Tags: library

Why Suffolk Libraries chose to build their own self-service app.

It’s so great to see the initial UX work that James and I prototyped in a design sprint come to fruition in the form of a progressive web app!

In the case of this web-app, if the tablets go offline, they will still store all the transactions that are made by customers. Once the tablet comes back online, it will sync it back up to the server. That is, essentially, what a Progressive Web App is — a kind of a website with a few more security and, most importantly, offline features.

Hudl Uniform

This design system takes an interesting approach, splitting the documentation between designing and coding.

Documenting Components – EightShapes – Medium

Part one of a deep dive by Nathan into structuring design system documentation, published on Ev’s blog.

How Fast Is Amp Really? - TimKadlec.com

An excellent, thorough, even-handed analysis of AMP’s performance from Tim. The AMP format doesn’t make that much of a difference, the AMP cache does speed things up (as would any CDN), but it’s the pre-rendering that really delivers the performance boost …as long as you give up your URLs.

But right now, the incentives being placed on AMP content seem to be accomplishing exactly what you would think: they’re incentivizing AMP, not performance.

Australian Government Open Language for Design

The design system for the Australian government is a work in progress but it looks very impressive. The components are nicely organised and documented.

(I’ve contributed a suggestion for the documentation in line with what I wrote about recently.)

The People Part of Design Systems – Related Works – Medium

I like the idea of “design bugs”:

Every two weeks or so, a group of designers would get together for a couple of hours to fix what we called “design bugs.” These were things that didn’t hinder functionality and wouldn’t have been filed as an engineering bug, but were places where we were using an old component, an existing one incorrectly, or a one-off alteration.

Questions To Ask Before Building a Component Library | Chromatic

• What problems will a component library solve?
• Is everyone on the project behind the component library?
• How will the component library be used?
• What tool(s) will be used to build the component library?
• Where should the component library live?
• How granular should the library be? How should it be organized?
• How will component code be scoped? What about page layout?
• What data will the library use? What else should it have?

Sketching in the Browser – SEEK blog – Medium

A step-by-step account of trying to find a way to keep Sketch files in sync with the code in a pattern library. The solution came from HTML Sketchapp, a more agnostic spiritual successor to AirBnB’s React Sketchapp.

The contract was incredibly straightforward—as long as you generated HTML, you could import it into Sketch.

After some tinkering, Mark Dalgleish came up with a command line tool to automate the creation of Sketch libraries from HTML elements with data-sketch- attributes.

Stimulus 1.0: A modest JavaScript framework for the HTML you already have

All our applications have server-side rendered HTML at their core, then add sprinkles of JavaScript to make them sparkle.

Yup!—I’m definitely liking the sound of this Stimulus JavaScript framework.

It’s designed to read as a progressive enhancement when you look at the HTML it’s addressing.

Arch Mission

Off-site backups of humanity’s knowledge and culture, stored in different media (including pyramidal crystals) placed in near-Earth orbit, the moon, and Mars.

We are developing specialized next-generation devices that we call Archs™ (pronounced “Arks”), which are designed to hold and transmit large amounts of data over long periods of time in extreme environments, including outer space and on the surfaces of other planetary bodies.

Our goal is to collect and curate important data sets and to install them on Archs™ that will be delivered to as many locations as possible for safekeeping.

To increase the chances that Archs™ will be found in the future, we aim for durability and massive redundancy across a broad diversity of locations and materials – a strategy that nature itself has successfully employed.

React, Redux and JavaScript Architecture

I still haven’t used React (I know, I know) but this looks like a nice explanation of React and Redux.

russellgoldenberg/scrollama: Scrollytelling with IntersectionObserver.

This looks like a handy JavaScript library for scroll-based events. But “scrollytelling?” No. Just …no.

TNZ Pattern Library Docs

New Zealand has a pattern library (in Fractal, no less).

The Origin of Stimulus

I really like the look of this markup-driven JavaScript library from the same people who brought us the pjax library Turbolinks.

The philosophy behind these tools matches my own philosophy (which I think is one of the most important factors in choosing a tool that works for you, not against you).

Herman: Automated Pattern Libraries | OddBird

A lightweight style guide generator. This one uses SassDoc to parse out the documentation for colours, type, etc.

The Significance of the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress | Dan Cohen

It’s a shame that this archiving project is coming to end. We don’t always know the future value of the present:

Researchers have come to realize that the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, transcriptions from London’s central criminal court, are the only record we have of the spoken words of many people who lived centuries ago but were not in the educated or elite classes. That we have them talking about the theft of a pig rather than the thought of Aristotle only gives us greater insight into the lived experience of their time.

Tips for in-house teams in a free market software culture

A great in-depth report from Alice on creating, running, and most importantly, selling an in-house design system. This makes a great companion piece to her Patterns Day talk.

Where internal teams seem to go wrong is not appreciating that the thing they’re building is still a product and so it needs to compete with other products on the market.

A11Y Style Guide

A library of accessible UI elements that you can use as a starting point, complete with HTML and CSS. Alas, no JavaScript, but there’s always Heydon’s inclusive components for that.

A collection of awesome design systems

A table of design systems, pattern libraries, style guides, or whatever we’re calling them.

18F: Digital service delivery | Building a large-scale design system: How we created a design system for the U.S. government

Maya Benari provides an in-depth walkthrough of 18F’s mission to create a consistent design system for many, many different government sites.

When building out a large-scale design system, it can be hard to know where to start. By focusing on the basics, from core styles to coding conventions to design principles, you can create a strong foundation that spreads to different parts of your team.

There’s an interface inventory, then mood boards, then the work starts on typography and colour, then white space, and finally the grid system.

The lessons learned make for good design principles:

• Talk to the people
• Look for duplication of efforts
• Know your values
• Empower your team
• Start small and iterate
• Don’t work in a vacuum
• Reuse and specialize
• Promote your system
• Be flexible