Toshi Omagari at TYPO Berlin 2018:
Limitation is a fantastic ingredient for creativity. In the early days of video games, you did not have a luxury to use retail fonts on screen and developers had to make their own in a pixel grid of multiples of 4, the most common being 8*8 pixels in monospace letter width.
Paul McCann:
Nobody was sure where they came from. These are what came to be known as the ghost characters (幽霊文字).
I’ve been working with CJK characters for the first time for the Open House Macau website, and finding everything about these writing systems to be fascinating.
Dan Golding:
Across the entire franchise, there’s still an unmistakable sound to the music of James Bond. So why does James Bond sound like James Bond? And how do you write a new Bond song?
Ben Porter, developer of MoonQuest:
So how can you take 7 years to make your game? Here are some important tips and tricks for taking your sweet time.
Jeremy Keith:
Frankly, the whole point of prefixed CSS is that is not used after a reasonable amount of time (originally, the idea was that it would not be used in production, but that didn’t last long). As we’ve moved away from prefixes to flags in browsers, I’m seeing the amount of prefixed properties dropping, and that’s very, very good. I’ve stopped using
autoprefixeron new projects, and I’ve been able to remove it from some existing ones—please consider doing the same.
Browser prefixes seem to be slowly going away. I stopped using Autoprefixer last year and haven’t missed it.
Jeremy Keith at Webstock 2018:
I also think we should remember the original motto of the World Wide Web, which was: let’s share what we know. And over the next few days, you’re going to hear a lot of amazing, inspiring ideas from amazing, inspiring people and I hope that you would be motivated to maybe share your thoughts. You could share what you know on Mark Zuckerberg’s website. You could share what you know on Ev Williams’s website. You could share what you know on Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey’s website. But I hope you’ll share what you know on your own website.
David Bryant Copeland writes a manifesto:
Brutalist Web Design is honest about what a website is and what it isn’t. A website is not a magazine, though it might have magazine-like articles. A website is not an application, although you might use it to purchase products or interact with other people. A website is not a database, although it might be driven by one.
A website is about giving visitors content to enjoy and ways to interact with you.
Game designer Jan Willem Nijman:
I gave a 4-minute talk at @AMazeFest about how making long games is unethical, watch it here
I love this idea:
We should all design our games like bus rides — they should have multiple stops along the way. If someone is happy with your game, they should be able to stop playing at that point. Give your game that ending after two hours. Give it that ending after ten hours for the people who want more of it and want to find all the secrets. Give it, like, the 100-hour ARG with speedrunning, trophy, whatever shit, but let people quit your game in a way that makes them happy.
Jeffrey Zeldman:
How can we tell which sites should be faster, and which should be slower? It’s easy. If the content is delivered for the good of the general public, the presentation must facilitate slow, careful reading. If it’s designed to promote our business or help a customer get an answer to her question, it must be designed for speed of relevancy.
Evan Puschak:
If a basic purpose of art is to illuminate human nature, then I think Comedy Central’s Nathan for You deserves a spot in the conversation about the best TV shows of this era.
Ethan Marcotte:
At the moment, I’m feeling like I need to write down not just the kind of work I like, but the kind of projects I can allow myself to do. I need to come up with an ethical framework for myself, and how I run my business.
Big agree.
Revisiting this incredible piece. The man was unique.
I love the sheer weirdness of the kitchen life: the dreamers, the crackpots, the refugees, and the sociopaths with whom I continue to work; the ever-present smells of roasting bones, searing fish, and simmering liquids; the noise and clatter, the hiss and spray, the flames, the smoke, and the steam. Admittedly, it’s a life that grinds you down. Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are in some fundamental way dysfunctional. We’ve all chosen to turn our backs on the nine-to-five, on ever having a Friday or Saturday night off, on ever having a normal relationship with a non-cook.
Jeffrey Zeldman:
Good communication strives for clarity. Design is its most brilliant when it appears most obvious—most simple. The question for web designers should never be how complex can we make it. But that’s what it has become. Just as, in pursuit of “delight,” we forget the true joy reliable, invisible interfaces can bring, so too, in chasing job security, do we pile on the platform requirements, forgetting that design is about solving business and customer problems … and that baseline skills never go out of fashion.
Adam Silver:
The best way to make pages fast, is to have less stuff in them. You’d be forgiven for wanting to punch me in the face as this is obvious. And yet web pages keep getting fatter and fatter.
Amazing video from CSS Day 2017:
In this session the two inventors of CSS will talk about what they’d do differently if they could design CSS all over again.
Oliver Williams thinks we should update the “mustard cut” technique to truly deprecate Internet Explorer, and I love the idea.
Users have more browsers than ever to choose from, yet IE manages to single-handedly tie us to the pre-evergreen past of the web. If developing Chrome-only websites represents one extreme of bad development practice, shackling yourself to a vestigial, obsolete, zombie browser surely represents the other.
He makes a crucial point — IE users might actually be better off with a pared-down experience:
By making a clean break with the past, we can focus our energies on building modern sites using modern standards without leaving users stuck on antiquated browsers with an untested and possibly broken site. We save a huge amount of mental overhead. If your content has real value, it can survive without flashy embellishments.