Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Facundo Corradini
CSS vertical alignment: Best practices and examples
Back in the good old days, the limits of CSS made even “simple” things like vertical centering a challenge, with some developers even relying on JavaScript solutions. It was fragile and very constrained, and there was always that one exception that made it fail. Whether we were trying to align an icon or image beside the text, create one of those popular hero banners, or create a modal overlay, centering things on the vertical axis was always a struggle.
Long-Term Design: Rewriting the Design Sales Pitch
We run our client service businesses just like door-to-door salespeople hawking vacuum cleaners. That may seem unfair, but it’s exactly how we sell design. We’re focused on short-term wins—but we’re teaching clients to see our work as disposable. Article Continues Below I want to believe we’re better than that. We spend our entire careers knocking on doors and shilling our services. It’s just how we do business.
Gaming the System…and Winning
Good intentions usually drive the “gamification” of websites—adding points, badges, and leaderboards to make them more engaging. It sounds like a great idea, but borrowing game design elements out of context is a risky way to design experiences, especially experiences intended to bring users back to a site. Article Continues Below Not everyone wants to spend more time on your site just to get a badge; some people simply aren’t motivated by such extrinsic rewards.
Big Data Visualization with Meaning
The web is not the traditional home of data visualization. You might come across a bar chart here or there in your online journey on any given day, but they’ve never been an artifact of web history. It seems like that’s been changing. Article Continues Below With the world becoming increasingly data-driven, we’re seeing more and more visualizations make their way onto our web pages and into our design briefs.
Using HTTP/2 Responsibly: Adapting for Users
A note from the editors: This article is part one of a two-part series exploring the new HTTP/2 protocol and using it responsibly. Be sure to read part two, Considering How We Use HTTP/2. With HTTP/2 ticking up steadily in use, it’s clear that there’s something to this long overdue update to the protocol. Implementing it, however, not only changes how websites are delivered to the user, it demands that we think critically about how we migrate existing sites to the protocol.
Be a Mentor
Looking back over my eleven-year career in the web industry, I owe most of my success to two people from early on: Holly and Rebecca. Both were supervisors; but, more importantly, both were mentors. I wouldn’t be where I am today without their mentorship. Three years into my career, I got a promotion and became a supervisor myself. It was so exciting to be in a position to mentor others and give back to the community! I only had one question: how the heck do I do that?
UX for Lizard Brains
Technology can make magic happen. In seconds, you can find all the blue sandals in a warehouse of millions of shoes. A million people can read the same article without killing one tree. You can undo, unsend, and even unfriend! But here’s the buzzkill: if unanticipated or unwelcome, the magic of technology is confusing, disorienting, and unintuitive—a UX designer’s worst nightmare. Article Continues Below So how can we ensure that the magic we create is intuitive?
What I Talk About When I Talk About Sorting: Untangling Array#sort
Sorting things is a fundamental part of our daily lives—it’s something we do everyday to make our lives easier, following all kinds of criteria. Whether you’re looking for a person’s phone number, the location of your favorite book, or even matching up your socks, sorting allows us to find what we are looking for in a faster and more effective way. Article Continues Below This is also the case in the world of web development.
Using Webfonts
A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 2 (“Using Webfonts") of Bram Stein's new book, Webfont Handbook, available now from A Book Apart. Now that you’ve selected a font, let’s put it on your website. Webfonts are defined in CSS through the @font-face rule. If you’re a web developer, you’ve most likely written, copied and pasted, or at the very least seen an @font-face rule.
Considering How We Use HTTP/2
A note from the editors: This article is part two of a two-part series exploring the new HTTP/2 protocol and using it responsibly. Be sure to read part one, Using HTTP/2 Responsibly: Adapting for Users. It’s important to remember that HTTP/2-specific optimizations may become performance liabilities for HTTP/1 users. In the final part of this series, we’ll talk about the performance implications of such a strategy and how build tools can help you manage HTTP/1- and HTTP/2-specific assets.
Patterns and Purpose, an Excerpt from Animation at Work
So we can use animations to tap into users’ visual systems and give them a cognitive speed boost, terrific! But before animating every element of our designs, we must learn when and how to use this new tool: with great power comes great responsibility, and so forth. And as animation must vie with many other concerns for development and design time, it makes sense to spend our resources where they’ll go the farthest.
A Dao of Product Design
When a designer or developer sets out to create a new product, the audience is thought of as “the user”: we consider how she might use it, what aspects make it accessible and usable, what emotional interactions make it delightful, and how we can optimize the workflow for her and our benefit. What is rarely considered in the process is the social and societal impact of our product being used by hundreds of thousands—even millions—of people every day.
The Ten Essentials for Good API Documentation
API documentation is the number one reference for anyone implementing your API, and it can profoundly influence the developer experience. Because it describes what services an application programming interface offers and how to use those services, your documentation will inevitably create an impression about your product—for better or for worse. Article Continues Below In this two-part series I share what I’ve learned about API documentation.
Web Maintainability Industry Survey: How Do We Maintain?
A note from the editors: As a community, we can learn so much from discovering what other developers are doing around the world. We encourage everyone to participate in this very brief survey created by Jens Oliver Meiert. Jens will share the results—and an updated guide to web maintainability based on the findings—in a few weeks. How often do we consider the maintenance and general maintainability of our websites and apps? What steps do we actively take to make and keep them maintainable?
Coding with Clarity
Working code isn’t necessarily good code. Your code also needs to be easy to read, understand, and modify. It needs clarity, and to achieve that, it has to be organized well, with careful planning and proper separation of ideas taking place before you even open your code editor. Coding for clarity is something that separates the great developers from the merely good, and there are a few basic principles that can set you on that path.
I Don’t Need Help
We have no excuse…admit it. UX may brag about intuitive and pretty, but we sure suck at helping people—this one thing that most defines, most embodies great user experience. Article Continues Below Throughout history, there’s one recurring theme: people need help. For all we know, the need for assistance might have triggered the development of communication. It could have led to bonding among tribes and our existence today.
Practical Design Discovery
A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 3 of Dan Brown's new book, Practical Design Discovery, available now from A Book Apart. One of the hardest design problems I ever worked on was for a company that helps IT groups manage risk. Their product focused on open-source components—inexpensive and widely supported by an enormous community, but often vulnerable to security flaws.
Demystifying Public Speaking
A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Lara Hogan's new book, Demystifying Public Speaking, available now from A Book Apart. Before you near the stage, before you write the talk, before you even pick a topic, take time to get comfortable with the idea of giving a talk. Article Continues Below You’re reading this because something about public speaking makes your palms sweat.
How People Perceive Lossy Image Quality: A Study
The notion that lossy image quality is subjective is not an unreasonable hypothesis. There are many factors that play into how humans perceive quality: screen size, image scaling, and yes, even performance. Article Continues Below Many research projects have tackled this subject, but I’ve recently launched a survey that attempts to understand how people perceive image quality in a slightly different way: in the context of performance.
Widen Out: Using Your Blog to Attract New Clients
Attracting future clients on autopilot—that’s the whole point of your website, right? Most freelancers accept the story that great work attracts leads, but I’m going to be straight with you: clients have no clue you exist. What usually tips the balance isn’t your portfolio—they see plenty of those. Article Continues Below Not many people talk about failures they had promoting their products and services. We struggle and we hide it.
The Mindfulness of a Manual Performance Audit
As product owners or developers, we probably have a good handle on which core assets we need to make a website work. But rarely is that the whole picture. How well do we know every last thing that loads on our sites? Article Continues Below An occasional web performance audit, done by hand, does make us aware of every last thing. What’s so great about that? Well, for starters, the process increases our mindfulness of what we are actually asking of our users.
Conducting the Technical Interview
I vividly remember my first interview as a manager. My hands were shaking as I led the candidate up the stairs to the conference room I had booked. When we got there, I went into a panic. What if I don’t ask a vital question? How do I even know what the vital questions are? What if I hire him and he’s completely unprofessional? How can I tell if he really knows JavaScript? Wait a second—does he have a prosthetic leg? Did I just take a candidate with a prosthetic leg up the stairs?
Integrating Animation into a Design System
Keeping animation choreography cohesive from the outset of a project can be challenging, especially for small companies. Without a dedicated motion specialist on the team, it can be difficult to prioritize guidelines and patterns early in the design process. What’s more likely to happen is that animations will be added as the product develops. Article Continues Below Unsurprisingly, the ad-hoc approach can lead to inconsistencies, duplications, and rework in the long run.
Practical User Research: Creating a Culture of Learning in Large Organizations
Enterprise companies are realizing that understanding customer needs and motivations is critical in today’s marketplace. Building and sustaining new user research programs to collect these insights can be a major struggle, however. Digital teams often feel thwarted by large organizations that are slow to change and have many competing priorities for financial investments.
User Interfaces for Variable Fonts
The tools we design with have a unique effect on the way we work, constraining and empowering us while we explore, examine and create. Variable fonts give us a new, wide open typographic space with which to work. Instead of prescribing value to individual UI elements in a vacuum, we should take a hybrid and calculated approach to variable font interfaces. How do we structure our design tools to adapt to the new advantages variable fonts provide us with?
Fait Accompli: Agentive Tech Is Here
A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Chris Noessel's new book, Designing Agentive Technology, AI That Works for People, available now from Rosenfeld Media. For a limited time, ALA readers can get 20% off Chris's book by using the code 'ALADAT' on the Rosenfeld Media site. Similar to intelligence, agency can be thought of as a spectrum. Some things are more agentive than others. Is a hammer agentive?
A List Apart volunteer update
A note from the editors: A few days ago, we announced a reimagined A List Apart, with you, our faithful readers of nearly 20 years, contributing your talents. The response from this community was humbling, thrilling, and, frankly, a bit overwhelming. If you volunteered to help A List Apart and haven’t heard back from us yet, here’s what’s up.
Considering Open Source Licenses
So you have a project that you want to use open source tools to create—well, I tip my hat off to you as a developer. But do you know the questions you need to answer before you get started? Article Continues Below What stage of development is your project in right now? Have you finished the planning phase? Are you going to work with a team? Will the project be split up into different modules? And so on. The principle of DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) has become an unwritten rule for developers.
Guerrilla Innovation
In a culture like Google’s, having paid time to innovate is celebrated. But most of us don’t work at Google; most of us work at places that are less than thrilled when someone has a bright new idea that will be amazing. Article Continues Below After all, who has time to try new things when the things we’re doing now aren’t broken? No one wants to be forced to use another app, to have yet another thing they are expected to log into, only to see it die out in six months.
Project Management for Humans
I loved the game Tetris as a kid. I played the Game Boy version for hours. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the concept of little shapes coming together in a logical way to clear a goal. The pieces complement one another, yet they all naturally work in different ways. The game has stuck with me since I was a kid (and, no, I’m not a gamer). I now have it on my phone and iPad and find myself playing it when I’m on a flight or bored, waiting for something to happen (which is never these days).
The Right Way to Select Technology, An Excerpt
A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Tony Byrne and Jarrod Gingras’s new book, The Right Way to Select Technology, available now from Rosenfeld Media. After establishing a solid business case, enterprises will typically turn to assembling the oft-dreaded “requirements document”—or more accurately, a set of documents, spreadsheets, and diagrams that compose a multiheaded requirements package.
Web Typography: Numerals
When it comes to numbers we have just ten digits. Throw in a comma and a period and we’ve got grand total of twelve characters. You might not think that would present much of a challenge to a typographer, but to a professional typesetter (that’s you if you’re a designer) numerals require far more nuance and variation than you might think at first glance.
Designing for Interaction Modes
We humans have developed ways of coping with digital interfaces. We have tactics. We accept shortcomings. We make do. Article Continues Below But why is it still so hard (on most of the internet) to avoid uphill struggles? Often, for example, a quality reading experience is only fully available via a hack, using Safari’s reader view or a browser plug-in. I use Instapaper to send articles to my Kindle—a device that’s devoted to reading mode—because reading is not just about getting the job done.
The FAQ as Advice Column
Dear A List Apart, Article Continues Below I have a problem that may be harming my content strategy career. In my current position, no one likes FAQs … except for me. The question-and-answer format is satisfying and efficient. Whenever I mention adding an FAQ section to a website, though, I receive numerous suggestions that I should wean myself off FAQs one question at a time or go cold turkey. Perhaps that is overdoing it, but sometimes I feel like defending FAQs by pen, sword, or Dothraki horde.
Writing for Designers
A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from the Introduction of Scott Kubie’s Writing for Designers, from A Book Apart. Shit. The writing. We forgot about the writing. The thing, the design thing…it needs words! Oh man, so many words. I thought somebody…wasn’t the client going to…shit. We’ve got to get the writing done. We’ve got to get the writing done! How are we going to get the writing done?! Article Continues Below Don’t worry, friend. I’m here. We’ll get the writing done.
var to JIT
In our previous article we described how the browser uses CSS to render beautiful pixels to the user’s screen. Although modern CSS can (and should!) be used to create highly interactive user experiences, for the last mile of interactivity, we need to dynamically update the HTML document. For that, we’re going to need JavaScript.
Tags to DOM
In our previous segment, “Server to Client,” we saw how a URL is requested from a server and learned all about the many conditions and caches that help optimize delivery of the associated resource. Once the browser engine finally gets the resource, it needs to start turning it into a rendered web page. In this segment, we focus primarily on HTML resources, and how the tags of HTML are transformed into the building blocks for what will eventually be presented on screen.
Braces to Pixels
Doesn’t CSS seem like magic? Well, in this third installment of “URL to Interactive” we’ll look at the journey that your browser goes through to take your CSS from braces to pixels. As a bonus, we’ll also quickly touch on how end-user interaction affects this process. We have a lot of ground to cover, so grab a cup of <insert your favorite drink’s name here>, and let’s get going.
Paint the Picture, Not the Frame: How Browsers Provide Everything Users Need
Kip Williams, professor of psychology sciences at Purdue University, conducted called “cyberball.” In his experiment, a test subject and two other participants played a computer game of catch. At a predetermined time, the test subject was excluded from the game, forcing them to only observe as the clock ran down. Article Continues Below The experience showed increases in self-reported levels of anger and sadness, as well as lowering levels of the four needs.
Progressive Web Apps: The Case for PWAs
A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Jason Grigsby’s Progressive Web Apps, from A Book Apart. Now that you know what a progressive web app is, you’re probably wondering if your organization would benefit from one. To determine if it makes sense for your organization, ask yourself two questions: Article Continues Below Does your organization have a website? If so, you would probably benefit from a progressive web app.
Conversations with Robots: Voice, Smart Agents & the Case for Structured Content
In late 2016, Gartner predicted that 30 percent of web browsing sessions would be done without a screen by 2020. Earlier the same year, Comscore had predicted that half of all searches would be voice searches by 2020.
Getting Clients
A note from the editors: We are pleased to present an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Design Is a Job by Mike Monteiro (A Book Apart, 2012). The biggest lie in this book would be if I told you I don’t worry about where the next client is coming from. I could tell you that once you build up enough of a portfolio, or garner enough experience, or achieve a certain level of notoriety in the industry, this won’t be a concern anymore.
Taming Data with JavaScript
I love data. I also love JavaScript. Yet, data and client-side JavaScript are often considered mutually exclusive. The industry typically sees data processing and aggregation as a back-end function, while JavaScript is just for displaying the pre-aggregated data. Bandwidth and processing time are seen as huge bottlenecks for dealing with data on the client side. And, for the most part, I agree. But there are situations where processing data in the browser makes perfect sense.
The Art of the Commit
A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 5 of David Demaree’s new book, Git for Humans, available now from A Book Apart. Git and tools like GitHub offer many ways to view what has changed in a commit. But a well-crafted commit message can save you from having to use those tools by neatly (and succinctly) summarizing what has changed.
Accessibility for Vestibular Disorders: How My Temporary Disability Changed My Perspective
Accessibility can be tricky. There are plenty of conditions to take into consideration, and many technical limitations and weird exceptions that make it quite hard to master for most designers and developers. Article Continues Below Become a patron I never considered myself an accessibility expert, but I took great pride in making my projects Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) compliant…ish.
The only reason your CSS fails – LogRocket
We are learning CSS the wrong way. CSS looks deceptively simple. We just declare how something should look in a couple of rules, and the browser works its magic. This results in many courses and learning resources teaching CSS in a practical, easy to follow, quick results approach based pretty much in memorizing rules like a robot.
You're using <em> wrong
And I am too. And so is everybody else. It’s been a bumpy road that somehow got us misusing one of the most important text-level semantic tags. In the dark ages of HTML, was barely used at all, despite being part of the specs since really early on (HTML 2.0 standard, 1995). But at that point in time and for some years to come, (almost) no one was thinking of semantics or even separation of concerns. Italics were simply marked up with tags, and we wouldn’t give it a second thought.
CSS Automatic WCAG contrast font-color depending on element background
You can apply CSS to your Pen from any stylesheet on the web. Just put a URL to it here and we'll apply it, in the order you have them, before the CSS in the Pen itself. If the stylesheet you link to has the file extension of a preprocessor, we'll attempt to process it before applying. You can also link to another Pen here, and we'll pull the CSS from that Pen and include it.
Switch font color for different backgrounds with CSS
Ever get one of those, "I can do that with CSS!" moments while watching someone flex their JavaScript muscles? That’s exactly the feeling I got while watching Dag-Inge Aas & Ida Aalen talk at CSSconf EU 2018. They are based in Norway, where WCAG accessibility is not a just good practice, but actually required by law (go, Norway!).
CSS grid alternative for the most annoying Flexbox issue
You can apply CSS to your Pen from any stylesheet on the web. Just put a URL to it here and we'll apply it, in the order you have them, before the CSS in the Pen itself. If the stylesheet you link to has the file extension of a preprocessor, we'll attempt to process it before applying. You can also link to another Pen here, and we'll pull the CSS from that Pen and include it.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Facundo
Contact Facundo, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack