Educational Sensational Inspirational Foundational
A historical record of foundational web development blog posts.
Every one of these 42 articles are gold!
It warms my heart to see Resilient Web Design included in this list.
Tags: art
871
Friday, September 1st, 2023
Wednesday, August 9th, 2023
Mayerle’s Lithographed International Test Chart, 1907 – Circulating Now from the NLM Historical Collections
An impressive piece of internationlisation and inclusive design.
Saturday, June 17th, 2023
You Deserve a Tech Union, A Book Apart
Coming soon—Ethan’s next book is exactly what the tech industry needs right now.
Tech workers—designers, engineers, writers, and many others—have learned that when they stand together, they’re poised to build a better version of the tech industry.
Tuesday, June 13th, 2023
When I lost my job, I learned to code. Now AI doom mongers are trying to scare me all over again | Tristan Cross | The Guardian
Ingesting every piece of art ever into a machine which lovelessly boils them down to some approximated median result isn’t artistic expression. It may be a neat parlour trick, a fun novelty, but an AI is only able to produce semi-convincing knock-offs of our creations precisely because real, actual people once had the thought, skill and will to create them.
Saturday, June 3rd, 2023
Bookin’. — Ethan Marcotte
The twelve(!) year old photo that Ethan has illustrated this post with still makes my heart sing.
Tuesday, May 30th, 2023
Our Maps Don’t Know Where You Are – The Markup
I wish more publishers and services took this approach to evaluating technology:
We scrutinize third-party services before including them in our articles or elsewhere on our site. Many include trackers or analytics that would collect data on our readers. These may be standard across much of the web, but we don’t use them.
Friday, May 5th, 2023
Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? | The New Yorker
Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.
Once again, absolutely spot-on analysis from Ted Chiang.
I’m not very convinced by claims that A.I. poses a danger to humanity because it might develop goals of its own and prevent us from turning it off. However, I do think that A.I. is dangerous inasmuch as it increases the power of capitalism. The doomsday scenario is not a manufacturing A.I. transforming the entire planet into paper clips, as one famous thought experiment has imagined. It’s A.I.-supercharged corporations destroying the environment and the working class in their pursuit of shareholder value. Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off, and the most successful weapon in its arsenal has been its campaign to prevent us from considering any alternatives.
Wednesday, April 19th, 2023
Grease
Grease is a website starter that makes building performant, accessible, aesthetic websites fast & frictionless.
Interestingly, this starter kit uses cascade layers for managing CSS.
Monday, April 17th, 2023
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
Thursday, March 23rd, 2023
Learn Privacy
Stuart has written this fantastic concise practical guide to privacy for developers and designers. A must-read!
Thursday, March 16th, 2023
The stupidity of AI | The Guardian
A great piece by James, adapted from the new edition of his book New Dark Age.
The lesson of the current wave of “artificial” “intelligence”, I feel, is that intelligence is a poor thing when it is imagined by corporations. If your view of the world is one in which profit maximisation is the king of virtues, and all things shall be held to the standard of shareholder value, then of course your artistic, imaginative, aesthetic and emotional expressions will be woefully impoverished. We deserve better from the tools we use, the media we consume and the communities we live within, and we will only get what we deserve when we are capable of participating in them fully. And don’t be intimidated by them either – they’re really not that complicated. As the science-fiction legend Ursula K Le Guin wrote: “Technology is what we can learn to do.”
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2023
Fujichia: Sayable Space
This game is hard:
Sayable Space is a television game for 1 or more people, it consists of saying “Space” out loud at the same time as Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) during the intro to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Or actually that’s just half of the game. The second half is saying “Space”, and the first half is remembering that you are playing this game.
Monday, February 13th, 2023
You can call me AI
I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a fan of initialisms and acronyms. They can be exclusionary.
It bothers me doubly when everyone is talking about AI.
First of all, the term is so vague as to be meaningless. Sometimes—though rarely—AI refers to general artificial intelligence. Sometimes AI refers to machine learning. Sometimes AI refers to large language models. Sometimes AI refers to a series of if/else statements. That’s quite a spectrum of meaning.
Secondly, there’s the assumption that everyone understands the abbreviation. I guess that’s generally a safe assumption, but sometimes AI could refer to something other than artificial intelligence.
In countries with plenty of pastoral agriculture, if someone works in AI, it usually means they’re going from farm to farm either extracting or injecting animal semen. AI stands for artificial insemination.
I think that abbreviation might work better for the kind of things currently described as using AI.
We were discussing this hot topic at work recently. Is AI coming for our jobs? The consensus was maybe, but only the parts of our jobs that we’re more than happy to have automated. Like summarising some some findings. Or perhaps as a kind of lorem ipsum generator. Or for just getting the ball rolling with a design direction. As Terence puts it:
Midjourney is great for a first draft. If, like me, you struggle to give shape to your ideas then it is nothing short of magic. It gets you through the first 90% of the hard work. It’s then up to you to refine things.
That’s pretty much the conclusion we came to in our discussion at Clearleft. There’s no way that we’d use this technology to generate outputs for clients, but we certainly might use it to generate inputs. It’s like how we’d do a quick round of sketching to get a bunch of different ideas out into the open. Terence is spot on when he says:
Midjourney lets me quickly be wrong in an interesting direction.
To put it another way, using a large language model could be a way of artificially injecting some seeds of ideas. Artificial insemination.
So now when I hear people talk about using AI to create images or articles, I don’t get frustrated. Instead I think, “Using artificial insemination to create images or articles? Yes, that sounds about right.”
Monday, January 9th, 2023
A post by Clearleft on LinkedIn
This is design engineering.
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023
Shift Happens
Marcin’s book is coming along nicely—you just know it’ll be a labour of love.
You’ve never seen a book on technology like this. Shift Happens is full of stories – some never before told – interleaved with 1,000+ beautiful full-color photos across two volumes.
The Kickstarter project launches in February. In the meantime, there are some keyboard-based games here for you to enjoy.
Monday, December 26th, 2022
The Institutions of Science With Lord Martin Rees
I love just about every answer that Martin Rees gives in this wide-ranging interview.
Saturday, December 24th, 2022
An Event Apart
My trip to California went well. It was bookended with a few days in San Diego on either end. I relished the opportunity to hang with family and soak up the sunshine.
In the middle was my outing to San Francisco for An Event Apart. There were some great talks: Krystal talking about onboarding, Miriam blowing my mind with cascade layers, Eric diving deep into the :has() selector, and David closing out the show with a superb call to arms.
I gave my talk on declarative design at the very start of the event, just the way I like it. I was able to relax and enjoy all the other talks without having mine on my mind.
The talk went down well. I thought maybe I might have the chance to repeat it at another An Event Apart sometime in 2023.
But that won’t happen. An Event Apart has closed its doors:
Seventeen years ago, in December 2005, we held our first conference in Philadelphia. The event we just held in San Francisco was our last.
Whenever I was invited to speak at An Event Apart, I always responded in the affirmative and always said it was an honour to be asked. I meant it every time.
It wasn’t just me. Ask anyone who’s spoken at An Event Apart. They’ll all tell you the same thing. It was an honour. It was also a bit intimidating. There was a definite feeling that you had to bring your A game. And so, everyone did. Of course that just contributed to the event’s reputation which only reinforced the pressure to deliver a top-notch presentation.
I’m really going to miss An Event Apart. I mean, I get why all good things must come to an end (see also: dConstruct), but it feels like the end of an era.
My first time speaking at An Event Apart was in 2007. My last time was in San Francisco this month.
Thank you, Eric, Jeffrey, Toby, Marci, and the entire An Event Apart crew. It has been my privilege to play a small part in your story.
- 2007
- Chicago
- Be Pure. Be Vigilant. Behave
- 2008
- San Francisco
- Pattern In The Process
- 2009
- Boston
- Future Shock Treatment
- 2010
- Seattle, Boston, Minneapolis, Washington DC, San Diego
- Paranormal Interactivity
- 2011
- Seattle, Boston, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Washington DC, San Francisco
- Design Principles
- 2012
- Austin
- The Spirit Of The Web
- 2013
- Atlanta, Washington DC, Chicago, Austin, San Francisco
- The Long Web
- 2014
- Seattle, San Diego, Chicago, Orlando, San Francisco
- Enhance!
- 2015
- Seattle, Austin, San Francisco
- Resilience
- 2016
- Seattle, Boston, Orlando, San Francisco
- Resilience, Evaluating Technology
- 2017
- Seattle, Denver
- Evaluating Technology
- 2018
- Seattle, Boston
- The Way Of The Web
- 2019
- Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco
- Going Offline
- 2020
- Online
- Design Principles For The Web
- 2021
- Online
- The State Of The Web
- 2022
- Online, San Francisco
- In And Out Of Style
- Declarative Design
12 Days of Web
All twelve are out, and all twelve are excellent deep dives into exciting web technologies landing in browsers now.
Monday, December 19th, 2022
Empty Pointers and Constellations of AI
AI becomes a stand-in term for whatever technologies and techniques are new, shiny, and just beyond the grasp of our understanding. We use it to gesture at a future we cannot fully comprehend or currently realise. As soon as we do, it will no longer be “AI.”
