Back in high school when I was writing essays, my teacher always demanded to use justified text, because simple left aligned or right aligned text looked ugly. Even back then as a totally rebellious teenager, I agreed with her. Print has used it for hundreds of years, why shouldn't we?

The web has always resisted this development because it was difficult. Yes, the css property text-align: justify exists, but browser were always missing the crucial functionality of hyphenating words. That led to very ugly justified texts and so called "rivers" of whitespace because the spaces got so large. Begrudingly, I got used to it.

I was surprised to learn that all major browsers support the new hyphens css property since late 2023. This one adds exactly that crucial functionality. I was stunned and immediately tried it out and oh look, the web is so much more beautiful now.

You can try out yourself here on Tildes! Just right click a comment, click "Inspect" and then when the dev console pops up, add

text-align: justify;
hyphens: auto:

to p, which stands for the paragraph html tag and in which all text posts are rendered on Tildes.

It looks so much better! But I do wonder why it hasn't spread around more in the web. Am I the only one? Am I nitpicky? I feel like the improvement is stark and very good for functionally no extra work. I even installed a browser extension which augments a website's css so I could automatically do it on most websites.

I'm a web designer and web host. I've basically been doing this for almost 30 years - I registered my first domain back in 1996, and I've had my own dedicated server(s) since 2002.

I've gone back to starting up a business to do design and hosting, and so I'd like to get my business out there a bit, so that is a motivation for this; but also, I have long supported hosting projects that I believed in. The longest project I've hosted has been the Simutrans community - since 2002, I have hosted most of the resources used by the community, including being the primary source for most downloads of the game for a number of years.

One thing that makes me different from most webhosts? I believe in quality, speedy, secure hosting. You can get budget hosting on overloaded servers with support that doesn't care about you. That's not what I do. For my paid customers, I charge a bit more, but that's because I make sure that the sites run as quickly as possible.

I primarily host WordPress-based sites, and I use Divi on most of those because while it's pretty easy for non-techie people to understand how to make minor changes for those that want/need to do that, it's powerful and allows me to design websites for businesses.

I'm writing this post to offer hosting and help for up to six projects that people want to work on.

What I will provide:

• Website running WordPress+Divi
• Help using Divi
• Some design help, possibly a complete design, but at least some help with design ideas
• If your project doesn't use WordPress+Divi, I'd still consider hosting you. The server is a shared server environment, meaning PHP apps - a LAMP environment, essentially

What I will not provide:

• A domain name. But they are cheap through https://Namecheap.com/. And you wouldn't need one initially as I can set you up with a development subdomain on na1.site. (And if you were happy with a subdomain, I'd certainly allow that to be permanent)

For how long? Indefinitely. I'd say permanently, but you can't predict the future. That said, as long as I'm around and you still want the hosting service. Again, I've hosted the Simutrans project for more than twenty years. So I've been around and will be.

Questions? Lemme know. Interested? Lemme know.

I'm trying to keep this relatively short, so please, if you do have questions, please do ask.

Hey there, I am asking for a friend who is interested in transitioning from their career of designing print ads (Photoshop and InDesign) to web design.

I would imagine they would need some courses on responsive design and Figma? But I'll let the people with experience talk if they're here.

Free is preferred but willing to pay if needed! And if you have links or specific online courses you really like and helped you, that would be great!

Thanks in advance!

Web devs: what's up with this trend? For enterprise apps, I get it…single sign-on needs to detect what your email domain is to send you to your identity provider. For consumers, I feel like it's gotta be one of these reasons:

• Users don't know about the tab key being able to move to other fields on a page
• Mobile users don't really have a tab key, despite there being "previous/next field" arrows on the stock iOS keyboard since its inception (Android users, help me out please)
• Users tend to hit Enter after typing in their username, leading to a form submission with a blank password
• Security, maybe? In the past I have sent a link and a password in separate emails or separate communication methods entirely. Are you hashing/salting these separately for better MITM mitigation?

Did your UX team make a decision? Are my password managers forever doomed to need a "keyboard combo" value for every entry from now on?

Non-devs: do you prefer one method over the other? If so, why?

Tildes maintainers: selfishly, thanks for keeping these together :)

Where do you share the art that you make with the world? Do you use a social media site? A personal website? Do you keep it all to yourself? Is your art something that can't be shared online so easily?

I have been a product designer and experience architect since before “UX” even meant anything.

I’ve never wanted for work, and I’ve always been confident in my skills as a leader both on the product and business strategy side.

But especially recently, I’ve started to feel some tremors I’ve never felt before:

1. A massive amount of young talent has flooded the industry via UX programs and boot camps - and much of them are quite talented!
2. Layoffs have further upped the available workers
3. AI and Automation have made good designers even more efficient, and even inexperienced designers can now move at the speed of light.

I also have some personal situations at play:

1. I took the last few years to launch and grow my own product business - scaling that eventually to an exit. So I’ve been out of the “product designer” game a bit - as I’ve been immersed in everything that comes with being a founder and startup growth.
2. I now have a family - I can’t grind as hard as I used to.

All this gives me some qualms about the ability to find work in the future.

With an industry now flooded in talent, and AI that commodifies and democratizes UI design - making it easier than ever to spit out good design - is there job security for product designers the next few years?

What does that look like? How will pay be affected? Where will the opportunity be?

I figured that more than complaining about the dearth of random and weird websites, I might ought to contribute something. I almost went to MassArt for new media installations. In those days I was a web monkey with a solid design bent and very orthogonal thinking. I still have a smidgeon of the thinking, we'll see what I have left of my design skills, but my tech skills are hopeless. Back then my tools were freehand, dreamweaver, bbedit, photoshop, flash, Perl, Solaris, mySQL. My last website was done with rudimentary css.

I would like to get right to the design and expression phase, I don't have an inclination to dive into coding. I also don't want to worry about security. I'll throw a few bucks down.

I'm still comfortable in photoshop, but would like a more fun tool. I cannot stand illustrator, and would love to have a vigorous chat with the folks at Adobe who chose to promote it and shelve freehand. Better yet, an even more vigorous chat with the moron at the FTC who approved Adobe's buyout of macromedia. You can bet that will be on the website. Is there any equivalent to freehand? I saw the post about a free, online illustration tool that came through recently, that might be a smidge rudimentary. What about dreamweaver? And how to publish? I don't care to learn about content management, scripting, databases, etc. if I can avoid it.

Bonus if there are AI tools to help.

I say that after throwing some caution to air because I understand that every new thing has some initial resistance or pushback due to the "past comfort zone" effect.

But having said that, I feel the aesthetics of the old site was much better than the new one. But then again, I'm from the old-school world who also prefers old reddit to the new one in browsing experience, so my opinion could be biased! But even considering the modern web design, don't you think the black icons on the top right have a somewhat odd look? And the "21 languages" feels a bit verbose, the I10N icon already conveys what that dropdown is about? And finally, that scrollable sidebar on the left looks a tad ugly?

I just hope this is just a beta stage or something of Wikipedia's new version and a better one will evolve soon! But that's just one humble unpopular opinion, me thinks!

This is a webpage for a courier company. This screengrab is the whole page as served to me. If I want to track my parcel I have to enter the details into the pretend phone on the right and pretend to use it like a phone, complete with tiny screen and fiddly controls.

I get that they would like me to install their app but this is almost offensively user-hostile design, and pretty much ensures I'll never install anything of the sort. I might consider installing the app of a company who deliver to me regularly and have a good track record of being good at their jobs, if that app offers useful functionality which can't be offered via a web page - but even that's unlikely. But these guys who I have never heard of until today and are pulling this nonsense? No way.