Recent job listings

~ 01 July 2009 ~

A few weeks ago I received the following remarks from Jeff Lin, an Authentic Jobs customer and founder of Bust Out Solutions:

Just wanted to let you know that I posted a job probably two years ago for a designer, got several responses, and ultimately found one guy who I tried to hire. It didn’t work out at the time, but we kept in touch, and I finally hired him a few months ago. It’s worked out great, and we recently launched Best Buy Idea X. I’m happy with the design, and in part thanks to Authentic Jobs for helping me find great talent!

Employers continue to find talented web and creative professionals through Authentic Jobs, which has been filling full-time and freelance positions throughout the globe since 2005. And we keep giving back, too, using 1% of our revenue to fund 74 loans to entrepreneurs around the world via Kiva.org. Thank you.

Some recent listings are highlighted below.

Full-time (International)

Cambridge, UK (or New York) Senior PHP Developer at English360
London, UK Senior Developer at Addison Corporate Marketing Limited

Full-time (U.S.)

Montgomery, AL User Interface Designer/Developer at Southern Poverty Law Center
Campbell, CA Rockstar Designer at ZURB, inc,
Cupertino, CA Sr. Web Front-End Engineer at Apple Inc.
Palo Alto, CA Facebook Communication Designer at Facebook
Santa Monica, CA User Interface Engineer at Demand Media
Boulder, CO Junior Web Developer at Wall Street On Demand
Washington, DC Infographics Designer at Pew Research Center
Washington, DC Front-End Developer at U.S. News & World Report
Laurel, MD Web Developer at LMD
New York, NY Web and E-Media Developer at NYC Department of Transportation
Cleveland, OH Contract Front-End Developer at The Sherwin-Williams Company
Arlington, VA Front-end Web Designer at Symplicity Corporation
Seattle, WA UI Developer at Angry Lapdog Productions, Inc.
Seattle, WA Web Developer at msnbc.com

Freelance

Freelance Sr. Web Developer at Magnani Caruso Dutton
Web Application UI/UX Designer at Fantastic
Mozilla Firefox Extension Developer at SEOmoz

Post a job or find one at Authentic Jobs.

Archived article (comments off)

The debate over page zooming vs. text scaling

~ 18 June 2009 ~

After posting my reasons for switching back to px for font-size citing page zooming as the primary justification, it was apparent that enthusiasm for page zooming wasn’t as unanimous as I had thought.

As a refresher from the article, low-vision users (or anyone) can alter their browser’s text size by changing the default text size permanently via the browser’s settings, or on-the-fly using the keyboard commands Ctrl+/- (Windows) or Command+/- (Mac).

Until recently, these commands would cause all major browsers to scale up or down the size of the text while retaining the formatting and layout of the page, commonly called text scaling or text zooming. Now, however, recent versions of every major browser now default to page zooming instead of text scaling for Ctrl+/- and Command+/- commands AND for the “Zoom” option in the browser’s menu. Page zooming literally zooms the entire page — layout, formatting, and text size — in unison. Elements retain their size and shape, which greatly reduces the need for us to compensate for text scaling. In effect, the browser assumes the burden of relative sizing.

Below are examples of each. First, page zooming:

Next, text scaling:

If you’re running Firefox or Safari on Mac or Windows, you can easily switch between these two options. Select the “Zoom Text Only” option under the “View” or “Zoom” menus to override page zooming.

So, what’s wrong with page zooming?

There are at least two compelling arguments I’ve heard that are unfavorable towards page zooming, and I am listening to what is being said:

“Low-vision users don’t like horizontal scrolling.” I’ve not done extensive research in this area myself, so it’s hard to counter-argue. Besides, it’s safe to say nobody — good vision or not — likes horizontal scrolling.

However, I’d like to see conclusive evidence that accompanies statements such as this from “Nik”, who commented in my previous article:

We found during usability testing for a site with a large proportion of users with vision problems that most of them preferred to use text zoom instead of page zoom because page zoom almost always means horizontal scrolling.

We need to know more about how these users configure their browsers in the first place, the keyboard commands they do and don’t use, and the like. Being asked to rate the two options in a usability lab vs. configuring and using one’s own computer are often two very different things.

“What about IE6?” First, if your project, organization, or client still requires supporting IE6, you have far worse things to be concerned about than page zooming vs. text scaling. I have the luxury of not being concerned about IE6 in my corporate and personal projects. That is not a luxury afforded to everyone.

With IE6, only text scaling is an option. IE6 (and 7 and 8 actually) will not rescale px values. There are valid arguments for and against this approach, but regardless the only option for text scaling in IE6 is with em and % values. So, if supporting IE6 is still part of your game plan, the argument here is that relative values should be too.

Is one site for all feasible?*

For me, at the core of this debate is a much bigger question: Is one site for all really feasible? Traditionally, I’ve believed it is. But increasingly I’m finding that it’s not always practical. Some examples:

I make the argument in Mobile Web Design that a mobile-optimized site is better for mobile users than a handheld style sheet that marginally modifies your existing site. I published this book nearly two years ago, and today I still believe that to be true, as do several other mobile experts.
Although I argue repeatedly in “The Highly Extensible CSS Interface” in favor or markup that endures the rigors of language translation, there are often elements (menus, buttons, etc.) within an interface that are virtually impossible or impractical to code in way such that any amount of text can be fitted properly. I’m seeing this right now with a project at work that has to be translated in 10 languages. The more practical solution has been to have a style sheet for each language, (language).css, that modifies the width, height, padding, etc. of those elements that cannot be compensated for otherwise.
In his article for A List Apart, “Big, Stark & Chunky”, Joe Clark points out the fact that merely compensating for text scaling may not be enough for low-vision users. Separate CSS files specifically for these users may be needed. “Standardistas were able to stomach the idea that blind people were simply ignoring the appearance of their sites because, self-evidently, they were blind,” he states. “It was no big deal; nothing happens to your visual design when you accommodate blind people. But to accommodate low-vision people, you have to totally rearrange your multicolumn site. You have to knowingly destroy your original graphic design.”

The reality of all this debate is the fact that, as I’ve already mentioned, every major browser seems to be trending towards page zooming as the default for the “Zoom” option, whether via keyboard or menu option. This trend, along with the other arguments in this article, leaves me unsettled about the right approach for extensibility within a layout, and even unsettled about px for font-size.

So, if you were expecting a conclusion of some sort at the end of this article, there isn’t one. I’m thinking aloud. Please do the same — let’s keep the discussion going.

Additional reading:

* This heading text is taken from a report of the same name, “Helping low-vision and other users with Web sites that meet their needs: is one site for all feasible?” by Mary Frances Theofanos and Janice Redish. The report, which is one of the references in Joe Clark’s article, can be purchased here.

Archived article 33 comments

Coding like it’s 1999

~ 04 June 2009 ~

UPDATE: Please see The debate over page zooming vs. text scaling.

Recently I made the switch back to HTML 4 for DOCTYPEs and px for font-size (sound like 1999 again?), and I’ve tweeted about it occasionally. I’m documenting the switch more thoroughly here.

HTML 4.01 Strict

I’ve chosen to go with HTML 4.01 Strict as the DOCTYPE in my projects moving forward, favoring it above XHTML 1.0 Strict and HTML 5. I’ll briefly explain my reasoning.

XHTML 1.0 Strict – This is what many of us in the industry, including myself, have been using for the past few years. However, Dave Shea offers a compelling argument to drop XHTML with an eye towards HTML 5:

“Six years ago, many of us thought XHTML would be the future of the web and we’d be living in an XML world by now. But in the intervening time it’s become fairly apparent to myself and others that XHTML2 really isn’t going anywhere, at least not in the realm that we care about…. I’m not ready to start working through the contortions needed to make my sites work with an HTML5 DOCTYPE yet, which leaves me with the most recent implemented version of the language…. [U]ntil I get a better sense that HTML5 has arrived, 4.01 will do me just fine for the next four or five years.”

HTML 5 – In a nutshell, HTML 5 is the next major version of the hypertext markup language. The good news is meaningless div and span elements will be replaced by more meaningful elements such as nav, header, and video.

This means instead of marking up something such as

<div class="header">
  <h1>Page Title</h1>
</div>

<object><param><embed src="http://vimeo.com/3956190"></embed></param></object>

we’ll be able to mark up the same HTML like this:

<header>
  <h1>Page Title</h1>
</header>

and this:

<video src="http://vimeo.com/3956190">

The bad news is HTML 5 is not currently supported adequately by major browsers (notably Internet Explorer). Estimates range from months to years before HTML 5 is fully supported and therefore a viable option for all of us creating websites.

An alternate approach is to maintain that same watchful eye towards HTML 5 by writing markup using current DOCTYPEs but with semantic, HTML 5-like class names. Jon Tan covers this approach beautifully in “Preparing for HTML5 with Semantic Class Names”.

For example, using the nav element, HTML 5 markup would be

<nav>
  <ul>
    <li><a href="">Item 1</a></li>
    ...
  </ul>
</nav>

while our semantic, HTML 5-like markup using HTML 4 or XHTML 1 would be

<div class="nav">
  <ul>
    <li><a href="">Item 1</a></li>
    ...
  </ul>
</div>

However, the drawback to this approach is you potentially end up with a lot of extra divs. If our goal is meaningful and lightweight markup, the most optimal markup right now would instead be the following:

<ul class="nav">
  <li><a href="">Item 1</a></li>
  ...
</ul>

So, my opinion about HTML 5? We’ll all adapt just fine when it’s ready for prime-time and fully supported. The mental shift will be minimal. Until then, I’ll keep coding the way we’ve always done it.

Additional resources:

px for font-size

For a number of years, px was the de facto standard for sizing text with font-size. It gave designers transferring their design from Photoshop (or other software) to HTML a consistent, absolute unit for text size. Then, as we became more knowledgeable of and concerned with accessibility, relative text size (em or %) gradually became the preferred unit. This enabled low-vision users, and really anybody, to change their browser’s default text size permanently via the browser’s settings, or on-the-fly using the keyboard commands Ctrl+ and Ctrl- (Windows) or Command+ and Command- (Mac).

Accordingly, and up until recently, all major browsers would scale up or down the size of the text while retaining the formatting and layout of the page. This is commonly called text scaling or text zooming. This adaptation required us to create markup that allowed for relative sizing of any elements containing text. For example, if a div contained text set atop a background image, we would have to either repeat the image as the div grew larger with text scaling or create the image larger than necessary to compensate for growth. This is something I covered in detail in my “The Highly Extensible CSS Interface” series of articles.

However, recent versions of every major browser — Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and yes, Internet Explorer — now default to page zooming instead of text scaling for Ctrl+/- and Command+/- commands. Page zooming literally zooms the entire page — layout, formatting, and text size — in unison. Elements retain their size and shape, which greatly reduces the need to compensate for text scaling. In effect, the browser assumes the burden of relative sizing.

What does all this mean? It means px can again be considered a viable value for font-size. It means the difference between setting text with absolute units or setting text with relative units is negligible for users. For you and me, however, the the difference is substantial. The burden of calculating relative units throughout a CSS document is replaced by the convenience of absolute units — 14px is 14px anywhere in the document, independent of parent elements whose font-size may differ.

Additional resources:

I suppose the only legacy practice left to switch back to at this point is tables…

UPDATE: Some of you may have been led to believe I’ve given a mandate for the industry to move to HTML 4 and px. Please note I’ve documented only my switch here and the reasoning for it, and that px can be considered a viable value for font-size. As I mention in the comments, you need to make the right decision based on your audience and users. If XHTML and relative sizing is the right choice for your project, no one else can tell you otherwise.

Archived article 78 comments

Free download: Good vs. Great Design (summary)

~ 19 May 2009 ~

If you’ve not yet signed up for next month’s HOW Design Conference in Austin, Texas, now is the time to do so.

The conference organizers have been gracious enough to allow me to publicly post the handout that will be provided in my session, “Good vs. Great Design”. This 10-page summary of my presentation is something I’ve been hoping to compile for quite some time now, and HOW has finally provided the impetus for making it happen.

Download good-vs-great.pdf (PDF, 588 KB)

Highlights from other sessions and speakers include:

Print to Web Breakthrough
The Secret of Project Management for In-House Designers
Keeping Creative Control with Difficult Clients
Communicating Up, Down and All Around the Organization
10 Things You Didn’t Know Fonts Could Do
Craft + Activism = Craftivism
Studio tours (frog design, Olive Interactive Design & Marketing, others) for pre-conference attendees
DJ Stout (Pentagram), Thomas Phinney (Adobe), Cynthia Rapp (Cartoon Network), Lia Braaten Hager (Proctor & Gamble), and nearly 50 other speakers

Hope to see you there.

Archived article (comments off)

Authentic Jobs: Advice for Staying Gainfully Employed

~ 07 May 2009 ~

The redesign for Authentic Jobs, which is coming along swimmingly thanks to your feedback, will include a blog to allow myself and others to post articles on the topic of employment, freelancing, and the like.

The following is one such article. I’ve been bookmarking the links below over the past few months in anticipation of the new blog. However, because the redesign is taking longer than I had hoped, I’ve decided to post the article now given the timeliness of the subject.

The last 6 months or so have been rocky for just about everyone and every business, and with layoffs and budget cutbacks, job search is certainly no exception. Many more applicants, but far fewer job openings. The good news is that things seem to be on the way up. We saw the same number of freelance listings in April as we did in January, but full-time listings increased by 34%. Currently on the site, you’ll find listings from Apple, HUGE, Facebook, frog design inc., Berklee College of Music, Backcountry.com, Comcast, Magnani Caruso Dutton, and plenty of other great companies small and large.

On to the advice. Whether you’re on the clock with an employer or a full-time freelancer, I’m fairly certain you’ll find the following remarks from authors around the globe to be helpful for staying gainfully employed in today’s economy.

Ross Johnson: How to Respond to an Authentic Jobs Posting

Ross Johnson of 3.7 Designs posted a freelance listing on Authentic Jobs, then in turn offered advice to those replying to his and other listings. He offers 6 tips for applying, one of which is the following:

I was surprised at how many applications failed to answer questions I specifically asked to have included. Others ignored large portions of the listing (like experience with common open source CMS solutions). Even if you had no experience (or little) I spent twice as long considering the applicants who at least addressed all of the points.

smashLAB: Stop acting like a sissy and market your company

Eric Karjaluoto of smashLAB argues in favor of maintaining or even increasing marketing efforts during tough times, not decreasing them. “The problem-of-the-day has less to do with numbers,” Eric mentions, and more to do with “fear, panic and our own knee-jerk reactions.”

What baffles me about all of this is how people are choosing to cut their spending. I can appreciate reducing office space or negotiating a lower lease rate. I similarly understand reducing staff members or entertaining job sharing options. What I can’t quite grasp, however, is this tendency to narrow the pipe for incoming sales. When you aren’t getting dates, you don’t go home and watch re-runs of Matlock; you get out of the house and meet people.

A nice office space doesn’t directly drive sales. Office perks may heighten morale but they don’t necessarily bring in new clients. In times like these, all of us have to look at what keeps the machine running. As such, there’s one simple truth that I want you to embrace: your company has to accelerate its marketing and sales efforts.

Design Observer: Designing Through the Recession

A top-notch article by none other than top-notch advice giver Michael Bierut.

In your desperation to compete for work, you’ll be tempted to do things that you might not do when times are good: take on work for a shady client, start a project without a contract, ship a finished job to someone who’s fallen behind on an agreed payment schedule. Do not do these things. Not only will they not help, they will almost certainly end in tears, probably your own.

The modern design studio can’t help but subscribe to the cult of asap. But while working at full speed is great for profit margins, it’s not so good for quality control. A design solution almost always benefits from a second, third or fourth look. Take advantage of the slower pace of a recession by remembering what it was like in design school to spend a full semester on a single project. What seemed then like torture may now feel like a luxury, and your work will benefit.

New York Times Opinion: Designing Through a Depression

Partly a response to The Times’ own article arguing design loves depression (which received a well-deserved rebuttal from Design Observer), Allison Arieff’s piece encourages using the power of design to make smarter choices for the consumer and the environment.

Maybe one way the recession as good for design is to see it not as a form of punishment for frivolous designers but rather as an opportunity to allow for a rethinking of design itself — and the role of the designer within it. This rethinking needs to come not just from designers but from the manufacturers, companies and other clients who decide what products and projects will be produced. There’s no excuse not to examine and re-examine what’s made, how it’s manufactured, what materials are used (and which are recyclable), what benefit it’s giving the consumer (or lack thereof) and what contribution, if any, it’s making to anything other than landfill.

D. Keith Robinson: Hanging In and Helping

Keith, co-founder of Blue Flavor, on staying ethical in difficult times:

If you’re running your business scared and making all your decisions by fear I think you’re doing it wrong, regardless of the economic situation. I know I didn’t start a business just to survive and get by. This will pass. It might take awhile, but it will and I want to be right with my business and myself when it does. I’d rather go down fighting for what’s right than bend a bunch of rules just to get by.

A List Apart: Filling Your Dance Card in Hard Economic Times

A solid round-up of advice by Pepi Ronalds for freelancers and full-timers alike.

People in our industry enjoy far more flexibility than ever before, due to the buoyant economy we’ve had for the last decade. The new economy won’t eliminate flexible working arrangements, but employers and clients do have more bargaining power and may expect more of you. Your employers won’t necessarily ask you to work longer, but they will ask you to be more focused, committed, accountable, and reliable when you’re in the office. They’ll appreciate it when you arrive on time and that you work when you’re at work. Minimize chats and distractions. Shut down personal messaging programs, Facebook, email, etc., until you’re on break or until the end of the day.

Boagworld: 5 options when website budgets get slashed

Paul Boag:

We spend the majority of our ever decreasing budgets on adding bells and whistles to existing websites when there are large number of potential customers who never reach our sites. Instead of sinking your budget and efforts solely into your website consider looking further afield. Could your web strategy be better served by putting resources into a Facebook group or a twitter account for example? … Ask yourself where your target audience congregates. Instead of constantly trying to draw users to your site begin to spend time where they already meet.

New York Times: Weary of Looking for Work, Some Create Their Own

A report from the New York Times on several entrepreneurs around the United States making the most of a largely barren job market.

Economists say there are some peculiarities to this wave of downturn start-ups. Chiefly, the Internet has given people an extraordinary tool not just to market their ideas but also to find business partners and suppliers, and to do all kinds of functions on the cheap: keeping the books, interacting with customers, even turning a small idea into a big idea.

The goal for many entrepreneurs nowadays is not to create a company that will someday make billions but to come up with an idea that will produce revenue quickly, said Jerome S. Engel, director for the center for entrepreneurship at the Berkeley Haas School of Business. Mr. Engel said many people will focus on serving immediate needs for individuals and businesses.

Think Vitamin: 15 Tips for Freelancers Starting Their Own Business

A generally helpful list of tips from Ed Raynham, particularly this one:

You should contact the customer on a regular basis (every 3 months if the job is over) to inquire how things are going. This will help to make the customer feel important and that you are still interested in their business even though the project is finished. It will also help to keep you in their mind for future projects. Try to avoid a sales push with every contact else this goodwill will be broken and they will dread your calls.

Jeffrey Zeldman: Recession Tips For Web Designers

Running a traditional business is like securing a political position in Chicago: it costs a fortune. That’s why bad times crush so many companies. But you are a creature of the internets. You don’t need an office to do great work. I ran Happy Cog out of my apartment for far longer than anyone realized. My clients, when they learned my secret, didn’t care.

Web design is a people business. If things are slow, email former clients. If you just lost your job, email former agency clients with whom you worked closely to inform them of your freelance business and find out how they’re doing. Best practice: focus the email on wishing them a happy holiday and asking how they’re doing. Let your email signature file tell them you’re now the president of Your Name Design. Leading with the fact that you just lost your job may earn sympathy (or commiseration: the client may have lost her job, too) but it’s not exactly a sure-fire project getter.

Shimon Rura: Working from Home: Why It Sucks

The reason I’ve included this article? It highlights the imperative need for in-person feedback. I take for granted how helpful this is in full-time employment. And if I ever go back to freelancing, this observation has changed my perception (positively) towards flying in to meet with every client at the start and throughout the project.

In an office you get feedback constantly. At the coffee pot in the morning, eye contact shows interest in your latest tasks, or nods express sympathy about difficult colleagues and bosses. When you have a question about something, your coworker’s eyes and facial expressions will tell you, consciously or subconsciously, if you’re sounding smart or stupid. Chances are, you depend on this feedback more than you realize. You need it both for work-specific communication, which is easy to see, and for maintaining your self-image, esteem, and motivation–which is harder to see because the mechanisms are subconscious.

There you have it. Take some time to peruse the articles I’ve linked to. Add a comment for other articles that should have been included here.

Recent job listings

~ 01 July 2009 ~

Archived article (comments off)

The debate over page zooming vs. text scaling

~ 18 June 2009 ~

So, what’s wrong with page zooming?

Is one site for all feasible?*

Archived article 33 comments

Coding like it’s 1999

~ 04 June 2009 ~

HTML 4.01 Strict

px for font-size

Archived article 78 comments

Free download: Good vs. Great Design (summary)

~ 19 May 2009 ~

Archived article (comments off)

Authentic Jobs: Advice for Staying Gainfully Employed

~ 07 May 2009 ~

Archived article 9 comments

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