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.
A deep, deep, deep dive into the JPEG format. Best of all, it’s got interactive explanations you can tinker with, a la Nicky Case or Bret Victor.
Jason describes the next big thing in web typography: streaming fonts!
…to enable the ability for only the required part of the font be downloaded on any given page, and for subsequent requests for that font to dynamically ‘patch’ the original download with additional sets of glyphs as required on successive page views—even if they occur on separate sites.
A free and open source neutral sans-serif typeface, released as part of version two of the design system for the US federal government.
Oodles and oodles of data on cities, including gorgeous animations of urban growth over time.
Font metrics help the computer determine things like the default spacing between lines, how high or low sub and super scripts should go, and how to align two differently sized pieces of text next to each other.
These diagrams of early networks feel like manuscripts that you’d half expect to be marked with “Here be dragons” at the edges.
