Adactio: Links

Magic Paintbox – Illuminated – Medium

What we get from the pattern library is time and freedom to be creative. I’ve seen people claim pattern libraries are the death of creativity and innovation in design. For us, it’s the opposite of that.

The principles behind Bulb’s design – Making Bulb – Medium

This is a great piece by Alla, ostensibly about Bulb’s design principles, but it’s really about what makes for effective design principles in general. It’s packed full of great advice, like these design principles for design principles:

Good principles are genuine

Good principles have a point of view

Good principles are memorable

Pitfalls of Card UIs - daverupert.com

I’m going through a pattern library right now, and this rings true:

I’m of the opinion that all cards in a Card UI are destined to become baby webpages. Just like modals. Baby hero units with baby titles and baby body text and baby dropdown menu of actions and baby call to action bars, etc.

In some ways this outcome is the opposite of what you were intending. You wanted a Card UI where everything was simple and uniform, but what you end up with is a CSS gallery website filled with baby websites.

Accessibility is not a feature. — Ethan Marcotte

Just last week I came across an example of what Ethan describes here: accessibility (in a pattern library) left to automatic checks rather than human experience.

The Complete CSS Demo for OpenType Features - OpenType Features in CSS

Every single font-feature-settings value demonstrated in one single page.

Design Laws in Nature by Jordan Moore

A deep, deep dive into biomicry in digital design.

Nature is our outsourced research and development department. Observing problems solved by nature can help inform how we approach problems in digital design. Nature doesn’t like arbitrary features. It finds a way to shed unnecessary elements in advancing long-term goals over vast systems.

Mozilla Protocol - Protocol Design System

Mozilla’s work-in-progress style guide and pattern library.

Monotype restored the font Walbaum, a 200-year-old serif typeface — Quartzy

The history and restoratin of a neglected typeface, complete with this great explanation of optical sizing:

Nix illustrated the point with an analogy: “Imagine if we all decided that 10-year-old boys would be the optimal human form,” he says. “Rather than having babies, we just shrunk 10-year-old boys to baby size, and enlarge them to the size of a full grown man. That’s kind of what we’re combatting.”

How can designers get better at learning from their mistakes?

Jon has seven answers:

Build a culture to learn from mistakes

Embrace healthy critique

Fail little and often

Listen to users

Design. Learn. Repeat

Create a shared understanding

Always be accountable

It’s gratifying to see how much of this was informed by the culture of critique at Clearleft.

A web of anxiety: accessibility for people with anxiety and panic disorders [Part 1] | The Paciello Group – Your Accessibility Partner (WCAG 2.0/508 audits, VPAT, usability and accessible user experience)

Enumerating the anti-patterns that cause serious user experience issues that don’t get nearly enough attention:

Urgency
Unpredictability
Powerlessness
Sensationalism

While such intrusions can be a source of irritation or even stress for many people, they may be complete showstoppers for people with anxiety or panic disorders.

I’m looking forward to reading the follow-up post.

(I was going to say I was anxiously awaiting the follow-up post but …never mind.)

Let’s serve everyone good-looking content

A terrific piece by Hidde, about CSS grid, but also about a much bigger question:

I don’t think we owe it to any users to make it all exactly the same. Therefore we can get away with keeping fallbacks very simple. My hypothesis: users don’t mind, they’ve come for the content.

If users don’t mind, that leaves us with team members, bosses and clients. In my ideal world we should convince each other, and with that I mean visual designers, product owners, brand people, developers, that it is ok for our lay-out not to look the same everywhere. Because serving good-looking content everywhere is more important than same grids everywhere.

Weft. — Ethan Marcotte

I think we often focus on designing or building an element, without researching the other elements it should connect to—without understanding the system it lives in.

Creating the “Perfect” CSS System – Gusto Design – Medium

This is great advice from Lindsay Grizzard—getting agreement is so much more important than personal preference when it comes to collaborating on a design system.

When starting a project, get developers onboard with your CSS, JS and even HTML conventions from the start. Meet early and often to discuss every library, framework, mental model, and gem you are interested in using and take feedback seriously. Simply put, if they absolutely hate BEM and refuse to write it, don’t use BEM.

It’s all about the people, people!

“Designer + Developer Workflow,” an article by Dan Mall

Dan compares the relationship between a designer and developer in the web world to the relationship between an art director and a copywriter in the ad world. He and Brad made a video to demonstrate how they collaborate.

‘Never assume anything’: The golden rules for inclusive design

Inclusive design is also future-proofing technology for everyone. Swan noted that many more developers and designers are considering accessibility issues as they age and encounter poor eyesight or other impairments.

Is it on brand?

Is it accessible?

Has it been tested?

Can it be reused?

They also have design principles.

Tags: design

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