#146 - Building the Woke Web

Hey everyone,

Welcome to issue #146, your weekly roundup of what’s happening in design, code and typography.

Thought provoking #

”Going forward, we will have to decide how we want to prepare for the shifts ahead of us. Scenario planning suggests that you come up with a “robust strategy”. Robust in this case doesn’t mean “rigid” but instead being flexible, adaptable, and also “resilient” and therefore well-prepared for a range of possible outcomes.” Mattias Ott in Welcome to the 21st Century.

“My students taught me that new experiences help us gain insight, that exploration results in joy, and that nothing needs to be perfect.” In Design With Your Inner Child In Mind, Renee Fleck tells her story of suffering a setback and how she used what she learnt during her time as a preschool school teacher to bounce back.

Design and Code #

The Surprising Things That CSS Can Animate. Will Boyd explores the properties that aren’t typically associated with animation, but turn out to be animatable.

Building the Woke Web: Web Accessibility, Inclusion & Social Justice. What would your life be like without the internet? Not if it didn’t exist at all, but if you were locked out of it? Would your days be different? Olu Niyiawosusi shares some interesting insights.

CUBE CSS. A CSS methodology oriented towards simplicity and consistency with a heavy dosage of pragmatism, from Andy Bell.

Grid for layout, Flexbox for components. Ahmad Shadeed explains the difference between these two CSS approaches and explores different use cases for each.

Typography #

Google fonts has added three new font famililes; DM Mono, a three weight, three style family designed for DeepMind. Jost, a variable font inspired by 1920s German sans-serifs and Balsamiq Sans a handwritten font created for the Balsamiq Wireframes contains 942 glyphs in 2 weights with italics.

Typographic Matchmaking. Veronika Burian and José Scaglione of Type Together share tips on pairing typefaces, “a difficult task that requires a balance of knowledge, eye experience, and boldness.”

Text for Proofing Fonts: A farewell to The Quick Brown Fox. Jonathan Hoefler on why Hoefler&Co have ditched pangrams and rewritten proofs from scratch, trading their wacky and self-satisfied cleverness for lists of words that are actually illustrative.

“Civilité was invented for ideological reasons but failed owing to changing tastes, a mistimed typographical fashion statement, if you like. Civilité was elaborate and Gothic at a time when all-things Gothic were already in decline.” John Boardley in Death of a typeface.

Something to watch #

Ryan Carl: Inserting Myself into the Conversation. Graphic Designer Ryan Carl discusses his background and process of ’Radical Simplicity‘, and walks through his conceptually-driven work that explores themes of identity and being, hope and togetherness.

From Twitter #

“The best thing you can do for yourself is to help other people succeed” from Shane Parrish.


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