Things I Like
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But now that I've met the cool kids, I know they are just like me. They have their own human failings, their own self-doubts, their own mortgages to pay. The cool kids are just as scared as the rest of us underneath their prestige and cool swagger.
This piece resonates with me so much. Now that I'm writing more on other sites and doing a few conference talks I'm meeting some of my heroes. I've been so happy to meet them and realize that we are all very much the same and worrying about a lot of the same things.
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As I already covered, aria-label is favored in accessible name calculation. Apart from aria-labelledby, it will override all additional naming methods. This means you can use it to provide better text for assistive technologies without altering text intended for visual users.
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If you want to imagine a truly frightening scenario, imagine an entire world in which people entrust their thoughts, their work, and pictures of their family to online services in the mistaken belief that the internet never forgets. Imagine the devastation when all of those trivial, silly, precious moments are wiped out. For some reason we have a hard time imagining that dystopia even though it has already played out time and time again.
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We once took on the tropes of print design and tried to apply them to the web. I fear that today we run the risk of treating web development no different to other kinds of software development, ignoring the strengths of the web that John highlighted for us. Flexibility, ubiquity, and uncertainty: don’t fight them as bugs; embrace them as features.
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So that’s what I learned. That’s why the experiment was a failure. This is the era of the quantified self and radical transformation. And I’ve made charts and counted and poked around. I can tell you the top 20 words for each of my years, the number of times I wrote about weight loss, the first time I started thinking about being a father. My basic self is just this single, continuous, thread — quantifiable, in the form of actuarial tables, bank account statements, square footage owned, number of children. But counting things doesn’t change them.
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Crucially, if a server can render links into a tags, like Ember currently does on the client, it would be possible for a user who did not receive JavaScript (for whatever reason) to navigate around the website. It might be possible to get forms working as well, by running all the validation and submission logic on the server instead of on the client. If this effort could be made at the outset by a framework maintainer, then every developer using that framework could immediately transform an app that only worked on the latest web browsers into a progressively enhanced experience compatible with virtually any web client—past, present, or future.
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The culture of busyness and hyperproductivity is so ascendant, that it is hard to raise questions about whether speed itself should be the ultimate rationale for innovation. Is ‘the best’ technical design always about maximum efficiency in the sense of being economical with time? This instrumental philosophy is certainly at the heart of engineering, in which the latest, fastest and most automated systems appear as, objectively, the best.
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Is it just me, or are new web UI technologies continuing to try to solve the wrong problems?
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I spend a lot of time thinking about and talking to people about magic and technology, and honestly one of the biggest reasons I do this is because I see magic disappearing from the internet all the time—or worse, magic being invoked toward entirely the wrong reasons and mostly questionable business models. Twitter bots aren’t the magic of alienated labor or the magic of manipulation. They’re honest magic, they’re chaos magic, they’re real fucking magic. That kind of magic has a way of persisting online, regardless of the vacillations of markets and platforms. For now, we have it in our Twitter bots, and for now, I’m just so happy it’s thriving.
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So I went back to my old job and tried to care about it. I was not successful. On one hand the company does not need me; there are thousands of other engineers that are as good or better. On the other hand, if I succeeded beyond anybody’s wildest dreams the net effect is that some extra billions of dollars would go to one billionaire instead of a different billionaire. It was hard to see why I should bother, and still is.
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A really great twenty post series about a guy instant messaging with his cat while at work. Hilarious and also touching.
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We now have a true Single Source of Truth for our theme tokens which can be used by a wide variety of platform and devices. We also have an internal repository of assets (like icons and fonts) that we keep updated in one place. The style guide pulls from this to display all the icons in our style guide.
This system, along with what I've researched and learned about Marriott and Lonely Planet, sounds fantastic! I'm hoping to find the time soon to dig in and get a better sense of how it works.
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We need to deal with our resources differently, in terms of how we waste things. We have to move away from the throwaway habit. Things can, and must, last longer. They must be designed so that they can be reused. We need to take more care of our environment. That means not only our personal environment but also our cities and our resources. That is the future of design, to take more care of these basic elements. Otherwise I’m not sure what the future of our planet will be. So designers have to take on that responsibility, and to do so we need more support from government. We need political support to solve the problems with our environment and how we should shape our cities. As designers, we shouldn’t be doing this for ourselves, but for our community. And the community needs support, not only to interact with each other democratically, but it also needs support to live democratically.
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So let me repeat: don’t use an icon if its meaning isn’t a 100% clear to everyone. When in doubt, skip the icon. Reside to simple copy. A text label is always clearer.
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These are super great experiments with CSS gradients. My bachelors is in fine art and I studied color theory and Rothko is one of my favorite artists, so it is also fitting that I love these. Not as great as the paintings, but for a digital representation, pretty great.