A great write-up from Hidde on dConstruct 2022 and how the speakers tackled the theme of design transformation:
They talked about turning a series of penstrokes into art, lasers into fireworks, human experiences into novels and patient data collection into a minimal effort task.
A lot of our work in web design and technology has a power to transform and that is wonderful, especially when we manage to be intentional about the how and why.
Jesse has his Oppenheimer moment, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
What got lost along the way was a view of UX as something deeper and more significant than a step in the software delivery pipeline: an approach that grounds product design in a broad contextual understanding of the problem and goes beyond the line-item requirements of individual components. Also lost along the way were many of the more holistic and exploratory practices that enabled UX to deliver that kind of foundational value.
I’m very taken with Github’s tab-container element—this is exactly how I think web components should be designed!
Lynn gives a step-by-step walkthrough of the latest amazing redesign of her website. There’s so much joy and craft in here, with real attention to detail—I love it!
The web embodies principles of openness and portability and access that best align with the needs, and frankly the purpose, of the cultural heritage sector.
Aaron’s talk from the 2019 Museums and the Web conference.
In 2019 the web is not “sexy” anymore and compared to native platforms it can sometimes seems lacking, but I think that speaks as much to people’s desire for something “new” as it does to any apples to apples comparison. On measure – and that’s the important part: on measure – the web affords a better and more sustainable framework for the cultural heritage to work in than any of the shifting agendas of the various platform vendors.
Following on from Stackbit’s tool, here’s another (more code-heavy) way of migrating from Ev’s blog to your own site.
This is very handy! Export your data from Ev’s blog and then import it into a static site generator of your choice.
You may have noticed the recent movement of people looking to get off Medium. Most of us are motivated by a desire to own our content, have data portability and get more control over how/where our content is displayed and monetized. Most importantly many of us consider our blog/site to be a core part of our online identity and while Medium offers a fantastic writing experience it sacrifices other important values. Luckily there’s a modern approach to running your blog which aligns with these ideals, its called the JAMstack and its all around us.
Nick Harkaway on technology in fiction:
Humans without tools are not magically pure; they’re just unvaccinated, cold, and wet.
SF is how we get to know ourselves, either who we are or who we might be. In terms of what is authentically human, SF has a claim to be vastly more honest and important than a literary fiction that refuses to admit the existence of the modern and goes in search of a kind of essential humanness which exists by itself, rather than in the intersection of people, economics, culture, and science which is where we all inevitably live. It’s like saying you can only really understand a flame if you get rid of the candle. Good luck with that.
And on Borges:
He was a genius, and he left this cryptic, brilliant body of work that’s poetic, incomplete, astonishing. It’s like a tasting menu in a restaurant where they let you smell things that go to other tables and never arrive at yours.
A walkthrough of the process of creating a futuristic interface with CSS (grid and animation).
While this is just one interpretation of what’s possible, I’m sure there are countless other innovative ideas that could be realized using the tools we have today.
This is nice example of a web component that degrades gracefully—if custom elements aren’t supported, you still get the markdown content, just not converted to HTML.
<ah-markdown>
## Render some markdown!
</ah-markdown>
A nice combination of style guide and pattern library, with plenty of documentation.
Beautiful use of CSS transitions and transforms.
Also: CSS is officially the new Flash—”skip intro” is back.
The campaign to restore out-of-print pulp sci-fi books in electronic formats.
A beautiful experiment with CSS transforms and a smattering of JavaScript.
Honor compares next week in Brighton to Austin in March.
Natalia is as excited as I am about the first week of September in Brighton: Reasons To Be Creative, dConstruct, Improving Reality, BrightonSF, and Maker Faire, now with added speakers.
Here’s a handy little tip for CSS animations: instead of changing position properties, use translate instead.
A competitor to Prezi built with HTML, CCS and JavaScript.
Eric is making some genuinely beautiful art by applying CSS transforms to some well-known sites.
Andy just debuted this at An Event Apart—lovely stuff.