Category: Blog

The here and now is, in my opinion, the quietest moment Taylor Sheridan has been in a while. The drama of Yellowstone ( both behind the scenes and onscreen ) is long over. Both Lawmen: Bass Reeves and the Yellowstone prequel sections 1883 and 1923 are finished. Lioness quietly awaits a likely time 3 regeneration. ]… ]

On Den of Geek, the second article Montana Sequels and More – Every Upcoming Taylor Sheridan Show appeared.

The story is a strange creature in writing and publishing. The novelette, the vessel’s red-headed stepchild, is greater than the craft’s red-headed stepchild, making it not really a novel but longer than a quick story. It’s a shape that allows fantasy writers to discover a story and characters in greater detail than a short history but doesn’t need the fundamental difficulty, historical blow, and multi-level plotting of a novel.

The story, however, also presents certain promotion problems: with length ranging from 17, 000 to 40, 000 thoughts ( a calculation that in itself is somewhat nebulous ), it can be tricky for publishers to convince consumers to shell out their hard-earned cash for a slim level that may not always reach even 100 pages.

Despite all this, Stephen King has long been an artist who’s embraced the book, going all the way back to his first set of four of them, the today famous Different Times. Some of his best works, in fact, fall under this umbrella, and it might even be argued that early King books like Carrie, The Running Man, and The Long Walk are novellas. This distinction has also marked the screen adaptations of King &#8217, s work. It can be challenging to condense his frequently mammoth novels into manageable running time for a feature, but the novella has consistently proven to be the ideal length for a movie.

With the glowingly received The Life of Chuck just released in theaters, now’s the time to take a look at the 15 movies and one limited series based on stories by the author that are officially branded as novellas. As one might expect, a number of them don’t work very well and haven’t even been widely seen while others are not just among the best King adaptations of all time, but stand tall as films on their own. All 16 of them are listed below, with the lowest possible position.

16. Dolan’s Cadillac ( 2009 )

Barely released anywhere and sent directly to video in the U. S., this Canadian production is based on one of King’s more obscure stories. It was published in installments in his long-defunct official newsletter, Castle Rock, before being included in his 1993 collection, Nightmares and Dreamscapes. A teacher named Robinson plots to murder a mob boss named Dolan, who had murdered Robinson’s wife, in a revenge tale. The scheme involves a highway construction site and a pit in which Robinson plans to bury Dolan alive inside his car.

The movie, which was directed by journeyman TV director Jeff Beesley, stars Wes Bentley and Christian Slater as Robinson and Dolan. Not widely reviewed, the film suffers from the two leads ‘ wildly divergent performances ( Bentley is lax while Slater chews the scenery ), a lack of suspense, and a needless fistful of subplots. It also lacks the psychological edge found in King’s original text.

15. Riding the Bullet ( 2004 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

” Riding the Bullet,” which runs just over 40 pages in King’s Everything’s Eventual collection, is probably more well-known for the way it was first published than for the story itself or the movie that was based on it. King made the novella available in 2000 as the world’s first mass-market e-book, allowing fans to download it for$ 2.50. Hundreds of thousands of downloads were apparently sold, but King did not experiment much further with this kind of publishing.

The film itself was directed by King specialist Mick Garris, who also directed the 1990s miniseries versions of The Stand and The Shining ( as well ). He falls flat here with this limited release. A college student ( Jonathan Jackson ) has a spectral encounter while hitchhiking home to be by his mother’s side after she has a stroke, and is forced to make a terrible decision in this light. Garris ( who also wrote the screenplay ) struggles to get this one to feature length, making for a rather dull experience.

14. A Good Marriage ( 2014 ),,

This little-seen indie thriller was adapted by King himself ( a relative rarity in the 21st century ) and directed by Peter Askin, perhaps best known for directing the original Off-Broadway production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Following a woman’s discovery that her husband is a serial killer after 27 years of marriage, King’s story, which was published in the 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars, is published. The movie, which stars Joan Allen as the wife and Anthony LaPaglia as her secretly psychopathic husband, is very faithful to the novella, right down to the third act turn it takes.

The problem is that the story is relatively small and told on the level of a TV movie-of-the-week, with Allen and LaPaglia not demonstrating the kind of chemistry needed to make a long marriage&#8212, even one that has in this story settled into complacency. Sure enough, A Good Marriage was relegated to direct-to-video release after a brief theatrical run, establishing its status as “minor” King.

13. In the Tall Grass ( 2019 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

Cube and Splice director Vincenzo Natali helmed this Netflix film based on a novella written by King with his son Joe Hill ( the tale can be found in Hill’s Full Throttle collection, which also features a second collaboration between father and son,” Throttle” ). In the original story, two siblings, a pregnant college freshman and her brother, pull over near a large field of grass while driving across country. They enter the field when they hear a young boy yelling for help from the grass, and they quickly become mired in an unsettling, constantly changing landscape.

The story contains some of the most disturbing imagery that either writer has ever dreamed up and continues the longtime King fascination with vast fields of tall vegetation that goes all the way back to stories like” Children of the Corn”. However, Natali extends the King boys ‘ relatively short story ( which runs about 46 pages in print ) to create a 90-minute film by including all kinds of new elements ( extra characters and a time loop aspect ), making the movie more and more difficult to understand.

12. Big Driver ( 2014 )

Despite having a grimy plot, this movie ended up on the Lifetime cable network of all places despite being another entry from King’s Full Dark, No Stars collection. There are also King connections all over it: director Mikael Salomon helmed the divisive second miniseries based on’ Salem’s Lot a decade earlier while the teleplay was penned by Richard Christian Matheson, son of one of King &#8217, s idols, Richard Matheson. A hulking truck driver who was raped and tortured by a mystery writer named Tess after giving a reading at a neighborhood library on a rural road allegedly carried out the murder mystery. After learning that the woman who invited her to the reading is the mother of her attacker&#8212, and thus led her into a trap&#8212, Tess takes vengeance into her own hands.

Reminiscent in some ways of the cult horror film Mother’s Day,” Big Driver” reads pretty damn dark on the page, which makes some of the movie’s attempts at humor rather jarringly out of place. Although the film can’t really get past its tired revenge-exploitation roots, the theme of female empowerment is well-meant. Maria Bello stars as Tess, while Ann Dowd is the evil mom.

11. The Langoliers ( 1995 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

The one full-fledged television production on this list is, ironically, proof of why sometimes it’s not always the best idea to give a King story a wide berth in terms of running time. The Langoliers, a commercial airliner that was first flung several minutes into the past through a gap in time, with the passengers finding themselves in an empty, decaying reality that is consumed by monstrous entities as time inexplicably moves forward. It was originally published in King’s 1990 collection Four Past Midnight.

One of King’s weirder excursions into that murky territory between sci-fi and horror,” The Langoliers” would probably have made for a tight, 110-minute movie. However, director Tom Holland’s faithful adaptation is overly long at three hours with commercials and released over two nights. Plus it’s hard to read King’s tale and not think of the time-eating monsters as Pac-Men, which is what they end up looking like onscreen thanks to some woeful’ 90s television VFX.

10. Silver Bullet ( 1985 )  

Based on King’s 1983 novella “Cycle of the Werewolf”, one of the earliest works by the author to be published in a limited edition, Silver Bullet was adapted for the screen by King himself, who jettisoned the story’s format of dividing the story into month-by-month chapters for a more straightforward narrative that preserves what’s ultimately a very simple tale of a small Maine town under siege from a werewolf.

The movie reflects that it is a very minor work. There’s little suspense about who the werewolf is from the onset, and what tension or mystery there is gets diffused pretty quickly. Directed by Daniel Attias ( a TV veteran helming his sole feature film ), Silver Bullet features Gary Busey and Everett McGill hamming it up in the adult leads while Corey Haim does credible work as the young paraplegic hero. The werewolf costume is less authentic. In an era where movies like The Howling and An American Werewolf in London changed the game for this classic monster, the bear-like lycanthrope here is so 1960s.

9. Mr. Harrigan’s Phone ( 2022 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

One of the four stories in King’s last collection of novellas, 2020’s If It Bleeds,” Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” is about a teenager who befriends an aging, wealthy businessman, both of whom happen to get their first iPhones at the same time. The boy discovers that calling the mysteriously still-active number allows him to leave messages for Mr. Harrigan… messages that have repercussions when the businessman passes away and his phone is buried with him.

Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, the movie, is one of a number of King-based works that have been subsidized by Netflix. The movie, which was directed by John Lee Hancock ( The Little Things ), stars Jaeden Martell and Donald Sutherland in one of his final roles as Mr. Harrigan. Hancock is a capable, competent director, and both Martell and Sutherland give deft performances, but the film is glacially paced. And building a movie around leaving voicemail messages just doesn’t seem like a good idea in practice.

8. Secret Window ( 2004 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

Secret Window, based on” Secret Window, Secret Garden,” was the first film to be released in the 1990 collection Four Past Midnight, and was directed and written by David Koepp ( Jurassic Park ). Johnny Depp stars as Mort Rainey, an author who’s suffering from writer’s block and going through a divorce when a man named John Shooter ( John Turturro ) shows up at his house, claiming that Rainey plagiarized a story of his and quickly escalating his grievance to include violence and murder.

Fans know that King loves to write about writers and their struggles, and similarities abound between this and King’s novel The Dark Half. However, the issue with both this story and the film is that the twist, which is that Shooter is not real but that Rainey has a hidden personality, can be seen before the first act even begins. Koepp also changes King’s ending and removes the supernatural aspect of the novella. The movie still has a stylish cast and is stylishly done, with Depp not opting for prosthetics or makeup.

7. Hearts in Atlantis ( 2001 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

This is peculiar. Hearts in Atlantis is not based on the collection of the same name, per se, but rather on the book’s centerpiece novella,” Low Men in Yellow Coats”. Anthony Hopkins stars in the film Ted Brautigan, an enigmatic boarder who moves in with 11-year-old Bobby Garfield ( Anton Yelchin ) and his mother ( Hope Davis ), who is portrayed by Scott Hicks of Shine fame. Although Ted and Bobby strike up a friendship, Ted is also on the run from the “low men” who want to capture him for his psychic powers.

Hearts in Atlantis got a mixed response from critics and audiences, although Roger Ebert enjoyed it, writing,” Rarely does a movie make you feel so warm and so uneasy at the same time”. The performances from Hopkins and Yelchin are excellent, and the movie is slow-moving but atmospheric. The biggest problem is that the menace of the “low men” is rendered rather vague. This is because the movie version had almost all of the context removed from the original story, which was tied to King’s Dark Tower mythos.

6. Apt Pupil ( 1998 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

The longest and darkest novella in King’s well-known series” Apt Pupil” is about a high school student named Todd Bowden who discovers that an elderly man from his hometown, Kurt Dussander, is actually a Nazi war criminal. Fascinated with the Holocaust and its atrocities, Todd begins a parasitic, mutually destructive relationship with Dussander, one that brings out the sadistic qualities in both and ends with mass murder.

Unfortunately, the history of” Apt Pupil” onscreen is a troubled one, not to mention the pitch-black subject matter that matches its. An initial 1987 adaptation starring Rick Schroeder and Nicol Williamson was abandoned halfway through shooting when funding ran out. So Bryan Singer picked up the option in 1995 and filmed it as his follow-up to The Usual Suspects, with Brad Renfro as Todd and Ian McKellen as Dussander. Both the film and the movie are spooky, but Singer also changes the ending, which is still dark but not nearly as violent as the novella. More disquieting, scandal erupted when three teenage extras accused Singer of making them strip naked for a shower scene, given later allegations surrounding Singer, this has only added an unsavory real-life aspect to an already deeply unpleasant movie.

5.1922 ( 2017 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

Thomas Jane has the distinction of starring in three Stephen King productions, and two of them are actually damn good ( the third is, uh, Dreamcatcher ). This Netflix adaptation of a novella from Full Dark, No Stars is actually the most recent of the three, and features Jane as Wilf James, a farmer who hatches a plot to murder his wife ( Molly Parker ) and recruits their own son ( Dylan Schmid ) into helping him. Although they succeed, things start to turn a certain way for Wilf and his son shortly afterward. It&#8217, s a grisly narrative involving rats and the spirits of the vengeful dead.

One of the sturdier recent King-based films, it &#8217 is a macabre tale that Australian writer-director Zak Hilditch nails in terms of atmosphere and faithfulness. Jane is excellent as the tormented, sociopathic Wilf, and the movie’s overall feeling of rot and dread effectively echoes what happens to Wilf both mentally and physically. This one’s a bit of a sleeper hit.

4. The Life of Chuck ( 2025 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

The Life of Chuck is not just the most recent adaptation of a King novella, but the story itself is one of the more recent King stories to appear on television. Published in 2020’s If It Bleeds &#8212, the author’s fifth collection of novellas to date &#8212,” The Life of Chuck” is a tale in three acts, told in reverse order. It begins with an ex-husband and wife desperate to reconnect as the world teeters on the edge of apocalypse and ends with a teenager seeing a vision of his ultimate fate but determined to live life as fully as possible. And there’s a wild dance number in the middle.

Adapted by King specialist Mike Flanagan ( Doctor Sleep), The Life of Chuck is not really a horror tale at all despite some eerie touches throughout. Instead, it’s a slouch for the idea of soaking up every moment in life you can, no matter how minor they may seem at the time. It’s also King at his most compassionate and humanist, which is something this planet could use right now. Flanagan captures the tone of King’s story perfectly, and the ensemble cast, led by Tom Hiddleston as the adult Chuck and Mark Hamill as his crusty grandfather, is wonderful.

3. The Mist ( 2007 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

Director-writer Frank Darabont switched from producing Stephen King prison dramas ( like The Green Mile and another that will appear later on this list ) to adapting this pulp horror shocker based on King’s 1980 novel, which clocked in at around 130 pages. Darabont’s film is similarly lean, following a group of people who take refuge in a supermarket after a mysterious fog containing nightmarish monsters descends on their small town and possibly the rest of the world.

As is often the case with King stories, the people are just as dangerous as the monsters, as the survivors split into two camps representing reason and fanaticism. However, even the good guys have a tendency to make mistakes, which is what Thomas Jane’s protagonist David Drayton does when he makes the final choice that ends the film even more depressingly than King’s. The Mist is straight-down-the-middle horror, which Darabont proves he’s equally effective at.

2. Stand By Me ( 1986 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

Stephen King’s classic novella” The Body” was first published in Different Seasons, alongside &#8220, Apt Pupil&#8221, and the story that inspired the next movie on this list. The Body was the first of three to appear on screen as Stand by Me, earning it the distinction of being the first movie to be adapted from a King story that wasn’t horror. The film is a poignant, nostalgic coming-of-age tale about four young boys who hike along a railroad track one endless summer day on a mission to see the dead body of another boy killed by a passing train.

The Body &#8221 is a meditation on memory, youth, growing up, and memory that is similar in some ways to Ray Bradbury’s writing, and director Rob Reiner has managed to capture the tone of King’s novella in one of the best adaptations of the author’s work. The four boys &#8212, a painfully young River Phoenix, Wil Wheaton, JerryO’Connell, and Corey Feldman&#8212, are all magnificent while Kiefer Sutherland and John Cusack are also effective in important supporting roles. Stand By Me remains a moving tribute to the fleeting innocence of childhood.

1. The Shawshank Redemption ( 1994 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

You presumably had a suspicion that everything would lead to this, right? The Different Seasons novella” Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” was faithfully transferred to the screen in 1994 by The Mist director and future The Walking Dead series creator, Frank Darabont. Despite positive reviews, top stars like Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins, and a deliberate attempt to downplay the King connection&#8212, plus an eventual seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture&#8212, The Shawshank Redemption was a box office bust upon release, barely earning back its$ 25 million budget.

However, home video and cable television saw a change in the situation, and The Shawshank Redemption is now regarded as a beloved classic in its own right. Which it is: the movie is a beautifully acted, moving, and superbly told tale of both one man’s ( Robbins ) refusal to give up on himself as he spends a potential life sentence in prison on false charges, as well as the friendship he forms behind bars with another lifer ( Freeman ) who finds his own hope restored by their bond. It has a lot of murder, savage violence, and rape in its plot, but it’s still a crowning achievement in the King filmography. It’s dark and harrowing in some places.

The Life of Chuck is in theaters now.

The post Stephen King Novella Adaptations Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

Summer Game Fest, one of the biggest entertainment activities of the year, features upcoming activities through announcements, debuts, and updates. This event associates with various productions, producers, and other business associates in the industry, taking place in June in Los Angeles, and Den of Geek returned to join in on the fun first]… ]

The first article on Den of Geek‘s Den was Our Preferred Things from Summer Game Fest 2025.

The book is a weird creature in writing and publishing. Not quite a novel but lengthier than a short story ( and also longer than the craft’s red-headed stepchild, the novelette ). It’s a genre that, unlike a short story, requires more depth into a story’s plot and characters without sacrificing fundamental complexity, historical breadth, and multi-level plotting.

The story, however, also presents certain promotion problems: with length ranging from 17, 000 to 40, 000 thoughts ( a calculation that in itself is somewhat nebulous ), it can be tricky for publishers to convince consumers to shell out their hard-earned cash for a slim level that may not always reach even 100 pages.

Despite all this, Stephen King has long been an artist who’s embraced the book, going all the way back to his first set of four of them, the then famous Different Times. In fact, some of his best works have fallen into this group, and it might even be argued that first King books like Carrie, The Working Guy, and The Long Walk are romances. This difference has also marked the panel alterations of King &#8217, s work. Condensing his usually giant novels or stretching his short stories to an acceptable working time for a feature can be difficult, but the novella has proven a number of times to be the ideal length for a film.

With the recently released The Life of Chuck in theaters and the highly anticipated release of the 15 movies and one limited series based on the author’s stories, the time has come to review the 15 films and the officially titled novellas. As one might expect, a number of them don’t work very well and haven’t even been widely seen while others are not just among the best King adaptations of all time, but stand tall as films on their own. Here are all 16 of them, with the order of least to first.

16. Dolan’s Cadillac ( 2009 )

This Canadian production, which was largely unreleased anywhere and was only released on video in the United States, is based on one of King’s more obscure tales. It was published in installments in his long-defunct official newsletter, Castle Rock, before being included in his 1993 collection, Nightmares and Dreamscapes. The plot is a revenge tale in which a teacher named Robinson plots to murder a mob boss named Dolan, who had murdered Robinson’s wife. The scheme involves a highway construction site and a pit in which Robinson plans to bury Dolan alive inside his car.

Wes Bentley and Christian Slater star as Robinson and Dolan in the film, which was helmed by journeyman TV director Jeff Beesley. The film suffers from the two leads ‘ wildly divergent performances ( Bentley is lax while Slater chews the scenery ), a lack of suspense, and a needless fistful of subplots, which are not widely reviewed. It also lacks the psychological edge found in King’s original text.

15. Riding the Bullet ( 2004 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

Running just over 40 pages in King’s Everything’s Eventual collection,” Riding the Bullet” is probably more famous for the way it was originally published than for either the story itself or the film based on it. King made the novella available in 2000 as the first mass-market e-book, allowing readers to download it for$ 2.50. Hundreds of thousands of downloads were apparently sold, but King did not experiment much further with this kind of publishing.

In terms of the film itself, it was directed by Mick Garris, a King specialist who also directed the 1990s miniseries versions of The Stand and The Shining (among others ). He falls flat here with this limited release. It’s a slight tale about a college student ( Jonathan Jackson ) who has a spectral encounter while hitchhiking home to be at his mother’s side after she has a stroke and is forced to make a terrible decision. This one is a rather dull experience because Gairs ( who also wrote the screenplay ) struggles to make it into a full-length film.

14. A Good Marriage ( 2014 ),,

This little-seen indie thriller was adapted by King himself ( a relative rarity in the 21st century ) and directed by Peter Askin, perhaps best known for directing the original Off-Broadway production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. King’s story, published in the 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars, is about a woman who discovers that her husband is a serial killer after 27 years of marriage. The third act turn of the film, which features Joan Allen as the wife and Anthony LaPaglia as her secretly psychotic husband, is very faithful to the book.

The problem is that the story is relatively small and told on the level of a TV movie-of-the-week, with Allen and LaPaglia not demonstrating the kind of chemistry needed to make a long marriage&#8212, even one that has in this story settled into complacency. Sure enough, A Good Marriage was relegated to direct-to-video release after a brief theatrical run, establishing its status as “minor” King.

13. In the Tall Grass ( 2019 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

This Netflix movie, based on a novella by King and his son Joe Hill, was directed by Cube and Splice director Vincenzo Natali ( the story can be found in Hill’s Full Throttle collection, which also features a second father-son collaboration,” Throttle” ). In the original story, two siblings, a pregnant college freshman and her brother, pull over near a large field of grass while driving across country. They enter the field when they hear a young boy yelling for help from the grass, and they quickly become mired in an unsettling, constantly changing landscape.

The story contains some of the most disturbing imagery that either writer has ever dreamed up and continues the longtime King fascination with vast fields of tall vegetation that goes all the way back to stories like” Children of the Corn”. But Natali stretches the King boys ‘ relatively slim tale ( it runs about 46 pages in print ) to make a 90-minute movie, adding all kinds of new elements ( extra characters and a time loop aspect ) that render the film increasingly incomprehensible.

12. Big Driver ( 2014 )

Despite having a grimy plot, this movie ended up on the Lifetime cable network of all places despite being another entry from King’s Full Dark, No Stars collection. There are also King connections all over it: director Mikael Salomon helmed the divisive second miniseries based on’ Salem’s Lot a decade earlier while the teleplay was penned by Richard Christian Matheson, son of one of King &#8217, s idols, Richard Matheson. The story is about a mystery writer named Tess who, after giving a reading at a local library, is raped and tortured by a hulking truck driver on a rural road. Tess commits vengeance into her own hands after learning that the woman who invited her to the reading is the mother of her attacker&#8212, and thus led her into a trap.

Reminiscent in some ways of the cult horror film Mother’s Day,” Big Driver” reads pretty damn dark on the page, which makes some of the movie’s attempts at humor rather jarringly out of place. Although the film can’t really get past its tired revenge-exploitation roots, the theme of female empowerment is well-meant. Maria Bello stars as Tess, while Ann Dowd is the evil mom.

11. The Langoliers ( 1995 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

The one full-fledged television production on this list is, ironically, proof of why sometimes it’s not always the best idea to give a King story a wide berth in terms of running time. The Langoliers, a commercial airliner that was first snagged into the sky by a rip in time, places the passengers trapped in an abandoned, decaying reality that are consumed by monstrous beings as time unavoidably progresses, was originally published in King’s 1990 collection Four Past Midnight.

One of King’s weirder excursions into that murky territory between sci-fi and horror,” The Langoliers” would probably have made for a tight, 110-minute movie. But at three hours with commercials, and released over two nights, director Tom Holland’s faithful adaptation is overly long. Plus, King’s story is difficult to read and doesn’t seem to have the time-eating monsters as Pac-Men, which they ultimately turn out to be thanks to some awful 90s television VFX.

10. Silver Bullet ( 1985 ) &nbsp,

Based on King’s 1983 novella “Cycle of the Werewolf”, one of the earliest works by the author to be published in a limited edition, Silver Bullet was adapted for the screen by King himself, who jettisoned the story’s format of dividing the story into month-by-month chapters for a more straightforward narrative that preserves what’s ultimately a very simple tale of a small Maine town under siege from a werewolf.

It’s very much a minor work and the movie reflects that. There is little suspense in the beginning about who the werewolf is, and the tension or mystery that arises quickly dissipates. Directed by Daniel Attias ( a TV veteran helming his sole feature film ), Silver Bullet features Gary Busey and Everett McGill hamming it up in the adult leads while Corey Haim does credible work as the young paraplegic hero. The werewolf costume is less authentic. In an era where movies like The Howling and An American Werewolf in London changed the game for this classic monster, the bear-like lycanthrope here is so 1960s.

9. Phone ( 202 ) from Mr. Harrigan: &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

One of the four stories in King’s last collection of novellas, 2020’s If It Bleeds,” Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” is about a teenager who befriends an aging, wealthy businessman, both of whom happen to get their first iPhones at the same time. The boy discovers that calling the mysteriously still-active number allows him to leave messages for Mr. Harrigan… messages that have repercussions when the businessman passes away and his phone is buried with him.

Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, the movie, is one of a number of King-based works that have been subsidized by Netflix. Directed by John Lee Hancock ( The Little Things ), the film stars It cast member Jaeden Martell as the boy Craig and Donald Sutherland in one of his final screen appearances as Mr. Harrigan. Although Hancock is a capable, competent director, Martell and Sutherland both deliver skillful performances, the movie has a slow pace. And building a movie around leaving voicemail messages just doesn’t seem like a good idea in practice.

8. Secret Window ( 2004 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

Written and directed by David Koepp ( Jurassic Park ), Secret Window is based on” Secret Window, Secret Garden”, first published in the 1990 collection Four Past Midnight. Mort Rainey, an author who is experiencing writer’s block and going through divorce, shows up at his home in the John Shooter ( John Turturro ), claiming Rainey plagiarized a personal story and quickly escalated his grievance to include violence and murder.

Fans know that King loves to write about writers and their struggles, and similarities abound between this and King’s novel The Dark Half. However, the issue with both this story and the film is that the twist, that Shooter is not real but a hidden aspect of Rainey’s own personality, can be seen before the first act even begins. Koepp also changes King’s ending and removes the supernatural aspect of the novella. Still, the film is stylishly done with a good cast where Depp is not encased in prosthetics or makeup for a change.

7. Hearts in Atlantis ( 2001 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

This is peculiar. Hearts in Atlantis is not based on the collection of the same name, per se, but rather on the book’s centerpiece novella,” Low Men in Yellow Coats”. Directed by Scott Hicks of Shine fame, the film stars Anthony Hopkins as Ted Brautigan, an enigmatic boarder who comes to live with 11-year-old Bobby Garfield ( Anton Yelchin ) and his mother Liz ( Hope Davis ). Although Ted and Bobby form a friendship, Ted is also on the run from the “low guys” who want to seduce him because of his psychic abilities.

Hearts in Atlantis got a mixed response from critics and audiences, although Roger Ebert enjoyed it, writing,” Rarely does a movie make you feel so warm and so uneasy at the same time”. The movie has a slow-moving but atmospheric tone, and Hopkins and Yelchin give excellent performances. The biggest problem is that the menace of the “low men” is rendered rather vague. This is because the original story was tied to King’s Dark Tower mythos, with nearly all of that context removed for the movie version.

6. Apt Pupil ( 1998 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

The longest and darkest novella in Todd Bowden’s beloved series” Apt Pupil” is about a high school student named Todd who discovers that Kurt Dussander, a Nazi war criminal, is actually living in his hometown. Fascinated with the Holocaust and its atrocities, Todd begins a parasitic, mutually destructive relationship with Dussander, one that brings out the sadistic qualities in both and ends with mass murder.

Unfortunately matching its pitch-black subject matter, the history of” Apt Pupil” onscreen is a troubled one. When funding ran out, the original 1987 adaptation starring Rick Schroeder and Nicol Williamson was abandoned halfway through production. So Bryan Singer picked up the option in 1995 and filmed it as his follow-up to The Usual Suspects, with Brad Renfro as Todd and Ian McKellen as Dussander. Both the film and the movie are spooky, but Singer also changes the ending, which is still dark but not nearly as violent as the novella. More disquieting, scandal erupted when three teenage extras accused Singer of making them strip naked for a shower scene, given later allegations surrounding Singer, this has only added an unsavory real-life aspect to an already deeply unpleasant movie.

5.1922 ( 2017 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

Thomas Jane has the honor of appearing in three Stephen King productions, two of which are incredibly good ( the third is, uh, Dreamcatcher ). This Netflix adaptation of a novella from Full Dark, No Stars is actually the most recent of the three, and features Jane as Wilf James, a farmer who hatches a plot to murder his wife ( Molly Parker ) and recruits their own son ( Dylan Schmid ) into helping him. Although they succeed, things start to turn a certain way for Wilf and his son shortly afterward. It&#8217, s a grisly narrative involving rats and the spirits of the vengeful dead.

It&#8217, s a macabre tale that Australian writer-director Zak Hilditch nails in terms of atmosphere and faithfulness, making for one of the sturdier recent King-based movies. The overall feeling of rot and dread effectively echoes what happens to Wilf both mentally and physically, and Jane is excellent as the tormented, sociopathic Wilf. This one’s a bit of a sleeper hit.

4. The Life of Chuck ( 2025 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

The Life of Chuck is not just the most recent adaptation of a King novella, but the story itself is one of the newer King tales to make it to the screen. The Life of Chuck is a tale in three acts told in reverse order, and was published in 2020’s If It Bleeds &#8212, the author’s fifth collection of novellas to date. It begins with an ex-husband and wife desperate to reconnect as the world teeters on the edge of apocalypse and ends with a teenager seeing a vision of his ultimate fate but determined to live life as fully as possible. And there’s a wild dance number in the middle.

Adapted by King specialist Mike Flanagan ( Doctor Sleep), The Life of Chuck is not really a horror tale at all despite some eerie touches throughout. Instead it’s a paean to the idea of appreciating every moment in life that you can, no matter how insignificant they may seem at the time. Additionally, it’s King at his most humanist and compassionate, which this planet could use at the moment. Flanagan captures the tone of King’s story perfectly, and the ensemble cast, led by Tom Hiddleston as the adult Chuck and Mark Hamill as his crusty grandfather, is wonderful.

3. The Mist ( 2007 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

Director-writer Frank Darabont went from making Stephen King prison dramas ( like The Green Mile and one more that will come later on this list ) to adapting this pulp horror shocker, based on King’s 1980 tale that clocked in at around 130 pages. A group of people who find refuge in a supermarket after a mysterious fog containing nightmarish monsters descends on their small town and possibly the rest of the world are followed by a similar lean group in Rabatont’s film.

As is often the case with King stories, the people are just as dangerous as the monsters, as the survivors split into two camps representing reason and fanaticism. However, even the good guys have a tendency to make mistakes, which is what Thomas Jane’s protagonist David Drayton does when he makes the final choice that ends the film even more depressingly than King’s. The Mist is straight-down-the-middle horror, which Darabont proves he’s equally effective at.

2.  Stand By Me ( 1986 ),  ,

Stephen King’s classic novella” The Body” was first published in Different Seasons, alongside &#8220, Apt Pupil&#8221, and the story that inspired the next movie on this list. The Body was the first of three to appear on screen as Stand by Me, earning it the distinction of being the first movie to be adapted from a King story that wasn’t horror. The film is a poignant, nostalgic coming-of-age tale about four young boys who hike along a railroad track one endless summer day on a mission to see the dead body of another boy killed by a passing train.

&#8220, The Body &#8221, is a meditation on youth, growing up, and memory, reminiscent in some ways of Ray Bradbury’s work, and director Rob Reiner captures the tone of King’s novella in what is easily one of the best adaptations of the author’s work. The four boys, who include a painfully young River Phoenix, Wil Wheaton, JerryO’Connell, and Corey Feldman, are all excellent actors, and Kiefer Sutherland and John Cusack excel in crucial supporting roles. Stand By Me remains a moving tribute to the fleeting innocence of childhood.

1. The Shawshank Redemption ( 1994 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

You kind of suspected it would all lead here, right? The Mist director and future The Walking Dead series creator, Frank Darabont, faithfully transferred Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption to the screen in 1994. Despite positive reviews, top stars like Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins, and a deliberate attempt to downplay the King connection&#8212, plus an eventual seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture&#8212, The Shawshank Redemption was a box office bust upon release, barely earning back its$ 25 million budget.

However, a second life on home video and cable television started to change things, and The Shawshank Redemption is now regarded as a beloved classic in its own right as well as one of the best King adaptations ever. Which it is: the movie is a beautifully acted, moving, and superbly told tale of both one man’s ( Robbins ) refusal to give up on himself as he spends a potential life sentence in prison on false charges, as well as the friendship he forms behind bars with another lifer ( Freeman ) who finds his own hope restored by their bond. It’s dark and harrowing in spots, with murder, savage violence, and rape all factoring into the story, but it remains a crowning achievement in the King filmography.

The Life of Chuck is currently available in theaters.

The post Stephen King Novella Adaptations Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

The story is a peculiar kind of writing and publishing. The novelette, the vessel’s red-headed stepchild, is more than the craft’s red-headed stepchild, making it not really a novel but longer than a quick story. It’s a format that, unlike a little story, allows fantasy writers to discover a story and its characters in greater depth.[…]

The article Stephen King Novella Adaptations Ranked appeared second on Den of Geek.

The book is a weird creature in writing and publishing. The novelette, the vessel’s red-headed stepchild, is greater than the craft’s red-headed stepchild, making it not really a novel but longer than a quick story. It’s a shape that allows fantasy writers to discover a story and characters in greater detail than a short history but doesn’t need the fundamental difficulty, historical blow, and multi-level plotting of a novel.

However, the novella also raises some marketing issues: publishers can struggle to persuade readers to pay for a thin volume that might not always reach even 100 pages with lengths ranging from 17 000 to 40 000 words ( another measure that is somewhat nebulous ).

Despite all of this, Stephen King has long been a fan of the story, dating back to his first selection of four, the now-famous Unique Seasons. In fact, some of his best tales have fallen into this category, and it could even be argued that first King books like Carrie, The Working Guy, and The Long Walk are really romances. This difference has also marked the panel alterations of King &#8217, s work. Condensing his frequently hegemonic novels or extending his short stories to an appropriate working day for a function can be challenging, but the novella has consistently proven to be the ideal length for a movie.

With the glowingly received The Life of Chuck only released in theaters, now’s the time to take a look at the 15 videos and one minimal series based on reports by the artist that are publicly branded as novellas. As one might expect, some of them don’t do well and haven’t even been widely seen, while others are strong as independent films on their own, not just among the best King adaptations of all time. Here are all 16 of them, ranked from least to first.

16. Dolan’s Cadillac ( 2009 )

Barely released anywhere and sent directly to video in the U. S., this Canadian production is based on one of King’s more obscure stories. Before being included in his 1993 collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes, it was initially published in his long-defunct official newsletter, Castle Rock. The story is a revenge tale in which a teacher named Robinson plots to kill a mob boss named Dolan, who had Robinson’s wife murdered. The scheme involves a highway construction site and a pit in which Robinson plans to bury Dolan alive inside his car.

The movie, which was directed by journeyman TV director Jeff Beesley, stars Wes Bentley and Christian Slater as Robinson and Dolan. Not widely reviewed, the film suffers from the two leads ‘ wildly divergent performances ( Bentley is lax while Slater chews the scenery ), a lack of suspense, and a needless fistful of subplots. Additionally, it lacks the psychological depth found in King’s original text.

15. Riding the Bullet ( 2004 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

The story itself and the movie based on it are probably more well-known than the way it was originally published, which is just over 40 pages in King’s Everything’s Eventual collection. King made the novella available in 2000 as the world’s first mass-market e-book, allowing fans to download it for$ 2.50. Hundreds of thousands of downloads were allegedly sold, but King did not do much more research into this kind of publishing.

As for the movie itself, it was directed by Mick Garris, a King specialist who also directed the 1990s miniseries versions of The Stand and The Shining (among others ). He falls flat here with this limited release. A college student ( Jonathan Jackson ) has a spectral encounter while hitchhiking home to be by his mother’s side after she has a stroke, forcing him to make a terrible decision. Garris ( who also wrote the screenplay ) struggles to get this one to feature length, making for a rather dull experience.

14. A Good Marriage ( 2014 ) &nbsp,

This little-seen indie thriller was adapted by King himself ( a relative rarity in the 21st century ) and directed by Peter Askin, perhaps best known for directing the original Off-Broadway production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. After 27 years of marriage, a woman discovers that her husband is a serial killer. King’s story was published in the 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars. The movie, which stars Joan Allen as the wife and Anthony LaPaglia as her secretly psychopathic husband, is very faithful to the novella, right down to the third act turn it takes.

The issue is that the story is only a small portion of a TV movie-of-the-week and Allen and LaPaglia fail to have the kind of chemistry needed to make a long marriage, even one that has settled into complacency in this tale. Sure enough, A Good Marriage was relegated to direct-to-video release after a very brief theatrical run, cementing its status as “minor” King.

13. In the Tall Grass ( 2019 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

Cube and Splice director Vincenzo Natali helmed this Netflix film based on a novella written by King with his son Joe Hill ( the tale can be found in Hill’s Full Throttle collection, which also features a second collaboration between father and son,” Throttle” ). In the first scene, two siblings, a pregnant college freshman and her brother, pull over close to a large field of grass while driving across the country. When they hear a little boy calling for help from the grass, they enter the field and find themselves quickly lost in an eerie, ever-changing landscape.

The story contains some of the most disturbing imagery that either writer has ever dreamed up and continues the longtime King fascination with vast fields of tall vegetation that goes all the way back to stories like” Children of the Corn”. However, Natali extends the King boys ‘ relatively short story ( which runs about 46 pages in print ) by creating a 90-minute film by including all kinds of new characters and a time-lapse aspect, making the movie more and more difficult to understand.

12. Big Driver ( 2014 )

Another entry from King’s Full Dark, No Stars collection, this film ended up on the Lifetime cable network of all places despite its grim narrative. There are also King connections all over it: director Mikael Salomon helmed the divisive second miniseries based on’ Salem’s Lot a decade earlier while the teleplay was penned by Richard Christian Matheson, son of one of King &#8217, s idols, Richard Matheson. A hulking truck driver who was raped and tortured by a rural road after giving a reading at a nearby library is the subject of the mystery writer’s story. After learning that the woman who invited her to the reading is the mother of her attacker&#8212, and thus led her into a trap&#8212, Tess takes vengeance into her own hands.

Big Driver reads pretty damn dark on the page, which makes some of the movie’s attempts at humor jarringly out of place because it is somewhat reminiscent of the popular horror film Mother’s Day. The theme of female empowerment is well-meant, but the movie can’t really overcome its tired revenge-exploitation roots. Maria Bello stars as Tess, while Ann Dowd is the evil mom.

11. The Langoliers ( 1995 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

Ironically, the one full-fledged television production on this list is proof that sometimes it’s not always the best idea to give a King story a wide berth in terms of running time. Originally published in King’s 1990 collection Four Past Midnight,” The Langoliers” is about a commercial airliner that gets flung several minutes into the past through a rip in time, with the passengers finding themselves in an empty, decaying reality that gets consumed by monstrous entities as time ineluctably moves forward.

One of King’s weirder excursions into that murky territory between sci-fi and horror,” The Langoliers” would probably have made for a tight, 110-minute movie. However, director Tom Holland’s faithful adaptation is overly long at three hours with commercials and two nights. Plus it’s hard to read King’s tale and not think of the time-eating monsters as Pac-Men, which is what they end up looking like onscreen thanks to some woeful’ 90s television VFX.

10. Silver Bullet ( 1985 ) &nbsp,

Based on King’s 1983 novella “Cycle of the Werewolf”, one of the earliest works by the author to be published in a limited edition, Silver Bullet was adapted for the screen by King himself, who jettisoned the story’s format of dividing the story into month-by-month chapters for a more straightforward narrative that preserves what’s ultimately a very simple tale of a small Maine town under siege from a werewolf.

The movie reflects that it is incredibly minor. There’s little suspense about who the werewolf is from the onset, and what tension or mystery there is gets diffused pretty quickly. Gary Busey and Everett McGill hammer it up in the adult leads while Corey Haim does believable work as the young paraplegic hero in Silver Bullet, which was directed by Daniel Attias ( a TV veteran helming his only feature film ). Less credible is the werewolf costume. In an era where movies like The Howling and An American Werewolf in London changed the game for this classic monster, the bear-like lycanthrope here is so 1960s.

9. Mr. Harrigan’s Phone ( 2022 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

The protagonist of King’s most recent collection of novellas,” Mr. Harrigan’s Phone,” is one of four stories in the 2020 film If It Bleeds. The two actors both happen to have their first iPhones at the same time. When the businessman dies and his phone is buried with him, the boy discovers that calling the mysteriously still-active number allows him to leave messages for Mr. Harrigan… messages that have repercussions.

Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, the movie, is one of a number of King-based works that have been subsidized by Netflix. The movie, which was directed by John Lee Hancock ( The Little Things ), stars It cast members Jaeden Martell and Donald Sutherland in one of his final roles as Mr. Harrigan. Hancock is a capable, competent director, and both Martell and Sutherland give deft performances, but the film is glacially paced. In reality, making a movie around leaving voicemails doesn’t seem like a good idea.

8. Secret Window ( 2004 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

Secret Window is based on” Secret Window, Secret Garden,” which was first released in the 1990 collection Four Past Midnight and was directed and written by David Koepp ( Jurassic Park ). Johnny Depp stars as Mort Rainey, an author who’s suffering from writer’s block and going through a divorce when a man named John Shooter ( John Turturro ) shows up at his house, claiming that Rainey plagiarized a story of his and quickly escalating his grievance to include violence and murder.

Fans are well-versed in King’s love of writing about writers and their struggles, and there are many similarities between this and King’s novel The Dark Half. But the problem with both this story and movie is that the twist&#8212, that Shooter is not real but a hidden aspect of Rainey’s own personality &#8212, can be seen coming before the first act even ends. Koepp also changes King’s ending and removes the supernatural aspect of the novella. The movie still has a stylish cast and is stylishly done, with Depp not opting for prosthetics or makeup.

7. Hearts in Atlantis ( 2001 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

This is an odd one. Hearts in Atlantis is not based on the collection of the same name, per se, but rather on the book’s centerpiece novella,” Low Men in Yellow Coats”. Anthony Hopkins stars in the film, which was directed by Scott Hicks of Shine fame and stars Bobby Garfield, an enigmatic boarder who moves in with his mother, Liz ( Hope Davis ), who is 11 years old. Although Ted and Bobby strike up a friendship, Ted is also on the run from the “low men” who want to capture him for his psychic powers.

Although Roger Ebert wrote,” Rarely does a movie make you feel so warm and so uneasy at the same time,” critics and audiences had mixed reactions to it. The film is atmospheric but slow-moving while the performances from Hopkins and Yelchin are excellent. The biggest problem is that the menace of the “low men” is rendered rather vague. This is because the movie version removed nearly all of the context that the original story had in relation to King’s Dark Tower mythos.

6. &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

The longest and darkest novella in King’s classic Different Seasons collection,” Apt Pupil” is about a high school student named Todd Bowden who discovers than an elderly man living in his town is actually a Nazi war criminal named Kurt Dussander. Fascinated with the Holocaust and its atrocities, Todd begins a parasitic, mutually destructive relationship with Dussander, one that brings out the sadistic qualities in both and ends with mass murder.

Unfortunately, the history of” Apt Pupil” onscreen is a troubled one, not to mention the pitch-black subject matter that matches its. An initial 1987 adaptation starring Rick Schroeder and Nicol Williamson was abandoned halfway through shooting when funding ran out. Bryan Singer chose to make the move in 1995 and filmed it as his follow-up to The Usual Suspects, starring Todd Renfro as Todd and Ian McKellen as Dustander. Both are chilling, as is the film itself, Singer also alters the ending, which is still dark but not nearly as violent as the novella. More disquieting, scandal erupted when three teenage extras accused Singer of making them strip naked for a shower scene, given later allegations surrounding Singer, this has only added an unsavory real-life aspect to an already deeply unpleasant movie.

5.1922 ( 2017 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

Thomas Jane has the distinction of starring in three Stephen King productions, and two of them are actually damn good ( the third is, uh, Dreamcatcher ). This Netflix adaptation of a Full Dark, No Stars novella is actually the most recent of the three. It stars Jane as Wilf James, a farmer who plots to murder his wife ( Molly Parker ) and coerces their own son ( Dylan Schmid ) into helping him. Although they’re successful, things go decidedly south for Wilf and his boy not long after. It&#8217, s a grisly narrative involving rats and the spirits of the vengeful dead.

One of the sturdier recent King-based films, it &#8217 is a macabre tale that Australian writer-director Zak Hilditch nails in terms of atmosphere and faithfulness. Jane is excellent as the tormented, sociopathic Wilf, and the movie’s overall feeling of rot and dread effectively echoes what happens to Wilf both mentally and physically. This is a little sleeper hit, though.

4. The Life of Chuck ( 2025 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

The Life of Chuck is not just the most recent adaptation of a King novella; rather, the story itself is one of the more recent King tales to appear on screen. Published in 2020’s If It Bleeds &#8212, the author’s fifth collection of novellas to date &#8212,” The Life of Chuck” is a tale in three acts, told in reverse order. As the world teeters on the brink of apocalypse, an ex-husband and ex-wife are desperate to reconnect, and the teenager has a vision of his ultimate fate who is determined to live life as fully as possible. And there’s a wild dance number in the middle.

Adapted by King specialist Mike Flanagan ( Doctor Sleep), The Life of Chuck is not really a horror tale at all despite some eerie touches throughout. Instead, it offers a rebuke to the idea of soaking up every moment of your life, no matter how minor they may seem. It’s also King at his most compassionate and humanist, which is something this planet could use right now. Flanagan perfectly captures the mood of King’s story, and the ensemble cast, which features Mark Hamill as his sour grandfather and Tom Hiddleston as the adult Chuck, is fantastic.

3. The Mist ( 2007 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

Based on King’s 1980 novel, the adaptation of this pulp horror shocker, director-writer Frank Darabont switched from producing Stephen King prison dramas ( like The Green Mile and another that will appear later on this list ) to adapting the film. Darabont’s film is similarly lean, following a group of people who take refuge in a supermarket after a mysterious fog containing nightmarish monsters descends on their small town and possibly the rest of the world.

The survivors split into two camps representing reason and fanaticism, which is frequently the case with King stories. As is often the case with King stories, the people are just as dangerous as the monsters. But even the good guys are prone to making mistakes, which is what protagonist David Drayton ( Thomas Jane again ) does when he makes a final decision that ends the movie on an even bleaker note than King’s story. The Mist is straight-down-the-middle horror, which Darabont proves he’s equally effective at.

2. Stand By Me ( 1986 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

The Body, a classic novella by Stephen King, was first published in Different Seasons, along with &#8220, Apt Pupil&#8221, and the plot that served as the inspiration for the upcoming film on this list. ” The Body” became the first of the three to arrive on the screen, as Stand by Me, giving it the distinction of being the first film adapted from a King story that was n&#8217, t horror. The film is a poignant, nostalgic coming-of-age tale about four young boys who hike along a railroad track one endless summer day on a mission to see the dead body of another boy killed by a passing train.

Inarguably one of the best adaptations of the author’s work, director Rob Reiner captures the tone of King’s novella in The Body, which is a meditation on youth, growing up, and memory. The four boys &#8212, a painfully young River Phoenix, Wil Wheaton, JerryO’Connell, and Corey Feldman&#8212, are all magnificent while Kiefer Sutherland and John Cusack are also effective in important supporting roles. Stand By Me continues to be a moving tribute to the fleeting innocence of childhood.

1. The Shawshank Redemption ( 1994 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

You presumably had a suspicion that everything would lead to this, right? The Different Seasons novella” Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” was faithfully transferred to the screen in 1994 by The Mist director and future The Walking Dead series creator, Frank Darabont. The Shawshank Redemption was a box office failure upon release, barely recovering its$ 25 million budget, despite positive reviews, top actors like Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins, and a deliberate attempt to downplay the King connection.

A second life on home video and cable television began to turn the tide, however, and The Shawshank Redemption is now considered not just one of the best King adaptations ever, but a beloved classic in its own right. Which it is: the movie is a beautifully acted, moving, and superbly told tale of both one man’s ( Robbins ) refusal to give up on himself as he spends a potential life sentence in prison on false charges, as well as the friendship he forms behind bars with another lifer ( Freeman ) who finds his own hope restored by their bond. It’s dark and harrowing in some places, with rape, savage violence, and murder all being incorporated into the plot, but it still ranks as a strong achievement in the King filmography.

The Life of Chuck is in theaters now.

The article Stephen King Novella Adaptations Ranked appeared second on Den of Geek.

Superman, to be sure, has an interesting solid. Not only do we find David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, and Nicholas Hoult as Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Lex Luthor, between, but we also get inspired options such as Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner and Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen. However, with such a packed group, […]

The article Superman: James Gunn’s Big Cast Defense Points to New Type of Shared Universe appeared first on Den of Geek.

The book is a weird creature in writing and publishing. The novelette, the vessel’s red-headed stepchild, is greater than the craft’s red-headed stepchild, making it not really a novel but longer than a quick story. It’s a shape that allows fantasy writers to discover a story and characters in greater detail than a short history but doesn’t need the fundamental difficulty, historical blow, and multi-level plotting of a novel.

However, the novella also raises some marketing issues: with lengths ranging from 17 000 to 40 000 words ( another measure that is somewhat nebulous ), it can be challenging for publishers to persuade readers to pay for a thin volume that may not always reach even 100 pages.

Despite all of this, Stephen King has long been a fan of the story, dating back to his first selection of four, the now-famous Unique Seasons. In fact, some of his best tales have fallen into this category, and it could even be argued that first King books like Carrie, The Working Guy, and The Long Walk are really romances. This difference has also marked the panel alterations of King &#8217, s work. It can be challenging to condense his frequently edgy novels into manageable working day for a feature film, but the book has consistently proven to be the ideal length.

With the glowingly received The Life of Chuck only released in theaters, now’s the time to take a look at the 15 videos and one minimal series based on reports by the artist that are publicly branded as novella. As one might expect, some of them don’t do very well and haven’t even been frequently seen, while others are among the best King alterations of all time and stand out as standalone movies on their own. These are all 16 of them, ranked from least to second.

16. Dolan’s Cadillac ( 2009 )

Little released somewhere and sent straight to video in the U. S., this French production is based on one of King’s more mysterious stories. Before being included in his 1993 collection, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, it was initially published in installments in his long-defunct official newsletter, Castle Rock. The story is a revenge tale in which a teacher named Robinson plots to kill a mob boss named Dolan, who had Robinson’s wife murdered. The scheme involves a highway construction site and a pit in which Robinson plans to bury Dolan alive inside his car.

The movie, which was directed by journeyman TV director Jeff Beesley, stars Wes Bentley and Christian Slater as Robinson and Dolan. Not widely reviewed, the film suffers from the two leads ‘ wildly divergent performances ( Bentley is lax while Slater chews the scenery ), a lack of suspense, and a needless fistful of subplots. Additionally, it lacks the psychological depth found in King’s original text.

15. Riding the Bullet ( 2004 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

” Riding the Bullet,” which runs just over 40 pages in King’s Everything’s Eventual collection, is probably more well-known for the way it was originally published than for the story itself or the movie that was based on it. King made the novella available in 2000 as the world’s first mass-market e-book, allowing fans to download it for$ 2.50. Hundreds of thousands of downloads were allegedly sold, but King did not do much more research into this kind of publishing.

As for the movie itself, it was directed by Mick Garris, a King specialist who also directed the 1990s miniseries versions of The Stand and The Shining (among others ). He falls flat here with this limited release. A college student ( Jonathan Jackson ) has a spectral encounter while hitchhiking home to be by his mother’s side after she has a stroke, and is forced to make a terrible decision. Garris ( who also wrote the screenplay ) struggles to get this one to feature length, making for a rather dull experience.

14. A Good Marriage ( 2014 ) &nbsp,

This little-seen indie thriller was adapted by King himself ( a relative rarity in the 21st century ) and directed by Peter Askin, perhaps best known for directing the original Off-Broadway production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. After 27 years of marriage, a woman discovers that her husband is a serial killer. King’s story was published in the 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars. The movie, which stars Joan Allen as the wife and Anthony LaPaglia as her secretly psychopathic husband, is very faithful to the novella, right down to the third act turn it takes.

The issue is that the story is only a small portion of a TV movie of the week, with Allen and LaPaglia failing to have the kind of chemistry needed to build a lasting marriage, even one that has settled into complacency in this tale. Sure enough, A Good Marriage was relegated to direct-to-video release after a very brief theatrical run, cementing its status as “minor” King.

13. In the Tall Grass ( 2019 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

Cube and Splice director Vincenzo Natali helmed this Netflix film based on a novella written by King with his son Joe Hill ( the tale can be found in Hill’s Full Throttle collection, which also features a second collaboration between father and son,” Throttle” ). In the first scene, two siblings, a pregnant college freshman and her brother, cross country and pull over next to a large field of grass. When they hear a little boy calling for help from the grass, they enter the field and find themselves quickly lost in an eerie, ever-changing landscape.

The story contains some of the most disturbing imagery that either writer has ever dreamed up and continues the longtime King fascination with vast fields of tall vegetation that goes all the way back to stories like” Children of the Corn”. However, Natali extends the King boys ‘ relatively short story ( which runs about 46 pages in print ) to create a 90-minute film by including all kinds of new elements ( extra characters and a time loop aspect ), making the movie more and more difficult to understand.

12. Big Driver ( 2014 )

Another entry from King’s Full Dark, No Stars collection, this film ended up on the Lifetime cable network of all places despite its grim narrative. There are also King connections all over it: director Mikael Salomon helmed the divisive second miniseries based on’ Salem’s Lot a decade earlier while the teleplay was penned by Richard Christian Matheson, son of one of King &#8217, s idols, Richard Matheson. A hulking truck driver who was raped and tortured by a rural road after giving a reading at a nearby library is the subject of the mystery writer’s story. After learning that the woman who invited her to the reading is the mother of her attacker&#8212, and thus led her into a trap&#8212, Tess takes vengeance into her own hands.

Big Driver, which is somewhat reminiscent of the popular horror film Mother’s Day, reads pretty damn dark on the page, which makes some of the humor’s attempts to be funny a little out of place. The theme of female empowerment is well-meant, but the movie can’t really overcome its tired revenge-exploitation roots. Maria Bello stars as Tess, while Ann Dowd is the evil mom.

11. The Langoliers ( 1995 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

Ironically, the one full-fledged television production on this list is proof that sometimes it’s not always the best idea to give a King story a wide berth in terms of running time. Originally published in King’s 1990 collection Four Past Midnight,” The Langoliers” is about a commercial airliner that gets flung several minutes into the past through a rip in time, with the passengers finding themselves in an empty, decaying reality that gets consumed by monstrous entities as time ineluctably moves forward.

One of King’s weirder excursions into that murky territory between sci-fi and horror,” The Langoliers” would probably have made for a tight, 110-minute movie. However, director Tom Holland’s faithful adaptation is overly long at three hours with commercials and two nights. Plus it’s hard to read King’s tale and not think of the time-eating monsters as Pac-Men, which is what they end up looking like onscreen thanks to some woeful’ 90s television VFX.

10. Silver Bullet ( 1985 ) &nbsp,

Based on King’s 1983 novella “Cycle of the Werewolf”, one of the earliest works by the author to be published in a limited edition, Silver Bullet was adapted for the screen by King himself, who jettisoned the story’s format of dividing the story into month-by-month chapters for a more straightforward narrative that preserves what’s ultimately a very simple tale of a small Maine town under siege from a werewolf.

The movie reflects that it is incredibly minor. There’s little suspense about who the werewolf is from the onset, and what tension or mystery there is gets diffused pretty quickly. Gary Busey and Everett McGill hammer it up in the adult leads while Corey Haim does believable work as the young paraplegic hero in Silver Bullet, which was directed by Daniel Attias ( a TV veteran helming his only feature film ). Less credible is the werewolf costume. In an era where movies like The Howling and An American Werewolf in London changed the game for this classic monster, the bear-like lycanthrope here is so 1960s.

9. Mr. Harrigan’s Phone ( 2022 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

The protagonist of King’s most recent collection of novellas,” Mr. Harrigan’s Phone,” is one of four stories in the film. Both of the characters both happen to be owners of their first iPhones at the same time. When the businessman dies and his phone is buried with him, the boy discovers that calling the mysteriously still-active number allows him to leave messages for Mr. Harrigan… messages that have repercussions.

Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, the movie, is one of a number of King-based works that have been subsidized by Netflix. The movie, which was directed by John Lee Hancock ( The Little Things ), stars It cast members Jaeden Martell and Donald Sutherland in one of his final roles as Mr. Harrigan. Hancock is a capable, competent director, and both Martell and Sutherland give deft performances, but the film is glacially paced. And making a movie around leaving voicemails doesn’t seem like a good idea in practice.

8. Secret Window ( 2004 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

Secret Window, based on” Secret Window, Secret Garden,” was the first film to be released in the 1990 collection Four Past Midnight, and was directed and written by David Koepp ( Jurassic Park ). Johnny Depp stars as Mort Rainey, an author who’s suffering from writer’s block and going through a divorce when a man named John Shooter ( John Turturro ) shows up at his house, claiming that Rainey plagiarized a story of his and quickly escalating his grievance to include violence and murder.

Fans are well-versed in King’s love of writing about writers and their struggles, and there are many similarities between this and King’s novel The Dark Half. But the problem with both this story and movie is that the twist&#8212, that Shooter is not real but a hidden aspect of Rainey’s own personality &#8212, can be seen coming before the first act even ends. Koepp also changes King’s ending and removes the supernatural aspect of the novella. The movie still has a stylish cast and is well-made, with Depp not clad in prosthetics or makeup for a change.

7. Hearts in Atlantis ( 2001 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

This is an odd one. Hearts in Atlantis is not based on the collection of the same name, per se, but rather on the book’s centerpiece novella,” Low Men in Yellow Coats”. Anthony Hopkins stars in the film, which was directed by Scott Hicks of Shine fame and centers on the enigmatic boarder Ted Brautigan, who moves in with 11-year-old Bobby Garfield ( Anton Yelchin ) and his mother ( Hope Davis ). Although Ted and Bobby strike up a friendship, Ted is also on the run from the “low men” who want to capture him for his psychic powers.

Although Roger Ebert enjoyed it, writing,” Rarely does a movie make you feel so warm and so uneasy at the same time,” Hearts in Atlantis received a mixed response from critics and audiences. The film is atmospheric but slow-moving while the performances from Hopkins and Yelchin are excellent. The biggest problem is that the menace of the “low men” is rendered rather vague. This is because the movie version had almost all of the context removed from the original story, which was tied to King’s Dark Tower mythos.

6. Apt Pupil ( 2000 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

The longest and darkest novella in King’s classic Different Seasons collection,” Apt Pupil” is about a high school student named Todd Bowden who discovers than an elderly man living in his town is actually a Nazi war criminal named Kurt Dussander. Fascinated with the Holocaust and its atrocities, Todd begins a parasitic, mutually destructive relationship with Dussander, one that brings out the sadistic qualities in both and ends with mass murder.

Unfortunately, the onscreen history of” Apt Pupil” is problematic, despite its pitch-black subject matter. An initial 1987 adaptation starring Rick Schroeder and Nicol Williamson was abandoned halfway through shooting when funding ran out. Bryan Singer made the decision in 1995 and filmed it as his follow-up to The Usual Suspects, starring Brad Renfro as Todd and Ian McKellen as Dustander. Both are chilling, as is the film itself, Singer also alters the ending, which is still dark but not nearly as violent as the novella. More disquieting, scandal erupted when three teenage extras accused Singer of making them strip naked for a shower scene, given later allegations surrounding Singer, this has only added an unsavory real-life aspect to an already deeply unpleasant movie.

5.1922 ( 2017 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

Thomas Jane has the distinction of starring in three Stephen King productions, and two of them are actually damn good ( the third is, uh, Dreamcatcher ). This Netflix adaptation of a Full Dark, No Stars novella is actually the most recent of the three. It stars Jane as Wilf James, a farmer who plots to murder his wife ( Molly Parker ) and coerces their own son ( Dylan Schmid ) into helping him. Although they’re successful, things go decidedly south for Wilf and his boy not long after. It&#8217, s a grisly narrative involving rats and the spirits of the vengeful dead.

One of the sturdier recent King-based films, it &#8217 is a macabre tale that Australian writer-director Zak Hilditch nails in terms of atmosphere and faithfulness. Jane is excellent as the tormented, sociopathic Wilf, and the movie’s overall feeling of rot and dread effectively echoes what happens to Wilf both mentally and physically. This is a little sleeper hit, though.

4. The Life of Chuck ( 2025 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

The Life of Chuck is not just the most recent adaptation of a King novella; rather, the story itself is one of the more recent King tales to appear on screen. Published in 2020’s If It Bleeds &#8212, the author’s fifth collection of novellas to date &#8212,” The Life of Chuck” is a tale in three acts, told in reverse order. An ex-husband and ex-wife are desperate to reconnect as the world sags toward the end of the world, and the story ends with a teenager seeing a vision of his ultimate fate but determined to live life as fully as possible. And there’s a wild dance number in the middle.

Adapted by King specialist Mike Flanagan ( Doctor Sleep), The Life of Chuck is not really a horror tale at all despite some eerie touches throughout. Instead, it’s a slouch for the idea of soaking up every moment in life you can, no matter how minor they may seem at the time. It’s also King at his most compassionate and humanist, which is something this planet could use right now. Flanagan perfectly captures the mood of King’s story, and the ensemble cast, which features Mark Hamill as his sour grandfather and Tom Hiddleston as the adult Chuck, is fantastic.

3. The Mist ( 2007 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

Director-writer Frank Darabont switched from producing Stephen King prison dramas ( like The Green Mile and another that will appear later on this list ) to adapting this pulp horror shocker based on King’s 1980 novel, which clocked in at around 130 pages. Darabont’s film is similarly lean, following a group of people who take refuge in a supermarket after a mysterious fog containing nightmarish monsters descends on their small town and possibly the rest of the world.

The survivors split into two camps representing reason and fanaticism, which is frequently the case with King stories. As is often the case with King stories, the people are just as dangerous as the monsters. But even the good guys are prone to making mistakes, which is what protagonist David Drayton ( Thomas Jane again ) does when he makes a final decision that ends the movie on an even bleaker note than King’s story. The Mist is straight-down-the-middle horror, which Darabont proves he’s equally effective at.

2. Stand By Me ( 1986 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

The Body, a classic novella by Stephen King, was first published in Different Seasons, along with &#8220, Apt Pupil&#8221, and the plot that served as the inspiration for the following film on this list. ” The Body” became the first of the three to arrive on the screen, as Stand by Me, giving it the distinction of being the first film adapted from a King story that was n&#8217, t horror. The film is a poignant, nostalgic coming-of-age tale about four young boys who hike along a railroad track one endless summer day on a mission to see the dead body of another boy killed by a passing train.

The Body &#8221 is a meditation on memory, youth, growing up, and memory that is similar in some ways to Ray Bradbury’s writing, and director Rob Reiner manages to capture King’s style in one of the best adaptations of the author’s work. The four boys &#8212, a painfully young River Phoenix, Wil Wheaton, JerryO’Connell, and Corey Feldman&#8212, are all magnificent while Kiefer Sutherland and John Cusack are also effective in important supporting roles. Stand By Me continues to be a moving tribute to the fleeting innocence of childhood.

1. The Shawshank Redemption ( 1994 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

You kind of assumed that everything would lead to this, didn’t you? The Different Seasons novella” Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” was faithfully transferred to the screen in 1994 by The Mist director and future The Walking Dead series creator, Frank Darabont. The Shawshank Redemption was a box office failure upon release, barely recovering its$ 25 million budget, despite positive reviews, top actors like Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins, and a deliberate attempt to downplay the King connection.

A second life on home video and cable television began to turn the tide, however, and The Shawshank Redemption is now considered not just one of the best King adaptations ever, but a beloved classic in its own right. Which it is: the movie is a beautifully acted, moving, and superbly told tale of both one man’s ( Robbins ) refusal to give up on himself as he spends a potential life sentence in prison on false charges, as well as the friendship he forms behind bars with another lifer ( Freeman ) who finds his own hope restored by their bond. The story is dark and harrowing in some places, with murder, brutal violence, and rape all being incorporated into the narrative, but King’s filmography still retains its best work.

The Life of Chuck is in theaters now.

The first post Stephen King Novella Adaptations Ranked appeared on Den of Geek.

Nothing compares to an oppressive world run by a military dictator in terms of romance and steam. Or more, that’s what writer Dani Francis ‘ debut novel, Silver Elite, postulates. The book, which was published in May 2025, has been the most new weapon in the ongoing civil war raging within online writing areas. Marketed as the first passage in]…]

The article The Newest BookTok Darling Silver Elite Proves Dire for Dystopian Literature appeared first on Den of Geek.

Writing and publishing in the book is a peculiar lion. Not quite a novel but lengthier than a short story ( and also longer than the craft’s red-headed stepchild, the novelette ). It’s a genre that allows fantasy writers to discover a history and its characters more in-depth than a short story, without requiring the fundamental complexity, chronological sweep, and multi-level plotting of a novel.

The story, however, also presents certain promotion problems: with length ranging from 17, 000 to 40, 000 thoughts ( a calculation that in itself is somewhat nebulous ), it can be tricky for publishers to convince consumers to shell out their hard-earned cash for a slim level that may not always reach even 100 pages.

Despite all this, Stephen King has long been an artist who’s embraced the book, going all the way back to his first set of four of them, the then famous Different Times. In fact, some of his best tales have fallen into this category, and it could even be argued that first King books like Carrie, The Working Guy, and The Long Walk are really romances. The monitor adaptations of King’s function have also been marked by this distinction. Condensing his usually giant novels or stretching his short stories to an appropriate running time for a feature can be difficult, but the novella has proven a number of times to be the ideal length for a film.

With the recently released in theaters and the highly anticipated The Life of Chuck, now is the time to look at the 15 films and one limited series of novels based on the works of the author. They are now officially branded as novellas. As one might expect, a number of them don’t work very well and haven’t even been widely seen while others are not just among the best King adaptations of all time, but stand tall as films on their own. Here are all 16 of them, ranked from least to first.

16. Dolan’s Cadillac ( 2009 )

This Canadian production, which was largely unreleased anywhere and was only released on video in the United States, is based on one of King’s more obscure tales. It was published in installments in his long-defunct official newsletter, Castle Rock, before being included in his 1993 collection, Nightmares and Dreamscapes. The story is a revenge tale in which a teacher named Robinson plots to kill a mob boss named Dolan, who had Robinson’s wife murdered. The plan involves Robinson intends to bury Dolan alive inside his car in a pit at the intersection of a highway construction site and a pit.

Wes Bentley and Christian Slater star as Robinson and Dolan in the film, which was helmed by journeyman TV director Jeff Beesley. The film suffers from the two leads ‘ wildly divergent performances ( Bentley is lax while Slater chews the scenery ), a lack of suspense, and a needless fistful of subplots, which are not widely reviewed. It also lacks the psychological edge found in King’s original text.

15.  Riding the Bullet ( 2004 )  ,  ,

Running just over 40 pages in King’s Everything’s Eventual collection,” Riding the Bullet” is probably more famous for the way it was originally published than for either the story itself or the film based on it. The novella was made available in 2000 as the first mass-market e-book that fans could download for$ 2.50. King made it available as the world’s first mass-market e-book. Hundreds of thousands of downloads were apparently sold, but King did not experiment much further with this kind of publishing.

As for the movie itself, it was directed by Mick Garris, a King specialist who also directed the 1990s miniseries versions of The Stand and The Shining (among others ). With this limited release, he falls flat here. It’s a slight tale about a college student ( Jonathan Jackson ) who has a spectral encounter while hitchhiking home to be at his mother’s side after she has a stroke and is forced to make a terrible decision. Gairis, who also wrote the screenplay, struggles to make this one into a full-length film, which results in a rather uninteresting experience.

14. A Good Marriage ( 2014 ) &nbsp,

This unreleased indie thriller was adapted by King himself ( a relative rarity in the 21st century ) and was directed by Peter Askin, who is perhaps best known for directing the first Off-Broadway production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. King’s story, published in the 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars, is about a woman who discovers that her husband is a serial killer after 27 years of marriage. The film, which stars Joan Allen as the wife and Anthony LaPaglia as her secretly psychotic husband, is very faithful to the bookla, right down to the third act turn it takes.

The problem is that the story is relatively small and told on the level of a TV movie-of-the-week, with Allen and LaPaglia not demonstrating the kind of chemistry needed to make a long marriage&#8212, even one that has in this story settled into complacency. Sure enough, A Good Marriage was relegated to direct-to-video release after a very brief theatrical run, cementing its status as “minor” King.

13. In the Tall Grass ( 2019 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

This Netflix movie, based on a novella by King and his son Joe Hill, was directed by Cube and Splice director Vincenzo Natali ( the story can be found in Hill’s Full Throttle collection, which also features a second father-son collaboration,” Throttle” ). In the original story, two siblings, a pregnant college freshman and her brother, pull over near a large field of grass while driving across country. When they hear a little boy calling for help from the grass, they enter the field and find themselves quickly lost in an eerie, ever-changing landscape.

The narrative includes some of the most eerie images that neither author has ever imagined, and it continues the King’s enduring fascination with enormous fields of tall vegetation, which dates all the way back to” Children of the Corn” tales. But Natali stretches the King boys ‘ relatively slim tale ( it runs about 46 pages in print ) to make a 90-minute movie, adding all kinds of new elements ( extra characters and a time loop aspect ) that render the film increasingly incomprehensible.

12. Big Driver ( 2014 )

Another entry from King’s Full Dark, No Stars collection, this film ended up on the Lifetime cable network of all places despite its grim narrative. The divisive second miniseries based on” Salem’s Lot” was directed by Mikael Salomon a decade earlier, and Richard Christian Matheson, the son of one of King &#8217’s idols, wrote the teleplay. The story is about a mystery writer named Tess who, after giving a reading at a local library, is raped and tortured by a hulking truck driver on a rural road. Tess commits vengeance into her own hands after learning that the woman who invited her to the reading is the mother of her attacker&#8212, and thus led her into a trap.

Reminiscent in some ways of the cult horror film Mother’s Day,” Big Driver” reads pretty damn dark on the page, which makes some of the movie’s attempts at humor rather jarringly out of place. The theme of female empowerment is well-meant, but the movie can’t really overcome its tired revenge-exploitation roots. Tess is played by Maria Bello, and Ann Dowd plays the evil mother.

11. The Langoliers ( 1995 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

The one full-fledged television production on this list is, ironically, proof of why sometimes it’s not always the best idea to give a King story a wide berth in terms of running time. Originally published in King’s 1990 collection Four Past Midnight,” The Langoliers” is about a commercial airliner that gets flung several minutes into the past through a rip in time, with the passengers finding themselves in an empty, decaying reality that gets consumed by monstrous entities as time ineluctably moves forward.

The Langoliers, one of King’s stranger intrigues into the tense crossroads between sci-fi and horror, would have made a tight, 110-minute film. But at three hours with commercials, and released over two nights, director Tom Holland’s faithful adaptation is overly long. Plus, it’s difficult to read King’s story and not think of the time-eating monsters as Pac-Men, which is what they end up looking like onscreen thanks to some awful 90s television VFX.

10. Silver Bullet ( 1985 ) &nbsp,

Silver Bullet, one of King’s earliest works to be released in a limited edition, was adapted for the screen by King himself, who broke the story’s structure by breaking it up into month-by-month chapters for a more straightforward narrative that preserves what is ultimately a very straightforward tale of a small Maine town under siege from a werewolf.

It’s very much a minor work and the movie reflects that. There is little suspense in the beginning about who the werewolf is, and the tension or mystery that arises quickly dissipates. Directed by Daniel Attias ( a TV veteran helming his sole feature film ), Silver Bullet features Gary Busey and Everett McGill hamming it up in the adult leads while Corey Haim does credible work as the young paraplegic hero. Less credible is the werewolf costume. The bear-like lycanthrope is so 1960s in a time when films like The Howling and An American Werewolf in London changed the game for this classic monster.

9. Phone ( 202 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, Mr. Harrigan’s

One of the four stories in King’s last collection of novellas, 2020’s If It Bleeds,” Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” is about a teenager who befriends an aging, wealthy businessman, both of whom happen to get their first iPhones at the same time. When the businessman dies and his phone is buried with him, the boy discovers that calling the mysteriously still-active number allows him to leave messages for Mr. Harrigan… messages that have repercussions.

The movie Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is one of several King-based works that Netflix has supported. Directed by John Lee Hancock ( The Little Things ), the film stars It cast member Jaeden Martell as the boy Craig and Donald Sutherland in one of his final screen appearances as Mr. Harrigan. The movie has a glacially slow pace, but Hancock is a capable, competent director and Martell and Sutherland both deliver skillful performances. And building a movie around leaving voicemail messages just doesn’t seem like a good idea in practice.

8. Secret Window ( 2004 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

Written and directed by David Koepp ( Jurassic Park ), Secret Window is based on” Secret Window, Secret Garden”, first published in the 1990 collection Four Past Midnight. Mort Rainey, an author who is going through divorce, is played by Johnny Depp as John Shooter ( John Turturro ), who claims Rainey plagiarized a personal story and quickly escalates his grievance to include violence and murder.

Fans know that King loves to write about writers and their struggles, and similarities abound between this and King’s novel The Dark Half. But the problem with both this story and movie is that the twist&#8212, that Shooter is not real but a hidden aspect of Rainey’s own personality &#8212, can be seen coming before the first act even ends. Koepp also alters King’s conclusion and removes the supernatural element from the novella. Still, the film is stylishly done with a good cast where Depp is not encased in prosthetics or makeup for a change.

7. Hearts in Atlantis ( 2001 ) &nbsp, &nbsp,

This is an odd one. Hearts in Atlantis is not directly related to the book’s central novella,” Low Men in Yellow Coats,” but rather on the collection of the same name. Directed by Scott Hicks of Shine fame, the film stars Anthony Hopkins as Ted Brautigan, an enigmatic boarder who comes to live with 11-year-old Bobby Garfield ( Anton Yelchin ) and his mother Liz ( Hope Davis ). Although Ted and Bobby form a friendship, Ted is also on the run from the “low guys” who want to seduce him because of his psychic abilities.

Hearts in Atlantis got a mixed response from critics and audiences, although Roger Ebert enjoyed it, writing,” Rarely does a movie make you feel so warm and so uneasy at the same time”. The film is atmospheric but slow-moving while the performances from Hopkins and Yelchin are excellent. The biggest issue is that the “low men “‘s threat is rendered rather ambiguously. This is because the original story was tied to King’s Dark Tower mythos, with nearly all of that context removed for the movie version.

6. Apt Pupil ( 1998 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

The longest and darkest novella in King’s classic Different Seasons collection,” Apt Pupil” is about a high school student named Todd Bowden who discovers than an elderly man living in his town is actually a Nazi war criminal named Kurt Dussander. Todd, who is fascinated by the Holocaust and its atrocities, forms a parasitic, mutually destructive bond with Dussander, which highlights both his and his character’s sadistic traits and culminates in mass murder.

Unfortunately matching its pitch-black subject matter, the history of” Apt Pupil” onscreen is a troubled one. When funding ran out, the original 1987 adaptation starring Rick Schroeder and Nicol Williamson was canceled halfway through production. So Bryan Singer picked up the option in 1995 and filmed it as his follow-up to The Usual Suspects, with Brad Renfro as Todd and Ian McKellen as Dussander. Both are chilling, as is the film itself, Singer also alters the ending, which is still dark but not nearly as violent as the novella. Given later allegations involving Singer, the scandal that followed when three teenage extras accused Singer of making them strip naked for a shower scene was more unsettling.

5.1922 ( 2017 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

Thomas Jane has the honor of playing in three Stephen King films, two of which are excellent ( the third is, uh, Dreamcatcher ). This Netflix adaptation of a novella from Full Dark, No Stars is actually the most recent of the three, and features Jane as Wilf James, a farmer who hatches a plot to murder his wife ( Molly Parker ) and recruits their own son ( Dylan Schmid ) into helping him. Although they’re successful, things go decidedly south for Wilf and his boy not long after. It’s a gruesome story with rats and the spirits of the vengeful dead.

It&#8217, s a macabre tale that Australian writer-director Zak Hilditch nails in terms of atmosphere and faithfulness, making for one of the sturdier recent King-based movies. Jane excels as the tormented, sociopathic Wilf, and the overall feeling of rot and dread effectively mirrors what transpires to Wil both mentally and physically. This one’s a bit of a sleeper hit.

4. The Life of Chuck ( 2025 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

The Life of Chuck is not just the most recent adaptation of a King novella, but the story itself is one of the newer King tales to make it to the screen. The Life of Chuck is a tale in three acts told in reverse order, and was published in 2020’s If It Bleeds &#8212, the author’s fifth collection of novellas to date. It begins with an ex-husband and wife desperate to reconnect as the world teeters on the edge of apocalypse and ends with a teenager seeing a vision of his ultimate fate but determined to live life as fully as possible. And there’s a wild dance number in the middle.

The Life of Chuck, which was adapted by King expert Mike Flanagan ( Doctor Sleep), does not actually have a horror story at all despite some eerie details all around. Instead it’s a paean to the idea of appreciating every moment in life that you can, no matter how insignificant they may seem at the time. This planet could use King at the moment because he is at his most compassionate and humanist. Flanagan captures the tone of King’s story perfectly, and the ensemble cast, led by Tom Hiddleston as the adult Chuck and Mark Hamill as his crusty grandfather, is wonderful.

3. The Mist ( 2007 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

Director-writer Frank Darabont went from making Stephen King prison dramas ( like The Green Mile and one more that will come later on this list ) to adapting this pulp horror shocker, based on King’s 1980 tale that clocked in at around 130 pages. Similar to its leanness, Rabatont’s film follows a group of people who find refuge in a supermarket after a mysterious fog containing nightmarish monsters descends on their small town and possibly the rest of the world.

As is often the case with King stories, the people are just as dangerous as the monsters, as the survivors split into two camps representing reason and fanaticism. But even the good guys are prone to making mistakes, which is what protagonist David Drayton ( Thomas Jane again ) does when he makes a final decision that ends the movie on an even bleaker note than King’s story. Darabont demonstrates he’s equally effective at straight-down-the-middle horror in The Mist, which is what it’s all about.

2.  Stand By Me ( 1986 ),  ,

Stephen King’s classic novella” The Body” was first published in Different Seasons, alongside &#8220, Apt Pupil&#8221, and the story that inspired the next movie on this list. ” The Body” became the first of the three to arrive on the screen, as Stand by Me, giving it the distinction of being the first film adapted from a King story that was n&#8217, t horror. One endless summer day, four young boys hike along a railroad track to see the body of another boy who was killed by a passing train. The movie is a poignant, nostalgic coming-of-age tale.

&#8220, The Body &#8221, is a meditation on youth, growing up, and memory, reminiscent in some ways of Ray Bradbury’s work, and director Rob Reiner captures the tone of King’s novella in what is easily one of the best adaptations of the author’s work. The four boys, who include a painfully young River Phoenix, Wil Wheaton, JerryO’Connell, and Corey Feldman, are all excellent actors in crucial supporting roles, along with Kiefer Sutherland and John Cusack. Stand By Me remains a moving tribute to the fleeting innocence of childhood.

1. The Shawshank Redemption ( 1994 ) &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

You kind of suspected it would all lead here, right? The Mist director and upcoming The Walking Dead series creator, Frank Darabont, faithfully transferred Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption to the screen in 1994. Despite positive reviews, top stars like Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins, and a deliberate attempt to downplay the King connection&#8212, plus an eventual seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture&#8212, The Shawshank Redemption was a box office bust upon release, barely earning back its$ 25 million budget.

A second life on home video and cable television began to turn the tide, however, and The Shawshank Redemption is now considered not just one of the best King adaptations ever, but a beloved classic in its own right. Which is true: the film is a beautifully performed, moving, and masterfully told tale of both one man’s ( Robbins ) refusal to give up on himself as he faces a potential life sentence for false charges and his friendship with another lifer ( Freeman ), who finds his own hope restored by their bond. It’s dark and harrowing in spots, with murder, savage violence, and rape all factoring into the story, but it remains a crowning achievement in the King filmography.

Right now, The Life of Chuck is in theaters.

The post Stephen King Novella Adaptations Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

” Any reply”? is perhaps one of the worst ways to ask for opinions. It’s obscure and unfocused, and it doesn’t give a clear picture of what we’re looking for. Getting good opinions starts sooner than we might hope: it starts with the demand.

Starting the process of receiving feedback with a question may seem counterintuitive, but it makes sense if we consider that receiving feedback can be seen as a form of pattern research. In the same way that we wouldn’t perform any studies without the correct questions to get the insight that we need, the best way to ask for feedback is also to build strong issues.

Design criticism is never a one-time procedure. Sure, any great comments process continues until the project is finished, but this is especially true for layout because architecture work continues iteration after iteration, from a high level to the finest details. Each stage requires its unique set of questions.

And suddenly, as with any great research, we need to examine what we got up, get to the base of its perspectives, and take action. Problem, generation, and analysis. This look at each of those.

The query

Being available to input is important, but we need to be specific about what we’re looking for. Any comments,” What do you think,” or” I’d love to hear your mind” at the conclusion of a presentation are likely to garner a lot of different ideas, or worse, to make everyone follow the lead of the first speaker. And next… we get frustrated because vague issues like those you turn a high-level moves review into folks rather commenting on the borders of buttons. Which topic may be a savory one, so it might be difficult to get the team to switch to the subject you wanted to concentrate on.

But how do we get into this scenario? It’s a combination of various components. One is that we don’t often consider asking as a part of the input approach. Another is how healthy it is to assume that everyone else will agree with the problem and leave it alone. Another is that in nonprofessional debate, there’s usually no need to be that exact. In summary, we tend to undervalue the value of the concerns, so we don’t work to make them better.

The work of asking good questions guidelines and focuses the criticism. It’s even a form of acceptance because it specifies what kind of comments you’d like to receive and how you’re open to them. It puts people in the right emotional position, especially in situations when they weren’t expecting to give opinions.

There isn’t a second best method to request suggestions. It simply needs to be certain, and sensitivity can take several shapes. The period than depth model for design critique has been a particularly helpful tool for my coaching.

” Stage” refers to each of the steps of the process—in our event, the design process. The type of input changes as the customer research moves on to the final design. But within a single stage, one might also examine whether some assumptions are correct and whether there’s been a suitable language of the amassed input into updated designs as the job has evolved. The layers of user experience could serve as a starting point for potential questions. What do you want to know: Project objectives? user requirements? Functionality? the content Interaction design? Information architecture UI design? design of navigation Visual design? Branding?

Here’re a few example questions that are precise and to the point that refer to different layers:

• Functionality: Is it desirable to automate account creation?
• Interaction design: Take a look through the updated flow and let me know whether you see any steps or error states that I might’ve missed.
• Information architecture: This page contains two competing pieces of information. Is the structure effective in communicating them both?
• User interface design: What do you think about the top-of-the-page error counter, which makes sure you can see the next error even when the error is outside the viewport?
• Navigation design: From research, we identified these second-level navigation items, but once you’re on the page, the list feels too long and hard to navigate. Do you have any suggestions for how to handle this?
• Visual design: Are the sticky notifications in the bottom-right corner visible enough?

The other axis of specificity is determined by how far you’d like to go with the information being presented. For example, we might have introduced a new end-to-end flow, but there was a specific view that you found particularly challenging and you’d like a detailed review of that. This can be especially helpful from one iteration to the next when it’s crucial to highlight the areas that have changed.

There are other things that we can consider when we want to achieve more specific—and more effective—questions.

Eliminating generic qualifiers from your questions like “good,” “well,” “nice,” “bad,” “okay,” and” cool” is a simple trick. For example, asking,” When the block opens and the buttons appear, is this interaction good”? is it possible to look specific, but you can identify the “good” qualifier and make the question” When the block opens and the buttons appear, is it clear what the next action is” look like?

Sometimes we actually do want broad feedback. That’s uncommon, but it can occur. In that sense, you might still make it explicit that you’re looking for a wide range of opinions, whether at a high level or with details. Or perhaps you should just say,” At first glance, what do you think”? so that it’s clear that what you’re asking is open ended but focused on someone’s impression after their first five seconds of looking at it.

Sometimes the project is particularly broad, and some areas may have already been thoroughly explored. In these situations, it might be useful to explicitly say that some parts are already locked in and aren’t open to feedback. Although it’s not something I’d recommend in general, I’ve found it helpful in avoiding getting back into rabbit holes like those that could lead to further refinement but aren’t currently what matters most.

Asking specific questions can completely change the quality of the feedback that you receive. People with less refined criticism will now be able to provide more actionable feedback, and even expert designers will appreciate the clarity and effectiveness gained from concentrating solely on what’s needed. It can save a lot of time and frustration.

The iteration

Design iterations are probably the most visible part of the design work, and they provide a natural checkpoint for feedback. Many design tools have inline commenting, but many of them only display changes as a single fluid stream in the same file. In addition, these kinds of design tools automatically update shared UI components, make conversations disappear and require designs to always display the most recent version, unless these would-be useful features were manually disabled. The implied goal that these design tools seem to have is to arrive at just one final copy with all discussions closed, probably because they inherited patterns from how written documents are collaboratively edited. That’s probably not the most effective way to go about designing critiques, but even if I don’t want to be too prescriptive, it might work for some teams.

The asynchronous design-critique approach that I find most effective is to create explicit checkpoints for discussion. For this, I’ll use the term iteration post. It refers to a write-up or presentation of the design iteration followed by a discussion thread of some kind. This can be used on any platform that can accommodate this structure. By the way, when I refer to a “write-up or presentation“, I’m including video recordings or other media too: as long as it’s asynchronous, it works.

Using iteration posts has a number of benefits:

• It creates a rhythm in the design work so that the designer can review feedback from each iteration and prepare for the next.
• Decisions are made immediately available for future review, and conversations are also always available.
• It creates a record of how the design changed over time.
• Depending on the tool, it might also make it simpler to collect and act on feedback.

These posts of course don’t mean that no other feedback approach should be used, just that iteration posts could be the primary rhythm for a remote design team to use. And from there, there can develop additional feedback techniques ( such as live critique, pair designing, or inline comments ).

I don’t think there’s a standard format for iteration posts. However, there are a few high-level components that make sense as a baseline:

1. The goal
2. The layout
3. The list of changes
4. The querys

Each project is likely to have a goal, and hopefully it’s something that’s already been summarized in a single sentence somewhere else, such as the client brief, the product manager’s outline, or the project owner’s request. Therefore, I would repeat this in every iteration post, literally copy and pasting it. The idea is to provide context and to repeat what’s essential to make each iteration post complete so that there’s no need to find information spread across multiple posts. The most recent iteration post will have everything I need if I want to know about the most recent design.

This copy-and-paste part introduces another relevant concept: alignment comes from repetition. Therefore, repeating information in posts is actually very effective at ensuring that everyone is on the same page.

The design is then the actual series of information-architecture outlines, diagrams, flows, maps, wireframes, screens, visuals, and any other kind of design work that’s been done. It’s any design artifact, in essence. For the final stages of work, I prefer the term blueprint to emphasize that I’ll be showing full flows instead of individual screens to make it easier to understand the bigger picture.

It might also be helpful to have clear names on the objects since it makes them look better to refer to. Write the post in a way that helps people understand the work. It’s not very different from creating a strong live presentation.

For an efficient discussion, you should also include a bullet list of the changes from the previous iteration to let people focus on what’s new, which can be especially useful for larger pieces of work where keeping track, iteration after iteration, could become a challenge.

Finally, as mentioned earlier, a list of the questions must be included in order to help you guide the design critique in the desired direction. Doing this as a numbered list can also help make it easier to refer to each question by its number.

Not every iteration is the same. Earlier iterations don’t need to be as tightly focused—they can be more exploratory and experimental, maybe even breaking some of the design-language guidelines to see what’s possible. Then, later, the iterations begin coming to a decision and improving it until the feature development is complete.

I want to highlight that even if these iteration posts are written and conceived as checkpoints, by no means do they need to be exhaustive. A post might be just a concept to start a conversation, or it might be a cumulative list of all the features that have been added gradually over the course of each iteration until the full picture is achieved.

Over time, I also started using specific labels for incremental iterations: i1, i2, i3, and so on. Although this may seem like a minor labeling tip, it can be useful in many ways:

• Unique—It’s a clear unique marker. Everyone knows where to go to review things, and it’s simple to say” This was discussed in i4″ with each project.
• Unassuming—It works like versions ( such as v1, v2, and v3 ) but in contrast, versions create the impression of something that’s big, exhaustive, and complete. Exploratory, incomplete, or partial should be the definition of an argument.
• Future proof—It resolves the “final” naming problem that you can run into with versions. No more files with the title “final final complete no-really-its-done” Within each project, the largest number always represents the latest iteration.

The wording release candidate (RC ) could be used to indicate when a design is finished enough to be worked on, even if there are some areas that still need improvement and, in turn, require more iterations, such as” with i8 we reached RC” or “i12 is an RC” to indicate when it is finished.

The review

What typically occurs during a design critique is an open discussion that can be very productive between two people. This approach is particularly effective during live, synchronous feedback. However, using a different approach when we work asynchronously is more effective: adopting a user-research mindset. Written feedback from teammates, stakeholders, or others can be treated as if it were the result of user interviews and surveys, and we can analyze it accordingly.

This shift has some significant advantages, making asynchronous feedback particularly effective, especially around these friction points:

1. It removes the pressure to reply to everyone.
2. It lessens the annoyance caused by swoop-by comments.
3. It lessens our personal stake.

The first friction point is having to press yourself to respond to each and every comment. Sometimes we write the iteration post, and we get replies from our team. It’s simple, straightforward, and doesn’t cause any issues. But other times, some solutions might require more in-depth discussions, and the amount of replies can quickly increase, which can create a tension between trying to be a good team player by replying to everyone and doing the next design iteration. This might be especially true if the respondent is a stakeholder or someone directly involved in the project who we feel we need to speak with. We need to accept that this pressure is absolutely normal, and it’s human nature to try to accommodate people who we care about. When we treat a design critique more like user research, we realize that we don’t need to respond to every comment, and there are alternatives: In asynchronous spaces, responding to all comments can be effective.

One is to let the next iteration speak for itself. The response is received when the design changes and a follow-up iteration is made. You might tag all the people who were involved in the previous discussion, but even that’s a choice, not a requirement.
• Another option is to respond politely to acknowledge each comment, such as” Understood. Thank you”,” Good points— I’ll review”, or” Thanks. In the upcoming iteration, I’ll include these. In some cases, this could also be just a single top-level comment along the lines of” Thanks for all the feedback everyone—the next iteration is coming soon”!
• Another option is to provide a quick summary of the comments before moving on. Depending on your workflow, this can be particularly useful as it can provide a simplified checklist that you can then use for the next iteration.

The swoop-by comment, which is the kind of feedback that comes from a member of a team or non-project who might not be aware of the context, restrictions, decisions, or requirements, or of the discussions from earlier iterations, is the second friction point. On their side, there’s something that one can hope that they might learn: they could start to acknowledge that they’re doing this and they could be more conscious in outlining where they’re coming from. Swoop-by comments frequently prompt the simple thought,” We’ve already discussed this,” and it can be frustrating to have to keep coming back and forth.

Let’s begin by acknowledging again that there’s no need to reply to every comment. However, if responding to a previously litigated point might be helpful, a brief response with a link to the previous discussion for additional information is typically sufficient. Remember, alignment comes from repetition, so it’s okay to repeat things sometimes!

Swoop-by commenting can still be useful for two reasons: first, they might point out something that isn’t clear, and second, they might have the power to fit in with a user’s perspective when they are seeing the design for the first time. Sure, you’ll still be frustrated, but that might at least help in dealing with it.

The personal stake we might have in the design could be the third friction point, which might cause us to feel defensive if the review turned into a discussion. Treating feedback as user research helps us create a healthy distance between the people giving us feedback and our ego ( because yes, even if we don’t want to admit it, it’s there ). In the end, presenting everything in aggregated form helps us to prioritize our work more.

Always remember that while you need to listen to stakeholders, project owners, and specific advice, you don’t have to accept every piece of feedback. You must examine it and come up with a conclusion that you can support, but sometimes “no” is the best choice.

As the designer leading the project, you’re in charge of that decision. In the end, everyone has their area of specialization, and the designer has the most background and knowledge to make the best choice. And by listening to the feedback that you’ve received, you’re making sure that it’s also the best and most balanced decision.

Thanks to Mike Shelton and Brie Anne Demkiw for their initial review of this article.

One of the most successful soft knowledge we have at our disposal is the ability to work together to improve our patterns while developing our own abilities and opinions, in whatever form it takes, and whatever it may be called.

Feedback is also one of the most underestimated equipment, and generally by assuming that we’re already good at it, we settle, forgetting that it’s a talent that can be trained, grown, and improved. Bad feedback can cause conflict in jobs, lower motivation, and negatively impact faith and teamwork over the long term. Quality opinions can be a revolutionary force.

Practicing our knowledge is absolutely a good way to enhance, but the learning gets yet faster when it’s paired with a good base that programs and focuses the exercise. What are some fundamental components of providing effective opinions? And how can comments be adjusted for isolated and distributed job settings?

We can find a long history of sequential opinions on the web: code was written and discussed on mailing lists since the beginning of open source. Currently, engineers engage on pull calls, developers post in their favourite design tools, project managers and sprint masters exchange ideas on tickets, and so on.

Design analysis is often the label used for a type of input that’s provided to make our job better, jointly. So it generally adheres to many of the concepts with comments, but it also has some differences.

The information

The content of the feedback serves as the foundation for every effective analysis, so we need to start there. There are many designs that you can use to form your content. The one that I personally like best—because it’s obvious and actionable—is this one from Lara Hogan.

This formula is typically used to provide feedback to people, but it also fits really well in a style criticism because it finally addresses one of the main inquiries that we work on: What? Where? Why? How? Imagine that you’re giving some comments about some pattern function that spans several screens, like an onboard movement: there are some pages shown, a stream blueprint, and an outline of the decisions made. You notice something that needs to be improved. If you keep the three elements of the equation in mind, you’ll have a mental model that can help you be more precise and effective.

A comment that appears to be reasonable at first glance could be included in some feedback, as it only appears to partially fulfill the requirements. But does it?

Not sure about the buttons ‘ styles and hierarchy—it feels off. Can they be altered?

Observation for design feedback doesn’t just mean pointing out which part of the interface your feedback refers to, but it also refers to offering a perspective that’s as specific as possible. Do you offer the user’s viewpoint? Your expert perspective? A business perspective? From the perspective of the project manager? A first-time user’s perspective?

I anticipate one to go forward and the other to go back when I see these two buttons.

Impact is about the why. Just pointing out a UI element might sometimes be enough if the issue may be obvious, but more often than not, you should add an explanation of what you’re pointing out.

I anticipate one to go forward and the other to go back when I see these two buttons. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow.

The question approach is meant to provide open guidance by eliciting the critical thinking in the designer receiving the feedback. Notably, in Lara’s equation she provides a second approach: request, which instead provides guidance toward a specific solution. While that’s generally a viable option for feedback, I’ve found that going back to the question approach typically leads to the best solutions for design critiques because designers are generally more open to experiment in a space.

The difference between the two can be exemplified with, for the question approach:

I anticipate one to go forward and the other to go back when I see these two buttons. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Would it make sense to unify them?

Or, for the request approach:

I anticipate one to go forward and the other to go back when I see these two buttons. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same pair of forward and back buttons.

At this point in some situations, it might be useful to integrate with an extra why: why you consider the given suggestion to be better.

I anticipate one to go forward and the other to go back when I see these two buttons. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons so that users don’t get confused.

Choosing the question approach or the request approach can also at times be a matter of personal preference. I spent a while working on improving my feedback, conducting anonymous feedback reviews and sharing feedback with others. After a few rounds of this work and a year later, I got a positive response: my feedback came across as effective and grounded. Until I changed teams. Quite unexpected, my next round of criticism from one particular person wasn’t very positive. The reason is that I had previously tried not to be prescriptive in my advice—because the people who I was previously working with preferred the open-ended question format over the request style of suggestions. However, there was one person in this other team who now preferred specific guidance. So I adapted my feedback for them to include requests.

One comment that I heard come up a few times is that this kind of feedback is quite long, and it doesn’t seem very efficient. Yes, but also no. Let’s explore both sides.

No, this kind of feedback is effective because the length is a byproduct of clarity, and giving this kind of feedback can provide precisely enough information for a sound fix. Also if we zoom out, it can reduce future back-and-forth conversations and misunderstandings, improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of collaboration beyond the single comment. Imagine that in the example above the feedback were instead just,” Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons”. Since the designer receiving this feedback wouldn’t have much to go by, they might just make the change. In later iterations, the interface might change or they might introduce new features—and maybe that change might not make sense anymore. Without explaining the why, the designer might assume that the change is one of consistency, but what if it wasn’t? So there could now be an underlying concern that changing the buttons would be perceived as a regression.

Yes, this style of feedback is not always efficient because the points in some comments don’t always need to be exhaustive, sometimes because certain changes may be obvious (” The font used doesn’t follow our guidelines” ) and sometimes because the team may have a lot of internal knowledge such that some of the whys may be implied.

Therefore, the equation above is intended to serve as a mnemonic to reflect and enhance the practice rather than a strict template for feedback. Even after years of active work on my critiques, I still from time to time go back to this formula and reflect on whether what I just wrote is effective.

The tone

Well-grounded content is the foundation of feedback, but that’s not really enough. The soft skills of the person who’s providing the critique can multiply the likelihood that the feedback will be well received and understood. It has been demonstrated that only positive feedback can lead to sustained change in people. It can be determined by tone alone whether content is rejected or welcomed.

Since our goal is to be understood and to have a positive working environment, tone is essential to work on. I’ve tried to summarize the necessary soft skills over the years using a formula that resembles that of the content receptivity equation.

Respectful feedback comes across as grounded, solid, and constructive. It’s the kind of feedback that, whether it’s positive or negative, is perceived as useful and fair.

Timing refers to the moment when the feedback occurs. To-the-point feedback doesn’t have much hope of being well received if it’s given at the wrong time. If a new feature’s entire high-level information architecture is about to go live when it’s about to be released, it might still be relevant if that questioning raises a significant blocker that no one saw, but those concerns are much more likely to have to wait for a later revision. So in general, attune your feedback to the stage of the project. Early iteration? Iteration that was later? Polishing work in progress? Each of these needs varies. The right timing will make it more likely that your feedback will be well received.

Attitude is the equivalent of intent, and in the context of person-to-person feedback, it can be referred to as radical candor. That entails checking whether what we have in mind will actually help the person and improve the overall project before writing. This might be a hard reflection at times because maybe we don’t want to admit that we don’t really appreciate that person. Hopefully that’s not the case, but it can happen, and that’s okay. Acknowledging and owning that can help you make up for that: how would I write if I really cared about them? How can I avoid being passive aggressive? What can I do to encourage constructive behavior?

Form is relevant especially in a diverse and cross-cultural work environments because having great content, perfect timing, and the right attitude might not come across if the way that we write creates misunderstandings. There could be many reasons for this, including the fact that occasionally certain words may cause specific reactions, that non-native speakers may not be able to comprehend all thenuances of some sentences, that our brains may be different, and that we may perceive the world differently. Neurodiversity is a requirement. Whatever the reason, it’s important to review not just what we write but how.

A few years back, I was asking for some feedback on how I give feedback. I was given some sound advice, but I also got a surprise comment. They pointed out that when I wrote” Oh, ]… ]”, I made them feel stupid. That wasn’t my intention at all! I felt really bad, and I just realized that I provided feedback to them for months, and every time I might have made them feel stupid. I was horrified … but also thankful. I quickly changed my situation by adding “oh” to my list of replaced words (your choice between aText, TextExpander, or others ) so that when I typed “oh,” it was immediately deleted.

Something to highlight because it’s quite frequent—especially in teams that have a strong group spirit—is that people tend to beat around the bush. It’s important to keep in mind that having a positive attitude doesn’t necessarily mean passing judgment on the feedback; rather, it simply means that you give it constructive and respectful feedback, whether it be difficult or positive. The nicest thing that you can do for someone is to help them grow.

We have a great advantage in giving feedback in written form: it can be reviewed by another person who isn’t directly involved, which can help to reduce or remove any bias that might be there. When I shared a comment with someone I knew,” How does this sound,”” How can I do it better,” or even” How would you have written it,” I discovered that the two versions had different meanings.

The format

Asynchronous feedback also has a significant inherent benefit: we can devote more time to making sure that the suggestions ‘ clarity of communication and actionability meet two main objectives.

Let’s imagine that someone shared a design iteration for a project. You are reviewing it and leaving a comment. Let’s try to think about some factors that might be helpful to consider, as there are many ways to accomplish this, and context is of course a factor.

In terms of clarity, start by grounding the critique that you’re about to give by providing context. This includes specifically describing where you’re coming from: do you know the project well, or do you just see it for the first time? Are you coming from a high-level perspective, or are you figuring out the details? Are there regressions? Which user’s point of view are you addressing when offering your feedback? Is the design iteration at a point where it would be okay to ship this, or are there major things that need to be addressed first?

Even if you’re giving feedback to a team that already has some project information, providing context is helpful. And context is absolutely essential when giving cross-team feedback. If I were to review a design that might be indirectly related to my work, and if I had no knowledge about how the project arrived at that point, I would say so, highlighting my take as external.

We frequently concentrate on the negatives and attempt to list every improvement that could be made. That’s of course important, but it’s just as important—if not more—to focus on the positives, especially if you saw progress from the previous iteration. Although this may seem superfluous, it’s important to keep in mind that design is a field with hundreds of possible solutions for each problem. So pointing out that the design solution that was chosen is good and explaining why it’s good has two major benefits: it confirms that the approach taken was solid, and it helps to ground your negative feedback. In the longer term, sharing positive feedback can help prevent regressions on things that are going well because those things will have been highlighted as important. Positive feedback can also help, as an added bonus, prevent impostor syndrome.

There’s one powerful approach that combines both context and a focus on the positives: frame how the design is better than the status quo ( compared to a previous iteration, competitors, or benchmarks ) and why, and then on that foundation, you can add what could be improved. There is a significant difference between a critique of a design that is already in good shape and one that isn’t quite there yet.

Another way that you can improve your feedback is to depersonalize the feedback: the comments should always be about the work, never about the person who made it. It’s” This button isn’t well aligned” versus” You haven’t aligned this button well”. Just before sending, review your writing to make changes to this.

In terms of actionability, one of the best approaches to help the designer who’s reading through your feedback is to split it into bullet points or paragraphs, which are easier to review and analyze one by one. You might want to break up the feedback into sections or even between several comments for longer pieces. Of course, adding screenshots or signifying markers of the specific part of the interface you’re referring to can also be especially useful.

One approach that I’ve personally used effectively in some contexts is to enhance the bullet points with four markers using emojis. A red square indicates that it is something I consider blocking, a yellow diamond indicates that it should be changed, and a green circle indicates that it is fully confirmed. I also use a blue spiral � � for either something that I’m not sure about, an exploration, an open alternative, or just a note. However, I’d only use this strategy on teams where I’ve already established a high level of trust because the impact could be quite demoralizing if I had to deliver a lot of red squares, and I’d change how I’d communicate that a little.

Let’s see how this would work by reusing the example that we used earlier as the first bullet point in this list:

• 🔶 Navigation—I anticipate one to go forward and the other to go back when I see these two buttons. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an “×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons so that users don’t get confused.
• � � Overall— I think the page is solid, and this is good enough to be our release candidate for a version 1.0.
• � � Metrics—Good improvement in the buttons on the metrics area, the improved contrast and new focus style make them more accessible.
• Button Style: Using the green accent in this context gives the impression that it’s a positive action because green is typically seen as a confirmation color. Do we need to explore a different color?
• Tiles—It seems to me that the tiles should use the Subtitle 2 style rather than the Subtitle 1 style given the number of items on the page and the overall page hierarchy. This will keep the visual hierarchy more consistent.
• � � Background—Using a light texture works well, but I wonder whether it adds too much noise in this kind of page. What is the purpose of using that?

What about giving feedback directly in Figma or another design tool that allows in-place feedback? These are generally difficult to use because they conceal discussions and are harder to follow, but in the right setting, they can be very effective. Just make sure that each of the comments is separate so that it’s easier to match each discussion to a single task, similar to the idea of splitting mentioned above.

One final note: say the obvious. Sometimes we might feel that something is clearly right or wrong, and we don’t say it. Or sometimes we might have a doubt that we don’t express because the question might sound stupid. Say it, that’s fine. You might have to reword it a little bit to make the reader feel more comfortable, but don’t hold it back. Good feedback is transparent, even when it may be obvious.

Another benefit of asynchronous feedback is that written feedback automatically monitors decisions. Especially in large projects,” Why did we do this”? There’s nothing better than open, transparent discussions that can be reviewed at any time, and this could be a question that arises from time to time. For this reason, I recommend using software that saves these discussions, without hiding them once they are resolved.

Content, tone, and format. Although each of these subjects offers a useful model, focusing on eight areas, including observation, impact, question, timing, attitude, form, clarity, and actionability, is a lot of work at once. One effective approach is to take them one by one: first identify the area that you lack the most (either from your perspective or from feedback from others ) and start there. Then the second, followed by the third, and so on. At first you’ll have to put in extra time for every piece of feedback that you give, but after a while, it’ll become second nature, and your impact on the work will multiply.

Thanks to Brie Anne Demkiw and Mike Shelton for reviewing the first draft of this article.

But what on earth is a passionate stress?

Envision a person determined to do it all. She is homeschooling two wonderful children while her father, who works remotely, is furthermore working remotely. She has a demanding customer fill at work—all of whom she loves. She wakes up early to get some movement in ( or frequently catch up on work ), prepares dinner while the kids are having breakfast, and works while positioning herself near the end of her “fourth grade” to watch as she balances clients, tasks, and budgets. Sound like a bit? Yet with a supportive group both at home and at work, it is.

Sounds like this person needs self-care because she has too much on her disk. But no, she doesn’t have occasion for that. She begins to feel as though she’s dropping balloons. Never accomplishing much. There’s not enough of her to be here and that, she is trying to divide her head in two all the time, all day, every day. She begins to question herself. And as those thoughts creep in more and more, her domestic tale becomes more and more important.

She KNOWS what she needs to perform right away! She really Would MORE.

This is a difficult and dangerous period. Know the reasons. Because when she doesn’t end that new purpose, that storyline will get worse. She immediately starts failing. She isn’t doing much. SHE is not enough. She’ll discover more she may do because she might neglect, or perhaps her home. She doesn’t nap as much, proceed because much, all in the attempts to do more. caught in this pattern of attempting to prove herself to herself without ever succeeding. Not feeling “enough”.

But, yeah, that’s what zealous burnout looks like for me. It doesn’t develop immediately in a great gesture; it develops gradually over the course of several weeks and months. My burning out process looks like speeding up, hardly a man losing focus. I move up and up and up, and therefore I simply quit.

I am the one who was

It’s amusing the things that shape us. Through the camera of my youth, I witnessed the battles, sacrifices, and fears of a person who had to make it all work without having much. I was happy that my mom was so competent and my dad sympathetic, I never went without and also got an extra here or there.

When my mother gave me food stamps as a child, I didn’t think shame; rather, I would have good started any debates about the subject, orally eviscerating anyone who dared to criticize the handicapped woman who was attempting to ensure all of our needs were met with so little. As a child, I watched the way the worry of not making those begins meet impacted people I love. As the non-disabled people in my home, I did take on many of the real things because I was” the one who was” make our lives a little easier. I soon realized that I had to put more of myself into it because I was the one who could. I learned first that when something frightens me, I can double down and work harder to make it better. I am in charge of the problem. When individuals have seen this in me as an adult, I’ve been told I seem courageous, but make no mistake, I’m not. If I seem courageous, it’s because this behavior was forged from another person’s fears.

And here I am, more than 30 years later, also feeling the urge to aimlessly force myself forward when faced with daunting tasks in front of me, assuming that I am the one who is and consequently does. I find myself driven to show that I may make things happen if I work longer hours, take on more responsibility, and do more.

Because I have seen how powerful a fiscally challenged person can be, I do not see people who struggle economically as problems because they are pulled along the way. I really get that I have been privileged to be able to prevent many of the issues that were current in my children. That said, I am also” the one who can” who feels she does, but if I were faced with not having much to make ends meet for my own home, I do see myself as having failed. Despite my best efforts and education, the majority of this is due to great riches. I will, yet, permit myself the pride of saying I have been cautious with my options to have encouraged that success. My sense of identity comes from the notion that I am” the one who can” and feel compelled to accomplish the most. I can choose to halt, and with some pretty precise warm water splashed in my face, I’ve made the choice to previously. But that choosing to stop is not my go-to, I move forward, driven by a fear that is so a part of me that I barely notice it’s there until I’m feeling utterly worn away.

Why the long history, then? You see, burnout is a fickle thing. Over the years, I’ve read and heard a lot about burnout. Burnout is real. Especially now, with COVID, many of us are balancing more than we ever have before—all at once! It’s difficult, and the avoidance, shutting down, and procrastination have an impact on so many amazing professionals. There are important articles that relate to what I imagine must be the majority of people out there, but not me. That’s not how I look at burnout.

The dangerous invisibility of zealous burnout

A lot of work environments see the extra hours, extra effort, and overall focused commitment as an asset ( and sometimes that’s all it is ). They see a person attempting to overcome obstacles, not a person trapped in fear. Many well-meaning organizations have safeguards in place to protect their teams from burnout. However, in situations like this, those alarms don’t always ring, and some organization members are surprised and depressed when the inevitable stop happens. And sometimes maybe even betrayed.

Parents—more so mothers, statistically speaking—are praised as being so on top of it all when they can work, be involved in the after-school activities, practice self-care in the form of diet and exercise, and still meet friends for coffee or wine. Many of us watched endless streaming COVID episodes to see how challenging the female protagonist is, but she is strong, funny, and capable of doing it. It’s a “very special episode” when she breaks down, cries in the bathroom, woefully admits she needs help, and just stops for a bit. Truth be told, countless people are hidden in tears or doom-scrolling to escape. We know that the media is a lie to amuse us, but often the perception that it’s what we should strive for has penetrated much of society.

Women and burnout

I cherish men. And though I don’t love every man ( heads up, I don’t love every woman or nonbinary person either ), I think there is a beautiful spectrum of individuals who represent that particular binary gender.

Despite this, especially in these COVID stressed out times, women are still more likely than their male counterparts to be burnout vulnerable. Mothers in the workplace feel the pressure to do all the “mom” things while giving 110 %. Mothers not in the workplace feel they need to do more to” justify” their lack of traditional employment. Women who are not mothers frequently feel the need to work even more at home because of the pressure. It’s vicious and systemic and so a part of our culture that we’re often not even aware of the enormity of the pressures we put on ourselves and each other.

Beyond happiness, there are costs. Harvard Health Publishing released a study a decade ago that “uncovered strong links between women’s job stress and cardiovascular disease”. The CDC noted,” Heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States, killing 299, 578 women in 2017—or about 1 in every 5 female deaths”.

According to what I’ve read, this connection between work stress and health is more dangerous for women than it is for their non-female counterparts.

But what if your burnout isn’t like that either?

That might not be you either. After all, each of us is so different and how we respond to stressors is too. It’s part of what makes us human. Don’t put too much emphasis on how burnout looks; instead, learn to recognize it in yourself. Here are a few questions I sometimes ask friends if I am concerned about them.

Are you content? This simple question should be the first thing you ask yourself. Chances are, even if you’re burning out doing all the things you love, as you approach burnout you’ll just stop taking as much joy from it all.

Do you feel like you have the authority to refuse? I have observed in myself and others that when someone is burning out, they no longer feel they can say no to things. Even those who don’t” speed up” feel pressured to say “yes” and not let the people around them be disappointed.

What are three things you’ve done for yourself? Another observance is that we all tend to stop doing things for ourselves. anything from avoiding conversations with friends to skipping showers and eating poorly. These can be red flags.

Are you using justifications? Many of us try to disregard feelings of burnout. Over and over I have heard,” It’s just crunch time”,” As soon as I do this one thing, it will all be better”, and” Well I should be able to handle this, so I’ll figure it out”. And it could be just one more thing you need to learn, or it might just be crunch time. That happens—life happens. BUT if all of this doesn’t stop, be open to yourself. If you’ve worked more 50-hour weeks since January than not, maybe it’s not crunch time—maybe it’s a bad situation that you’re burning out from.

Do you have a plan to stop feeling this way? If something has an exit route with a pause button if it is truly temporary and you do need to simply push through, it does.
defined end.

Take the time to listen to yourself as you would a friend. Be honest, allow yourself to be uncomfortable, and break the thought cycles that prevent you from healing.

So now what?

Although what I just described is a different path to burnout, it is still burnout. There are well-established approaches to working through burnout:

• Get enough sleep.
• Eat healthy.
• Work out.
• Go outside.
• Take a break.
• Practice self-care in general.

Those are hard for me because they feel like more tasks. If I’m in the burnout cycle, doing any of the above for me feels like a waste. Why would I take care of myself when I’m dropping all those other balls, according to the narrative? People need me, right?

Your inner voice might already be pretty bad if you’re deeply in the cycle. If you need to, tell yourself you need to take care of the person your people depend on. If your roles are pushing you toward burnout, use them to help make healing easier by justifying the time spent working on you.

I have come up with a few suggestions for me to help me remember the airline attendant’s advice to put on your face first when I feel burned out.

Cook an elaborate meal for someone!

Okay, since I’m a “food-focused” person, I’ve always been a fan. There are countless tales in my home of someone walking into the kitchen and turning right around and walking out when they noticed I was” chopping angrily”. But it’s more than that, and you should give it a try. Seriously. It’s the perfect go-to if you don’t feel worthy of taking time for yourself—do it for someone else. Because the majority of us work in a digital world, cooking can pique your interest and make you feel present in the moment in all your ways. It can break you out of your head and help you gain a better perspective. In my house, I’ve been known to pick a place on the map and cook food that comes from wherever that is ( thank you, Pinterest ). Because it’s not what I was raised making, I enjoy making Indian food because the smells are warm and the bread only needs a small amount of kneading to keep my hands busy. And in the end, we all win!

Vent like a sniveling jerk.

Be careful with this one!

I have been making an effort to practice more gratitude over the past few years, and I recognize the true benefits of that. Having said that, sometimes you just need to let it all out, even the ugly ones. Hell, I’m a big fan of not sugarcoating our lives, and that sometimes means that to get past the big pile of poop, you’re gonna wanna complain about it a bit.

When that is required, turn to a trusted friend and give yourself some pure verbal diarrhea, yelling at you all the way through. You need to trust this friend not to judge, to see your pain, and, most importantly, to tell you to remove your cranium from your own rectal cavity. Seriously, it’s about getting a reality check here! One of the things that I admire most about my husband is how he can simplify things down to the simplest of terms, even though sometimes after the fact. ” We’re spending our lives together, of course you’re going to disappoint me from time to time, so get over it” has been his way of speaking his dedication, love, and acceptance of me—and I could not be more grateful. Of course, it required that I remove my head from that rectal cavity. So, again, usually those moments are appreciated in hindsight.

Pick up a book!

There are many books out there that are more like you sharing their stories and how they’ve come to find greater balance than they are self-help. Maybe you’ll find something that speaks to you. Among the titles that have stood out to me are:

• Thrive by Arianna Huffington
• Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
• Girl, Stop apologizing, Rachel Hollis
• Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

Or, a tactic I enjoy using is to read or listen to a book that is NOT related to my work-life balance. I’ve read the following books and found they helped balance me out because my mind was pondering their interesting topics instead of running in circles:

• The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart
• Darin Olien’s Superlife
• A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford
• Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden is available.

If you’re not into reading, pick up a topic on YouTube or choose a podcast to subscribe to. I’ve watched countless permaculture and gardening topics in addition to how to raise chickens and ducks. For the record, I don’t currently have a particularly large food garden or raise any kind of livestock. I just find the topic interesting, and it has nothing to do with any aspect of my life that needs anything from me.

Give yourself a break.

You are never going to be perfect—hell, it would be boring if you were. It’s OK to be broken and flawed. Being tired, depressed, and worried is human nature. It’s OK to not do it all. You can’t be brave without being imperfect, which is terrifying.

This last one is the most important: allow yourself permission to NOT do it all. You never promised to be everything to everyone at all times. Our fears determine our strength, not ours.

This is hard. I struggle with it. It’s what’s driven me to write this—that it’s OK to stop. It’s OK that your unhealthy habit that might even benefit those around you needs to end. You can still succeed in life.

I recently read that we are all writing our eulogy in how we live. What will your professional accomplishments say, knowing that your speech won’t include them? What do you want it to say?

Look, I get that none of these ideas will “fix it”, and that’s not their purpose. None of us has complete control over what happens in our environment, but only how we react to it. These suggestions are to help stop the spiral effect so that you are empowered to address the underlying issues and choose your response. They are the things that largely work for me. Maybe they’ll work for you.

Does this sound familiar?

If something resounds familiar to you, it’s not just you. Don’t let your negative self-talk tell you that you “even burn out wrong”. It is not improper. Even if rooted in fear like my own drivers, I believe that this need to do more comes from a place of love, determination, motivation, and other wonderful attributes that make you the amazing person you are. We’re going to be OK, ya know. When we stop and look around, the only eyes that judge us are usually the ones who look in the mirror, so the lives that unfold before us might never seem to be the same as the story in our heads.

Do you remember that Winnie the Pooh sketch that had Pooh eat so much at Rabbit’s house that his buttocks couldn’t fit through the door? Well, I already have a strong connection to Rabbit, so it was surprising when he unexpectedly declared that this was unacceptable. But do you recall what happened next? He put a shelf across poor Pooh’s ankles and decorations on his back, and made the best of the big butt in his kitchen.

At the end of the day, we are resourceful and aware that we can push ourselves if necessary, even when we are exhausted or have a ton of stuff in our room. None of us has to be afraid, as we can manage any obstacle put in front of us. And maybe that means we need to redefine success in order to make room for comfort in human nature, but that doesn’t really sound so bad either.

So, wherever you are right now, please breathe. Do what you need to do to get out of your head. Give thanks and be considerate.

Although I’m not sure when I first heard this statement, it has stuck with me over the centuries. How do you generate solutions for scenarios you can’t think? Or create items that are functional on products that have not yet been created?

Flash, Photoshop, and flexible pattern

When I first started designing sites, my go-to technology was Photoshop. I started by making a design for a 960px canvas that I would later add willing to. The growth phase was about attaining pixel-perfect reliability using set widths, fixed levels, and absolute placement.

All of this was altered by Ethan Marcotte’s speak at An Event Apart and the subsequent article in A Checklist Off in 2010. I was sold on responsive pattern as soon as I heard about it, but I was even terrified. The pixel-perfect models full of special figures that I had formerly prided myself on producing were no longer good enough.

My first encounter with reactive style didn’t help my fear. My second project was to get an active fixed-width website and make it reactive. I quickly realized that you didn’t just put responsiveness at the end of a job. To make smooth design, you need to prepare throughout the style phase.

A new way to style

Removing restrictions and creating content that can be viewed on any system has always been the goal of designing responsive or liquid websites. It relies on the use of percentage-based design, which I immediately achieved with local CSS and power groups:

.column-span-6 { width: 49%; float: left; margin-right: 0.5%; margin-left: 0.5%;}.column-span-4 { width: 32%; float: left; margin-right: 0.5%; margin-left: 0.5%;}.column-span-3 { width: 24%; float: left; margin-right: 0.5%; margin-left: 0.5%;}

Therefore using Sass to re-use repeated slabs of code and transition to more semantic premium:

.logo { @include colSpan(6);}.search { @include colSpan(3);}.social-share { @include colSpan(3);}

Media questions

The next ingredient for flexible design is press queries. Without them, content would shrink to fit the available space, regardless of whether it remained readable ( The exact opposite issue resulted from the development of a mobile-first approach ).

Media questions prevented this by allowing us to add breakpoints where the design could adapt. Like most people, I started out with three breakpoints: one for desktop, one for tablets, and one for mobile. Over the years, I added more and more for phablets, wide screens, and so on. 

For years, I happily worked this way and improved both my design and front-end skills in the process. The only problem I encountered was making changes to content, since with our Sass grid system in place, there was no way for the site owners to add content without amending the markup—something a small business owner might struggle with. This is because each row in the grid was defined using a div as a container. Adding content meant creating new row markup, which requires a level of HTML knowledge.

String premium was a mainstay of early flexible design, present in all the frequently used systems like Bootstrap and Skeleton.

 
1 of 7
 
2 of 7
 
3 of 7
 
4 of 7
 
5 of 7
 
6 of 7
 
7 of 7

Another difficulty arose as I moved from a design firm building websites for tiny- to medium-sized companies, to larger in-house teams where I worked across a collection of related sites. In those capacities, I began to work many more with washable parts.

Our rely on multimedia queries resulted in parts that were tied to frequent screen sizes. If the goal of part libraries is modify, then this is a real problem because you can just use these components if the devices you’re designing for correspond to the viewport sizes used in the pattern library—in the process never really hitting that “devices that don’t already occur” goal.

Then there’s the problem of space. Media questions allow components to adapt based on the viewport size, but what if I put a component into a sidebar, like in the figure below?

Container queries: our savior or a false dawn?

Container queries have long been touted as an improvement upon media queries, but at the time of writing are unsupported in most browsers. There are workarounds for JavaScript, but they can lead to dependencies and compatibility issues. The basic theory underlying container queries is that elements should change based on the size of their parent container and not the viewport width, as seen in the following illustrations.

One of the biggest arguments in favor of container queries is that they help us create components or design patterns that are truly reusable because they can be picked up and placed anywhere in a layout. This is an important step in moving toward a form of component-based design that works at any size on any device.

In other words, responsive elements are meant to replace responsive layouts.

Container queries will help us move from designing pages that respond to the browser or device size to designing components that can be placed in a sidebar or in the main content, and respond accordingly.

We still use layout to determine when a design needs to adapt, which is my concern. This approach will always be restrictive, as we will still need pre-defined breakpoints. For this reason, my main question with container queries is, How would we decide when to change the CSS used by a component?

The best place to make that choice is probably not a component library that is disconnected from context and real content.

As the diagrams below illustrate, we can use container queries to create designs for specific container widths, but what if I want to change the design based on the image size or ratio?

In this example, the dimensions of the container are not what should dictate the design, rather, the image is.

Without having strong cross-browser support for them, it’s difficult to say for certain whether container queries will be a success story. Responsive component libraries would definitely evolve how we design and would improve the possibilities for reuse and design at scale. However, we might always need to modify these elements to fit our content.

CSS is changing

Whilst the container query debate rumbles on, there have been numerous advances in CSS that change the way we think about design. The days of fixed-width elements measured in pixels and floated div elements used to cobble layouts together are long gone, consigned to history along with table layouts. Flexbox and CSS Grid have revolutionized layouts for the web. We can now create elements that wrap onto new rows when they run out of space, not when the device changes.

.wrapper { display: grid; grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, 450px); gap: 10px;}

The repeat() function paired with auto-fit or auto-fill allows us to specify how much space each column should use while leaving it up to the browser to decide when to spill the columns onto a new line. Similar things can be achieved with Flexbox, as elements can wrap over multiple rows and “flex” to fill available space. 

.wrapper { display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; justify-content: space-between;}.child { flex-basis: 32%; margin-bottom: 20px;}

The biggest benefit of all of this is that you don’t have to wrap elements in container rows. Without rows, content isn’t tied to page markup in quite the same way, allowing for removals or additions of content without additional development.

This is a big step forward when it comes to creating designs that allow for evolving content, but the real game changer for flexible designs is CSS Subgrid.

Remember the days of crafting perfectly aligned interfaces, only for the customer to add an unbelievably long header almost as soon as they’re given CMS access, like the illustration below?

Subgrid allows elements to respond to adjustments in their own content and in the content of sibling elements, helping us create designs more resilient to change.

.wrapper { display: grid; grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(150px, 1fr)); grid-template-rows: auto 1fr auto; gap: 10px;}.sub-grid { display: grid; grid-row: span 3; grid-template-rows: subgrid; /* sets rows to parent grid */}

CSS Grid allows us to separate layout and content, thereby enabling flexible designs. Meanwhile, Subgrid allows us to create designs that can adapt in order to suit morphing content. The above code can be implemented behind an @supports feature query even though Firefox is the only browser that supports subgrid at the time of writing.

Intrinsic layouts

I’d be remiss not to mention intrinsic layouts, a term used by Jen Simmons to describe a mix of contemporary and traditional CSS features used to create layouts that respond to available space.

Responsive layouts have flexible columns using percentages. Intrinsic layouts, on the other hand, use the fr unit to create flexible columns that won’t ever shrink so much that they render the content illegible.

frunits is a statement that says I want you to distribute the extra space in this manner, but never that it should be smaller than the content inside.

—Jen Simmons,” Designing Intrinsic Layouts”

Additionally, intrinsic layouts can mix and match both fixed and flexible units, letting the content choose how much space is taken up.

What makes intrinsic design stand out is that it not only creates designs that can withstand future devices but also helps scale design without losing flexibility. Without having the same breakpoints or the same amount of content as in the previous implementation, components and patterns can be lifted and reused.

We can now create designs that adapt to the space they have, the content within them, and the content around them. We can create responsive components using an intrinsic approach without relying on container queries.

Another 2010 moment?

This intrinsic approach should in my view be every bit as groundbreaking as responsive web design was ten years ago. It’s another instance of “everything changed,” in my opinion.

But it doesn’t seem to be moving quite as fast, I haven’t yet had that same career-changing moment I had with responsive design, despite the widely shared and brilliant talk that brought it to my attention.

One possible explanation for that might be that I now work for a sizable company, which is significantly different from the role I held as a design agency in 2010: In my agency days, every new project was a clean slate, a chance to try something new. Nowadays, projects use existing tools and frameworks and are often improvements to existing websites with an existing codebase.

Another possibility is that I now feel more prepared for change. In 2010 I was new to design in general, the shift was frightening and required a lot of learning. Additionally, an intrinsic approach isn’t exactly new; it’s about applying existing skills and CSS knowledge in a unique way.

You can’t framework your way out of a content problem

Another reason for the slightly slower adoption of intrinsic design could be the lack of quick-fix framework solutions available to kick-start the change.

Ten years ago, responsive grid systems were everywhere. With a framework like Bootstrap or Skeleton, you had a responsive design template at your fingertips.

Because having a selection of units is a hindrance when creating layout templates, intrinsic design and frameworks do not work together quite as well. The beauty of intrinsic design is combining different units and experimenting with techniques to get the best for your content.

And then there are design tools. We probably all used Photoshop templates for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices at some point in our careers to drop designs in and demonstrate how the site would look at each of the three stages.

How do you do that now, with each component responding to content and layouts flexing as and when they need to? This kind of design must take place in the browser, which is something I’m very fond of.

The debate about “whether designers should code” is another that has rumbled on for years. When designing a digital product, we should, at the very least, design for a best- and worst-case scenario when it comes to content. It’s not ideal to implement this in a graphics-based software package. In code, we can add longer sentences, more radio buttons, and extra tabs, and watch in real time as the design adapts. Does it continue to function? Is the design too reliant on the current content?

Personally, I look forward to the day intrinsic design is the standard for design, when a design component can be truly flexible and adapt to both its space and content with no reliance on device or container dimensions.

First, the content

Content is not constant. After all, to design for the unanticipated or unexpected, we must take into account changes in content, such as in our earlier Subgrid card illustration, which allowed the cards to make adjustments to both their own and sibling elements.

Thankfully, there’s more to CSS than layout, and plenty of properties and values can help us put content first. Subgrid and pseudo-elements like ::first-line and ::first-letter help to separate design from markup so we can create designs that allow for changes.

Instead of dated markup tricks like this —

 First line of text with different styling...

—we can target content based on where it appears.

.element::first-line { font-size: 1.4em;}.element::first-letter { color: red;}

Much bigger additions to CSS include logical properties, which change the way we construct designs using logical dimensions (start and end) instead of physical ones (left and right), something CSS Grid also does with functions like min(), max(), and clamp().

This flexibility allows for directional changes according to content, a common requirement when we need to present content in multiple languages. In the past, this was often achieved with Sass mixins but was often limited to switching from left-to-right to right-to-left orientation.

Directional variables must be set in the Sass version.

$direction: rtl;$opposite-direction: ltr;$start-direction: right;$end-direction: left;

These variables can be used as values—

body { direction: $direction; text-align: $start-direction;}

—or as real estate.

margin-#{$end-direction}: 10px;padding-#{$start-direction}: 10px;

However, now we have native logical properties, removing the reliance on both Sass ( or a similar tool ) and pre-planning that necessitated using variables throughout a codebase. These properties also start to break apart the tight coupling between a design and strict physical dimensions, creating more flexibility for changes in language and in direction.

margin-block-end: 10px;padding-block-start: 10px;

There are also native start and end values for properties like text-align, which means we can replace text-align: right with text-align: start.

Like the earlier examples, these properties help to build out designs that aren’t constrained to one language, the design will reflect the content’s needs.

Fluid and fixed

We briefly covered the power of combining fixed widths with fluid widths with intrinsic layouts. The min() and max() functions are a similar concept, allowing you to specify a fixed value with a flexible alternative. 

For min() this means setting a fluid minimum value and a maximum fixed value.

.element { width: min(50%, 300px);}

The element in the figure above will be 50 % of its container as long as the element’s width doesn’t exceed 300px.

For max() we can set a flexible max value and a minimum fixed value.

.element { width: max(50%, 300px);}

Now the element will be 50 % of its container as long as the element’s width is at least 300px. This means we can set limits but allow content to react to the available space.

The clamp() function builds on this by allowing us to set a preferred value with a third parameter. Now we can allow the element to shrink or grow if it needs to without getting to a point where it becomes unusable.

.element { width: clamp(300px, 50%, 600px);}

This time, the element’s width will be 50 % of its container’s preferred value, with no exceptions for 300px and 600px.

With these techniques, we have a content-first approach to responsive design. We can separate content from markup, meaning the changes users make will not affect the design. By anticipating unforeseen language or direction changes, we can begin creating future-proofing designs. And we can increase flexibility by setting desired dimensions alongside flexible alternatives, allowing for more or less content to be displayed correctly.

Situation first

Thanks to what we’ve discussed so far, we can cover device flexibility by changing our approach, designing around content and space instead of catering to devices. But what about that last bit of Jeffrey Zeldman’s quote,”… situations you haven’t imagined”?

It’s a completely different design process for someone using a mobile phone and moving through a crowded street in glaring sunshine from a person using a desktop computer. Situations and environments are hard to plan for or predict because they change as people react to their own unique challenges and tasks.

This is why making a choice is so crucial. One size never fits all, so we need to design for multiple scenarios to create equal experiences for all our users.

Thankfully, there is a lot we can do to provide choice.

Responsible design

” There are parts of the world where mobile data is prohibitively expensive, and where there is little or no broadband infrastructure”.

” I Used the Web for a Day on a 50 MB Budget“

Chris Ashton

One of the biggest assumptions we make is that people interacting with our designs have a good wifi connection and a wide screen monitor. However, in the real world, our users may be commuters using smaller mobile devices that may experience drops in connectivity while traveling on trains or other modes of transportation. There is nothing more frustrating than a web page that won’t load, but there are ways we can help users use less data or deal with sporadic connectivity.

The srcset attribute allows the browser to decide which image to serve. This means we can create smaller ‘cropped’ images to display on mobile devices in turn using less bandwidth and less data.

The preload attribute can also help us to think about how and when media is downloaded. It can be used to tell a browser about any critical assets that need to be downloaded with high priority, improving perceived performance and the user experience. 

There’s also native lazy loading, which indicates assets that should only be downloaded when they are needed.

With srcset, preload, and lazy loading, we can start to tailor a user’s experience based on the situation they find themselves in. What none of this does, however, is allow the user themselves to decide what they want downloaded, as the decision is usually the browser’s to make. 

So how can we put users in control?

The media queries are returning.

Media questions have always been about much more than device sizes. They allow content to adapt to different situations, with screen size being just one of them.

We’ve long been able to check for media types like print and speech and features such as hover, resolution, and color. These checks allow us to provide options that suit more than one scenario, it’s less about one-size-fits-all and more about serving adaptable content.

The Level 5 spec for Media Queries is still being developed as of this writing. It introduces some really exciting queries that in the future will help us design for multiple other unexpected situations.

For instance, a light-level feature allows you to alter a user’s style when they are in the sun or in the dark. Paired with custom properties, these features allow us to quickly create designs or themes for specific environments.

@media (light-level: normal) { --background-color: #fff; --text-color: #0b0c0c; }@media (light-level: dim) { --background-color: #efd226; --text-color: #0b0c0c;}

Another key feature of the Level 5 spec is personalization. Instead of creating designs that are the same for everyone, users can choose what works for them. This is achieved by using features like prefers-reduced-data, prefers-color-scheme, and prefers-reduced-motion, the latter two of which already enjoy broad browser support. These features tap into preferences set via the operating system or browser so people don’t have to spend time making each site they visit more usable. 

Media questions like this go beyond choices made by a browser to grant more control to the user.

Expect the unexpected

In the end, we should always anticipate that things will change. Devices in particular change faster than we can keep up, with foldable screens already on the market.

We can design for content, but we can’t do it the same way we do for this constantly changing landscape. By putting content first and allowing that content to adapt to whatever space surrounds it, we can create more robust, flexible designs that increase the longevity of our products.

A lot of the CSS discussed here is about moving away from layouts and putting content at the heart of design. There are still many more things we can do to adopt a more intrinsic approach, from responsive to fluid and fixed. Even better, we can test these techniques during the design phase by designing in-browser and watching how our designs adapt in real-time.

When it comes to unexpected circumstances, we must make sure our goods are accessible whenever and wherever needed. We can move closer to achieving this by involving users in our design decisions, by creating choice via browsers, and by giving control to our users with user-preference-based media queries.

Good design for the unexpected should allow for change, provide choice, and give control to those we serve: our users themselves.

We’ve been conversing for a long time. Whether to present information, perform transactions, or just to check in on one another, people have yammered aside, chattering and gesticulating, through spoken discussion for many generations. Only recently have we begun to write our conversations, and only recently have we outsourced them to the system, a system that exhibits a far greater affection for written communications than for the vernacular rigors of spoken speech.

Laptops have trouble because between spoken and written speech, talk is more primitive. Machines must wrestle with the chaos of human statement, including the squabbling and pauses, the gestures and body vocabulary, and the dialect variations that can impede even the most skillfully created human-computer conversation. In the human-to-human situation, spoken language also has the opportunity of face-to-face call, where we can easily interpret verbal interpersonal cues.

In contrast, written language develops its own fossil record of dated terms and phrases as we commit to recording and keeping usages long after they are no longer relevant in spoken communication ( for example, the salutation” To whom it may concern” ). Because it tends to be more consistent, smooth, and proper, written word is necessarily far easier for devices to interpret and know.

Spoken dialect is not a pleasure in this regard. Besides the visual cues that mark conversations with emphasis and personal context, there are also linguistic cues and outspoken behaviors that mimic conversation in complex ways: how something is said, never what. Our spoken language reaches far beyond what the written word can ever deliver, whether it’s rapid-fire, low-pitched, high-decibel, satirical, awkward, or moaning. But when it comes to words interfaces—the devices we conduct spoken discussions with—we experience exciting difficulties as designers and content strategists.

Voice Compositions

We interact with voice interfaces for a variety of reasons, but according to Michael McTear, Zoraida Callejas, and David Griol in The Conversational Interface, those motivations by and large mirror the reasons we initiate conversations with other people, too ( ). We typically strike up a dialogue as a result:

• we need something done ( such as a transaction ),
• we want to hear something, some kind of data, or
• we are social people and want someone to talk to ( conversation for conversation’s pleasure ).

A second talk from beginning to end that achieves some goal for the consumer, starting with the words interface’s initial greeting and ending with the user exiting the interface, also fits into these three categories, which I refer to as interpersonal, technical, and prosocial. Note here that a conversation in our human sense—a chat between people that leads to some result and lasts an arbitrary length of time—could encompass multiple transactional, informational, and prosocial voice interactions in succession. In other words, a voice interaction is a conversation, but it must not be one particular voice interaction.

Purely prosocial conversations are more gimmicky than captivating in most voice interfaces, because machines don’t yet have the capacity to really want to know how we’re doing and to do the sort of glad-handing humans crave. Additionally, there is a debate about whether users actually prefer organic human conversations that start with prosocial voiceovers and then seamlessly transition to other types. In fact, in Voice User Interface Design, Michael Cohen, James Giangola, and Jennifer Balogh recommend sticking to users ‘ expectations by mimicking how they interact with other voice interfaces rather than trying too hard to be human—potentially alienating them in the process ( ).

That leaves two different types of conversations we can have with one another that a voice interface can also have easily, including one that is transactional and one that is informational, teaching us something new ( “discuss a musical” ).

Transactional voice interactions

When you order a Hawaiian pizza with extra pineapple, you’re typically having a conversation and a voice interaction when you’re tapping buttons on a food delivery app. Even when we walk up to the counter and place an order, the conversation quickly pivots from an initial smattering of neighborly small talk to the real mission at hand: ordering a pizza ( generously topped with pineapple, as it should be ).

How are things going, Alison?

Burhan: Hi, welcome to Crust Deluxe! It’s chilly outside. How can I help you?

Alison: Can I get a pizza from Hawaii with extra pineapple.

Burhan: Sure, what size?

Alison: Big.

Burhan: Anything else?

Alison: No thanks, that’s it.

Burhan: Something to drink?

Alison: I’ll have a bottle of Coke.

Burhan: You got it. It will cost about$ 15 and take fifteen minutes to complete.

Each progressive disclosure in this transactional conversation reveals more and more of the desired outcome of the transaction: a service rendered or a product delivered. Conversations that are transactional have certain characteristics: they are direct, precise, and cost-effective. They quickly dispense with pleasantries.

Informational voice interactions

Meanwhile, some conversations are primarily about obtaining information. Alison might visit Crust Deluxe with the sole intention of placing an order, but she might not want to leave with a pizza at all. She might be just as interested in whether they serve halal or kosher dishes, gluten-free options, or something else. Even though we have a prosocial mini-conversation once more at the beginning to practice politeness, we are after much more.

How are things going, Alison?

Burhan: Hi, welcome to Crust Deluxe! It’s chilly outside. How can I help you?

Alison: Can I ask a few questions?

Burhan: Of course! Go right ahead.

Alison, do you have any menu items that are halal?

Burhan: Absolutely! On request, we can make any pie halal. We also have lots of vegetarian, ovo-lacto, and vegan options. Do you have any other dietary restrictions in mind?

Alison: What about gluten-free pizzas?

Burhan: For both our deep-dish and thin-crust pizzas, we can definitely make a gluten-free crust for you, without a problem. Anything else I can answer for you?

Alison: That’s it for the moment. Good to know. Thank you.

Burhan: Anytime, come back soon!

This dialogue is entirely different. Here, the goal is to get a certain set of facts. Informational conversations are research expeditions that seek the truth through information gathering. Voice interactions that are informational might be more long-winded than transactional conversations by necessity. Responses are typically longer, more in-depth, and carefully communicated to ensure that the customer understands the main ideas.

Voice Interfaces

Voice-based user interfaces use speech at the core to assist users in accomplishing their objectives. But simply because an interface has a voice component doesn’t mean that every user interaction with it is mediated through voice. We’re most concerned in this book with pure voice interfaces because multimodal voice interfaces can lean on visual components like screens as crutches, which are completely dependent on spoken conversation and lack any visual component, making them much more nuanced and challenging to deal with.

Though voice interfaces have long been integral to the imagined future of humanity in science fiction, only recently have those lofty visions become fully realized in genuine voice interfaces.

IVR ( interactive voice response ) systems

Though written conversational interfaces have been fixtures of computing for many decades, voice interfaces first emerged in the early 1990s with text-to-speech ( TTS ) dictation programs that recited written text aloud, as well as speech-enabled in-car systems that gave directions to a user-provided address. We became familiar with the first real voice interfaces that could actually be spoken to without having to deal with overburdened customer service representatives as a result of the development of interactive voice response ( IVR ) systems.

IVR systems allowed organizations to reduce their reliance on call centers but soon became notorious for their clunkiness. These systems, which are commonplace in the corporate world, were primarily intended as metaphorical switchboards to direct customers to real phone agents (” Say Reservations to book a flight or check an itinerary” ), and it is likely that when you call an airline or hotel conglomerate, you will have the opportunity to have a conversation with one. Despite their functional issues and users ‘ frustration with their inability to speak to an actual human right away, IVR systems proliferated in the early 1990s across a variety of industries (, PDF).

IVR systems have a reputation for having less scintillating conversations than we’re used to in real life ( or even in science fiction ), despite being extremely repetitive and monotonous conversations that typically don’t veer from a single format.

Screen readers

The invention of the screen reader, a tool that converts visual content into synthesized speech, was a development of IVR systems in parallel. For Blind or visually impaired website users, it’s the predominant method of interacting with text, multimedia, or form elements. Perhaps the closest thing we have today to an out-of-the-box delivery of content via voice is represented by screen readers.

Among the first screen readers known by that moniker was the Screen Reader for the BBC Micro and NEEC Portable developed by the Research Centre for the Education of the Visually Handicapped (RCEVH) at the University of Birmingham in 1986 ( ). The first IBM Screen Reader for text-based computers was created by Jim Thatcher in the same year, which was later recreated for a computer with graphical user interfaces ( GUIs ) ( ).

With the rapid growth of the web in the 1990s, the demand for accessible tools for websites exploded. Screen readers started facilitating quick interactions with web pages that ostensibly allow disabled users to traverse the page as an aural and temporal space rather than a visual and physical one with the introduction of semantic HTML and especially ARIA roles in 2008, enabling speedy interactions with the pages. In other words, screen readers for the web “provide mechanisms that translate visual design constructs—proximity, proportion, etc. in A List Apart, writes Aaron Gustafson, “into useful information.” ” At least they do when documents are authored thoughtfully” ( ).

There is a big draw for screen readers: they’re challenging to use and relentlessly verbose, despite being incredibly instructive for voice interface designers. The visual structures of websites and web navigation don’t translate well to screen readers, sometimes resulting in unwieldy pronouncements that name every manipulable HTML element and announce every formatting change. Working with web-based interfaces is a cognitive burden for many screen reader users.

In Wired, accessibility advocate and voice engineer Chris Maury considers why the screen reader experience is ill-suited to users relying on voice:

I disliked the operation of Screen Readers from the beginning. Why are they designed the way they are? It makes no sense to present information visually before converting it to audio only after that. All of the time and energy that goes into creating the perfect user experience for an app is wasted, or even worse, adversely impacting the experience for blind users. __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

In many cases, well-designed voice interfaces can speed users to their destination better than long-winded screen reader monologues. After all, users of the visual interface have the advantage of freely scurrying around the viewport to find information without worrying about it. Blind users, meanwhile, are obligated to listen to every utterance synthesized into speech and therefore prize brevity and efficiency. Users with disabilities who have long had no choice but to use clumsy screen readers might find that voice interfaces, especially more contemporary voice assistants, provide a more streamlined experience.

Voice assistants

Many of us immediately associate voice assistants with the popular subset of voice interfaces found in living rooms, smart homes, and offices with the film Star Trek or with Majel Barrett’s voice as the omniscient computer. Voice assistants are akin to personal concierges that can answer questions, schedule appointments, conduct searches, and perform other common day-to-day tasks. And because of their assistive potential, they are quickly receiving more attention from accessibility advocates.

Before the earliest IVR systems found success in the enterprise, Apple published a demonstration video in 1987 depicting the Knowledge Navigator, a voice assistant that could transcribe spoken words and recognize human speech to a great degree of accuracy. Then, in 2001, Tim Berners-Lee and others created their vision for a” semantic web agent” that would carry out routine tasks like” checking calendars, making appointments, and finding locations” ( hinter paywall ). It wasn’t until 2011 that Apple’s Siri finally entered the picture, making voice assistants a tangible reality for consumers.

There is a significant variation in how programmable and customizable some voice assistants are compared to others due to the sheer number of voice assistants available today ( Fig 1 ). At one extreme, everything except vendor-provided features is locked down, for example, at the time of their release, the core functionality of Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana couldn’t be extended beyond their existing capabilities. There are no other means of developers communicating with Siri at a low level, aside from predefined categories of tasks like messaging, hailing rideshares, making restaurant reservations, and other things, which are still possible today.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home offer a core foundation on which developers can build custom voice interfaces. For this reason, developers who feel constrained by the limitations of Siri and Cortana are increasingly using programmable voice assistants that are extensibable and customizable. Amazon offers the Alexa Skills Kit, a developer framework for building custom voice interfaces for Amazon Alexa, while Google Home offers the ability to program arbitrary Google Assistant skills. Users today have the option to choose from among the thousands of custom-built skills available in the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa ecosystems.

As businesses like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google continue to occupy their positions, they’re also selling and open-sourcing an unheard array of tools and frameworks for designers and developers that aim to make creating voice interfaces as simple as possible, even without code.

Often by necessity, voice assistants like Amazon Alexa tend to be monochannel—they’re tightly coupled to a device and can’t be accessed on a computer or smartphone instead. In contrast, many development platforms, such as Google’s Dialogflow, have omnichannel capabilities that allow users to create a single conversational interface that then manifests as a voice interface, textual chatbot, and IVR system upon deployment. I don’t prescribe any specific implementation approaches in this design-focused book, but in Chapter 4 we’ll get into some of the implications these variables might have on the way you build out your design artifacts.

Voice Content

Simply put, voice content is content delivered through voice. Voice content must be free-flowing and organic, contextless and concise in order to preserve what makes human conversation so compelling in the first place. Everything written content is not.

Our world is replete with voice content in various forms: screen readers reciting website content, voice assistants rattling off a weather forecast, and automated phone hotline responses governed by IVR systems. We’re most concerned with the audiobook content being delivered as a requirement rather than an option.

For many of us, our first foray into informational voice interfaces will be to deliver content to users. There is only one issue: any content we already have isn’t in any way suitable for this new environment. So how do we make the content trapped on our websites more conversational? And how do we create fresh copy that works with voice-recognition?

Lately, we’ve begun slicing and dicing our content in unprecedented ways. Websites are, in many ways, colossal vaults of what I call macrocontent: lengthy prose that can last for miles in a browser window, like microfilm viewers of newspaper archives. Back in 2002, well before the present-day ubiquity of voice assistants, technologist Anil Dash defined microcontent as permalinked pieces of content that stay legible regardless of environment, such as email or text messages:

An example of microcontent can be a day’s weather forecast [sic], an airplane flight’s arrival and departure times, an abstract from a lengthy publication, or a single instant message. __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

I would update Dash’s definition of microcontent to include all instances of bite-sized content that goes beyond written communiqués. After all, today we encounter microcontent in interfaces where a small snippet of copy is displayed alone, unmoored from the browser, like a textbot confirmation of a restaurant reservation. Informing delivery channels both established and novel, Microcontent provides the best opportunity to find out how your content can be stretched to the limits of its potential.

As microcontent, voice content is unique because it’s an example of how content is experienced in time rather than in space. We can instantly look at a digital sign for an instant and be informed when the next train is coming, but voice interfaces keep our attention captive for so long that we can’t quickly evade or skip, a feature that screen reader users are all too familiar with.

Because microcontent is fundamentally made up of isolated blobs with no relation to the channels where they’ll eventually end up, we need to ensure that our microcontent truly performs well as voice content—and that means focusing on the two most important traits of robust voice content: voice content legibility and voice content discoverability.

Fundamentally, how voice content manifests in perceived time and space both affect the legibility and discoverability of our voice content.