Links

The Worm is Back! | NASA

The return of NASA’s iconic “worm” logo (for some missions).

Responsive Images the Simple Way - Cloud Four

A nice succint explanation of using the srcset and sizes attributes on the img element—remember, you probably don’t need picture and source elements if your use case is swapping out different sized versions of the same image.

One caveat thought: you do need to know the dimensions of the images. If you’re dealing with unknown or user-generated photos, that can be an issue.

Visual Design Inspiration from Agency Websites–And Other Tangential Observations | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

Tyring to do make screenshots of agency websites is tricky if the website is empty HTML with everything injected via JavaScript.

Granted, agencies are usually the ones pushing the boundaries. “Pop” and “pizazz” are what sell for many of them (i.e. “look what we can do!”) Many of these sites pushed the boundaries of what you can do in the browser, and that’s cool. I like seeing that kind of stuff.

But if you asked me what agency websites inspired both parts me, I’d point to something like Clearleft or Paravel. To me, they strike a great balance of visual design with the craft of building for an accessible, universal web.

Sight and Sound: The Cinema of Walter Murch on Vimeo

I enjoyed this documentary on legendary sound designer and editor Walter Murch. Kinda makes me want to rewatch The Conversation and The Godfather.

Design Systems Podcast 10. Jeremy Keith: Overcoming Entropy and Turning Chaos Into Order

I enjoyed talking with Chris about design systems (and more). The episode is now available for your huffduffing pleasure.

CSS Architecture for Modern JavaScript Applications - MadeByMike

Mike sees the church of JS-first ignoring the lessons to be learned from the years of experience accumulated by CSS practitioners.

As the responsibilities of front-end developers have become more broad, some might consider the conventions outlined here to be not worth following. I’ve seen teams spend weeks planning the right combination of framework, build tools, workflows and patterns only to give zero consideration to the way they architect UI components. It’s often considered the last step in the process and not worthy of the same level of consideration.

It’s important! I’ve seen well-planned project fail or go well over budget because the UI architecture was poorly planned and became un-maintainable as the project grew.

Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In - Electric Literature

Ted Chiang’s hot takes are like his short stories—punchy, powerful, and thought-provoking.

Why we are living in JG Ballard’s world

I’m not the only one thinking about J.G. Ballard.

A luxury cruiseliner quarantined in San Francisco bay, its well-heeled passengers confined to their cabins for weeks on end. Holidaymakers on lockdown at a quarantined hotel in Tenerife after an Italian doctor comes down with coronavirus. A world of isolated individuals rarely leaving their homes, keeping a wary distance from one another in public, communicating with their friends and loved ones via exclusively technological means. These situations are so Ballardian as to be in the realm of copyright infringement.

Home (BBC film of J. G. Ballard’s The Enormous Space) - YouTube

Here’s a BBC adaption of that J.G. Ballard short story I recorded. It certainly feels like a story for our time.

Indoor Voices 🤫🤫🤫

A group blog by a whole bunch of people who are staying at home.

It’s hard to believe, but there was a time where the internet was just full of casual websites posting random stuff. And you’d go to them maybe even multiple times a day to see if they had posted any new stories. It was something we all did when we were bored at our desks, at our jobs. Now there are no more desks. But there are still blogs.

How to build a bad design system | CSS-Tricks

Working in a big organization is shocking to newcomers because of this, as suddenly everyone has to be consulted to make the smallest decision. And the more people you have to consult to get something done, the more bureaucracy exists within that company. In short: design systems cannot be effective in bureaucratic organizations. Trust me, I’ve tried.

Who hurt you, Robin?

Transreal Cyberpunk Readings

When you’re done listening to my reading of a J.G. Ballard short story, here’s a motherlode of huffduffable sci-fi shorts by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling.

James Meek · In 1348

This makes me want to re-read Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror.

This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For | WIRED

I just love the way that Laurie Penny writes.

In the end, it will not be butchery. Instead it will be bakery, as everyone has apparently decided that the best thing to do when the world lurches sideways is learn to make bread. Yeast is gone from the shops. Even I have been acting out in the kitchen, although my baked goods are legendarily dreadful. A friend and former roommate, who knows me well, called from Berlin to ask if I had “made the terrible, horrible biscuits yet.” These misfortune cookies tend to happen at moments of such extreme stress that those around me feel obliged to eat them. They say that if you can make a cake, you can make a bomb; if the whole thing implodes, my job will not be in munitions.

Brighton Quarantine Delivery

Fellow Brightonians, here’s a handy one-stop shop for all the places doing deliveries right now, generated from this spreadsheet by Chris Boakes.

HTML DOM - Common tasks of managing HTML DOM with vanilla JavaScript

This is a great way to organise code snippets—listed by use case, and searchable too!

Next time you’re stuck on some DOM scripting, before reaching for a framework or library, check here first.

Hobbies for the hell of it | Brad Frost

We should celebrate our hobbies for the joy-giving activities they are, and recognize that they don’t need to become anything bigger than that. And of course that’s not to say they those hobbies can’t turn into something bigger — it’s incredible when your passions and your occupation overlap — but it should be because you want to rather than that you feel pressured to. Not every activity you do needs to become a big official thing.

To-Do Terrarium

I love this little to-do app! Every time you tick something off your list, something grows in your virtual terrarium. Lovely!

Prioritising Requirements | Trys Mudford

Over the past few years, I’ve given quite a few workshops and talks on evaluating technology. This methodical approach to evaluation and prioritisation from Trys is right up my alley!

In any development project, there is a point at which one must decide on the tech stack. For some, that may feel like a foregone conclusion, dictated by team appetite and experience.

Even if the decision seems obvious, it’s always worth sense-checking your thought process. Along with experience and gut-feelings, we also have blind-spots and biases.

I feel like there’s a connection here to having good design principles—the kind that explicitly value one facet over another.

So no one told us the internet was gonna be this way | The Outline

An interview with Joanne McNeil about her new book, Lurking:

Someone who was creating, say, a small decentralized community for a specific group of people would not have luck finding investors, as opposed to Facebook, which sought to build a platform for all.

‘Sfunny, when I was on Quarantine Book Club the other day, this is exactly what I talked about one point—how Facebook (and venture capital) moved the goalposts on what constitutes success and failure on the web.