The day we started to allow email clients to be full-blown web browsers (but without the protections of browsers) was the day we lost — time, security, privacy, and effectiveness. Now we spend all our time fighting with the materials of an email (i.e. color and layout) rather than refining its substance (i.e. story and language).
The design process in action in Victorian England:
Recognizing that few people actually read statistical tables, Nightingale and her team designed graphics to attract attention and engage readers in ways that other media could not. Their diagram designs evolved over two batches of publications, giving them opportunities to react to the efforts of other parties also jockeying for influence. These competitors buried stuffy graphic analysis inside thick books. In contrast, Nightingale packaged her charts in attractive slim folios, integrating diagrams with witty prose. Her charts were accessible and punchy. Instead of building complex arguments that required heavy work from the audience, she focused her narrative lens on specific claims. It was more than data visualization—it was data storytelling.
I really, really enjoyed this deep dive into practical HTML semantics. Sit back and enjoy!
This is a story about pizza and geometry.
The interactive widget here really demonstrates the difference between showing and telling.
I want to posit that, in a time of great uncertainty—in an era of climate change and declining freedom, of attrition and layoffs and burnout, of a still-unfolding rearrangement of our relationship to work—we would do well to build more space for practicing the future. Not merely anticipating it or fearing it or feeding our anxiety over the possibilities—but for building the skill and strength and habits to nurture the future we need. We can’t control what comes next, of course. But we can nudge, we can push, we can guide and shape, we can have an impact. We can move closer to the future we want to live in, no matter how far away it seems to be.
The algorithm I’m going after is pretty simple: If the grid of items has an odd number of items, then make the first item full-width. But CSS can’t do logic… right? Well… hold my proverbial beer.