The power of a good visual isn’t just a scientifically well-documented phenomenon; it’s the whole reason our industry exists. Indeed, our existence as a species is largely defined by our sense of sight. What we see, and how we interpret the things that we see, is a major factor in determining our actions and thus, the course of our lives.

You can hear, read, and think about anything at all, any concept, any object, or any person; but you’ll have a harder time understanding it until you’ve seen it.

Have you ever met someone who has never seen snow for themselves? Maybe you are one of those people. The few I’ve met simply can’t comprehend what it is. Oh, they know it’s moisture in the air that got nice and cold, but they don’t get it. I’ve met a few who told me about their first encounters with snow; and I witnessed the sheer wonder, the amazement on their faces at this white stuff that just fell out of the sky. I’ve heard of one or two people in far off countries who had snow described to them, and didn’t believe it. They thought these foreigners were just making it up.

Visual media, such as photography and video, are the closest that we can come to experiencing life elsewhere without going there ourselves. When you add a photo to a website, you’re not just adding pretty pixels. You’re offering your users a miniature experience to go along with whatever you’re selling.

Need I emphasize just how important it is that you pick the right experience?

Photography as design

When I design a content-driven website that needs imagery, I turn to photography over illustration every time. Now, this is mostly because I can’t draw more than a stick figure to save my life —if you’re an illustrator, or have one on your team, then more power to you! I’m jealous.

The right photo can take a good design, and make it great. The right photo can be the solution to the itching in the back of your brain that says, Something’s just missing. But it absolutely has to be the right photo.

Contrast

Because usability comes first, make sure that the photo you integrate into your design has the right kind of contrast. Chances are, you’ll be putting things like text on top of it, and there is nothing more irritating than text you can barely read. I’m looking at you, thin-white-fonts-on-light-backgrounds.

To find the right kind of contrast, start with the obvious: if the photo is light, use dark text or elements, and vice versa. If you want to use light text with a light background, put something dark in between the text and the photo. A subtle drop shadow is usually acceptable.

Quality

Let’s say that you’re making a website for a small restaurant. What kind of photos do you want in the design? Do want a photo taken by somebody who stood across the busy street, and snapped photos with a point-and-shoot camera in their shaky hands? Do you like answering rhetorical questions?

If your client hasn’t had photos of their business and/or products taken by a professional, try to convince them to get that done. Failing that, tell them all about how awesome minimalist design is. Not having photos as a part of your design is better than trying to work with bad photos.

Relevance

A picture might be worth a thousand words, but some words are more relevant than others. This should go without saying, but you need to use photos that have something to do with whatever you’re selling. In the case of the aforementioned restaurant, you’ll want to use photos of the actual business, or their actual food. With this kind of business, stock photos will not do you any good.

When you’re selling something a little bit less tangible, like insurance for example, you can get away with using photos that are more symbolically linked to the product or service in question. Make sure, though, that the symbolism is strong, and easily recognized by your website’s users. Symbols vary from country to country, and culture to culture.

Big images sell

This seems almost a little obvious if you think about it. Bigger images will have a bigger visual impact. I mean, why not?

Well, the lovely people at Econsultancy decided that just thinking about it wasn’t enough. They needed data. They published their findings in three case studies, which you can read here.

Photography as content

Photos aren’t just great for completing a design, of course, they also make great content, especially when they are paired with non-visual content such as text or audio. This can serve one of several purposes:

Drawing attention

An eye-catching image can be used to represent an article or page, drawing the user’s attention to the content in question. When confronted with large blocks of text, especially online, the human brain tends to start skimming over it, instead of reading it in detail.

Photos can break up the visual monotony, and help users to identify an article, link, story, or what-have-you that they might be interested in. If you remember anything from this article, remember this: imagery makes people stop and pay attention.

Context

Photos can provide the user with visual context for a text-heavy page, article, or audio file. Visual context may consist of things like a picture of the author, a picture of a place mentioned in the text, and so on.

Be careful when choosing a photo to provide context. The photo you choose will likely set the reader’s entire mood, so make sure that the mood of the photo fits the mood of the article.

Other considerations

Permission

If a photo’s not yours, or doesn’t belong to the client, then make sure that you have permission to use it. Get that permission in writing if you can, and always, always credit (and link back to) the photographer unless they have specified otherwise.

It doesn’t take that much work to plan ahead, and ask for their permission in advance. Still, there are ways to avoid that. This brings us to stock photo sites.

Stock Photos: free or paid?

The advantage of stock photo sites is that you never have to wonder where you stand when it comes to permission. Better still, there are a bunch of sites where you can get great stock for free. But, you may also want to look into paying for your stock photos, especially when you’re picking photos to be used as part of a site’s design.

Free Stock Photos – Advantages:

• Free. Seriously, it’s hard to beat that.
• There’s a large selection of good ones out there.

Free Stock Photos – Disadvantages:

• There are also a lot of bad ones. You may have to sort through a lot of trash to get the photos you need.
• You may never find what you need. Sometimes you need something very specific that isn’t there.
• Permissions vary. Some photos will require an attribution link, which may be less than ideal in a design.

Despite the disadvantages, free stock photos are often the way to go. I’ve found the best ones at stock.xchng, StockVault, and with some considerable searching, DeviantArt. (Happy hunting!)

Paid Stock Photos – Advantages:

• If you buy a photo, then you have all the permission you need, usually.
• More varied, more (and sometimes weirdly) specific photos.

Paid Stock Photos – Disadvantages:

• Well… the money. I mean, stock photos are getting pretty cheap these days, but that just makes them like songs on iTunes. When they only cost a dollar, it’s so easy to just buy “one more”.

There are myriad paid stock sites, so it really depends on which one has the photo you want. You could always start with some of the more popular sites: Shutterstock, iStockphoto and Dreamstime.

Photos of people

Lastly, we must consider photos of people. Never, ever use stock photos of people in your design (at least, not if they look like stock photos). They may as well be mannequins for all the feelings of authenticity that they invoke.

Use photos of real people, the people behind a product or service. Show them at work, preferably. If the products being sold are meant to to be worn, pictures of models wearing said items are also acceptable.

But photos of random people blinding the user with their unnaturally white teeth are pointless unless you’re advertising a dentist. Even then, you could probably be more original.

In conclusion

Be careful when choosing the photos you use in your design and content. Make sure to budget in enough time to find the right photos, because the process can take a while. Don’t settle for anything less than a great photo.

What tips would you add for using photos in design? Do you use stock photos or take your own? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, photography image via Shutterstock.

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Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.  

~JFK

Like most, We initially expressed great disappointment after the ouster of Egypt’s first democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi on July 3, 2012.  We feared that Egypt, in the nascence of its democratic experience, had set a disastrous precedent for its political culture; however, We do believe that there was no way to avoid what transpired on that significant day.

As the Economist puts it, “Majoritarianism – the credo of an expanding group of elected but autocratic rulers around the world, which holds that electoral might always makes you right—is not true democracy, even if, on the face of it, the two things look alike.”

Yes – Morsi was democratically elected. To be specific, by 13 million votes. Democratic, right?

Well, it’s more complicated than that.  22 million people signed a petition started by the grassroots opposition movement Tamarod (“Rebellion” in Arabic) urging President Morsi to step down from the presidency – almost double the amount that voted him into office.

Which is truly the voice of the people? Being elected to office by a “majority” does not simultaneously create a just, democratic rule.

Perhaps no single event illustrates this best than in November of 2012, five months after Morsi was elected into office, when he gave himself sweeping new powers which placed him and his executive decrees/orders above judicial review and the constitutional court. As one Al Jazeera contributor put it, this was the only coup that happened in Egypt, and it was executed by Morsi.

There has never been a concrete definition for democracy.  Throughout history, the characteristics of practiced democracy have been as varied as the regions of the world they were practiced in.  However, the system of checks and balances has always gone hand in hand with democracy, from Ancient Greece to modern times.  Morsi’s decree made void any check or balance of power that may have previously existed. 

Democracy is also categorized by civil freedoms, namely, freedom of religion and freedom of the press.  More journalists were jailed under Morsi’s one year tenure than under the ousted autocrat Hosni Mubarak’s 30 year rule. Bassam Youssef, an Egyptian satirist who runs a show called al-Bernameg, which is often likened to Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show,” was arrested for allegedly insulting the president and Islam. 

Can you imagine if Jon Stewart were jailed for criticizing President Obama?

(Unfortunately, restrictions on press seems to be a broader trend in the political culture of Egypt.  Even the military, viewed widely as a secular institution,  closed down various media and news outlets within Egypt promptly after Morsi’s ouster). 

Our founding fathers were scared of what minorities would be subject to at the whim of the majority. Protection of minorities is so embedded in the democratic process that it is often overlooked, but it cannot be in the case of Egypt.

Morsi’s hastily approved constitution (which many judges and elected officials boycotted to express their disapproval) only protects those belonging to “heavenly religions” to practice their religion publicly.  There is no constitutional protection for Egypt’s Bahai minority.  Even with the constitutional guarantee for Muslims and Christians, Egypt’s Coptic Christian community (approximately 10% of the population) and Shia minority face constant physical and mental intimidation and discrimination. 

In recent weeks, the more extreme supporters of Morsi, self-dubbed as “supporters of legitimacy,” have called for the destruction and defacement of Coptic owned stores, homes, and churches.  Many pro-Morsi supporters have heeded the call, with acts ranging from spray painting “Islamic” on Coptic properties, to dragging nuns through the streets, to burning churches.   Copts, seen by many pro-Morsi supporters as one of the main coup-encouraging groups, have faced unprecedented violence since Morsi’s removal.   

Upon entering office, Morsi banned the National Democratic Party – Hosni Mubarak’s party – from political practice. In a democracy, you cannot exclude your opponents from the political process.  Even now as military leaders and the interim government arrest senior Muslim Brotherhood members and debate the dissolution of the Muslim Brotherhood and their political arm, The Freedom and Justice Party, the current violence is indicative of the following chaos that would undoubtedly overcome Egypt.  Egypt’s path forward must be all inclusive – religious minorities, secularists, military leaders, ultra-conservative parties (such as Al-Nour), and the Muslim Brotherhood.  A difficult feat indeed, but a necessary feat nonetheless.  As history shows, when groups are excluded from the political process, there are violent and chaotic ramifications. 

Living conditions – call it “the icing on the cake.”  On top of political polarization, religious tension, and a yearning for civil freedoms, power outages are chronic, shortages of fuel are commonplace, and higher food prices have driven up Egypt’s inflation rate to a two year high. Robberies, kidnappings, and murders all dramatically increased during Morsi’s one year tenure, yet nothing was done to build on the capacity of the police force as an institution. As it stands now, they are inadequate at best. 

These concerns are shared amongst all Egyptians, regardless of political affiliation, and regardless of religion.  The current war-like state on the streets of Egypt’s capitol will only worsen the pitiful living conditions in the land of the pyramids. 

As the international community goes through the cliché process of holding press conferences “strongly condemning the violence in Egypt” and calling on “all parties in Egypt to come to the negotiating table for a peaceful dialogue,” it would do them well to bear in mind how lack of international involvement and support has played out in Syria. 

There is an important distinction to note between politics stateside and politics abroad, a distinction that many of us take for granted. 

Regardless of who is president of the US, though some may be loath to admit, our lives do not change that much, and that is the simple truth.  Sure, you may pay a little more taxes or save more money, but your general welfare isn’t threatened.

This is not the case for Egypt and much of the rest of the world.  When elected officials change, their lives may change, for better or worse.

As TiVo tries for a second act — streaming everything you subscribe to — content providers are calling the shots.

TiVo was an early disruptor of conventional television-watching.  In 1999 it launched a black box that stored shows on hard-disk – the digital video recorder or DVR – making it famously easy (compared to VCRs) for people to record lots of shows and skip through ads when watching them.  But as other set-top boxes got better, and cloud-based streaming services arose, TiVo customers plunged from a 2007 high of 4.4 million customers, to less than half that today.

The two leading review websites BestHosting365.com and JoomlaHosting.me are ready to carry out wide and deep cooperation with each other to bring people a better experience of hosting selection.

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Having people you can learn from is an essential part of being a successful developer. No amount of reading will ever fully prepare you for the ever-changing web landscape, so being able to look to seasoned and experienced mentors is vital. Nicholas Zakas is one of those people that you can look to.

A leader in the JavaScript world and incredibly savvy in scalability and performance, Nicholas is one of those that helps define best practices through his vast experiences at companies like Yahoo! and Box. One of his most amazing attributes are his approachability and his desire to genuinely help push the web forward.

Let's get into our Q&A so you can learn a little more about this great developer.

Certainly. I'm a software engineer who focuses on front-end web development. I love the web and knew very early on that I wanted to make that my career. That love has led me in many directions, including writing and speaking. At the moment I'm working at Box, taking on the challenge of helping the company scale.

Yahoo! was the most impactful professional experience of my life. Prior to that, I was a big fish in a small pond, and day one I realized I was now in an ocean. Solving problems normally and solving problems at scale require two different ways of thinking. At scale, there's never just "one more" thing. I remember one conversation in particular where someone wanted to make an extra Ajax request and I said no. His response was, "what's the big deal, it's just one more request?" I had to explain that one more request per user when there are millions of users means a dramatic increase in server load that we need to capacity plan for. I chuckled at that, because I was on the other side of that conversation when I first arrived at Yahoo!.

Everything I do has been affected by my experience at Yahoo!. I'm obsessed with scalability and the problems associated with it, and most of my work since then, both at Box and while consulting, has been in helping companies scale their web applications. My experience at Yahoo! made it so that I understand these issues from many angles, not just technical but also personnel-wise and organization-wise.

I think front-end developers are still lagging in having a solid amount of computer science knowledge. It's true that having a CS degree alone does not guarantee success as a front-end developer, but it certainly helps. I know several excellent FEs that are now going back and either taking computer science courses formally or trying to pick up more CS knowledge through reading and other means.

Web applications are so much more complicated than they were before, and understanding design patterns, abstraction, and architectural principles is becoming more and more important. Those who come into the industry without a good CS background will either be limited in their professional growth or will start picking up these CS principles some other way. I firmly believe that the best and the brightest are the ones who can bring CS principles back into the front-end. Whether that's through formal training or not, that knowledge becomes important to furthering your career.

The biggest issue I see is lack of code organization. Part of the problem is that web technologies like CSS and JavaScript are mostly without built-in form. Whereas Java has packages and C++ has includes, web technologies don't give you a formal way of organizing your code. That leads to poor code organization and then poor architecture, because there are also not any built-in patterns.

Learning about design patterns, code organization, and architectural principles would benefit front-end engineers tremendously. Not just for their FE code, but also for the ability to participate meaningfully in conversations about other parts of their technology stack.

Yes, there's definitely been an influx of practitioners getting involved in the standards committee. There's Rick Waldron and Yehuda Katz from the jQuery Foundation and Eric Ferraiuolo from the YUI team on TC39, people with real-world experience creating web applications and JavaScript libraries. There are also a lot of vocal people who participate on the es-discuss list regularly and who represent the practitioner view. Even I chime in from time to time when I feel like reality isn't quite intersecting with plans.

This communication between practitioners and those deciding the future direction of the technologies we use is imperative. Via es-discuss, TC39 members are generally responsive. I look at this relationship as being similar to the one between citizens and elected officials. If the citizens aren't telling the officials what's important to them, it's hard for the officials to know. Random people complaining about something here or there doesn't make someone think of it as important – it's when a critical mass all reach out and say, "yes, this is important" that change happens.

I feel like it's a developer expertise issue. What I see most frequently is people without much web development experience deciding that it's easy, so they're just going to hack something together. After all, JavaScript looks like many of the other C-based languages, and so they start writing it as if it were C or C++ or Java – then they get frustrated because the functionality they're used to doesn't exist…then they turn to things like CoffeeScript or Dart because it gives them back what they perceive to have lost.

If you flip the script a bit, if people actually took a little bit of time to learn JavaScript before diving in, I'd hope there would be a greater appreciation for what a unique and dynamic language it is. Unfortunately, the "agile" and "rapid" development processes tend to encourage people not to stop and learn about what they're trying to do, but just get stuff done so as to keep up their velocity and deliver. When that happens, finding something that looks familiar makes far more sense than using something completely new.

To me, this is too specific a specialization. As a front-end engineer, your job is to cross-cut concerns, including performance, maintainability, internationalization, accessibility, and more. To put it another way: if front-end engineers are not thinking about these things, then I'm not sure what they're thinking about. In my experience, the more you split off specializations, the harder it is to convince everyone that it's their responsibility as well. "Oh, the performance team will take care of that." "That? The accessibility team will worry about it." This isn't to say that you don't have people who happen to be more in tune with certain concerns, but I believe that you want everyone on the team to be thinking about all of these issues all the time.

I do a lot of reading. My Twitter feed is made up primarily of human news aggregators that let me stay up-to-date with what's going on. I also do a lot of writing, which I find leads me to research areas I might not normally look at in an effort to explain things better. Lastly, I'm constantly experimenting, both on my own and at work, and looking at the real-world problems people are having to see if I can come up solutions.

1. The changing API landscape – make sure you know what's possible
2. How to effectively use the ever-evolving development tools
3. Standards efforts – understanding what's coming, what's not, and why
4. Browser feedback channels – you should be using them
5. Code organization and design patterns

Closing

Thank you Nicholas for taking the time to offer up this insight.

I urge our readers to follow Nicholas on Twitter and also check out his blog, where he posts some of the most frequently referenced articles in web development.

In this follow up to the Create an HTML5 Desktop Application in the Maqetta Editor article, Rob Gravelle explains how to work with Dojo DateTextBox control properties to change the date display format as well as perform various validation checks. You'll also get better acquainted with the Palette and Property tabs of the Maqetta editor.