Link tags: understanding

Frank Chimero · Redesign: On This Design

Most experienced designers want concision—clear, robust, consistent, elegant systems that avoid redundancy. Concise designs are smoother to implement, faster to render, quicker to understand, and easier to hand-off and maintain. Achieving a simplicity with clarity means that you’re engaging with the fundamentals of the problem (and of your craft) at the correct fidelity. You’ve cut through complexity with insight, understanding, and committed decision-making. That third one is critical. A lot of complexity comes from an unwillingness to commit to the things that insight and understanding surface.

Design muscles

Look. Observe. See.

How can designers get better at learning from their mistakes?

Jon has seven answers:

1. Build a culture to learn from mistakes
2. Embrace healthy critique
3. Fail little and often
4. Listen to users
5. Design. Learn. Repeat
6. Create a shared understanding
7. Always be accountable

It’s gratifying to see how much of this was informed by the culture of critique at Clearleft.

as days pass by — Inside out

A very thoughtful post from Stuart, ostensibly about “view source”, but really about empowerment, choice, and respect.

I like that the web is made up of separate bits that you can see if you want to. You can understand how it works by piecing together the parts. It’s not meant to be a sealed unit, an appliance which does what the owner wants it to and restricts everything else. That’s what apps do. The web’s better than that.

Resilient, Declarative, Contextual

This is really good breakdown of what’s different about CSS (compared to other languages).

These differences may feel foreign, but it’s these differences that make CSS so powerful. And it’s my suspicion that developers who embrace these things, and have fully internalized them, tend to be far more proficient in CSS.

Failing to distinguish between a tractor trailer and the bright white sky | booktwo.org

James talks about automation and understanding.

Just because a technology – whether it’s autonomous vehicles, satellite communications, or the internet – has been captured by capital and turned against the populace, doesn’t mean it does not retain a seed of utopian possibility.

Sideways Dictionary

This is a rather lovely idea—technical terms explained with analogies.

I just finished writing something about HTTPS and now I wish I had used this.

Typography for User Interfaces | Viljami Salminen

The history and physiology of text on screen. You can also see the slides from the talk that prompted this article.

The Web’s Grain by Frank Chimero

Superb. Absolutely superb.

A magnificent tour-de-force by Frank on the web’s edgelessness.

Read. Absorb. Read again. This is the essence of responsive web design, distilled.

What a Misunderstanding!

A variation on “Christ, what an asshole!”

Localization Problems: A Cellphone's Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail

When localisation attacks. This is like a more morbid Douglas Adams vignette.

David Seah : FYI, I am Not Dave Shea

With a name like Dave Seah, misunderstandings are bound to occur.