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Design APIs: The Evolution of Design Systems
17.12.2019
A clever idea from Matthew Ström:
[...] design APIs don’t seem like a stretch of the imagination. An API-driven approach is the natural extension of the work currently being done on design systems, including tokens and standardization projects.
If you buy into the idea of design tokens, that...
The Origin Story of Container Queries
16.12.2019
Container queries don’t exist today but a lot of web developers have been arguing in their favor lately. At first, the idea sounds relatively simple: whereas media queries allow us to make style changes based on the width of the browser, container queries would allow us to make style updates when...
“Link In Bio” is a slow knife
16.12.2019
Anil Dash:
If Instagram users could post links willy-nilly, they might even be able to connect directly to their users, getting their email addresses or finding other ways to communicate with them. Links represent a threat to closed systems.
On CodePen, we have a TextExpander snippet we use...
Top-5 Cryptos This Week: ATOM, XTZ, LINK, BCH, NEO
15.12.2019
Bears are attempting to take control. Can the top five performers move against the trend and climb higher? Let’s study the charts
Adam Argyle’s 2020 CSS Predictions
13.12.2019
I think Adam's first prediction is his boldest, even beyond his Hail Mary prediction. CSS grid is awesome and gap is perhaps one of its best qualities, but gap superseding spacing things out in other ways (e.g. margin) is a bold prediction indeed, especially with Firefox being the only browser...
Yap
13.12.2019
Interesting idea for a "chat room" from Postlight:
Create a Yap chat room.
Invite others to join and talk.
Share a URL of just about anything.
Everyone gathering can comment on what you’ve shared.
If you think your conversation deserves an audience, share the URL of your chat publicly.
Only...
lite-youtube-embed
13.12.2019
A standard copy-and-paste YouTube embed lands on your page as an <iframe> which loads a big ol' pile of other stuff to play that video. But the UX of it is still essentially an image and a play button. Click the play button and the video plays. You can build essentially the same thing with...
Freak Flags
11.12.2019
I don't see image sprites used that much anymore, but it's still a good technique for reducing downloaded decorative image assets when you have multiple on a page. The big idea is combining all the graphics into one and then shifting around the size and background-position to reveal one at...
Making a Better Custom Select Element
11.12.2019
We just covered The Current State of Styling Selects in 2019, but we didn't get nearly as far and fancy as Julie Grundy gets here. There is a decent chunk of JavaScript that powers it, so I'm still very much eyeballing browsers' recent interest in giving us more powerful selects in (presumably)...
WordPress.com: One CMS, Infinite Possibilities
11.12.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Have you ever looked at a site and knew exactly what CMS powers it? You might see a distinctive design aesthetic that gives it away. Or maybe it's something even less obvious and even harder to articulate, but you know it when you see it.
That seems true with just about...
Ethereum Price Unmoved by ‘Missing Link to Mass Adoption’
10.12.2019
It's been almost a week since an important Ethereum (ETH) scalability solution was announced, but the market is still unimpressed by the “missing link to mass adoption of Ethereum.”
On December 5, Matter Labs, a developer of scaling and privacy engine for Ethereum, announced this “link”...
How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers
9.12.2019
Dylan Paulus:
Facebook actually hides 'dummy' DOM nodes between the 'Sponsored' text. These values are entirely random characters, with a random number of DOM nodes between them. Invisible characters. At this point our CSS ad blocker is completely broken. There is no way for us to possibly code...
Music and Web Design
9.12.2019
Brad has a long history in music outside of being a web designer, and draws some interesting parallels. One is that he had reached for more complex music in an effort to become a better musician — and developers can do the same thing. The other is that the composition of music can be seen...
Motion Paths – Past, Present and Future
6.12.2019
Cassie Evans has a great intro to motion paths. That is, being able to animate an element along a path. Not just up/down/left/right, but whatever curvy/wiggly/weird path you want.
It's an interesting subject because there are so many different technologies helping to do it over time. SMIL...
Case Study: lynnandtonic.com 2019 refresh
6.12.2019
Lynn Fisher walks us step-by-step through the redesign process of her latest outstanding personal website. In this design, increasing the width of the browser window will cause the illustrations on the page crack to open and reveal more within them:
This case study reminded me that Lynn also has...
CSS Architecture for Modern JavaScript Applications
6.12.2019
There is a lot to like from Mike Riethmuller here:
The title. When you're building a website from JavaScript-powered components anyway, that is a moment to talk about how to do styling, because it opens some doors to JavaScript-powered styles that you probably wouldn't otherwise choose.
The...
Auto Layout lands in Figma
5.12.2019
Here’s a fresh update to my favorite design tool that is thoroughly exciting: Auto layout! That means we can make frames that resize based on the size of the content within it. That's particularly useful for buttons in a design system where you want to drop a button on the page and then keep...
Firefox 71: First Out of the Gate With Subgrid
5.12.2019
A great release from Firefox this week! See the whole roundup post from Chris Mills. I'm personally stoked to see clip-path: path(); go live, which we've been tracking as it's so clearly useful. We also get column-span: all; which is nice in case you're one of the few taking advantages of...
WhoCanUse
4.12.2019
There are loads of microsites and developer tools for looking at color accessibility, including tools built right into browser DevTools. They often show you if a color passes AA or AAA WCAG guidelines. But color contrast is more complicated than that because there is a wide variety of vision...
The New Klim Type Website is Impossibly Lovely
4.12.2019
I’ve spent the last hour hunched over the new Klim Type foundry website with my arms outstretched as if it was a fire in a very dark cave. Klim Type makes and sells wondrous fonts — like Tiempos, and National 2 or Pitch — and this fresh redesign now showcases them in all their glory. Here’s...