Link tags: gui

Global and Component Style Settings with CSS Variables — Sara Soueidan

Sara shares how she programmes with custom properties in CSS. It sounds like her sensible approach aligns quite nicely with Andy’s CUBE CSS methodology.

Oh, and she’s using Fractal to organise her components:

I’ve been using Fractal for a couple of years now. I chose it over other pattern library tools because it fit my needs perfectly — I wanted a tool that was unopinionated and flexible enough to allow me to set up and structure my project the way I wanted to. Fractal fit the description perfectly because it is agnostic as to the way I develop or the tools I use.

A Guide to the Responsive Images Syntax in HTML | CSS-Tricks

Chris has put together one of his indispensable deep dives, this time into responsive images. I can see myself referring back to this when I need to be reminded of the syntax of srcset and sizes.

Modern CSS Solutions

…for old CSS problems.

Very handy!

Extinguished Countries

Guidebooks to countries that no longer exist.

The first book will be on the Republic of Venice. There’ll be maps, infographics, and I suspect there’ll be an appearance by Aldus Manutius.

Our first guidebook tells the story of the Republic of Venice, la Serenissima, a 1000-year old state that disappeared in 1797.

This is Not my Beautiful House: Examining the Desktop Metaphor, 1980-1995 | continent.

From Xerox PARC to the World Wide Web:

The internet did not use a visual spatial metaphor. Despite being accessed through and often encompassed by the desktop environment, the internet felt well and truly placeless (or perhaps everywhere). Hyperlinks were wormholes through the spatial metaphor, allowing a user to skip laterally across directories stored on disparate servers, as well as horizontally, deep into a file system without having to access the intermediate steps. Multiple windows could be open to the same website at once, shattering the illusion of a “single file” that functioned as a piece of paper that only one person could hold. The icons that a user could arrange on the desktop didn’t have a parallel in online space at all.

The Guardian digital design style guide

What a lovely way to walk through the design system underpinning the Guardian website.

Bonus points for using the term “tweak points”!

The Patterns Day Edition | Amy Hupe, content designer.

Amy’s talk at Patterns Day was absolutely brilliant! Here’s an account of the day from her perspective.

The evident care Jeremy put into assembling the lineup meant an incredible mix of talks, covering the big picture stuff right down to the nitty gritty, and plenty in between.

Her observation about pre-talk nerves is spot-on:

I say all of this because it’s important for me and I think anyone who suffers with anxiety about public speaking, or in general, to recognise that having a sense of impending doom doesn’t mean that doom is actually impending.

Patterns Day

Here’s a nice little round-up of Friday’s Patterns Day.

Weeknotes #16 | Trys Mudford

Just look at these fantastic pictures that Trys took (very unobstrusively) at Patterns Day—so rock’n’roll!

Patterns Day notes

Stuart took copious notes during every single talk at Patterns Day—what a star!

A Complete Beginner’s Guide to React by Ali Spittel

This really is a most excellent introduction to React. Complete with cheat sheet!

Readable Code without Prescription Glasses | Ocasta

I saw Daniel give a talk at Async where he compared linguistic rules with code style:

We find the prescriptive rules hard to follow, irrespective of how complex they are, because they are invented, arbitrary, and often go against our intuition. The descriptive rules, on the other hand, are easy to follow because they are instinctive. We learned to follow them as children by listening to, analysing and mimicking speech, armed with an inbuilt concept of the basic building blocks of grammar. We follow them subconsciously, often without even knowing the rules exists.

Thus began some thorough research into trying to uncover a universal grammar for readable code:

I am excited by the possibility of discovering descriptive readability rules, and last autumn I started an online experiment to try and find some. My experiment on howreadable.com compared various coding patterns against each other in an attempt to objectively measure their readability. I haven’t found any strong candidates for prescriptive rules so far, but the results are promising and suggest a potential way forward.

I highly recommend reading through this and watching the video of the Async talk (and conference organisers; get Daniel on your line-up!).

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.

GitHub - frctl/awesome-fractal: A curated list of awesome things related to Fractal

A starter list of Fractal examples and links. You can expand it.

᚛ᚈᚑᚋ ᚄᚉᚑᚈᚈ᚜ and ᚛ᚑᚌᚐᚋ᚜ - YouTube

When is a space not a space?

Tom talks about ogham stones and unicode.

Letterform Archive – From the Collection: Blissymbolics

The fascinating story of Charles K. Bliss and his symbolic language:

The writing system – originally named World Writing in 1942, then Semantography in 1947, and finally Blissymoblics in the 1960s – contains several hundred basic geometric symbols (“Bliss-characters”) that can be combined in different ways to represent more complex concepts (“Bliss-words”). For example, the Bliss-characters for “house” and “medical” are combined to form the Bliss-word for “hospital” or “clinic”. The modular structure invites comparison to the German language; the German word for “hospital ” – “krankenhaus” – translates directly to “sick house”.

Mozilla Protocol - Protocol Design System

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

Brighton Guide

Fascinating snippets of information about some of the most interesting buildings in Brighton.

(The website was made by Lydia and Tash as a project for Code First: Girls)

Beyond style guides: lessons from scaling design at TELUS

I like the questions that the TELUS team ask about any potential components to be added to their design system:

1. Is it on brand?
2. Is it accessible?
3. Has it been tested?
4. Can it be reused?

They also have design principles.

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