Right here at A Checklist Aside, we’re in search of new authors, and meaning you. What must you write about? Glad you requested!
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It is best to write about subjects that hold you up at night time, passions that make you the primary to indicate up within the workplace every morning, concepts that matter to our group and about which you’ve a narrative to inform or an perception to share.
We’re not in search of case research about your organization or thousand-foot overviews of subjects most ALA readers already learn about (i.e., you don’t have to inform A Checklist Aside readers that Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the online). However you additionally don’t have to put in writing earth-shaking manifestos or share new methods of working that can utterly change the online. sturdy thought, or detailed recommendation about an {industry} finest apply make wonderful ALA articles.
Though A Checklist Aside covers every thing from accessible UX and product design to superior typography and content material and enterprise technique, the candy spot for an A Checklist Aside article is one that mixes UI design (and design considering) with front-end code, particularly when it’s revolutionary. Thus our hottest article of the previous ten years was Ethan Marcotte’s “Responsive Internet Design”—a wedding of design and code, accessible to folks with numerous backgrounds at differing ranges of experience.
Within the decade-plus earlier than that, our hottest articles have been Douglas Bowman’s “Sliding Doorways of CSS” and Dan Cederholm’s “Fake Columns”—once more, marriages of design and code, and principally within the nature of intelligent workarounds (as a result of CSS in 2004 didn’t actually allow us to design pages as flexibly and creatively, and even as reliably, as we wished to).
From hacks to requirements#section3
Though intelligent front-end tips like Sliding Doorways, and visionary re-imaginings of the medium like Responsive Internet Design, stay our hottest choices, the journal has provided fewer of them lately, focusing extra on UX and technique. To a sure extent, if a front-end approach isn’t earth-changing (i.e., isn’t greater than only a approach), and if it isn’t semantic, inclusive, accessible, and progressively enhanced, we don’t care how flashy it’s—it’s not for us.
The demand to create extra highly effective layouts was additionally, in an actual means, glad by the rise of frameworks and shared libraries—one more reason for us to have eased off front-end tips (though not all frameworks and libraries are equally or in some instances even acceptably semantic, inclusive, accessible, and progressively enhanced—and, sadly, a lot of their customers don’t know or care).
Most significantly, now that CSS is lastly able to true structure design with out hacks, any accountable internet design publication will wish to ease off on the movement of front-end hacks, in favor of standards-based schooling, from fundamental to superior. Why would any editor or writer (or framework engineer, for that matter) advocate that designers use 100 kilos of fragile JavaScript when a dozen strains of secure CSS will do?
It is going to be fascinating to see what occurs to the demand for structure hack articles in Medium and internet design publications and communities over the following twelve months. It is going to even be fascinating to see what turns into of frameworks now that CSS is so succesful. However that’s not our drawback. Our drawback is discovering the very best concepts for A Checklist Aside’s readers, and dealing with the {industry}’s finest previous and new writers to shine these concepts to near-perfection.
In spite of everything, much more than being identified for genius one-offs like Responsive Internet Design and Sliding Doorways of CSS, A Checklist Aside has spent its life introducing future-friendly, user-focused design advances to this group, i.e., preventing for internet requirements when desk layouts have been the trend, preventing for internet requirements when Flash was the trend, pushing for actual typography on the internet years earlier than Typekit was a gleam in Jeff Veen’s eye, pushing for readability in structure when most design-y web sites thought single-spaced 7px Arial was lots sufficiently big, selling accessible design options, user-focused options, unbiased content material and communities, and so forth.
Nice, industry-changing articles are nonetheless what we would like most, whether or not they’re front-end, design, content material, or strategy-focused. And altering the {industry} doesn’t should imply inventing a very new means of laying out pages or evaluating shopper content material. It could additionally imply developing with a compelling argument in favor of an essential however embattled finest apply. Or sharing an insightful story that helps those that learn or not it’s extra empathetic and extra moral of their every day work.
Who will write the following 20 years of nice A Checklist Aside articles? That’s the place you are available in.
Publishing on A Checklist Aside isn’t as easy-peasy as dashing off a put up in your weblog, however the outcomes—and the viewers—are value it. And whenever you write for A Checklist Aside, you by no means write alone: our industry-leading editors, technical editors, and copyeditors are prepared that can assist you polish your finest thought from good to nice.
Come share with us!