#117 - Simplify
Hey everyone,
Welcome to issue #117, your weekly roundup of what’s happening in design, code and typography.
News (from me) #
Lately I‘ve been thinking about how to simplify my life and my work. I’ve been juggling various different projects and – whether dealing with faulty internet or broken project dependencies – it feels like I’m spending more time fixing things than actually getting stuff done.
I was reminded of Frank Chimero’s seminal article Everything easy is hard again in which he poses “…the easiest and cheapest strategy for dealing with complexity is not to invent something to manage it, but to avoid the complexity altogether with a more clever plan.”
With this in mind, I’ve begun to simplify my convoluted workflow by building new starter projects for both Hugo and Eleventy. I’m mid way through writing up the process and I hope to share both with you soon. My aim of course is to get back to basics by removing as much of the complexity and external dependencies as possible. Work with the web instead of against it and remove the barriers which are preventing me from getting things done.
Thought provoking #
“Use the platform until you can’t, then augment what’s missing. And when you augment, do so with care because the responsibility of ensuring the security, accessibility, and performance that the platform tries to give you by default now falls entirely on you.“ In Using the Platform Tim Kadlec delineates the care and consideration required when building for the web.
“The chief enemy of good decisions is a lack of sufficient perspectives on a problem” Alain de Botton found in The Great Mental Models by Farnam Street.
Design and Code #
How do you get into web performance and make better websites? Andy Bell asks Twitter and these are the responses. Check out Andy’s Web Perf Notion table for all the great resources.
What Newspapers Can Teach Us About Web Design from Frederick O’Brien. Before the home page, there was the front page. From the Gutenberg Principle to grid systems to above the fold, newspapers teach us much about the foundations of web design.
Semantic sidenotes for the web. How Koos Looijesteijn uses the element as a semantic HTML solution to represent side comments and small print.
Understand Website Accessibility with the Firefox Accessibility Inspector. Firefox DevTools now has a new Accessibility Inspector that shows an outline of the accessibility tree, and lists problems with contrast or missing labels, and much more. Jen Simmons gives you a tour.
Typography #
Only on Saturday: The Wood Type Prints of Jack Stauffacher. An exquisite book that explores the typographic experiments of Jack Stauffacher, the beloved San Francisco printer and designer.
The small differences. Robin Rendle on how using OpenType features can help improve the legibility of numbers in tables.
Typographic Illusions. A collection of free tools for demonstrating typographic phenomena, for anyone teaching or studying typeface design.
Greek Type Anatomy. Irene Vlachou, gives her insight on Greek font anatomy terminology.
Flow, a typeface built for wireframing by Dan Ross.
Something to watch #
A Real-Life Journey Into the Opinionated World of “Utility-First” CSS. Simon Vrachliotis presents a great case for adopting Utility Classes to help maintain CSS at scale.