I was talking to my friend Cameron Moll, and he discussed a series of articles about mental health that he, his wife, and a mental health nurse practitioner wrote. There’s some really fantastic information and advice in there, and I highly recommend giving it a read. | Continue reading
Simply saying the word “grid” conjures up strong and confusing feelings. Kinda like puberty! With so much history and so many different (and sometimes competing) paradigms, it’s no wonder conversations around layout and grid are so fraught, confusing, and contentious. I’m long ov … | Continue reading
This Design System ROI Calculator by Knapsack is fun. It’s often tough to quantify the benefits a design system provides, so things like this are helpful even as a conversation starter. | Continue reading
The Component Gallery is a collection of interface components from real-world design systems. I created it to help with some of the problems that I experience every day as a front-end developer: Some interface problems have already been solved: there’s no need to reinvent the wh … | Continue reading
Atomic design and the future of design systems with Brad Frost - PodRocket | Continue reading
Web components! They’re currently at the vanguard of web development and are a reliable source of hot drama in the community. We’ve built a number of web component-powered design systems with Fortune 500 companies over the last 4 years, and it’s been a wild ride. We’ve seen a ton … | Continue reading
Now here’s an interesting article: Why We’re Breaking Up with CSS-in-JS. I took to Twitter to spew out some thoughts, so I thought I’d capture them here. I’m fortunate in that I get to duck my head into a lot of companies, and get to witness all manner of cultures and technical … | Continue reading
A collection of Design Systems for Figma from all over the globe 🌎Extremely useful. I will no doubt be referring to Design Systems For Figma on the regular. | Continue reading
The Arrogance of the Anthropocene really paints the picture of how insignificant human existence is on a geological scale. Despite the author painting a pretty wild picture of how much of a blip we all are, he makes it clear that we absolutely still need strong and swift action t … | Continue reading
Here’s my man Chantastic with a great video summarizing how to write interactive tests with Storybook. Unit testing has always been a bit of a rough spot in our workflow and seemed duplicative or off to the side of the main component workflow, so I’m really pleased to see these k … | Continue reading
For the first time in my career, I took a relatively extended break from work. I’m just now returning after 6 weeks of being away, so I wanted to share some reflections from my time off. Here’s what I said I wanted to accomplish during my break: I’m not setting any goals for m … | Continue reading
TL;DR: Design systems + CSS Zen Garden = Awesome.Is it possible to create a single design system that powers wildly different-looking brands and experiences? The answer is yes! But why would you want to? Different audiences and contexts - The team at GE recently discussed the op … | Continue reading
In September of last year, I dragged my cursor across all of August 2022 in Google Calendar. I gave the calendar entry the title of “Time off?” A year later, I’m actually taking that time off! Which means that for the first time in my working life, I’m taking a break from work th … | Continue reading
Here’s some good food for thought for naming conventions for various aspects of design systems: Naming conventions for design systems | Continue reading
Very rarely is exactly one design system created to serve exactly one product that expresses exactly one design language. Nearly all the design systems we’ve worked on require a high degree of flexibility in order to properly serve our clients’ needs. Some of this flexibility is … | Continue reading
I like playing music a lot. I love it, in fact. Playing music gives me an enormous amount of physical, mental, and spiritual satisfaction. I'm fortunate in that I get play music in some capacity every day, often starting my day with a little session, some form of lunchtime music … | Continue reading
Here's a nice article by the folks at Storybook that deconstructs my interview with Michael Chan. The gist of the article is: 🙅♂️ Not all engineers are made for design system work 🛠 Design system developers need custom tools 🐌 Design systems go stale … | Continue reading
This is a great read about the creative process behind my new favorite movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Similar to my breakdown of The Beatles’ Get Back documentary, this post analyzes the lessons learned from the creative process that wielded SUCH AN INCREDIBLE FILM. | Continue reading
This is the third time in the last four years that I’ve been forcibly yanked away from my normal life —both personal and professional — for extended periods of time. My nervous system is threadbare. My bones are exhausted. My face, neck, and back muscles are on fire. My wife is … | Continue reading
A good overview of a common foe: wrestling mustard to achieve sufficient contrast when wielding yellow. Source: The “Dark Yellow Problem” in Design System Color Palettes | by Lodestar Design | Apr, 2022 | Medium | Continue reading
This post really resonated with me, and hits at my feeling of needing an extended break to just kinda collect myself and get my feet back under me. My family has been through multiple rounds of crazy shit and it’s definitely had an impact on all aspects of my life, including work … | Continue reading
Henry Heffernan’s portfolio website is fantastic. I’d love to see a rebirth of creative personal portfolio websites. | Continue reading
These are fantastic, and strangely reflective of my life right now. Source: Cars vs Giant Bulge and Other Outlandish Vehicular Simulations | Continue reading
The music video for Around The World by Daft Punk is one of my all-time favorites, so I thoroughly enjoyed this video with (a very young!) Michel Gondry. | Continue reading
In my opinion, I Think You Should Leave is one of the funniest things created in the last number of decades. As a fan of absurd and goofball comedy, it’s right up my alley. Here’s a website that links directly to every ITYSL sketch, and here’s a dedicated ITYSL meme website. | Continue reading
This little diagram captures all the work that really goes into getting something done (often well before it’s actually captured in any formal way). | Continue reading
Love me a good pros/cons article. This post does a great job talking about React-based headless UI frameworks that provide functionality and accessibility controls, but don't provide any default styling (a la Material Design or Bootstrap). We've used a few libraries (like Downshi … | Continue reading
I find the best way to learn about a technical concept is by writing about it. Often I’ll refer back to a blog post I’ve written in the past, to refresh my memory. Sometimes the act of writing itself is enough to preserve it in my mind.100% yes. Source: CSS { In Real Life } | A B … | Continue reading
I've always hated writing lyrics, and felt everything I came up with was shallow, contrived, and s.In three and a half minutes, Jacob Collier provides a treasure trove of techniques for writing interesting lyrics. Watch it here. | Continue reading
Here's a pretty candid interview I did about how I do a shit job of taking care of myself and my wellbeing. But I'm working on it!Ever feel like you wish you had more time in the day? Guess what. There’s only ever going to be 24 hours in the day, and even if you utilize every pro … | Continue reading
This is a pretty great guide to naming design tokens and follows pretty closely how we structure our tokens. | Continue reading
This is close to exactly what I've been wanting: a way to use web components like
Pinball Map is a perfect example of the best qualities of the web. Crowd-sourced info on where to play pinball across the world. | Continue reading
Here's the Storybook team with a post that breaks down how different teams organize and structure their Storybooks. This kind of analysis is great and demonstrates how you can slice things in many useful ways depending on the needs and goals of the system.I'm happy they included … | Continue reading
Here's a fun Twitter thread about how cheese, snails, Christianity, underwear, and eyeglasses all contributed to the rise of the modern book. | Continue reading
Here's a break down how we build components with similar conventions across many different frameworks, written by my brother Ian (@frostyweather).All of these frameworks can have similar component structure, component user APIs, properties, state management, methods/functions, li … | Continue reading
You can version a design system's component library as a single package (e.g. Polaris v8.0), or you can version each component within the library as its own mini package (e.g. Atlaskit Badge v15.0.8) This post breaks down the pros and cons of versioning the whole library vs indiv … | Continue reading
If you get a chance to watch Get Back, do it. It's absolutely incredible. It's as close as anyone's going to get to being a fly on the wall and witnessing The Beatles' creative process. Here's a taste:The Beatles doc is incredible. Here’s a clip of Paul coming up with ‘Get Back’. … | Continue reading
Here's Jeremy Keith and the Clearleft crew with a new course for web.dev: Learn Responsive Design | Continue reading
This is a powerful and important read from Max Böck:He rightfully assesses the state of the landscape in its present form:This is the web as envisioned by late-stage capitalism: a giant freemium game where absolutely everyone and everything is a “digital asset” that can be packag … | Continue reading
I had the honor to be the first guest on Storybook's new Storytime show with the great Michael Chan (aka @chantastic). We talked about the history of atomic design and the rise of the modern JS landscape, how directly-consumable UI components are a game changer for front-end deve … | Continue reading
This is a great read about the web3 landscape as well as a super thoughtful critique from someone who really knows what they're talking about.I love this post because it's not some analysis from an outsider, but rather from a veteran developer who has actually created things usin … | Continue reading
We're getting closer and closer and closer to being able to actually use container queries. I for one and so freaking excited.Source: A New Container Query Polyfill That Just Works | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks | Continue reading
:has() looks really cool, and I can see this being really helpful for a design system's more composable components.Source: The CSS :has() selector is way more than a “Parent Selector” – Bram.us | Continue reading
In brief, the six principal plays in the denialist playbook are: Doubt the Science Question Scientists’ Motives and Integrity Magnify Disagreements among Scientists and Cite Gadflies as Authorities Exaggerate Potential Harm Appeal to Personal Freedom Reject Whatever Would R … | Continue reading
This post is a fantastic breakdown of naming things in front-end code. Many of the specifics he outlines are things we adhere to in our own work, but ultimately any one of these conventions can be handled differently. With that in mind, these are probably the most important lines … | Continue reading
There's no doubt about it: 2021 was unquestionably better than the nightmare that was 2020. Of course, we're still in the midst of a global pandemic that continues to throw a wrench into any attempt at living a normal life, but I'll take that versus dealing with acute personal cr … | Continue reading
Defensive CSS by Ahmad Shadeed does a great job breaking down a lot of common (and not so common!) CSS issues when working with dynamic content. Super helpful for people building design systems. I'm happy to report we put most of these techniques to use, but also learned some new … | Continue reading