I lost my position as global minister for future generations because I spent my effort points to fast to reach net zero.
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The Climate Game — Can you reach net zero?
The terminal for the 21st century
“Warp is a blazingly fast, rust-based terminal reimagined from the ground up to work like a modern app.”
Remix Icon - Open source icon library
“Remix Icon is a set of open source neutral style system symbols elaborately crafted for designers and developers. All of the icons are free to use for both personal and commercial.”
Heroicons
Open source icons by the makers of Tailwind CSS
Tabler Icons
Open source icons by Paweł Kuna
List of countries for Fake address generator
Phone is Still the Best Way to Order Pizza
“When ordering pizza for pickup, there is no easier way to do it than using a phone. On average, it takes no more than 20 seconds: There are many, many websites and apps that partner with local pizza shops. Often these apps require you to sign up or add excess information.”
Build internal tools with YAML
YAML is terrible, because a wrong indentation (was it spaces or tabs?) can break your application. That aside, this looks very useful for many projects.
“Create web apps, internal tools, admin consoles, BI dashboards, and more.”
GPS
The Global Positioning System explained with clear interactive animations.
Brian Lovin
“Internet things, saved for later.”
Tatiana Mac
“American designer who builds inclusive, accessible, and ethical products with thoughtful practices.”
Sara Souedian
“Web UI and design systems engineer”
Josh W Comeau
“Friendly tutorials for developers. Focus on React, CSS, Animation, and more!”
Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young
“Wear sunscreen.”
I like the part that’s not included in Baz Luhrmann’s version too.
Gradient Generator
Beautiful gradients without muddy centers!
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
Just as relevant to designers as to programmers.
Erika Hall Knows How to Fix Your Design Process (But You’re Probably Not Going to Like It)
The title is a bit off, to me this is really a lot of design wisdom condensed in quotable pieces.
Biased by Design
“A resource for cultivating awareness of when and how cognitive bias can be introduced into the design process”
Discover Forgotten Trends in Web Design
“Web Design Museum exhibits over 2,000 carefully selected and sorted web sites that show web design trends between the years 1991 and 2006.”
The Third Web
I’ve been putting of writing a post like this myself, because I felt that maybe I just didn’t understand blockchain technology well enough. That maybe I should read yet another whitepaper, join another Discord. Buy some ether.
“I am a studied computer scientist with a nontrivial amount of experience. One main issue I have with Web3 from that perspective is that it’s just bad engineering.”
My current hypothesis is that everything blockchain is like a combination of a pyramid scheme, scientology, Tamagotchi, a lottery and a lot of words trying to obfuscate that. It definitely doesn’t deserve the name Web3, because it has little to do with the actual World Wide Web.
Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper.
If you thought Roblox was a benign environment where kids can play and learn to make their own games, watch this video on YouTube.
Languages don’t all have the same number of terms for colors – scientists have a new theory why
“People with standard vision can see millions of distinct colors. But human language categorizes these into a small set of words. In an industrialized culture, most people get by with 11 color words: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple and gray.”
Control Panel
“In praise of dials, toggles, buttons, and bulbs.”
Histography
I’ve had this idea for visualizing history on nested timelines, to get a better sense of the scale of history. This site does it in a much more clever, interesting and ambitious way than I would have done it.
“Welcome to Histography, where every dot is a historic event from Wikipedia ”
Protopia Futures Framework
Monika Bielskyte summarizes her and her collaborator’s views on how to shape our futures.
“By now, Dystopias have become so obvious and banal that they are memes rather than cautionary tales […]. But also, and possibly even worse: they serve as product roadmaps for entities such as Peter Thiel’s Palantir, the deeply racialized predictive surveillance tech inspired by Minority Report.”
Websites that spark joy.
“A curated list of sites with an extra bit of fun.”
Staff Design
An interview series about hands-on career tracks in design
Leading with Craft
“A series about hands-on career paths in the design industry.”
Huetone • Make colors accessible
It takes some getting to know this tool, but it’s one of the very few that really helps create full, coherent and usable color palettes.
Why Cars Rarely Crash into Buildings in the Netherlands
“I’ve lived in the Netherlands for a year and a half and I realized that I haven’t seen a car crash into a building yet. You would think that cars regularly crashing into buildings would signal a problem to most people, but a lot of Americans and Canadians just accept it as normal.”
Mutsuacen
Not entirely sure what to use this tool for animated vector drawings for. But it’s fun to play with!
How does Dialup work?
“Dialup is a voice-chat app that connects you to people in surprising ways. Get recurring calls with people you want to meet.”
Shh! Don’t Tell Them There’s No Magic in Design Thinking
“When the term Design Thinking first emerged on the scene, I found it completely puzzling. People were treating it as if it was a revolutionary new methodology to produce better products and services.”
Disrespectful Design, Part II
With dishonest cookie banners (‘We respect your privacy’) disrespectful design has become common. Which is odd, because traditionally design was about showing off how much a client could spend on making their visitors or customers feel comfortable.
“What can you do, as a builder, if your job seems to require to employ disrespectful design patterns? First, it’s worth rehashing what Disrespectful Design is.”
Five reasons why moral philosophy is distracting and harmful
I disagree with several parts of the article, but it’s nice to see a different take on moral philosophy that’s not nihilism. Or is it?
Grumpy Website+
I can stop tweeting—this is the definitive collection of bad design!
Making Disabled Buttons More Inclusive
“Let’s get into why we use them and how we can do better than the traditional disabled attribute in HTML (e.g.
<button disabled>) to mark a button as disabled.”
In almost every project I argue against adding disabled states to buttons, but end up including them nonetheless. This is a helpful guide for doing that the right way.
Tokimeki Unfollow
“If you’re like me, you’ve followed a bajillion accounts over your years on Twitter dot com.”
It takes a bit of time, but it’s a fun way to improve your Twitter feed.
Europe's Software Problem
“Europe’s communication needs are currently almost exclusively delivered by Chinese hardware that connects us to US-based platforms. For a variety of reasons, this is not a good idea.”
The Ministry for the Future, or Do Authors Dream of Electric Jeeps?
I agree with a lot of the criticism of the book. Still, we need more books like this: serious, ambitious explorations of what it means to be on collision course with nature. To me, the badly outlined solutions that the book explores only make it more obvious what a great challenge we’re facing.
How to survive a design career and avoid burnout
“Then it was shut down, for no discernible reason other than a global partnership that went awry. […] I asked Stanley what on earth had happened there. I might have imagined a flicker of pain on his face, but his answer was that you have to make peace that you will leave a trail of destruction as you make change happen in a large organisation.”
Marxian Alienation And Web Development
“Burnout is not just overwork, or the ensuing exhaustion. Some of you will already know this.”
Precognition
“It’s almost impossible to predict the future. But it’s also unnecessary, because most people are living in the past. All you have to do is see the present before everyone else does.”
Worry is an unhelpful friend and a shoddy fortune-teller
“It all started with Goofy blowing lewd kisses at my mom. I was a five-year-old at Disney World, happily exploring with my parents. Happily, that is, until I entered what seemed like an adulterous nightmare.”
Worrying is stupid and can you can stop doing it.
Photopea: advanced photo editor
“Free online photo editor supporting PSD, XCF, Sketch, XD and CDR formats.”
Avatar generator playground - Boring Avatars
Boring avatars generates custom, SVG-based avatars from any username and color palette.
Left-Side Vertical Navigation on Desktop: Scalable, Responsive, and Easy to Scan
“Vertical navigation is a good fit for broad or growing IAs, but takes up more space than horizontal navigation. Ensure that it is left-aligned, keyword front-loaded, and visible. Many teams will try to shoehorn a broad navigation hierarchy into a horizontal navigation bar on desktop sites.”
JENKEM - Matt Tomasello in "Rodney Mullen on Bath Salts: Round Three"
A weird skateboarding video.
Add a Goat to your next video call. Only £5!
“Spice up your virtual meetings by inviting along a Goat!”
Was pretty surreal to have a goat in the meeting, unannounced.
A Simple and Definitive Icons Library
WEBTOON
If there’s a YouTube for comics, it’s Webtoon.
The way we think about charity is dead wrong
“Too many nonprofits, he says, are rewarded for how little they spend—not for what they get done. Instead of equating frugality with morality, he asks us to start rewarding charities for their big goals and big accomplishments (even if that comes with big expenses).”
Dan Palotta explains how crazy it is that people find we shouldn’t pay managers of charity big bucks. I agree with his analysis, but my conclusion they get paid fine and we should just tax the other people’s millions and billions.
A better segmented control
“A few years ago, we built a segmented control component for the Lyft Product Language (LPL) design system. You may have read our guide to designing and using selection controls.”
Career Development: What It Really Means to be a Manager, Director, or VP
“It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of big-company HR practices. I’m more of the First Break all the Rules type. Despite my general skepticism of many standard practices, we still do annual performance reviews at my company, though I’m thinking seriously of dropping them.”
Adding is favoured over subtracting in problem solving
A few days after reading about this alternative way of thinking, I managed to apply it felt like a genius!
In Praise of the Unambiguous Click Menu
“I still remember my excitement when I learned how to build a hover-triggered submenu with just CSS. (It was probably after reading this 2003 article from A List Apart.) At the time, it was a true CSS trick. Seriously. Wild times.”
Since touch screens, I avoid using mouse hover and right click to disclose essential UI elements.
Against Performative Positivity
“I am considered a pessimist—the ‘Daria’ of design—whose standards are too high and too critical. Designers, I would argue, are afraid to embrace dissent because it disrupts the positivity bubble.”
The Best Landing Page Design Inspiration
“Lapa Ninja is a gallery featuring the best 2949 landing page design from around the web. Buy Lapa Ninja a Coffee ☕️”
No more boring apps
“How did our apps get so boring? It’s time we put play, aesthetics, and quality-of-life over efficiencies.”
I don’t care for his styling. Still I find Andy’s venture interesting, because it’s the first time I see a designer sell digital products directly to consumers using an influencer type of marketing and a subscription model where one pays for supporting the creator rather than products updates.
Citibank just got a $500 million lesson in the importance of UI design
I expect this case to show up in thousands of slide decks of UX teams showing IT departments why they’re underfunded and understaffed.
“A federal judge has ruled that Citibank isn’t entitled to the return of $500 million it sent to various creditors last August. Kludgey software and a poorly designed user interface contributed to the massive screwup.”
A Strong Personal Brand Will Enhance Your Life
I tend to agree with the article. But instead of ‘personal branding’ can we say ‘ethics and professional presence’ or something?
Uniwidth typefaces for interface design
Uniwidth ≠ monospaced!
“As a web/interface/visual designer I work a lot with label states. Selected, unselected, active, inactive, available, out of stock. Considering that you should never use color as the only visual cue (always remember accessibility dear designer), text weight is often my go-to solution.”
The Building Blocks of CDR Systems
Carbon dioxide removal is what we need to avoid climate disasters. There’s a lot more possible than planting trees. It’s not a light read, but I find it very uplifting!
Why I'm losing faith in UX
Important points about the relevance and ethics of design.
“We’re headed into a dangerous time, when our society is run on digital platforms, and UX isn’t leading the way to ensure that those tools are usable.”
Pika
“Pika is an easy to use, open-source, native colour picker for macOS.”
Spirulina Algae (Bio)
I’m all for modernism, but this shop’s design is more interesting than everything else I’ve seen in the last months. Just add a product to the cart to see why. And yes: I’m ordering algae as food, because they’re super healthy and a sustainable source of protein. Algae are going to save the world!
The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram
“To be truly countercultural in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self.”
Running a personal website is both counterculture and totally mainstream personal branding.
Wells Fargo says hundreds of customers lost homes after computer glitch
“Hundreds of people had their homes foreclosed on after software used by Wells Fargo incorrectly denied them mortgage modifications.”
Web Accessibility Is Out To Get You And Make You Feel Sad
Although without context it may look obnoxious or elitist, I admire Heydon’s stubbornly requiring visitors to turn off JavaScript.
Httpster
“Httpster is an inspiration resource showcasing totally rocking websites made by people from all over the world.”
Latest from the Showcase
The Internet's Original Sin
“It’s not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web.”
Your Life In Weeks
Google Tried to Prove Managers Don't Matter. Instead, It Discovered 10 Traits of the Very Best Ones
“The hypothesis was that the quality of a manager doesn’t matter and that managers are at best a necessary evil, and at worst a useless layer of bureaucracy. The early work of Project Oxygen, in 2002, included a radical experiment – a move to a flat organization without any managers.”
What We Got Wrong About Self-Management: Embracing Natural Hierarchy at Work
“The best example we’ve experienced is when brand new people join the company. They naturally look towards more experienced and skilled people that are already part of the team, to help them figure out the best first steps.”
First, Let’s Fire All the Managers
“Finally, there’s the cost of tyranny. The problem isn’t the occasional control freak; it’s the hierarchical structure that systematically disempowers lower-level employees.”
FarbVeló
A playful color picking tool
Parametric Color Mixer
Of all the automatic color tools I’ve tried, this one seems working the best: a lot of control and no unexpected color combinations.
Logical Fallacies In Design Critiques
The Clocklike Regularity of Major Life Changes
MJD 59,143
“You’ll be pivoting towards either greater engagement or greater detachment. You’ll either help invent the future, or retreat with the declining age and turn into a producer of nostalgia.”
If enough people say big change is coming, it becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy.
One Legged Space Signatures
“Essentials for cool websites (in 1999)”
I label increasingly nonsensical images with ‘UI’ and ‘UX’ and hope they get used in serious presentations
People Problems
“If no one cares about performance work today, then shouting and screaming and being a jerk about it won’t help at all.
Trust me, I have been that jerk.”
What do executives do, anyway?
“An executive with 8,000 indirect reports and 2000 hours of work in a year can afford to spend, at most, 15 minutes per year per person in their reporting hierarchy… even if they work on nothing else. That job seems impossible.”
How do managers* get stuck?
“*May also apply to senior ICs”
How to Do What You Love
“Doing what you love is complicated. The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids.”
How to Do Great Things
“While we can acknowledge that luck plays a role, we often use that as a crutch to avoid doing what we can do to intelligently prepare for opportunities.”
Ira Glass: Advice for beginners
Lovely short comic strip
Cabin. Privacy-first Analytics
Cabin looks like a good alternative to dealing with Google Analytics’ bloated UI and privacy situation.
Running an All-hands
“ I attended an event that took me through the gamut of emotions. I was educated, inspired, amused, moved and energized. There were moments where I could literally feel chills down my spine. ”
Don't Be Evil
Some perspectives on whether technology is inherently good or not.
Welcome to Your Bland New World
My only problem with this article is that I feel seen.
Beyond Media Queries: Using Newer HTML & CSS Features for Responsive Designs
If there’s one thing that I find hard to explain to other designers, it’s that breakpoints are silly. Meanwhile, CSS is getting better and better at making responsive design easy!
Make me think!
Instant classic referring to the (also excellent) book ‘Don’t Make Me Think’. Have a look, if only for the animated illustrations!
“Simplification is a powerful design strategy. Naturally the button to make an emergency call should be as simple as possible. And yet, we also need further design strategies that help us accept, understand, and interact with complex situations in our lives.”
LCH colors in CSS: what, why, and how?
I’d never thought I’d get excited about color spaces, but this is big! Designs finally get to have highly saturated colors, consistently across browsers!
“We actually get access to about 50% more colors.”
julian.digital
Very much a ‘personal website’, but in a good way. His blog has well-researched and smart articles. Signaling As A Service is one of my favorites.
Winamp Skin Museum
This gives me a proper museum visit feel, because of nostalgia and because all the controls work. It really whips the llama’s ass!
“The Winamp Skin Museum is an attempt to build a fast, searchable, and shareable, interface for the collection of Winamp Skins amassed on the Internet Archive.”
The future of last-mile delivery has arrived … in a small Dutch city
Sidewalk Talk: “Where technologists and urbanists discuss the future of cities.”
I consider designing cities is one of the highest forms of design. I think it’s crazy complicated. This particular post is about why Nijmegen is “home to the world’s first successful neighborhood freight hub. Why has it worked out where others failed?”
Ethics for designers
Matthew Strom managed to create a readable series of articles applying ethics philosophy to design. It’s the kind of series I’ve had in mind to create, but never managed to complete, because I was too much focused on finding solutions instead of asking questions and gathering what philosophy has created already.