Progressive enhancement is a design and development principle where we build in layers which automatically turn themselves on based on the browser’s capabilities.
The idea of progressive enhancement is that everyone gets the perfect experience for them, rather than a pre-determined “perfect” experience from a design and development team.
Everyone’s raving about this great talk by Marcin, and rightly so!
This is kind of about art direction and kind of about design systems.
There is beauty in trying to express something specific; there is beauty too in finding compromises to create something epic and collective.
My only concern is whether we are considering the question at all.
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.
Hallelujah! We’re finally getting our two wishes for CSS animations and transitions:
- Animating to and from
display: none;for the sake of enter/exit animations.- Animating to and from the intrinsic size of an element (such as
height: auto;).
I really, really like Paul’s idea of splitting up the indie web principles into one opinionated nerdy list of dev principles, and a separate shorter list of core principles for everyone:
- Own your identity An independent web presence starts with an online identity you own and control. The most reliable way to do this today is by having your own domain name.
- Own your content You should retain control of the things you make, and not be subject to third-parties preventing access to it, deleting it or disappearing entirely. The best way to do this is by publishing content on your own website.
- Have fun! When the web took off in the 90’s people began designing personal sites with garish backgrounds and animated GIFs. It may have been ugly but it was fun. Let’s keep the web weird and interesting.
Whenever I confront a design system problem, I ask myself this one question that guides the way: “What would HTML do?”
HTML is the ultimate composable language. With just a few elements shuffled together you can create wildly different interfaces. And that’s really where all the power from HTML comes up: everything has one job, does it really well (ideally), which makes the possible options almost infinite.
Design systems should hope for the same.
Finally! View transitions for multi-page apps (AKA websites) will be landing in Chrome soon—here’s hoping other browsers follow suit. Mozilla are up for it. Apple are, as usual, silent on their intentions.
Nice to see a blog post of mine referenced to show that this is a highly-requested feature. Blogging gets results, folks!
Fifteen years after the first one, Papercamp is back this September and the line-up looks good.
Long live the papernet!
Snook’s Law in action:
Big, flashy things get noticed. Quiet, boring things don’t.
There isn’t much infrastructure in place to quantify the constant, silent, boring, predictable, round-the-clock passive successes of this aspect of design systems after the initial effort is complete.
A lack of bug reports, accessibility issues, design tweaks, etc. are all objectively great, but there are no easy datapoints you can measure here.
If you start with a high-quality, legible, free typeface and experiment with size, weight, colour, line height, and (subtle) letter spacing, you might find these free options will get you further than you’d think. These are professional fonts crafted and maintained by experts and they can help your content land the way it deserves to.
Another terrific interactive tutorial from Ahmad, this time on container queries.
The arc of the web is long and bends towards flexibility.
A case study in making a beautiful responsive homepage.
AI image generation is essentially a truncated exercise in taste; a product of knowing which inputs and keywords to feed the image-mashup machine, and the eye to identify which outputs contain any semblance of artistry. All that is to say: AI itself can’t generate good taste for you.
I know how to do full-stack development, not because I wanted to but because I had to.
Grim, but true. I know quite a few extremely talented front-end developers who have been forced out of the field because of what’s described here.
There is no choice anymore, I can’t escape it. React is so pervasive that almost every job is using it. On the rare occasion that they’re not using it, they’re using something like it.
I’m really excited about John’s talk at this year’s UX London. Feels like a good time to revisit his excellent talk from dConstruct 2015:
I’m going to be opening up the second day of UX London 2024, 18th-20th June. As part of that talk, I’ll be revisiting a talk called Metadesign for Murph which I gave at dConstruct in 2015. It might be one of my favourite talks that I’ve ever given.
Robin describes his experience of using a design system, having previously been one of the people making and enforcing a design system:
However it’s only now as a product designer that I realize just how much I want the design system to carefully guide me instead of brute-forcing its decisions onto my work. I want to fall into the loving embrace of the system because I don’t wanna have to think about hex values or button sizes or box shadows. I don’t want to rethink padding and margins or rethink the grid each time I design a page.
But by golly if a design system says “no” to me then I will do my very best to blow it up.