Responsive Text in Responsive Web Design

There are a lot of articles on responsive web design and there are a lot of articles on responsive text. Here’s a list of the best one’s I’ve read so far.

However, if you do have the time and go ahead and browse through them, you’ll eventually end up with some questions. One of them is the following:

Should font change based on screen size and device capabilities?

I am not just referring to changing the font size. I am talking about changing whole typefaces based on resolution, device capabilities and any other factors one could consider useful when making decisions about fonts. There are fonts that look great in small type and look awful in large sizes. There are other fonts that look great only if their big and chunky (I refer to font sizes larger than 50 pixels especially). There are fonts that look great on Windows and look anything but great on Macs or Unix.

Forget about the Mac; fonts look nice on Mac even if they were designed for Windows.

Some fonts look great on mobile devices while others may blend in on some devices. The HTC Touch just popped into my mind and I guess a large, square font would blend in with the actual phone design.

The main question is if designers and developers should consider changing font families as well in their responsive designs, not just font sizes. If it’s not too much trouble, if it improves the experience, if it doesn’t create any issues and problems, if it doesn’t change the feeling of the design, if branding allows type change, then why not?

New milestones!

  1. 85% of new businesses fail
  2. 70% of remaining businesses fail
  3. 62% of remaining businesses fail
  4. 55% of remaining businesses fail
  5. 50% of remaining businesses fail
  6. 47% of remaining businesses fail
  7. 41% of remaining businesses fail

The above list shows the failure rates of new businesses from the 1st year up to the 7th. In 2012, only 0.00120311325% of the new businesses started in 2004 are still operational. I am very proud to say that WebRaptor is one of those!

WebRaptor started as an idea in the summer of 04. By the end of October that year the website that was soon going to run our first service was operational. Then, on a bright, sunny, 1st Wednesday of November, I found myself in the small city of Bistrita, at the only bank that accepted international money transfers to businesses (not individuals) via Western Union. 

I remember queuing didn’t take long and I managed to make the payment just before the closing hours, at around 5 PM. I then rushed back, scanned the receipt and e-mailed it over to one of the managers of Acenet Inc, company that became our first service provider. They had a crappy site but excellent prices and a great support team, which was invaluable to WebRaptor as a starting business. 

A couple of hours later our 1st company website www.webraptorhosting.com was up and running. Unfortunately I don’t have a screenshot of the site back than. Fortunately, wayback machine has one. I can also tell you one thing about the site: it had something in common with a black hole. And it also had a velociraptor.

One and a half years later, WebRaptor Design, with its respective domain came to life and the company now offered web design to complement it’s web hosting services.

In 2008 we ditched the Hosting and Design from our presence names, registered our very first trademark: WebRaptor and our current brand was born.

It is now 2012, and we sailed through the crisis like nothing bad happened, we went global (having clients all over the world), we’ve had our share of bad decisions and bad clients, but what we’re left with is the great stuff: great clients, awesome projects, impressive future plans for our clients and more.

We’re still small but we take pride in that, especially because we know our clients and our clients know us. With us, you don’t ever get to talk to a stranger if you need help with any of your services or solutions. We have no awful call centers and we don’t keep our clients on hold with bad music.

We started in an era where Google was leading the game and everyone was crazy about optimizing sites for their little bot. We then continued with the social era of Facebook, Twitter and the rest and we’re now entering an era where sites shouldn’t be optimized and made to look the same on all browsers. We are in an era when sites should respond, react and change themselves based on resolution, device, operating system and features available to users. Why? So that your clients have the best experience possible with your brand.

We’re entering an era when websites developed 3 or 4 years ago fail miserably and need adjustments if not total overhauls. We’re entering an era when it’s mandatory that you keep up with the new technologies or go bust in an instant (not months or years). 

We’re entering the most challenging times in web development and 8 years from now we will still be here and our clients will be never better!

Why device dependent breakpoints are wrong in responsive design

There’s been a lot of discussions and talks lately regarding responsive design, techniques used to achieve responsive designs, pros and cons and so forth. Although articles didn’t necessary touch the breakpoints topic, comments and discussions on the article’s subject often did. And people had two sides to choose from: breakpoints based on device resolution and breakpoints based on how the content dictates it.

The side I chose was the second option. Even if you chose the first one, how many times have you said to yourself, your peers or your clients that content is king or content precedes design? So why chose breakpoints based on device resolution then? It simply doesn’t make sense.

Device dependent breakpoints basically are IE hacks and conditional statements applied to device names, types and resolutions. This battle is similar to the conditional styles that some of us applied to the dreadful internet explorer. The situation created in the past couple of years with the advent of smartphones, especially the touchy ones, is the same as the one we confronted with years ago when there was IE5, IE6 and the rest of the browsers.

The solution is the same, breakpoints should be decided based on content flow not device resolution. It is wise for a couple of reasons, but the most important is that in the next couple of years multiple devices, with multiple resolutions and with multiple DPI numbers will be launched on market. What will you do then? Create 50 copies of the same website? How about have only a few that match all of these devices without any headaches?

Just in case you’re still not convinced, think again about the times you almost got crazy because of internet explorer, think how much easier and better content based breakpoints are to set and their benefits. Finally, you can check out some interesting articles (make sure you go through the comments as well as they contain valuable insights too)

Must read:

http://informationarchitects.net/blog/responsive-typography-the-basics/

http://www.tangledindesign.com/blog/deciding-what-responsive-breakpoints-to-use/

http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2012/03/22/device-agnostic-approach-to-responsive-web-design/

http://www.palantir.net/re-thinking-breakpoints

Always trust your gut

So a few months ago I had a great opportunity. A risky opportunity. Risky because the end results could have gone both ways. I had about a week or so to think about the opportunity and to decide on whether I want to take it or not. All the numbers added up and projected a great outcome (or at least the ones I was presented with). So based on the numbers, research and expected outcome based on medium term projections, I made the decision to seize the opportunity.

However, during the exact same time, I had a gut feeling that something isn’t right and that I shouldn’t risk anything and let the opportunity pass by. Unfortunately, I didn’t. Now, a couple of months later, the result went the bad way and there’s no way of turning it back.

This happened to a rather large project with a lot of components. Previously, it happened only on small projects or parts of projects which were easily corrected and their impact minimum. Unfortunately, correcting the course this time is not feasible.

Therefor, whatever decision you have to make, big or small, if you gut feeling stands in opposition with what math says, go with your gut feeling. At least you’ll be happy with your decision and without regrets.

Fired the second client in 8 years. Sad days… Bright future

WebRaptor was started back in the end of 2004. Since then we’ve worked with a lot of clients from all over the world. We still work and closely keep in touch with most of them. However, until recently, there was only one client that was fired. Yes, you read it right, developers fire clients too, not just the other way around (by that I refer to the fact that the project did not finish and had no change to be finished).

Last week we fired a client for the second time. We didn’t fire the client as much as the client fired itself due to contract violations. It was a project that was started a long time ago and should have been finished a long time ago. Some delays came from WebRaptor, but most of them came from ongoing client modifications and requests. Don’t get me wrong, modifications are usually for the better, but if you don’t release and keep on modifying, competition is going to get ahead of you! Big time!

Releases should be stated clearly inside your contracts

First lesson learned. Make sure your contract states that if the client doesn’t want to release the product, you, as a developer can do that, without any implications and liabilities. Why? Because bringing third party (not acquaintances) to try out your solution is the best thing that can ever happen to a project.

If you shove your head in one box and keep working on the details you will loose the bigger picture and the end result is likely to be awful. If you get feedback soon, early, and repeat the process, the end result will be as close as possible to what the end user wants.

The above applies to anything that is not meant to revolutionize a domain, field or bring a completely new approach to a old problem.

Modifications over modifications = increased fees, invoiced frequently

Although most of you, or at least I hope so, have this in your contracts (project modifications result in increased prices), make sure your clients understand this for a fact. Otherwise, when modifications pile up and it’s time to negotiate on pricing, clients may not agree. Don’t wait for months for this. If your project has modifications, invoice the added work as soon as possible and don’t let it pile up just because you’re covered by the contract.

If you don’t, you may have to go through the painful process of using collection agencies. Painful because it usually takes time for the collection results to be final. And during that time, the regret is going to be bigger especially if you’ll find yourself with cash-flow problems.

Don’t ever forget about project termination

It’s probably one of the most important aspects a project manager or a senior executive has to asses throughout the entire lifecycle of a project. All projects must be terminated sooner or later to make way for new projects. And those projects that are less productive and projections aren’t that sweet must be terminated as soon as possible.

So don’t just sign a new contract, and start working on the project. Do a project assessment, as often as possible, weeks if not days, and if the project isn’t profitable, ditch it.

It was a fun project, but it had to go.

Is your business healthy?

Don’t jump and answer yes if the income or profit graph for your past year looks similar to the graph in the picture. Having a healthy business is not only getting higher profits or more income. 

If your numbers snap into the graph you are on the right track, but have you considered any risks that could turn that graphs upside down in a matter of weeks? If you haven’t it is time to start doing so. 

How many clients do you have? Is any of them, or a combination of clients in a monopoly position?

If you answered just a few or enough for the first question, then you expose yourself to a lot of risks. Here’s just a bad scenario I could think of right now. Half of your clients decide they no longer need you! Yes… it can happen. Think of this as the worst case scenario. Your revenue drops to half before you have time to cut your costs in half and in a blink of an eye you’re now on loss.

A good solution is to get more clients. You’re probably be okay when your answer to this question is somewhere close to more than I can handle.

What about the monopoly? 

I am referring here to revenue monopoly, not anything else. Is any of your clients or a combination of a few clients generating more than 50% of your revenue? If yes, you’re again big trouble and walking on a very risky slope. If the client or clients combo suddenly cancel your services, your income drops by half again. Your costs remain the same and all of a sudden you’re on loss. Again!

So, if you do have a couple of clients generating most of your revenue, start getting more clients and diverging your income streams away from the few channels you’re currently on.

There’s more to it…

Of course the above are just a couple of ways one thriving business could go bust in no time. There’s a lot more things that could go wrong, and if you think of any please share them.

What’s missing in Twitter

One user tweets in multiple languages, merges business with personal

More and more users are starting to burst tweets. The bad thing is that many of them now switch from one language to another (I’ve done it), they switch from personal to business or from business to personal (although my twitter account is business, I’ve also tweeted some personal opinions too).

Loosing listeners

I don’t have the statistics under my nose (although it would be nice to get a response from twitter), but I guess it’s somewhat natural for users to lose their audience when they start doing the above. You’ve got your fan base listening in English. Then you tweet something in Romanian, German or Spanish. Although the tweet is on the same topic you’ve used your audience with, its very likely that you loose some of your followers if you start doing this often.

Geeting more followers

A nice feature that would solve this issue would be similar to Google’s circles in Google plus. One user has one account and multiple subaccounts (think of them like follower circles). This way tweets in English and on primary subject could be kept on the main account and followers of that account would get the info you share. Tweets in Romanian, German or Spanish on the same subject would be sent on their respective Romanian, German or Spanish subaccounts and only the followers of those subaccounts would get them in their timeline. You could also add a rant section, a personal section or whatever you want. 

The above features would allow concentrating all your followers under one big roof and keep things simple. Currently, if you want to achieve something similar you’d have to create multiple accounts for each topic or language, switch between them and so on. A complete mess.

Yahoo mail’s awful spam assassin system

I’ve only used Yahoo’s email services because its bundled with the account you get to make if you want to use their instant messaging service. Although these days you can barely find me online on Yahoo Messenger, a couple of years ago I would have been one of those regular users who are online whenever their computers are powered. Given the fact that Romanians tend to use Yahoo Messenger without any chance for any other service, I didn’t have a chance and had to get the account to talk to friends, family or colleagues.

Yahoo’s spam detector has serious issues

A couple of years ago I had a server hosted in UK (don’t exactly remember where) which was running a website for a client I had back then. The main problem with the website was that it was a subscription service requiring email address validation and Yahoo was blocking (not just placing into spam folder) all the emails sent from that server. 

Whoever signed up with a Yahoo email address couldn’t validate their account. After weeks of research and contacting Yahoo support the cause was identified and unfortunately it could only be solved by Yahoo (as it was on their end). The problem wasn’t solved so we had to switch datacenters, update DNS, experience downtime and the whole bundle of issues.

You’d think that since 2006 Yahoo’s problems with spam are solved, but no. WebRaptor [new window] hosts a couple of servers with BurstNet in UK and US. Neither could send initially any emails to Yahoo accounts as all of them very permanently rejected.

Had to go again through the entire process described above. The good thing was that this time Yahoo managed to solve the issue and emails are now going through. Finally! 

The irony [ The “best” web-based email ]

I haven’t accessed my Yahoo email account much since I signed up (I think it was about 10 years ago). I never gave anyone that email address so nobody send me legit email on that address. However, although Yahoo has a very strict policy against spam blocking a lot of emails, legitimate emails, they fail to block spam from reaching my inbox. 

My inbox now contains about 50.000 emails. My spam folder contains 62 emails, the oldest dating back to 1st of January 2003. 

If you want to check out a long topic with the issue, check this one on Web Hosting Talk [new window].

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