#140 - Resilient website
Hey everyone,
Welcome to issue #140, your weekly roundup of what’s happening in design, code and typography.
Thought provoking #
“Scaling requires a great level of empathy and seeing your work through the eyes of your collaborators.” A systems view of brand design. Brand Designer Pedro del Corro talks to Design Director Jessica Svendsen about the task of creating and maintaining design systems at Dropbox Brand Studio.
“The title ‘Front-End Developer’ is obsolete.” Chris Coyier has his say about an interesting Twitter thread from Benjamin De Cock.
Design and Code #
“If you’re using a framework to build your site, you’re making a trade-off in terms of initial performance—even in the best of scenarios.” Tim Kadlec in The Cost of Javascript Frameworks.
“Masonry” Grids are being tested in Firefox Nightly, behind a feature flag. This is really exciting and means in the near future we might finally have native support for one of the more tricky patterns to implement.
In his new article Color theme switcher, Max Böck takes dark themes to the next level by showing us how to build ten dynamic color themes.
What is a resilient website? Jeremy Keith talks to A Question of Code podcast about progressive enhancement and what makes a great website.
Sarah Drasner creates a Hero Generator to automate the repetitive task of writing the html and CSS needed for the infamous hero pattern.
Typography #
Times New Arial is a variable font concept by Liebermann Kiepe Reddemann, which uses interpolation to combine the two visual extremes of a classic serif and a classic grotesque into one hybrid font.
Malou Verlomme has made Macklin’s complete superfamily available for free as variable fonts, for one week starting from 29th April.
Accessible Font Sizing, Explained. What sort of best practices can we rely on to make for an accessible reading experience? Andrés Galante has the answers.
How Femme Type found the hidden women of typography within a year. Amber Weaver, the designer behind the organisation, speaks to Design Week and reflects on a year of celebrating women in typography.
Something to watch #
Jason Lengstorf and Thor Schaeff teach us how to build an ecommerce store on the Jamstack using Stripe Checkout and Netlify Functions in this episode of Learn with Jason. You can also read the in-depth tutorial over on Netlify.
Content (from me) #
Accessibility check your writing on macOS. If you’re running Mac Sierra or above, this quick fun tip will help you make your writing more inclusive.
From Twitter #
Web development became so complex. As a huge advocate for building static sites, this tweet from Evaldas Burlingis about making simpler choices caught my eye this week.