The Bloated Web Page

I'm constantly annoyed and frustrated by the crap that websites are blasting my phone with when I try t o read an article or browse a web page. Popups, autoplaying videos that refuse to close, ads that jump out and shove the text I'm reading out of the way;; I'm sure you've seen it all.

If you want to get a better idea of what's happening and why, read The 49MB Web Page by Shumham Bose, a developer and user interface design expert. The article was triggered when they looked behind the scenes at what was happening when they opened an article from The New York Times website and found that the browser downloaded 49 MB of data. (That's roughly equivalent to an album of MP3s or 50 books in EPUB format). 

When you open a website on your phone, it's like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.

I don't usually see most of this on my PC because I run an ad blocker (uBlock Origin Lite) that blocks much of the crap that the article discusses.  I use Firefox with uBlock Origin as my default browser on the phone, despite the annoyance of having different browsers on my PC and phone. (I know, I know; it's just laziness that keeps me from using Firefox on my PC). Apps, where publishers seem to consider pushing ads their primary purpose in life, are also problematic. 

I should point out that there are real security problems inherent in the use of programmatic ad auctions and tracking pixels and their associated scripts. (I'll have another post about this tomorrow or Monday). 

This is the best article about web design that I've seen in a very long time. Even if you're not particularly technical, it's worth reading just to understand why your browsing experience is so unpleasant.

First Impressions of iPad OS 26

This is the first of two posts about my Apple  tablets. Tomorrow's post will be about my experience with the iPad Mini. 

I put off upgrading my tablets to iPadOS 26 for a month, but finally decided that the Mini shouldn't have any problems running it. My main concern was the Liquid Glass interface, which looked to me like it could seriously compromise readability. The first thing I did after upgrading was to turn down the transparency and motion effects. Given that, I haven't noticed any readability issues that weren't also present before upgrading.

I did turn on the windowing interface, mainly so I could access app menus. I was worried about readability because they are very small at  the top of the window, but they expand to a reasonable size when triggered. One of my peeves about iPad OS in general is that the top-of-screen menus and icons are too small and there doesn't seem to be any way of making them bigger (unlike Windows). I did run into a problem in Play Books where the bottom controls (go to TOC, move the page slider) wouldn't' respond; I had pulled down the window a bit too far and switching back to the full-screen interface fixed it. (I haven't been able to reproduce that so it may have been a glitch). 

I was excited to hear that Apple had introduced the Accessible Reading feature.  Google's similar Reading Mode app is a lifesaver on my Pixel phone. Sadly, Apple's version is not up to the quality of the Google app. It's fussy to customize, it's not clear how to switch out of it to the standard interface, and sometimes it just hangs up. I'll have to experiment more with it and hope that Apple improves it in later OS updates. 

Battery life, which was not great to start with, seems to be a bit worse under iPad OS 26, even with the Liquid Glass junk turned down or off. 

I'm certainly not the only one who doesn't want to have anything to do with the Liquid Glass interface. N/g, founded by user interface experts Jakob Neilsen and Don Norman, have published an epic takedown of IOS 26 and Liquid Glass.

The interface is restless, needy, less predictable, less legible, and constantly pulling focus rather than supporting seamless access to content. Instead of smoothing the path for everyday tasks, iOS 26 makes users relearn basics while enduring a constant parade of visual stunts.

Apple may call it Liquid Glass. To many users, it feels more like a fogged‑up window: pretty from a distance, but frustrating when you try to see beyond it.

Apple seems to be feeling the heat. The latest IOS beta includes an option to turn off Liquid Glass, or at least reduce the transparency effects. (There are options that will do this under the Accessibility settings, but they are not prominent). 

 

Featured Links - June 16, 2025

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A bearded iris in our garden

Imperial ouroboros. "Andor's second season is a powerful look at the fragility of oppressive ideologies." This is the best article I've read about the series and reveals just how remarkable an achievement it was. There's a master's thesis waiting for someone who wants to explore the revolutionary themes in Andor, The Expanse, and Babylon 5. 

This 1999 email from a tech pioneer helped me think about Apple’s WWDC. "Jef Raskin instigated the Mac project in 1979. Twenty years later, he was dismayed with the state of personal computing. What would he think today?"

RIP to the almost future of computing: Apple just turned the iPad into a Mac. "We didn’t need 15 years to get back to where we started." I will probably not use the new interface on my iPad Mini, but may on the bigger iPad Air. 

Teachers Are Not OK. 'AI, ChatGPT, and LLMs "have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching."'

432 Chinese robots moved an entire 7,500-ton neighborhood before returning it to its original spot to build a subway. Metrolinx, are you paying attention to what's going on elsewhere in the world?

50 Rare Vintage Pictures Showing The Everyday Grit Of Working Class Americans Back In The Day. This is a fascinating collection. I wonder what an equivalent series of photos would show today.

Neanderthals Spread Across Asia With Surprising Speed—and Now We Know How. "A new study suggests our prehistoric cousins likely traveled through the Ural Mountains and southern Siberia."

The Core of Fermat’s Last Theorem Just Got Superpowered. "By extending the scope of the key insight behind Fermat’s Last Theorem, four mathematicians have made great strides toward building a “grand unified theory” of math."

What It Took to Build the Death Star. "We know so much about the theft of its plans, and its final destruction over the Yavin system—but building the Death Star was a project decades in the making." Taking Star Wars seriously. 

20 hidden features in Apple’s upcoming 26-branded software. "Everything from iOS 26 to watchOS 26 is getting fun new features." I'm looking forward to trying out the new iPadOS later this year.

The semicolon defended by its advocates. I remember arguments about semicolons in my university English classes more than 50 years ago. 

Cart Cartoon Network Trolls Homophobes Hard For Melting Down Over Pride Month Fan Art. "The cable channel's Instagram account share oon Network Trolls Homophobes Hard For Melting Down Over Pride Month Fan Art. "The cable channel's Instagram account shared several pieces of fan art depicting characters from beloved shows to celebrate Pride Month—and trolled several homophobes who sounded off in the comments." Good. 

What the Fastest-Growing Christian Group Reveals About America. (archive link) "Instead of killing off faith, modernity has supercharged some of its most dramatic manifestations."

Featured Links - June 3, 2025

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Springtime at the marina

• What are ultra-processed foods, really? "We dug into the research and answered your questions."
• The MAHA Report Is a Health Hoax: RFK Jr. Just Cited Studies That Don’t Exist. "America’s top health official tabled a report filled with fake science, dead links, and ChatGPT hallucinations. This isn’t policy—it’s malpractice by executive order."
• Predicting and Preventing Alzheimer’s Disease. "With all the advances in both the science of aging and artificial intelligence (AI), we are in a propitious position to accurately and precisely determine who is at high risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease years before signs of even mild cognitive deficit."
• 5,000-Year-Old Bread Recipe Recreated in Turkey—and Locals Can’t Get Enough. "A bread made from ancient grains is rising again in Turkey, and it's a big hit." Not only does it taste good, but it's made from drought-resistant plants.
• HellCaptcha: Accessibility Theater at Its Worst. "hCaptcha's "Accessibility" Mode Is a Fucking Cookie. And it's wrapped in a maze of broken promises, bad design, and outright user hostility."
• Massive security blunder: Russian nuclear site blueprints exposed in public procurement database. "Russia is modernizing its nuclear weapon sites, including underground missile silos and support infrastructure. Data, including building plans, diagrams, equipment, and other schematics, is accessible to anyone in the public procurement database."
• Changing of the guard and Best laid plans. "What does a change in ownership for the genre's legacy short fiction magazines mean for the SF/F community?" The science fiction magazines, especially Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, were my gateway into the genre.
• The Radical Development of an Entirely New Painkiller. "The opioid crisis has made it even more urgent to come up with novel approaches to treating suffering." Finally there’s something effective." This article gives real insight into the complexity of developing a new drug.
• ‘My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six’: Alan Alda on childhood, marriage and 60 years of stardom. "Best known as Hawkeye in the TV series M*A*S*H, the 89-year-old actor, director and writer has another hit on his hands with a revamp of his 1981 movie The Four Seasons. He talks about his Parkinson’s disease, Woody Allen – and what he really thinks of Donald Trump."

Featured Links - September 16, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

The entrance to Frenchman's Bay

Why Does The Fibonacci Sequence Appear So Frequently In Nature? "The rationale behind irrationality." A good explanation of a simple mathematic sequence that has hidden complexities.

650-Foot High Megatsunami in Greenland Sends Seismic Waves Worldwide. "In September 2023, a megatsunami in Greenland triggered seismic waves worldwide, caused by a landslide in Dickson Fjord. The event generated two seismic signals: a high-energy signal from the landslide and a long-lasting VLP signal from a seiche in the fjord. The findings offer new insights into the risks posed by climate change and landslides in Greenland."

Inside Iron Mountain: It’s Time to Talk About Hard Drives. "Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services sounds the alarm: Aging tracks created through an all-digital workflow aren't guaranteed to play back." This has been a known issue with recording tape for many years and now it's happening with hard drives and optical media. We need a long-term (hundreds of years or more) storage media for digital data.  

When bats were wiped out, more human babies died, a study found. Here's why. "Researchers find infant deaths increased after farmers used more pesticides to compensate for rise of pests." Unintended consequences are killing children.

AI can now replicate the human brain to solve the 'cocktail party problem' – and it has led to criminal convictions. "The human brain can single out noises in a busy room, but technology can't, which makes using recordings as proof tricky."

Brick and Roses: How Community-Led Development Shapes Design. "Across North America and the U.K., community land trusts, co-ops and co-housing groups are nourishing bold, aspirational design paradigms — and a new generation of urban advocacy." High-density developments don't have to be ugly and soulless.

An AI May Have Just Invented "Alternative" Physics. "An AI shown videos of physical phenomena and instructed to identify the variables involved produced answers different from our own." This is really interesting and brings to mind a number of science fiction stories with exactly that idea. 

The 2024 Worldcon in Glasgow: Some Thoughts. A report on the Glasgow Worldcon by Abigail Nussbaun. Wish I could have been there. 

How a Bad User Interface Almost Wrecked a US Destroyer

A bad user interface can make a website hard to navigate or a software program hard to use. But in the real world of physical things, a bad user interface can have more serious consequences. This article by Adrian Hanft describes how bad design contributed to the collision that killed ten sailors and wrecked a destroyer. 

Two years ago a Navy destroyer was ripped open by the nose of a Liberian tanker. Ten sailors were crushed or drowned as their sleeping quarters filled with water after the collision.

At the heart of the tragedy is a single checkbox on a touchscreen. This is the untold story of how bad design caused a crew to lose control of the $1.8 billion John S McCain destroyer and the mystery around how designers manage to avoid blame when their creations cause death and destruction.

Before going any further, I want to make it clear that I am just a civilian piecing together this story from whatever information I can glean from the internet. I have trudged through hundreds of pages of technical documents and dense reports. Much of this documentation is intentionally vague, some of it has been redacted, and all of it has undoubtedly been scrubbed by lawyers and PR professionals. As a result, there are probably errors in my analysis and conjecture. However, with that disclaimer in mind, I believe the following story may be the clearest, most human-readable account of the McCain accident that you will find anywhere. It may also be the first and only public source of real design criticism ever written in the two years since the accident. I am not sure how the responsibility fell to me, but I am happy to describe the role that design played in this tragedy.

Featured Links - April 8, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

The hydro marsh

• Throngs of Himself. "Paul Linebarger wrote science fiction as Cordwainer Smith. His multiple selves did not stop there." Long and fascinating article about an author who deserves to be better known.
• The Far Right Is Crawling With Eclipse Conspiracy Theories. "Everyone has lost their goddamn minds." I guess this is nothing new and I'm not surprised that Alex Jones and all would have fit perfectly into a Babylonian mindset.
• HarperCollins made a tiny tweak to its book design—and has saved thousands of trees as a result. "The publisher is reducing the number of pages in its books by tweaking their fonts and layout." When I was working as a technical writer, I always tried to reduce the page count in long documents, though my font choices were more limited than those at HarperCollins.
• Breakthrough in prime number theory demonstrates primes can be predicted. In terms of significance, this is the mathematical equivalent of Einstein's theory of relativity, assuming their research is verified. The examples in the paper look convincing, but the formal math is far beyond me. However, I have seen reports that people haven't been able to confirm some of the examples, so this may be one of those too good to be true bits of research. Remember cold fusion?
• A Vigilante Hacker Took Down North Korea’s Internet. Now He’s Taking Off His Mask. 'As “P4x,” Alejandro Caceres single-handedly disrupted the internet of an entire country. Then he tried to show the US military how it can—and should—adopt his methods.'
• Make Beautiful Things: The Aesthetic Drive Behind Rocket Lab’s Rise in Aerospace. "Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck has some unique approaches to innovation—and they seem to be working." Their next rocket is really interesting. 
• Buried rivers flow under Canadian cities, hidden in a labyrinth of tunnels and sewer pipes. "Will we revive them or let the waterways fade from memory? Jaela Bernstien and Emily Chung uncover hidden rivers across Canada.‍" This is an excellent interactive article. 
• Lawsuit filed against LG over appliance malfunction due to allegedly faulty parts. "It's a tremendous hassle. I think they should make it right." We have one of these fridges; I am keeping my fingers crossed we aren't one of the ones who have a problem.

Featured Links - December 4, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A faded burning bush

• Towards an Optimal Diet. "In aggregate, several recent publications, two very popular books, and a new, large $189 million NIH clinical trial, may help to provide an objective basis for what we should eat to be and stay healthy."
• Google Rolls Out New Accessibility Features to Make Daily Tasks Easier. "New features in Maps, Search and Chrome are aimed at helping users with disabilities navigate their devices more easily."
• How ‘Skeuomorphism’ Is Making U.S. Roads More Deadly. "After you read this, you'll never look at a "frunk" the same way again." Trucks of that size should only be available for commercial use.
• Spirals inspire walking aids for people with disabilities. "Engineers design a special shoe that may improve gait and a skateboard that rocks and rolls." 
• The real AI fight. "Effective Accelerationists and Effective Altruists are both in vigorous agreement about something genuinely stupid."
• The Secret Language of Ships. "Signs and symbols on the sides of ships tell stories about an industry few outsiders understand."
• Our fragile moment: how lessons from Earth’s past can help us survive the climate crisis. "In this sweeping work of science and history, the renowned climate scientist and author of The New Climate War shows us the conditions on Earth that allowed humans not only to exist but thrive, and how they are imperiled if we veer off course."
• 'What I want are recovery narratives': CBC Radio host Gill Deacon on life with long COVID. "CBC Here & Now host is among the 10-15% of people who will get long COVID, research suggests." After suffering for months with long COVID symptoms, she had a blood test to confirm that she had had COVID-19 because her case was completely asymptomatic. 

A Couple of Impressive Interactive Websites

As a technical writer, I made my living wrangling words. I used graphics, mostly diagrams and screen captures, to enhance the content but they were never the primary part of my documentation. But the web has made interactive graphics an effective way of conveying information that would be difficult or impossible to do with just words. I am in awe of the people who can do this; aside from being a competent photographer, I am not a graphics person.

Here are a couple of websites that seriously impressed me, both with their content and the way it was conveyed. 

• goog_1893961212A portrait of Tenochtitlan, a 3D reconstruction of the capital of the Aztec Empire. 

"Not much is left of the old Aztec - or Mexica - capital Tenochtitlan. What did this city, raised from the lake bed by hand, look like? Using historical and archeological sources, and the expertise of many, I have tried to faithfully bring this iconic city to life." 

The site uses 3D modelling to show what Tenochtitlan might have looked like just before the Spanish invasion. The images are stunning. I especially liked the use of overlay graphics to show the comparison between 1500 and now. 

• The James Webb telescope is a giant leap in the history of stargazing. "Our view of the universe will never be the same." (no paywall link)

This interactive page, produced by the New York Times, is the best site I've seen for showing the capabilities of the James Webb telescope in comparison to the Hubble and terrestrial telescopes. 

Thanks to the Recomendo newsletter for pointing out these sites. 

Featured Links - July 31, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Wild flowers

• archives.design: "A digital archive of graphic design related items that are available on the Internet Archives."
• The Ed's Up - An Ending .... Ed Yong is one of the best journalists out there. I didn't know he had a newsletter, but I've just subscribed. 
• Spatial biology is lighting it up. "A rapid fire chain of discoveries are illuminating health and disease."
• That Which Copyright Destroys, ‘Pirates’ Can Save. 'There’s an interesting post on TorrentFreak that concerns so-called “pirate” subtitles for films. It’s absurd that anyone could consider subtitles to be piracy in any way. They are a good example of how ordinary people can add value by generously helping others enjoy films and TV programs in languages they don’t understand.'
• A beautiful, broken America: what I learned on a 2,800-mile bus ride from Detroit to LA. "Gone are the small, clean, cheap motels and public spaces where anyone can find a place to nurse a cup of coffee. Yet the camaraderie of the Greyhound is hanging on." 
• 2023 World Fantasy Awards Finalists. The awards will be presented during the World Fantasy Convention in Kansas City at the end of October.
• Here's What 'Oppenheimer' Gets Right--and Wrong--about Nuclear History. It gets a lot of things right, but not everything. 

Featured Links - July 29, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A peaceful afternoon at the Topsail Island marina

• A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon. "Through these illustrations, I hope to commemorate the complexity of the Aztec Pantheon, make the academic research more accessible, and show how this civilization is still alive in our global culture. With luck, they will also help you see this society with the wonderment of your inner child’s eyes, just like I did all those years ago."
• Why the Arctic Is Warming 4 Times as Fast as the Rest of Earth. "The loss of sea ice is exposing darker waters, which absorb more of the sun’s energy. It’s a devastating feedback loop with major consequences for the planet."
• ‘There’s no one long Covid’: Experts struggle to make sense of the continuing mystery. "A group of virologists gathered to ask and answer questions about what causes long Covid, how to predict who gets it, and how to treat it."
• The unexpected star of NASA’s Webb images — the alt text descriptions. "A team in Baltimore was responsible for the words that made the stunning photos accessible to everyone."
• Best Practices for Graphics in Modern Publishing Pipelines. "The following best practices for creating and publishing graphics are application-agnostic and can be done in everything from open source software to top-flight, tools-integrated component content management systems."
• Could machine learning fuel a reproducibility crisis in science? "‘Data leakage’ threatens the reliability of machine-learning use across disciplines, researchers warn."
• Tonga Eruption Filled The Atmosphere With Water, Potentially Damaging The Ozone Layer. It could also contribute to global warming over the next decade.

Featured Links - June 28, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• Astronomers Radically Reimagine the Making of the Planets. "Observations of faraway worlds have forced a near-total rewrite of the story of our solar system."
• Rarely Seen Paintings by J.R.R. Tolkien Portray a Lush ‘Lord of the Rings’ Landscape. "The Tolkien Estate recently published a trove of rare, unpublished art by the famed fantasy author on its website."
• Monkeypox Has Undergone “Accelerated Evolution”, Mutating At Unprecedented Rates. "The ongoing monkeypox outbreak is unprecedented. This research could help to explain why."
• Covid hasn’t given up all its secrets. Here are 6 mysteries experts hope to unravel. Two years into the pandemic, there is still a lot to learn about the virus.
• The 100 Most Popular Emojis Explained. "There are so many emojis, it can be difficult to know what they all mean. Here are the most popular emojis explained."
• State of CSS 2022. "Web styling features of today and tomorrow, as seen at Google IO 2022, plus some extras."
• America Is Sliding Into the Long Pandemic Defeat. "In the face of government inaction, the country’s best chance at keeping the crisis from spiraling relies on everyone to keep caring." Another essential read from Ed Yong.

Featured Links - January 3rd, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• Surprise! The Pandemic Has Made People More Science Literate. This may be just about the only good thing to come out of the pandemic.
• 10 lessons I’ve learned from the Covid–19 pandemic. Everyone in public health and all politicians should read this and be tested annually on the key points.
• ‘The Fuse Has Been Blown,’ and the Doomsday Glacier Is Coming for Us All. New data suggests a massive collapse of the ice shelf in as little as five years. “We are dealing with an event that no human has ever witnessed,” says one scientist. “We have no analog for this”.
• Webb Space Telescope Got a Lucky Boost From Its Christmas Launch. "The mission may have enough fuel to last over a decade, thanks to an ultra-precise launch."
• New ways to customize tables in Google Docs. Tables become a lot more useful in Google Docs.
• The History of the Graphical User Interface -- 1945 to 1980. "A visual, historical tour of the early years of computer GUI's... starting in 1945."
• Texas Scientists Are Sharing the Design for Their New, Cheap Covid-19 Vaccine. "A low-cost, effective vaccine authorized for use in India this week could soon be shared around the world."
• Archaeologists Find Ancient Tsunami Victim on the Turkish Coast. "Human and dog remains at Çeşme-Bağlararası are the latest evidence of the Thera eruption and the ensuing tsunami that roared through the Mediterranean."
• NOVA's top 5 science stories of 2021. "Scientific advancements helped humans push through both the pandemic and the atmosphere this year, and a long-awaited visit from some underground insects set the country abuzz."

Free Fonts From Google

There are many sources of free fonts on the web, but if I was looking for fonts I'd go to Google. Their Google Fonts page has a large selection of different types of fonts and a well-thought-out interface that allows for searching, filtering, and browsing. 

Thanks to the excellent Recomendo newsletter for the heads up.

There are about 1,000 very classy fonts available for free on Google Fonts. These are fonts you would actually want to use in your book or on your website. Some are commissioned by Google and designed by world-class typographers, such as the font Roboto used in Google maps. Many of these fonts come as families with different weights, italic, bold, extra glyphs, etc

Virtual Tours of Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings

Frank Lloyd Wright created some of the most beautiful buildings of the 20th century. In this time of physical isolation, you can now take virtual tours of a dozen of his buildings.

Ever wanted to go inside Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Fallingwater? Now’s your chance (even if the US is on lockdown) thanks to a new series of digital tours.

The waterside home in Pennsylvania is among a dozen of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most iconic designs available to explore as part of the #WrightVirtualVisits initiative. The social media project is a collaboration between the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and Unity Temple Restoration Foundation.

The participating organisations will swap a short video touring a different Wright-designed house on their social media channels at 12 pm CST every Thursday over the coming weeks.

Remembering Letraset

I just came across a Twitter thread that brought back some memories. Does anyone remember Letraset?

Today in pulp I look back at the simple idea that launched a thousand fanzines: Letraset! Launched in 1959 by Dai Davies and Fred Mackenzie it heralded a graphic design revolution that brought funky fonts to the masses...

Today in pulp I look back at the simple idea that launched a thousand fanzines: Letraset! Launched in 1959 by Dai Davies and Fred Mackenzie it heralded a graphic design revolution that brought funky fonts to the masses...

 Letraset started life as a wet transfer system: you placed the letter into water, carefully slid off the transfer and tried to apply it to the paper without creasing it. Whilst fiddly it was still quicker than hand-painting your letters.

 In 1961 Letraset adopted the dry transfer process: letters screenprinted onto a polythene sheet were sprayed over with adhesive. You placed the sheet over the paper and used a pencil to rub over the letter, which detached from the carrier sheet and stuck to the paper. 

By the time I got into technical writing, dekstop publishing was already in its infancy. However, there was still a place for Letraset, as I found when I had to use it to produce headings and titles for my first manual. I never did use it for fanzine (I published a science fiction fanzine in the early 1990s.) as by that time I was able to use Ventura Publisher on a PC and laser print my pages.

You young kids don't know how easy you have it. You'll never know the exquisite pain of using your last 18 point Futura letter E and realizing that you need one more, and it's 7 o'clock in the evening on the night before a deadline and the printing shop closed at 6:00.

How Modern Design Fails Older Consumers

Don Norman is the author of one of the classic works on design, Design of Everyday Things, and a former Apple VP. He's also 83 and finding that modern design is failing him and a whole generation of consumers.

In a Fast Company article, he rails against what he sees. Don't be mislead by the title of the article. What he describes is a problem that affects more than just the elderly.

Do not think that thoughtful design is just for the elderly, or the sick, or the disabled. In the field of design, this is called “inclusive design” for a reason: It helps everyone. Curb cuts were meant to help people who had trouble walking, but it helps anyone wheeling things: carts, baby carriages, suitcases. Closed captions are used in noisy bars. As Kat Holmes points out in her book Mismatch, all of us are disabled now and then. Some of us have permanent disabilities, but all of us have suffered from situational and temporary problems. When outside in the sun, the text message that just arrived is unreadable: wouldn’t it be nice if the display, whether cellphone, watch, or tablet, could switch to large, higher contrast lettering? Are elderly people handicapped? Maybe, but so is a young, athletic parent while carrying a baby on one arm and a bag of groceries in the other (and perhaps trying to open their car door). Ride-share bicycles and scooters cannot be used by people who need to carry bulky packages. Everyone has difficulty hearing people in noisy environments. Noise-canceling headphones are for everyone, not just the elderly. Almost anything that will help the elderly population will end up helping everyone.

I couldn't agree with him more. I constantly find myself running up against bad design that makes my life more difficult. I've reccently unsubscribed from a couple of interesting looking email newsletters because the publishers formatted them in small, light grey type on a white background, thus making them virtually impossible for me to read. It's a small thing, but it's symptomatic of the problem that Norman discusses in the article.

Getting Started With CSS Layout

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) have gotten a lot more complicated since they were introduced in the latter part of the 1990s. You can now use them to do animation, complex formatting, and layouts that respond to different screen sizes and formats.

Getting Started wtih CSS Layouts is a guide to the many properties of CSS layouts. It should be helpful to anyone creating a CSS layout from scratch or modifying the generated CSS code from a tool like RoboHelp or WebWorks ePublisher.

Designing a New Mobile Experience for the Guardian

The Guardian is one of the best British newspapers, and they have a strong online presence. They're also turning a profit, without a paywall, which is a rarity in the newspaper business. Clearly they're doing something right.

This article describes the process that The Guardian went through in updating its mobile website. While much of the article is specific to the newspaper business in the UK, there's quite a bit that would apply to any technical communication group planning on developing or redesigning their mobile presence.

The recommendations from the article are particularly relevant to technical communication:

• Make sure the website looks and feels like a digital product and not a print newspaper;
• Innovate not only by investing in technology and new products, but also by providing training and continuous support to journalists;
• Rethink the newsroom structure: hire as many developers, data scientists and designers as possible;
• Do not be afraid to experiment: Build, Measure, Learn (Ries, 2011);
• Be humble and open: the world has changed, business has changed — you should change, too;
• Always involve the end-user in product decisions. Talk and, more importantly, listen to customers on a regular basis.

Some Design and Typography Articles

Here are some interesting articles about design and typography.

• The Value of Multi-Typeface Design. Technical writers tend to minimize the number of typefaces in their documentation, but there are times when it's appropriate to go the other way.
• How to redesign a 175-year-old newspaper. The Economist isn't a newspaper, but the article is still a good read. 
• The Magical, Surprising History of Serifs. "Once viewed as uncivilized, sans serif typefaces somehow became the epitome of streamlined efficiency."
• If Your Favorite Typefaces Were Celebrities. Who would be Comic Sans?