The research has been standing still for a while. My initial idea was abandoned and I opted instead of going into some more familiar domains: front-end design. So instead pursuing my idea of topic modeling and content (and text) analysis, I have instead steered into the area of accessibility and usability. At least for now.
However, in my rapid review, I will need to perform some sort of content analysis; namely thematic analysis. But, it will be a manual type of thematic analysis.
Well that was good and all, but as I was writing about accessibility I realized it has been a while since I actively pursued front-end design.
Therefore, I have been preoccupied with freshening up a bit on the topic and continuing to explore the possibilities of responsive designs. This brought me down the rabbit hole including researching things like Cassowary, constraint programming and adaptive design, as well "progressive enhancement" and "natural breakpoints".
Finally ending up with the conclusion that flexbox seems to be the breakthrough technology that is sufficient to deal with a lot of the design issues that can occur in web design.
With that realization, I have been repeating and re-learning some of the concepts of flexbox and decided to design a responsive flexbox navigation.
The navigation, can be considered fundamental in any design. So I think it's a good start for any design.
Then, of course, how content is structured can also be considered important, especially when it comes to things like usability, accessibility and SEO. But also for aesthetic reasons.
Building this using only vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript felt like a good way to practice and "code through" some concepts that I believe are important, whether you'll use vanilla methods or frameworks.
There are still some work to do, but the majority of work on the navigation now seems to be done. Some added bonus would be using CSS animations, but I think I will finish the first rendition first, being more simple and without "all that bling".
