Posts in: Design
Started listening to Transmissions (the podcast) this week 🎙️.
Transmissions, narrated by Maxine Peake, tells the story of Joy Division and New Order through interviews, recordings and examines the influence of the music today. This audio documentary was released in 2020.
Thrilled to hear Peter Saville’s participation as one of the interviewees in this project. Saville talks about the design of the iconic Joy Division and New Order record sleeves he designed in the early 1980s.
đź”—Andy Bell: Front-end is so much more than building designs
”Only by starting those fires have I developed into a more experienced designer and developer who knows the danger signs and importantly, learned the value of working slowly and methodically.”
Registered for Design for Cognitive Bias: Using Mental Shortcuts for Good Instead of Evil, featuring David Dylan Thomas and hosted by Content Strategy Seattle.
Matthias Ott: Shitty Code Prototypes
Prototyping with code is my favorite way to build prototypes whenever I want to work with the real material of the Web and sketch out an idea in the browser with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Maybe it’s a layout that uses CSS Grid, a GSAP animation test, or a little interactive component. Whatever it is, I try to focus on the essence of what I want to try out and learn. What I don’t focus on, however, is code quality. And this is where it can get complicated.
Bloomberg: The Unsung Art of Office Design
An interview with architects and designers LeeAnn Suen and Florian Idenburg on their new book about office design.
Architecture has a very interesting relationship with, say, reality; maybe with capitalism. The architect wants to position themself as a critical person who tries to — or claims to — work for the people, against the system. So office work is very rarely celebrated, because it’s considered participating within the system, rather than taking a critical distance or sort of an opposition to that.
Intention vs. Drift
Jason Lengstorf: Intention vs. Drift — Let’s Learn Design Systems, Part 1 Since design systems happen whether we want them to or not, our task is not to decide whether or not we need one. We need to decide if we’re better served by being intentional about our design system decisions or letting the design system drift to see what emerges from real-world use. Most design systems fall somewhere in between intentional and emergent.
Once in a while you stumble on a site not using webfonts, just good old Georgia or Verdana. Those Matthew Carter designs sure hold up pretty well after all these years.
Fontshare
Link: Fontshare, by Indian Type Foundry Over on my macro blog last week I wrote about switching from Google Fonts to self-hosting my webfonts. Self-hosting variable fonts is not that difficult, but finding the variable font files from Google can be tricky. If you are interested in switching from variable fonts on Google’s CDN to self-hosting, Fontshare is worth looking into. They don’t have every Google variable font, but many of the better-designed ones.
Let’s Make a Design System!
Frontend Stampede: Let’s Make a Design System! I bookmarked this to watch a while ago and I’m glad I took the time to watch it. This is a replay of a live Twitch stream hosted by Alex Trost, with Mike Aparicio sharing many lessons he’s learned from building design systems. As a demo, Mike did a CSS refactor and built a fledgling design system based on the frontend.horse home page, walking through the steps he took to get there.