Tags: writing

To Make a Book, Walk on a Book — Craig Mod

The ability of the physical world — a floor, a wall — to act as a screen of near infinite resolution becomes more powerful the more time we spend heads-down in our handheld computers, screens the size of palms. In fact, it’s almost impossible to see the visual patterns — the inherent adjacencies — of a physical book unless you deconstruct it and splay it out on the floor.

Craig gives us a walkthrough—literally—of the process behind the beautiful Koya Bound book.

Deciding to make any book is an act of creative faith (and ego and hubris, but these aren’t all exclusionary). But before Dan and I sold any copies of Koya Bound, we walked atop the pages that would become the book, not really knowing if there existed an audience for the book.

Web Publications for the Open Web Platform: Vision And Technical Challenges

Given my experience publishing Resilient Web Design as a web book, I think I should take a good look at this nascent spec.

What we envision for Packaged Web Publications is similar to the goals and techniques of Progressive Web Apps: breaking the boundaries between web sites and mobile apps, an emphasis on “offline” paradigms, and so on. The time is right to broaden the scope and power of the web to include publications.

Improbable Botany by Wayward — Kickstarter

Improbable Botany is a brand-new science fiction anthology about alien plant conquests, fantastical ecosystems, benevolent dictatorships and techno-utopias.

This is the book plants don’t want you to read…

The illustrations look beautiful too.

Writing Hacks: The Adafruit Guide to Being Excellent to Each Other in Emails « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!

Language is a technology. It’s a particularly strange one that’s made of squiggles and sounds and maps of meaning, but like any other technology, it’s hackable.

Good advice on reducing unintended stress via email.

Negativity bias is a tendency for negatives to have a greater effect than positives on our emotional state.

For email this can have radical effects: positive emails seem neutral, neutral emails seem negative, and even slightly negative emails can lead to actual, measurable pain.

Even with the best of intentions we can come off distant — or just plain mean.

What football will look like in the future

I can’t remember the last time I was genuinely surprised, delighted, and intrigued by an online story like this.

Seat 14C

Here’s a fun premise for a collection of sci-fi short stories:

Flight 008 through a temporary wrinkle in the local region of space-time. What these passengers will soon find out as they descend into SFO is that the wrinkle has transported them 20 years in the future, and the year is now 2037.

Read the stories of the passengers from Flight 008, imagined by the world’s top science fiction storytellers, as they discover a future transformed by exponential technologies.

Authors include Bruce Sterling, Madeline Ashby, Paulo Bacigalupi, and Gregory Benford.

Design systems - Alla Kholmatova

Here’s the website for Alla’s forthcoming book. You can sign up to a low-volume mailing list to get notified of updates.

Meet “Design Systems”, A New Smashing Book (Pre-Release) – Smashing Magazine

Alla’s book is going to be a must-have (I know because I’ve been reviewing it as she’s been writing it). Pre-order it now. It’s out in September.

100 words, 100 days.

When I did my 100 days project, I found it really challenging. I’m so impressed that Amber has managed to do this: she wrote exactly 100 words every day for 100 days.

10,000 words, 10 megawords, 100 h-entries of hand-written HTML:

I can’t believe I have written ten thousand words. If I were to read everything out it would take me almost an hour. Yet, one hundred words seems like such a small amount. An amount that only takes a few minutes to write.

Programming Design Systems

This is a really intriguing book that combines design theory and programming—learn about contrast, colour, and shapes, with each lesson supported by code examples.

It’s still a work in progress but the whole thing is online for free. Yay for web books!

ongoing by Tim Bray · Still Blogging in 2017

This really resonates with me. Tim Bray duly notes that people are writing on Medium, and being shunted towards native apps, and that content is getting centralised at Facebook and other hubs, and then he declares:

But I don’t care.

Same.

Any­how, I’m not go­ing away.

Same.

leaving the future behind – Al Robertson

Science fiction isn’t about technology, it’s about people …and how people change in response to technology.

So ironically, perhaps the only way that any piece of science fiction can be sure that it will remain resonant as the years pass is to make sure that any technical speculation can drop away once it’s no longer relevant. The science will fall back to Earth like an exhausted booster section, tumbling away from the rocket that will one day reach the stars. And then we’ll be left with stories about how people change when change arrives – and that, for me, is what science fiction is.

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.

The Elements of Bureaucratic Style

I’m currently reading The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker, and it resonates nicely with this article on the numbing effect of the bureaucratic style exemplified in phrases like “officer-involved shooting.”

Watching the cell phone videos of the assault has, for most people, the immediate effect of provoking outrage and awakening a desire for justice. The purpose of bureaucratic speech is to dull these responses. It suggests your outrage is not worth it, that it’s fine to go back to what you were doing, that it’s best to move along and mind your own business.

Reflections on Resilient Web Design - Scott Dawson

I’m genuinely touched that my little web book could inspire someone like this. I absolutely love reading about what people thought of the book, especially when they post on their own site like this.

This book has inspired me to approach web site building in a new way. By focusing on the core functionality and expanding it based on available features, I’ll ensure the most accessible site I can. Resilient web sites can give a core experience that’s meaningful, but progressively enhance that experience based on technical capabilities.

Recommended Reading: Resilient Web Design, a Free e-Book from Jeremy Keith – WordPress Tavern

A jolly nice review of Resilient Web Design.

After just a few pages in, I could see why so many have read Resilient Web Design all in one go. It lives up to all the excellent reviews.

A bit more on container queries. — Ethan Marcotte

Ethan wrote about container queries on his website. Paul wrote his counter-argument on his website. Now Ethan responds. It’s fun to watch two gentlemen engage in civilised discourse.

Blogs, man. They’re gonna big, I tells ya.

Joe Coleman

Joe’s site is very clever …but is it as clever as Jon’s?

Fullstopnewparagraph — Freelance copywriter | London

Jon’s site is very clever …but is it as clever as Joe’s?

The Road To Resilient Web Design – Smashing Magazine

Chapter 3 of Resilient Web Design, republished in Smashing Magazine:

In the world of web design, we tend to become preoccupied with the here and now. In “Resilient Web Design“, Jeremy Keith emphasizes the importance of learning from the past in order to better prepare ourselves for the future. So, perhaps we should stop and think more beyond our present moment? The following is an excerpt from Jeremy’s web book.