#143 - World Wide Waste
Hey everyone,
Welcome to issue #143, your weekly roundup of what’s happening in design, code and typography.
Thought provoking #
“A lot of folks tend to think that product design means fonts and big, rounded corners, splashy gradients and animations. Conversations will focus entirely on how and what instead of why.” Robin Rendle in Notes about product design.
World Wide Waste with Gerry McGovern. Gerry McGovern talks to Shop Talk Shop about the amount of energy used sending the bits and bytes around the internet, the cost of storage, new phones vs old phones, the scale of data, and how do we adjust our process and culture to make changes?
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” – Confucius
Design and Code #
Easily use Design Tokens in Eleventy. Haydon Pickering shows just how simple it is to turn JSON data into CSS by using custom permalinks and no extra dependencies.
Tatiana Mac continues her series Beginner’s Guide to Eleventy [Part II], where she covers the various tools needed for installation in detail.
Accessible Images For When They Matter Most. Creating accessible images seems like a simple topic at first glance — you just need to add alt text to an image, right? But the topic is much more nuanced than some people think. Carie Fisher shares some insights.
Robin Rendle shows How to Make a CSS-Only Carousel with absolutely no JavaScript whatsoever.
Chris Coyier has started a new video series on Notion for Web Development Teams.
Typography #
CSS has 3 new functions min(), max() and clamp(). Clamp is particularly exciting in respect of simple fluid typography. Jeremy Keith, Ahmand Shadeed and Jason Pamental have all written fantastic articles about these new features.
“The typeface you use to express your thoughts is something that can potentially shape how people will perceive you or your message.” How typefaces influence you from Daniel Tamul and Katherine Haenschen.
BallPill is What a Font Looks Like When its Designer’s on the Rebound. Emily Gosling talks to designer Benoît Bodhuin about looking back to previous work in order to create new fonts.
Inari is a display typeface based on grid explorations from non-digital mediums, such as tricot and embroidery. All the 577 glyphs were drawn with special attention to the ink flow they would have if written traditionally.
Something to watch #
“Insert Complicated Title Here”.Virgil Abloh’s 2017 presentation to the Harvard Graduate School of Design about finding a personal design language and working collaboratively.
Content (from me) #
A quick explainer on Hoisting in JavaScript.