824
Thursday, December 5th, 2024
Thursday, October 31st, 2024
My Modern CSS Reset | jakelazaroff.com
I like the approach here: logical properties and sensible default type and spacing.
Saturday, October 19th, 2024
2004 was the first year of the future
I enjoyed reading through these essays about the web of twenty years ago: music, photos, email, games, television, iPods, phones…
Much as I love the art direction, you’d never know that we actually had some very nice-looking websites back in 2004!
Tuesday, October 15th, 2024
She Built a Microcomputer Empire From Her Suburban Home
The story of Lore Harp McGovern is like something from Halt And Catch Fire.
Monday, September 30th, 2024
OpenFreeMap
This project, based on OpenStreetMap, looks great:
OpenFreeMap lets you display custom maps on your website and apps for free.
You can either self-host or use our public instance.
I’m going to try it out on The Session once there’s documentation for using this with Leaflet.
The Unraveling of Space-Time | Quanta Magazine
This special in-depth edition of Quanta is fascinating and very nicely put together.
Wednesday, September 25th, 2024
Introducing TODS – a typographic and OpenType default stylesheet | Clagnut by Richard Rutter
This is a very handy piece of work by Rich:
The idea is to set sensible typographic defaults for use on prose (a column of text), making particular use of the font features provided by OpenType. The main principle is that it can be used as starting point for all projects, so doesn’t include design-specific aspects such as font choice, type scale or layout (including how you might like to set the line-length).
Tuesday, September 17th, 2024
Nic Chan
What an excellent personal website!
PENGUIN SERIES DESIGN – the art of Penguin book covers
Exploring the graphic design history of Penguin books:
The covers presented on this site are all from my own collection of about 1400 Penguins, which have been chosen for the beauty or interest of their cover designs. They span the history of the company all the way back to 1935 when Penguin Books was launched.
Wednesday, September 11th, 2024
First Impressions of the Pixel 9 Pro | Whatever
At this point, it really does seem like “AI” is “bullshit you don’t need or is done better in other ways, but we’ve just spent literally billions on this so we really need you to use it, even though it’s nowhere as good as what we were already doing,” and everything else is just unsexy functionality that makes what you do marginally easier or better. I’m sorry we live in a world where enshittification is being marketed as The Hot And Sexy Thing, but just because we’re in that world, doesn’t mean you have to accept it.
Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024
The Beatrice Warde Memorial Lecture - St Bride Foundation
Oh, this looks like an excellent event (in London and online):
Adventures in Episodic Type Design
With David Jonathan Ross
Thursday 17th October 2024
Thursday, August 22nd, 2024
Frostapalooza in photos and videos | Brad Frost
These are great!!!
Openly Licensed Images, Audio and More | Openverse
A library of CC-licensed photos.
Next time you’re tempted to use a generative “AI” tool to make an image for a slide deck, use this instead.
Tuesday, August 20th, 2024
Will Browar | Photographing Frostapalooza
Wow! The photos that Will took at Frostapalooza (and in the run-up) are absolutely fantastic!
He also shares the technical details for all you camera nerds.
Tuesday, July 2nd, 2024
Config 2024: In defense of an old pixel (Marcin Wichary, Director of Design, Figma) - YouTube
Everyone’s raving about this great talk by Marcin, and rightly so!
Sunday, June 30th, 2024
Should this be a map or 500 maps? - by Elan Ullendorff
This is kind of about art direction and kind of about design systems.
There is beauty in trying to express something specific; there is beauty too in finding compromises to create something epic and collective.
My only concern is whether we are considering the question at all.
Wednesday, May 22nd, 2024
Fluid
I really like the newly-launched website for this year’s XOXO festival. I like that the design is pretty much the same for really small screens, really large screens, and everything in between because everything just scales. It’s simultaneously a flyer, a poster, and a billboard.
Trys has written about the websites he’s noticed using fluid type and spacing: There it is again, that fluid feeling.
I know what he means. I get a similar feeling when I’m on a site that adjusts fluidly to any browser window—it feels very …webby.
When responsive design was on the rise, it was a real treat to come across a responsive site. After a while, it stopped being remarkable. Now if I come across a site that isn’t responsive, it feels broken.
And now it’s a treat to come across a site that uses fluid type. But how long will it be until it feels unremarkable? How will it be until a website that doesn’t use fluid type feels broken?
Friday, April 19th, 2024
The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
A fascinating in-depth look at the maintenance of undersea cables:
The industry responsible for this crucial work traces its origins back far beyond the internet, past even the telephone, to the early days of telegraphy. It’s invisible, underappreciated, analog.
It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about the fixing of it, either.
Friday, April 12th, 2024
Some of the best free fonts | Clearleft
If you start with a high-quality, legible, free typeface and experiment with size, weight, colour, line height, and (subtle) letter spacing, you might find these free options will get you further than you’d think. These are professional fonts crafted and maintained by experts and they can help your content land the way it deserves to.
Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024
Hanging punctuation in CSS
There’s a lovely CSS property called hanging-punctuation
. You can use it to do exactly what the name suggests and exdent punctuation marks such as opening quotes.
Here’s one way to apply it:
html {
hanging-punctuation: first last;
}
Any punctuation marks at the beginning or end of a line will now hang over the edge, leaving you with nice clean blocks of text; no ragged edges.
Right now it’s only supported in Safari but there’s no reason not to use it. It’s a perfect example of progressive enhancement. One line of CSS to tidy things up for the browsers that support it and leave things exactly as they are for the browsers that don’t.
But when I used this over on The Session I noticed an unintended side-effect. Because I’m applying the property globally, it’s also acting on form fields. If the text inside a form field starts with a quotation mark or some other piece of punctuation, it’s shunted off to the side and hidden.
Here’s the fix I used:
input, textarea {
hanging-punctuation: none;
}
It’s a small little gotcha but I figured I’d share it in case it helps someone else out.