Workshop Countdown Clock
Here’s a nifty little progressive web app that Trys whipped up so that Clearlefties running workshops remotely still get to have their beloved countdown clock.
Link tags: shop
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Photopea | Online Photo Editor
I found myself needing to open some old Photoshop files recently, but I haven’t had Photoshop installed on my computer for years (not since Adobe moved to the Mafia pricing model). It turns out there’s an online recreation of Photoshop!
I remember when this was literally the example people would give for the limitations of the web: “Well, you can’t build something like Photoshop in the browser…”
Brendan Dawes - Adobe Alternatives
Brendan describes the software he’s using to get away from Adobe’s mafia business model.
Smashing TV — Webinars and Live Sessions — Smashing Magazine
Don’t miss this—a masterclass in SVG animation with Cassie (I refuse to use the W word). Mark your calendar: August 20th.
Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites
1,841 instances of dark patterns on ecommerce sites, in the categories of sneaking, urgency, misdirection, social proof, scarcity, obstruction, and forced action. You can browse this overview, read the paper, or look at the raw data.
We conducted a large-scale study, analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites to characterize and quantify the prevalence of dark patterns.
UX Workshop | Trys Mudford
I’m so, so happy that Trys has joined us at Clearleft!
Here, he recounts his first day, which just happened to coincide with an introductory UX workshop that went really well.
New Adventures 2019 | Part Two: Progressive Web | Abstrakt
Here’s a thorough blow-by-blow account of the workshop I ran in Nottingham last week:
Jeremy’s workshop was a fascinating insight into resilience and how to approach a web project with ubiquity and consistency in mind from both a design and development point of view.
The Return of New Adventures
Westley came along to my workshop at New Adventures …and liked it! (phew!)
I have long been a proponent of progressive enhancement on the web, perhaps before I knew the true value of it to the people that use the things we build for the web, but Jeremy has always been able to expand my understanding of its importance in the wider scope of things, how it inherently builds resilience into your products, and how it makes it more widely available to people across the world, in vastly different scenarios. The workshop itself was fluid enough to cater to the topics that the attendees were interested in; from over-arching philosophy to technical detail around service workers and new APIs. It has helped me to understand that learning in this kind of environment doesn’t have to be rigorously structured, and can be shaped as the day progresses.
Read on to discover how I incorporated time travel into the day’s activities.
The 15 Web Design Books of 2018 You Can’t Afford to Miss
How lovely! Going Offline is in very good company in this list, and Oliver has some nice words to say about it:
Starting with no assumption of JavaScript knowledge, Jeremy explains the latest strategies, the ins and outs of fetching and caching, how to enhance your website’s performance, and more.
Extremely beginner-friendly and approachable, it can be read in half a day and will help you get Service Workers up and running in no time.
But all I want for Christmas is for Shopify to stop enabling Breitbart.
Designing With Code
How mucking about in HTML and CSS can lead to some happy accidents.
‘Sfunny, people often mention the constraints and limitations of “designing in the browser”, but don’t recognise that every tool—including Sketch and Photoshop—comes with constraints and limitations. It’s just that those are constraints and limitations that we’ve internalised; we no longer even realise they’re there.
Steve Jobs on Prototypes - Snook.ca
I’ve thought often of how our design and prototyping tools for the web are often not of the web. Tools like Photoshop and Sketch and Invision create approximations but need to walk the line between being a tool to build native apps and to build web apps. They do well in their ability to quickly validate designs but do little to validate technical approach.
What’s in a pattern name? — Ethan Marcotte
Ethan emphasises the importance of making a shared language the heart of any design system. I heartily agree!
This isn’t new thinking, mind: folks like Alla Kholmatova and Charlotte Jackson have been talking about this for ages. (And in doing so, they’ve massively influenced how I think about modular, pattern-driven design.)
Think like it’s 1995; code like it’s 2035 - Grayscale
This is such a great write-up of the workshop I did in Hong Kong!
Jeremy, it was a pleasure to work with you and you are always welcome here in Hong Kong!
If you fancy having this one-day workshop at your company, get in touch.
Tips for Running Workshops - TimKadlec.com
I’ve just come back from running a workshop at Webstock in New Zealand, followed by another one in Hong Kong. I heartily concur with Tim’s advice here. I’ve certainly migrated to having a more modular approach to workshops. In fact, these days I have little to no slides. Instead, it’s all about being flexible.
You can spend forever carefully crafting and refining your workshop and coming up with solid exercises but at the end of the day, you need to be ready to go with the flow.
Some sections you wanted to cover you may not get to. Some topics you hadn’t allotted a lot of time to may need to become more detailed. That’s all fine because the workshop is about helping them, not yourself.
Social Decay on Behance
If only our digital social networks were to exhibit this kind of faded grandeur when they no longer exist.
Introducing Web Payments: Easier Online Purchases With The Payment Request API — Smashing Magazine
A nice overview of the Payment Request API, which is getting more and more browser support.
Webconf.asia - Workshop The Progressive Web
I’m giving a workshop in Hong Kong on February 21st. If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you there. If you know anyone in Hong Kong, please spread the word.
This workshop will teach you how to think in a progressive way. Together we’ll peel back the layers of the web and build upwards, creating experiences that work for everyone. From URL design to Progressive Web Apps, this journey will cover each stage of technological advancement.
Voice Guidelines | Clearleft
I love what Ben is doing with this single-serving site (similar to my design principles collection)—it’s a collection of handy links and resources around voice UI:
Designing a voice interface? Here’s a useful list of lists: as many guiding principles as we could find, all in one place. List compiled and edited by Ben Sauer @bensauer.
BONUS ITEM: Have him run a voice workshop for you!
Draggable JS – JavaScript drag and drop library
This looks like a very nice little JavaScript library for drag’n’drop. The site works as an example of the functionality in action.
Brought to you by Shopify, the company enabling Breitbart.
CSS and SVG animation workshop by codebarbrighton
There were two days of Codebar workshopping on the weekend as part of the Brighton Digital Festival. Cassie talked people through this terrific CSS animation tutorial, making this nifty Brighton-based piece.