Link archive: April 18th, 2018

Brutalist design is the bad influence we all need

What these brands are taking from web-brutalism — and truly, we should all be learning something here — is that User-centered design doesn’t need to be monopolized by the same colors, same buttons, same photography and even same copy you see in pretty much every single website or product.

The Untold Story of Jaime Levy, Punk-Rock Cyber-Publishing Pioneer

This excerpt from Claire L. Evans’s new book Broad Band sounds like Halt and Catch Fire, but for real.

Many people saw the web for the first time in Jaime’s loft, on a Mac II her hacker friend Phiber Optik set up with a 28.8K internet connection. As avant-garde guitarist Elliott Sharp performed live, and another friend, DJ Spooky, played house tracks, Jaime’s guests gathered around the Mac’s small screen. At the top of 1994, there were fewer than 1,000 websites in the world, mostly personal home pages. These converts would call themselves the “early true believers,” counting the year of their arrival online as a mark of status, the way the first punks claimed 1977.

Best Practices With CSS Grid Layout — Smashing Magazine

A great set of answers from Rachel to frequently asked questions about CSS grid. She addresses the evergreen question of when to use flexbox and when to use grid:

I tend to use Flexbox for components where I want the natural size of items to strongly control their layout, essentially pushing the other items around.

A sign that perhaps Flexbox isn’t the layout method I should choose is when I start adding percentage widths to flex items and setting flex-grow to 0. The reason to add percentage widths to flex items is often because I’m trying to line them up in two dimensions (lining things up in two dimensions is exactly what Grid is for).

The three Rs of web performance

  1. Reduce
  2. Reuse
  3. Restructure

The slides from Matthew’s talk on the performance overhauls he did on FixMyStreet.com and TrainTimes.org.uk.