Posts in the Writing Category

Design for Real Life is now available, for free, in its entirety, at dfrlbook.com.  If you like what you read and want a personal copy, or just to support Sara and me, print-on-demand and ePub versions are also available from a number of sources.  There are some countries where the book is not yet available, which we hope will be fixed soon.  We’ll update the “Buy the book” page as appropriate.

The booksite contains the entire content of the book, with no paywalls or premium tiers or whatever gimmicks late-stage capitalism/early-stage infoconomy is forcing online publishers to try this month.  So if you want to read it for nothing more than some of your time, or share it with people who you think might benefit from the free resource, go for it!  Spread the word far and wide!  Please and thank you.

To those who already own a copy of the book, the only real differences between that text and the one we have now is: we removed all the A Book Apart (ABA) branding and contact information, and made a couple of URL updates.  We also had to switch to fonts for which we had licensing.  Thus, if you have the ABA version, this is essentially the same thing.  You do not need to buy this new printing.  You certainly can buy it, if you want, but the content won’t be different in any meaningful way.

A project like this does not happen individually, and some thanks are in order.

First, so very many thanks to my co-author, Sara Wachter-Boettcher.  Not just for writing it with me almost a decade ago, but also for her tireless work on the tedious minutia of transferring ownership of publisher accounts, obtaining a new ISBN, organizing the work that needed to be done, et cetera, et cetera.  Basically, project managed the whole thing.  It would have taken forever to get done if I’d been in charge, so the credit for it being live goes entirely to her.

Second, many thanks to Jeff Eaton, who wrote a converter called Dancing Queen that takes in an ABA ePub file and spits out Markdown files containing all the text and images of the figures.  Then he gave it to us all for free.

Third, we were able to get the book up for free thanks to the generosity of fellow ABA author and union man Mat Marquis, who wrote some code to take the output of Dancing Queen and import it into an 11ty install.  He did free tech support and lent a helping hand to us whenever we ran into snags.  He was also an integral part of the process that led to all the ABA authors reclaiming full ownership of their books.  He’ll deny every word of it, but dude is a mensch.  You should hire him to do cool stuff for you.

Speaking of all the ABA authors, the community we formed to help each other through the reclamation process has been a real blessing.  So many tips and tricks and expressions of support and celebrations of progress have flowed through the team over the past few months.  None of us had to do any of this alone.  Collective action, community support, works.

The conversion to ePub was handled by the entirely capable Ron Bilodeau, who leveraged his experience doing that work for ABA to do it for us.  Thank you, Ron!

And certainly not least, thank you to everyone at A Book Apart for publishing the book in the first place, for being great partners in its creation, and for releasing the books back to us when it was time to close up shop.  It’s hard to imagine it would have existed at all without ABA, so thank you, one and all.

• Design for Real Life: Online for Free AND On Sale for Money was published on Thursday, October 10th, 2024.
• It was assigned to the Books, Design, and Writing categories.
• There has been one reply.

If you’re reading this, odds are you’ve at least heard of A Book Apart (ABA), who published Design for Real Life, which I co-wrote with Sara Wachter-Boettcher back in 2016.  What you may not have heard is that ABA has closed up shop.  There won’t be any more new ABA titles, nor will ABA continue to sell the books in their catalog.

That’s the bad news.  The great news is that ABA has transferred the rights for all of its books to their respective authors! (Not every ex-publisher does this, and not every book contract demands it, so thanks to ABA.) We’re all figuring out what to do with our books, and everyone will make their own choices.  One of the things Sara and I have decided to do is to eventually put the entire text online for free, as a booksite.  That isn’t ready yet, but it should be coming somewhere down the road.

In the meantime, we’ve decided to cut the price of print and e-book copies available through Ingram.  DfRL was the eighteenth book ABA put out, so we’ve decided to make the price of both the print and e-book $18, regardless of whether those dollars are American, Canadian, or Australian.  Also €18 and £18.  Basically, in all five currencies we can define, the price is 18 of those.

…unless you buy it through Apple Books; then it’s 17.99 of every currency, because the system forces us to make it cheaper than the list price and also have the amount end in .99.  Obversely, if you’re buying a copy (or copies) for a library, the price has to be more than the list price and also end in .99, so the library cost is 18.99 currency units.  Yeah, I dunno either.

At any rate, compared to its old price, this is a significant price cut, and in some cases (yes, Australia, we’re looking at you) it’s a huge discount.  Or, at least, it will be at a discount once online shops catch up.  The US-based shops seem to be up to date, and Apple Books as well, but some of the “foreign” (non-U.S.) sources are still at their old prices.  In those cases, maybe wishlist or bookmark or something and keep an eye out for the drop.  We hope it will become global by the end of the week.  And hey, as I write this, a couple of places have the ebook version for like 22% less than our listed price.

So!  If you’ve always thought about buying a copy but never got around to it, now’s a good time to get a great deal.  Ditto if you’ve never heard of the book but it sounds interesting, or you want it in ABA branding, or really for any other reason you have to buy a copy now.

I suppose the real question is, should you buy a copy?  We’ll grant that some parts of it are a little dated, for sure.  But the concepts and approaches we introduced can be seen in a lot of work done even today.  It made significant inroads into government design practices in the UK and elsewhere, for example, and we still hear from people who say it really changed how they think about design and UX.  We’re still very proud of it, and we think anyone who takes the job of serving their users seriously should give it a read.  But then, I guess we would, or else we’d never have written it in the first place.

And that’s the story so far.  I’ll blog again when the freebook is online, and if anything else changes as we go through the process.  Got questions?  Leave a comment or drop me a line.

• Design for Real Life News! was published on Monday, July 22nd, 2024.
• It was assigned to the Web and Writing categories.
• There have been two replies.

Twenty years and twenty days ago, I published the first blog post on meyerweb.com.  It wasn’t my first blog post; I’d been putting blog-style updates on my CWRU home page since at least 1997, and probably a year or so earlier, albeit without the kind of archiving that would later come to define blogging.  Regardless, December 6th, 1999, is the moment this site effectively came online.

In those days, I just hand-modified the HTML of the site’s home page, copy-and-pasting the least recent entry on the home page to an manually-managed archive page.  A year or so into that, I decided to rework things to automate the process.  Näturally, the solution was to write my posts as XML files, jam them through some hand-authored XSLT, and get HTML out the other side.  Most of which, in fairness, was auto-generated.  My C and V keys breathed small sighs of relief.  It was a few years after that when I migrated to WordPress, doing so primarily to get support for comments on posts, a feature I maintain to this day.

A lot has come out of this site, and most of that is due to its blog.  This is where I worked out my CSS reset in public, with the community’s input; where I announced css/edge (in the days before my blog posts had titles) and An Event Apart; where I commented on the issues of the day as the web evolved; where I complained about browser vendors and standards bodies; and where I chronicled some of the very worst moments of my life.  There are posts in the archive that still get decent traffic today.  Here are the top ten from just this month:

1. The Constants Gardener (August 31st, 2005) – about CSS, variables, and Shaun Inman.
2. Un-fixing Fixed Elements with CSS Transforms (September 12th, 2011) – how element transforms establish formatting contexts, and how that interacts with fixed positioning.
3. Reset Reloaded (May 1st, 2007) – when I finalized CSS Rest 1.0, including the much-regretted :focus {outline: 0;} line that set web accessibility back by years (see point #2 in the post and weep).
4. Resetting Again (January 15th, 2008) – a small update to Reset 1.0.
5. Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty (December 24th, 2014) – how good design can lead to very bad outcomes.
6. Reset Reasoning (April 18th, 2007) – an early explanation for why I was working on a reset at all.
7. Content Blocking Primer (September 19th, 2015) – written when iOS shipped content blockers, it still feels timely, which depresses me.
8. JavaScript Will Save Us All (October 22nd, 2008) – an argument you could use in support of Houdini today, and an argument I’m much less certain about the rightness of today.  (Be careful what you wish for, etc.)
9. Wanted: Layout System (February 17th, 2009) – basically, me begging for Grid years before Grid was a thing (while deriding attempts to get partway there through display trickery, something else I’m less righteous about today).
10. Formal Weirdness (May 15th, 2007) – why form elements are weird, as a way of understanding why styling them is so restricted and difficult.

Looking over that list, 2007 was a big year for meyerweb, and 2008 wasn’t too shabby either.  Not that 2019 was terrible: the site still gets about 13,000 visits a day, and the blog portion is probably half to two-thirds of that traffic.

I won’t deny that blogging has been harder of late.  There are a few reasons, from social media releasing a lot of the “talk to the world” pressure that drove the original blogs to time available to write to having trouble feeling like what I have to say is of value.  On that last, I need to to remind myself of what I would tell anyone who asked: speaking is valuable, whether or not anyone listens, and what you can’t ever know is who will hear what you have to say at exactly the moment they need to hear it.

And so, in 2020, I’m going to do my best to rededicate myself to posting here, at a minimum of once a month but hopefully closer to once a week.  It will be the same blend I’ve always maintained, mixing technical posts with personal expression at will, sometimes in the same post.

Here’s to another twenty years — if not more — of blogging.

• Twenty Years (and Days) Later was published on Thursday, December 26th, 2019.
• It was assigned to the Writing category.
• There have been two replies.

We have a lot of new layout tools at our disposal these days — flexbox is finally stable and interoperable, and Grid very much the same, with both technologies having well over 90% support coverage. In that light, we might think there’s no place for old tricks like negative margins, but I recently discovered otherwise.

That’s the opening paragraph to my 24ways piece “Flexible Captioned Slanted Images”, which I now realize I should have called “Accessible Flexible Captioned Slanted Images”.  Curse my insufficient title writing!  In just about 2,000 words, I explore a blend of new CSS and old layout tricks to take an accessible markup structure and turn it into the titular slanted images, which are fully flexible across all screen sizes while being non-rectangular.

It’s just my second piece for 24ways, coming a dozen years and a day after the first — and is very possibly my last, as Drew closed out this year by putting 24ways on hiatus.  Fifteen years is a heck of a run for any project, let alone an annual side project, and I salute everyone involved along the way.  Content is hard.  Managing content is harder.  Here’s to everyone who put in the time and energy to make such a valuable resource.  If you’ve never been through the 24 ways archives, now’s your chance.  I promise it will be very much worth your time.

• “Flexible Captioned Slanted Images” at 24 ways was published on Tuesday, December 24th, 2019.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

I toyed with the idea of nesting elements with borders and some negative margins to pull one border on top of another, or nesting a border inside an outline and then using negative margins to keep from throwing off the layout. But none of that felt satisfying.

It turns out there are a number of tricks to create the effect of stacking one border atop another by combining a border with some other CSS effects, or even without actually requiring the use of any borders at all. Let’s explore, shall we?

That’s from the introduction to my article “Stacked ‘Borders’”, which marks the first time I’ve ever been published at the venerable upstart CSS-Tricks.  (I’m old, so I can call things both venerable and an upstart.  You kids today!)  In it, I explore ways to simulate the effect of stacking multiple element borders atop on another, including combining box shadows and outlines, borders and backgrounds, and even using border images, which have a much wider support base than you might have realized.

And yes, as per my usual, the images in the piece are all double-dpi :screenshot captures directly from Firefox.

Many thanks to Chris Coyier for accepting the piece, and Geoff Graham for his editorial assistance.  I hope you’ll find at least some part of it useful, or better still, interesting.  Share and enjoy!

• “Stacked ‘Borders’” Published at CSS-Tricks was published on Tuesday, March 19th, 2019.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

Just over an hour before I started writing this post, I handed off CSS Pocket Reference, 5th Edition to the Production department at O’Reilly.  What that means, practically speaking, is that barring any changes that the editors find need to be made, I’m done.

Besides all the new-new-NEW properties included in this edition (flexbox and grid being just two of the most obvious examples), we put a lot into improving the formatting for this edition.  Previous editions used a more sprawling format that led to the 4th edition getting up to 238 pages, which cast serious shade on the word “Pocket” there in the title.  After all, not all of us live in climates or cultures where 24/7 cargo pants are a viable option.

So with a few ideas from me and several more from the production team, we managed to add in all the new properties and still bring the page count down below 200.  My guess is the final copy will come in about 190 pages, but much will depend on how crazy the indexer gets, and how much the formatting gets changed in the final massaging.

We don’t have a firm release date yet; I’m pulling for April, but it’s really not up to me.  I’ll make announcements via all the usual channels when pre-order is available, and of course when publication day arrives.

For now, for the first time in many years, I don’t have a book project on my to-do list.  I don’t even have a book proposal on my to-do list.  It’s a slightly weird feeling, but not an unwelcome one.  I’ll be putting the extra time into my content for An Event Apart: I’m giving a talk this year on using the new CSS tools to make our jobs easier, and doing Day Aparts in Boston and San Francisco where I spend six hours diving deep into guts of stuff like flexbox Grid, writing modes, features queries, and a whole lot more.

So my time will continue to be fully spoken for, is what I’m saying.  It’ll all be fun stuff, though, and it’s hard to ask for more out of my work.

• “CSS Pocket Reference, 5th Edition” to Production was published on Thursday, February 15th, 2018.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

 

My wife Kat and I tell ourselves we’d love another child for who they are, not for who they replace. We even believe it. But we can’t be sure of it — and that keeps us from shutting our eyes, jumping back into the adoption process, and hoping it will turn out okay. We know all too horribly well that sometimes, it doesn’t.

That’s the opening of my essay “The Second Third Child”, included in the new book from Modern Loss titled Modern Loss: Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome, published this week.

I’m deeply honored to be one of the 40+ contributors to the book, some of whom you may know — Dresden Dolls co-founder Amanda Palmer, CNN’s Brian Stelter, author Lucy Kalanithi, Dear Evan Hansen director Michael Greif, Stacy London of What Not To Wear — and many of whom you may not, as I will be unknown to the vast majority of the book’s readers. I’ve written articles for Modern Loss in the past, but to be entrusted with a part of their first book was humbling.

Several of the essays in the book are intentionally funny, but mine is not one of them. It’s quiet, reflective, and elegiac in more than one way, but never anything but honest. It appears in the first section of the book, titled “Collateral Damage”.

As Stephen Colbert put it: “Talking about loss can feel scary. This book isn’t. It’s about grieving deeply over the long term, and the reassurance that you’re far from broken because of it.” I hope my essay, and the book as a whole, helps readers to come to terms with their own grief, by seeing that they are not alone, and that they did the best they could even if it doesn’t feel that way at all.

All my thanks to Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner for making me a part of their incredible, inspiring work.

• My Contribution to “Modern Loss” was published on Thursday, January 25th, 2018.
• It was assigned to the Books, Projects, and Writing categories.
• There have been two replies.

Yesterday afternoon, CSS: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition went to the printers.  Eighteen years after the First Edition hit shelves, eleven years after its predecessor came out, five years after I first started working on this edition, and thanks in no small part to Estelle Weyl and a parade of long-suffering editors at O’Reilly, the last changes were entered, the pages were locked, and the repository closed.

It comes in at 1,088 pages: almost exactly twice the length of the Third Edition, with six new chapters and a lot of overhauling of old chapters.  Flexbox, Grid, filtering, blending, clipping and masking, float shapes, animations and transitions, transforms, image borders, counting systems, custom properties (a.k.a. CSS variables), media and feature queries — they’re all in there, and a whole lot more besides.  Gradients got a major new section in what used to be called just “Colors and Backgrounds” and is now “Colors, Backgrounds, and Gradients”.  And all the new background properties!  So many new background properties.

We didn’t skimp on the visuals, either.  The book has, if I counted correctly, a total of 778 figures.  Almost all of them were captured in-browser, and you can download or clone all the files from GitHub.  If you’d rather just browse them online, you can do so thanks to GitHub Pages.  That’s also where to find the transition and animation examples that are referenced in the text, but not figures themselves (detailed animation being somewhat difficult to represent on paper).  If we add figures and animation examples together, there are 826 elements supporting the main text.  Which feels like a lot to me.

The book will be available in both tree-wafer and glowing-display formats from your favorite supplier of such things; e.g., Amazon.  (If you’re going to buy through Amazon and are inclined to support another aspect of my life, please designate Rebecca’s Gift as your Amazon Smile recipient before buying the book.)  I also hear tell it will be available DRM-free from eBooks.com, and potentially in PDF form for those who prefer it.  O’Reilly doesn’t sell books directly any more, but I do believe it will be avialable to those with Safari subscriptions.

I’ll have more to say about the book and its contents as the release date draws closer.  Last I heard, it should be out by the end of this month, but as always, release dates can slip for any number of reasons.  Even if this release does slip, it should still come out no later than early November.

(Let’s hope I didn’t just jinx that.)

This is always a tense and exhilarating time.  What if I got a huge piece completely wrong?  What if I made the wrong calls on what to include and what to defer to the next edition?  What if I missed egregious typos?  What if nobody likes it?  Basically, the same doubts that strike most any author.  But there’s also the incredible feeling of a project brought to its conclusion and the anticipation of getting it into readers’ hands.  This has been a longer-than-usual time coming, but as it usually does, the time has come at last.  I hope you’re looking forward to it half as much as I am.

• “CSS: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition” Goes to Print was published on Wednesday, October 11th, 2017.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, and Writing categories.
• There have been nine replies.