Links, page 14

David Jonathan Ross:

One of the major things I’ve learned over the last years is that how a font is licensed can have a huge effect on how it ends up being used, (sometimes even more so than its design). This is a tough pill to swallow.

So these days I truly consider licensing and marketing to be a part of my type design process. This started with my typeface Input, where I worked with Font Bureau to create a license that allowed programmers to use it in their code editors for free, with a separate license for published use.

I use David’s wonderful Input Sans Narrow on this site (and my business card!), and I can confirm that both the free code-editing license and the all-in-one desktop/web commercial licensing terms played an important part in that decision.

Julia Wolkoff, for Artsy:

Life was cruel to French ballet dancers, and they didn’t have it much easier at the hands of Degas himself.

Mat Honan reviews the Pixel 3:

“We’re doomed,” a colleague texts me on Signal. A push alert from a well-regarded news site has more details on the alleged murder and dismemberment of a Saudi journalist. On Nextdoor, several neighbors report that their drinking water has tested positive for unsafe levels of pesticides. The Citizen app prompts me to record video of an angry naked man rampaging in the shit-strewn streets of San Francisco. Facebook is hacked and our information is out there. Everyone on Twitter is angry, you fucking cuck. You idiot. You tender, triggered snowflake. Everyone on Instagram is posturing, posing. You are less beautiful than they. The places you go are not as interesting. You should feel bad because you are worse in every way. The world is dying; come see it, come see it.

Dave Rupert:

Let’s say we have a site with ~300 third-party scripts all responsibly loaded as async, what would be the User Experience costs and risks?

Olivia Nuzzi:

The president craned his neck slightly upward, in the direction of the door. “Could you give me the list, please?” he asked, raising his voice so a secretary could hear. “I’ve gotta give you the list. Nobody has come close to doing what we’ve done in less than two years as president. Whether it’s regulations or tax cuts or so many other things.” The secretary walked into the room, holding two sheets of computer paper. “Give that to Olivia,” Trump said. “These are just some of the things that were done since taking office,” he told me. The pages were stamped with 58 bullet points, typed in a large font. At the top, underlined, bold, and all-caps, it read, “TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ACCOMPLISHMENTS.” On the first page, the points related mostly to jobs numbers or executive orders or promises from the tax-reform bill. On the second page, there were more puzzling accomplishments like, “Republicans want STRONG BORDERS and NO CRIME. Democrats want OPEN BORDERS which equals MASSIVE CRIME.”

“So,” Trump went on, “it would be great to have an accurately written story, because we do have — when you walk in here, I think you see, if you read something, it’s totally different than the fact.”

Eric Stiens:

#5) How I made an art of it. How to figure out how to hurt people that were hurting you. You know what the funny thing is? Sometimes the way you fuck people up is making them hurt you more than they intended.

Marco Arment:

Even with almost no complications, the basic essence of the Infograph dial has poor time legibility.

Miles Klee, for MEL Magazine:

“Every homeless person has like three scooters now,” Michael Ghadieh, owner of an electric bike store in San Francisco, told CNET. “They take the brains out, the logos off and they literally hotwire it.”

Ben Frain gives some very useful and pragmatic advice on how to build web front-end prototypes.

Producing something of high fidelity, perfectly matching any flat designs, runs counter to the notion of creating something quickly. The challenge for the prototyper is therefore how to cut corners that don’t impact the fidelity of the prototype.

Jeremy Keith adds:

In my experience, it’s vital that the prototype does not morph into the final product …no matter how tempting it sometimes seems.

Prototypes are made to be discarded (having validated or invalidated an idea). Making a prototype and making something for production require very different mindsets: with prototyping it’s all about speed of creation; with production work, it’s all about quality of execution.

Max Böck:

Text-only sites like these are usually treated as a MVP of sorts. A slimmed-down version of the real site, specifically for emergencies.

I’d argue though that in some aspects, they are actually better than the original.

This is the web as it was originally designed. Pure information, with zero overhead. Beautiful in a way.

Jeremy Keith:

I really like this design pattern. Cover 80% of the use cases with a declarative solution in HTML, but also provide an imperative alternative in JavaScript that gives more power. HTML5 has plenty of examples of this pattern. But I feel like the history of web standards has a few missed opportunities too.

In recent years there’s been a push to expose low-level browser features to developers. They’re inevitably exposed as JavaScript APIs. In most cases, that makes total sense. I can’t really imagine a declarative way of accessing the fetch or cache APIs, for example. But I think we should be careful that it doesn’t become the only way of exposing new browser features. I think that, wherever possible, the design pattern of exposing new features declaratively and imperatively offers the best of the both worlds—ease of use for the simple use cases, and power for the more complex use cases.

Rachel Andrew:

There is frequently talk about how developers whose main area of expertise is CSS feel that their skills are underrated. I do not think we help our cause by talking about CSS as this whacky, quirky language. CSS is unlike anything else, because it exists to serve an environment that is unlike anything else. However we can start to understand it as a designed language, with much consistency. It has codified rules and we can develop ways to explain and teach it, just as we can teach our teams to use Bootstrap, or the latest JavaScript framework.

A look at the 12 principles of animation developed by Disney to give life to an image.

Explainers about Disney’s animation techniques have been done to death, but Kristian’s stellar editing and compositing make this one worth watching. He uses some great examples that I hadn’t seen before.

Eye-opening and surprisingly poignant.

Heydon Pickering:

Most of you will be familiar with JavaScript’s fat arrow functions, also known as “chonky darts”.

In ES2019, fat arrow functions are not the only kinds of arrow functions available to you. Let’s take a look at some of the others and what they have to offer.

Brad Frost:

JavaScript is eating the world and the rest of the frontend stack with it. Those server-side languages people used to write in? Node. HTML? JSX. Styling? We do that in JS now too. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are three sturdy, capable languages that each have their own histories, nuances, and best practices. I do worry that as we author more and more in JS we risk losing those hard-won HTML/CSS best practices. Of course, it’s totally possible to preserve those HTML/CSS best practices even as we write everything in JS, which is why I want to make sure libraries like React are accessible to frontend people like me who don’t come from a JavaScript/programming background.