Bookmarks

2021

July

Opens in new window The dangerous downsides of perfectionism - BBC Future

I’ve always regarded myself as a perfectionist, and as I’ve recently started exploring this trait in my CBT sessions I can see that it isn’t necessarily helpful. Having read this article I would say I hold aspects of both the adaptive and maladaptive perfectionist types and was a helpful read in why I can get myself into an anxious state, and where setting unatainable goals can dramatically affect my mental health.

2020

November

July

March

February

Opens in new window Home | Utopia

An interesting approach to fluid typography. Need to spend some time exploring this.

Tagged with: Typography, RWD, and Fluor

January

2019

December

November

Opens in new window Bruce Lawson's personal site

Last week I was moaning about the fact that 63% of developers surveyed don’t test accessibility. And I was banging on about editing a ‘learn HTML’ book which was riddled with basic accessibility errors, when Frederik replied in order to shut my whining and make me do something about it:

Opens in new window Find out who can use your color combination

It's a tool that brings attention and understanding to how color contrast can affect different people with visual impairments. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible.

Opens in new window IndieWeb Link Sharing

A pain point of the IndieWeb is that it's sometimes not as convenient to share content as it is on the common social media platforms. Posting a new short “note” on my site currently requires me to commit a new markdown file to the repository on Github.

Opens in new window The Web Project Guide

Building and managing a web project is a big, complex process — one that branches far beyond the phases directly in front of us. On one hand, there’s the multi-disciplinary nuts and bolts work of creating the site itself.

Opens in new window 150 years of Nature

Take a journey through a 3D network of our papers. Across 7 essays, leading historians explore how the past century and a half has forged some of the defining features of today’s scientific system.

Opens in new window Creating a full bleed CSS utility

Sometimes you want to break your components out of the constraints that they find themselves in. A common situation where this occurs is when you don’t have much control of the container that it exists in, such as a CMS main content area.

Opens in new window Geocoding Data

A key step in the data visualization process is the conversion of data to the right format. When working with geospatial related information in particular, data needs to be in geoJSON to be accurately superimposed onto a map.

Opens in new window A Useful Guide to Content Types, Part 2

When we first started building websites, they were “static,” meaning each page was coded individually and published by putting files on a server. Today, we have content management systems (CMS) that allow us to turn every piece of content into data, with technical content types.

Opens in new window A love letter to my website

This is a declaration of love for personal websites, written from years of thinking on the subject, reviewing thousands of portfolios, building websites for friends and bookmarking those of strangers. It’s a subject I’m so passionate about, I built my business on it.

October

Opens in new window Design Sprint WORKSHOP - (Lightning Decision Jam AJ&Smart)

Looking for a short workshop that shows the power of Design Sprints or Design Thinking? Use Lightning Decision Jam! It's a problem solving exercise for up to 100 participants! Lightning Decision Jam - 1 HOUR WORKSHOP - Design Sprint & Design ThinkingSpotify Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/user/11

Opens in new window Stack Overflow

I joined Stack Overflow in the spring of 2017 as a product designer on their then in-beta product, Documentation. After that, I worked on various Q&A efforts. After that, I’d create and maintain their design system, Stacks.

Opens in new window Rethinking CSS

What about Semantics? “SORRY. I disagree. Nonsemantic classnames that refer to visual styles will always be a bad idea.” “If you use templates, then giving a meaningful name to the file should be enough.

Opens in new window GitHub Primer open-source projects

GitHub is looking for a Production Designer to join the Design Systems team. This role will tackle high-visibility design projects and build a library of design assets for use in presentations. Styles can be mixed and matched to achieve many different layouts, independent of their location.

Opens in new window The Myths of Color Contrast Accessibility

There’s a growing demand for designers to make their interfaces accessible to all users. It’s important to accommodate users with disabilities, but there are many myths to color contrast accessibility being perpetuated by misinformed people.

Opens in new window How to recreate Medium’s article layout with CSS Grid

When people think of CSS Grid they normally envision image grid layouts and full web pages. However, CSS Grid is actually a superb technology for laying out articles as well, as it allows you to do things which previously was tricky to achieve.
Tagged with: CSS and Front-end development

Opens in new window Cool URIs don't change

Cool URIs don't change What makes a cool URI? A cool URI is one which does not change. What sorts of URI change? URIs don't change: people change them. There are no reasons at all in theory for people to change URIs (or stop maintaining documents), but millions of reasons in practice.

Opens in new window Flickity

Link directly to Flickity files on unpkg. If you want to use Flickity to develop commercial sites, themes, projects, and applications, the Commercial license is the appropriate license. With this option, your source code is kept proprietary. Read more about Flickity commercial licensing.

Opens in new window Designing accessible color systems

Color contrast is an important aspect of accessibility. Good contrast makes it easier for people with visual impairments to use products, and helps in imperfect conditions like low-light environments or older screens.
Tagged with: A11y, Accessibility, Colour, and Design

Opens in new window Making radio buttons and checkboxes easier to use

At GDS we’re always looking for ways to make our pages easier for anyone to use. One particular area that comes up in user research is the difficulty people have with clicking on small checkboxes or radio buttons in forms.
Tagged with: Front-end development, Accessibility, and A11y

Opens in new window See how Freehand works

Freehand is an entirely new way to creatively collaborate in InVision. Wireframing, planning, design presentations, and feedback—do it all with Freehand.

Opens in new window How to do crazy 8’s remotely

I believe most of us have already heard about the word “crazy 8's”. If you are a designer in the term of software development, you might be familiar with it. Even if you haven’t heard about it, now I’m assuming that you hear it.

Opens in new window Sharing Sketches Remotely

Over the past few years, EightShapes has embedded sketching into workflow to quickly generate ideas. Whether with our clients using formal scenarios, or internally to work through ideas ad-hoc, sketching is now part of our DNA, and reinforces our core value of “show, don’t tell.”
Tagged with: Design and Remote working

Opens in new window Remote collaborative brainstorming and sketching

I’ve been facilitating design studios with collocated teams for years. Many, including me, have covered the benefits of collaboratively sketching new ideas and concepts with a cross-functional team. Recently though, I was tasked with bringing this exercise to a distributed team.
Tagged with: Design and Remote working

September

Opens in new window A list of creative exercises for creative teams

Every Friday afternoon, the Product Experience team at Foursquare gets together and ends the week with a creative exercise. The PX team is a big mash-up of visual designers, UX, copy, research, and product operations, and it’s a lot of people’s favorite meeting of the week.
Tagged with: Teams and Creative

Opens in new window Brad Frost and Dan Mall: Rethinking designer-developer collaboration

In this episode of the Design Better Podcast, Aarron and Eli talk with Dan and Brad about reducing friction between these two very different disciplines. They explore a few misconceptions around agile methodology, the risks of the creative technologist role, and the latest in design systems thinking. This is a conversation you don’t want to miss.
Tagged with: Podcast, Design Systems, and Collaboration

Opens in new window Team models for scaling a design system

Nathan Curtis looks at how we can avoid the 'Overlords' those who may have previously 'owned' the design system to a federated approach, allowing consistency but also allowing the design system to scale with multiple contributors.
Tagged with: Design Systems

Opens in new window Open Source Guides

Open Source Guides are a collection of resources for individuals, communities, and companies who want to learn how to run and contribute to an open source project.
Tagged with: Open Source

Opens in new window Making remote teams work

Mandy Brown, Editorially’s CEO, looks at remote work culture from a positive angle. Through interviews with other remote workers and mining her own experiences, Brown offers up some observations about what makes for a good remote culture, and why it’s likely here to stay.
Tagged with: Remote working

Opens in new window The 1-hour design principles workshop

Design principles are a valuable tool for any team that works together towards a shared outcome. Written well, design principles can create alignment, speed up decision-making, and increase the quality of the team’s output. Lately, I’ve worked with two of my teams to write design principles.
Tagged with: Design Principles and Workshop

Opens in new window Atlassian plays

Step-by-step instructions for tracking your team's health, and new ways of working ("plays") that build your Get $#!τ Done™ muscle. Use the plays on their own, or in concert with Atlassian tools.
Tagged with: Team Building

Opens in new window Introducing SF Symbols

SF Symbols introduces a comprehensive library of vector-based symbols that you can incorporate into your app to simplify the layout of user interface elements through automatic alignment with surrounding text, and support for multiple weights and sizes. Learn how easy it is to adapt to different screen sizes and layouts, and improve the accessibility and localizability of your app. Get details on how to create new symbols for your specific needs that perfectly match the visual style of SF Symbols.
Tagged with: Video, Design, SVG, Icons, and Apple

Opens in new window Light Theme, Redeemed

This is a story of light theme’s redemption. So sit back, remove your protective eyewear, and let’s go on a journey. Maybe you’ll even find yourself using light theme in the coming days. That said, you probably don’t use light theme today.
Tagged with: Accessibility, Design, and Colour

Opens in new window The gradual design system: how we built Slack kit

In 2016, Slack was two years old and already used by millions of people. Our codebase had grown rapidly, and like many companies that focused on product/market fit, our code was built in a way that favored time-to-market over maintainability, consistency, or reusability.
Tagged with: Design systems

Opens in new window Jina Bolton - Designing a design system

Product design for web and mobile is evolving at a fast pace. As the range of devices and platforms continues to expand, so do the various design considerations. Design systems help a design team build a framework that meets their needs by bringing together all of the critical design components - in one place.
Tagged with: Video and Design Systems

Opens in new window Typography in design dystems

I’ve never really been happy about the way I’ve worked with typography in design systems before. As I’m currently working on another big design system, it seemed time to change that. Let’s deconstruct these a bit.
Tagged with: Design Systems and Typography

Opens in new window Change aversion and the conflicted user

Change aversion, much like change itself, is a divisive topic. One camp asserts that users hate change. Software users have “baby duck syndrome” – imprinting on the first system they learn and judging later iterations by their similarity to the first.
Tagged with: UX and Design

Opens in new window Top 10 application-design mistakes

Designing complex applications is a challenging undertaking. Building applications that have both the depth to support complicated tasks and the intuitiveness to make it clear how to get that work done is a tremendous challenge.
Tagged with: UX and Design

Opens in new window WICG/focus-visible

Based on the proposed CSS :focus-visible pseudo-selector, this prototype adds a focus-visible class to the focused element, in situations in which the :focus-visible pseudo-selector should match.

Opens in new window Garret Miller - The gradual design system

As Slack has rapidly scaled, we've built our own component library that outlines our product foundations and interface elements. In the process, we found that the most important output of our work isn't just the design system, but rather the processes that define how we work together with shifting priorities and a rapidly scaling product. Learn about what we've built, the hiccups we've encountered along the way, and how the work we're doing now will pave the way for an even more powerful Slack in the future.
Tagged with: Design Systems and Video

Opens in new window GOV.UK Service Manual

Helping government teams create and run great digital services that meet the Digital Service Standard. The Service Standard provides the principles of building a good service. This manual explains what teams can do to build great services that will meet the standard.

Opens in new window Design principles

Design Principles are a set of considerations that form the basis of any good product. Design Principles help teams with decision making. A few simple principles or constructive questions will guide your team towards making appropriate decisions.
Tagged with: Design principles

Opens in new window Design principles: what are they and how do they help?

From Silicon Valley startups like Airbnb to multi-national companies like IBM, design principles are becoming adopted. But what exactly are design principles? Senior management is very good at establishing goals, but are much worse at clearly defining how the company will achieve those goals.
Tagged with: Design principles and Workshop

Opens in new window The problem with tooltips and what to do instead

Tooltips are messages that appear when the user hovers over part of an interface, usually an icon, to explain how certain things work or what they mean. They then disappear when the user hovers off the element. Adam explains some of the pitfalls with tooltips and offers some alternative advice.
Tagged with: A11y and Accessibility

Opens in new window Mark Boulton - The ugly truth about design systems

Design systems are great for scaling design across complex organisations and products. But in our drive for scale, consistency and standards, have we considered the risks and the cost? What are the problems we may face and how can we overcome them? In this talk, Mark will expose the ugly truth of rolling out design systems; from engineering and code, to designers and stakeholders and provide guidance from his experience of producing design systems for over a decade.
Tagged with: Design Systems and Video

Opens in new window Faster image loading with embedded image previews

The Embedded Image Preview (EIP) technique introduced in this article allows us to load preview images during lazy loading using progressive JPEGs, Ajax and HTTP range requests without having to transfer additional data.
Tagged with: Web performance and Front-end development