Adactio: Links

The Era of Newshammer - daverupert.com

Dave has redesigned his site. Now it’s extra Dave-y.

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.

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

Robtober 2017 | Rob Weychert

What an excellent example of a responsive calendar!

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?

Draggable JS – JavaScript drag and drop library

This looks like a very nice little JavaScript library for drag’n’drop. The site works as an example of the functionality in action.

Brought to you by Shopify, the company enabling Breitbart.

CSS and SVG animation workshop by codebarbrighton

There were two days of Codebar workshopping on the weekend as part of the Brighton Digital Festival. Cassie talked people through this terrific CSS animation tutorial, making this nifty Brighton-based piece.

Photon Design System

Most design systems I link to are for websites, so interesting to see this one for a web browser: Firefox.

There are guidelines for tone of voice and motion design as well as the usual guidelines for typography, colour, and interface elements.

Exclusive Design Principles ⚒ Nerd

This is a fascinating exercise—take a good set of design principles and test them for reversibility. The results are entirely plausible.

I’ve taken this exercise to the extreme. The philosophy behind inclusive design is that the thing you create works for everybody, no matter the context. The idea behind this experiment in Exclusive Design is that you design something for one specific person, in a controlled environment, in a specific context. Tailor made.

Maybe I should add these to my collection.

Provide a unique experience
Ignore situation
Be inconsistent/innovative
Take control
Offer the best possible solution
Prioritise identity
Add nonsense

Short Trip - Alexander Perrin

Well, this is simply delightful.

Visions - A Literary Science Fiction Magazine

This forthcoming sci-fi quarterly publication looks intriguing:

Each issue contains a part of a previously untranslated novel as well as essays looking at the world through the lens of different writers.

I’m loving their typeface. It’s called Marvin. It was specially made for the magazine, and available to download and use for personal use for free.

Marvin gets its distinctive voice not only from its Art Nouveau vibe but also from its almost geometrically perfect construction. Its roundness and familiarity with Bauhaus typefaces shows its roots in geometric sans serifs at the same time.

The story of its (re)construction is fascinating. (Thanks for the heads-up, Jason.)

My foreword for Design Systems. — Ethan Marcotte

Ethan’s foreword for Alla’s brilliant book.

(I know the book is brilliant because I was reviewer throughout. Pre-order it now.)

V6: The Archive | Rob Weychert

Rob has redesigned his site and it’s looking lovely. Here’s the first part of a three-part series on the rationale behind the relaunch:

I don’t pretend everything I do or say online is worthy of preservation. But while I’m still breathing, I want to be the one who decides what gets preserved and what doesn’t. And I want it all to be available in one place. Owning and operating my own site is the only way.

Hell, yeah!

Why strong sound design is critical to successful products - O’Reilly Media

From Designing Products with Sound by Amber Case and Aaron Day:

Sound eases cognitive burdens.

Sound is also a powerful brand differentiator.

Sound is emotional.

Finally, sound impacts productivity.

But also:

Not every product needs sound design.

UI Sounds: From Zero To Hero | Icons8 Blog

Following on from Ruth’s piece, here are some more thoughts on sound in UI from Roman Zimarev, the creator of icon sounds.

He makes a distinction between notification sounds and interaction sounds, as well as talking about sound identity in branding.

The Uncomfortable - a collection of deliberately inconvenient objects

These are ingenious. I think the chain fork is my favourite, but the uncomfortable broom is pretty great too.

Then there’s the inflatable doorknob.

A New bradfrost.com! | Brad Frost

I’m doubling down on owning my own content, so I’m excited to have a less-crusty home for it all.

It’s fun! In a world where even sites that aren’t Medium dot com are looking like Medium dot com, I’m excited to try something different.

This is not a checklist. Instead, it is a set of broad guidelines meant to preserve an underlying value. It can be used as a guide for someone working on implementation or as a tool to evaluate an existing project.

I’ve added them to my collection of design principles.

Tags: design

1118