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Learn HTML

This is a great step-by-step guide to HTML by Estelle.

This Is What I Want To Do – Trailer 3 - YouTube

I can’t wait to see this documentary about Marc and Beyond Tellerrand!

This Is What I Want To Do – Trailer 3

Balisage: Metaphors We Code By

My talk, Building, was about the metaphors we use to talk about the work we do on the web. So I’m interested in this analysis of the metaphors used to talk about markup:

The difference between correct-ness and useful-ness in a design system • Robin Rendle

I remember Lara telling me a great quote from the Clarity conference a few years back: “A design system needs to be correct before it’s complete.” In other words, it’s better to have one realistic component that’s actually in production than to have a pattern library full of beautiful but unimplemented components. I feel like Robin is getting at much the same point here, but he frames it in terms of correctness and usefulness:

If we want to be correct, okay, let’s have components of everything and an enormous Figma library of stuff we need to maintain. But if we want to be useful to designers who want to get an understanding of the system, let’s be brief.

Words To Avoid in Educational Writing | CSS-Tricks

This old article from Chris is evergreen. There’s been some recent discussion of calling these words “downplayers”, which I kind of like. Whatever they are, try not to use them in documentation.

Guarding Against Disposable Design — Smashing Magazine

Always refreshing to see some long-term thinking applied to the web.

Top Secret Rosies

I need to seek out this documentary, Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of World War II.

It would pair nicely with another film, The Eniac Programmers Project

The web is something different - daverupert.com

The web is so much bigger than the little boxes we try to put it in. The web is good at many things and not great (yet) at others. The web is a snowball rolling down hill, absorbing other technologies along the way. The web is an interactive window across space and time, a near instant connection to anyone on the planet. The web is something different. I wish we’d see the web more for itself, not defined by its nearest neighbor or navel-gazing over some hypothetical pathway we could have gone down decades ago.

A History of the Web in 100 Pages - Web Directions

I’m excited by this documentary project from John! The first video installment features three historic “pages”:

  • As We May Think,
  • Information Management: A Proposal, and
  • the first web page.

Adam Curtis’s Seaside Dream (Phil Gyford’s website)

chef’s kiss!

(you know my opinion of Adam Curtis’s documentaries)

Coded Bias Official Trailer on Vimeo

Coded Bias follows MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini’s startling discovery that many facial recognition technologies fail more often on darker-skinned faces, and delves into an investigation of widespread bias in artificial intelligence.

BBC Radio 4 - Under the Cloud

James made a radio programme about “the cloud”:

It’s the central metaphor of the internet - ethereal and benign, a fluffy icon on screens and smartphones, the digital cloud has become so naturalised in our everyday life we look right through it. But clouds can also obscure and conceal – what is it hiding? Author and technologist James Bridle navigates the history and politics of the cloud, explores the power of its metaphor and guides us back down to earth.

Sophie Zhang and The Social Dilemma | Revue

I watched The Social Dilemma last night and to say it’s uneven would be like saying the Himalayas are a little bumpy.

I’m shocked at how appealing so many people find the idea that social networks are uniquely responsible for all of society’s ills.

This cartoon super villain view of the world strikes me as a kind of mirror image of the right-wing conspiracy theories which hold that a cabal of elites are manipulating every world event in secret. It is more than a little ironic that a film that warns incessantly about platforms using misinformation to stoke fear and outrage seems to exist only to stoke fear and outrage — while promoting a distorted view of how those platforms work along the way.

Tolerance | Trys Mudford

Trys ponders home repair projects and Postel’s Law.

As we build our pages, components, and business logic, establish where tolerance should be granted. Consider how flexible each entity should be, and on what axis. Determine which items need to be fixed and less tolerant. There will be areas where the data or presentation being accurate is more important than being flexible - document these decisions.

British & Exotic Mineralogy

A really lovely unmonetisable enthusiasm:

All 2,242 illustrations from James Sowerby’s compendium of knowledge about mineralogy in Great Britain and beyond, drawn 1802–1817 and arranged by color.

You can dive in and explore or read more about the project and how it was made.

It reminds me of Paul’s project, Bradshaw’s Guide: the both take a beloved artifact of the past and bring it online with care, love, and respect.

We Are As Gods

A forthcoming documentary about Stewart Brand (with music by Brian Eno).

NASA Collection

Back in 1985, Ian wrote to NASA to get some info for a shool project (that’s how it worked before the World Wide Web). NASA sent him a treaure trove in response. Here they are, scanned as PDFs. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Space Shuttle, and more.

Sight and Sound: The Cinema of Walter Murch on Vimeo

I enjoyed this documentary on legendary sound designer and editor Walter Murch. Kinda makes me want to rewatch The Conversation and The Godfather.

Free Movie of the Week

While we’re all confined to quarters during The Situation, Gary Hustwit is offering one of his films for free every week. The fantastic Helvetica is just about to finish its run, but every one of Gary’s films is worth watching (and rewatching): Helvetica, Objectified, Urbanized, and Rams.

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit is streaming his documentaries free worldwide during the global COVID crisis. Each week we’ll be posting another film here. We hope you enjoy them, and please stay strong.

Frank Chimero · Redesign: Wants and Needs

Websites sit on a design spectrum. On one end are applications, with their conditional logic, states, and flows—they’re software.

On the other end of the design spectrum are documents; sweet, modest documents with their pleasing knowableness and clear edges.

For better or worse, I am a document lover.

This is the context where I fell in love with design and the web. It is a love story, but it is also a ghost story.