When you think of heraldry what comes to mind is probably knights in shining armor, damsels in distress, jousting, that sort of thing. Medieval stuff. But I prefer to think of it as one of the earliest design systems.
This totally checks out.
I like Jason’s guidelines—very in keeping with The Session’s house rules.
And I really like his motivation for trying out comments:
The timing feels right. Twitter has imploded and social sites/services like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon are jockeying to replace it (for various definitions of “replace”). People are re-thinking what they want out of social media on the internet and I believe there’s an opportunity for sites like kottke.org to provide a different and perhaps even better experience for sharing and discussing information. Shit, maybe I’m wrong but it’s definitely worth a try.
Yes! More experiments like this please! Experiments that aren’t just “let’s clone Twitter”.
A hall of shame for ludicrously convoluted password rules that actually reduce security.
An excellent and clear explanation of specificity in CSS.
This is a wonderful interactive explanation of the way CSS hierarchy works—beautiful!
The video of a talk in which Mark discusses pace layers, dogs, and design systems. He concludes:
It’s true many design systems are the blueprints for manufacturing and large scale application. But in almost every instance I can think of, once you move from design to manufacturing the horse has bolted. It’s very difficult to move back into design because the results of the system are in the wild. The more strict the system, the less able you are to change it. That’s why broad principles, just enough governance, and directional examples are far superior to locked-down cookie cutters.
- Obey the Law of Locality
- ABD: Anything But Dropdowns
- Pass the Squint Test
- Teach by example
I saw Daniel give a talk at Async where he compared linguistic rules with code style:
We find the prescriptive rules hard to follow, irrespective of how complex they are, because they are invented, arbitrary, and often go against our intuition. The descriptive rules, on the other hand, are easy to follow because they are instinctive. We learned to follow them as children by listening to, analysing and mimicking speech, armed with an inbuilt concept of the basic building blocks of grammar. We follow them subconsciously, often without even knowing the rules exists.
Thus began some thorough research into trying to uncover a universal grammar for readable code:
I am excited by the possibility of discovering descriptive readability rules, and last autumn I started an online experiment to try and find some. My experiment on howreadable.com compared various coding patterns against each other in an attempt to objectively measure their readability. I haven’t found any strong candidates for prescriptive rules so far, but the results are promising and suggest a potential way forward.
I highly recommend reading through this and watching the video of the Async talk (and conference organisers; get Daniel on your line-up!).
A deep, deep dive into biomicry in digital design.
Nature is our outsourced research and development department. Observing problems solved by nature can help inform how we approach problems in digital design. Nature doesn’t like arbitrary features. It finds a way to shed unnecessary elements in advancing long-term goals over vast systems.
A really excellent piece from Derek on the history of community management online.
You have to decide what your platform is for and what it’s not for. And, yeah, that means deciding who it’s for and who it’s not for (hint: it’s not bots, nor nazis). That’s not a job you can outsource. The tech won’t do it for you. Not just because it’s your job, but because outsourcing it won’t work. It never does.
I’ve been wondering about this for quite a while: surely demanding specific patterns in a password (e.g. can’t be all lowercase, must include at least one number, etc.) makes it easier to crack them, right? I mean, you’re basically providing a ruleset for brute-forcing.
Turns out, yes. That’s exactly right.
When employees are faced with this requirement, they tend to:
- Choose a dictionary word or a name
- Make the first character uppercase
- Add a number at the end, and/or an exclamation point
If we know that is a common pattern, then we know where to start…
Not listed:
And here’s another reason why password rules are bullshit: you’re basically giving a list of instructions to hackers—the password rules help them narrow down the strings they need to brute force.
Tom talks about “Things Rules Do.”
Things Rules Do is twenty minutes that looks at games of all forms, and the rules and systems that make their skeleton. It’s about the weird things that rules can do, beyond “tell you how to play”, such as inspire mastery, encourage deviance, and tell stories.