#147 - No input, no output

Hey everyone,

Welcome to issue #147, your weekly roundup of what’s happening in design, code and typography.

Thought provoking #

Your output depends on your input from Austin Kleon.

The Return of the 90s Web. Max Böck explores web technologies from the past that look like they might be making a comeback.

Design and Code #

How Web Accessibility Works. Segun Ola explains the Accessibility Object Model (AOM) and Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA).

Building a hexagonal grid using CSS grid. Jesse Breneman shows how to use CSS Grid and clip-path polygons to recreate familiar grids from tabletop war games, board games (Settlers of Catan, for instance), and computer games.

Speaking of which, Stephen Barkan has recreated Catan in Figma!

CSS Custom Properties Fail Without Fallback. Mattias Ott continues his 100 day writing challenge with insight into how CSS properties don’t support the Cascade when a value is invalid.

CSS :is() and :where() are coming to browsers. Šime Vidas explains two new pseudo-classes.

Typography #

A Practice for Everyday Life launches APFEL Type Foundry. Launching with four retail typefaces and a bespoke service, the studio is hoping to continue its type-focused work “untethered” from its studio projects.

Letters from Sweden release Inline, their second collaboration with Stefania Malmsten. Inline is a companion to Line that also stands on its own. Where Line is a thin script with graffiti influences, Stefania got the idea for a typeface that would be the exact opposite of Line – a heavy face where the counter spaces in the characters would correspond to the different stroke weights in Line. Inline comes in three widths, with 7 optical sizes in each width, a total of 21 styles.

The TypeLab for Typographics 2020 is a free 72-hour online event, with work­shops, demos, inter­views, experiments, and more. Livestreams of TypeLab events are free and publicly accessible on YouTube via one of our 3 international hosts (Americas, Europe, and Asia)

Something to watch #

CEO Jason Fried walkthroughs HEY, a fresh new take on email from Basecamp. HEY is unlike anything that’s come before it and I absolutely love the design. Will this encourage other companies to rethink email? I hope so.

From Twitter #

The fucking WHAT behind accessibility at Twitter?? from Haydon Pickering.