Link archive: April 3rd, 2017

The Most Exciting Design Systems Are Boring | Big Medium

Design-system builders should resist the lure of the new. Don’t confuse design-system work with a rebrand or a tech-stack overhaul. The system’s design patterns should be familiar, even boring.

The job is not to invent, but to curate.

Interesting thoughts from Josh on large-scale design systems and how they should prioritise the mundane but oft-used patterns.

When the design system is boring, it frees designers and developers to do the new stuff, to solve new problems. The design system carries the burden of the boring, so that designers and developers don’t have to.

Cascading HTML Style Sheets — A Proposal

It’s fascinating to look back at this early proposal for CSS from 1994 and see what the syntax might have been:

A one-statement style sheet that sets the font size of the h1 element:

h1.font.size = 24pt 100%

The percentage at the end of the line indicates what degree of influence that is requested (here 100%).

Questioning Container Queries / Paul Robert Lloyd

Paul’s being contrary again.

Seriously though, this is a good well-reasoned post about why container queries might not be the the all-healing solution for our responsive design problems. Thing is, I don’t think container queries are trying to be an all-encompassing solution, but rather a very useful solution for one particular class of problem.

So I don’t really see container queries competing with, say, grid layout (any more than grid layout is competing with flexbox), but rather one more tool that would be really useful to have in our arsenal.

adactio/ama: Ask @adactio anything!

I’ve made one of them there “ask me anything” things so that you can ask me, well …anything.