#168 - Homegrown websites
Hey everyone,
Welcome to issue #168, your weekly roundup of what’s happening in design, code and typography.
Thought provoking #
“Collaboration is a compounding investment: taken alone, each individual episode might not be optimal. Over time, the team learns and improves, gets more attuned to each other, uncovers surprising opportunities and novel strategies. That old saw: if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Matthew Ström in The hand and the brain
“Most of my favorite websites out there are grown—homegrown in fact. They are corners of the web where some unique human has been nurturing, curating, and growing stuff for years. Their blog posts, their links, their thoughts, their aesthetic, their markup, their style, everything about their site—and themselves—shows growth and evolution and change through the years. It’s a beautiful thing, a kind of artefact that could never be replicated or manufactured on a deadline.”
Jim Nielsen in The organic web.
Design and Code #
Jamstack Explorers is a new learning platform from the folks at Netlify. “Chart a course through new frameworks, through bright new tools and APIs, through Netlify’s features and workflows, and through the very fabric of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript itself.”
A Deep Dive Into CSS Grid minmax(). Ahmad Shadeed explains when to use the minmax() function and share an interesting technique which uses comparison functions to do away with media queries.
Understanding disability in a digital society from Elisabeth Ward. This is an important moment for digital accessibility. The Covid-19 pandemic has shown us that accessibility is no longer a ‘nice to have’.
A Complete Guide to CSS Gradients. Learn all you need to know about how and when to use linear, radial and conic gradients.
Typography #
“We approached F37 to explore a custom font that delivered on the brand’s fun, quirky personality, while minding our modern and pioneering objectives. Taking cues from the logo, F37 was able to mirror its tapered edges and dynamic angles in a fresh and modern way that felt authentic to the brand and hit on all of the objectives we set out to accomplish.” Laura Crowder on the new font for Baskin Robbins.
Kris Sowersby: The Art of Letters. A book of letterforms by one of the world’s leading type designers. A visual feast exploring type.
Times New Roman— Graphic Design History 101. How did Times New Roman become the default typeface we all use? Born out of anger, selected for its economics, and adopted because of its accessibility. This video dives into the history of the Times New Roman typeface, how it came to be, and why is it such a staple from congress to college.
Something to watch #
Create a Subscription Form from Scratch using HTML, CSS and MailChimp. Jay Fremaint shows how to take a design mockup and code a custom subscribe form with CSS.