Paul has published the slides and transcript of his knock-out talk at Patterns Day. This a must-read: superb stuff!
Design systems are an attempt to add a layer of logic and reasoning over a series decisions made by complex, irrational, emotional human beings. As such, they are subject to individual perspectives, biases, and aspirations.
How does the culture in which they are made effect the resulting design?
Paul finishes up his excellent three part series by getting down to the brass tacks of designing and building components on the web …and in cities. His closing provocation has echoes of Heydon’s rallying cry.
If you missed the other parts of this series, they are:
Danielle and Mark have been working flat out on Fractal. Here’s the roadmap they’re working to.
Sally gives a really good introduction to using service workers as a progressive enhancement.
Paul is turning his excellent talk on design systems into a three part series. Here’s part one, looking at urban planning from Brasília to London.
I’m at Disney World for a special edition of An Event Apart, so this lightning talk from Dan Williams seems appropriate to revisit.
A deeply thoughtful piece (as always) by Wilson, on the mindset needed for a sustainable way of working.
When we start with the assumption that optimizing for rapid, unbounded growth is a goal, we immediately narrow the possibility space. There are only so many choices we can make that will get us there. The same choices that made annual monoculture and the shopping mall the most efficient engines for short-term growth and profit are the same qualities that made them unsustainable in the long term.
There are more ways to scale than growth. There are more ways to deepen our impact than just reaching more people. What if we put just as much effort into scaling the impact of our work over time? Can we build digital products around sustainable systems that survive long enough to outlive us, that are purpose-built to thrive without our constant cultivation?
I wish to cover the entire Brighton Pavilion in Bakelite for my own amusement.
I really like these thoughts on the importance of design systems for the web. It’s not about providing a few perfect deliverables that won’t survive once they go live; it’s about designing for the unexpected, the unpredictable:
Design for every state, not the best state.
Soon the trilogy will be complete: a documentary on urban planning sounds like the perfect way for Gary Hustwit to follow up Helvetica and Objectified.
Starbucks has opened a branch in Brighton by disregarding planning permission, ignoring planning laws, and by asserting is not in fact a café or coffee shop but a retail outlet.
A comprehensive set of sketches, diagrams and screenshots from Soxiam showing the evolution and iteration of interfaces on Vimeo and other sites.
Molly has written a great article about CSS and urban planning. The ensuing comments are sometimes thought-provoking, but mostly just plain antfucking.