Prompted by his recent talk at Smashing Conference, Mark explains why he’s all about the pace layers when it comes to design systems. It’s good stuff, and ties in nicely with my recent (pace layers obsessed) talk at An Event Apart.
Structure for pace. Move at the appropriate speed.
There’s a running joke at just about any gathering at Clearleft where we measure TTPL—Time To Pace Layers—a measurement of how long we can discuss anything before making an inevitable reference to Stewart Brand’s framing.
It’s one of those concepts that, once your brain has been exposed, you start seeing everywhere. Like bad kerning or sexism.
A pace layer model for readers (and writers).
Ben points to a new product aiming to ease the pain of connected devices bumping up against the harsh realities of shearing layers:
By exposing the ‘hardwiring’ of our electrical systems, Conduct emphasises how much we rely on existing systems to power our ‘new’ technology – the rate of change and advancement in our traditional technologies moves at a much slower pace than our mobile app-based world and there are physical limitations as a result of this hardwired legacy.
I am—unsurprisingly—in favour of exposing the seams like this.
A wonderful, wonderful history of the web from Dave at this year’s Beyond Tellerrand conference. I didn’t get to see this at the time—I was already on the way back home—so I got Dave to give me the gist of it over lunch. He undersold it. This is a fascinating story, wonderfully told.
So gather round the computer, kids, and listen to Uncle Dave tell you about times gone by.
A great history lesson from Dave.
Ah, I remember when the CSS Zen Garden was all fields. Now get off my CSS lawn.
The web demonstrates its loosely-joined nature yet again; a photo of mine from a science hack/design fiction exhibit results in Dave discovering his family crest.
A fantastic bit of image manipulation JavaScript from Dave.
Dave has been experimenting with processing and documenting the results here.
Dave has made some icons — very nice ones.
A transcript of the Q&A session with Dave.
With a name like Dave Seah, misunderstandings are bound to occur.