Grease
Grease is a website starter that makes building performant, accessible, aesthetic websites fast & frictionless.
Interestingly, this starter kit uses cascade layers for managing CSS.
Tags: start
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Wednesday, April 19th, 2023
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2023
Fujichia: Sayable Space
This game is hard:
Sayable Space is a television game for 1 or more people, it consists of saying “Space” out loud at the same time as Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) during the intro to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Or actually that’s just half of the game. The second half is saying “Space”, and the first half is remembering that you are playing this game.
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023
Shift Happens
Marcin’s book is coming along nicely—you just know it’ll be a labour of love.
You’ve never seen a book on technology like this. Shift Happens is full of stories – some never before told – interleaved with 1,000+ beautiful full-color photos across two volumes.
The Kickstarter project launches in February. In the meantime, there are some keyboard-based games here for you to enjoy.
Monday, June 27th, 2022
Utopian project kickstarter — Figma
Do you like the ideas behind Utopia? Do you use Figma?
If the answer to both those questions is “yes”, then James has made a very handy Figma community file for you:
This work-in-progress is intended as a starting point for designers to start exploring the Utopia approach, thinking about type and space in fluid scales rather than device-based breakpoints.
Tuesday, April 12th, 2022
Starting and finishing
Someone was asking recently about advice for public speaking. This was specifically for in-person events now that we’re returning to actual live conferences.
Everyone’s speaking style is different so there’s no universal advice. That said, just about everyone recommends practicing. Practice your talk. Then practice it again and again.
That’s good advice but it’s also quite time-consuming. Something I’ve recommended in the past is to really concentrate on the start and the end of the talk.
You should be able to deliver the first five minutes of your talk in your sleep. If something is going to throw you, it’s likely to happen at the beginning of your talk. Whether it’s a technical hitch or just the weirdness and nerves of standing on stage, you want to be able to cruise through that part of the talk on auto-pilot. After five minutes or so, your nerves will have calmed and any audio or visual oddities should be sorted.
Likewise you want to really nail the last few minutes of your talk. Have a good strong ending that you can deliver convincingly.
Make it very clear when you’re done—usually through a decisive “thank you!”—to let the audience know that they may now burst into rapturous applause. Beware the false ending. “Thank you …and this is my Twitter handle. I always like hearing from people. So. Yeah.” Remember, the audience is on your side and they want to show their appreciation for your talk but you have to let them know without any doubt when the talk is done.
At band practice we sometimes joke “Hey, as long as we all start together and finish together, that’s what matters.” It’s funny because there’s a kernel of truth to it. If you start a song with a great intro and you finish the song with a tight rock’n’roll ending, nobody’s going to remember if somebody flubbed a note halfway through.
So, yes, practice your talk. But really practice the start and the end of your talk.
Wednesday, February 9th, 2022
The web is a miracle
I wonder what kinds of conditions would need to be true for another platform to be built in a similar way? Lots of people have tried, but none of them have the purity of participation for the love of it that the web has.
Tuesday, January 5th, 2021
new.css
A minimal style sheet that applies some simple rules to HTML elements so you can take a regular web page and drop in this CSS to spruce it up a bit.
Thursday, November 19th, 2020
The Browser Company
It looks like something interesting is going on here. A new browser? It’s hard to tell from the vague marketing copy, but I suspect we’re not looking at a new rendering engine here, but perhaps a new browser interface.
Thursday, August 20th, 2020
Star Trek: The Motion Picture | Typeset In The Future
The latest edition in this wonderful series of science-fictional typography has some truly twisty turbolift tangents.
Wednesday, August 5th, 2020
Kissa. Book. Launch. — Roden Explorers Archive
Own. Your. Nook. There’s power in owning your nook of the ‘net — your domain name, your design, your archives — and it’s easier than ever to do so, and run a crowdfunding campaign at the same time.
Thursday, February 20th, 2020
monica.css – Monica Dinculescu
Monica shares the little snippet of handy CSS she uses at the start of any project.
Thursday, August 22nd, 2019
AccentDesign/Fractal-Atomic: An awesome starter point for your Fractal UI component library
If you want to use Brad’s Atomic Design naming convention—atoms, molecules, etc.—and you like using Fractal for making your components, this starter kit is just for you:
Keep what you need, delete what you don’t and add whatever you like on top of whats already there.
Thursday, June 20th, 2019
A simple starter kit for Eleventy - Hylia Starter Kit
Andy has made this very handy pre-configured starter kit for anyone who wants to get a blog up and running on Netlify with Eleventy.
Thursday, April 11th, 2019
Nothing Fails Like Success – A List Apart
On an individual and small collective basis, the IndieWeb already works. But does an IndieWeb approach scale to the general public? If it doesn’t scale yet, can we, who envision and design and build, create a new generation of tools that will help give birth to a flourishing, independent web? One that is as accessible to ordinary internet users as Twitter and Facebook and Instagram?
Design perception
Last week I wrote a post called Dev perception:
I have a suspicion that there’s a silent majority of developers who are working with “boring” technologies on “boring” products in “boring” industries …you know, healthcare, government, education, and other facets of everyday life that any other industry would value more highly than Uber for dogs.
The sentiment I expressed resonated with a lot of people. Like, a lot of people.
I was talking specifically about web development and technology choices, but I think the broader point applies to other disciplines too.
Last month I had the great pleasure of moderating two panels on design leadership at an event in London (I love moderating panels, and I think I’m pretty darn good at it too). I noticed that the panels comprised representatives from two different kinds of companies.
There were the digital-first companies like Spotify, Deliveroo, and Bulb—companies forged in the fires of start-up culture. Then there were the older companies that had to make the move to digital (transform, if you will). I decided to get a show of hands from the audience to see which kind of company most people were from. The overwhelming majority of attendees were from more old-school companies.
Just as most of the ink spilled in the web development world goes towards the newest frameworks and toolchains, I feel like the majority of coverage in the design world is spent on the latest outputs from digital-first companies like AirBnB, Uber, Slack, etc.
The end result is the same. A typical developer or designer is left feeling that they—and their company—are behind the curve. It’s like they’re only seeing the Instagram version of their industry, all airbrushed and filtered, and they’re comparing that to their day-to-day work. That can’t be healthy.
Personally, I’d love to hear stories from the trenches of more representative, traditional companies. I also think that would help get an important message to people working in similar companies:
You are not alone!
Tuesday, January 1st, 2019
Welcome to the Silicon Seaside - PCMag UK
A profile of Brighton, featuring Clearleft’s own Chris How.
Friday, October 26th, 2018
Silicon Valley by the Sea: Is Brighton Really a UK Startup Hub?
Terrible title; nice article. Rich speaks his brains about Clearleft and what we like about being in Brighton.
Monday, October 22nd, 2018
Did I Make a Mistake Selling Del.icio.us to Yahoo?
For once, Betteridge’s law of headlines is refuted.
This is a fascinating insight into the heady days of 2005 when Yahoo was the cool company snapping up all the best products like Flickr, Upcoming, and Del.icio.us. It all goes downhill from there.
There’s no mention of the surprising coda.
Friday, April 6th, 2018
Relaunching Pitas.com, a 20-year old blogging community by Andrew Smales — Kickstarter
This is so great! I don’t just mean the Kickstarter project itself, but this write-up of the origins of pitas.com—it’s a fascinating, heartfelt, genuine piece of web history.
The whole point behind Pitas was, and is, being a simple way to blog. You just open the site, type something into the entry box, and click POST.
And now it’s coming back …if this project gets funded.
I guess if the site gets infested by Nazis we’ll probably not do anything about it for 10 years, then make a bunch of wimpy statements, do nothing, maybe finally request free help from the community and still do nothing about it.
Just kidding, their asses will be kicked off immediately.
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2017
An Epitaph for Newsvine » Mike Industries
Newsvine has closed. Mike reflects on what he built, with a particular eye to the current online news situation.
When we look at how the average person’s news and media diet has changed over the last decade or so, we can trace it directly back to the way these and other modern organizations have begun feeding us our news. Up until 10 or 15 years ago, we essentially drank a protein shake full of news. A good amount of fruits and vegetables, some grains, some dairy, some tofu, and then a little bit of sugar, all blended together. Maybe it wasn’t the tastiest thing in the world but it kept us healthy and reasonably informed. Then, with cable news we created a fruit-only shake for half the population and a vegetable-only shake for the other half. Then with internet news, we deconstructed the shake entirely and let you pick your ingredients, often to your own detriment. And finally, with peer-reinforced, social news networks, we’ve given you the illusion of a balanced diet, but it’s often packed with sugar, carcinogens, and other harmful substances without you ever knowing. And it all tastes great!
There’s also this interesting litmus test for budding entrepreneurs:
We didn’t know for sure if it was going to work, but the day we decided we’d be happy to have tried it even if it failed was the day we ended up quitting our jobs (incidentally, if you are thinking about leaving your job for a new risky thing, this is the acid test I recommend).