#185 - For 100% of humanity

Hi everyone,

Welcome to Issue #185!

The past few weeks I’ve been documenting the AIN UI design system, and building a microsite for it. I’ve also been researching CMS options, in preparation to migrate client sites, before Forestry shuts shop, early next year. Perhaps I’ll write more about this soon.

Over Easter we managed to get out of London, spending time with family in Warwickshire. We visited the impressive Chastleton House and had tea and cake in the churchyard next door. It was all very English. Sadly no car boot sales, but an enjoyable, and surprisingly sunny weekend, nonetheless.

Here are some links that caught my eye this month. And, one I wrote myself about the various ways to build menus with Hugo.

Thought provoking #

“Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

Pick the best project you can think of and apply an aggressive timeline. Reduce the work to an absolute minimum. Be realistic. Dominick Schroer on The joy of small projects.

Progressively Enhanced Builds. What if build processes were thought of as enhancements and not dependencies? Interesting stuff from Jim Nielsen.

Design and Code #

Five principles for minimal design. Inspired by Dieter Rams’s Ten Principles for Good Design, Carl Barenbrug asks the question: What is minimal design?

Automating My Netlify “Public Folder” Workflow With macOS Shortcuts. Jim Nielsen’s has a seriously cool image process for his blog.

Menus in Hugo. Learn how to build section menus, front matter menus, config menus and sub menus. Also, how to highlight current menu items (parent and child items), and use menu params to add external links.

Performance and sustainability #

Optimising Largest Contentful Paint. Harry Roberts identifies the potential candidates for LCP, and offers tips on how to optimise them.

Picture perfect images with the modern <img> element. Lots practical advice from Addy Osmani, including some helpful tools that you may not be familiar with.

Privacy and security #

“If you’re doing something wrong out of ignorance, personally I think there’s no shame in that. But once you know better, continuing to do it wrong is a choice, and usually a bad one.”

Nate Bartram in Why to Care About Privacy After Years of Sharing Data.

Typography #

Best Font for Online Reading: No Single Answer. A reading-speed study by Adobe found that “different fonts are best for different people, with reading skills being a possible differentiator impacting font choice.” It appears age of the reader also has an impact.

How to Fix Your Low-Contrast Text. Ben Myers shows how to tackle the first of the six most common accessibility defects, as identified by the 2022 WebAIM Million report.

Childish Font Sizes. Tyler Sticka explains why larger fonts with generous x-height, balanced word and line spacing, reasonable line lengths, consistent alignment and adequate contrast is not just for kids.

Something to watch #

Holdfast | Fighting for the Right to Eat is short film from Patagonia about coastal subsistence gathering by Californian Indians. It looks at the challenges faced by the effects of the climate crisis, combined with unsustainable harvesting by non-native people.

Thank you for reading #

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Seeing you in the next one.

Harry


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