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All Posts, page 26

  1. The Cult of the Complex
    alistapart.com

    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.

  4. The Slow Death of Internet Explorer and the Future of Progressive Enhancement
    alistapart.com

    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.

  8. Black Panther ★★★★☆

    2018 film

    Watched 4 May 2018

    Fun to watch, extremely cool, wholly original. And not a single “crossover event” to be seen. The Marvel movie I’d been waiting for since Iron Man.

  10. I tried leaving Facebook. I couldn’t
    theverge.com

    Sarah Jeong, for The Verge:

    Facebook had replaced much of the emotional labor of social networking that consumed previous generations. We have forgotten (or perhaps never noticed) how many hours our parents spent keeping their address books up to date, knocking on doors to make sure everyone in the neighborhood was invited to the weekend BBQ, doing the rounds of phone calls with relatives, clipping out interesting newspaper articles and mailing them to a friend, putting together the cards for Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas, and more. We don’t think about what it’s like to carefully file business cards alphabetically in a Rolodex. People spent a lot of time on these sorts of things, once, because the less of that work you did, the less of a social network you had.

  11. The Illusion of Control in Web Design
    alistapart.com

    Aaron Gustafson:

    Last week, two events reminded us, yet again, of how right Douglas Crockford was when he declared the web “the most hostile software engineering environment imaginable.” Both were serious enough to take down an entire site—actually hundreds of entire sites, as it turned out. And both were avoidable.

    Start simply. Code defensively. User-test the heck out of it. Recognize the chaos. Embrace it. And build resilient web experiences that will work no matter what the internet throws at them.

  14. Game Score Fanfare: The Anxiety of Celeste and its Music
    youtube.com

    Mathew Dyason:

    Celeste is a poignant exploration of facing anxiety, helped in large part by its deeply personal soundtrack by Lena Raine. Let’s look at how the music approaches the theme of anxiety, whether by inducing it, or turning stress into something more productive.

    I often listen to film and video game soundtracks to help me focus while working (including the Celeste soundtrack!). This video gets to why that works so well. The idea that stress can be positive (eustress instead of the negative distress) is a powerful concept that I wasn’t aware of.

  15. Plainness and Sweetness
    frankchimero.com

    Frank Chimero:

    I find that the more input I have in the content and strategy of the project, the less burden I place on the aesthetics. Perhaps this is because I believe the aesthetic of the work should be an extention of its objectives, so if you get the strategy right, the look follows. Since I like to tackle problems sideways, I must risk being plain and rely on direct visuals to keep the work comprehensible.