Introduction No design project starts from scratch. We all come to proj-ects with preexisting knowledge, biases, and assumptions. Even with a little bit of experience, we can feel confident in knowing what works and what doesn’t. But that confidence comes...

Introduction: I’d prepared a deeply technical talk on web performance, heavy on the “how” of image and markup optimizations. I’d designed and timed my slides, gathered feedback from cowork-ers, and practiced over and over. I was nervous about going onstage...

Introduction: I should start this book with an apology—not to you, reader, though I don’t doubt that I’ll owe you at least one by the time we get to the end. I owe JavaScript a number of apologies for the...

Introduction: Confession: I was aware of SVG’s existence for years before I realized that was possible, in part because early implemen-tations of SVG required the object or iframe element. SVG support on the HTML img element came much later (and...

Introduction: You’ll find this phrase everywhere at ThinkUp, a service that sends its users daily updates about their interactions on social media. By all accounts, ThinkUp cares deeply about its members. It doesn’t sell data. It doesn’t run advertising. And...

Introduction: When  I start making websites as a hobby in 1995, being a web developer meant knowing HTML. That’s it. Neither JavaScript nor CSS would ship in browsers for a year, and Flash wouldn’t exist until later in the decade....

Introduction: There’s more to “going responsive” than fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries. Indeed, most organizations that have implemented a responsive design report that the design and development decisions were the easy part. The hard part is getting the...

Introduction: For deCAdeS, we explored the digital world with prosthetics called mouse, keyboard, and cursor. We nudged plastic bricks across our desks. We directed onscreen arrows to poke buttons from afar. We clicked icons. We pointed at pixels. But then...

Introduction: In early 2012, my wife and I rented an apartment in Siem Reap, Cambodia. She was volunteering at a children’s hospital; I was clocking in remotely to build websites with my Filament Group colleagues back in the United States....

Introduction: Look around you. You make choices based on design every day. The chair you’re probably enjoying now is designed to make you feel comfortable. The clothes you choose to wear are designed to make you feel confident or relaxed...