Link tags: tools

“Artificial Intelligence & Humanity,” an article by Dan Mall

AI is great anything quantity-related and bad and anything quality-related.

Sensible thinking from Dan here, that mirrors what we’re thinking at Clearleft.

In other words, it leans heavily on averages; the closer the training data matches an average, the higher degree of confidence that the result is more “correct,” or at least desirable.

The problem is that this is the polar opposite of what we consider creativity to be. Creativity isn’t about averages. It’s about the outliers, sometimes the one thing that’s different than all the rest.

How to build lean efficient websites in 2023 | Go Make Things

1. Start with mostly static HTML.
2. Progressively enhance the dynamic parts.
3. Pick small, focused tools.

Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new accessibility features - Apple

This is the kind of press release I like.

The Cost of Convenience - DEV Community

The pros and cons of dependencies in your toolchain.

Why Chatbots Are Not the Future by Amelia Wattenberger

Of course, users can learn over time what prompts work well and which don’t, but the burden to learn what works still lies with every single user. When it could instead be baked into the interface.

Accessibility for designer: where do I start? by Stéphanie Walter - UX Researcher & Designer.

Stéphanie has gathered a goldmine of goodies:

Articles, resources, checklists, tools, plugins and books to design accessible products

Why ChatGPT Won’t Replace Coders Just Yet

I’ve been using Copilot for over a year now, and this is more or less how I use it: To help me quickly blast through boilerplate code so I can more quickly get to the tricky bits.

There’s a more subtle problem with ChatGPT’s code generation, which is that it suffers from ChatGPT’s general “bullshit” problem.

Designing a Utopian layout grid: Working with fluid responsive values in a static design tool. | Utopia

James describes his process for designing fluid grid layouts, which very much involves working with the grain of the web but against the grain of our design tools:

In 2022 our design tools are still based around fixed-size artboards, while we’re trying to design products which scale gracefully to suit any screen.

When Our Tools Hold Us Back | OddBird

What happens if the ‘pace layers’ get out of sync?

A very thoughtful post by Miriam on how tools can adversely affect the pace of progress in the world of web standards.

When tools intervene between you and your access to the web platform, proceed with caution. Ask not only: How well does it work? But also: How well does it fail? Not only: What features do they provide? But also: What features do they prevent?

Our web design tools are holding us back ⚒ Nerd

A good ol’ rant by Vasilis on our design tools for the web.

Get Blogging!

Your easy guide to starting a new blog.

A blog is an easy way to get started writing on the web. Your voice is important: it deserves its own site. The more people add their unique perspectives to the web, the more valuable it becomes.

Folk Interfaces

Folk creations fill a gap. They solve problems for individuals and small communities in a way that that centralised, top-down, industrial creations never can. They are informal, distributed practices that emerge from real world contexts. Contexts where individuals have little or no control over the “official” means of production – of furniture, urban architecture, crockery, artwork, media stories, or taxonomies. In response people develop their own unpolished, unofficial, and deeply practical creations.

Now apply that to software:

Only professional programmers and designers get to decide what buttons go on the interface, what features get prioritised, and what affordances users have access to. Subverting that dynamic is the only way people can get their needs met with the computational tools they have at hand.

Utopian project kickstarter — Figma

Do you like the ideas behind Utopia? Do you use Figma?

If the answer to both those questions is “yes”, then James has made a very handy Figma community file for you:

This work-in-progress is intended as a starting point for designers to start exploring the Utopia approach, thinking about type and space in fluid scales rather than device-based breakpoints.

Reflections on Design Systems and Boundaries - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Jim shares his thoughts on my recent post about declarative design systems. He picks up on the way I described a declarative design systems as “a predefined set of boundary conditions that can be used to generate components”:

I like this definition of a design system: a set of boundaries. It’s about saying “don’t go there” rather than “you can only go here”. This embraces the idea of constraints as the mother of invention: it opens the door to creativity while keeping things bounded.

The Case for Design Engineers - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

This is really interesting. I hadn’t thought too much about the connection between design engineering and declarative design before now, but Jim’s post makes the overlap very clear indeed.

Changing with the times · Chris Burnell

I think, with the sheer volume of functionality available to us nowadays on the front-end, it can be easy to forget how powerful and strong the functionality is that we get right off shelf with HTML. Yes, you read that right, functionality.

Contextual Spacing For Intrinsic Web Design | Modern CSS Solutions

To complement her talk at Beyond Tellerrand, Stephanie goes through some of the powerful CSS features that enable intrinsic web design. These are all great tools for the declarative design approach I was talking about:

• clamp()
• min() and max()
• fit-content, min-content, and max-content
• grid functions like repeat() and minmax()
• custom properties for spacing

Progressively Enhanced Builds - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Rather than thinking, “how do I combine a bunch of disparate content, templates, and tooling into a functioning website?”, you might think “how do I start at a functioning website with content and then use templates and build tooling to enhance it?”

I think Jim is onto something here. The more dependencies you have in your build process, the likelier it is that over time one of them will become a single point of failure. A progressive enhancement approach to build tools means you’d still be able to launch your site (even if it’s not in its ideal state).

I want to be able to view, edit, and if need be ship a website, even if the build process fails. In essence, if the build does fail I can still take all the source files, put them on a server, and the website remains functional (however crude).

Be the browser’s mentor, not its micromanager. - Build Excellent Websites

This one-page site that Andy has made to illustrate his talk at All Day Hey is exactly what I was talking about with declarative design.

Give the browser some solid rules and hints, then let it make the right decisions for the people that visit it, based on their device, connection quality and capabilities. This is how they will get a genuinely great user experience, rather than a fragmented, broken one.

Design Systems Aren’t Cheap

Just like jQuery dominated the front end yesterday, React dominates it today. There will be something new that dominates it tomorrow. Your design system team will continue doing the same work and incurring more and more costs to keep up with framework churn. And let’s not forget the cost of updating tomorrow’s legacy apps, who are consumers of your soon to be legacy design system.