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There are quite a few threads in the Cavern of COBOL for web design, but all of them seem to focus on “under the hood” stuff - Javascript and its frameworks, CMSes, Python, and so on. There’s nowhere I've found on SA to discuss front-end web design, i.e. what the user sees when they click on a website. The average user doesn’t care if a site is done in Angular, React, Python, or whatever - they want it to load fast, look pretty, and be able to find what they need without any effort on their part. So I wanted to make a thread for web designers to discuss the latest web design trends, ask each other for advice on designs as well as dealing with clients, get inspiration, etc. A lot of designers either freelance or are stuck in one job where their corporate culture dictates what design elements they use and what the sites look like overall. It’s tough to keep up with the latest trends, and I know I feel like I’m constantly playing catch-up, especially with no one to talk about what I do except for the salespeople I work for. Design has opened up a ton in the past three years alone, with IE all but dying out finally and Edge being not-a-complete-travesty. Mobile-first has really pushed up to the front, which I have to keep reminding myself of, and browser support for things there is even more uniform. I’m always happy to go to CanIUse.com and see a bunch of green rectangles for features I want to use. I know it’s trendy to be full-stack these days, but there are multiple threads for the rest of the “stack”. Let’s have this one for the visuals, with HTML and CSS (even SASS/LESS) being the deepest we go on code-talk. Got a few questions to start: 1. What do you think about the trend of dark faded background images or video in the hero space of a website’s homepage with white text over it? It seems like the most attractive way to have imagery and text in that space, but every time I try to use it, I get “hey, why is the image kinda… dark?” and then when I explain it and show examples, I get asked to brighten the image anyway and it means the white text is now “too hard to read”, which leads me to tell them they can’t have it both ways. I get if it’s a staff photo or something proprietary, but just stock imagery? It can be faded, at least I feel. 2. Do you think a “Contact Us” page is very important? Some clients/salespeople try to get me to remove it. Whenever I go to an informational site, it’s the first page I look for. 3. Where do you go to keep up with the latest web trends? I've been hitting up https://www.awwwards.com every few weeks to see what other folks are doing, and on YouTube I follow Traversy Media (which I can't link to because vBulletin wants to convert it to a YouTube playlist). I'm not sure if this belongs in Creative Convention or Cavern of COBOL - feel free to let me know, mods!
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Dec 26, 2018 21:15
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This seems like a great thread topic to provoke holy wars, it's like the emacs of fading/scaling images while you scroll vs the vi of just give me the goddamn text you heathens. I'm in the vi camp, I hate literally every modern web design trend. I hate grey-text-on-lighter-grey-background, I hate images changing while I scroll, I hate text over images, I hate images that contain the text so a search won't work, I hate when pages do some poo poo with the scrolling so as you scroll down the movement stalls and animates a thing rather than scrolling for a while, like one section of the scrollbar controls a timeline instead of the y-axis, I hate dynamic loading of more content as you scroll (again makes the page unsearchable), I hate forms that don't work and forms that almost work until you press the back button because they were naturally several pages but were instead implemented as one page with ajax. Oh, and I hate anything being slideshows or videos. So in answer to your question 2, yes, a "contact us" link, made of text, present on every page, where the text includes one of "contact", "support" or "help", is pretty important for a business, but is a horrible idea for any sort of solo operation because people will contact you and it will be an annoying waste of time approximately every time. I totally understand why companies try to filter these out by making the user jump through hoops of "perhaps this automated choose-your-own-adventure help system will answer your question" or "have you tried asking THE COMMUNITY?" because people are dumb and won't look for the answer themself if you don't force them to, but it's still annoying as gently caress when what you want to contact them about is something like "you shipped me the wrong thing" where obviously you're not going to be able to self-serve.
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Dec 27, 2018 06:37
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It seems weird to me that there's a cult of static pages among a lot of webdevs yet this has never affected the inexorable rise of dynamic insanity that passes for web 2.0 these days. My gripe with the static pages fashion is that the tools are always a moving target, I'm on my third generation of static site generators with the implementation veering between Ruby and Python depending on the fashionable build tool of the moment. And don't get me started on mobile-friendly design. 
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Dec 27, 2018 07:50
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roomforthetuna posted:This seems like a great thread topic to provoke holy wars, it's like the emacs of fading/scaling images while you scroll vs the vi of just give me the goddamn text you heathens. My searches for "web design trends 2019" keeps getting listicles with "unorthodox scrolling" being in the top 10. Just let me scroll! Fade things in as I scroll maybe, but don't hijack my scrollbar. It's even counter-intuitive on a mobile device, so they don't even have the excuse of "well it works great on the phone!". As for the contact page, these are small to medium sized businesses like contractors, landscapers, small-practice lawyers, locksmiths, etc. If people are looking for them on the web, they're looking to contact them. I can't stand being told not to have a contact page.
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Dec 27, 2018 15:15
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The answer to every question in this thread is: it depends. Design is all about context.
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Dec 27, 2018 15:51
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Double post, because it’s a hot new design trend! Re: contact pages; you could replace every business website with a single page that simply listed the name, phone number, and hours, and in 90% of the cases, it would be a vast improvement.
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Dec 27, 2018 15:55
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Good idea for a thread. They had one similar in CC a while back but it's fallen by the wayside.
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Dec 27, 2018 21:09
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Lumpy posted:The answer to every question in this thread is: it depends. Yeah you're right, design is subjective. That's why it'll hopefully make for good discussion. The technology behind the design isn't subjective though, for instance - what's everyone's design workflow look like? Mine is a little up in the air right now because I've been trying out new solutions. I've started developing locally instead of FTPing into a dev server my agency set up. I've found it's faster for me to just code a straight up HTML page than lay it out in Photoshop (which I haven't done in years, thank god those days are over), but I've been curious about programs like Adobe XD. I've tried it out and a few other similar programs, but I haven't found anything that I'm as comfortable with as plain old HTML/CSS. I push the site live onto the dev server when I want to show the work (and back it up in the process). All of my sites are done on Wordpress, so I've been using Local by Flywheel.
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Dec 27, 2018 21:28
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LifeLynx posted:Yeah you're right, design is subjective. That's why it'll hopefully make for good discussion. The technology behind the design isn't subjective though, for instance - what's everyone's design workflow look like? If I have time to actually design, I use Sketch. If not, I mess with stuff in the dev console and copy / paste into my scss, and replace pixel values and colors with their variable names. Everything is a multiple of 8px always. I have a set of UI colors (success, info, warning, danger) that have 4 tints each, and then 3 or so "brand" colors, and 5 shades of grey (which are never "pure" grey.. they will be slightly cool or warm depending on the brands colors) . I have a SCSS file with the colors named, and all my spacing is named and done from the master unit: code:
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Dec 27, 2018 22:50
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I take it that this thread will be the place to post our bad websites for design / ui / ux critiques?
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Dec 28, 2018 01:49
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Newf posted:I take it that this thread will be the place to post our bad websites for design / ui / ux critiques? There was a thread in CC for them, but it was stagnant and got archived. I don't see why they shouldn't be posted in here!
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Dec 28, 2018 03:10
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The fundamental problem with web design in general is that what looks good or attractive in someone's head, or during a pitch/meeting, only rarely lines up with a good and useful experience for someone visiting the website later on. A related problem is that anyone working on a website is going to spend far, far more time staring at ultimately inconsequential aspects of it than any visitor ever will, so it's easy to obsess over a small thing that doesn't matter while ignoring the big picture for usability. Ultimately, the end goal for a great design should be something that doesn't stand out because the experience is so seamless for the visitor to accomplish their goal that they don't even notice the design, which is sort of at odds with the design process because people will inevitably bitch about how "boring" the design is; hence, the weird scroll effects, animations, background music, carousels and other assorted crimes.
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Dec 30, 2018 14:51
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PT6A posted:The fundamental problem with web design in general is that what looks good or attractive in someone's head, or during a pitch/meeting, only rarely lines up with a good and useful experience for someone visiting the website later on. A related problem is that anyone working on a website is going to spend far, far more time staring at ultimately inconsequential aspects of it than any visitor ever will, so it's easy to obsess over a small thing that doesn't matter while ignoring the big picture for usability. This goes for clients as well. A lot of my time designing a site goes into tweaking minor things that 99% of users aren't going to care about, but the client thinks is important because they're scrutinizing every part of the site. Things as simple as the order of photos in a gallery can eat up time. Let's be honest, no one is clicking on that photo gallery.
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Dec 30, 2018 15:07
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LifeLynx posted:This goes for clients as well. A lot of my time designing a site goes into tweaking minor things that 99% of users aren't going to care about, but the client thinks is important because they're scrutinizing every part of the site. Things as simple as the order of photos in a gallery can eat up time. Let's be honest, no one is clicking on that photo gallery. Yeah, I'm including clients -- at least the ones who are involved in the design of the website -- in the group of people who stare at poo poo for too long, for sure. It can be good to have a separate person or group of people on the client's side who are only allowed to look at the website-in-progress for a short period of time, because it's more representative of how an actual visitor will see the site. Usually, they're the ones who come up with the insights that the designers/website working-group have been overlooking for weeks or whatever. The vast majority of good design is a human problem as much as it's a technical issue or a graphic design problem. No one teaches you how to wheedle what people actually want out of them, or how to convince them that their awful idea is bad, or how to guide them in a certain direction while still getting valuable input on what they'd like to see, or even how to re-evaluate whether your own ideas are counterproductive -- that's all poo poo you learn as you go along.
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Dec 30, 2018 15:23
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Two polar opposites here: first, I've recently fallen in love with SASS after resisting using it for so long because I thought it would just be a crutch. Just being able to nest styles and use variables is great. I know those will be available in pure CSS "soon", but who knows when that will be. Secondly, I coded something today in pure unstyled HTML, just a normal document because I couldn't be bothered to open up Google Docs. If you're like me and haven't seen what a pure HTML document untouched by CSS looks like in years - browser styling excepted of course - give it a whirl.
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Jan 5, 2019 05:07
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