Links

Jessman5 on Twitter: “I made a poster from @adactio’s talk about Resilience. :) This took me way too long…”

I love this illustration that Jess made of my Resilience talk at the Render conference.

Spacehack.org

Ariel and Lisa have redesigned the excellent Spacehack site and it’s looking stellar!

Position Wanted: Front-End Director - Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design

Hmmm …I think Jeffrey might have just given me my new job title.

Issue 596729 - chromium - Do not show the app banner unless the Manifest has a display set to standalone or fullscreen - Monorail

I am shocked and disgusted by this arbitrary decision by the Chrome team. If your Progressive Web App doesn’t set its manifest to obscure its URL, you get punished by missing out on the add to home screen prompt.

Google is declaring war on URLs again.

Developing Dependency Awareness – Smashing Magazine

A typically superb article by Aaron. Here, he breaks down a resilient approach to building for the web by examining the multiple ways you could add a button to a page. There’s a larger lesson here too:

We don’t control where our web-based products go or how our users access them. All we can do is imagine as many less-than-perfect scenarios as possible and do our best to ensure our creations will continue to do what they’re supposed to do. One of the easiest ways to do that is to be aware of and limit our dependencies.

Building Web Apps for Everyone - O’Reilly Media

Here’s a fantastic and free little book by Adam Scott. It’s nice and short, covering progressive enhancement, universal JavaScript, accessibility, and inclusive forms.

Download it now and watch this space for more titles around building inclusive web apps, collaboration, and maintaining privacy and security.

Did I mention that it’s free?

ICONS #9: Jeremy Keith Tickets, Wed, 15 Jun 2016 at 16:00

I’ll be speaking to students in Vasilis’s class for Communication and Multimedia Design in Amsterdam right before CSS Day. There are (free) tickets available if you’re around. I’ll be talking about digital preservation and long-term thinking on the web.

This meetup is, like all other Icons Meetups, free to attend for everyone. For students and lecturers of CMD Amsterdam, of course. But also for all professional (digital) designers who want to be inspired.

Bad Character - The New Yorker

A fascinating thought experiment from Ted Chiang:

So let’s imagine a world in which Chinese characters were never invented in the first place. Given such a void, the alphabet might have spread east from India in a way that it couldn’t in our history, but, to keep this from being an Indo-Eurocentric thought experiment, let’s suppose that the ancient Chinese invented their own phonetic system of writing, something like the modern Bopomofo, some thirty-two hundred years ago. What might the consequences be?

Android Instant Apps and the web - Broken Links

I’ve been poking around at Google’s information on “instant apps” since they announced it at Google I/O. My initial impressions mirror Peter’s.

Either they allow access to more device APIs (which could be a massive security hole) or else they’re more or less websites.

Podcasting lock-in and the lesson from Penn Station | Manton Reece

While the open web still exists, we really dropped the ball protecting and strengthening it. Fewer people’s first choice for publishing is to start a web site hosted at their own domain. Like the destruction of Pennsylvania Station, sometimes you only know in hindsight that you’ve made a mistake. We were so caught up in Twitter and Facebook that we let the open web crumble. I’m not giving up — I think we can get people excited about blogging and owning their own content again — but it would have been easier if we had realized what we lost earlier.

Owning my words and photos and audio bits – Colin Devroe

By publishing to my own web site first…

• I feel like I’m curating a library rather than throwing loose papers into a raging torrent.
• I have the ability to quickly move to another platform if I so wish
• I can choose how things look and feel
• I can track, or not track, any metric I’d like to
• I can publish several different types of media: photos, audio
• I can turn discussion on or off

Publishing Your Content Online and Syndicating it Elsewhere | W. Ian O’Byrne

A good introduction to the Indie Web approach:

This post was primarily directed at friends and colleagues that already blog in other spaces, and wonder why/how they would re-post content to Medium or elsewhere.

Everything is a Remix: The Force Awakens on Vimeo

The newest Kirby Ferguson video looks at remixing through the lens of the newest Star Wars film.

Bowiebranchia

Nudibranchia or other opisthobranchia compared to the various looks of David Bowie.

Responsive Product Comparison Table

Here’s a nice little pattern from Dave—showing data tables one column at a time on smaller screens.

Render 2016 - Jeremy Keith on Vimeo

Here’s another version of my talk Resilience—the same one I gave at Beyond Tellerrand—this time from the Render conference in Oxford.

Shuffleboard At McMurdo (Idle Words)

Maciej’s first report from Antarctica is here. Put the kettle on and settle in for a grand read.

BBC Blogs - Internet Blog - BBC UX&D on creating a GEL foundation for everyone

Al runs through the process of updating GEL—the BBC’s Global Experience Language design system. I particularly like the thought that’s gone into naming type sizes.

Design systems and Postel’s law | Journal | The Personal Disquiet of Mark Boulton

Marvellous insights from Mark on how the robustness principle can and should be applied to styeguides and pattern libraries (‘sfunny—I was talking about Postel’s Law just this morning at An Event Apart in Boston).

Being liberal in accepting things into the system, and being liberal about how you go about that, ensures you don’t police the system. You collaborate on it.

So, what about the output? Remember: be ’conservative in what you do’. For a design system, this means your output of the system – guidelines, principles, design patterns, code, etc etc. – needs to be clear, unambiguous, and understandable.

FamilySearch Style Guide

A straightforward little pattern library. There’s also the story of making it a living style guide.