Links

9 squares – The Man in Blue

Some lovely little animation experiments from Cameron.

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

React is just JavaScript – YLD Engineering Blog – Medium

I like that this introduction to React doesn’t assume any knowledge (or desire) to create an entire app from scratch through command line invocations. Instead, here’s a clear explanation of how you can add React—which is, after all, some JavaScript—to an existing project. Oh, and you can write your CSS in CSS.

(Caveat: because everything’s happening in script elements in the browser, what’s outlined here will only do client-side rendering.)

Fixing these webs - daverupert.com

I’m a fan of fast websites. Your website needs to be fast. Our collective excuses, hand-wringing, and inability to come to terms with the problem-set (There is too much script) and solutions (Use less script) of modern web development is getting tired.

I agree with every word of this.

Sadly, I think the one company with a browser that has marketshare dominance and could exert the kind of pressure required to stop ad tracking and surveillance capitalism is not incentivized to do so.

So the problem is approached from the other end. Blame is piled on authors for slow first-party code. We’re told to use certain mobile publishing frameworks that syndicate to proprietary CDNs to appease the gods of luck and fortune.

Thinking in Triplicate – Mule Design Studio – Medium

Erika has written a great guest post on Ev’s blog. It covers the meaning, the impact, and the responsibility of design …and how we’ve been chasing the wrong measurements of success.

We design for the experience of a single user at a time and expect that the collective experience, and the collective impact, will take care of itself.

Tools In The Basement | Brad Frost

It’s possible to create components in a vacuum, but ultimately you have no idea whether or not those components can successfully address your user and business needs. I’ve witnessed firsthand several design system initiatives crash and burn due to components created in isolation.

Font Playground — Play with variable fonts!

A fun way to play around with the options in variable fonts.

Should I try to use the IE version of Grid Layout? Revisited for 2018

Rachel follows up on my recent post about CSS grid in old IE with her thoughts.

As Jeremy notes, the usefulness of a tool like Autoprefixer is diminishing, which is a good thing. It is becoming far easier to code in a way that supports all browsers, where support means usable in an appropriate way for the technology the user has in front of them. Embrace that, and be glad for the fact that we can reduce complexity based on the increasing interoperability of CSS in our browsers.

How to build complicated grids using CSS grid

A nice walkthrough of a CSS grid in production. I was surprised to see percentages used as units—I wonder if it would feel “cleaner” if they were converted to fr units?

CSS: A New Kind Of JavaScript | HeydonWorks

A bold proposal by Heydon to make the process of styling on the web less painful and more scalable. I think it’s got legs, but do we really need another three-letter initialism?

We waste far too much time writing and maintaining styles with JavaScript, and I think it’s time for a change. Which is why it’s my pleasure to announce an emerging web standard called CSS.

You don’t have to live in public

I tried very hard in that book, when it came to social media, to be platform agnostic, to emphasize that social media sites come and go, and to always invest first and foremost in your own media (website, blog, etc.) and mailing list.

I still stand by that advice, but if I re-wrote the book now, I would encourage artists to use much more caution when it comes to using social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.