Meanwhile, on the Internet...

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

This is phenomenal.

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 it Source: STRIKE! Magazine – On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

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

What an amazing demo. Source: Container Queries in Web Components | Max Böck

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

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 isn’t a bad […]

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

This image is fantastic: This is a great read from Ben: The Never-Ending Job of Selling Design Systems – A List Apart

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 […]

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 […]

Source: The context dilemma: design tokens and components | Frontside

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 […]

Source: The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists – Scientific American

Source: The Only Strategy Left for Democrats Democrats 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 […]