#134 - Work from home
Hey everyone,
Welcome to issue #134, your weekly roundup of what’s happening in design, code and typography.
Thought provoking #
”If you’re having trouble focusing on work, or anything else, it’s not that you’re terrible at working from home or bad at your job. It’s that you’re doing this in a set of circumstances completely unprecedented in our lifetimes.” Eric Meyer on Trying to Work From Home.
Design and Code #
Automating the Boring Parts of Product Design. Brian Lovin walks through the Figma plugins he built for Github to help speed up his design process and simplify tedious workflows.
”Healthy friction in our processes, paired with automation and reporting where appropriate, can have a substantial impact on what we ship.” Building with Friction from Tim Kadlec.
A Complete Guide to calc() in CSS. Chris Coyier breaks down what’s possible with the calc() function.
New media queries you need to know from Kristofer Selbekk. Media queries let us alter the styles applied to our documents based on the device viewing them, and the context they’re viewed in. And every so often, we get new ones.
CSS Podcast. Una Kravets and Adam Argyle, Developer Advocates from Google, gleefully breakdown complex aspects of CSS into digestible episodes covering everything from accessibility to z-index.
“My strategy is loose, then tight. I write the first draft of an essay fast, trying out all kinds of ideas. Then I spend days rewriting it very carefully.” How to write usefully from Paul Graham.
Typography #
The performance benefits of Variable Fonts. Mandy Michael shows how variable fonts impact the performance of a website. In terms of number of font requests, font file size and time to first render.
Mona Lisa is an affordable monospaced font designed to improve developers’ productivity and reduce fatigue.
Textblock. A javascript tool for adjusting size, leading, and grades to cast continuously responsive typography. It works over your current CSS as a progressive enhancement.
Something to watch #
The Visual Art of Brian Eno: Light and Time. A unique visual adventure through the ideas and work of one of art’s most vital luminaries, Brian Eno.
The Coronavirus Explained & What You Should Do. The latest video from Kurzgesagt explains what actually happens when COVID19 infects a human and what should we all do about it.
Content (from me) #
Filtering content in Gatsby by date and deadline. A quick tutorial showing how to set up filters on a GraphQL query and automate the build step with IFTTT.
WFH. I made a pen to show you how to get started with google hosted variable fonts.