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 transcript of a terrific talk by Paul, calling for a more thoughtful, questioning approach to digital design. It covers the issues I’ve raised about Booking.com’s dark patterns and a post I linked to a while back about the shifting priorities of designers working at scale.
Drawing inspiration from architectural practice, its successes and failures, I question the role of design in a world being eaten by software. When the prevailing technocratic culture permits the creation of products that undermine and exploit users, who will protect citizens within the digital spaces they now inhabit?
Cameron contrasts Syd Mead with Frank Lloyd Wright.
Mastery of materials is a valuable thing to have. It will help you build what’s needed now and forge ahead into the near future. But vision is also valuable – it helps inspire and drive teams, and lays out a longer term future that can alter the path of humanity. What I take from the futurists and the realists is that there’s a place for every person and every process; what you need to do is find your own place, get comfortable, and own it.
Another brilliant talk from Frank, this time on the (im)balance between the commercial and the cultural web.
Remember: the web is a marketplace and a commonwealth, so we have both commerce and culture; it’s just that the non-commercial bits of the web get more difficult to see in comparison to the outsized presence of the commercial web and all that caters to it.
This really resonates with me:
If commercial networks on the web measure success by reach and profit, cultural endeavors need to see their successes in terms of resonance and significance.
Ballardian spaces.
Chris has set up a whole site dedicated to someone-else’s-server sites with links to resources and services (APIs), along with ideas of what you could build in this way.
Here’s one way to think about it: you can take your front-end skills and do things that typically only a back-end can do. You can write a JavaScript function that you run and receive a response from by hitting a URL. That’s sometimes also called Cloud Functions or Functions as a Service, which are perhaps better names, but just a part of the whole serverless thing.
Paul pulls no punches in this rousing talk from Patterns Day.
The transcript is on his site.
Paul has published the slides and transcript of his knock-out talk at Patterns Day. This a must-read: superb stuff!
Design systems are an attempt to add a layer of logic and reasoning over a series decisions made by complex, irrational, emotional human beings. As such, they are subject to individual perspectives, biases, and aspirations.
How does the culture in which they are made effect the resulting design?
A thoroughly impractical—but fun to imagine—alternative to a space elevator:
Analemma inverts the traditional diagram of an earth-based foundation, instead depending on a space-based supporting foundation from which the tower is suspended. This system is referred to as the Universal Orbital Support System (UOSS). By placing a large asteroid into orbit over earth, a high strength cable can be lowered towards the surface of earth from which a super tall tower can be suspended. Since this new tower typology is suspended in the air, it can be constructed anywhere in the world and transported to its final location.
The construction might sound like Clarke’s The Fountains Of Paradise, but I imagine life in the tower would be more like Ballard’s High Rise.
🎵 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.)
Some great thoughts here from Francis on how crafting solid HTML is information architecture.
A good overview of ideas and techniques for structuring CSS and naming classes.
A fascinating look at an attempt to redefine the taxonomy of online porn.
Porn is part of the ecosystem that tells us what sex and sexuality are. Porn terms are, to use Foucault’s language, part of a network of technologies creating truths about our sexuality.
Reminds of the heady days of 2005, when it was all about tagging and folksonomies.
The project, at its most ambitious, seeks to create a new feedback loop of porn watched and made, unmoored from the vagaries of old, bad, lazy categories.
Did you know that Abby Covert’s book is available online in its gloriously hyperlinked entirety?
Depending on how you’re currently structuring your CSS and class attributes, web components might not make all that much of a difference to your workflow.
I’m so happy that Ember is moving to a server-side rendering model. Not only that, but as Tom points out here, it’s crucial that the server-side rendering is the default and the client-side functionality than becomes an enhancement.
The videos from EnhanceConf are started to go up already. Stefan’s talk really struck me—all the talks were great but this one had the most unexpected insight for me. It really clarifies a lot of ideas that I’ve been trying to articulate, but which Stefan crystalises by taking the long-zoom view.
A really good explanation of how a peer-to-peer model for the web would differ from the current location-centric approach.
What really interests me is the idea of having both models co-exist.
You just have to think about the ways in which our location-centrism is contributing to the problems we are hitting, from the rise of Facebook, to the lack of findability of OER, to the Wikipedia Edit Wars.
This rousing call-to-arms by Abby the IA makes a great companion piece to her interview on The Big Web Show.
A response to a rant I linked to recently.
The solution for bad JavaScript web apps is not to abandon them altogether, but to make better ones.
I couldn’t agree more. The tools have evolved and we now have frameworks and practices that allow us to render from the server and use the same code to render on the client, progressively enhancing from a solid robust base.
JavaScript is the best technology to build excellent interactivity in the browser. Still, the most important skill of a client-side JavaScript developer is to know when not to solve a problem with client-side JavaScript. It’s always more robust to solve a problem further down in the stack.
The problem is that I don’t see a willingness from developers to embrace this way of thinking. Instead I see it dismissed as being unrealistic or more expensive.
Still, it always takes time for behaviour to change so maybe things will only get better. I certainly hope so.