Stuff and things
Firefox and Chrome have now officially launched support for CSS grid. Months of saving Rachel Andrew talks in your Pocket account and saying "I'll get to that soon, it won't be ready for a couple years anyway" have finally paid off!
I'm kind of stoked to get into it. Here's a CSS-Tricks primer.
I'm still pretty into design systems and style-guide driven design, and I'm encouraged that the faddish nature of the conversation around these methods is passing into general wisdom and best practice. But there's still a lot of knowledge that has yet to be put "out there."
Brad Frost and Anna Debenham, who co-hosted a podcast together last year, are two of the biggest public proponents to recently release books on the subject. Whereas Frost's focuses more on the "why" and the philosophy of style-guide-driven design, Debenham's is very much a "how" book.
She first goes through some of the methodologies and techniques that help break designers of the nasty habit of designing by pages: style tiles, element collages, and component libraries. Then she covers the advantages of style guides.
From there, it's all practical. She focuses most of the book on the step by step process of implementing your first style-guide-driven redesign or creation of a component library. Throughout, she answers questions that real people doing real things with real style guides are going to ask: how rigid should I be, what tools should I use, what about maintenance once it's built... etc.
Overall, it's a short read but dense with useful, practical information from that rare breed — a developer who can write and explain concisely and clearly. If you've gotten on board the philosophical train of style guides but aren't sure where to start, it's a good buy at $8. Get it here.
Pretty bad. Not meant to be depressing though, I don't think. The core thing here is that you can't assume people are like you. Which you should not be doing, anyway.
These are great. The Japanese are particularly good at (or at least responsive to) character logos, as evidenced by the old classic Mitsui OSK Lines logo that you might've seen on a shipping container.
Oh yay. The intersection of voter disenfranchisement and irresponsible design, it's the perfect storm of my rage.
This is a pretty good set of guidelines. I usually set up rules for any given project; I can't say that I've ever really had a major guiding principle for how I'm going to do things.
Don't name your band after people that a lot of your audience considers the villains if you don't have any idea what you're talking about. Further... if someone calls you on it, at least pretend you did know what you were doing at the time (ex: George Lucas, who said 100% that the rebels were the Viet Cong), otherwise you're just a tool. It's almost like #145, "Don't pretend you don't understand why your use of Nazi imagery bothers everyone." (Hi Iceage).
Good points here. I think we're actually pretty good at this. We tally Zendesk feedback and periodically meet with customer service to see what's actually a problem and what is just the result of a few loud voices.
EDIT: I spent a lot of time using Jeet on a lot of sites and apps once I discovered it. Thanks, Jeet.
I've used a lot of CSS frameworks, minimal grids, etc etc. I've even made my own, which frankly would've worked for this site. But it didn't work for the more complex purpose I had hoped to apply it to, so I ended up using Jeet, which is a variation on what this site actually uses.
This site uses Lost Grid, a PostCSS based system that's pretty neat. But its creator's earlier work, Jeet (for Stylus or Sass), is a pretty beautiful creation on its own. Awesomely, it's now being maintained again by someone else, so it feels alive and pretty safe to use. That's nice because I'm just not quite ready to throw PostCSS-based tools into production yet. I need speed, and speed means familiarity. That means Sass. I'd encourage anyone looking for a grid that is only a grid to look at Jeet.
Pretty comprehensive writeup about the use of icons from the makers of iA Writer, one of the App Store's most popular overpriced minimalist writing apps.
The long and short of it:
So... everything is bad, more or less. They advise getting things right without icons in the IA and wireframing stage, then adding on the emotional component as part of UI design. Sound approach, but ultimately we're still left with icons as a pretty good solution that are still mostly unable to convey verbs and abstract concepts.
