Link tags: print

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Print To CSS by Dan Davies

A series of really nice CSS grid demos based on two-page magazine spreads.

Jon Aizlewood · Agile and design — How to avoid Frankensteining your product

Jon’s ranting about Agile here, but it could equally apply to design systems:

Agile and design is like looking at a picture through a keyhole. By slicing big things into smaller things, designers must work incrementally. Its this incrementalism that can lead to what I call the ‘Frankensteining’ of a digital product or service.

Type in the digital era is a mess

Marcin explains why line height works differently in print and the web. Along the way, he hits upon this key insight about CSS:

Web also took away some of the control from typesetters. What in the print era were absolute rules, now became suggestions.

Remember that every line of CSS you write is a suggestion to the browser.

Accessibility Events | CSS-Tricks

If you’re using Apple’s VoiceOver, both your phone and your computer will broadcast your assumed disability to the entire internet, unless and until you specifically tell it to stop.

Apple’s new feature a step towards digital apartheid - Axess Lab

I also discussed this accessibility events feature with my friend who is a screen reader user herself. She said it feels like it’s a first step towards a well-meant digital apartheid.

Great Leap Years - Official site of Stephen Fry

I just binge-listened to the six episodes of the first season of this podcast from Stephen Fry—it’s excellent!

It covers the history of communication from the emergence of language to the modern day. At first I was worried that it was going to rehash some of the more questionable ideas in the risible Sapiens, but it turned out to be far more like James Gleick’s The Information or Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet (two of my favourite books on the history of technology).

There’s no annoying sponsorship interruptions and the whole series feels more like an audiobook than a podcast—an audiobook researched, written and read by Stephen Fry!

So We Got Tracked Anyway

Even using a strict cookie policy won’t help when Facebook and Google are using TLS to fingerprint users. Time to get more paranoid:

HTTPS session identifiers can be disabled in Mozilla products manually by setting ‘security.ssl.disablesessionidentifiers’ in about:config.

Architecting the uncertain - Getting started with Agile Software Architecture

Some ideas on the best of use of time in sprint zero of an agile project.

  • Understand your context
  • Identify risks
  • Understand the business process
  • Get testing infrastructure
  • Understand quality attributes
  • Get to know the people
  • Prepare an initial product backlog
  • Build a walking skeleton/spike
  • Build a learning backlog

A Guide To The State Of Print Stylesheets In 2018 — Smashing Magazine

Good advice on print styles from Rachel. The browser support situation is frustrating; I suspect it’s because the people working on browsers would rather get stuck in on shinier stuff.

Measuring the Hard-to-Measure – CSS Wizardry

Everything old is new again—sometimes the age-old technique of using a 1x1 pixel image to log requests is still the only way to get certain metrics.

While tracking pixels are far from a new idea, there are creative ways in which we can use them to collect data useful to developers. Once the data is gathered, we can begin to make much more informed decisions about how we work.

The search for another intelligence (Upsideclown)

A wonderful short story from Matt. I can see this one staying with me.

Jeremy Keith Interview

I had a chat with Toby Osbourn over Skype. He’s writing a book all about print stylesheets so that’s we talked about.

bastianallgeier/letter: Letter is a simple, highly customizable tool to create letters in your browser.

A nice little use of print (and screen) styles from Bastian—compose letters in a web browser.

Instead of messing around in Word, Pages or even Indesign, you can write your letters in the browser, export them as HTML or PDF (via Apple Preview).

The Futures of Typography

A wonderfully thoughtful piece from Robin, ranging from the printing technologies of the 15th century right up to the latest web technologies. It’s got all my favourite things in there: typography, digital preservation, and service workers. Marvellous!

What design sprints are good for — Cennydd Bowles

Cennydd enumerates what design sprints are good for:

  • generating momentum,
  • highlighting the scope of the design process,
  • developing the team, or
  • provoking core product issues.

And also what they’re not so good for:

  • reliable product design,
  • proposing sophisticated user research,
  • answering deep product-market fit questions, or
  • getting the green light.

After the flood | Projects | Robot Life Survey

Lovely prints!

The Robot Life Survey is an alternative-history from design company After the flood, where mechanical intelligence is discovered by man, noted and painted for posterity and science.

SpaceTime Coordinates Memento ~ your personal place in space by govy — Kickstarter

This is a rather lovely idea—a disc with eight rings, each marked with the position of a planet, the arrangement of which corresponds to a specific date.

Your Social Media Fingerprint

Clever! By exploiting the redirect pattern that most social networks use for logging in, and assuming that site’s favicon isn’t stored in a CDN, it’s possible to figure out whether someone is logged into that site.

The web is not print and other stories

Rachel takes a look back at twenty years of building on the web. Her conclusion: we’ve internalised constraints that are no longer relevant, and that’s holding us back from exploring new design possibilities:

Somehow the tables have turned. As the web moves on, as we get CSS that gives us the ability to implement designs impossible a few years ago, the web looks more and more like something we could have build with rudimentary CSS for layout. We’ve settled on our constraints and we are staying there, defined by not being print.

thoughtbot/design-sprint: Product Design Sprint Material

If you’re intrigued by the kind of design sprints I wrote about recently, here’s a handy collection of resources to get you going.