#132 - Learn in public

Hey everyone,

Welcome to issue #132, your weekly roundup of what’s happening in design, code and typography.

Thought provoking #

“You already know that you will never be done learning. But most people “learn in private”, and lurk. They consume content without creating any themselves. Again, that’s fine, but we’re here to talk about being in the top quintile. What you do here is to have a habit of creating learning exhaust.” Learn In Public from Shawn Wang.

”…writing can also be fun, matter-of-fact, rushed, bonkers, commercial, crass—and totally successful. Anything can work. Not everything does! But the gates of the city are wide open and there are a thousand ways in.” Writing and lightness from Robin Sloan and a response from Robin Rendle, also titled Writing and lightness.

Design and Code #

HTML: The Inaccessible Parts. Dave Rupert rounds up the plain ol’ HTML that causes accessibility problems into a little living document, to reference when writing code.

7 Principles of Icon Design. Clarity, Readability, Alignment, Brevity, Consistency, Personality, Ease of Use. Helena Zhang shares the key attributes of great icon design.

Intercom on Product: Why making every day count is key to progress. As Muhammad Ali once said “don’t count the days; make the days count”. A fantastic podcast from Des Traynor and Paul Adams on how to ensure you are doing just that.

Performant front-end architecture. This post describes some techniques to make front-end apps load faster and provide a good user experience.

Typography #

Machine dreams of a san–serif A. Lynne Yun and Kevin Yeh make a generative A based on avatars, using machine learning tool RunwayML and the MyFonts developer API.

Responsive web experiences using a single font file, with dramatically reduced download times, HTTP requests, and lines of CSS. Try Aktiv Grotesk VF for free.

Inter is now available from Google Fonts.

Something to watch #

Making Things Better: Redefining the Technical Possibilities of CSS. In this hour-long talk recorded live at An Event Apart DC 2019, Rachel Andrew looks at the things coming into browsers right now which change the way we see web design.

New content (from me) #

The ‘show up every day’ conundrum. ‘Show up every day’ is generally very good advice, but often it leaves me feeling like I want more from it. In this short article I share what I mean by this.

Some thoughts on Nicholas C. Zakas’s 5 question problem solving strategy.

From Twitter #

My brother is teaching front end workshops at LeWagon London.


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