PWAs just work better than your typical mobile site. Period.
But bear in mind:
Maybe simply because the “A” in PWA stands for “app,” too much discussion around PWAs focuses on comparing and contrasting to native mobile applications. We believe this comparison (and the accompanying discussion) is misguided.
A showcase of fun experiments with variable fonts, courtesy of Mandy.
A nice walkthrough of a CSS grid in production. I was surprised to see percentages used as units—I wonder if it would feel “cleaner” if they were converted to fr units?
A beautiful looking site from InVision collecting case studies of design-led companies (although this site is weirdly over-engineered and entirely dependent on JavaScript for rendering some text on a screen—prepare yourself for janky scrolling).
We hoped for a bicycle for the mind; we got a Lazy Boy recliner for the mind.
Nicky Case on how Douglas Engelbart’s vision for human-computer augmentation has taken a turn from creation to consumption.
When you create a Human+AI team, the hard part isn’t the “AI”. It isn’t even the “Human”.
It’s the “+”.
I really like getting Paul’s insights into building his Bradshaw’s Guide project. Here he shares his process for typography, images and geolocation.
A collection of interactive lessons—games that teach—featuring the work of Bret Victor, Nicky Case, and more (the site is put together by Nicky Case).
If you ever need to pull up some case studies to demonstrate the business benefits of performance, Tammy and Tim have you covered.
A look at the technical details behind Firefly’s pattern library. The tech stack includes Less, BEM, and some React, but it’s Anna and Danielle that really made it work.
This is a thorough write-up of an interesting case where SVG looks like the right tool for the job, but further research leads to some sad-making conclusions.
I love SVG. It’s elegant, scalable and works everywhere. It’s perfect for mobile… as long as it doesn’t move. There is no way to animate it smoothly on Android.
A step-by-step walkthrough of layering on enhancements to a site. The article shows the code used, but it isn’t really the code that matters—it’s the thought and planning that went into it.
A great case study from Richard, walking through the process of redesigning the website for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
Many of the free fonts available from Google are pretty bad, but this site showcases how some of them can be used to great effect.
A concise case study from gov.uk:
Designing for the constraints of mobile is useful – if we get the fundamentals of the service working on small screens and slow network speeds, it can work on more capable devices.
A great talk by Amber on the history of personal publishing and the ideas and technologies driving the Indie Web movement.
This is a really great idea—a portable open device lab. It’s UK-based and you can hire it out for a few days at a time.
A terrific case study in progressive enhancement: starting with a good ol’ form that works for everybody and then adding on features like Ajax, SVG, the History API …the sky’s the limit.
Here’s a really useful case study for anyone who wants to do “guerrilla” responsive design: when you’re handed a fixed-width mockup but you know that responsive is the way to go:
I started by styling up every element, without layout. The result was a fully elastic layout that effectively served as a mobile, or small screen, layout, which just needed some tweaking of horizontal spacing.
Bingo! And this approach had knock-on benefits as it “supported writing component-based, or modular, CSS”.
A behind-the-scenes look at how Gov.uk is handling mobile devices. Spoiler: it’s responsive.
I found this particularly interesting:
When considering the extra requirements users of different devices have we found a lot in common with work already done on accessibility.
Another responsive design case study. This one’s got numbers too.