Jeremy Keith

Making websites. Writing books. Speaking at conferences. Living in Brighton. Working at Clearleft. Playing music. Taking photos. Answering email.

Journal 2330 Links 6126 Articles 64 Notes 2625

Thursday, October 6th, 2016

Down with the tool fetish - QuirksBlog

PPK responds in his typically strident way to posts by Tim and Bastian. I don’t agree with everything here, but I very much agree with this:

It’s not about what works for you. It’s about what works for your users.

If a very complicated set-up with seven brand-new libraries and frameworks and a bunch of other tools satisfies you completely as a web developer but slows your sites down to a crawl for your users, you’re doing it wrong.

If serving your users’ needs requires you to use other tools than the ones you’d really like to use, you should set your personal preferences aside, even though it may make you feel less good. You have a job to do.

But it’s worth remembering this caveat too.

It baffles me that anyone could misinterpret being in favour of progressive enhancement as being against JavaScript. It’s the opposite.

Wishing I could’ve accepted the invitation to speak @Fronteers to go toe-to-toe with @NolanLawson …sounds like @IreAderinokun already did.

Fleeing Orlando a day early to escape the rough beast, its hour come ’round at last, slouching towards Florida to be born.

Hiding inline SVG icons from screen readers | 456 Berea Street

A good reminder from Roger on how to hide images from an SVG sprite from assistive technology (use aria-hidden) and how to expose them (use title elements within the sprite).

Benjamin Parry @benjaminparry ~ Why I Volunteer And Why You Should Too

Benjamin’s retrospective on three years of volunteering at web conferences, some of them run by Clearleft.

A Redesign with CSS Shapes · An A List Apart Article

Eric walks through a really nice use of CSS shapes and @supports on a page of the An Event Apart site.

It’s a nice little illustration of how we can use advanced features of CSS right now, without the usual wait for widespread support.

Wednesday, October 5th, 2016

First Time User Experiences

Krystal’s excellent annotated collection of onboarding examples.

SmashingConf Freiburg 2016 - Paul Lloyd on Designing Systems: Theory, Practice, and the Unfortunate In-Between on Vimeo

The video of Paul’s fantastic talk on design systems.

So nice that @beep is giving props in his @aneventapart talk to @lottejackson’s pattern-naming exercise and @allmarkedup’s Fractal project.

Such an honour to be introduced by @zeldman.

Tuesday, October 4th, 2016

How to prototype in the browser | GDS design notes

This is a clever quick’n’dirty way of prototyping iterations on an existing site using dev tools and screenshots.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we evaluate technologies (it will be the subject of my next talk). Tim is thinking along the same lines. I like his list of four questions to ask when weighing up the pros and cons of any web tool:

Who benefits from the use of this tool and how?

Who suffers and how?

How does it fail?

Does the abstraction feed the core?

Fantasy UIs

Interviews with the designers who make on-screen interfaces for sci-fi films.

The Proposal | gablaxian.com

This is how Graham proposed to Linzi …and you can try it out for yourself.

(I must’ve got something in my eye when I got to the end of the level. Weird.)

So happy to receive a shiny new copy of @gerrymcgovern’s latest book, Transform.

Y’know who’s truly awesome?

@tiffehr

I am in awe.

https://twitter.com/michelleminkoff/status/783088254312521728

Monday, October 3rd, 2016

Fifteen

My site has been behaving strangely recently. It was nothing that I could put my finger on—it just seemed to be acting oddly. When I checked to see if everything was okay, I was told that everything was fine, but still, I sensed something that was amiss.

I’ve just realised what it was. Last week on the 30th of September, I didn’t do or say anything special. That was the problem. I had forgotten my blog’s anniversary.

I’m so sorry, adactio.com! Honestly, I had been thinking about it for all of September but then on the day, one thing led to another, I was busy, and it just completely slipped my mind.

So this is a bit late, but anyway …happy fifteenth anniversary to this journal!

We’ve been through a lot together in those fifteen years, haven’t we, /journal? Oh, the places we’ve been and the things we’ve seen!

I remember where we were on our tenth anniversary: Bologna. Remember we were there for the first edition of the From The Front conference? Now, five years on, we’ve just been to the final edition of that same event—a bittersweet occasion.

Like I said five years ago:

It has been a very rewarding, often cathartic experience so far. I know that blogging has become somewhat passé in this age of Twitter and Facebook but I plan to keep on keeping on right here in my own little corner of the web.

I should plan something special for September 30th, 2021 …just to make sure I don’t forget.

Normalize (CSS) No More. | shaunrashid.com

This crystallises something I’ve been thinking about for a while. There’s a fundamental philosophical idea underpinning CSS reset or normalise boilerplate that feels at odds with the belief that it’s perfectly fine for websites to look different in different browsers and devices.

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