Things I Like
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After a while, Margy just rolled her eyes and gave up, because it's always like this with Mister Rogers, because the thing that people don't understand about him is that he's greedy for this—greedy for the grace that people offer him. What is grace? He doesn't even know. He can't define it. This is a man who loves the simplifying force of definitions, and yet all he knows of grace is how he gets it; all he knows is that he gets it from God, through man. And so in Penn Station, where he was surrounded by men and women and children, he had this power, like a comic-book superhero who absorbs the energy of others until he bursts out of his shirt.
There's a lot of talk right now about Fred Rogers because of the new documentary that was just released. I've been reading many things I missed and this profile is absolutely amazing. I also recommend this article on his way of talking to children. And it's hard right now, with all the horror going on, to be without voices like his.
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I've seen this unity happen in organizations willing to prioritize design systems. These projects give our teams a standard from which to design and build—they give us a common language to speak. They allow us to solve the small problems while creating building blocks to solve the big ones. They let us deliver faster and serve our users more effectively. But more importantly, they marry a designer's passion for the experience and visuals with a developer’s passion for the process and performance. Design systems are unifiers, giving a voice to every expertise required to do this work. They build trust among those roles—instead of pitting us against one another.
As much as many focus on how systems can increase efficiency, I also think Ben's hit on a really excellent point, the systems bring teams together. And it spans the various disciplines as everyone needs to be involved to make the system successful.
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This guide is for you if you are fairly new to CSS and wondering what the best way to approach layout is, but also if you are an experienced developer from elsewhere in the stack who wants to make sure your understanding of layout today is up to date. I have not tried to fully document each layout method here, as that would have created a book and not an article. Instead, I am giving an overview of what is available to you, with plenty of links to find out more.
I love these types of overviews and I refer to them a lot in my work. And the section on grid is especially good for the size of this article. I've been thinking a lot about how to do new and different layouts with grid and reading through this helped me to see how it's possible. I also love that Rachel warns about accessibility problems with moving content around on the screen too much.
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My advice after learning from so many helpful people this weekend is this: if you’re thinking of writing something that explains a weird thing you struggled with on the Internet, do it! Don’t worry about the views and likes and Internet hugs. If you’ve struggled with figuring out this thing then be sure to jot it down, even if it’s unedited and it uses too many commas and you don’t like the tone of it.
Robin is dead on here, write what you're learning and doing, put it out there for other people to learn from, you never know when your perspective and way of writing could help someone else learn something new.
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Unfortunately, the reality of capitalism and turned that dream into a big giant popularity contest, shaped by crude tools – likes, hearts, retweets, and re-shares. We have created systems that boost noise and weaken signals. Every time I tune into news and all I see is noise rising to the top. Whether it is YouTube or Instagram — all you see are memes that are candy-colored candy, mean to keep us hooked.
Not surprising, but it's so true that the feed is trying hard to control us and what we see and think. One of the reasons I still love and use RSS a lot is because it's not controlled by any algorithms, I made a choice to follow a column, website, etc and it shows up when they publish new content in reverse chronological order.
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Either way, to become good writers we have to think about structure, composition, kindness, sentences, clauses, arguments dressed with punctuation. But instead of trusting the data from surveillance state web advertising companies we must ignore them all and return first and foremost to trusting our keyboards.
Several years ago I removed analytics from this site and I did it so that my attitude would change. I now push things out and I let it go. I may hear from people on Twitter or some other way, but I'm almost always surprised when I do and I have no idea how many people even stop by and look at various pages.
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Second, I am so tired of hearing “hobbyist” and “amateur” thrown around as pejorative terms. It’s such a lame, macho move. God forbid we ever do anything for pleasure or love.
This whole thing is amazing and Kleon hits the nail on the head. In the past few years I've taken up a couple of regular hobbies. I love them, they're relaxing, they're worth my time, and I'm learning new things as I do them. And I subscribe to following my passion, but completely realize that it may not always be what pays my bills. My hobbies feed that and, to be honest, I have no idea where they'll take me in the end.
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Taking criticism is often described metaphorically as standing in front of a firing squad. Being a helpless target. But it's not. It's an empowering practice. It requires just as much work as giving criticism.
A wonderful essay on how to take criticism, so many wonderful insights, worth your time.
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It seems like a grim story. Except that the story isn’t over. During the past two years, as I have discovered the people and forces behind the 50-year U.S. tailspin, I have also discovered that in every arena the meritocrats commandeered there are now equally talented, equally driven achievers who have grown so disgusted by what they see that they are pushing back.
A bit of a difficult read, but it ends with hope and I found the history interesting and helpful in understanding where we are in the US today.
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I think we’re well past the point where our industry gets a pass for launching products without thinking about their second-order effects. But additionally: if we assume that this technology’s a given, what kind of policies and protections do we need to help the folks affected by it?
I agree with Ethan here, I have so many questions after seeing Duplex and many of them should be answered before it's out in the world and the negative consequences have started to be felt by people. Tech is full of smart people, I wish more of them would use their brains to think proactively rather than always being reactive.
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I think we lose sight of the real value of a design system when we focus too much on the components. The components are the trees.
Jeremy nails this on the head. When I think about systems I think of them more as documentation, that beyond the code, colors, and more is the way in which you should be using all of it. What's the purpose and how is it used?
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There is a lot of really interesting information about design systems and how teams and organizations are creating them, maintaining them, and thinking about them in this survey. And it's no surprise that having executives who champion the system as well as all the various disciplines involved in creating and maintaining it makes it much more successful.
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Whenever someone asks me to do something that I think seems ill-conceived in some way, I ask them to write it down. That's it. Because writing is high effort. Making sentences is the easy bit, it's the thinking I want them to do. By considering their request it slows them down. Maybe 30% of the time or something, they come back and say 'oh, that thing I asked you to do, I've had a think and it's fine, we don't need to do it'.
This is such good advice. I find writing is the way I think, so even jotting things down in a notebook helps me to clarify what I'm thinking. And in a team environment, clarity is so helpful, it will cut down on the amount of time spent spinning to figure out what the other person means.
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It’s hard for me to understand how John was able to write with so much sensitivity, and also have such a glaring blind spot.
I found this piece really thought provoking, mainly because the John Hughes films were a major part of my teenage years. I can still recite entire scenes from memory with no additional prompting, especially from "Sixteen Candles." And I, like Ringwald, think about those films now with almost two minds, one is my teenage self relating too and glad for that, the other is my adult self somewhat appalled that I watched those films as many times as I did.
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Because frankly, I can’t stop thinking about how much automation has changed our industry already. And I know the rate of automation is only going to accelerate from here.
Ethan's been doing a lot of writing about our industry and how we are moving forward and I really love this post. Too often we think what we're doing is new and different, but is it really? Can we look at the mistakes made in the past and learn from them? And as he says, "what happens next?"