I found myself needing to open some old Photoshop files recently, but I haven’t had Photoshop installed on my computer for years (not since Adobe moved to the Mafia pricing model). It turns out there’s an online recreation of Photoshop!
I remember when this was literally the example people would give for the limitations of the web: “Well, you can’t build something like Photoshop in the browser…”
A handy tool for tweaking the animations in your SVGs.
See how an Enigma machine works …and interact with it.
Letters to be encrypted enter at the boundary, move through the wire matrix, and exit.
Play around with this variable font available soon from Google Fonts in monospaced and sans-serif versions.
The ellipsis is the new hamburger.
It’s disappointing that Apple, supposedly a leader in interface design, has resorted to such uninspiring, and I’ll dare say, lazy design in its icons. I don’t claim to be a usability expert, but it seems to me that icons should represent a clear intention, followed by a consistent action.
This is why we need an nth-letter selector in CSS .
A nice standalone tool for picking colours out of photos, and generating a colour palette from the same photo.
A case study from Twitter on the benefits of using a design system:
With component-based design, development becomes an act of composition, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel.
I think that could be boiled down to this:
Component-based design favours composition over invention.
I’m not saying that’s good. I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m also not saying it’s neutral.
Some excellent explanations for these five pieces of sensible typography advice:
- Set your base font size in relative units
- Check the colour of your type and only then its contrast
- Use highly legible fonts
- Shape your paragraphs well
- Correctly use the heading levels
A look at all the factors that went into choosing the Apollo landing sites, including this gem:
Famous amateur astronomer, Sir Patrick Moore, also produced a hand drawn map of the moon from his own observations using his homemade telescope at his home in Selsey, Sussex. These detailed pen and ink maps of the Moon’s surface were used by NASA as part of their preparations for the moon landing.
What a lovely way to walk through the design system underpinning the Guardian website.
Bonus points for using the term “tweak points”!
Correlation does not imply causation.
A showcase of fun experiments with variable fonts, courtesy of Mandy.
Lighthouses of the world, mapped.
How cartography made early modern global trade possible.
Maps and legends. Beautiful!
This broke my brain.
The challenge: in the fewest resources possible, render meaningful text.
- How small can a font really go?
- How many bytes of memory would you need (to store it and run it?)
- How much code would it take to express it?
Lets see just how far we can take this!
Each typeface highlights a piece of history from a specific underrepresented race, ethnicity, or gender—from the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Argentina to the Civil Rights Movement in America.
From the days of Xerox PARC:
In your garage organization, there’s always a bucket for miscellaneous. You’ve got nuts and bolts and screws and nails, and then, stuff, miscellaneous stuff. That’s kind of what the hamburger menu button was.
Same as it ever was.
Ooh! A documentary on Claude Shannon—exciting!
I just finished reading A Mind At Play, the (very good) biography of Claude Shannon, so this film feels very timely.
Mixing contemporary interviews, archival film, animation and dialogue drawn from interviews conducted with Shannon himself, The Bit Player tells the story of an overlooked genius who revolutionized the world, but never lost his childlike curiosity.
Marcin explains why line height works differently in print and the web. Along the way, he hits upon this key insight about CSS:
Web also took away some of the control from typesetters. What in the print era were absolute rules, now became suggestions.
Remember that every line of CSS you write is a suggestion to the browser.