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ableton, your website..

Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 12:44 pm
by nathannn
come on now.

Re: ableton, your website..

Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 1:11 pm
by 3dot...
please elaborate...

Re: ableton, your website..

Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 1:50 pm
by Angstrom
If you are saying that their website has all the joyous naive quality of 2002 web design about it then yes.
"Responsive Design" it aint


My guess is the Ableton web team are more Stackoverflow.com than they are SmashingMagazine.com

Re: ableton, your website..

Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 2:09 pm
by 3dot...
it just works...

Re: ableton, your website..

Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 6:59 pm
by H20nly
^ yeah. it could be worse:

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/



edit: it could be MUCH ^ worse

Re: ableton, your website..

Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 7:20 pm
by sporkles
I seriously doubt that their website is their main concern right now.

Re: ableton, your website..

Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 7:20 pm
by siliconarc
Angstrom wrote:SmashingMagazine.com
that's the first time i've been impressed by a site's window resizing. slick.

Re: ableton, your website..

Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 7:34 pm
by Angstrom
Yeah, that's "responsive design", it's intended to address all the people who are now browsing via handheld devices, or devices with widely varying screen resolutions. Giant cinema displays for example.

As a lazy man I'd love to ignore it and keep designing for 960 grids, but a quick look at a log for pretty much any site these days will show a massive amount of users (around 50% or more ) who are on portable devices, some of them with 'retina' resolution. Some of them tiny, some huge.

this means I now have to do a lot of @media queries just to deliver a site that looks half decent.

here's a semi-random overview of the subject which google threw up
http://line25.com/tutorials/create-a-re ... ia-queries


I fondly remember the days when I didn't know what a "virtual pixel" was.

Re: ableton, your website..

Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 7:45 pm
by sporkles
The mobile version of Ableton's does "respond" by putting the menu on top instead. I don't see a problem with that. OK, it does look silly with that tiny main column when you're on a 1600x900 laptop display, but that's been the preferred layout for blogs a looong time, probably because it translates so neatly to a mobile display. I'd say the Ableton site is a lot better in that respect than, say, NI's site.

Re: ableton, your website..

Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2012 6:44 am
by littlepig
I like the Ableton website because it is nice and clear since lacks all nonsense that is put on more 'modern' websites. Just like the Ableton interface is nice and clear without lots of fiddly 3d effects.

Anyway with the windows 8 metro intrface coming hopefully we will see a move back to simpler clearer graphics.

Re: ableton, your website..

Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2012 6:48 am
by pencilrocket
garyboozy wrote:
Angstrom wrote:SmashingMagazine.com
that's the first time i've been impressed by a site's window resizing. slick.
wow, superb web design.
sporkles wrote:I'd say the Ableton site is a lot better in that respect than, say, NI's site.
That's the worst example. Everything is better than that.

Re: ableton, your website..

Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2012 10:31 am
by d.reamonn
:x

Re: ableton, your website..

Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2012 11:07 am
by trommelmeister
littlepig wrote:I like the Ableton website because it is nice and clear since lacks all nonsense that is put on more 'modern' websites. Just like the Ableton interface is nice and clear without lots of fiddly 3d effects.
Can't agree more! Like you said, it has a clear design without any unnecessary effects. I have not really an idea about how the Ableton web site would look like if it were "responsive" or "more responsive".

Re: ableton, your website..

Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2012 1:31 pm
by Angstrom
Responsivity is not the latest set of effects, in facts it's based on increasing functionality.
All it really does is present the most usable interface for each type of user, on each type of device. In an earlier post I put a link to a quick explanation.

Somebody else pointed out that ableton do have a "mobile" site, this is OK, and that strategy was the one which came before the idea of "responsive" (to provide a mobile version) . Quickly people learned that was a mistake. What is mobile ... A phone, an iPad, a galaxy tab? Which version, what resolution is it, is it retina? How is that different from a retina desktop display? The concept of a mobile site died pretty quickly. That evolved into the idea of queries onto the properties of the device itself, and delivering a site which has the correct font sizes, widths, and actionable elements for the device that you are on. Also, that the site properties can mutate in real tiime, so on a desktop if you shrink the browser window you don't gain a giant scroll bar and lose the menu (for example) as you would on an older fixed site..

Anyway, the concept of responsively is just a part of a modern site. On my computer Ableton's website occupies the left half of my screen. That's pretty weird however you slice it!

Re: ableton, your website..

Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2012 2:18 pm
by sporkles
Angstrom wrote:
Anyway, the concept of responsively is just a part of a modern site. On my computer Ableton's website occupies the left half of my screen. That's pretty weird however you slice it!
Yeah, that I can agree on. Left justified content is design from the hind side of the millennium. But what exactly is it about Ableton's site that needs to be "responsive"? What I like about it is that it's so matter-of-factly laid out. There are no bells and whistles, and the information is compact and easy to find. Like I mentioned, a lot of empty space on-screen does seem like a waste, but what would you put there? When a website spans the entire available width of a desktop/laptop display, it looks bloated to me. Particularly if you're reading a blog post, or any bulk of text on a monitor, the text shouldn't extend too far horizontally, as it makes it that much harder to keep track. (Take my post here now, for example; if your window is maximised, the text extends all the way across the screen - very hard to read. Incidentally, the text will wrap when you resize the window, so it does respond to that, making it easier to read.)