#190 – Slow lane

Hi everyone,

Welcome to Issue #190.

Last week I had a million things to do, before setting off for a few months of travelling. So I’m only just finding the time to send this issue now.

I’m currently in Greece, where I’ll be for the next couple of weeks. Working on bits and pieces, rekindling personal projects and making the most of the last of the good weather. After what has been a busy couple of months, I’m rather enjoying being back in the slow lane, again.

Here’s what I discovered during the month of September.

Thought provoking #

‘Instead of “going public,” you could say we’re “going purpose.” Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.’ Yvon Chouinard in Earth is now our only shareholder.

Generative AI: A Creative New World by Sonya Huang, Pat Grady and GPT-3.

“Am I giving people something worthwhile here? Or have I just written a list of fish?“ Nick Parker in List of Fish.

Design and Code #

Manuel Matuzović demonstrates Building the main navigation for a website with accessibility in mind – using semantic HTML and ARIA attributes.

Wouter Groeneveld rounds up all the Cool Things People Do With Their Blogs.

If you’re a big fan of checklists like me, then UX Checklists For Interface Designers from Vitaly Friedman is worth a read.

A whole cascade of layers. Miriam Eric Suzanne’s personal approach to CSS Cascade Layers.

CSS container queries are finally here. A short post from Ahmad Shadeed showing how to use these exciting new component level media queries.

Help shape what’s happening in CSS by taking The 2022 State of CSS annual developer survey.

Performance and sustainability #

HTTP Archive’s annual state of the web report is out now. New for this year is a chapter on web sustainability, which provides tons of tips to help developers make websites more sustainable.

Critical CSS? Not So Fast! A great article by Harry Roberts about when it makes sense to use critical CSS loading techniques and when it doesn’t.

How To Improve Largest Contentful Paint for Faster Load Times. Lots of useful tips in this one from Karolina Szczur.

Typography #

Looking for a friendly, easy going font that’s clean and simple? Erik D. Kennedy has you covered with his new font Figtree, just released on Google fonts.

This sites type is now variable. Elliot Jay Stocks on implementing variable fonts.

Something to watch #

The Web is Good Now. Chris Coyier talks at CascadiaJS 2022 about a few things in the world of web design and development that have gotten a lot easier.

Thank you for reading #

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Seeing you in the next one.

Harry

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