Posts from June 2011

Now available: the results from the A List Apart Survey for People Who Make Web Sites, 2010.  This is the fourth industry snapshot we’ve compiled, and the story that’s emerged over that time is proving to be pretty consistent.  You can get a high-level view from the Introduction, and then dive deeper into the results in the following chapters.  And, as is traditional, the Addendum contains links to the full (anonymized) data set in three formats for your own analytical investigations.  We’d love to see what you come up with!

Something that surprised me quite a bit was that in 2010 we got about half the number of respondents we’ve gotten in past years — not quite seventeen thousand participated in 2010 instead of just over thirty thousand as we saw in previous years.  I’m not quite sure what to make of that.  Is the industry shrinking?  Did we not get the word out as effectively?  Was it a bad time of year to run a survey?  Are people getting tired of taking the survey?  There’s no real way to know.

At least there weren’t any wild swings in the results, which might have indicated we’d lost some subgroups in disproportionate numbers.  Whatever caused the drop in participation, it appears to have done so in an evenly-distributed fashion.

Regardless, I’d like to see higher participation next year, so if anyone has good suggestions regarding how to make that happen, please do let me know in the comments.

We plan to run the 2011 survey in the next couple of months (and I’ll post a bit more about that soon) but for now, I hope you find the 2010 results an interesting and useful look at who we are.

• Results of The Web Design Survey, 2010 was published on Monday, June 27th, 2011.
• It was assigned to the Projects and Web categories.
• There have been eleven replies.

Can CSS create art?  That’s a question I set out to explore recently, and I like to think that the answer is yes.  You can judge for yourself: Spinning the Web, a gallery on Flickr.

To be clear, when I say “Can CSS create art?” I don’t mean that in the sense of wondering if art, or artful designs, can be accomplished with CSS.  I think we all know the answer there, and have known at least since the Zen Garden got rolling.  What I’m doing here is using some basic CSS to generate art, using web sites as the medium.  For the series I linked, I spun all of the elements on a page using transform: rotate() to see what resulted.  Any time I saw something I liked, I took a screenshot.  After I was done, I winnowed the shots down to the best ones.

As some of you old-schoolers will probably have recognized, I’m absolutely following in the footsteps of Joshua Davis here, and in fact my working title for this effort was “Once Upon a Browser”.  I saw Josh speak years ago, and clearly remember his description of how he generated a lot of his art.  My process is almost identical, albeit with a bit less automation and computational complexity.

Because this is me, I built a little commentary joke into the first images in the series.  It’s not terribly subtle, but with luck one or two of you will get the same chuckle I did.

I’m already thinking about variants on this theme, so there may be more series to come.  In the meantime, as I surf around I’ll stop every now and again to spin what I see.  I’ll definitely mention any new additions via Twitter, and new series both there and here.  And of course if you follow me on Flickr, you’ll see new pieces as they go up.

I hope you enjoy them half as much as I enjoyed creating them.  And if anyone wants to use the originals as desktop wallpapers, as Tim proposed, feel free!

• Spinning the Web was published on Friday, June 3rd, 2011.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Projects, and Web categories.
• There have been fourteen replies.