Fred is soft skills and professional development editor at Smashing Magazine and a software engineer at The Guardian. His interests include American literature, reviewing an album a week with two friends on their music webzine, Audioxide, and sleeping.
In this age of endless newfangled organizational tools, the spreadsheet holds firm. Frederick O’Brien explains how, from engineering to design, they can still provide a rock-solid foundation for your work.
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Balancing the age-old simplicity of words on paper with the myriad creative possibilities of the web is a tension as old as the web itself. Leaning into that overlap can bring new dimensions not just to the things we write but also to how we write them.
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Words alone aren’t enough to safeguard best practices in the world of web design and development. Web design documentation must be like its medium — interactive and constantly evolving.
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Perhaps more than any other person in history, Leonardo da Vinci showed the kind of magic that can happen in the overlap between art and science, where much of web development lives. His methods and outlooks are just as applicable to the web today as they were in Renaissance Italy.
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All the data in the world won’t do anyone any good if we can’t make sense of it. Or better yet, make it sing. Here are some stunning examples of data visualization in the wild, and some pointers on how to start making your own.
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This installment of Web Design Done Well celebrates weird and wacky websites. Sites with sweet, innocent, sometimes pointless purposes. Are they money makers? Game changers? Not necessarily, but they sure are fun, and in ways only the web could really manage.
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The last 18 months have been a time of unprecedented turbulence. As the people of the world have flooded online, businesses have joined them, using web development tools to adapt in real-time. Several years ago there seemed to be a gulf between drag-and-drop tools and full-blown web development. Today, it’s heartening to see the likes of Wix adding more code-heavy options to their repertoire.
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For better or worse, the web is absolutely awash with content. A lot of it is great, a lot of it is not. A lot of the talk around it has the cold, calculating cadence you’d sooner expect from industrialists talking about assembly lines. They say content is king, and they’re right. The web has unlocked untold possibilities for storytellers — provided the story is right, of course. Here are some of our favorite examples of editorial content thriving in the digital realm.
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Design often revolves around visuals, but the other senses deserve love too. In this article, we tune in to audio features that are making sites sing. Most of us have had the misfortune of crossing bad examples (auto-playing videos being a particularly egregious example) but audio can give web experiences a whole new dimension when applied well. What follows are some astounding sounds from the World Wide Web.
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Sometimes it’s the little things in web life that make us look twice. From carousels to documentation to cookie disclaimers, here are some sites taking the mundane and sprinkling in a little magic. Great ideas in web design come so thick and fast that it can be easy to miss them if you’re not careful. In this article, Frederick O’Brien brings you a small antidote to that, piecing together splashes of inspiration that caught our eye.
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Quick, constant change is a given on the web. It is often one of its greatest strengths. As ever, though, there is a balance to find. Although longevity takes a different form online, its value is immeasurable.
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Saul Bass is a graphic design legend. Responsible for title sequences in films like North by Northwest and Anatomy of a Murder, as well as a number of iconic posters and brand logos over the years. His work, in the words of Martin Scorsese, “distilled the poetry of the modern, industrialized world.” Film credits, brand logos, posters… Saul did it all, and the principles that informed his work are just as valuable now as they were 50 years ago.
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The founding principles of the World Wide Web have been warped by years of over-reliance on advertising. Fixing that imbalance and moving toward a more ethical, open web means relaying the foundations, with sites showing other ways are possible. Incorporate sustainability into your designs. Communicate what you do and how you survive and what people can do to help. Progress does not happen on its own!
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Implementing best SEO practice can produce immediate results, but long-term performance requires long-term maintenance. Besides, the journey is more important than the destination, isn’t it? The most beautiful, spectacular site in the world won’t do anyone much good if people can’t find it on Google (or Bing, or DuckDuckGo).
This is not an exhaustive list, but hopefully there is enough to help you win over some of the most tedious search engine optimization issues.
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Modern websites aren’t inseparable from screens any more. Between phone assistants, home speakers, and screen readers, more and more people are using the web without even looking at it. Websites need to evolve in kind. In the article, Frederickk O’Brien will try to break down what that means for websites going forward, what designers can do about it, and why this might finally be a leap forward to accessibility. More than two thirds of the web is inaccessible to those with visual impairments, after all. It’s time to make websites easy to talk to.
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The dream of a machine-readable Internet is as old as the Internet itself, but only in recent years has it really seemed possible. The benefits of developing for the Semantic Web are not always immediate, or visible, but every site that does strengthens the foundations of an open, transparent, decentralized internet. As major websites take strides towards data-fying their content, now’s the perfect time to jump on the bandwagon.
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SEO is an ever-changing world. Blink and you’ll miss the latest best practices, thought leaders, and tools. Feeling out of touch is natural. Every tweak to major search engine algorithms sends shockwaves throughout the web. For those who don’t follow the SEO space it can be easy to lose track of the latest trends, authorities, and resources. That’s what this page is for. It will break down SEO’s hot topics, common questions, and the best resources for staying up to date with that world. This guide is your way back into the groove, baby.
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The ancients can teach us a thing or two about design — even web design. The Roman architect Vitruvius had buildings in mind when laying out his golden triad, but its principles are just as applicable to the web as they are to brick and mortar. Today’s article is about architecture, and how some of its core tenets apply to the worldwide web. Architectural terms are not unusual in web development, and for good reason. In many ways, web developers are digital architects. Today, Frederick O’Brien will focus on Vitruvius, a Roman architect, and how his principles can and should be applied to websites.
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In recent years a slew of ‘readability’ programs have appeared to help us tidy up the things we write. Used everywhere from newsrooms to browser plugins, these systems offer automated feedback on how writing can be clearer, neater, and less contrived. Sounds good right? Well, up to a point. Readability programs may seem like a godsend, but the worst thing writers can do is write to please them above all others. Finding your voice is hard enough without also trying to sound like everyone else.
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All search engines share the same purpose: to organize the web’s content and deliver the most relevant, useful results possible to search queries. How they achieve this has changed enormously since the days of Lycos and Ask Jeeves. Google alone uses more than 200 ranking factors, and those are just the ones we know about. Retrofitting search engine optimization only gets you so far. As metadata gets smarter, it’s more important than ever to build it into the design process from the start.
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Foldable devices have brought with them talk of a ‘foldable web,’ and the idea that long-standing web conventions may be on the verge of a serious shakeup. Is it all hype, or is it time to get flexible? The ‘foldable web’ will bring with it new challenges, new opportunities, and, in all likelihood, new syntax. The web could be in for its biggest shakeup since the smartphone. Users and coders alike have gotten rather used to the playing field: desktop and mobile with a sprinkling of tablets. Not any more. If you thought you knew responsive design before, In this article, Frederick O’Brien will show you that you ain’t seen nothing yet.
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No frills, or flashing neon frills with sprinklers attached? ‘Brutalist’ websites have flourished in recent years, but their guiding philosophy remains unclear. Brutalist web design has grown so quickly that there does not seem to be a clear consensus on what the style actually is. To some it means practicality, to others audacity. Love it or hate it, brutalist architecture celebrates rawness.
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Before the home page, there was the front page. From the Gutenberg Principle to grid systems to above the fold, newspapers teach us much about the foundations of web design. In this article, Frederick O’Brien will examine several tenets of newspaper design and show their connection to best practice online. At the core of that connection is a principle childlike in its simplicity, one newspaper and web designers alike would do well to remember.
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