Bookmarks

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youtube.com

Imitative Photography

This guy shows how you can learn by imitating the good way.
Exploring photography through imitation!
Until you're mastering a craft, imitation is a totally okay way to practice it.

voussoir.net

CSS for printing to paper

Every time I open an Adobe application I get confused about what year it is and why everything is like when I was a young student. If I ever have to typeset a book, I probably will try to do it with HTML and this guide.

denisdefreyne.com

Hello! I’m Denis.

I’m a software engineer based in Berlin, Germany. My pronouns are he/him. You might be interested in my weeknotes, or perhaps my perpetual interests. In the past, I’ve worked for SoundCloud, BCG Digital Ventures, Pitch, Shopify, and others.

aftel.net

Aftel

I made this countdown timer to run workshops, but it turns out to be popular among educators and students too.
If you regularly use Aftel, you’re gonna love that you can do everything with keyboard shortcuts!

feed-generator.app

feed generator

Somehow I always run into issues with other tools generating RSS feeds automatically, so I'm going to try this one to make my own template next time.

utopia.fyi

Fluid type scale calculator

This table lists font size values in px for your type scales at the min and max viewport widths entered above. Add a viewport width to show its corresponding font size values.
I've been using this page for a while now, but Proportio.app looks like a more complete and easier alternative.

proportio.app

Proportio.app

Tool for creating proportional scales for typography, iconography, spacing, and components in design systems.

betterimagesofai.org

Better Images of AI

What’s the problem with current tropes? Abstract, futuristic or science-fiction-inspired images of AI hinder the understanding of the technology’s already significant societal and environmental impacts.

youtube.com

VFD Displays

Posy makes beautiful and often nostalgic videos about things that he cares about, but very few others. And makes them interesting.
VFD or Vacuum Fluorescent Display valhalla...

github.io

Poline

I don't understand how it works and I haven't found a way to make it useful, but it's pretty and fun to play with.
"poline" is an enigmatic color palette generator, that harnesses the mystical witchcraft of polar coordinates. Its methodology, defying conventional color science, is steeped in the esoteric knowledge of the early 20th century.

floor796.com

Floor796

An ever-expanding animation scene depicting the everyday life of the 796th floor of the huge space station

matthewstrom.com

How to pick the least wrong colors

I do have a formal design education, but I can very much relate with Matthew's feeling incompetent and love how he managed to turn a ton of research into an algorithm.
I’m a self-taught designer.1 This has its upsides: I learn at my own pace (in my case, slowly over decades and counting), I design my own curriculum, and I don’t have to do any homework or pass any tests.

godly.website

Godly

Astronomically good web design inspiration from all over the Internet, every day.

loadmo.re

LOADMORE

loadmo.re is a mobile-websites showcase initiated by DVTK. The curation was initially based on our own selection and is now meant to grow through submissions from our online community. From its earliest days, digital design practice has been focused on creating interfaces for computers.

subpixel.space

Life After Lifestyle

One of the best and most inspiring articles I read this year.
Now we know what culture is. So it is finally time to talk about the way that new cultures are being made, and how this has changed from the lifestyle era. The social order is reconfiguring once again, and we are all shaping it in some way.

co.uk

Pure CSS Parallax Websites

This article demonstrates how to use CSS transforms, perspective and some scaling trickery to create a pure CSS parallax scrolling website. If you find this article useful and want to explore CSS Parallax further, you may find my follow-up article "Practical CSS Parallax" an interesting read.

robbowen.digital

Holograms, light-leaks and how to build CSS-only shaders.

With mix-blend-mode finally gaining wide browser-support, we now have access to many of most common shading techniques in CSS. With some choice images and a bit of careful layering it's possible to build some surprisingly high-quality effects without the need for introducing any JS dependencies.

shkspr.mobi

Paper Prototype CSS

Introducing Paper Prototype CSS. When I first started designing the OpenBenches website, I wanted to make it look deliberately crappy. I didn't want the people testing it getting too hung up on what it looked like.

knots3d.com

Knots 3D

Feel free to explore our knot catalog and learn how to tie over 150 knots!

ft.com

The Climate Game

Can you reach net zero?
I lost my position as global minister for future generations because I spent my effort points to fast to reach net zero.

bulwinkle.net

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.

lowdefy.com

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.

ciechanow.ski

GPS

The Global Positioning System explained with clear interactive animations.

tatianamac.com

Tatiana Mac

American designer who builds inclusive, accessible, and ethical products with thoughtful practices.

tante.cc

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.

histography.io

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

medium.com

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.

dialup.com

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.

mutsuacen.com

Mutsuacen

Not entirely sure what to use this tool for animated vector drawings for. But it's fun to play with!

youtube.com

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.

somehowmanage.com

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.

medium.com

The Nine States of Design

Interfaces are merely the thoughtful composition of components. This leaves an often glaring hole for users on “the unhappy path” — The places where users may, intentionally or not, stray from your idealized flow.
Not really about states of a design, but a useful checklist for making sure all important component states are covered.

berthub.eu

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.

glitch.me

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.

css-tricks.com

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.

jasoncrawford.org

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.

uxdesign.cc

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.

medium.com

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.

css-tricks.com

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.

futuress.org

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.

andy.works

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.

arstechnica.com

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.

uxdesign.cc

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.

creativegood.com

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.