There’s something deliciously appropriate about using a painting cloning service to clone a photograph of some cloned dogs.
“Did you just order an oil painting of Barbra Streisand’s dogs?” is the most Simon and Natalie thing ever.
Although this comes close:
This is a great interview with Rich on all things related to web typography—including, of course, variable fonts.
I’m so lucky that I literally get to work side by side with Rich; I get to geek out with him about font stuff all the time.
Rob attended the excellent Ampersand event last Friday and he’s made notes for each and every talk.
¶, &, @, ‽, ☺, #, and ☛.
There’s a veritable smörgåsbord of great workshops on the horizon…
Clearleft presents a workshop with Jan Chipchase on field research in London on May 29th, and again on May 30th. The first day is sold out, but there are still tickets available for the second workshop (tickets are £654). If you’ve read Jan’s beautiful Field Study Handbook, then you’ll know what a great opportunity it is to spend a day in his company. But don’t dilly-dally—that second day is likely to sell out too.
This event is for product teams, designers, researchers, insights teams, in agencies, in-house, local and central government. People who are curious about human interaction, and their place in the world.
I’m really excited that Sarah and Val are finally bringing their web animation workshop to Brighton (I’ve been not-so-subtly suggesting that they do this for a while now). It’s a two day workshop on July 9th and 10th. There are still some tickets available, but probably not for much longer (tickets are £639). The workshop is happening at 68 Middle Street, the home of Clearleft.
This workshop will get you up and running with web animation in less time than it would take to read all the tutorials you have bookmarked. Over two days, you’ll go from beginner or novice web animator to having expert level knowledge of the current web animation landscape. You’ll get an in-depth look at animating with CSS, JavaScript, and SVG through hands-on exercises and learn the most efficient workflows for each.
A bit before that, though, there’s a one-off workshop on responsive web typography from Rich on Thursday, June 29th, also at 68 Middle Street. You can expect the same kind of brilliance that he demonstrated in his insta-classic Web Typography book, but delivered by the man himself.
You will learn how to combine centuries-old craft with cutting edge technology, including variable fonts, to design and develop for screens of all shapes and sizes, and provide the best reading experiences for your modern readers.
Whether you’re a designer or a developer, just starting out or seasoned pro, there will be plenty in this workshop to get your teeth stuck into.
Tickets are just £435, and best of all, that includes a ticket to the Ampersand conference the next day (standalone conference tickets are £235 so the workshop/conference combo is a real bargain). This year’s Ampersand is shaping up to be an unmissable event (isn’t it always?), so the workshop is like an added bonus.
See you there!
I’m soooo excited that Mandy is speaking at Ampersand here in Brighton in June!
Be there or be square.
I really, really like service workers. They’re one of those technologies that have such clear benefits to users that it seems like a no-brainer to add a service worker to just about any website.
The thing is, every website is different. So the service worker strategy for every website needs to be different too.
Still, I was wondering if it would be possible to create a service worker script that would work for most websites. Here’s the script I came up with.
The logic works like this:
So HTML files are served network-first, while all other files are served cache-first, but in both cases a fresh copy is always put in the cache. The idea is that HTML content will always be fresh (unless there’s a problem with the network), while all other content—images, style sheets, scripts—might be slightly stale, but get refreshed with every request.
My original attempt was riddled with errors. Jake came to my rescue and we revised the script into something that actually worked. In the process, my misunderstanding of how await works led Jake to write a great blog post on await vs return vs return await.
I got there in the end and the script seems solid enough. It’s a fairly simplistic strategy that could work for quite a few sites, but it has some issues…
Service workers don’t perform any automatic cleanup of caches—that’s up to you to do (usually during the activate event). This script doesn’t do any cleanup so the cache might grow and grow and grow. For that reason, I think the script is best suited for fairly small sites.
The strategy also assumes that a file will either be fetched from the network or the cache. There’s no contingency for when both attempts fail. So there’s no fallback offline page, for example.
I decided to test it in the wild, but I expanded it slightly to fix the fallback issue. The version on the Ampersand 2018 website includes a worst-case-scenario option to show a custom offline page that has been pre-cached. (By the way, if you haven’t got a ticket for Ampersand yet, get a ticket now—it’s going to be superb day of web typography nerdery.)
Anyway, this fairly basic script seems to be delivering some good performance improvements. If you’ve got a site that you think would benefit from this network/caching strategy, and it’s served over HTTPS, then:
serviceworker.js,script element at the bottom of your HTML pages:
if (navigator.serviceWorker && !navigator.serviceWorker.controller) {
navigator.serviceWorker.register('/serviceworker.js');
}
You can also use the script as a starting point. You might find issues specific to your particular website. That’s okay—you can tweak and adjust the script to suit your needs.
If this minimal service worker script proves in any way useful to you, thank Jake.
The gorgeous website for this year’s Ampersand conference might well be one of the first commercial uses of variable fonts in the wild. Here, Richard documents all the clever things Mark did to ensure good fallbacks for browsers that don’t yet support variable fonts.
Save the date! The best web typography conference in the world is back in Brighton on June 29th, and this time it’s at the best venue: The Duke Of York’s.
In fact, you can do more than saving the date: you can snap up a super early bird ticket for whopping £85 saving.
Take a break. Build a sandcastle. It’s relaxing.
A great run-down of this year’s excellent Ampersand conference.
I wish I had known that Robin was there—I’d like to thank him for his kind words about Chloe.
The audio is now up from all the talks at this year’s excellent Ampersand conference.
In the space of one week, Brighton played host to three excellent conferences:
I made it to two of the three—alas, I couldn’t make it to Meaning this year because it clashed with Richard’s superb workshop on Responsive Web Typography.
FF Conf and Ampersand were both superb. Despite having very different subject matter, the two events have a lot in common. They’re both affordable, one-day, single-track, focused gatherings.
Both events really benefit from having a mastermind overseeing the line-up: Remy in the case of FF Conf, and Richard in the case of Ampersand. That really paid off. Both events were superbly curated, with a diverse mix of speakers and topics.
It was really interesting to see both conferences break out of the boundary of what happens inside web browsers. At FF Conf, we were treated to talks on linguistics and inclusivity. At Ampersand, we enjoyed talks on physiology and culture. But of course we also had the really deep dives into the minutest details of JavaScript, SVG, typography, and layout.
Videos will be available from FF Conf, and audio will be available from Ampersand. Be sure to check them out once they’re released.
I’m staying with my brother-in-law Jeb in Seattle’s Green Lake neighbourhood. Right around the corner from his house, there’s a great little sandwich place called The Butcher & The Baker.
Yes, the mandatory ampersand is there setting off all the hipster alarm bells but, y’know, I’ve been thinking… if the label “hipster” means good food, good coffee, good beer, good music, or good bicycles, well I’m okay with that.
In the case of The Butcher & The Baker, the food is very good indeed. They could probably slap adjectives like “hand-crafted” or “artisinal” on everything they produce.
They make delicious sandwiches.
Hipsters.
I’m in America. This is a three-week trip and in those three weeks, I’m speaking at four conferences.
That might sound like a fairly hectic schedule but it’s really not that bad at all. In each place I’m travelling to, travel takes up a day, the conference portion takes up a couple of days, but I still get a day or two to just hang out and be a tourist, which is jolly nice.
This sojourn began in Boston where I was speaking at An Event Apart. It was—as ever—an excellent event and even though I was just speaking at An Event Apart in Seattle just a few weeks ago, there were still plenty of fresh talks for me to enjoy in Boston: Paul talking about performance, Lea talking about colour in CSS, Dan talking about process, and a barnstorming talk from Bruce on everything that makes the web great (although I respectfully disagree with his stance on DRM/EME).
My own talk was called The Long Web and An Event Apart Boston was its final outing. I first gave it at An Event Apart DC back in August—it’s had a good nine-month run.
My next appearance at An Event Apart will be at the end of this American trip in San Diego. I’ll be presenting a new talk there. Whereas my previous talk was a rambling affair about progressive enhancement, responsive design, and long-term thinking, my new talk will be a rambling affair about progressive enhancement, responsive design, and long-term thinking.
Sooner or later people are going to realise that I keep hammering home the same message in all my talks and this whole speaking-at-conferences gig will dry up. Until then, I’ll keep hammering home that same old message.
I have two opportunities to road-test this new talk before An Event Apart San Diego (for which, by the way, tickets still remain: use the code AEAKEITH when you’re booking to get $100 off).
I’ll be speaking at Bmoresponsive in Baltimore at the end of this week. Before that, I have the great pleasure (and pressure) of opening the show tomorrow at the Artifact conference here in good ol’ Austin, Texas (and believe it or not, you can still get a ticket: this time use the code ADACTIO100 when you’re booking to get $100 off).
Until then, I have some time to wander around and be a tourist. It is so nice to be here in Austin when it’s not South by Southwest. I should probably fretting over this talk but instead I’m spending my time sampling tacos and beers in the sunshine.
Being a beachy surfer kind of place, it made sense that we spent our last day in San Diego hanging out by the beach. We went to La Jolla. We watched people swim, snorkel, and paddle-board. In amongst the human activity, we also saw the occasional seal pop its head out of the water.
It was another beautiful day in San Diego. It was also my last day in San Diego: tomorrow I head north to San Francisco.
I was all set for another flight until disastrously my Kindle gave up the ghost. The e-ink display is b0rked, permanently showing half of Jane Austen and half of a New Aesthetic glitch. So on the way to dinner at the Stone Brewery this evening, we stopped off at a Best Buy so I could slap down some money to buy a bog-standard non-touch, non-white Kindle.
Imagine my disgust when I get it home, charged it up, connected it to a WiFi network, registered it, and discovered that it comes encumbered with advertising that can’t be switched off (the Amazon instructions for unsubscribing from these “special offers”—by paying to do so—don’t work if your device is registered with a UK Amazon account).
A little bit of Googling revealed that the advertising infestation resides in a hidden folder named /system/.assets. If you replace this folder with an empty file (and keep WiFi switched off by having your Kindle in airplane mode), then the advertising is cast out.
So connect your Kindle—that you bought, with your money—to your Mac, open up the Terminal and type:
cd /Volumes/Kindle/system
rm -r .assets
touch .assets
Now I can continue to read The Shining Girls in peace on my flight to San Francisco tomorrow.
I remember the first time I was in San Diego in 2008, a bunch of us were hanging out at the Lamplighter, a dive bar that was the scene of my first traumatic karaoke experience. Tess and Erin were extolling the virtues of San Diego. They described it as having all the good aspects of Los Angeles but without the craziness. True enough, San Diego is a pretty laid back place.
Today was a laid back kinda day. Jessica, Jeb and I were in full tourist mode, wandering around the seafront and revisiting the USS Midway. What can I say? I like airplanes. And ships.
We ended the day at a pizza place that I’m pretty sure I’ve been to before. That would’ve been the last time I was in San Diego, which was Halloween 2010. Once again, I met up with Tess and Erin except that this time they were in fancy dress; Scott Pilgrim fancy dress to be precise. Erin cut an impressive figure as Ramona, while Ted came as “Mark Pilgrim as Scott Pilgrim” …possibly the meta-geekiest thing ever.
That was before Tess and Erin up sticks and moved to San Francisco. Coincidentally, San Francisco will be the next stop on my trip so here’s hoping I see them there.
I’ve been to San Diego twice before. The first time was in 2008 for one of Jared’s conferences that took place on Coronado. The second time was two years later for An Event Apart in 2010. That time I was staying downtime.
This time I’m staying with Jeb in Ocean Beach. I like it here. It’s got a very laid-back feel. People walk down the street with surfboards under their arms. Or else they skate down the street. Probably on their way to get fish tacos. Exceptionally good fish tacos.
As the name suggests, there is a beach here. More importantly, there is a dog beach. A dog beach! A beach where dogs of all shapes and sizes can run free, cavort in the surf and sniff one another’s butts.
I like dog-watching and everyone here has a dog. I particularly like hanging out with these two mutts: Lola and Mesa.
Like almost everywhere in San Diego, Ocean Beach lies under a flight path—a natural consequence of having your airport right downtown. Jeb told us about “The OB Pause”. That’s when you’re in the middle of a conversation and you pause…
vrrrroooOOOOOOOOoooooommmmm
…and then continue right where you left off once the jet has left your airspace.
The weather is glorious right now here in Brighton. As much as I get wanderlust, I’m more than happy to have been here for most of June and for this lovely July thus far.
Prior to the J months, I made a few European sojourns.
Mid-may was Mobilism time in Amsterdam, although it might turn out that this may have been the final year. That would be a real shame: it’s a great conference, and this year’s was no exception.
As usual, I had a lot of fun moderating a panel. This time it was a general “hot topics” panel featuring Remy, Jake, Wilto, and Dan. Smart, opinionated people: just what I want.
Two weeks after Mobilism, I was back on the continent for Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf. I opened up the show with a new talk. It was quite ranty, but I was pleased with how it turned out, and the audience were very receptive. I’ll see about getting the video transcribed so I can publish the full text here.
Alas, I had to miss the second day of the conference so I could down to Porto for this year’s ESAD web talks, where I reprised the talk I had just debuted in Germany. It was my first time in Portugal and I really liked Porto: there’s a lot to explore and discover there.
Two weeks after that, I gave that same talk one last spin at FFWD.pro in Zagreb. I had never been to Croatia before and Jessica and I wanted to make the most of it, so we tagged on a trip to Dubrovnik. That was quite wonderful. It’s filled with tourists these days, but with good reason: it’s a beautiful medieval place.
With that, my little European getaways came to an end (for now). The only other conference I attended was Brighton’s own Ampersand, which was particularly fun this year. The Clearleft conferences just keep getting better and better.
In fact, this year’s Ampersand might have been the best yet. And this year’s UX London was definitely the best yet. I’d love to say that this year’s dConstruct will be the best yet, but given that last year’s was without doubt the best conference I’ve ever been to, that’s going to be quite a tall order.
Still, with this line-up, I reckon it’s going to be pretty darn great …and it will certainly be good fun. So if you haven’t yet done so, grab a ticket now and I’ll see you here in Brighton in September.
Here’s hoping the weather stays good.
An incredibly detailed write-up of Ampersand.