Link archive: October, 2017

52

sparkline
                    5th                     10th                     15th                     20th                     25th                     30th     
12am
4am
8am                
12pm              
4pm                
8pm

map

Tuesday, October 31st, 2017

Never Use Futura

The book draws together the many and varied uses of Futura that make it a universal language while simultaneously confirming its unique typographic voice. The book is a playful yet passionate rebuttal to the perceived dominance of Helvetica as the typeface of modern design.

‘Neopets’: Inside Look at Early 2000s Internet Girl Culture - Rolling Stone

Girls on Neopets took what they needed from the site and used the skills acquired there to further develop a burgeoning digital girls’ culture, whether it be in expanding their guild pages into personal sites, teaching others to code, or exchanging those skills for economic gain in Neopets.

I have anecdotal evidence from a few people that Neopets was their introduction to web design and development.

Airplanes and Ashtrays – CSS Wizardry

Whenever you plan or design a system, you need to build in your own ashtrays—a codified way of dealing with the inevitability of somebody doing the wrong thing. Think of what your ideal scenario is—how do you want people to use whatever you’re building—and then try to identify any aspects of it which may be overly opinionated, prescriptive, or restrictive. Then try to preempt how people might try to avoid or circumvent these rules, and work back from there until you can design a safe middle-ground into your framework that can accept these deviations in the safest, least destructive way possible.

Netflix functions without client-side React, and it’s a good thing - JakeArchibald.com

A great bucketload of common sense from Jake:

Rather than copying bad examples from the history of native apps, where everything is delivered in one big lump, we should be doing a little with a little, then getting a little more and doing a little more, repeating until complete. Think about the things users are going to do when they first arrive, and deliver that. Especially consider those most-likely to arrive with empty caches.

And here’s a good way of thinking about that:

I’m a fan of progressive enhancement as it puts you in this mindset. Continually do as much as you can with what you’ve got.

All too often, saying “use the right tool for the job” is interpreted as “don’t use that tool!” but as Jake reminds us, the sign of a really good tool is its ability to adapt instead of demanding rigid usage:

Netflix uses React on the client and server, but they identified that the client-side portion wasn’t needed for the first interaction, so they leaned on what the browser can already do, and deferred client-side React. The story isn’t that they’re abandoning React, it’s that they’re able to defer it on the client until it’s was needed. React folks should be championing this as a feature.

On platforms and sustainability – confused of calcutta

JP Rangaswami also examines the rise of the platforms but he’s got some ideas for a more sustainable future:

A part of me wants to evoke Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander when it comes to building sustainable platforms. The platform “community” needs to be cared for and looked after, the living spaces they inhabit need to be designed to last. Multipurpose rather than monoculture, diverse rather than homogeneous . Prior industrial models where entire communities would rely on a single industry need to be learnt from and avoided. We shouldn’t be building the rust belts of the future. We should be looking for the death and life of great platforms, for a pattern language for sustainable platforms.

André Staltz - The Web began dying in 2014, here’s how

This is the clickbaitiest of titles, but the post has some good sobering analysis of how much traffic driven by a small handful players. It probably won’t make you feel very cheery about the future.

(For some reason, this article uses all-caps abbreviations for company names, as though a stock ticker started generating hot takes: GOOG, FB, AMZN, etc. It’s a very odd writing style for a human.)

Sunday, October 29th, 2017

Five thoughts on design and AI by Richard Pope - IF

I like Richard’s five reminders:

  1. Just because the technology feels magic, it doesn’t mean making it understandable requires magic.
  2. Designers are going to need to get familiar with new materials to make things make sense to people.
  3. We need to make sure people have an option to object when something isn’t right.
  4. We should not fall into the trap of assuming the way to make machine learning understandable should be purely individualistic.
  5. We also need to think about how we design regulators too.

Can You Afford It?: Real-world Web Performance Budgets – Infrequently Noted

Alex looks at the mindset and approaches you need to adopt to make a performant site. There’s some great advice in here for setting performance budgets for JavaScript.

JavaScript is the single most expensive part of any page in ways that are a function of both network capacity and device speed. For developers and decision makers with fast phones on fast networks this is a double-whammy of hidden costs.

Friday, October 27th, 2017

Transpiled for-of Loops are Bad for the Client - daverupert.com

This story is just a personal reminder for me to repeatedly question what our tools spit out. I don’t want to be the neophobe in the room but I sometimes wonder if we’re living in a collective delusion that the current toolchain is great when it’s really just morbidly complex. More JavaScript to fix JavaScript concerns the hell out of me.

Yes! Even if you’re not interested in the details of Dave’s story of JavaScript optimisation, be sure to read his conclusion.

I am responsible for the code that goes into the machine, I do not want to shirk the responsibility of what comes out. Blind faith in tools to fix our problems is a risky choice. Maybe “risky” is the wrong word, but it certainly seems that we move the cost of our compromises to the client and we, speaking from personal experience, rarely inspect the results.

Monday, October 23rd, 2017

Voice Guidelines | Clearleft

I love what Ben is doing with this single-serving site (similar to my design principles collection)—it’s a collection of handy links and resources around voice UI:

Designing a voice interface? Here’s a useful list of lists: as many guiding principles as we could find, all in one place. List compiled and edited by Ben Sauer @bensauer.

BONUS ITEM: Have him run a voice workshop for you!

Sunday, October 22nd, 2017

How to write a talk - Notist

Rachel describes her process of putting technical talks together:

This method of creating a talk is the one that I find gets me from blank page to finished slide deck most effectively.

She also acknowledges that many other processes are available.

If you are stuck, and your usual method isn’t working, don’t be afraid to try a different approach even if just to get the ideas moving and take you away from staring at the blank page! You might discover that some types of talk benefit from an alternate starting point. There really are no rules here, other than that you do end up with a talk before you need to walk out on that stage.

Saturday, October 21st, 2017

Thursday, October 19th, 2017

Design Systems | susan jean robertson

Susan reviews Alla’s superb book on design systems:

If you’re interested in or wanting to create a design system or improve the one you have or get buy in to take your side project at work and make it part of the normal work flow, read this book. And even better, get your colleagues to do the same, so you’ll have a shared understanding before you begin the hard work to build your own system.

Susan also published her highlights from the book. I really like that!

The Story of CSS Grid, from Its Creators · An A List Apart Article

It must be the day for documenting the history of CSS. Here’s an article by Aaron on the extraordinary success story of CSS Grid. A lot of the credit for that quite rightly goes to Rachel and Jen:

Starting with Rachel Andrew coming in and creating a ton of demos and excitement around CSS Grid with Grid by Example and starting to really champion it and show it to web developers and what it was capable of and the problems that it solves.

Then, a little bit later, Jen Simmons created something called Labs where she put a lot of demos that she created for CSS Grid up on the web and, again, continued that momentum and that wave of enthusiasm for CSS Grid with web developers in the community.

Building a CSS-only image gallery (with fallbacks)

A great step-by-step walkthrough of building a really nice image gallery without any JavaScript.

The end result is really impressive but there’s still the drawback that the browser history will be updated every time you click on an image thumbnail (because the functionality relies on ID attributes referenced via :target). Depending on your use-case, that may or may not be desirable.

Tuesday, October 17th, 2017

Wednesday, October 11th, 2017

Failing to distinguish between a tractor trailer and the bright white sky | booktwo.org

James talks about automation and understanding.

Just because a technology – whether it’s autonomous vehicles, satellite communications, or the internet – has been captured by capital and turned against the populace, doesn’t mean it does not retain a seed of utopian possibility.

Monday, October 9th, 2017

Defining design principles at EMBL | Journal | The Personal Disquiet of Mark Boulton

Mark describes the process he favours for creating (discovering?) design principles, like the ones for EMBL (I must remember to add those to the collection).

All you do is be mindful of when the team repeats design desires. This could be several members of the team say the same thing in a slightly different way, or that you keep circling around and around a problem but struggle to articulate it. By being mindful at all times to this a team can quickly pull together principles that are derived from doing the work on their particular problem rather than principles which are imposed on the work. An important difference.

Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android: What developers need to know - Microsoft Edge Dev Blog

This is such a strange announcement from Microsoft. It’s worded as though they chose to use the WebKit engine on iOS. But there is no choice: if you want to put a browser on iOS, you must use the WKWebView control. Apple won’t allow any other rendering engine (that’s why Chrome on iOS is basically a skin for Safari; same for Opera on iOS). It’s a disgraceful monopolistic policy on Apple’s part.

A word to the Microsoft marketing department: please don’t try to polish the turd in the shit sandwich you’ve been handed by Apple.

“async” attribute on img, and corresponding “ready” event · Issue #1920 · whatwg/html

It looks like the async attribute is going to ship in Chrome for img elements:

This attribute would have two states:

  • “on”: This indicates that the developer prefers responsiveness and performance over atomic presentation of content.
  • “off”: This indicates that the developer prefers atomic presentation of content over responsiveness.

Saturday, October 7th, 2017

Thursday, October 5th, 2017

Wednesday, October 4th, 2017

18F: Digital service delivery | Building a large-scale design system: How we created a design system for the U.S. government

Maya Benari provides an in-depth walkthrough of 18F’s mission to create a consistent design system for many, many different government sites.

When building out a large-scale design system, it can be hard to know where to start. By focusing on the basics, from core styles to coding conventions to design principles, you can create a strong foundation that spreads to different parts of your team.

There’s an interface inventory, then mood boards, then the work starts on typography and colour, then white space, and finally the grid system.

The lessons learned make for good design principles:

  • Talk to the people
  • Look for duplication of efforts
  • Know your values
  • Empower your team
  • Start small and iterate
  • Don’t work in a vacuum
  • Reuse and specialize
  • Promote your system
  • Be flexible

This Future Looks Familiar: Watching Blade Runner in 2017 | Tor.com

If you subtract the flying cars and the jets of flame shooting out of the top of Los Angeles buildings, it’s not a far-off place. It’s fortunes earned off the backs of slaves, and deciding who gets to count as human. It’s impossible tests with impossible questions and impossible answers. It’s having empathy for the right things if you know what’s good for you. It’s death for those who seek freedom.

A thought-provoking first watch of Blade Runner …with an equally provocative interpretation in the comments:

The tragedy is not that they’re just like people and they’re being hunted down; that’s way too simplistic a reading. The tragedy is that they have been deliberately built to not be just like people, and they want to be and don’t know how.

That’s what really struck me about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: the tragedy is that these people can’t take action. “Run! Leave! Go!” you want to scream at them, but you might as well tell someone “Fly! Why don’t you just fly?”

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2017

JavaScript Systems Music

A massively in-depth study of boundary-breaking music, recreated through the web audio API.

  1. Steve Reich - It’s Gonna Rain (1965)
  2. Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports, 2/1 (1978)
  3. Brian Eno - Discreet Music (1975)

You don’t have to be a musician or an expert in music theory to follow this guide. I’m neither of those things. I’m figuring things out as I go and it’s perfectly fine if you do too. I believe that this kind of stuff is well within reach for anyone who knows a bit of programming, and you can have a lot of fun with it even if you aren’t a musician.

One thing that definitely won’t hurt though is an interest in experimental music! This will get weird at times.

An Epitaph for Newsvine » Mike Industries

Newsvine has closed. Mike reflects on what he built, with a particular eye to the current online news situation.

When we look at how the average person’s news and media diet has changed over the last decade or so, we can trace it directly back to the way these and other modern organizations have begun feeding us our news. Up until 10 or 15 years ago, we essentially drank a protein shake full of news. A good amount of fruits and vegetables, some grains, some dairy, some tofu, and then a little bit of sugar, all blended together. Maybe it wasn’t the tastiest thing in the world but it kept us healthy and reasonably informed. Then, with cable news we created a fruit-only shake for half the population and a vegetable-only shake for the other half. Then with internet news, we deconstructed the shake entirely and let you pick your ingredients, often to your own detriment. And finally, with peer-reinforced, social news networks, we’ve given you the illusion of a balanced diet, but it’s often packed with sugar, carcinogens, and other harmful substances without you ever knowing. And it all tastes great!

There’s also this interesting litmus test for budding entrepreneurs:

We didn’t know for sure if it was going to work, but the day we decided we’d be happy to have tried it even if it failed was the day we ended up quitting our jobs (incidentally, if you are thinking about leaving your job for a new risky thing, this is the acid test I recommend).

Monday, October 2nd, 2017

Web Components: The Long Game – Infrequently Noted

One of the things we’d hoped to enable via Web Components was a return to ctrl-r web development. At some level of complexity and scale we all need tools to help cope with code size, application structure, and more. But the tender, loving maintainance of babel and webpack and NPM configurations that represents a huge part of “front end development” today seems…punitive. None of this should be necessary when developing one (or a few) components and composing things shouldn’t be this hard. The sophistication of the tools needs to get back to being proportional with the complexity of the problem at hand.

I completely agree with Alex here. But that’s also why I was surprised and disheartened when I linked to Monica’s excellent introduction to web components that a package manager seemed to be a minimum requirement.

eBay’s Font Loading Strategy | eBay Tech Blog

Here’s the flow that eBay use for the font-loading. They’ve decided that on the very first page view, seeing a system font is an acceptable trade-off. I think that makes sense for their situation.

Interestingly, they set a flag for subsequent visits using localStorage rather than a cookie. I wonder why that is? For me, the ability to read cookies on the server as well as the client make them quite handy for situations like this.

When the news goes sideways – James Donohue – Medium

The BBC has been experimenting with some alternative layouts for some articles on mobile devices. Read on for the details, but especially for the philosophical musings towards the end—this is gold dust:

Even the subtext of Google’s marketing push around Progressive Web Apps is that mobile websites must aspire to be more like native apps. While I’m as excited about getting access to previously native-only features such as offline support and push notifications as the next web dev, I’m not sure that the mobile web should only try to imitate the kind of user interfaces that we see on native.

Do mobile websites really dream of being native apps, any more than they dreamt of being magazines?

How to Trick Yourself into Writing a Book in Five Easy Steps

Great advice from Jen on writing a book:

  1. Write emails to Ted. Try to find a little comfort zone inside the larger uncomfortable task.
  2. Don’t write a Book. Write Chapters. Break a large chore into smaller tasks and focus on one at a time.
  3. Trap yourself. Set up a workspace that limits distraction and procrastination.
  4. Don’t despair the zero-word-count days. Give yourself credit for behind-the-scenes work, even self-care.
  5. Get amnesia. Keep your eye on the prize.