Many dismiss copywriting as something that ad agency people do. Truthfully, all of us need to pay close attention to copywriting if we want to achieve our business objectives.

The goal of a “regular” text is to inform or entertain. The goal of Web copy (and ideally your website in general) is to get people to do something—to sign up, make a purchase, or something similar. Hiring a professional copywriter can be very expensive, which is one of the reasons why this is a valuable skill to have yourself.

“I don’t need to learn copywriting, I write based on how it sounds to me.”

Think you don’t need to learn copywriting?

David Ogilvy, the father of modern advertising, addressed this in his book Ogilvy on Advertising. One of his copywriters told him that he had not read any books about advertising; he preferred to rely on his own intuition.

Ogilvy asked him: “Suppose your gallbladder has to be removed this evening. Will you choose a surgeon who has read some books on anatomy and knows where the gallbladder, is or someone who relies on his own intuition?”

What distinguishes top experts from mediocre players is that the best know more. You can write better copy if you know more about it.

The Process Of Writing Great Copy

Everything is easier with the right process. If your approach to copywriting is “I’ll just try to be convincing”, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

You don’t even need to be a “natural writer” to come up with excellent copy, you just need the right process and some key principles about writing copy that sells.

The best processes are simple, as those are the ones you actually use.

Here are the six steps of effective copywriting process:

1. Research: customer, product and competition.
2. Outline and guideposts.
3. Draft copy.
4. Conversion boost.
5. Revise, rearrange.
6. Test.

And now let’s get to the details:

1. Research

This is often the most time-intensive part of your copywriting.

“You don’t stand a tinker’s chance of producing successful advertising unless you start doing your homework. I have always found this extremely tedious, but there is no way around it.”
— David Ogilvy

David Ogilvy had the task to do copywriting for a Rolls Royce ad. He spent three weeks reading about it before he came up with the headline and the rest of the copy. While he was talking about advertising, it equally applies to your website copy—the goal is to get people to do something.

Ogilvy’s famous Rolls Royce ad.

You need to figure out why people buy the product, how they buy it, what they use it for, and what really matters to them. If you don’t have this figured out, you really cannot write a copy that works. When it’s your own business that you’re writing copy for, things go much faster, of course, as you know the product and the competition.

Gauge the Competition

You need to be aware of your direct competition, how they present their product, and what claims they seem to be making. If you are not selling something unique, you are selling as much for your competition as you are selling for yourself. Being “like” others or choosing to be “one of the leading providers of” is a losing strategy.

Neuromarketing research tells us that differentiating our claims is the key to talking to the old brain, the decision making part of our brain. Our whole business identity should be different from the competition, and the claims we’re making about our product should stand out.

Get Out of the Office

The answers are not in your office and you won’t have eureka-moments at brainstorming meetings (working solo is far more effective anyway). You have to interview people. Don’t waste time interviewing random people, you need to talk to your ideal customers and find out what’s on their minds.

Find out what they think about your kind of product, what language they use when they talk about it, what attributes are important to them, and what promises would most likely convince them to buy it. Pick the last 10 to 20 customers (who still remember their purchasing experiences), and ask them these questions (recording the interviews is a good idea, but ask for permission):

• Who are you? What do you do? (customer profile)
• What does our product help you do? (helps you understand how they use it, tells you words they use to describe our product)
• Which parameters did you compare on different options? (which features matter)
• What were the most important ones? (key pains to solve)
• Which alternatives did you consider? (competitors we have to look at)
• What made you choose our product? (our key advantage)
• What were the biggest hesitations and doubts before the purchase? (things we have to address in the copy)
• Were there questions you needed answers to, but couldn’t find any? (necessary information to provide)
• What information would have helped you make the decision faster? (same as above)
• In which words would you recommend it to somebody you know? (words they use to describe our product)

Take note of the exact wording they use. Your copy needs to match the conversation in your customer’s mind. If you talk about “scribing devices” and he needs a pen, there’s a mismatch.

My point is that when customers see the product described in words they have in their mind already, then you’ve got their attention.

2. Outline And Guideposts

Next step: write the outline. Guideposts are the markers that help you write the content.

Writing an outline usually only takes a few minutes and provides a road map for the rest of the project. It allows you to complete the work faster and ensures that you stick to the flow.

The outline structure will depend on the page you’re writing the copy for. The main pages you need a well thought-out copy in place are your home page and product pages.

Here are outline templates I personally use, and you can copy them. I’ve tweaked and tested them over the years, and this model works the best for me.

Home Page Copy

Your home page copy structure depends a lot on your business. A nail salon would have a different approach from an e-commerce store; a website selling mobile app design courses is different from a hosting company. Hence, it’s basically impossible for me to give you an outline template for your home page.

What IS universal is the value proposition. Every home page needs one (unless you’re a very well-known brand)

A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered. It’s the primary reason a prospect should buy from you. The value proposition is usually a block of text with a visual.

There is no one right way to go about it, but I suggest you start with the following formula:

• Headline:
  What is the end-benefit you’re offering, in one short sentence. Can mention the product and/or the customer. Attention grabber.
• Sub-headline or a two-to-three sentence paragraph:
  A specific explanation of what you do/offer, for whom, and why is it useful.
• Bullet points:
  List the key benefits or features.

Here’s a list of useful value proposition examples you can check out.

Product Page Copy Outline

Product page is where you sell the value of your product and where the user takes action (adds to cart, sign up, makes a purchase, etc.).

1. Name of the product.
2. Value proposition: what’s the end-benefit of this product and who is it for?
3. Specific and clear overview of what the product does and why is that good (features and benefits).
4. What’s the pain that it solves? Description of the problem.
5. List of everything in the product (e.g. curriculum of the course, list of every item in the package, etc.).
6. Technical information: parameters, what do you get and how does it work?
7. Objection handling. Make a list of all possible FUDs (fears, uncertainties, doubts) and address them.
8. Bonuses (what you get on top of the offer).
9. Money-back guarantee (+ return policy).
10. Price.
11. Call to action.
12. Expectation setting: what happens after you buy?

What you now have in place is like a skeleton. Next step would be to start writing the draft version of the copy by filling in the blanks.

3. Draft Copy

Start filling in the blanks in the template above, and keep these points in mind for the style of your writing.

Avoid Jargon and Blandvertising

The goal of the copy is to connect with the reader, and guide them towards an action.

“Human relationships are about communicating. Business jargon should be banished in favor of simple English. Simplicity is a sign of truth and a criterion of beauty. Complexity can be a way of hiding the truth.”
— Helena Rubinstein

Using complicated, fancy words does not make you seem any smarter or your solution any better—it just turns everybody off. Who wants to read something that doesn’t feel like it’s written for them? Talk to people like a real human. If you wouldn’t use a phrase on your website in a conversation with a customer, then don’t use it.

In addition to fancy words, avoid meaningless phrases. What do “on-demand marketing software”, “integrated solutions” or “flexible platform” really mean anyway?

Or useless phrases like “changing the way X is done”, “paradigm shifting …” or “exceeding customer expectations”—stop the nonsense. These bland phrases have long lost any meaning, and you will just waste precious attention time. You can see a list of the top 100 most overused buzzwords and marketing speak in press releases here.

Another thing to avoid—superlatives and hype. Saying things like “the best”, “world leader”, “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” will just ruin your integrity. People don’t believe such claims anyway (even if they’re true).

What to do instead? Be specific.

Be Specific

Specificity converts.

“Clearer and more specific subject lines convert better.”
— Bob Kemper, Senior Director of Sciences, MECLABS.

While in that specific quote Bob was focused on subject lines, this principle applies equally well to all copywriting. Specific is believable, specific is attractive, specific is convincing. Don’t be vague, be specific.

“We have the best coffee in the world” vs “Our estate earned the ‘world’s best coffee’ title at the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s Roasters Guild for the third year in a row.” Which claim is more believable?

You can use a superlative if you back it up.

Here’s an example. Can you understand what they offer?

Specific headline. Specific call to action with a specific explanation of what they get when they sign up. Specific benefits listed. Specific image to show the product in action.

It Has to Be About Them

Remember the old brain I mentioned before?

Our brains have three layers, and the oldest part—the old brain—is the decision-making part.

The “Old Brain” is the part that humans and their predecessors have had the longest—like 450 million years or so. So the part of the brain that controls decisions is fairly primitive and mostly concerned with survival.

If your copy is about you (your product, your company) and not the prospect (his problems, his life), you will fail. Make it about them. Too many companies start by stating “our company was founded…”, “we offer …” or something especially useless like “welcome to your website”.

Instead of saying “we specialize in dog training”, say “train your dog in two weeks”—move the focus from you to the benefit they will receive. People care about themselves—not you—and whether your website can be helpful in some way.

How Much Information Should I Provide?

Tests have shown that 79% of people don’t read, they just skim. However, 16% read everything.

Those 16% are your main target group, the most interested people. If people are not interested in what you are selling, it doesn’t matter how long or short your sales copy is. If they are interested, you should give them as much information as possible.

Complete information is the best sales copy. A study by IDC showed that 50% of the uncompleted purchases were due to lack of information. They can always skip parts and click the “buy” button once they have the information they need. But if they read through the whole thing and they’re still not convinced, then you have a problem.

This is why you should always strive to say everything that can possibly be said about your product. You cannot be there in person to explain and answer the questions, so your copy needs to do it for you.

All at Once or Make Them Click?

Long form copy works just great, but it’s not necessary to provide all the information on a single page. It’s okay to move supplemental information onto a different page (layer, popup, etc.) and just link to it.

For instance, Amazon often hides full technical information of products behind a link—since it’s only interesting to the hardcore tech savvy customers (and most customers are not).

Full technical details available after clicking a link.

The important thing is that all the information needed to make the decision is on a single page. Don’t make people work click to read stuff that you want them to read anyway (like features, benefits, testimonials, pricing, etc.).

When, Where and If at All Should I Show the Price?

Some people think that the price drives readers away, and they should hide it somehow—or make it hard to get to. While there is truth in that sometimes, it’s mostly false.

Consider this:

1. People always want to know how much things cost.
2. If you don’t publish the price, have a “get a quote” form instead. But if your competition does, they may get the client.

You should always make the price easy to find, but for more complex / expensive products communicate the value before the price.

Let’s say you’re selling a copper vase. Price: $990.

Seems expensive. But what if you knew that it was designed by Andy Warhol and previously used by Kurt Cobain? If you know who these people are and respect them, this changes everything, and it might seem like a steal instead.

So communicate value before price.

If your price is cheap, you want people to know it. If it’s expensive, the price qualifies the right people who are convinced to buy your copy. Giving price details also convinces your reader of the image and brand value of your product.

4. Conversion Boost

Once you have the content in place, it’s time to give it a conversion boost. The goal of the website copy is to convert the reader into a buyer (or subscriber, lead, etc.). There are certain things we can do to improve the conversion rate (the percentage of readers that take action) of the copy.

We’ll use three guides here to make the copy sell better:

• Conversion frameworks.
• Science of persuasion.
• Neuromarketing research.

Conversion boost. Image credit APM Alex.

Conversion Frameworks and Why They Matter

Conversion frameworks are a structured approach for increasing website conversion rates. The most prominent ones have been fine-tuned over the years and have been proven to boost sales.

While the conversion frameworks apply to a website as a whole, they can also be used as frameworks to improve sales copy.

There are many conversion frameworks around, let’s use one of them as an example:

C = 4m + 3v + 2(i-f) – 2a

This is not a lesson in physics, but a conversion formula developed by Marketing Experiments. Translation:

C = Probability of conversion
m = Motivation of user (when)
v = Clarity of the value proposition (why)
i = Incentive to take action
f = Friction elements of process
a = Anxiety about entering information

Summary: The probability of conversion depends on the match between the offer and visitor motivation + the clarity of the value proposition + (incentives to take action now—friction)—anxiety. The numbers next to each character signify the importance of them.

How to apply this to your copy:

• Is your value proposition easy to understand and perfectly clear? Would everyone understand what you offer and how it’s beneficial to them?
• Go through your copy and see if there’s any way to make your statements clearer.
• Communicate value: don’t just list features, turn them into benefits.
• Make a list of all possible questions, doubts and objections that prospects might have in the buying process. Address them.
• Make the buying or signup process as easy as possible, remove everything that is not absolutely necessary.
• Add microcopy: explain why you need certain data and what happens after they give it to you.
• Provide full information: what happens after they buy, what can they expect, when is the product shipped, what’s the delivery time.
• Add risk reversal: what kind of guarantees are in place? What happens if they don’t like it, or it’s not what they thought, etc?

The Science of Persuasion

Persuasion has been researched thoroughly. Mr. Cialdini is undoubtedly the biggest authority on the field. His books are bestsellers and have been on the “must-read” list for marketers and copywriters for years.

In his research, Cialdini came up with six scientific principles of persuasion that will help guide you to become more effective at getting people to do what you want. In case you’re not familiar with those principles, then here’s the summary:

Principle 1: Reciprocity
People feel obligated to give back to others who have given to them.
How to use it: teach your prospect something useful in your copy, give away free stuff, and better yet—add value to your prospects long before you even start to sell them something.

Principle 2: Liking
We prefer to say “yes” to those we know and like.
How to use it: talk/write like a human, connect with the reader, share details about yourself. Blog. Be friendly and cool (like Richard Branson, Oprah, Gary V).

Principle 3: Social Proof
People decide what’s appropriate for them to do in a situation by examining and following what others are doing.
How to use it: show how many others are already using your product. Show off your numbers. Use testimonials. Link to 3rd-party articles.

Principle 4: Authority
People rely on those with superior knowledge or perspective for guidance on how to respond AND what decisions to make.
How to use it: Demonstrate your expertise. Show off your resume and results. Get celebrity (in your niche) endorsements.

Principle 5: Consistency
Once we make a choice/take a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressure to behave consistently with that commitment.
How to use it: Start small and move up from there. Sell something small at first (a no-brainer deal), even if you make no money on it. They now see themselves as your customer, and will most likely return to make a larger purchase.

Principle 6: Scarcity
Opportunities appear more valuable when they are less available.
How to use it: Use time or quantity limited bonuses. Limit access to your product. Promote exclusivity.

What Neuromarketing Teaches Us

Research in neuromarketing (put together in this book) reveals interesting things about our brains.

Neuromarketing study in action. Image credit: SMI Eye Tracking.

We’re usually trying to talk to the “new brain”—the sophisticated one—but it’s the brute “old brain” that makes all the decisions, so we need to dumb it down. Here’s the formula for talking to the old brain:

Selling probability = Pain x Claim x Gain x (Old Brain)³

1. First you need to identify the prospect’s pain and make sure they acknowledge the pain before you start to sell them anything. Then, you’ve got to differentiate your claims from your competitors. The strongest claim is the one that eliminates the strongest pain.
2. Next, you have to show convincing proof to back the claims up. The “Old Brain” is resistant to new ideas and concepts, so your proof must be very convincing. Show tangible evidence, data, before & after comparisons, testimonials, and case studies.
3. In order to reach the old brain, you need to start with a “grabber”—something that really gets the attention (“if you’re selling fire extinguishers, start with fire”, like Ogilvy said). Second—the “Old brain” is visual, so use a big picture to illustrate and reinforce your message. Visuals get to the brain much faster than words. Best visuals show contrast—before/after, beginning/end, then/now.

How to apply it to your copy:

• Start with a grabber—something that evokes emotion.
• Address the pain from the get-go.
• Use a big picture next to your value proposition, one that the prospect can identify with.
• Are your claims different from the competition?
• Add proof to your claims in all possible formats.

5. Revise And Rearrange

Done with conversion boosting? Now enjoy a full night of sleep and come back to the copy in the morning.

A fresh look a day later will help you spot inconsistencies, missing information, and flaws in the general flow of the copy. Use this time to add more information, rearrange the order of different blocks and fix the typos (spelling mistakes can cost you customers).

Before you publish the sales copy, it always pays to get two or three other people to read it and give you feedback. You want feedback from your ideal customers—do they get any questions that were left unanswered? Is there any part that needs to be made clearer? And peers—other marketers or entrepreneurs. What could make the offer better and more credible?

Once the editing is complete, you can make it live on your website. Don’t guess whether the headline or value propositions are as good as they can be, immediately launch two versions of the copy and test them.

6. Test

There is no good way to predict how well the copy will do. Sometimes the conversion rates can skyrocket overnight. Sometimes the new copy turns out to be a downright dud.

You need to test your copy. Image credit Horia Varlan.

Maybe it’s because the offer is weak. Perhaps the headline is the bottleneck. It’s impossible to put the finger on the problem as all you have are hypothesis. The only way to know is to test.

Don’t trust a copywriter who says he always writes killer copy on his first try. Nobody does.

Most common problems:

• Your value proposition is poor.
• The offer doesn’t match the audience’s needs.
• The headline is weak.
• It’s not clear how the visitor benefits from this.

Start with A/B testing value propositions, and go from there.

Conclusion

Writing great copy is a skill you have to learn just like anything else. Use the outline and the tips to get started on the right track. Stephen King, the famous writer, said that if you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. I believe the same goes for writing great copy.

The best Web copy is not the one that uses sophisticated persuasion and mind manipulation techniques. The best copy provides full information about the product, its benefits, and makes it clear whether it’s the right one for the user.

(jvb) (il)

© Peep Laja for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

  

E-commerce runs on secrets. Those secrets let you update your blog, shop at Amazon and share code on GitHub. Computer security is all about keeping your secrets known only to you and the people you choose to share them with.

We’ve been sharing secrets for centuries, but the Internet runs on a special kind of secret sharing called public-key cryptography. Most secret messages depend on a shared secret—a key or password that everyone agrees on ahead of time. Public-key cryptography shares secret messages without a shared secret key and makes technologies like SSL possible.

Cryptography is a scary word: it conjures thoughts of complex equations and floating-point arithmetic. Cryptography does have a lot of math, but it’s more about keeping and sharing secrets.

A Simple Secret

Telling my best friends a secret is easy: I find a private place and whisper it in their ears. As long as no one is listening in, I’m totally secure. But the Internet is full of eavesdroppers, so we need codes.

We’ve all been inventing codes since we were children. I created this simple number code (actually a cipher) when I was 5:

a=1, b=2, c=3, d=4, e=5…

It fooled my friends, but not my parents. Simple substitution ciphers are based on a lack of knowledge. If you know how they work, then you can decode every message. The experts call this “security through obscurity.” Letter and number substitutions don’t work on the Internet, because anyone can look them up on Wikipedia. For computer security, we need codes that are still secure even if the bad guys, or your parents, know how they work.

The most secure code is still easy to use: a “one-time pad.” One-time pads have been used for centuries, so they don’t even need computers. They played a big part in World War II, when each pad of paper with the key numbers was used only once.

Let’s say I wanted to send you this secret message:

I love secrets

First, I’d turn the message into numbers using my simple cipher from when I was 5. (I’ve heard rumors that other people had this idea first, but I don’t believe it.)

Then I’d mash my keyboard to generate a random key string for my one-time pad.

Now I can add the two strings together. If my number is greater than 26, I would just wrap it around to the beginning. So, i(9) + e(5) = n(14), and o(15) + t(20) = i(35 - 16 = 9). The result is an encrypted string:

Decrypting the string to get the secret back is easy. We just subtract the one-time pad: n(14) - e(5) = i(9). Follow that pattern through the entire message, and you can securely share a secret. You don’t even need a computer: just work it out with a pen and paper.

This function is called a symmetric-key algorithm, or a shared-key algorithm, since it uses the same key to encrypt and decrypt the message. Modern systems can safely use the pad more than once, but the basic idea is the same.

The one-time pad is totally secure because the bad guys don’t know how we got the encoded letter. The n could be i + e, j + d or any other combination. We can use our shared secret (the one-time pad) once to share another secret.

But there’s a fatal flaw. We need to share the one-time pad ahead of time before we can start sharing secrets. That’s a chicken-and-egg problem because we can’t share the pad without worrying that someone will snoop. If the bad guys get the one-time pad, then they would be able to read everything.

One-time pads help me share secrets with my best friends, but I can’t use them with strangers such as Amazon or Facebook. I need a way to share something publicly that doesn’t compromise my one-time pad. I need a public key.

The Public-Key Backpack

Public-key encryption focuses on a single problem: how do I prove that I know something without saying what it is? An easy concept to help us understand this is a backpack full of weights.

I want to prove that I know which weights are in my pack, but I don’t want to tell you what they are. Instead of showing you all of the weights separately, I’ll just tell you the total. Now you can weigh the pack and see if I’m right without ever opening it.

If the pack weighs 20 kilos, then you wouldn’t know if it has one 20-kilo weight, twenty 1-kilo weights or something in between. With a large number, you can be pretty confident that I know what’s in the pack if I know the total; you don’t have to see inside. The weight of the backpack is the public part, and the individual weights are the private part.

This basic backpack enables us to share a secret without really sharing it. If we each have a backpack, then we can both share secrets.

The backpack works well enough for smaller numbers, but it isn’t useful in the real world. Backpack algorithms were a mere curiosity for decades. Then RSA changed everything.

RSA

RSA was the first public-key encryption system that worked in the real world. Invented more than 30 years ago, it coincided with the introduction of the more powerful computers that were needed to run the big numbers. RSA is still the most popular public-key encryption system in the world.

The basic premise of RSA is that factoring large numbers is difficult. Let’s choose two prime numbers: 61 and 53. I’m using the numbers from Wikipedia’s article on “RSA” in case you want more details.

Multiply these two numbers and you get 3233:

61 × 53 = 3233

The security of RSA comes from the difficulty of getting back to 61 and 53 if you only know 3233. There’s no good way to get the factors of 3233 (i.e. the numbers that multiply to make the result) without just looking for all of them. To think of this another way, the weight of our backpack is 3233 kilos, and inside are 61 weights weighing 53 kilos each. If you make the resulting number large enough, then finding the numbers that produced it would be very difficult.

Public And Private Keys

Unlike the one-time pad, RSA uses the public key to encrypt information and the private key to decrypt it. This works because of the special relationship between the public and private keys when they were generated, which allows you to encrypt with one and decrypt with the other.

You can share the public key with anyone and never reveal the private key. If you want to send me a secret message, just ask for my public key and use it to encrypt the message. You can then send it to anyone you want, and you’ll know that I’m the only one who can decrypt the message and read it.

I could send you a message in the same way. I would ask for your public key, encrypt the message using it and then send it to you to decrypt. The popular program Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) worked like that. We’re secure as long as we both keep our private keys private.

Exchanging keys is made even easier by special key servers that allow you to search for people and find their public keys.

Public-key encryption also works in reverse to provide digital signatures. Let’s say I want to write a message and prove that I wrote it. I just encrypt it with my private key and post it. Then anyone who wants to check can decrypt it with my public key. If the decryption works, then it means I have the private key and I wrote the message.

RSA is relatively simple: take two numbers (the private key), apply some math, and get a third number (the public key). You can write out all of the math in a few lines, and yet RSA changed the world. Business doesn’t work on the Internet without public-key encryption.

RSA And HTTPS

We use public-key encryption every day with HTTPS. When you access Facebook, Twitter or Amazon with HTTPS, you’re using a simple encryption mechanism like the one-time pad, but you’re creating the pad with public-key encryption. Without HTTPS, anyone else at Starbucks could read your credit-card number, Facebook password or private email while sipping a latte.

Amazon has a certificate from a company named VeriSign. The certificate certifies that Amazon is Amazon, and it contains its public key. Your browser creates a special key just for that session and encrypts it using Amazon’s public key. Then it sends it over the Internet, knowing that only Amazon can decrypt the session key. Once you’ve exchanged that secret key, you can use it as the one-time pad to protect your password and credit-card number.

You could keep using public-key encryption for the whole session, but because of all the math, it’s much slower than the one-time pad.

RSA And GitHub

Another place many of us use RSA is GitHub. Every time you push a change to GitHub or pull from a master branch, GitHub has to make sure you have permission to make the change. It gets its security through a secure command shell using RSA.

Remember when you set up your GitHub account and followed some commands to generate keys?

You used the SSH-Keygen tool to generate a new RSA private/public key pair. Then you went to your GitHub account page and entered your public key.

Now, when GitHub needs to authenticate you, it asks your computer to sign something with your private key and return the signed data. With your public key, GitHub can confirm that the signature is authentic and could only have been produced by someone who has the corresponding private key—even though GitHub itself doesn’t have that private key.

That’s better than a simple password because nobody can snoop it. And if GitHub ever gets hacked, your private key won’t be in danger because only you have it.

Sharing Passwords

When WordPress.org was “hacked”, it wasn’t really hacked. WordPress plugin developers, like everyone else, have accounts on other websites. They also reuse their passwords. When hackers cracked those other websites, they used the stolen passwords to log into WordPress.org and make malicious changes to plugins.

Most people use the same user name and password on multiple websites. That makes your website only as secure as everyone else’s. Public-key encryption changes that. Because you never have to share your private key, it doesn’t matter if other websites get hacked. If an attacker breaks into GitHub and gets your public key, they can’t use it to impersonate you or log in as you on other websites. Only someone with your private key can do that, which is why your private key remains safe on your computer. Using public-key cryptography makes GitHub much more secure.

GitHub Gets Hacked

GitHub was hacked recently, but not because the encryption failed. Real-world security breaches are caused by problems in implementation, not in math.

In this case, the hacker was able to exploit a hole and add his public key to the Ruby on Rails repository. Once the key was added, GitHub used it to verify the hacker’s identity and granted him access. We’re lucky this hacker was friendly and told GitHub about the issue.

Once the problem was fixed, you could keep using your private key because GitHub never had it to lose; it stayed on your machine. Public keys saved GitHub from serious problems.

The weakest link in GitHub’s security was in the mechanism that allowed clever users to add public keys to other projects without being authorized. The math was perfect, but the implementation wasn’t.

Public Keys In The Wild

Knowing the fundamentals is essential (you might say the key) to writing secure applications. The math is complex, but the basics are simple:

• There are two main types of encryption: shared-key encryption, such as a one-time pad, and public-key encryption, which uses public and private keys.
• Shared-key encryption is faster, but sharing the keys is difficult.
• RSA is the most popular public-key encryption algorithm, but a few others are in general use, as well as some cool experimental systems.
• Public-key cryptography works best in combination with other technologies.
• Don’t ever share your private key with anyone.

When it comes time to implement public-key cryptography in your application, don’t. RSA and other algorithms are already implemented in all major languages. These libraries include extra security features such as padding and salts, and they have a lot of testing behind them.

Most security flaws come from poor implementations and misunderstanding about the libraries. You don’t have to write your own cryptography libraries, but you do have to know the fundamentals so that you can use the ones that are out there.

Illustrations in this article were provided by Robb Perry.

(al) (km)

© Zack Grossbart for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

  

In this article, we take a break from some of the more advanced ways to customize WordPress, and share some super-easy customization techniques for the WordPress Admin area.

If you’re just getting started with WordPress, or have been running with default functionality for a while and now want to dig in with some useful and easy ways to customize your WordPress site, a great place to start is the WordPress Admin area, or backend. One of the great things about WordPress is that each part of the backend is easily customized using simple PHP functions.

In this article, you’ll learn how to customize the login page with your own logo, add new widgets to the dashboard, add custom content to the admin footer, make it easier to get in and out of the Admin area, and more. When combined, these techniques can improve branding, accessibility, and usability of your WordPress-powered site.

Changing the Default WordPress Login URL

By default, logging in to the WordPress Admin area requires either /wp-admin or /wp-login.php in the URL, which isn’t a lot to type. You can, however, make it even easier by changing the login URL to something more memorable and better branded.

This technique requires .htaccess file manipulation. Usually, this is a file hidden in the root of your WordPress installation. It’s automatically created by WordPress after setting custom permalinks using URL rewriting.

First, check your SFTP/FTP client preferences to show hidden files—most FTP clients manage that. Then, check that the file .htaccess exists. If that is not the case, create it by using your favorite notepad. On Windows, use the Notepad++ software to create it. Open it and add this line on top:

RewriteRule ^login$ http://YOUR_SITE.com/wp-login.php [NC,L]

Just replace the login keyword with one of your choice and your website’s URL.

Now, open your favorite browser and go to http://yoursite.com/login. You’ll be redirected to the WordPress login page. Remember that your clients are not supposed to know everything about WordPress usages—a user-friendly URL is far better to remember than /wp-login.php.

Easy to remember, easy to teach, easy to learn!

Changing the Default External Link of the WordPress Login Page

When you log into WordPress, the default logo links to WordPress.org. Let me show you a quick tip for using your own link. Open the functions.php file. Then, add the following lines of code. And be sure to remember the PHP tag enclosure.

// Use your own external URL logo link
function wpc_url_login(){
	return "http://wpchannel.com/"; // your URL here
}
add_filter('login_headerurl', 'wpc_url_login');

Don’t forget to save the file. Log out to view the result. Better, no?

Customizing the Login logo Without a Plugin

Reinforce your brand by changing the default WordPress login logo. The logo is one of the most important elements of your brand! People will memorize it to find you quickly. Showcase it!

This is the default WordPress login screen:

To enhance it, add these lines of code in your functions.php:

// Custom WordPress Login Logo
function login_css() {
	wp_enqueue_style( 'login_css', get_template_directory_uri() . '/css/login.css' );
}
add_action('login_head', 'login_css');

The third line points towards a separate stylesheet. Even though it’s possible to use that of your default CSS theme, I advise you to use Firebug—a useful Firefox add-on—or any other Web development tool that allows you to edit your website in real-time. As you can see, just one line of code is needed to change the default logo.

#login h1 a {
	background-image: url("http://YOUR-WEBSITE.com/wp-content/themes/YOUR_THEME/images/custom_logo.png") !important;
	}

Feel free to change the logo URL if it’s not located in your theme folder. Now have a look at your login page: your custom logo appears!

If that is not the case, make sure that no white lines are present at the end of your functions.php file.

Changing the Footer of Your WordPress Administration

The default WordPress administration footer thanks you for using their content management system and links to WordPress.org. For professional use and website branding, you’ll want to customize this area.

Open the Appearance menu and click on Editor. Click on functions.php on the right side of your screen. You can also access the footer by using an FTP client to locate /wp-content/themes/NAME_OF_YOUR_THEME/functions.php.

Now, add the following lines of code, taking care to place them between PHP tags:

// Custom WordPress Footer
function remove_footer_admin () {
	echo '© 2012 - WordPress Channel, Aurélien Denis';
}
add_filter('admin_footer_text', 'remove_footer_admin');

To customize the content, just change the second line inside the echo, between the quotes.

Finally, refresh your browser to see the result.

Adding Custom Widgets to Your Dashboard

It can be useful to add your own widget to provide general or commercial information. Adding a widget to the WordPress dashboard can be done very quickly. Again, open the functions.php file, then, add the following lines of code:

// Add a widget in WordPress Dashboard
function wpc_dashboard_widget_function() {
	// Entering the text between the quotes
	echo "<ul>
	<li>Release Date: March 2012</li>
	<li>Author: Aurelien Denis.</li>
	<li>Hosting provider: my own server</li>
	</ul>";
}
function wpc_add_dashboard_widgets() {
	wp_add_dashboard_widget('wp_dashboard_widget', 'Technical information', 'wpc_dashboard_widget_function');
}
add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'wpc_add_dashboard_widgets' );

In this example, add the desired text between the echo tag, after the quotes. You could also insert HTML; an unordered list for example. Name your widget—this will be the widget title—by replacing “Technical informations” with your title of choice. This is what it will look like.

If you do not see your custom widget, click on the Options menu screen located in the top right of the window to display it.

Hiding Unwanted WordPress Dashboard Widgets

The WordPress dashboard displays multiple widgets that you can easily move by dragging and dropping. To mask them definitively, just add the following lines in the functions.php file:

add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'wpc_dashboard_widgets');
function wpc_dashboard_widgets() {
	global $wp_meta_boxes;
	// Today widget
	unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_right_now']);
	// Last comments
	unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_recent_comments']);
	// Incoming links
	unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_incoming_links']);
	// Plugins
	unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_plugins']);
}

You can choose what widgets you’d like to hide. In this case, “Right Now”, “Recent comments”, “Incoming links” and “Plugins” have been removed from your WordPress dashboard. To learn more about this feature, have a look at the codex.

Creating Your Own Custom Admin Color Scheme

If you’re not totally satisfied with the WordPress admin color scheme, this is how you can customize it. All you need to do is create a new CSS stylesheet. In this example, we’ll call it admin.css and place it in a folder entitled/css. Once again, edit the functions.php file and add this snippet:

// Custom WordPress Admin Color Scheme
function admin_css() {
	wp_enqueue_style( 'admin_css', get_template_directory_uri() . '/css/admin.css' );
}
add_action('admin_print_styles', 'admin_css' );

Your admin.css file must contain styles that are compatible with WordPress. Again, I recommend you use Firebug or Web Inspector to identify the right ones.

Conclusion

That’s all folks! I hope you have learned a few good tips to make WordPress act more like a white label CMS. Remember that customization is not just a branding technique, but also a way to boosting your productivity, by increasing user-friendliness.

If you’re not comfortable with PHP, you can make most of these changes with the White Label CMS WordPress plugin. Do you know any other great tips? Share them with us!

(jc)

© Aurélien Denis for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

  

Responsive design is the hottest topic in front-end Web development right now. It’s going to transform the Web into an all-singing, all-dancing, all-devices party, where we can access any information located anywhere in the world. But does responsive design translate well from the text-heavy Web design blogosphere to the cold hard reality of commercial systems?

Rumors came through our office grapevine that management was looking to revamp our mobile presence. There was talk of multiple apps being built externally that could be used on some of the major mobile devices. Our team had been getting familiar with responsive design and put forward a proposal of doing away with device-specific apps and developing a single responsive website that could be served to both desktop and mobile users. After a few hasty demos and prototypes, the idea was accepted and we began work.

The brief: make our current website, Airport-Hotels.uk, responsive while retaining the existing layout for users on browsers of 1000 pixels and up.

The following is what we picked up along the way.

Starting With Desktop Is OK

The general consensus now seems to be “mobile first.” I agree. Starting with a single(ish)-column mobile website is the easiest way to get your CSS off to a great start. However, we use an external design agency, so the time and cost of a new mobile-first design was not feasible. It was left to the front-end developer to translate the existing design onto screens of smaller dimensions.

The solution was to break up the website into smaller blocks (or nuggets), which could then be positioned differently as the browser’s width increased. This led to our first base media query, which contained the main branding elements, with minimal layout information. Because the nuggets were of a fairly fixed size, we had a foundation for creating a grid for each of our major media queries. Anything that wasn’t deemed to be a “nugget,” such as a larger block of text, would be responsive and fill in the gaps that the nuggets couldn’t.

While this method is not as good a practice as “mobile first,” it does have the advantage of being faster and cheaper than a full redesign. And you pick up great knowledge along the way for when resources do become available for something more substantial.

Less Is More

When getting your feet wet with media queries, you’re tempted to go all out, but do you need to? Theoretically, you could serve a completely different design to each device. While this would be spectacular and self-satisfying, maintaining it would be a nightmare. We ended up using the default media queries in Andy Clarke’s 320 and Up framework, containing four breakpoints (1382 pixels was not in the brief). Looking back now, we could have removed at least one of those queries, possibly two.

We’ve been gathering statistics in the weeks since the website’s release, and by far the majority of our customers are running browsers either of 320 × 480 pixels or on full desktops. We could hit over 85% of our user base by focusing on these resolutions, while cutting down on development time and maintenance.

This was especially evident on our availability page, which easily contains the most information of any of the pages in our booking flow. In the end, rather than try to serve the perfect design to each device width, we moved much of the CSS for the largest media query to the size below: less maintenance, less fuss, and more time to work on the UX (and, importantly to the business, to make bookings).

Ability Sniffing Is Not Enough

When I first saw tools like Modernizr, I thought they would change everything. I suppose they have, but don’t rely on them too much. Mobile browsers have more inconsistencies than any desktop I have ever seen. Even WebKit-based browsers can render things completely differently. With debugging tools at a minimum, it’s like we’ve been thrust back into the pre-developer toolbar era of IE bug fixing. Luckily, that’s one of my favorite things.

Exploring this strange new world of bugs became one of the major aspects of the project. A few of my favorites are highlighted below. Hopefully, they won’t trip you up.

CSS Columns

I love CSS columns. I had been wanting to use them for a while; but, other than small personal projects, nothing with appropriate content came up. While trying to work out the best layout for our website on a 320-pixel device, I realized that, rather than generating columns using floats or inline blocks, we could reduce the layout CSS to just a few lines by creating CSS columns. With most major mobile Web browsers being based on WebKit and Opera, this seemed to be a fairly reasonable solution and appeared to lay out everything perfectly. Great!

Here is the original code for the 320-pixel media query:

.product {
    -moz-column-count: 2;
    -moz-column-gap: 5px;
    -webkit-column-count: 2;
    -webkit-column-gap: 5px;
    column-count: 2;
    column-gap: 5px;
}

And here is the updated solution (roughly speaking — the actual code was much longer):

.product>div {
    width: 49%;
    float: left;
    margin: 0.5%;
}

Unfortunately, the column specification isn’t quite ready yet. On BlackBerrys and some HTC Android phones, our form elements (specifically, the buttons) became unclickable. The layout was perfect — we checked that the CSS was accepted with Modernizr, and all the links worked — and yet you couldn’t click the “Book” button. Back to the drawing board with that one.

We ended up using a more standard float-based column layout.

CSS Gradients

Gradients were another excellent instance of browser idiosyncrasies. We used a lot of CSS gradients in this redevelopment to replace some images. This should have saved the user’s bandwidth and made redesigns and maintenance faster.

On WebOS (with a WebKit-based browser), though, CSS gradients would render as completely black unless used on a form input element. It was baffling. In the end, we figured out that it was a bug in the implementation of -webkit-linear-gradient. We’ve learned that the bug has been fixed in the upcoming version, so this might not be an issue in the future.

Here is the offending CSS:

.ppcHeader {
    background: #73bff1; /* Old browsers */
    background: -moz-linear-gradient(left, #73bff1 0%, #009ff7 100%); /* FF3.6+ */
    background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, right top, color-stop(0%,#73bff1), color-stop(100%,#009ff7)); /* Chrome,Safari4+ */
    background: -webkit-linear-gradient(left, #73bff1 0%,#009ff7 100%); /* Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ */
    background: -o-linear-gradient(left, #73bff1 0%,#009ff7 100%); /* Opera11.10+ */
    background: -ms-linear-gradient(left, #73bff1 0%,#009ff7 100%); /* IE10+ */
    background: linear-gradient(left, #73bff1 0%,#009ff7 100%); /* W3C */
    margin-bottom: 20px;
}

(Bear in mind that CSS gradients add a heavy load to the browser’s rendering engine, so if you are using a lot of them, switching them off for mobile might be wise.)

JavaScript on BlackBerry 5.0 and Opera Mini

Basically, JavaScript does not work on Blackberry 5.0. BlackBerry tries, but it’s so inconsistent and buggy that it’s not worth it. We were reliably advised by Peter-Paul Kochs to just resort to device sniffing and to turn off any JavaScript. This is another reason to make sure your websites are progressively enhanced by falling back to non-JavaScript versions.

Meanwhile, Opera Mini works fine with JavaScript, but each of a website’s pages is rendered on Opera’s servers and then essentially compressed into a big image before being sent to the mobile device. This is great for the user because it can reduce bandwidth to 10% of the normal browsing experience. On the other hand, if you have onkeyup validation in your forms, this can be a problem because each call to the JavaScript would require refreshing the entire page from the server.

Forms Drop Users

This was and still is one of the major problems with mobile browsing on our e-commerce website. In order to make a purchase on an average website, the user has to fill in a lot of information: names, addresses, credit-card details, the list goes on and on. While typing on mobile has gotten much easier, navigating large forms is a frustrating and laborious process.

Our mockup payment page had 22 form inputs that needed some kind of interaction. These were required either to make a successful booking, to provide information to the product supplier after booking or for our own sales and data purposes.

The question became (as it always seems to be with mobile), what could we remove and what did we have to keep? Well, we tried to take the middle path, which is currently in development or might even be live by the time you read this.

We chose to split our payment process into two stages. Because our users can save more on their purchase by booking early, our first payment stage asks for the very minimum of information required in order to confirm a booking: name, car registration and credit-card details. This gives the user the best price available and chalks up another booking for us. Part two of the payment process is to gather the rest of the information required to “complete” the booking. This second stage can be filled out at the user’s convenience, either immediately or later on using our online booking management system. This eases any frustration caused by having to fill out a large form.

Good UI != Good UI

A good user interface means something completely different on mobile devices — and even tablets for that matter. Many of the user-friendly features we have implemented on our desktop website would just be bad ideas on these smaller mouse-less devices.

Lightboxes

Lightboxes were all the rage a few years ago. They were a convenient and pretty way to display a small amount of content or something that wasn’t worth loading a new page for. In IE 7 and up, you can position lightboxes using position: fixed, which is great. On mobile devices, though, browsers do not implement position: fixed, or they implement it in an odd way to prevent non-mobile-ready websites from not working at all. This will ruin any lightboxes.

We recommend just loading a new page for lightbox content: less JavaScript, easier and fast. A new tab would also be fine, but due to the infancy of tabbed browsing on mobile devices, maintaining the flow is probably a better idea for now.

Hovers

Content that is only visible via hovering obviously doesn’t work on touchscreens. What used to be an easy way to hide content while keeping it accessible has become a bit of a nightmare to deal with. We tried just removing the hover and showing the content, to see what would happen. The iPhone actually handles hovers fairly well, translating them into tap events. On Android, you need to click and hold for a little while to prevent the default action of clicking the link (our links are anchor-tag-based).

In the end, modifying the code that handles the hovers (assuming it’s JavaScript) and adding a tap event seemed to be the best solution. This allowed us to preserve the design’s aesthetic, while keeping as much functionality as possible for mobile users.

if( document.createTouch ) {
    this.addEvent(c[j],'tap',this.tipOver,false);
} else {
    this.addEvent(c[j],'mouseover',this.tipOver,false);
    this.addEvent(c[j],'mouseout',this.tipOut,false);
}

Date Picker

Our date-picker calendar was one of the biggest hurdles to overcome in the UI. We have a text input that allows the user to enter a date. Prior to the date-picker, our solution was a dynamically generated select box, but that caused confusion among many users because they might have remembered the day of the week they were flying on but not the date. So, we added the jQuery UI Datepicker to make filling in the search form one step easier.

However, what was one step forward for convenience on the desktop was one step back on mobile. Focusing the text input would open both the date picker and the phone’s keyboard, thus obscuring the date picker.

Our next option was to use the HTML5 date input. Because this element was released so recently, browsers are still playing catch up, and implementations vary wildly. It’s just as rough on desktop, with Firefox still rendering it as a text input, Chrome adds an up/down selector and forces the date format, while Opera actually renders a calendar just like the jQuery UI Datepicker. This solution still requires the date-picker JavaScript, but it forces the format, which can actually make it less user-friendly. While the concept is great and the solution will be great once the bugs are ironed out, we found that the date type input is not yet ready for commercial use in this fashion.

Our eventual solution (not yet live) was to use a JavaScript “touch event” query to generate a more mobile-friendly date picker than the standard jQuery UI one. This creates an iOS-styled triple drop-down menu for day, month and year and is user-friendly on mobile devices. The no-JavaScript backup can be either a text input or a select drop-down menu. Have a look at the code for yourself.

Fix IE First

The final point, which reflects the complexity of mobile development, is how to fit old versions of IE into this new technology. IE 8 and below ignores media queries, which presents a rather sticky problem when your entire website is based on them. There are several solutions to this, which we’ll explore below.

JavaScript Polyfills

I can think of two great JavaScript polyfill options for media queries. The first is Respond.js, which continually monitors the browser’s width, parses the CSS and then serves the correct styles for that width. This is a great solution if you need the website to respond on IE 8 and below. The main issue is the time between the document loading and the JavaScript kicking in; the website is initially displayed using the base style sheet, usually the mobile view, before it “jumps” to the full desktop version. Obviously, this doesn’t look great on a desktop monitor, and if the user is on an old browser, then their computer and Internet connection will probably be slow, too, which means that the jump time could be even longer.

The other JavaScript option here is the Chrome frame, which achieves the same end and has the same disadvantages. This solution isn’t bad, but just not right for our implementation.

Include All Media Queries

This is one of my favorite options for responsive websites and is also used in the latest version of the 320 and Up boilerplate. Create a separate CSS file for each device width; and for IE, serve them all to the user, with no media queries. With a mobile-first approach and a couple of fixed widths in your IE style sheet, this will serve the full-sized version of the website to users of outdated browsers. This solution is fast, simple and easy to maintain.

A Separate IE Style Sheet Entirely

Finally, given the right conditions, you could just write a completely separate IE style sheet, full of conditional comments to load the full desktop version of the website. Theoretically, this need only contain small amounts of layout information; but given that many of these styles will be reproduced in your media queries for wider widths, it can cause maintenance issues down the line. Duplicating code is never a good idea, which makes me wary of this solution.

Interestingly, we used this solution in the end, but with a twist. We used a PHP plugin in our template files to combine, compress and cache our CSS files. Due to some issues with the cache in IE, we were already generating a separate cached CSS file for IE users. We added a couple of lines to the PHP file to strip out media queries entirely as it combines and compresses the CSS. This method delivers the results of the “include all media queries” solution, while allowing the option for inline media queries in the style sheet. Because of the way we organized the CSS, this turned out to be the best solution for the project.

Conclusion

After all that, we finally have the first version of our responsive booking flow. I like to think that this epitomizes “mobile-ready.” We aren’t necessarily mobile-optimized, but our feet are on the bottom rung of a tall ladder that climbs to a great system that works perfectly on all devices. This is the starting point, if you will.

Was it worth it? It’s been a long journey, with a lot of head scratching and learning on our feet fast, but that’s what Web development is about, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. You can’t be perfect the first time round, and you don’t have to be. The point is that this technology is ready now, and the sooner you start using it, the better prepared you’ll be for the mobile market as it comes running at you. In the next few years, we’re hoping to see JavaScript network APIs that will allow Web users to add purchases directly to their monthly phone bill. I expect the mobile e-commerce market will explode at that point. Will you be ready?

(al) (da) (il)

© Gavyn McKenzie for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

  

In my nearly two decades as an information architect, I’ve seen my clients flush away millions upon millions of dollars on worthless, pointless, “fix it once and for all” website redesigns. All types of organizations are guilty: large government agencies, Fortune 500s, not-for-profits and (especially) institutions of higher education.

Worst of all, these offending organizations are prone to repeating the redesign process every few years like spendthrift amnesiacs. Remember what Einstein said about insanity? (It’s this, if you don’t know.) It’s as if they enjoy the sensation of failing spectacularly, publicly and expensively. Sadly, redesigns rarely solve actual problems faced by end users.

I’m frustrated because it really doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s look at why redesigns happen, and some straightforward and inexpensive ways we might avoid them.

The Diagnostic Void

Your users complain about your website’s confounding navigation, stale content, poor usability and other user experience failures. You bring up their gripes with the website’s owners. They listen and decide to take action. Their hearts are in the right place. But the wheels quickly come off.

Most website owners don’t know how to diagnose the problems of a large complex website. It’s just not something they were ever taught to do. So, they’re put in the unfortunate, uncomfortable position of operating like country doctors who’ve suddenly been tasked to save their patients from a virulent new pandemic. It is their responsibility, but they’re simply unprepared.

Sadly, many website owners fill this diagnostic void — or, more typically, allow it to be filled — with whatever solution sounds best. Naturally, many less-than-ethical vendors are glad to dress up their offerings as solutions to anyone with a problem — and a budget. The tools themselves (search engines, CMS’, social apps) are wonderful, but they’re still just tools — very expensive ones, at that — and not solutions to the very specific problems that an organization faces. Without proper diagnostics to guide the configuration of tools, any resulting improvements to the user experience will be almost accidental.

Sometimes design agencies are brought in to fill the diagnostic void. And while not all agencies are evil, a great many follow a business model that depends on getting their teams to bill as many hours as they can and as soon as possible. Diagnostics can slow the work down (which is why clients rarely include a diagnostic phase in their RFPs). So, many agencies move to make a quick, tangible impression (and make their clients happy) by delivering redesigns that are mostly cosmetic.

A pretty face can last only a few years, but by then the agency is long gone. Invariably, the new owner wishes to make their mark by freshening or updating the website’s look. And another agency will be more than happy to oblige. Repeat ad nauseam, and then some.

Oh, and sometimes these redesigns can be pricey. Like $18 million pricey.

See why I’m so grouchy?

Forget the Long Tail: The Short Head Is Where It’s At

Whether you’re a designer, researcher or website owner, I’ve got some good news for you: diagnostics aren’t necessarily difficult or expensive. Better yet, you’ll often find that addressing the problems you’ve diagnosed isn’t that hard.

And the best news? Small simple fixes can accomplish far more than expensive redesigns. The reason? People just care about some stuff more than they care about other stuff. A lot more. Check this out and you’ll see:

This hockey-stick-shaped curve is called a Zipf curve. (It comes from linguistics: Zipf was a linguist who liked to count words… but don’t worry about that.) Here it is in dragon form, displaying the frequency of search queries on a website. The most frequently searched queries (starting on the left) are very, very frequent. They make up the “short head.” As you move to the right (to the esoteric one-off queries in the “long tail”), query frequency drops off. A lot. And it’s a really long tail.

This is absolutely the most important thing in the universe. So, to make sure it’s absolutely clear, let’s make the same point using text:

In this case, tens of thousands of unique queries are being searched for on this university website, but the first one accounts for 1.4% of all search traffic. That’s massive, considering that it’s just one query out of tens of thousands. How many short-head queries would it take to get to 10% of all search traffic? Only 14 — out of tens of thousands. The 42 most frequent queries cover over 20% of the website’s entire search traffic. About a hundred gets us to 30%. And so on.

It’s Zipf’s World; We Just Live in It

This is very good news.

Want to improve your website’s search performance? Don’t rip out the search engine and buy a new one! Start by testing and improving the performance of the 100 most frequent queries. Or, if you don’t have the time, just the top 50. Or 10. Or 1 — test out “campus map” by actually searching for it. Does something useful and relevant come up? No? Why not? Is the content missing or mistitled or mistagged or jargony or broken? Is there some other problem? That, folks, is diagnostics. And when you do that with your website’s short head, your diagnostic efforts will go a very long way.

The news gets better: Zipf is a rule. The search queries for all websites follow a Zipf distribution.

And the news gets even jump-up-and-down-and-scream-your-head-off better: Zipf is true not only for your website’s search queries. Your content works the same way! A small subset of your website’s content does the heavy lifting. Much of the rest has little or no practical value at all. (In fact, I’ve heard a rumor that 90% of Microsoft.com’s content has never, ever been accessed. Not once. But it’s a just a rumor. And you didn’t hear it here.) Bottom line: don’t redesign all of your content — focus on the stuff that people actually need.

You’ll also see a short head when it comes to your website’s features. People need just a few of them; the rest are gravy.

And there’s more. Of all the audience types that your website serves, one or two matter far more than the others. What tasks do those audience types wish to accomplish on your website? A few are short-head tasks; the rest just aren’t that important.

As you can see, the Zipf curve is everywhere. And fortunately, the phenomenon is helpful: you can use it to prioritize your efforts to tweak and tune your website’s content, functionality, searchability, navigation and overall performance.

Your Website Is Not A Democracy

When you examine the short head — of your documents, your users’ tasks, their search behavior and so forth — you’ll know where to find the most important problems to solve. In effect, you can stop boiling the ocean…

… and start prioritizing your efforts to diagnose and truly solve your website’s problems.

Now, let’s put these short-head ideas together. Below is a report card for an academic website that starts with the short head of its audience:

In other words, of all the audience types this university website has, the three most important are people who might pay money to the university (applicants,) people who are paying money now (students) and people who will hopefully pay money for the rest of their lives (alumni). How do we know they’re the most important audiences? We could go by user research; for example, the analytics might suggest that these audiences generate more traffic than anyone else. Or perhaps the university’s stakeholders believe that these are the most important ones in their influence and revenue. Or some combination of both. Whatever the case, these three audiences likely swamp all other segments in importance.

Then, we would want to know the short-head tasks and information needs of each audience type. We might interview stakeholders to see what they think (column 2). And we might perform research — user interviews and search analytics, for example — to find out what users say is most important to them (column 3).

Of course, as the good folks at xkcd demonstrate, stakeholders and users don’t always see things the same way:

That’s why talking to both stakeholders and users is important. And once you’ve figured out the short head for each, you’ll need to earn your salary and, through some careful negotiation, combine your takes on each audience type’s needs. That’s what we’ve done in column 4.

Finally, in column 5, we’ve tested each task or need and evaluated how well it works. (Because it’s a university-related example, letter grades seemed appropriate.) You can do this evaluation in an expensive, statistically significant way; but really, enough research is out there to suggest that you don’t need to spend a lot of time and money on such testing. More importantly, these needs and tasks are often fairly narrow and, therefore, easy to test.

So, after testing, we can see what’s not going well. Finding information on “mentoring” is hard for applicants. And current students have a devil of a time when they “look up grades.”

Now we’re done diagnosing the problems and can begin making fixes. We can change the title of the “Paired Guidance Program” page to “Mentoring.” We can create a better landing page for the transcript application. The hard part, diagnostics, is out of the way, and we can now fix and tune our website’s performance as much as our resources allow.

From Project To Process To Payoff

These fixes are typically and wonderfully small and concrete, but because they live in the short head, they make a huge and lovely impact on the user experience — at a fraction of the cost of a typical redesign.

The tuning process itself is quite simple. It’s what we used to arrive at the report card below:

If you repeat this simple process on a regular basis — say, every month or quarter — then you can head off the entropy that causes fresh designs and fresher content to go rotten. Thus, the redesign that your organization has scheduled for two years from now can officially be canceled.

Your website’s owners ought to be happy about all this. And you should be, too: rather than tackling the project of getting your website “right” — which is impossible — you can now focus on tweaking and tuning it from here on out. So, forget redesigns, and start owning and benefiting from a process of continual improvement.

Special Thanks – Illustrations

Eva-Lotta is a UX Designer and Illustrator based in London, UK where she currently works as an interaction designer at Google. Besides her daytime mission of making the web a more understandable, usable and delightful place, she regularly takes sketchnotes at all sorts of talks and conferences and recently self-published her second book. Eva-Lotta also teaches sketching workshops and is interested in (something she calls) visual improvisation. Exploring the parallels between sketching and improvisation, she experiments with the principles from her theater improvisation practice to inspire visual work.

(al)

© Louis Rosenfeld for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

  

The idea behind this project was to produce a consistent set of buttons that could be used for the range of social actions frequently taken in Web applications. These actions are often important goals for users, such as connecting third-party accounts or sharing content to third-party platforms, so their appearance has to be attractive and clear.

The standard buttons provided by third parties (such as Facebook, Twitter and SoundCloud) vary in size, style and interactivity. A consistent button set could reduce a lot of that visual noise and inconsistency. Furthermore, having it in CSS format means that changing the text for certain actions would be a breeze for developers, and it also allows administrators of non-English websites to translate labels into their native languages.

The button set was designed from the beginning to require no extra markup, and the elements used are entirely the choice of the (semantically considerate) designer. All buttons are fully scalable and customizable, and they degrade gracefully on older browsers, although the aesthetics in IE 6 and 7 are admittedly inferior to image-based alternatives.

No raster images or sprites were used. Instead, vector icons were inserted using a custom font file, an @font-face rule and pseudo elements. For more information, John Hicks has an informative write-up on this technique.

Download The Button Set For Free

This button set is free to use and extend, personally or commercially. No attribution is required.

• Preview
• Demo
• Download the package (ZIP, 147 KB)
• GitHub repository (handwritten CSS)
• Sass framework (six buttons) (by @adamstac)

Features

• 100%-vector CSS3 buttons
• @font-face icons and custom font files
• 72 services supported
• Button and icon versions supported
• Em sizing for full scalability
• Generic primary and secondary action buttons for consistency
• Graceful degradation on older browsers

Preview

Screenshots of each set are below. Or view a live demo.

Usage

The button set was designed with simplicity and semantics in mind. No unnecessary or extra markup is required, and button types are called through class names. Call the zocial.css file on your page (make sure the font files and the zocial.css file are in the same directory). Buttons can be displayed with the following markup:

<button class="zocial facebook">Sign in with Facebook</button>

The parent element is agnostic, so you may use <a>, <div> or <button>, but it must contain a child <span> element. [Thanks, Lea!]

To choose buttons from the set, include the appropriate class name for the service, such as .dropbox, .linkedin or .twitter.

Icon versions can be displayed by including an extra .icon class, as follows:

<a class="zocial quora icon">Follow me on Quora</a>

More code samples are available on the Zocial page.

(al)

© Sam Collins for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

  

The idea behind this project was to produce a consistent set of buttons that could be used for the range of social actions frequently taken in Web applications. These actions are often important goals for users, such as connecting third-party accounts or sharing content to third-party platforms, so their appearance has to be attractive and clear.

The standard buttons provided by third parties (such as Facebook, Twitter and SoundCloud) vary in size, style and interactivity. A consistent button set could reduce a lot of that visual noise and inconsistency. Furthermore, having it in CSS format means that changing the text for certain actions would be a breeze for developers, and it also allows administrators of non-English websites to translate labels into their native languages.

The button set was designed from the beginning to require no extra markup, and the elements used are entirely the choice of the (semantically considerate) designer. All buttons are fully scalable and customizable, and they degrade gracefully on older browsers, although the aesthetics in IE 6 and 7 are admittedly inferior to image-based alternatives.

No raster images or sprites were used. Instead, vector icons were inserted using a custom font file, an @font-face rule and pseudo elements. For more information, John Hicks has an informative write-up on this technique.

Download The Button Set For Free

This button set is free to use and extend, personally or commercially. No attribution is required.

• Preview
• Demo
• Download the package (ZIP, 147 KB)
• GitHub repository (handwritten CSS)
• Sass framework (six buttons) (by @adamstac)

Features

• 100%-vector CSS3 buttons
• @font-face icons and custom font files
• 72 services supported
• Button and icon versions supported
• Em sizing for full scalability
• Generic primary and secondary action buttons for consistency
• Graceful degradation on older browsers

Preview

Screenshots of each set are below. Or view a live demo.

Usage

The button set was designed with simplicity and semantics in mind. No unnecessary or extra markup is required, and button types are called through class names. Call the zocial.css file on your page (make sure the font files and the zocial.css file are in the same directory). Buttons can be displayed with the following markup:

<button class="zocial facebook">Sign in with Facebook</button>

The parent element is agnostic, so you may use <a>, <div> or <button>, but it must contain a child <span> element. [Thanks, Lea!]

To choose buttons from the set, include the appropriate class name for the service, such as .dropbox, .linkedin or .twitter.

Icon versions can be displayed by including an extra .icon class, as follows:

<a class="zocial quora icon">Follow me on Quora</a>

More code samples are available on the Zocial page.

(al)

© Sam Collins for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

  

Editor’s Note: This post is the first in the new Smashing Daily series on Smashing Magazine, where we highlight items to help you stay on the top of what’s going on in the industry. Vasilis van Gemert will carefully pick the most interesting discussions, tools, techniques and articles that were published recently and present them in a nice compact overview.

Vasilis goes through dozens of RSS feeds and hundreds of tweets so that you don’t have to. Do you find the new series interesting? What would you like to have? And what wouldn’t you like to see? Let us know! We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments!

A couple of words from Vasilis himself:

“Years ago I started collecting links, and once a week I would write an email to my colleagues with a small introduction to every link. Later on I decided that more people than just my colleagues might benefit from this collection, so I decided to publish everything on The Daily Nerd.

“Last November, during the Fronteers conference in Amsterdam, Lea Verou convinced me to start writing in English; up until then, I wrote my comments in Dutch. More and more people started following me, and I think that’s a good thing; I believe more talented people than me should know the things I know. By more talented people, I of course mean you, the reader, so you can understand just how excited I was when Vitaly Friedman asked me if I wanted to start publishing the Daily Nerd on Smashing Magazine. So, here we are, the first episode of the Smashing Daily! I hope you like it!”

Smashing Daily #1: Mobile Device Lab, Browsers and Animated GIFs

Your local mobile device lab
Jeremy Keith started an open local mobile device lab in Brighton, and he urges you to do the same in your home town.

Web font performance: Weighing @font-face options and alternatives
An important part of design and UX is performance, so when you decide to use a Web font, you should definitely know what the negative impact that choice might have on your users. Here’s an excellent in-depth article about font performance. Yes, you should definitely read it (and the comments, too, because they’re actually quite good).

Miscellany #7,” Shady Characters
Here’s a short post by Keith Houston, with news and thoughts about unusual characters. A pleasure to read, like everything else on his blog.

TypeStacks: Instant font stacks based on your font
Here’s a nice tool that suggests a font stack based on your chosen font. It knows the fonts served by TypeKit, although it doesn’t seem to know too many Google Fonts. Still, a very handy tool.

Let’s Get Physical (Units)
There are a few occasions when we’d love to use physical units (such as cm and in), but unfortunately these units don’t work as expected in CSS. Boris Smus has written an extensive article about these units, how they should work, why we want them and why they work the way they work.

Cutting the Mustard
The BBC is working on a responsive news website, and it is sharing everything it finds out, which is extremely useful. In this article Tom Maslen explains how the BBC manages browser support. An absolute must read for anybody who is struggling with the growing complexity of browser support. This solution (or something similar) should be implemented everywhere.

H5BP
Here’s an overview of projects related to the HTML5 Boilerplate. Some excellent stuff is in there, but before you start using everything in there, remember the excellent advice of Rachel Andrew: “Stop solving problems you don’t yet have.”

html5shiv and Serving Content From Code Repositories
Never just link to scripts hosted on other domains, because you won’t always get the advantages, such as caching and Gzip. This is explained in detail in this excellent article. Yes, you should definitely read it.

Thinking Async
Loading an external JavaScript file can block the rest of the page from loading, which of course is a major performance and usability problem. The solution is to load scripts asynchronously, and Chris Coyier shows us ways to do that, extensively as always.

Experience Design Is the Future of Mobile Payments
“Holistic” means something like “complete.” So, Perry Chan argues that a “complete” user experience is the future of mobile payments. I actually think that right now, in the short run, whatever the future, the things we have right now are just terrible. Anything would less painful (at least here in the Netherlands). (I also think the future of UX on the Web is bigger fonts — much bigger).

Learn CSS selectors interactively
CSS selectors can be pretty hard to understand, especially the difference between nth-child and nth-of-type. There are many tools to visualize the difference, and this is another one by Ben Howdle.

Allen Tan on highlighting and focus,” Readmill Blog
My father always scribbles annotations in the margins of his paper books. He’s probably been doing this for more than 50 years now, and if somehow we could assemble these annotations, it would be an incredibly interesting and useful database. But as it is, it’s pretty useless. Allen Tan writes about this and more in this article on modern digital reading.

Browser Support
If, for whatever reason, you don’t like any of the tools or websites out there that tell you what browsers support what CSS feature, then this tool might be the one you’re looking for. I still prefer When Can I Use… or Mozilla Developer Network Docs, though.

Stamen
Your app needs a map, but you want something other than boring old Google Maps? You could try OpenStreetMap with one of these beautiful map tiles.

Browser Support? Forget It!
What does “browser support” mean exactly? Some think it means pixel perfection for a predefined set of browsers. According to David Bushell, it means something else. This is a good read for people (or clients) who struggle with the ever-expanding browser landscape.

The id Attribute Got More classy in HTML5
One of the easy ways to get a somewhat unique ID is by using the UNIX epoch time, which generates a string like 1336984564. The problem is that in HTML, an ID had to begin with a letter. Mathias Bynens tells us if this is still the case in HTML5.

Autofill City and State From Zip Code With Ziptastic
Filling out forms is a pain in the butt, especially on devices without a traditional keyboard. You should be asking users for as little information as possible. If there were a way to make things easier, you should probably do it. For instance, you could prefill parts of an address when the user enters their ZIP code. Chris Coyier shows us what a flow like that could look like.

CSS Layout Gets Smarter With calc()
A thing we needed desperately before being able to use box-sizing: border-box was the ability to mix different CSS units. There are still some use cases for this, though, and luckily more and more browsers are supporting the calc() property. Here’s how it works.

Last Click

The Origin of the <blink> Tag
Here’s the true story behind the blink tag by the guy who came up with the idea, Louis J. Montulli II. A nice anecdote on early browser history.

mr. div
Of course, you could use a simple Web technology like canvas or WebGL to generate beautiful animations, but why do it the easy way when you could use the ever-amazing animated GIF? Here’s a great Tumblr blog to follow if you’re looking for some random fantastic 4-D inspiration.

What Do You Think?

Do you like this new series? What would you like to see in it? Please provide some feedback, and let us know what you think!

Do You Think That the New Smashing Daily Series Is a Good Idea?

(al) (vf) (il)

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

  

Editor’s Note: This post is the first in the new Smashing Daily series on Smashing Magazine, where we highlight items to help you stay on the top of what’s going on in the industry. Vasilis van Gemert will carefully pick the most interesting discussions, tools, techniques and articles that were published recently and present them in a nice compact overview.

Vasilis goes through dozens of RSS feeds and hundreds of tweets so that you don’t have to. Do you find the new series interesting? What would you like to have? And what wouldn’t you like to see? Let us know! We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments!

A couple of words from Vasilis himself:

“Years ago I started collecting links, and once a week I would write an email to my colleagues with a small introduction to every link. Later on I decided that more people than just my colleagues might benefit from this collection, so I decided to publish everything on The Daily Nerd.

“Last November, during the Fronteers conference in Amsterdam, Lea Verou convinced me to start writing in English; up until then, I wrote my comments in Dutch. More and more people started following me, and I think that’s a good thing; I believe more talented people than me should know the things I know. By more talented people, I of course mean you, the reader, so you can understand just how excited I was when Vitaly Friedman asked me if I wanted to start publishing the Daily Nerd on Smashing Magazine. So, here we are, the first episode of the Smashing Daily! I hope you like it!”

Smashing Daily #1: Mobile Device Lab, Browsers and Animated GIFs

Your local mobile device lab
Jeremy Keith started an open local mobile device lab in Brighton, and he urges you to do the same in your home town.

Web font performance: Weighing @font-face options and alternatives
An important part of design and UX is performance, so when you decide to use a Web font, you should definitely know what the negative impact that choice might have on your users. Here’s an excellent in-depth article about font performance. Yes, you should definitely read it (and the comments, too, because they’re actually quite good).

Miscellany #7,” Shady Characters
Here’s a short post by Keith Houston, with news and thoughts about unusual characters. A pleasure to read, like everything else on his blog.

TypeStacks: Instant font stacks based on your font
Here’s a nice tool that suggests a font stack based on your chosen font. It knows the fonts served by TypeKit, although it doesn’t seem to know too many Google Fonts. Still, a very handy tool.

Let’s Get Physical (Units)
There are a few occasions when we’d love to use physical units (such as cm and in), but unfortunately these units don’t work as expected in CSS. Boris Smus has written an extensive article about these units, how they should work, why we want them and why they work the way they work.

Cutting the Mustard
The BBC is working on a responsive news website, and it is sharing everything it finds out, which is extremely useful. In this article Tom Maslen explains how the BBC manages browser support. An absolute must read for anybody who is struggling with the growing complexity of browser support. This solution (or something similar) should be implemented everywhere.

H5BP
Here’s an overview of projects related to the HTML5 Boilerplate. Some excellent stuff is in there, but before you start using everything in there, remember the excellent advice of Rachel Andrew: “Stop solving problems you don’t yet have.”

html5shiv and Serving Content From Code Repositories
Never just link to scripts hosted on other domains, because you won’t always get the advantages, such as caching and Gzip. This is explained in detail in this excellent article. Yes, you should definitely read it.

Thinking Async
Loading an external JavaScript file can block the rest of the page from loading, which of course is a major performance and usability problem. The solution is to load scripts asynchronously, and Chris Coyier shows us ways to do that, extensively as always.

Experience Design Is the Future of Mobile Payments
“Holistic” means something like “complete.” So, Perry Chan argues that a “complete” user experience is the future of mobile payments. I actually think that right now, in the short run, whatever the future, the things we have right now are just terrible. Anything would less painful (at least here in the Netherlands). (I also think the future of UX on the Web is bigger fonts — much bigger).

Learn CSS selectors interactively
CSS selectors can be pretty hard to understand, especially the difference between nth-child and nth-of-type. There are many tools to visualize the difference, and this is another one by Ben Howdle.

Allen Tan on highlighting and focus,” Readmill Blog
My father always scribbles annotations in the margins of his paper books. He’s probably been doing this for more than 50 years now, and if somehow we could assemble these annotations, it would be an incredibly interesting and useful database. But as it is, it’s pretty useless. Allen Tan writes about this and more in this article on modern digital reading.

Browser Support
If, for whatever reason, you don’t like any of the tools or websites out there that tell you what browsers support what CSS feature, then this tool might be the one you’re looking for. I still prefer When Can I Use… or Mozilla Developer Network Docs, though.

Stamen
Your app needs a map, but you want something other than boring old Google Maps? You could try OpenStreetMap with one of these beautiful map tiles.

Browser Support? Forget It!
What does “browser support” mean exactly? Some think it means pixel perfection for a predefined set of browsers. According to David Bushell, it means something else. This is a good read for people (or clients) who struggle with the ever-expanding browser landscape.

The id Attribute Got More classy in HTML5
One of the easy ways to get a somewhat unique ID is by using the UNIX epoch time, which generates a string like 1336984564. The problem is that in HTML, an ID had to begin with a letter. Mathias Bynens tells us if this is still the case in HTML5.

Autofill City and State From Zip Code With Ziptastic
Filling out forms is a pain in the butt, especially on devices without a traditional keyboard. You should be asking users for as little information as possible. If there were a way to make things easier, you should probably do it. For instance, you could prefill parts of an address when the user enters their ZIP code. Chris Coyier shows us what a flow like that could look like.

CSS Layout Gets Smarter With calc()
A thing we needed desperately before being able to use box-sizing: border-box was the ability to mix different CSS units. There are still some use cases for this, though, and luckily more and more browsers are supporting the calc() property. Here’s how it works.

Last Click

The Origin of the <blink> Tag
Here’s the true story behind the blink tag by the guy who came up with the idea, Louis J. Montulli II. A nice anecdote on early browser history.

mr. div
Of course, you could use a simple Web technology like canvas or WebGL to generate beautiful animations, but why do it the easy way when you could use the ever-amazing animated GIF? Here’s a great Tumblr blog to follow if you’re looking for some random fantastic 4-D inspiration.

What Do You Think?

Do you like this new series? What would you like to see in it? Please provide some feedback, and let us know what you think!

Do You Think That the New Smashing Daily Series Is a Good Idea?

(al) (vf) (il)

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

  

I had thought terms like “intellectual property” and “intellectual theft” were of fairly recent provenance, so my eye was caught by the latter’s use in a headline of a 1930 edition of the US trade journal The American Printer.

The article it headed proved to be equally intriguing, a response by the president of American Type Founders (ATF) to a June 1929 article in the German journal Gebrauchsgraphik by the designer Rudolf Koch, calling the ATF a “highway robber of German intellectual property.” At issue was a typeface marketed by the ATF earlier in 1929 called Rivoli.

Koch and the German type foundry Klingspor asserted that Rivoli was no more than a copy of Koch’s 1922 design of Koch Antiqua, also later known as Locarno and released in the US as Eve. Klingspor had already taken legal action for piracy against the Viennese foundry Karl Brendler und Sohne for its lookalike Radio Antiqua but with no success.

Part of the sample of Wyss’ script offered by the ATF to back its claim that Koch Antiqua was not its designer’s intellectual property. Neither of the two styles of “g” resemble Koch’s, however, to take just one example.

Koch Antiqua, and uppercase letters of the italic.

Klingspor lost that case, the ATF argued, because far from Koch Antiqua being Koch’s or German intellectual property, both it and the Austrian face were based on the Lombardic penmanship of the Swiss calligrapher Urbanus Wyss, in particular from his 1549 book Libellus Valde Doctus. Klingspor could not claim theft of a design that was not its to begin with.

Whatever the truth of this, the most striking part of the ATF’s broadside was its free admission that the similarity between Rivoli and Koch Antiqua/Eve, far from being accidental, was quite deliberate, Rivoli having been created and released both as a spoiler for the popular Eve and as a “reprisal” face. Klingspor was partially owned by Stempel, whose 1925 catalogue contained what the ATF claimed were “confessedly” fourteen type series of US origin, including what they deemed pirated versions of their own designs.

The ATF’s comparison of the faces that accompanied its article, but not the truth, says David Pankow. What was purported to be Wyss’ script was, in fact, Brendler and Sohne’s Radio Antiqua, printed heavily on soft paper.

The ATF-Koch-Stempel face-off was part of a savage turf war fought by a company to defend its commercial position, with—arguably, only a decade after a World War—some national antagonism thrown in. (For the full story, see David Pankow’s “A Face by Any Other Name Is Still My Face: A Tale of Type Piracy” in Printing History New York, 1998, page 37.) The ATF remained relatively conservative in its designs, whereas on its own doorstep the New York-based Continental Typefounders’ Association was importing type in which was enshrined the latest European stylistic developments. The acerbity of the language on both sides was unrestrained, and it was exacerbated by the ATF’s suspicions that Continental was involved, too, stoking the fires of the argument.

Type design is a business that has long been bedevilled by piracy and plagiarism (conscious or not), licensing issues and scant or no legal protection for intellectual property. Some of the problems stem from the nature of the craft itself. Although, in theory, the number of ways you can position the points of, say, the capital “A” are myriad, the demands of legibility, style and fashion radically reduce the options, and alphabet designs all use the same raw material.

As designer Dave Farey described himself, facetiously but with an undercurrent of truth, “Nothing I have done is original. It’s all based on the 26 letters of the alphabet and the Arabic numerals.” Add to this the revivals and redrawings of classic faces, and the similarities are unavoidable. Type design is an art that is constantly echoing and alluding. Most people who work in the graphic arts are, in a big part of their design psyche, fans. We were probably inspired to get started in the first place by seeing other people’s work that we absolutely love. It’s unavoidable that some of that DNA will crop up or be used consciously in our own work. In the case of type revivals, you can at least credit your source in the type’s name; as designer Nick Shinn says on Typophile, “plagiarism means copying without recognition of the source.”

In today’s digital environment, do any of the attitudes and practices that marked the ATF quarrel persist? I asked Phil Garnham of London’s Fontsmith if he regards other font companies as rivals:

“I think there is definitely a healthy and friendly rivalry between today’s independent digital foundries. Over the past few years, as designers have become more aware of the power of type in branding, particularly the possibilities of bespoke type and with the boom in type design education at Reading University and Type Media at the Hague, fresh competition is popping up on a monthly basis, which is a great thing for type design. It keeps us all on our toes and looking for new possibilities within our beloved alphabets.”

And spoilers? Phil feels the tactic might still be out there, but for his own part, like musicians who consciously don’t listen to other people’s music when writing and recording, he tries not to look too much at other work: “I think that it keeps me detached from other people’s ideas, and allows me to pursue mine, free from any subconscious involvement.”

But even then, you can find that what you’ve done looks like something else. “Arguably, I think there are many designers tripping up in this way, even with the best intentions. I’ve been in this awkward position myself. You have to explore new proportions and alternative letterforms so you can bring something new to the market.”

Square leg: Horatio with its restyled “R” in the Letraset catalogue, available in three weights.

How close have people steered consciously? Dave Farey recalls from his time working for Letraset that among a selection of faces presented to the committee for inclusion in the dry transfer giant’s range was Harry, a design owned by the Visual Graphics Corporation (VGC). The committee loved it, but unfortunately permission hadn’t yet been obtained, and VGC refused. So Letraset produced Horatio. “I think the only thing we changed was the leg of the uppercase R,” Dave recalls, adding candidly, “Ours was worse.”

Heldustry, from the 1983 Compugraphic Type catalogue.

Clues could even be gleaned from the font names—or not. Customers requesting Helvetica from photosetting companies of the 1980s that used the Compugraphic type library might have been told, “We don’t have Helvetica, but we do have Heldustry,” which looked… well, similar. The catalogue that digital company Bitstream produced at the start of the 1990s was helpful to customers unable to find familiar names: its Staccato 222, for instance, was the “Bitstream version of Mistral”; “Lapidary 333 was the Bitstream version of Perpetua”; Venetian 301 the “Bitstream version of Centaur.”

Staccato, from the Bitstream catalogue, early 1990s.

Some More Face-Offs

Memphis and Stymie

Memphis, seen here in extra bold weight, and Stymie Bold. Memphis was designed by Emil Weiss.

1931 saw ATF squaring off with Stempel again, countering its Memphis slab serif with Stymie, the name being golf lingo for blocking your opponent’s line of play. ATF’s prolific Morris Fuller Benton based Stymie on his own Rockwell Antique, which was itself basically a repackaging of Litho Antique, whose owner (the Inland Type Foundry) had been taken over by ATF. According to Patricia Cost in her book The Bentons, Monotype then copied Rockwell Antique and called it, confusingly, Stymie Bold.

Janco and Banco

Rather than stealing the design, Excoffon exercised squatter’s rights in the territory… with style (above). The names were nearly identical—probably no coincidence.

French type legend Roger Excoffon’s employers, Fonderie Olive, was such rivals with Parisian foundry Deberny and Peignot that Excoffon examined with a magnifying glass a picture of its designer Marcel Janco at work on his new self-named type. “Then I rapidly made some sketches for a few letters in a commercial type, not identical, but of the same family… The rest is a success story. Banco was used throughout the world… It’s the most shameful thing I ever did in my career.” (You’ll find this story in Roger Excoffon et la Fonderie Olive, by Sandra Chamaret, Julien Gineste and Sébastien Morlighem, Ypsilon Editeur, Paris, 2010.)

Starling Burgess vs. Stanley Morison

A comparison of Starling Burgess’ design (Lanston no.54) and Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent’s work on Times, as it appeared in “Printing History 31/32” (1994).

According to a 1994 article by Mike Parker that appeared in Printing History, Times New Roman was an extremely close reproduction of a typeface designed years earlier by genius boat and car designer and maverick Starling Burgess, which lay unpaid for and abandoned at Lanston Monotype until the design of the new face for The Times newspaper became problematic. Although Morison had a reputation among some for being a slippery operator, the story as presented seems hard to credit: Font Bureau offers a Mike Parker design called Starling.

Futura and Twentieth Century

Close but no cigar: Twentieth Century (above), and Lanston Monotype’s response to Futura (below).

Buffalo, New York-based foundry P22 has in its Lanston Type Company collection Twentieth Century, “Monotype’s answer to Futura.” It describes Sol Hess’ redrawing as “close”; as an attractive optional extra, it has included digital recreations of some of Paul Renner’s original experimental characters for Futura.

Comic Sans and Chalkboard

Comic and Chalkboard: both ideal for warning notices.

Apple’s OS X doesn’t supply you with the world’s favorite, Comic Sans, but you do get Chalkboard, which inhabits pretty much the same terrain.

Helvetica and Arial

Hard to fully love perhaps, but Arial has certainly been well used, if only because it is the default setting.

Arial, designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders, seems to attract its share of ill will in “font hate” blogs these days on the grounds of it being Microsoft’s Helvetica lookalike.

Does It Really Matter?

For the user, does any of this matter? If you like a font and it fits your purpose, then its provenance is irrelevant. And if it’s a new or recent design, then it comes with little or no back story. In terms of design rationale, investigating the background of your choice is always useful. Who designed it? When and for whom—for a particular project or for a company? If for a project, would those associations jar with how you’re planning to use it now, and does that matter? If it was originally designed for Monotype, is the font you’re planning to buy from Monotype or from another foundry? What does Monotype offer as its version, and how does it compare? Stempel Garamond versus Simoncini Garamond, or Garamont?

Koch Rivoli: channelling the spirit of Rudolf Koch and Willard T. Sniffin.

And how has history served those original battling typefaces? Sebastian Carter in Twentieth Century Type Designers describes Koch Antiqua as “one of the most successful advertising faces of the inter-war period, still often used to suggest the vanishing luxury of ocean liners.” Although some of that usage might have been in reality Rivoli, Koch’s reputation as a type designer endures.

As does the name Rivoli, although its creator or draughtsman, the magnificently named Willard T. Sniffin, is less remembered. But UrbanFonts.com for one offers as a free font Koch Rivoli (a pairing of names that would have the German designer spinning in his grave), an uppercase-only design that takes inspiration from the thick-thin double stroke of Koch’s italic uppercase—and Rivoli’s.

Note: A big thank you to our fabulous Typography editor, Alexander Charchar, for preparing this article.

© Simon Loxley for Smashing Magazine, 2012.