In the last year or two there has been a slow but steady trickle of articles attempting to account for UML ’s lack of long-term success (if you have time for only one, I suggest Hillel Wayne’s article ). As fate would have it, I had some involvement in UML standardisation in the early 2000s, so I saw some of the…
I heard about VHS recently. It’s a tool for creating recordings of command-line tools, so you can create little demos and tutorials about how to use them. You can write a script to run comman…
People reappropriating existing software to solve their own unique problems
Designing from cradle to grave is no longer good enough. We need to postpone that grave as long as possible. This is how to design for a right to repair.
Users that are prone to seizures or motion sickness may need to disable animation or motion. Add an option for users to disable this. This…
CSS gives us so many options when it comes to expressing color—we can use hex codes, rgb, hsl, and more. Which option should we choose? This turns out to be a surprisingly important decision! In this article, we'll take a tour of color formats in CSS, and see which option will serve us best.
Texts on this and that.
I love the way Apple names things: FireWire, App Nap, iPhone, iPod, EarPod, AirPod, AirPlay, FairPlay etc. It’s playful and there’s a lot of reuse of words and sounds. Having just finished reading the biography of Steve Jobs, I decided to visualize various Apple product and feature names as a network to see this reuse…
At the Fronteers conference, Manuel during his presentation did an exercise on building HTML that seemed fairly straightforward. On the site of Max Böck there's a thing you can click to open up a theme selector. What's that thing? Of course, it's a button! Because it opens the theme selector at the top of the […]
In the near future, transforming text over an entire document will become as commonplace as filtering images.
All browsers add an 8px margin on the body element – it’s part of the w3c-recommended default stylesheet which browsers generally use as a starting point for their own ‘user agent’ styles. But why 8px ? Where does that come from?
A few thoughts you're free to ignore
Painters at work notice details we’d ignore. From those details they develop delightful insights into reality. What do I mean? Let’s look at Van Eyck’s “Arnolfini Portrait” and find out:
What abstraction really means in programming, from PL theory, by Jimmy Koppel: why functions, interfaces, and indirection are not abstraction.
Choices in photographic tone reproduction
A century ago, the father of modern architecture, Le Corbusier, was commissioned by a French industrialist to design some homes for factory workers near Bordeaux. The resulting development, Cité Fr…
A look at some interesting use-cases for CSS flexbox and grid in Figma app.
One day I saw a few pictures shared by my friend Fish. I was attracted by their slight blur and the subtle glowing effects, and wondered what kind of filter function was used. But then she told me it's just because the camera lens wasn't wiped clean.
Note: this article will make more sense if you are using a mouse or other pointing device. Requires javascript.
Create And Share Mathematical Tiling Patterns
Just a couple of ideas! They came to me while I was poking around thinking of something to say for Alex Trost’s Holiday Mega-Stream (my segment starts here). Styleable Resizers Ya know how a …
I spent the last years making technology calm and pleasant to use. This is roughly how I did it.
AVIF is the first browser image format we've had in 10 years. Let's see how it performs…
An engineering deep-dive into skateboard truck design flaws
Bill Tavis designed this lovely vintage-style map of the familiar fractal shape, the Mandelbrot set. He is selling a poster version of the map, starting at the
Extending elements beyond the content area with CSS Grid and named grid lines.
