A running collection of things I’ve found interesting, well-made, or worth spreading—mostly from art, design, tech, photography, and film, with the occasional thought or two of my own.
"Because no matter how good Figma is, it's an intermediary abstraction, like Photoshop before it. If you're working with the web, you'll work faster without such an abstraction layer in the design process filtering the collaboration between programmer and designer.
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Leave Figma to the early conceptual stages of web design. Or put it to good use for native mobile development, when you rarely have a choice. But embrace doing the bulk of the design for the web directly in the core elements of its periodic table."
The old "should designers code?/designers should code" yadda yadda yadda.
I mostly agree, that we keep replacing Photoshop with faster, more convenient tools for us to make pictures of websites. End of the day though, they’re still pictures of websites and apps.
When you're working on an app with a mostly locked set of components and styles (a design system), working directly in code can be totally OK, and will shorten the time it takes to ship the change. Add to that the (waste of) time spent on keeping your pictures of the app synchronised with the app itself and working directly in code makes even more sense. Exploring wildly different layouts and design ideas is still faster with visual tools.
"And thus, throwing humility to the wind, I’d like to propose Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem, as a sort of play on Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. More specifically, it will always end up frustrating very large segments of the population and will always fail to accurately represent the “proper” level of moderation of anyone."
"You, me, and UI", is a nice article series on various topics to do with user interfaces from The Verge.
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What's in a day if you mash the activities of all 8 billion people on Earth into one?
Among other things:
Time spent growing and collecting food varied strongly with wealth, from over 1 hour in low-income countries to less than 5 minutes in high-income countries.
via Om Malik
Craig Mod's experience in Venice very much matches my own:
As I lifted her substantial luggage, careful to do so only with my legs, not my back, she intoned in German-accented English: Thank you, this broken foot of mine vould not keep me avay, nothing vould keep me avay from my dear Venice.
Her deranged veneration seemed omnipresent and fundamental to the city. I felt surrounded by cult worshipers. But they all vanished when I ippon ura’d (“one street backed” as we call it in my Japan pop-up newsletters) the sinking town. It seemed as if very few were here to explore.
Radiating intent also has the advantage over asking permission that the “radiator” keeps responsibility if things go sour. It doesn’t transfer the blame the way seeking permission does, which is good.
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Substack is in the news much these days in connection to the bird site. Here, Elizabeth Lopatto of The Verge laments the login wall many websites pester you with these days. Before Substack, there was Medium making the same moves, as some might remember. Substack also disables text selection, a dick move of the highest order.
via Pixel Envy
On June 29, 2014, at 8:02 p.m. ET, a user named NooYawkCity made the first of what would come to be many posts to a popular martial-arts forum on reddit.com. It was titled “58 year old white belt”."
I found this fascinating – Francis Ford Coppola has one guiding word for every movie he makes.
via Austin Kleon
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This has been in my notes for far too long, so long that I've no idea where I learned of it. Anyway, Ooh Directory is a directory of (at the time of this writing) over a thousand blogs on a plethora of topics.
The Sony Design Gallery is way, way too small, considering the vast history of consistently exquisite industrial design Sony has produced.
(via Daring Fireball)
Simple Type Co. is a small type foundry from Dan Cederholm of Dribble fame. They have some fun typefaces as well as some neat goods. My favs are the anchorsand tee (pictured here) and the ampersandwitch pin. What can I say, I like ampersands.
I was bummed to be hit across the face with a "subscribe!" modal though.
