Link tags: design

The things of everyday design || Matthew Ström: designer & developer

The evolution of affordances on the web:

The URL for a page goes at the top. Text appears in a vertically scrolling column. A dropdown menu has a downward-pointing triangle next to it. Your mouse cursor is a slanted triangle with a tail, and when you hover over a link it looks like Mickey Mouse’s glove.

Most of these affordances don’t have any relationship to the physical characteristics of the interaction they mediate. But remove them from a website, application, or interface, and users get disoriented, frustrated, and unproductive.

Make me think! – Ralph Ammer

This is about seamful design.

We need to know things better if we want to be better.

It’s also about progressive enhancement.

Highly sophisticated systems work flawlessly, as long as things go as expected.

When a problem occurs which hasn’t been anticipated by the designers, those systems are prone to fail. The more complex the systems are, the higher are the chances that things go wrong. They are less resilient.

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?

CSS photo effects - a Collection by Lynn Fisher on CodePen

These wonderfully realistic photo effects from Lynn are quite lovely!

Works offline

How do we tell our visitors our sites work offline? How do we tell our visitors that they don’t need an app because it’s no more capable than the URL they’re on right now?

Remy expands on his call for ideas on branding websites that work offline with a universal symbol, along the lines of what we had with RSS.

What I’d personally like to see as an outcome: some simple iconography that I can use on my own site and other projects that can offer ambient badging to reassure my visitor that the URL they’re visiting will work offline.

Round 1: post your ideas / designs · Issue #1 · works-offline/logo

This is an interesting push by Remy to try to figure out a way we can collectively indicate to users that a site works offline.

Well, seeing as browsers have completely dropped the ball on any kind of ambient badging, it’s fair enough that we take matters into our own hands.

A walkthrough of our design system and how we got here | Kyan

It all started at Patterns Day…

(Note: you’ll probably need to use Reader mode to avoid taxing your eyes reading this—the colour contrast …doesn’t.)

A tale of three skeuomorphs

A trashcan, a tyepface, and a tactile keyboard. Marcin gets obsessive (as usual).

Spatial Awareness

Robin Hawkes has made a lovely website to go with his newsletter all about maps and spatial goodies.

Dark Ages of the Web

Notes on the old internet, its design and frontend.

Fussy Web, True Meaning. · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Websites are primarily seen as functional software, built to fulfill a business objective and to reach quantifiable goals. The field of user experience is obsessed with KPIs, jobs-to-be-done, optimized user flows, and conversion rates. And in quest of ever more efficient processes – and in the spirit of true modernists –, design and development teams try to standardize solutions into reusable templates and components, streamlined pattern libraries, and scalable design systems.

The design systems between us. — Ethan Marcotte

Smart thoughts from Ethan on how design systems can cement your existing ways of working, but can’t magically change how collaboration works at your organisation.

Modern digital teams rarely discuss decisions in terms of the collaborative costs they incur. It’s tempting—and natural!—to see design- or engineering-related decisions in isolation: that selecting Vue as a front-end framework only impacts the engineering team, or that migrating to Figma only impacts designers. But each of these changes the way that team works, which impacts how other teams will work and collaborate with them.

Weird Wide Webring

More of the whimsical web!

The Whimsical Web

A collection of truly personal sites.

This site is meant to showcase how a more personal web could look like, and hopefully give you some inspiration to make your own corner of the web a bit weirder.

Of course Cassie’s site is included!

Takin’ five. — Ethan Marcotte

I linked to the first of Ethan’s short videos on accessibility last week, but it’s well worth checking out all five:

1. Introduction to using VoiceOver on macOS
2. Designing beautiful focus states
3. Flexible and accessible typesetting
4. Responsively designing with viewport units
5. Designing beautiful and accessible drop caps

Cassie Evans’s Blog

Cassie’s redesign is gorgeous—so much attention to detail! (And performant too)

Global and Component Style Settings with CSS Variables — Sara Soueidan

Sara shares how she programmes with custom properties in CSS. It sounds like her sensible approach aligns quite nicely with Andy’s CUBE CSS methodology.

Oh, and she’s using Fractal to organise her components:

I’ve been using Fractal for a couple of years now. I chose it over other pattern library tools because it fit my needs perfectly — I wanted a tool that was unopinionated and flexible enough to allow me to set up and structure my project the way I wanted to. Fractal fit the description perfectly because it is agnostic as to the way I develop or the tools I use.

Type Specimens

This is a lovely new project from Mark that gets very meta, cataloging specimens of type specimens:

This project will dig into specimens from these three perspectives: as artefacts made by and for font designers to evolve type culture; as tools for font users to make decisions about choosing and using type; and as effective marketing tools.

CUBE CSS - Piccalilli

I really, really like Andy’s approach here:

The focus of the methodology is utilising the power of CSS and the web platform as a whole, with some added controls and structures that help to keep things a bit more maintainable and predictable. The end-goal is shipping as little CSS as possible—leaning heavily into progressive enhancement and modern techniques.

If you use the cascade for everything, you’re going to run into trouble. But equally, micro-managing styles on every element will also get you into trouble. I think Andy’s found a really great sweet spot here that gets the balance just right.

CUBE CSS in essence, is a progressive enhancement approach, vs a fight against the grain of CSS or a pixel-pushing your project to within an inch of its life approach.

Yes! It feels very “webby” to me.

Responsive web design turns ten. — Ethan Marcotte

2010 was quite a year:

And exactly three weeks after Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers was first published, “Responsive Web Design” went live in A List Apart.

Nothing’s been quite the same since.

I remember being at that An Event Apart in Seattle where Ethan first unveiled the phrase and marvelling at how well everything just clicked into place, perfectly capturing the zeitgeist. I was in. 100%.