Home Refreshment
A nifty little responsive demo from Nick, recreating a 1948 Coca-Cola ad that was designed to be responsive to different wall spaces.
Tags: design
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The Great Convergence of Design, Consulting and Engineering
This is a perceptive overview of three different species of agencies—consulting-led, engineering-led, and design-led. Clearleft fits squarely into that last category …and the weaknesses of that particular flavour of agency ring very true:
Design firms have historically lacked the business strategy chops and pedigree of the consultants.
It will probably come as no surprise that Clearleft has been getting “more strategic” recently.
Design needs more MBAs with C-suite relationships and an almost arrogant assumption that of course they belong there, advising the CEO and truly bringing design thinking to business. It’s time to do strategy for real. The market has never been more receptive to it than it is right now.
What walls are for – disambiguity
Digital things look ‘finished’ too soon. When something is a work in progress on a wall, it looks unfinished, so you keep working on it. moving things around, reshaping things, connecting things, erasing things, and making them again. Walls make it easier to iterate. Iteration, in my opinion, is massively correlated with quality.
Fractional. — Ethan Marcotte
Ethan’s ode to the fr unit in CSS grid.
Thinking in Triplicate – Mule Design Studio – Medium
Erika has written a great guest post on Ev’s blog. It covers the meaning, the impact, and the responsibility of design …and how we’ve been chasing the wrong measurements of success.
We design for the experience of a single user at a time and expect that the collective experience, and the collective impact, will take care of itself.
Tools In The Basement | Brad Frost
It’s possible to create components in a vacuum, but ultimately you have no idea whether or not those components can successfully address your user and business needs. I’ve witnessed firsthand several design system initiatives crash and burn due to components created in isolation.
How to build complicated grids using CSS grid
A nice walkthrough of a CSS grid in production. I was surprised to see percentages used as units—I wonder if it would feel “cleaner” if they were converted to fr units?
Steve Jobs on Prototypes - Snook.ca
I’ve thought often of how our design and prototyping tools for the web are often not of the web. Tools like Photoshop and Sketch and Invision create approximations but need to walk the line between being a tool to build native apps and to build web apps. They do well in their ability to quickly validate designs but do little to validate technical approach.
Accessibility for Teams
I really, really like the way that this straightforward accessibility guide is subdivided by discipline. As Maya wrote in the blog post announcing its launch:
Each person on a team, whether you’re a manager, designer, or developer, has a role to play. Your responsibilities are different depending on your role. So that’s how we structured the guide, with a separate section for each of five roles:
- Product management
- Content design
- UX design
- Visual design
- Front-end development
Pattern Library First: An Approach For Managing CSS — Smashing Magazine
Rachel goes into detail on how she uses pattern libraries—built with Fractal to build interfaces. I know it sounds like we paid her to say all the nice things about Fractal, but honestly, we didn’t even know she was writing this article!
After discovering Fractal two years ago, we have moved every new project — large and small — into Fractal.
ASCIIFlow Infinity
Is it a graphic design tool? Is it a text editor? Is it just good fun?
Brutalist Web Design
A website is not a magazine, though it might have magazine-like articles. A website is not an application, although you might use it to purchase products or interact with other people. A website is not a database, although it might be driven by one.
Stacking the Bricks: How the Blog Broke the Web
The title is quite clickbaity, but this is a rather wonderful retelling of web history on how Content Management Systems may have stifled a lot of the web’s early creativity.
Also, there’s this provocation: we like to rail against algorithmic sorting …but what if the reverse-chronological feed was itself the first algorithm?
Fonty: the new way for testing web fonts
This is very neat! Test out how Google Fonts will look on your website: type in your URL and away you go. Works well on mobile too.
Ampersand 2018 | Rob Weychert
Rob attended the excellent Ampersand event last Friday and he’s made notes for each and every talk.
Keynote: The Building Blocks Of The Indie Web - YouTube
Here’s the video of the talk I gave at Design4Drupal last week in Boston. There’s a good half an hour of questions at the end.
Design-Driven Companies. Are We There Yet? » Mike Industries
Mike talks about the pros and cons of working with companies at different stages of design maturity:
- design hostile,
- design ignorant,
- design agnostic,
- design interested, and
- design driven.
The Layouts of Tomorrow | Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer
A walkthrough of the process of creating a futuristic interface with CSS (grid and animation).
While this is just one interpretation of what’s possible, I’m sure there are countless other innovative ideas that could be realized using the tools we have today.