Adactio: Links—Tagged with design

Creating distraction-free reading experiences — Adrian Zumbrunnen

It’s our job as designers to bring clarity back to the digital canvas by crafting reading experiences that put readers first.

Building a Progressively-Enhanced Site | Jim Nielsen’s Blog

This is an excellent case study!

The technical details are there if you want them, but far more important is consideration that went into every interaction. Every technical decision has a well thought out justification.

Dimensions.Guide | Database of Dimensioned Drawings

There’s something quite lovely about this site, both in its purpose and execution.

Dimensions.Guide is a comprehensive reference database of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of the everyday objects and spaces that make up our world. Created as a universal resource to better communicate the basic properties, systems, and logics of our built environment, Dimensions.Guide is a free platform for increasing public and professional knowledge of life and design.

Four Cool URLs - Alex Pounds’ Blog

A fellow URL fetishest!

I love me a well-designed URL scheme—here’s four interesting approaches.

URLs are consumed by machines, but they should be designed for humans. If your URL thinking stops at “uniquely identifies a page” and “good for SEO”, you’re missing out.

Carson: Textured fluid type - Steve Honeyman

I reckon it’s time for distressed type to make a comeback—CSS is ready for it.

The 100 Year Web (In Praise of XML)

I don’t agree with Steven Pemberton on a lot of things—I’m not a fan of many of the Semantic Web technologies he likes, and I think that the Robustness Principle is well-suited to the web—but I always pay attention to what he has to say. I certainly share his concern that migrating everything to JavaScript is not good for interoperability:

This is why there are so few new elements in HTML5: they haven’t done any design, and instead said “if you need anything, you can always do it in Javascript”.

And they all have.

And they are all different.

Read this talk transcript, and even if you don’t agree with everything in it today, you may end up coming back to it in the future. He’s playing the long game:

The web is the way now that we distribute information. We will need the web pages we create now to be readable in 100 years time, just as we can still read 100-year-old books.

Requiring a webpage to depend on a particular 100-year-old implementation of Javascript is not exactly evidence of future-thinking.

Remove Background from Image – remove.bg

Well, this looks like it could come in handy—no more tedious time in Photoshop trying to select turn a person into a separate layer by hand; this does it for you.

Is Tech Too Easy to Use? - The New York Times

Seams!

Of all the buzzwords in tech, perhaps none has been deployed with as much philosophical conviction as “frictionless.” Over the past decade or so, eliminating “friction” — the name given to any quality that makes a product more difficult or time-consuming to use — has become an obsession of the tech industry, accepted as gospel by many of the world’s largest companies.

Design process for the messy in-between » cog & sprocket

Designing your design process:

Know your strengths and focus resources on your weaknesses.

Learn to identify the immovable objects.

What has to be perfect now and what can be fixed later?

Drupal’s commitment to accessibility | Dries Buytaert

Shots fired!

I’ve come to believe that accessibility is not something you do for a small group of people. Accessibility is about promoting inclusion. When the product you use daily is accessible, it means that we all get to work with a greater number and a greater variety of colleagues. Accessibility benefits everyone.

WALL·E | Typeset In The Future

A deep dive into Pixar’s sci-fi masterpiece, featuring entertaining detours to communist propaganda and Disney theme parks.

Rams — Gary Hustwit

The newest Gary Hustwit film is a documentary about Dieter Rams, featuring plinkity music by Brian Eno.

Rams is a design documentary, but it’s also a rumination on consumerism, materialism, and sustainability.

Adding value, by adding values – Public Digital

Ben Terrett on balancing the needs of an individual user with the needs of everyone else.

Of course we care about our clients: we want them to be successful and profitable. But we think there’s a balance to be struck between what success means for just the user or customer, and what success means for society.

You could create components that strike the perfect balance between reuse and context sensitivity. But defining the components of your design system is just the first step. It has to make its way into the product. If it doesn’t, a design system is like a language with no extant literature or seminal texts.

Marissa Christy outlines the reasons why your design system might struggle:

The redesign isn’t prioritized

The tech stack is changing

Maintenance takes discipline

But she also offers advice for counteracting these forces:

Get buy-in from the whole team

Prioritize a lightweight re-skin on older parts of the product

Treat a design system like any other product project: start small

Don’t wait for others. Lead by example.

Finally, don’t compare yourself to others on the internet

The International Flag of Planet Earth

A proposed flag for the planet.

Tags: design

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