This article is a fantastic reminder to live our whole lives, not just our work lives.So ask yourself this: Who would you be if work was no longer the axis of your life? How would your relationship with your close friends and family change, and what role would you serve within yo … | Continue reading
We often talk about design systems as singular entities. "The design system saves time and increases quality." "Oh, the design system provides that." "Update to the latest version of the design system." The reality is that a design system is a multi-faceted layer cake, and also o … | Continue reading
I had the privilege to speak with Rachel Weissman on the Design To Be Conversation podcast about mental health. I shared my family's own recent experience with mental health issues and talked about mental health issues facing the design/tech industry today. There's a real urgency … | Continue reading
Using a design system made a simple form page 47% faster to develop versus coding it from scratch.It's super tricky to measure the value of a design system, so the folks at Sparkbox had a great idea. They raced to see how fast it would take to build a design from scratch vs using … | Continue reading
Using a design system made a simple form page 47% faster to develop versus coding it from scratch. It’s super tricky to measure the value of a design system, so the folks at Sparkbox had a great idea. They raced to see how fast it would take to build a design from scratch vs usin … | Continue reading
Back in March, I shared that I started volunteering with an organization called Project Healthy Minds. PHM's mission is three-fold:End the stigma around mental illnessGet people access to mental health careMake mental health care an integral part of how businesses and institution … | Continue reading
Back in March, I shared that I started volunteering with an organization called Project Healthy Minds. PHM’s mission is three-fold: End the stigma around mental illnessGet people access to mental health careMake mental health care an integral part of how businesses and instituti … | Continue reading
One thing we run into a fair amount in our design system work is the need to clarify the difference between “dark mode” and “components rendered on a dark background”. What is actual dark mode? prefers-color-scheme is a CSS media feature that listens to a user’s preference fo … | Continue reading
One thing we run into a fair amount in our design system work is the need to clarify the difference between "Dark mode" and "components rendered on a dark background". What is actual dark mode? prefers-color-scheme is a CSS media feature that listens to a user's preference for da … | Continue reading
Here's a great talk about web components from Dave. We've been building a lot of web component-based design systems with our clients, and I'm bullish about their future.I think if you were using Web Components before 2020 you were an early adopter and you probably have some scars … | Continue reading
This is phenomenal. | Continue reading
Subtitle: How a Wisconsin-based wastewater management magazine forever changed the trajectory of my life.In early 2010, I was hired as a "mobile web developer" at R/GA at a time when the iPhone 3GS was brand new, Android was still getting its sea legs, Nokia dominated the mobile … | Continue reading
Your docs belong in the code repository It needs to be next to the code so that authors and contributors can update/read the docs while working on the code or docs. Providing it in a separate repository or otherwise separated will undoubtedly lead to discrepancies sooner or later … | Continue reading
Fantastic read from Rachel that you can take time off — even extended time off — from the fast-moving frontend landscape and still come back and be alright.Source: I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine | Continue reading
Holy shit this is absolutely fantastic.One of the most frequent, confusing conversations w/ designers is "No, the pink lines that overlay design comps aren't all that helpful for how things actually work in the browser."Grid and layout might be the facets of web design that best … | Continue reading
in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for itSource: STRIKE! Magazine – On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs | Continue reading
I love making stuff. I’m always going to want to make stuff. Long after anyone wants to see my stuff, I’ll want to make stuff.Source: Conan O’Brien on His Late-Night Legacy and Future | Continue reading
What an amazing demo. Source: Container Queries in Web Components | Max Böck | Continue reading
Container queries are going to change how we build design systems. Super pumped that they're finally on the horizon. Source: Say Hello To CSS Container Queries | Continue reading
A design system's reference website (such as lightningdesignsystem.com, polaris.shopify.com, and a slew of others) serves as the center of gravity for the design system. It rounds up all the design system's ingredients and serves a watering hole for different disciplines, teams, … | Continue reading
However, as the roles of the front-end developer have stretched into the realms of ‘engineering’, it has created a split: Front-of-the-front-end: UI focused Back-of-the-front-end (referred to as ‘Engineering’ from now): Integration focused(Terms coined by Brad Frost)Again, this i … | Continue reading
I'm thrilled to announce that I'm joining Project Healthy Minds, a non-profit focused on destigmitizing mental illness and getting people access to mental health care and resources.There is a growing global mental health crisis that has been exacerbated by COVID-19 and so many ot … | Continue reading
I wrote about how much I love Notion and I've been keeping track of my healthy habits using the tool.Keeping up with new years resolutions and forming new habits requires consistency above all else. When things start slipping, it's very easy to just say "screw it" and abandon the … | Continue reading
saving space at the cost of clarity, ease of use and accessibility is a bad tradeoff to make.Source: Material Design Text Fields Are Badly Designed — Smashing Magazine | Continue reading
The Great Divide is real, and I'm pleased that the terms "front-of-the-front-end" and "back-of-the-front-end" have gained traction ever since I quipped about them on the Shop Talk Show. A few of my clients have actually moved away from a culture of "we only hire full-stack develo … | Continue reading
This image is fantastic:This is a great read from Ben: The Never-Ending Job of Selling Design Systems – A List Apart | Continue reading
This is a good deep dive into setting up design token architecture.It largely maps to how we tend to structure things, with some slight language and architectural differences: They use "Option design tokens"; we call them "Tier 1" or "Definition" design tokens. This is where a b … | Continue reading
I recently wrote about how much I love Notion and have been using it to stay on top of my personal and professional life. One of the things I've been using Notion for is to track my progress on healthy habits.The idea is to be able to look at the calendar or table at the end of t … | Continue reading
"When should we make something a component?" is a question I've been fielding for years. My strong answer: right from the start. Creating things with a component-based mindset right out the gate saves countless hours and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Everything is a component.Bu … | Continue reading
The PSP’s web browser is – charitably – pathetic. It is slow, frequently runs out of memory, and can only open 3 tabs at a time.But the GOV.UK pages are written in simple HTML. They are designed to be lightweight and will work even on rubbish browsers. They have to. This is for e … | Continue reading
Source: The context dilemma: design tokens and components | Frontside | Continue reading
This is a super impressive productivity workflow from Susan Fowler, and it's amazing to see how being thorough and disciplined can yield big results.I have a far less thorough version of this that I'd like to write up. Some of it is present in my recent post about Notion, but the … | Continue reading
Source: The 'Shared Psychosis' of Donald Trump and His Loyalists - Scientific American | Continue reading
Source: The Only Strategy Left for DemocratsDemocrats have been presented a mandate to govern aggressively on behalf of the people and the nation, and in the face of a violently unspooling and destructive right-wing party. Democrats have won the White House, and the Senate. They … | Continue reading
This is the first post I've ever written with the mindset of "I'm going to revisit this post 1, 5, 10, 20, 40 years down the road and either laugh or cry at how accurate or off the mark I was." I want to capture my thoughts — scattershot as they are — for the sake of capturing an … | Continue reading
This post is a long time coming. I've been using Notion since 2017, but it's been a slow journey to get to a point where I can say that our relationship is official. Notion is now an invaluable tool for how I operate my life, and I'm excited to walk through how I use it.My histor … | Continue reading
It's difficult to put into words just how terrible 2020 has been. It's been utterly devastating at a macro level, and at a personal level it's proven to be the most brutal year of my life, shattering me physically, mentally, and spiritually.Over 1,600,000 have died from the coron … | Continue reading
The more I author code as it will be run by the browser the easier it will be to maintain that code over timeSource: Cheating Entropy with Native Web Technologies - Jim Nielsen’s Weblog | Continue reading
The products we design are always influenced by the users’ world where they are situated. By bringing context into design systems first, before building the components which result from it, we enable teams to make more confident decisions and deliver the best outcomes for their u … | Continue reading
Fantastic article by Linzi Berry about creating a smart, accessible color system to power a design system. Source: Color within Constraints. A scalable color system for digital… | by Linzi Berry | Tap to Dismiss | Continue reading
Successful design systems are finely tuned to the organization they serve. At the beginning of every client design system engagement, we spend a great deal of time learning about our client's culture, politics, products, tools, and workflows. Sure, we'll get links to decks, GitHu … | Continue reading
I'm working on a couple themeable design systems right now, and we're architecting components to offer a white list of themeable CSS properties, so each brand can define their design language using design tokens and then pipe those through into the design system's components.Maki … | Continue reading
Hoo boy, a blog post rebounding a blog post which rebounds a blog post. Let me jump on this train!Jeremy Keith clearly articulates a concern about design systems I often hear from many designers:In that light, design systems take their place in a long history of dehumanising app … | Continue reading
Here are a few random stories from my last couple weeks of work.We have a datepicker field that has a calendar SVG icon sitting on top of the field. There was an issue where clicking the icon wasn't triggering the datepicker widget to pop up.To fix this, I first started transform … | Continue reading
There are a lot of parallels between music and web design/development. Here's how I see it:Art and scienceCall it the difference between Type A vs Type B personalities. Or Right brain vs left brain. Or whatever other split you want to come up with.On one hand, there's the discipl … | Continue reading
I had a fantastic time traveling to Amsterdam to speak at CSS Day (I was part of the + UI Special day). It was an absolutely phenomenal event and I learned a ton from all the amazing speakers.In my talk, I discuss a bunch of topics around the technical aspects of creating and mai … | Continue reading
Hey there! I wrote a book called Atomic Design that dives into this topic in more detail, which you can buy in paperback and/or ebook formats.We’re not designing pages, we’re designing systems of components.—Stephen HayAs the craft of Web design continues to evolve, we're recogni … | Continue reading
There was a fun tweet circulating around yesterday:You're working on a frontend project. You can install max. 5 dependencies. Which ones do you pick?— Kitze (@thekitze) July 19, 2019Naturally, everyone weighed in with their tools of choice, and it's of course fascinating to see w … | Continue reading