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June 2019

  1. Frank Chimero on causing ‘good trouble’ and re-imagining the status quo to combat achievement culture
    creativeboom.com

    Great interview. Frank Chimero is always thought-provoking:

    Everyone has their lean years, but I think they make a poor compass. You can always work more. We need to disabuse ourselves of the thought that work is the solution to our problems, or that by keeping up we are getting closer to something worth having. Being more active is not being freer. I won’t romanticise those months on peanut butter and jelly as freedom, but I can confidently say that in retrospect the problems of that time were no better or worse than the ones I’ve experienced at the peak of my successes.

  2. Relearn CSS layout: Every Layout
    every-layout.dev

    Heydon Pickering and Andy Bell have created a terrific resource for CSS layout patterns following algorithmic design principles.

    We make many of our biggest mistakes as visual designers for the web by insisting on hard coding designs. We break browsers’ layout algorithms by applying fixed positions and dimensions to our content.

    Instead, we should be deferential to the underlying algorithms that power CSS, and we should think in terms of algorithms as we extrapolate layouts based on these foundations. We need to be leveraging selector logic, harnessing flow and wrapping behavior, and using calculations to adapt layout to context.

    This approach is precisely what I’ve been striving for ever since Jen Simmons’s Intrinsic Web Design talk from last year.

  3. Drop caps & design systems
    product.voxmedia.com

    Ethan Marcotte:

    When I’m asked to describe design systems work, I say the word that springs immediately to mind is mapmaking. As designers like Matthew Ström and Alla Kholmatova have argued, every website has a design system underneath it. Take yours, for example: your website’s interface is built from a library of components, each shaped by a series of design decisions and business needs. Your design system may not be explicit—maybe you don’t have a polished pattern library, or a set of well-defined design principles, or maybe your documentation’s not as robust as you’d like it to be—but it’s still a system. And in order to improve that system, you have to research it before you can begin to gradually, slowly improve it.

  5. The New Wilderness
    idlewords.com

    Maciej Ceglowski writes about privacy and I want to quote the whole thing:

    Ambient privacy is not a property of people, or of their data, but of the world around us. Just like you can’t drop out of the oil economy by refusing to drive a car, you can’t opt out of the surveillance economy by forswearing technology (and for many people, that choice is not an option). While there may be worthy reasons to take your life off the grid, the infrastructure will go up around you whether you use it or not.

    Because our laws frame privacy as an individual right, we don’t have a mechanism for deciding whether we want to live in a surveillance society. Congress has remained silent on the matter, with both parties content to watch Silicon Valley make up its own rules. The large tech companies point to our willing use of their services as proof that people don’t really care about their privacy. But this is like arguing that inmates are happy to be in jail because they use the prison library. Confronted with the reality of a monitored world, people make the rational decision to make the best of it.

    That is not consent.

  7. Tech and Antitrust
    stratechery.com

    Ben Thompson:

    Suggesting that users changing ecosystems is a sufficient antidote to Apple’s behavior is like suggesting that users subject to a hospital monopoly in their city should simply move elsewhere; asking a third party to remedy anticompetitive behavior by incurring massive inconvenience with zero immediate gain is just as problematic as making up market definitions to achieve a desired result.