#118 - Teaching CSS
Hey everyone,
Welcome to issue #118, your weekly roundup of what’s happening in design, code and typography.
This week we have two quotes worthy of reflection, an interesting read on colour and tutorials on dark mode and semantic form styling. Also Sir Tim Berners-Lee talks about his aspirations for the future of the World Wide Web.
Thought provoking #
“Always make a definition or sketch of what presents itself to your mind, so you can see it stripped bare to its essential nature and identify it clearly, in whole and in all its parts, and can tell yourself its proper name and the names of those elements of which it is compounded and into which it will be dissolved.” Marcus Aurelius in Meditations.
“The most interesting people are the ones who don’t avoid reality. The people who are honest both with themselves and with others. These people have mastered something many of us have yet to learn: They have accepted their reality and then embraced it. They lean in.” Tobias Van Schneider in Lean In.
Design and Code #
Rachel Andrew on Teaching CSS as a robust language, one which has been designed to allow us to present information to multiple environments, to many different people, via a sea of ever-changing devices.
No, absolutely not from Robin Rendle. What you need to build a great website is restraint and the ability to educate everyone about performance, responsive design, and accessibility.
Thinking about color. How Cloudflare have reimagined their usage of color and improved accessibility.
Dark Mode. Varun Vachhar on the hidden complexity of adding dark mode to his Gatsby powered website.
Very Basic Form Styling. Bradley Taunt with some great tips on how to keep your web forms semantic and simple.
Upgrading (the idea of) dependencies. Pascal Laliberté on the three stages of maturity and what it means to be dependent.
Typography #
Get More For Less With Variable Fonts. Variable fonts create new possibilities for transforming typography. Danielle Romo gives a brief overview of their performance benefits and how they work.
The performance cost of custom web fonts, and how to solve it. How converting, subsetting and preloading can drastically improve web font performance and reduce impact on the planet.
How to Release Your Debut Typeface with No Formal Type Training. The story behind Simula by Justin Sloane.
What is the key to quality Cyrillic? How American clients are different from Russian ones? Why making a custom font for less than $15k is unprofitable? Type.Today talks to Maria Doreuli.
Something to watch #
Sir Tim Berners-Lee: The World Wide Web - A Mid-Course Correction. Sir Tim Berners-Lee talks about his aspirations for the future of the World Wide Web, now in its 30th anniversary year.