Tags: ui

The Art of Penguin Science Fiction

A century of sci-fi book covers.

What the Vai Script Reveals About the Evolution of Writing - SAPIENS

How a writing system went from being a dream (literally) to a reality, codified in unicode.

Min-Max-Value Interpolation

Here’s a really nice little tool inspired by Utopia for generating one-off clamp() values for fluid type or spacing.

Fluid Type Scale - Generate responsive font-size variables

This is kind of a Utopia lite: pop in your minimum and maximum font sizes along with a modular scale and it spits out some custom properties for clamp() declarations.

Contextual Spacing For Intrinsic Web Design | Modern CSS Solutions

To complement her talk at Beyond Tellerrand, Stephanie goes through some of the powerful CSS features that enable intrinsic web design. These are all great tools for the declarative design approach I was talking about:

• clamp()
• min() and max()
• fit-content, min-content, and max-content
• grid functions like repeat() and minmax()
• custom properties for spacing

You Don’t Need A UI Framework — Smashing Magazine

We noticed a trend: students who pick a UI framework like Bootstrap or Material UI get off the ground quickly and make rapid progress in the first few days. But as time goes on, they get bogged down. The daylight grows between what they need, and what the component library provides. And they wind up spending so much time trying to bend the components into the right shape.

I remember one student spent a whole afternoon trying to modify the masthead from a CSS framework to support their navigation. In the end, they decided to scrap the third-party component, and they built an alternative themselves in 10 minutes.

This tracks with my experience. These kinds of frameworks don’t save time; they defer it.

The one situation where that works well, as Josh also points out, is prototyping.

If the goal is to quickly get something up and running, and you don’t need the UI to be 100% professional, I do think it can be a bit of a time-saver to quickly drop in a bunch of third-party components.

Progressively Enhanced Builds - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Rather than thinking, “how do I combine a bunch of disparate content, templates, and tooling into a functioning website?”, you might think “how do I start at a functioning website with content and then use templates and build tooling to enhance it?”

I think Jim is onto something here. The more dependencies you have in your build process, the likelier it is that over time one of them will become a single point of failure. A progressive enhancement approach to build tools means you’d still be able to launch your site (even if it’s not in its ideal state).

I want to be able to view, edit, and if need be ship a website, even if the build process fails. In essence, if the build does fail I can still take all the source files, put them on a server, and the website remains functional (however crude).

UI Pattern: Natural Language Form

I only just found this article about those “mad libs” style forms that I started with Huffduffer.

Blogging and the heat death of the universe • Robin Rendle

A cautionary tale on why you should keep your dependencies to a minimum and simplify your build process (if you even need one):

If it’s not link rot that gets you then it’s this heat death of the universe problem with entropy setting in slowly over time. And the only way to really defend against it is to build things progressively, to make sure that you’re not tied to one dependency or another. That complex build process? That’s a dependency. Your third party link to some third party font service that depends on their servers running forever? Another dependency.

Be the browser’s mentor, not its micromanager. - Build Excellent Websites

This one-page site that Andy has made to illustrate his talk at All Day Hey is exactly what I was talking about with declarative design.

Give the browser some solid rules and hints, then let it make the right decisions for the people that visit it, based on their device, connection quality and capabilities. This is how they will get a genuinely great user experience, rather than a fragmented, broken one.

Thoughts on Exerting Control With Media Queries - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Some thoughts on CSS, media queries, and fluid type prompted by Utopia:

We say CSS is “declarative”, but the more and more I write breakpoints to accommodate all the different ways a design can change across the viewport spectrum, the more I feel like I’m writing imperative code. At what quantity does a set of declarative rules begin to look like imperative instructions?

In contrast, one of the principles of Utopia is to be declarative and “describe what is to be done rather than command how to do it”. This approach declares a set of rules such that you could pick any viewport width and, using a formula, derive what the type size and spacing would be at that size.

Carousels: No one likes you - Joni Halabi

The only person who wants a carousel on your site is you. That’s it. It’s a self-serving vanity project so that you can showcase all of your babies at the same time without telling the world which one is your favorite.

Utopia - an introduction - YouTube

James and Trys have made this terrific explanatory video about Utopia. They pack a lot into less than twenty minutes but it’s all very clearly and methodically explained.

Software Paper Cuts · Matthew Bischoff

Running up against a paper cut bug feels a little bit like getting a physical one: not the end of the world, but certainly unpleasant. These types of tiny annoyances accrete over time, especially when no one is paying attention to them. In a single day of using my phone, I encounter dozens of these minor bugs that each annoy me just a little bit, making the task I’m trying to accomplish just a little bit more complicated.

Fluid type sizes and spacing — Piper Haywood

Prompted by Utopia, Piper shares her methodology for fluid type in Sass.

Unveiling the new WebPageTest UI - WebPageTest Blog

If you haven’t seen it yet, the new redesign of WebPageTest is lovely!

The UI fund

This is an excellent initiate spearheaded by Nicole and Sarah at Google! They want to fund research into important web UI work: accessibility, form controls, layout, and so on. If that sounds like something you’ve always wanted to do, but lacked the means, fill in the form.