Stream

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

Weeknotes #2

S01E02: A week of education, discussions and design.
Tagged with: Figma, Design Systems, WCAG, Accessibility, and Storybook

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

Weeknotes #1

S01E01: I recently came across #weeknotes as a way of reflecting and looking back over your week. It's an opportunity to write down, summarise, jot notes of what your week looked like, what went well, and maybe not so well. A mini retrospective and journal in one you may say. So here goes my first weeknote.

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