Tags: buttons

Slopes | Tinkersynth

Have fun with this little machine, tweaking the parameters for generating a Joy Division/Jocelyn Bell-Burnell data visualisation.

The interface is quite delightful!

A Complete Guide to Links and Buttons | CSS-Tricks

Chris takes two side-by-side deep dives; one into the a element, the other into the button element.

Even if you think you already know those elements well, I bet there’ll be something new here for you. Like, did you know that the button element can have form over-riding attributes like formaction, formenctype, formmethod, formnovalidate, and formtarget?

Accessible Icon Buttons — Sara Soueidan – Freelance-Front-End UI/UX Developer

Sara runs through the many ways of providing an accessible name to an icon button, backed up with Scott’s testing.

Proper UI hierarchy · accssible

Bringing gradients back, baby!

This is going to be a handy reference to keep on hand whenever you want a button to actually look like a button.

What would a world without pushbuttons look like? | Aeon Essays

A history of buttons …and the moral panic and outrage that accompanies them.

By looking at the subtexts behind complaints about buttons, whether historically or in the present moment, it becomes clear that manufacturers, designers and users alike must pay attention to why buttons persistently engender critiques. Such negativity tends to involve one of three primary themes: fears over deskilling; frustration about lack of user agency/control; or anger due to perceptions of unequal power relations.

Control Panel

Analogue switches, dials, and buttons, buttons, buttons (just like that Flickr group I linked to).

A Tale of Two Buttons

In defence of the cascade (especially now that we’ve got CSS custom properties).

I think embracing CSS’s cascade can be a great way to encourage consistency and simplicity in UIs. Rather than every new component being a free for all, it trains both designers and developers to think in terms of aligning with and re-using what they already have.

Remember, every time you set a property in CSS you are in fact overriding something (even if it’s just the default user agent styles). In other words, CSS code is mostly expressing exceptions to a default design.

On Designing and Building Toggle Switches

Sara shows a few different approaches to building accessible toggle switches:

Always, always start thinking about the markup and accessibility when building components, regardless of how small or simple they seem.

Design Patterns on CodePen

This ever-growing curated collection of interface patterns on CodePen is a reliable source of inspiration.

Starability - Accessible rating system demo

Accessible star ratings (progressively enhanced from radio buttons) with lots of animation options. The code is on Github.

Designing Button States - Cloud Four

The canonical example in just about every pattern library is documenting button variations. Here, Tyler shows how even this seemingly simple pattern takes a lot of thought.

Control Panel | Flickr

Photos of analogue interfaces: switches, knobs, levers, dials, buttons, so many buttons.

Smithsonian 3D Apollo 11 Command Module

This is so wonderful! A 3D fly-through of the Apollo 11 command module, right in your browser. It might get your fan whirring, but it’s worth it.

Click through for lots of great details on the interface controls, like which kinds of buttons and switches were chosen for which tasks.

And there’s this lovely note scrawled near the sextant by Michael Collins (the coolest of all the astronauts):

Spacecraft 107, alias Apollo 11, alias ‘Columbia.’ The Best Ship to Come Down the Line. God Bless Her.

Links, Buttons, Submits, and Divs, Oh Hell | Adrian Roselli

Use the right element for the job.

• Does the Control Take Me to Another Page? Use an Anchor.
• Does the Control Change Something on the Current Page? Use a Button.
• Does the Control Submit Form Fields? Use a Submit.

Responsible Social Share Links — Jonathan Suh

If you insist on having “social” sharing buttons, here’s a way to avoid bloating your page unnecessarily.

But you might want to reconsider whether you need them at all.

Replacing Radio Buttons Without Replacing Radio Buttons

A great technique from Heydon for styling radio buttons however you want.

Links are not buttons. Neither are DIVs and SPANs by Karl Groves

Yes! THIS!

You can’t create a button by Nicholas Zakas

Related to my rant on links that aren’t actually links: buttons that aren’t actually buttons.

Sweep the Sleaze | Information Architects

Some sensible advice from Oliver Reichenstein. Cluttering your social media icons isn’t helping and may actively be hindering your audience.

Buttons for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store

This app might be just be so cool that it's worth getting an iPhone just to use it. "When you press the camera button, Buttons records the current time or location, then searches the net for other photos that have been taken in the very same moment or place."