#176 - Why do we interface?
Hey everyone,
Welcome to issue #176.
June is here and the good weather has finally arrived. At least in the UK anyway! This should have gone out last week, I know. I took some time off over the bank holiday and although I had good intentions to schedule my newsletter, unfortunately it didn’t quite happen. Before now I would have beaten myself up about these sorts of things, but let’s face it, stressing about things you can’t control is wasted energy.
Ok, here’s a few things that peaked my interest over the course of May – as usual, mainly in and around the fields of design, code and typography. You’ll also find a couple of pieces by me on working with data and redirects in Hugo.
Thought provoking #
“No other person on the planet has your weird mix of experience and perspective that shapes why and how you create what you create. Whether it’s an online course, email newsletters, or Notion template, the creators who will stand out are those that know how to translate their weirdness/awesomeness into something dynamic and interesting.” Marie Poulin on standing out as a creator.
“As technology marches forward, we must pause to ponder about what future we are trying to build. Instead of letting the technology drag us along, or being complicit in ruining the world one optimized metric at a time, we should remind ourselves of how technology’s role is to serve us as humans — not to limit our humanity or to take advantage of our vices but, rather to make us more human.” In Why do we interface?, Ehsan Noursalehi looks at the past present and future of interfaces.
Things by me #
Hugo & Redirects. Learn why redirects are important if you make changes to the structure of your content, and how to set them up on Hugo websites that utilise Netlify in less than 5 minutes.
Working with data which doesn’t require a page.You wont always want Hugo to generate a page for all your content. Here we look at what to do with content that doesn’t require a page, and how to display it on a list page.
Design and Code #
25 Years of CSS. Eric Meyer reflects on how CSS began 25 years ago this month in a conference room in Paris, May 7th, 199
Brighton based studio Pixelhop are building a tool called Stack Earth which will allow you to connect your favourite hosting providers, calculate the carbon emissions of your websites and offset to tree planting charities. Very cool.
Container Queries in Web Components. Max Böck builds a demo book store to test out the power of CSS Container Queries.
Should DevTools teach the CSS cascade? Stefan Judis proposes a small developer tools addition that could help more developers understanding CSS.
Typography #
Optimising web fonts. A 3 part series looking at some of the tricks and techniques to consider when optimising fonts for the web.
I studied the fonts of the top 1000 websites. Here’s what I learned. Where data science meets design. An interesting project by Renee Fleck.
Nordic’s largest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat create The Climate Crisis Font Climate which uses variable font technology and data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center to visualise the urgency of the climate crisis in a very clever way.
“Leverage type as much as possible to define your brand.” A look at designing Indeed Sans, a new custom typeface for Indeed, designed by Dalton Maag.
Something to watch #
The new responsive: Web design in a component-driven world. Una Kravets on controlling macro and micro layout in a new era of responsive web design. A great explainer on container queries and some other interesting developments in CSS.