unique joy of entering other worlds by reading fiction.

For a while, I forced myself to have perfect balance. I didn’t allow myself to read two non-fiction books in a row or two fiction books in a row. I made myself alternate between the two.

I’ve let that lapse now. I’m reading more fiction than non-fiction, and I’m okay with that.

But I still like looking back on what I’ve been reading and seeing patterns emerge. Like there’s a clear boom in the last year of reading retellings of the Homeric epics (all kicked off by reading the brilliant Circe by Madeline Miller).

I also keep an eye out for a different kind of imbalance. I want to make sure that I’m not just reading books by people like me—middle-aged heterosexual white dudes.

You may think that a balanced reading diet would emerge naturally, but I’m not so sure. Here’s an online bookshelf. Here’s another online bookshelf. Plenty of good stuff in both. But do either of those men realise that they’ve gone more than a year without reading a book written by a woman?

It’s almost certainly not a conscious decision. It’s just that in the society we live in, the default mode tends towards what’s been historically privileged (see also films, music, and painting).

It’s like driving in a car that subtly pulls to one side. Unless you compensate for it, you’ll end up in the ditch without even realising.

I feel bad for calling attention to those two reading lists. It feels very judgy of me. And reading is something that doesn’t deserve judgement. Any reading is good reading.

Mind you, maybe being judgemental is exactly why I’m drawn to people’s bookshelves in the first place. It might be that I’m subsconsciously looking for compatibility signals. If I see a bookshelf filled with books I like, I’m bound to feel predisposed to like that person. And if I see a bookshelf dominated by Jordan Peterson and Ayn Rand, I’m probably going to pass judgement on the reader, even if I know I shouldn’t.

I’ve always associated good design with thoughtfulness. Like, I should be able to point to any element in an interface and the designer should be able to tell me the reasons it’s there. Those reasons may be rooted in user needs or asthetics or some other consideration, but the point is that there’s a justification for it. Justify every pixel!

But I’ve come to realise that this is a bit reductionist. Now when I point at an interface element, I still expect the designer to be able to justify its inclusion, but I’d also like to know the trade-offs that were made.

Suppose there’s a large hero image. I’m sure the designer would have no problem justifying its inclusion on the basis of impact and the emotional heft it delivers. But did they also understand the potential downsides? Were they aware of the performance implications of including a large image?

I hope the answer to both questions is yes. They understood the costs, but they decided that, on balance, the positives outweighed the negatives.

When it comes to the positives, universal principles of design often apply. Colour theory, typography, proximity, and so on. But the downsides tend to be specific to the medium that the design is delivered in.

Let’s say you’re designing for print. You want to include an extra typeface just for footnotes. No problem. There isn’t really a downside. In print, you can use all the typefaces you want. But if this were for the web, then the calculation would be different. Every extra typeface comes with a performance penalty. A decision that might be justified in one medium might not work in another medium.

It works both ways; on the web you can use all the colours you want, without incurring any penalties, but in print—depending on the process you’re using—you might have to weigh up that decision very differently.

From this perspective, every design decision is like a balance sheet. A good web designer understands the benefits and the costs behind each decision they make.

It’s a similar story when it comes to web development. Heck, we even have the term “tech debt” to describe decisions that we know aren’t for the best in the long term.

In fact, I’d say that consideration of the long-term effects is something that should play a bigger part in technical decisions.

When we’re weighing up the pros and cons of using a particular tool, we have a tendency to think in the here and now. How might this help me right now? How might this hinder me right now?

But often a decision that delivers short-term gain may well end up delivering long-term pain.

Alexander Petros describes this succinctly:

Reopen a node repository after 3 months and you’ll find that your project is mired in a flurry of security warnings, backwards-incompatible library “upgrades,” and a frontend framework whose cultural peak was the exact moment you started the project and is now widely considered tech debt.

When I wrote about making the Patterns Day website I described my process as doing it “the long hard stupid way”—a term that Frank coined in a talk he gave a few years back. But perhaps my hands-on approach is only long, hard and stupid in the short time. With each passing year, the codebase will retain a degree of readability and accessibility that I would’ve sacrificed had I depended on automated build processes.

Robin Berjon puts this into the historical perspective of Taylorism and Luddism:

Whenever something is automated, you lose some control over it. Sometimes that loss of control improves your life because exerting control is work, and sometimes it worsens your life because it reduces your autonomy.

Or as Marshall McLuhan put it:

Every extension is also an amputation.

…which is fine as long as the benefits of the extension outweigh the costs of the amputation. My worry is that, when it comes to evaluating technology for building on the web, we aren’t considering the longer-term costs.

Maintenance matters. With the passing of time, maintenance matters more and more.

Maybe we avoid thinking about the long-term costs because it would lead to decision paralysis. That’s understandable. But I take comfort from some words of wisdom on the web from the 1990s. Tim Berners-Lee’s style guide for hypertext:

Because hypertext is potentially unconstrained you are a little daunted. Do not be. You can write a document as simply as you like. In many ways, the simpler the better.

For the shortest month of the year, February managed to pack a lot in. I was away for most of the month. I had the great honour of being asked back to speak at Webstock in New Zealand this year—they even asked me to open the show!

I had no intention of going straight to New Zealand and then turning around to get on the first flight back, so I made sure to stretch the trip out (which also helps to mitigate the inevitable jet lag). Jessica and I went to Hong Kong first, stayed there for a few nights, then went on Sydney for a while (and caught up with Charlotte while we were out there), before finally making our way to Wellington. Then, after Webstock was all wrapped up, we retraced the same route in reverse. Many flat whites, dumplings, and rays of sunshine later, we arrived back in the UK.

As well as giving the opening keynote at Webstock, I did a full-day workshop, and I also ran a workshop in Hong Kong on the way back. So technically it was a work trip, but I am extremely fortunate that I get to go on adventures like this and still get to call it work.

September 13th, 2007:

Jeremy Keith looks a bit like Alan Rickman’s Severus Snape in Harry Potter.

February 25th, 2009:

I have to start off by saying—and maybe this will come as no surprise—but you look a lot to me like the guy who plays Snape on Harry Potter. Do you get that? Do you get that a lot?

January 24th, 2013:

I just figured out who @adactio looks exactly like. Try and guess.

— Amber Weinberg (@amberweinberg)

@amberweinberg Please don’t say Severus Snape.

— Jeremy Keith (@adactio)

@adactio lololol I admit, last night when you were bundled up in a scarf you looked SO like him that’s exactly why I thought

— Amber Weinberg (@amberweinberg)

April 24th, 2013:

Another conference, another person telling me I remind them of Severus Snape. Never Alan Rickman, mind …only ever Alan Rickman as Snape.

— Jeremy Keith (@adactio)

January 14th, 2016:

RIP Alan Rickman :-( I always thought he looked a bit like @adactio

— Ian Devlin (@iandevlin)

It’s summertime. Suddenly everything green seems to be growing with amazing fecundity. It’s quite something to see so much life blooming all at once.

Jessica and I have two little patches of earth in raised beds in our back garden. Right now they’re positively overflowing with lettuces: mustard greens, rocket, and a lovely variety called “marvel of four seasons”. Collectively they are the gift that keeps on giving. I can go out in the evening and harvest a great big bowlful of salad, and by the time I go out the next evening, there’s a whole new green feast waiting.

A Dao of Web Design by John Allsopp is a document that stands outside of time. It was a perfectly crafted message for its own era, and amazingly it’s even more relevant now, a full fathom fifteen years later.

We once took on the tropes of print design and tried to apply them to the web. I fear that today we run the risk of treating web development no different to other kinds of software development, ignoring the strengths of the web that John highlighted for us. Flexibility, ubiquity, and uncertainty: don’t fight them as bugs; embrace them as features.

This is the second briefest visit I’ve ever paid to Seattle. I arrived last night and I’ll be leaving in just a couple of hours to head for home.

The briefest visit I’ve ever paid to Seattle was just over a week ago. That lasted just long enough for me to grab a few hour’s sleep in a hotel near the airport — in room 404, no less — before heading north to Anchorage, Alaska.

In the following week I saw plenty of sights. I certainly had no lack of daylight in which to see them. With just a few weeks to go until the Summer solstice, night time doesn’t last very long.

I spent three days on The Spirit of Columbia cruising around the glaciers of Prince William Sound and the rest of the time was divided between Anchorage, Talkeetna and Denali National Park.

The three-day cruise offered up plenty of wildlife sightings: one bear, a drove of mountain goats, a bevy of otters, a bob of seals, a convocation of eagles and a gam of whales. The sight of a young humpback whale lunge-feeding near the shoreline was eclipsed only by the unusual sight—to my eyes, at least—of an eagle swimming. I thought that maybe the eagle was in distress but no, apparently when an eagle catches a really big fish, it will try to swim to the shore with it rather than let the prize go.

The landscape was, needless to say, spectacular. I took plenty of pictures but the only ones that really get the scale across are the panoramas I stiched together (Photoshop CS3 makes this a breeze using File → Automate → Photomerge).

Peruse these at full size to get all the detail. I’m particularly fond of the panoramas created from pictures taken on a crisp clear day atop a glacier at Denali after an exhilarating helicopter ride.

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Three years ago, Jessica and I went on a cruise through Alaska’s Inside Passage. Now we’re going back. This time we’re going to Prince William Sound to see some glaciers …y’know, before they’re all gone.

I’ll be hastening the glacial melting by flying across the Atlantic to Seattle before heading onto Anchorage to start the four-day excursion out on the water. After that, the plan is to spend a little time in Denali.

I expect to be completely incommunicado the whole time, barring the occasional Twitter update. If you send me any email over the next week or so, don’t expect a response. Then again, that’s true anyway whether I’m traveling or not.

Redesigns are like buses: you need to wear clean underwear in case you get hit by one. No, hang on: You wait for one for ages, then loads come along at once… yeah, that’s what I meant.

Paul has been busy since leaving Oxford for his new job in London. He’s been marking up the new design for the front page of The Guardian website. This is a nice refreshing change for the paper’s site, making really good use of colour and typography in a pleasing grid. It’s a bit wide for my taste but at least most of the content that gets cut off at 800 pixels is mostly marketing guff (with the exception of the search at the top of the page: shame that the header couldn’t be liquid even if the rest of the page stays fixed).

Don’t worry: I’m not that much of a zealot that I’m going to judge designs purely based on whether they’re fixed width or liquid. But if you want to see a great example of a hybrid design, check out what Patrick has been doing with the ongoing design of his site: the third column drops below the second when the window width gets narrow—a smooth adaptive technique I first saw pioneered in a previous incarnation of Colly’s site.

Speaking of kick-ass Brit designers hailing from North of the Watford gap, Malarkey has redesigned his site. Actually, he’s done more than that. He’s condensed his two sites—business and personal—into one. You can read all about the ins and outs of the redesign but I recommend having a little poke around the site first to see how many delightful little Easter eggs you can spot.

There’s a ton of really nice little touches. Obviously the superb illustrations by Kevin really stand out but did you also notice that all the borders between columns are hand-drawn in pencil? Needless to say, the typography is uniformly excellent. Oh, and see if you can figure out how he managed to get two columns of text to flow around a single image on the front page.

Design is more than just visual appearance and Andy has pulled out all the stops in making sure that his personality comes across not just in the graphical elements but also in the copy. My favourite little touch is down in the footer:

If you need help using this site, please consult our help page. If you need help using our help page, download our How to use help PDF (what’s a download?)

That last link leads to a page that includes this great piece of advice:

Advisory notice: When you download something from the internet, don’t forget to put it back.

I haven’t been immune to the redesign bug. I finally got ‘round to making a long-overdue overhaul of the Salter Cane site.

The old Flash site served its purpose well. It was atmospheric and mysterious—mostly because we didn’t have anything much to say so atmosphere and mystery were all we wanted to communicate. Times have changed though. There’s a lot happening with the band: concerts, an album release, songs on iTunes and a general increase in activity. Time for the band members to get blogging.

That doesn’t mean I’ve ditched the atmosphere but I felt it was time to remove some of the mystery. The design itself came together very, very quickly—just a couple of days—and it isn’t finished yet. I still need to create pages for the individual band members, add an archive of past concerts and work on expanding the individual blog post pages. But the overall look and feel is all in place and I’m quite pleased with how it has turned out. It has a lighter touch than the previous design but still has a lot of that olde-worlde feeling.

It all works pretty nicely on my mobile phone which is a nice bonus. The front page is also a mini mashup, pulling in the latest posts from the band’s MySpace page and the latest pictures on Flickr tagged with “saltercane”. And, of course, there are microformats a-plenty.

I spent most of my efforts on getting the typography right, paying a lot of attention to Richard’s ideas about baselines and vertical rhythm. I’ve added a couple of touches using CSS selectors that not all browsers support—transcending CSS and all that malarkey. Safari users will get the nice :first-line and :first-letter styles (though I did have to shoot off a bug report to Dave Hyatt pointing out that the letter styled with the :first-letter pseudo-class doesn’t scale when the user resizes the text size—but this might well be already fixed in the nightly builds of WebKit).

So all in all, it’s a busy time for redesigns. But wait, there’s more…

Keep your eye on the d.Constuct website over the next couple of days. Much as I love the current holding page, what’s coming is even better. Paul has been slaving away in the Clearleft office to make a site that really fits the theme of this year’s conference: designing the user experience. You can expect a fun-filled redesign.

When the d.Constuct site launches, you’ll be able to see for yourself what a great line-up we’ve got for the conference this year. I’m looking forward to it already. Don’t worry: tickets won’t be going on sale for quite a while yet but be sure to mark the date in your calendar: September 7th, 2007. On that day, Brighton is most definitely the place to be.