As designers creating images to communicate complex ideas, we rationalize our processes, we bring objectivity to our craft, we want our clients to think that our decisions are based on reasoning. However, we should also defend our intuitions, our subjectivity. We should also defend pursuing beauty as it is one of our most powerful tools.
The most important lesson that blogging taught me is that writing is for thinking first, communication last.
You and I are partaking in something magical.
The key to making a beautiful URL is finding a balance between brevity and clarity. In other words, a good URL is short but not so short as to obscure what it’s pointing to. Put another way, a good URL contains enough information about its related resource to be useful, but not so much information that it drags on and becomes unwieldy.
I was content-buddying with one of my colleagues yesterday so Bobbie’s experience resonates.
This advice works both ways:
- Collaboration
- Communication
- Respect
Years before becoming Prime Minister of the UK, Rishi Sunak wrote this report, Undersea Cables: Indispensable, insecure.
Video visions of aspirational futures made from the 1950s to the 2010s, mostly by white dudes with bullshit jobs.
Good writing advice from Matt.
I find, more often than not, that I understand something much less well when I sit down to write about it than when I’m thinking about it in the shower. In fact, I find that I change my own mind on things a lot when I try write them down. It really is a powerful tool for finding clarity in your own mind. Once you have clarity in your own mind, you’re much more able to explain it to others.
Or, Why wasn’t the Telegraph Invented Earlier?
A wonderful deep-dive into optical telegraphy through the ages.
A fascinating four-part series by Lisa Charlotte Muth on colour in data visualisations:
What, then, is a personal website? It is precisely that, personal. It is a new kind of self-portraiture done not with pencils, charcoal, ink, or paint. Instead it is self-portraiture done in markup language, code, prose, images, audio, and video.
A potted history of communication networks from the pony express and the telegraph to ethernet and wi-fi.
…you would be forgiven if you saw an API where a feature went from green (supported) to red (unsupported) and you thought: is the browser being deprecated?
That’s the idea behind my new shiny domain: canistilluse.com. I made the site as satire after reading Jeremy Keith’s insightful piece where he notes:
the onus is not on web developers to keep track of older features in danger of being deprecated. That’s on the browser makers. I sincerely hope we’re not expected to consult a site called canistilluse.com.
It’s weirdly gratifying to see a hastily-written sarcastic quip tuned into something real.
It’s not just a story about unloved APIs, it’s a story about power, standards design, and who owns the platform — and it makes me afraid for the future of the web.
A thoughtful, considered post by Rich Harris on the whole ballyhoo with alert and its ilk:
For all its flaws, the web is generally agreed to be a stable platform, where investments made today will stand the test of time. A world in which websites are treated as inherently transient objects, where APIs we commonly rely on today could be cast aside as unwanted baggage by tomorrow’s spec wranglers, is a world in which the web has already lost.
Believe it or not, I generally am a fan of Google and think they do a good job of pushing the web forward. I also think it’s appropriate to waggle fingers when I see problems and request they do better. “Better” here means way more developer and user outreach to spell out the situation, way more conversation about the potential implications and transition ideas, and way more openness to bending the course ahead.
With any changes to the platform, but especially breaking ones, communication and feedback on how this will impact people who actually build things with the web is super important, and that was not done here.
Chris has written a thoughtful reflection on last week’s brouhaha around confirm, prompt, and alert being deprecated in Chrome. The way that the “developer relations” folks at Google handled feedback was less than ideal.
I reached out to one of the Google Chrome developer advocates I know to see if I could learn more. It did not go well.
As part of my content buddying process, I am henceforth going to typeset all drafts in this font. I just tested it with this sentence:
We can leverage the synergy of a rich immersive user paradigm shift.
This old article from Chris is evergreen. There’s been some recent discussion of calling these words “downplayers”, which I kind of like. Whatever they are, try not to use them in documentation.