Link tags: clearleft
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15 years of Clearleft
Ah, look at this beautiful timeline that Cassie designed and built—so many beautiful little touches! It covers the fifteen years(!) of Clearleft so far.
But you can also contribute to it …by looking ahead to the next fifteen years:
Let’s imagine it’s 2035…
How do you hope the practice of design will have changed for the better?
Fill out an online postcard with your hopes for the future.
The Clearleft podcast and the decline of design · Paul Robert Lloyd
Now this is the kind of response I was hoping to stir up with the first season of the Clearleft podcast!
With echos of design’s subjugation reverberating across all six episodes, this first season inadvertently told the story of how my profession has been captured by a desire to serve business interests above all others, while being disarmed by its tendency for introspection and need to be recognised.
Can digital design redeem itself? I hope so. Maybe in the next season of the Clearleft podcast, we’ll find out how.
Recreating Wildlife Photographer of the Year online – part 1 – Introduction and technical approach – Blogs from the Natural History Museum
You’ve seen the Wildlife Photographer Of The Year project from Clearleft’s viewpoint …and you’ve listened to the podcast episode, right?
Now here’s the story from the team that made the website. It’s a great walkthrough of thoughtfully evaluating technologies to figure out the best approach.
Always at Your Service · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer
Thoughts on user experience design and service design, prompted by the Clearleft podcast:
I especially enjoyed the latest episode about a topic that has become a bit of a hyped buzzword over the last few years: Service design.
Rich with anecdotes and stories, the episode started with an investigation: What is service design, anyway?
S01E04: Cassie Evans - Behind the Source
This is a lovely little interview with Cassie—it really is an honour and a privilege to work with her!
SofaConf 2020 - a technical write-up | Trys Mudford
Trys describes the backend architecture of the excellent Sofa Conf website. In short, it’s a Jamstack dream: all of the convenience and familiarity of using a database-driven CMS (Craft), combined with all the speed and resilience of using a static site generator (Eleventy).
I love the fact that anyone on the Clearleft events team can push to production with a Slack message.
I also love that the site is Lighthousetastically fast.
Home | SofaConf 2020
You don’t want to miss this! A five-day online conference with a different theme each day:
- Monday: Product Strategy
- Tuesday: Research
- Wednesday: Service Design
- Thursday: Content Strategy
- Friday: Interaction Design
Speakers include Amy Hupe, Kelly Goto, Kristina Halvorson, Lou Downe, Leisa Reichelt and many more still to be announce, all for ludicrously cheap ticket prices.
I know it sounds like I’m blowing my own trumpet because this is a Clearleft event, but I had nothing to do with it. The trumpets of my talented co-workers should be blasting in harmonious chorus.
(It’s a truly lovely website too!)
It’s OK.
This is for everyone at Clearleft, but I’m sharing it here for you too.
Visual Design Inspiration from Agency Websites–And Other Tangential Observations | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog
Tyring to do make screenshots of agency websites is tricky if the website is empty HTML with everything injected via JavaScript.
Granted, agencies are usually the ones pushing the boundaries. “Pop” and “pizazz” are what sell for many of them (i.e. “look what we can do!”) Many of these sites pushed the boundaries of what you can do in the browser, and that’s cool. I like seeing that kind of stuff.
But if you asked me what agency websites inspired both parts me, I’d point to something like Clearleft or Paravel. To me, they strike a great balance of visual design with the craft of building for an accessible, universal web.
Prioritising Requirements | Trys Mudford
Over the past few years, I’ve given quite a few workshops and talks on evaluating technology. This methodical approach to evaluation and prioritisation from Trys is right up my alley!
In any development project, there is a point at which one must decide on the tech stack. For some, that may feel like a foregone conclusion, dictated by team appetite and experience.
Even if the decision seems obvious, it’s always worth sense-checking your thought process. Along with experience and gut-feelings, we also have blind-spots and biases.
I feel like there’s a connection here to having good design principles—the kind that explicitly value one facet over another.
Workshop Countdown Clock
Here’s a nifty little progressive web app that Trys whipped up so that Clearlefties running workshops remotely still get to have their beloved countdown clock.
Getting your priorities right | Clearleft
A ludicrously useful grab-bag of prioritisation techniques from Chris—so, so handy for workshops and sprint planning.
Variable fonts’ past, present and future, according to Dalton Maag
In this interview, Biance Berning says:
Cassie Evans from Clearleft is an interesting person to follow as she combines web animation with variable font technology, essentially exploring the technology’s practicality and expression.
Hells yeah!
We’re only just scratching the surface of what variable fonts can do within more interactive and immersive spaces. I think we’ll see a lot more progress and experimentation with that as time goes on.
Self Treat
It’s been an absolute pleasure having Holly, Laçin, and Beyza at Clearleft while they’ve been working on this three-month internship project:
Self Treat is a vision piece designed to increase self-management of minor health conditions.
You can also read the blog posts they wrote during the process:
The rise of research ops — a view from the inside | Clearleft
I moderated this panel in London last week, all about the growing field of research ops—I genuinely love moderating panels. Here, Richard recounts some of the thought nuggets I prised from the mind casings of the panelists.
Jon Aizlewood · Agile and design — How to avoid Frankensteining your product
Jon’s ranting about Agile here, but it could equally apply to design systems:
Agile and design is like looking at a picture through a keyhole. By slicing big things into smaller things, designers must work incrementally. Its this incrementalism that can lead to what I call the ‘Frankensteining’ of a digital product or service.
Why your design system should include content | Clearleft
Rachel makes the case for integrating content design patterns into component libraries:
Instead of content design systems and visual design systems existing in isolation, the ideal is one design system that accommodates everything, marrying the content and design together in the way it will actually be used and experienced.
The Patterns Day Edition | Amy Hupe, content designer.
Amy’s talk at Patterns Day was absolutely brilliant! Here’s an account of the day from her perspective.
The evident care Jeremy put into assembling the lineup meant an incredible mix of talks, covering the big picture stuff right down to the nitty gritty, and plenty in between.
Her observation about pre-talk nerves is spot-on:
I say all of this because it’s important for me and I think anyone who suffers with anxiety about public speaking, or in general, to recognise that having a sense of impending doom doesn’t mean that doom is actually impending.
Patterns Day
Here’s a nice little round-up of Friday’s Patterns Day.