Jeremy Keith

Home Refreshment

A nifty little responsive demo from Nick, recreating a 1948 Coca-Cola ad that was designed to be responsive to different wall spaces.

The Great Convergence of Design, Consulting and Engineering

This is a perceptive overview of three different species of agencies—consulting-led, engineering-led, and design-led. Clearleft fits squarely into that last category …and the weaknesses of that particular flavour of agency ring very true:

Design firms have historically lacked the business strategy chops and pedigree of the consultants.

It will probably come as no surprise that Clearleft has been getting “more strategic” recently.

Design needs more MBAs with C-suite relationships and an almost arrogant assumption that of course they belong there, advising the CEO and truly bringing design thinking to business. It’s time to do strategy for real. The market has never been more receptive to it than it is right now.

Industry Fatigue by Jordan Moore

There are of course things worth your time and deep consideration, and there are distractions. Profound new thinking and movements within our industry - the kind that fundamentally shifts the way we work in a positive new direction are worth your time and attention. Other things are distractions. I put new industry gossip, frameworks, software and tools firmly in the distractions category. This is the sort of content that exists in the padding between big movements. It’s the kind of stuff that doesn’t break new ground and it doesn’t make or break your ability to do your job.

Introducing ‘My Browser’ - Andy Bell - Front-End Developer

Andy describes the technical approach he took building his handy reporting tool, My Browser:

Although the site is built with bleeding edge technology such as web components, it’s built with a progressive-first approach. This means that in order to get the best experience, you need to be on a modern browser, but to do the most basic function—reporting data, you can still do it by pressing a “generate report” button, which is the default state.

Not only is this a liberating way to work, it really pays off in performance:

We’re given so much for free to make a progressively enhanced website or web app. We’ve got feature detection and @supports in CSS which means that “My Browser” ships with no polyfills, fallbacks or hacks like Autoprefixer. The app degrades gracefully instead.

This has been a very refreshing way to work that I’ve enjoyed a lot. The fact that the whole thing comes in around 25kb tells you how effective progressive enhancement can be for performance too.

Short note on progressive ARIA by The Paciello Group

Léonie makes a really good point here: if you’re adding aria attributes to indicate interactions you’re making available through JavaScript, then make sure you also use JavaScript to add those aria attributes.

Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet · An A List Apart Article

This is a great description by Chris of the problems that webmentions aim to solve.

If you use Twitter, your friend Alice only uses Facebook, your friend Bob only uses his blog on WordPress, and your pal Chuck is over on Medium, it’s impossible for any one of you to @mention another. You’re all on different and competing platforms, none of which interoperate to send these mentions or notifications of them. The only way to communicate in this way is if you all join the same social media platforms, resulting in the average person being signed up to multiple services just to stay in touch with all their friends and acquaintances.

Given the issues of privacy and identity protection, different use cases, the burden of additional usernames and passwords, and the time involved, many people don’t want to do this. Possibly worst of all, your personal identity on the internet can end up fragmented like a Horcrux across multiple websites over which you have little, if any, control.

Transform your type online with variable fonts | Creative Bloq

This is a great interview with Rich on all things related to web typography—including, of course, variable fonts.

I’m so lucky that I literally get to work side by side with Rich; I get to geek out with him about font stuff all the time.

What walls are for – disambiguity

Digital things look ‘finished’ too soon. When something is a work in progress on a wall, it looks unfinished, so you keep working on it. moving things around, reshaping things, connecting things, erasing things, and making them again. Walls make it easier to iterate. Iteration, in my opinion, is massively correlated with quality.

Fractional. — Ethan Marcotte

Ethan’s ode to the fr unit in CSS grid.

Laura Kalbag – Insecure

The web can be used to find common connections with folks you find interesting, and who don’t make you feel like so much of a weirdo. It’d be nice to be able to do this in a safe space that is not being surveilled.

Owning your own content, and publishing to a space you own can break through some of these barriers. Sharing your own weird scraps on your own site makes you easier to find by like-minded folks. If you’ve got no tracking on your site (no Google Analytics etc), you are harder to profile. People can’t come to harass you on your own site if you do not offer them the means to do so