Link tags: design

Seb Lester’s Favorite Fonts

Seb picks his top ten typefaces inspired by calligraphy.

A History of Design Systems on the Web - The History of the Web

It’s great to see former Clearlefties like Nat, Paul and Anna rightly getting namechecked in this history of designing for the web in a systemic way. It’s a tradition that continues to this day with projects like Utopia.

Defining the WHAT and WHY of Design Principles — Anton Sten — UX-lead

Just like brand values, mission statements, or vision decks, design principles can be generic and provide little to no actual value.

But used correctly, design principles help you make decisions resulting in a superior experience.

Tiny Helpers

A very comprehensive collection of standalone little tools for web design and development—tools that do one thing.

Plus Equals #3, September 2021

Want to take a deep dive into tiling images? Like, a really deep dive. Rob has you covered.

New principle: Do not design around third-party tools unless it actually breaks the Web · Issue #335 · w3ctag/design-principles

There’s a really interesting discussion here, kicked off by Lea, about balancing long-term standards with short-term pragmatism. Specifically, it’s about naming things.

Naming things is hard. Naming things in standards, doubly so.

Basic Pattern Repository

A nice little collection of very simple—and very lightweight—SVGs to use as background patterns.

Benjamin Parry~ Writing ~ Engineering a better design test ~ @benjaminparry

It sometimes feels like we end up testing the limitations of our tools rather than the content and design itself.

What Benjamin found—and I heartily agree—is that HTML prototypes give you the most bang for your buck:

At the point of preparing for usability testing, it seemed ludicrous to move to any prototyping material other than the one we were already building in. The bedrock of the web: HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Designing Beautiful Shadows in CSS

This is a great tutorial—I just love the interactive parts that really help make things click.

Can we have custom media queries, please?

I knew that custom properties don’t work in media queries but I had no idea that there was such a thing as custom media queries, which effectively do the same thing.

But this is not implemented in any browser. Boo! This would be so useful! If browser makers can overcame the technical hurdles with container queries, I’m sure they can deliver custom media queries.

Schedule / Inclusive Design 24 (#id24) 23 September 2021

The annual day-long online accessibility event is back on September 23rd.

No sign-up. No registration. All sessions are streamed live and publicly on the Inclusive Design 24 YouTube channel.

Sentence Forms (not Mad Libs) | Adrian Roselli

Apparently the sentence forms that I kicked off with Huffduffer are making a comeback.

MD Nichrome by Mass-Driver

Marvin has some competition! Here’s another beautiful sci-fi variable font:

MD Nichrome is a display typeface based on the typography of paperback science fiction from the 70s and early 80s.

Design Titles

Keep refreshing until you find your next job title.

Tabs in HTML?

I’ve been having some really interesting chats with Brian about tabs, markup, progressive enhancement and accessibility. Here’s a braindump of his current thinking which is well worth perusing.

Whatever Happened to UI Affordances? – Terence Eden’s Blog

Flat, minimalist, clean, material - whatever you want to call it - is an annoying antipattern. Computers are here to make life easier for humans. Removing affordances is just a nasty thing to do to your users.

A Lifetime of Systems Thinking - The Systems Thinker

I don’t agree with all of the mythbusting in this litany of life lessons, but this one is spot on:

The best thing that can be done to a problem is to solve it. False. The best thing that can be done to a problem is to dissolve it, to redesign the entity that has it or its environment so as to eliminate the problem.

Remember that next time you’re tempted to solve a problem by throwing more code at it.

Design System Day, Thursday 22 July 2021

This looks interesting: a free one-day Barcamp-like event online all about design systems for the public sector, organised by the Gov.uk design system team:

If you work on public sector services and work with design systems, you’re welcome to attend. We even have some tickets for people who do not work in the public sector. If you love design systems, we’re happy to have you!

UXLondon 2021

Here’s a great write-up (with sketch notes) of last week’s conference portion of UX Fest:

There was a through-line of ethics through the whole conference that I enjoyed. The “design is the underdog” is tired and no longer true. I think that asking ourselves “now that we are here, how do we avoid causing harm?” is a much more mature conversation.

Bringing Dark Patterns to Light. Transcript of the speech I gave at the… | by Harry Brignull | Jun, 2021 | Medium

Harry gave a speech at the Federal Trade Commission’s Dark Patterns workshop in April. Here’s the transcript, posted to Ev’s blog.

When I first worked on Dark Patterns in 2010, I was quite naive. I thought that they could be eradicated by shaming the companies that used them, and by encouraging designers to use a code of ethics.

The fact that we’re here today means that approach didn’t work.