Link archive: March 20th, 2017

Untitled Sans & Serif Design Information · Klim Type Foundry

Two new typefaces, designed to be deliberately lacking in expression.

The write-up of the making of the typefaces is as open and honest as the finished output. This insight into the design process rings very, very true:

Post rationalisation is an open secret in the design industry. Only when a project is finished can it be written up, the messy process is delineated and everything seems to follow a logical sequence up until the final thing is unveiled, spotless and perfect.

However, I suspect the process is largely irrational for most designers. There is a point where all the input has been processed, all the shit drawings, tenuous concepts and small ideas have been thrown away and you just work towards the finish, too exhausted and distracted to even know if it’s worth anything or not. And, if you’re lucky, someone or something will come along and validate the work.

Render Search

🎵 If there’s something strange, in your neighbourhood’s architectural renders, who you gonna call? 🎵

James Bridle!

(I ain’t ‘fraid of no render ghost.)

1917. Free history.

Time-shifted reports from the Russian revolution, 100 years on.

All the texts used are taken from genuine documents written by historical figures: letters, memoirs, diaries and other documents of the period.

Every day, when you go onto the site, you will find out what happened exactly one hundred years ago: what various people were thinking about and what happened to each of them in this eventful year. You may not fast-forward into the future, but must follow events as they happen in real time.

Designing Systems, Part 3: Components and Composition / Paul Robert Lloyd

Paul finishes up his excellent three part series by getting down to the brass tacks of designing and building components on the web …and in cities. His closing provocation has echoes of Heydon’s rallying cry.

If you missed the other parts of this series, they are:

1. Theory, Practice, and the Unfortunate In-between,
2. Layers of Longevity, and
3. Components and Composition

World Wide Web, Not Wealthy Western Web (Part 2) – Smashing Magazine

The second part of Bruce’s excellent series begins by focusing on the usage of proxy browsers around the world:

Therefore, to make websites work in Opera Mini’s extreme mode, treat JavaScript as an enhancement, and ensure that your core functionality works without it. Of course, it will probably be clunkier without scripts, but if your website works and your competitors’ don’t work for Opera Mini’s quarter of a billion users, you’ll get the business.

But how!? Well, Bruce has the answer:

The best way to ensure that everyone gets your content is to write real, semantic HTML, to style it with CSS and ensure sensible fallbacks for CSS gradients, to use SVG for icons, and to treat JavaScript as an enhancement, ensuring that core functionality works without scripts. Package up your website with a manifest file and associated icons, add a service worker, and you’ll have a progressive web app in conforming browsers and a normal website everywhere else.

I call this amazing new technique “progressive enhancement.”

You heard it here first, folks!

The future of the open internet — and our way of life — is in your hands

We’ve gone through the invention step. The infrastructure came out of DARPA and the World Wide Web itself came out of CERN.

We’ve gone through the hobbyist step. Everyone now knows what the internet is, and some of the amazing things it’s capable of.

We’ve gone through the commercialization step. Monopolies have emerged, refined, and scaled the internet.

But the question remains: can we break with the tragic history that has befallen all prior information empires? Can this time be different?

The first part of this article is a great history lesson in the style of Tim Wu’s The Master Switch. The second part is a great explanation of net neutrality, why it matters, and how we can fight for it.

If you do nothing, we will lose the war for the open internet. The greatest tool for communication and creativity in human history will fall into the hands of a few powerful corporations and governments.

Tim Berners-Lee ~ The World Wide Web - YouTube

There’s something very endearing about this docudrama retelling of the story of the web.