Newsletters; or, an enormous rant about writing on the web that doesn’t really go anywhere and that’s okay with me
The other day I made an advice thread based on Jacobian’s from last year! If you know a source for one of these, shout and I’ll edit it in.
Capture and manage visual website feedback and bugs on page from your team and stakeholders.
October has become a month full of drawings, with people across the world joining the #inktober challenge, or a variation of it. This year, Marina invited me to tag along with her. Of course, I said yes, as I saw this as a good way to challenge each other, but also to have some accountability to get through the month.
I started Gumroad in 2011. In 2015, we reached a peak of 23 full-time employees. In 2016, after failing to raise more money, I ended up back where I began: a one-person company. Today, when I’m asked how many people work at Gumroad, I respond with “ten or so.” That’s how I convert the number of people we have into what others expect. But the truth is more complicated:
Explore, buy, and collect premium sneaker collections from luxury to contemporary collaborations with brands including Nike, Balenciaga, Mihara Yasuhiro, Jordan, Yeezy and Gucci.
We’ve trained a neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language.
It's Fall, which means we get to see all of the phone makers announce their latest models promising to be the "best phones we've ever built". While the yearly ritual has become routine to the point where the media reviews are almost written in advance, it's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture of just how far these devices have advanced over the past 13 years.
This brilliant bike wheel reflector with 360 degree reflectivity protects you in the dark.
Privacy-friendly alternatives to Facebook that don't track you.
Burger King is on a mission to transform its business, achieving the highest standards for food quality, sustainability and restaurant experiences in the QSR industry. It was time for their visual identity to reflect the rest of their business by creating a brand world that modern consumers could feel good about.
Where remote teams collaborate. Work closer together and get things done with Input.
I haven’t thought about ordering CSS properties in a while, but I began to work on the redesign of HTMHell recently and I decided to challenge my current approach.
It’s fairly possible to judge a component and say that it’s easy to implement it in HTML&CSS. I agree, it’s easy when you are working for practice purposes only, but for a real-life project, it’s completely different. The perfect responsive component that you just built will fail quickly in case it was used for a real-life project with real content. Why? It’s because judging on how a component can be built without considering the edge cases.
Way back when I was just starting my web developer career, I made the mistake of taking a few years off from building websites. I still remember clearly the moment I came back and realized table layouts were not a thing anymore. Instead, everybody was using this new hotness called “floats”.
We all know that design involves a codex of taste—evident to its practitioners yet largely unwritten. To explain this understanding a key would help; that is, a system of good and bad that resembles design yet states explicit rules. We can then attempt to ‘read’ design via this system and see how it fits.
A modern attempt at creating a CSS-only aspect-ratio box that fills its wrapper. Sometimes you encounter a problem repeatedly throughout your career. Usually after the first few times you codify your approach, forging a ‘silver bullet’ for next time. However, on occasion, the problem is so obtuse you never quite nail it down. For me, that problem is the CSS-only contained aspect-ratio box.
PictureThis identifies 1,000,000+ plants every day with 98% accuracy-better than most human experts. Get your gardening questions answered and become a “green thumb” with PictureThis!
Our personal practices can be thought of as a “ritual” — held sacred and done a particular way. The kind of weekdays I love most is when I feel focused during the workday and stress-free at night. What differentiates a day where I feel focused from a day I don’t is if I’m clear on my answer to this question:
I fell in love with personal productivity in college. As I read more and more productivity blogs (with my newfound productivity powers), I started making little tweaks in my life: block scheduling my day, keeping my phone outside of my workspace (which was just my desk in my bedroom), and not working after dinner.
Written by Dave Morris and Josh Tumath who are part of something called the Presentation Layer team; a team working on the design system and React front-end for the new BBC website
Hawaii is famous for its spectacular beaches. But over the past century, three of the state’s major islands, Oahu, Maui and Kauai, have lost roughly one-quarter of their sandy shores. With rising seas, the losses are projected to grow much worse. Why is this happening?
Video game design is still a young enough practice to feel mysterious and discoverable. That's even more true for mobile games. Going behind the scenes of Headland, a new action-adventure game for mobile, we learn the field of game design is one designers are creating as they go.
GitHub is where the world builds software. More than 56 million developers around the world build and work together on GitHub. With our new homepage, we wanted to show how open source development transcends the borders we’re living in and to tell our product story through the lens of a developer’s journey.
When using CSS Custom Properties we mainly use them directly as variables in calculations for other properties. Having one CSS Custom Property control a varying set of other properties — such as both colors and numbers — is not exactly possible. There are some hacky workarounds we can use, but these don’t cover all scenarios. Thankfully there’s a new idea popping up: Higher Level Custom Properties. Although still premature, these Higher Level Custom Properties would allow us to drop the hacks.
When I joined Browser I was tasked with working on Twine, an in-house SASS extranet. Most of the frontend was already built, including the beginnings of a highly reusable component library. One component in particular stood out for me: the ‘flag’. A flag is similar to the ubiquitous media object, but with a more nuanced alignment...
There are two types of biases — Preferential: From liking one option over others. Dispositional: From one’s inherent qualities of mind and character. As a designer, I have a preferential bias toward neutral colours and a dispositional bias toward organised and structured design systems. One is a choice and the other is a result of my tendency to use design thinking.
Imagine ringing in the year 2030 and the world as we know it has not yet ended. How might we look back upon the role of UX design in the 2020s?
Seatback Safety cards have been used since the dawn of commercial flight. While their pamphlet form has remained largely the same for a century, they have significantly evolved in ways that reflected broader social and technological trends.
When I built my post template I added the most basic "meta" tags like author, description, and keywords. Sites like Twitter are smart enough to use those tags and generate a basic preview card, but there are tools to augment the look of this card. The two most popular are Twitter’s Card Components and Facebook’s Open Graph Image. Hooking into these protocols is as easy as adding some extra "meta" tags to the page’s "head", but it’s important to know the data type each tag is expecting.
Deep dives into powerful Figma features. We’ll skip the basics and get into the nitty-gritty of prototyping, auto-layout, systems, and illustration.
This was the first year in many that I managed to regularly update and publish content on my personal site. In past years I started strong (usually around New Years) with fresh writing, energy, and enthusiasm. But somewhere around February or March, things died off and I could never find that momentum again.
Misconceptions stick. Here are our gems: 10 common misconceptions about design interface our designers often hear about. Can you outsmart the traps?
A color palette composer inspired by audio parametric equalizers. Create beautiful color palettes with a scientific precision.
Think you've got a great taste in music? Are you down with the latest trends? Consider yourself a bit of music connoisseur, ey!? ...Well, let's see what this AI thinks about that!
It is time to rethink how we cook a set of favicons for modern browsers and stop the icon generator madness. Currently, frontend developers have to deal with 20+ static PNG files just to display a tiny website logo in a browser tab or on a touchscreen. Read on to see how to take a smarter approach and adopt a minimal set of icons that fits most modern needs.
