Archive: November 21st, 2016

Tentacular: Douglas Coupland on Helvetica, clip art and the gangly beast that is the internet

Douglas Coupland on web typography.

When I discuss the internet’s feel and its random rodeo of fonts, I think of the freedom, naivety, laziness, greed, cluelessness and skill I see there — it’s a cyberplace as wondrous as the bubbling cradle of pea-soup goo from which life emerged. The internet has a rawness, a Darwinian evolutionary texture. It’s a place where metrics totally unrelated to print typography dictate the look and feel.

29 Bullets

Russell wrote an article for Wired magazine all about PowerPoint, but this extended director’s cut on his own site is the real deal.

Who knew that the creator of PowerPoint was such an enthusiast for the concertina?

FormLinter—Detect common issues that hurt conversions

A little tool for testing common form issues.

• Did we remember to give every input a label? (No, placeholders are not an adequate replacement)?
• Do our labels’ for attributes match our inputs’ ids?
• Did we take advantage of the url, email, and password input types, or did we forget and just use text?
• Are our required fields marked as such?

My biggest takeaway from the second Offline Camp in Santa Margarita, CA — plus toast!

J. Renée Beach writes on Ev’s blog about three things to consider when planning for offline experiences:

• Freshness,
• Reach, and
• Assurance.

How will you express to your users that the content is up to date, safe and available across their network?

Designing for new digital rights

A series of quick’n’dirty prototypes to illustrate some of the design challenges involved in handling personal data:

• Data access tracker
• Data minimisation
• Guardian for digital identity
• Home privacy settings
• Portable shopping list
• Single trip insurance checker

If we don’t start exploring what the General Data Protection Regulation means for people, the same thing that happened with the cookie law will happen again.

These new rights have the potential to improve how our digital products and services work.

Free Icon Design Guide - Icon Utopia

Here you go: a free book on icon design in three parts, delivered via email.

You Are Not Paid to Write Code – Brave New Geek

Gall’s Fundamental Theorem of Systems is that new systems mean new problems. I think the same can safely be said of code—more code, more problems. Do it without a new system if you can

A cautionary tale of the risks involved with embracing new frameworks.

But when you introduce a new system, you introduce new variables, new failure points, and new problems.

…almost anything is easier to get into than out of.

Is Dark Matter Hiding Aliens?

Here’s a fun cosmic hypothesis on the scale of an Olaf Stapeldon story. There are even implications for data storage:

By storing its essential data in photons, life could give itself a distributed backup system. And it could go further, manipulating new photons emitted by stars to dictate how they interact with matter. Fronts of electromagnetic radiation could be reaching across the cosmos to set in motion chains of interstellar or planetary chemistry with exquisite timing, exploiting wave interference and excitation energies in atoms and molecules.