Link tags: loom

Breaking looms by Matthew Ström

Another follow-on to my post about design systems and automation. Here, Matthew invokes the spirit of the much-misunderstood Luddite martyrs. It’s good stuff.

Design systems are used by greedy software companies to fatten their bottom line. UI kits replace skilled designers with cheap commoditized labor.

Agile practices pressure teams to deliver more and faster. Scrum underscores soulless feature factories that suck the joy from the craft of software development.

But progress requires more than breaking looms.

Presenting the new d3.loom chart form plugin - Visual Cinnamon

Nadieh has packaged up the code for her lovely loom diagrams as a plug-in for d3.

Paul Ford: What is Code? by Paul Ford

It seems grossly unfair to refer to this as an article. It’s a short book. It’s a very good short book; lucid and entertaining in equal measure. A very enjoyable read.

It is, unfortunately, surrounded by some distracting “enhancements” but perhaps you can use your cleaner-upper software of choice to route around their damage: Instapaper, Pocket, Readability, whatever works for you.

Planetary: collecting and preserving code as a living object | Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York

Aaron Straup-Cope and Seb Chan on the challenges of adding (and keeping) code to the Cooper-Hewitt collection:

The distinction between preservation and access is increasingly blurred. This is especially true for digital objects.

Brian Eno & Peter Chilvers at The Apple Store, Regent Street

Well, this is quite something. Matt will be interviewing the creators of Bloom in London this Friday. You might have heard of that Eno chap.

jCquard: The Do Less, Punch More JavaScript Library

This is certainly the most backwards-compatible JavaScript library out there.