A Bestiary of Functions for Systems Designers
Whether your game surfaces its numbers to the player or not, odds are it has underlying systems that rely on them, and you use functions to determine how those numbers affect each other. In other words, a mathematical function is usually at the core of the answer to a bunch of frequent game design questions.
The Tragedy of Safari 15 for Mac’s ‘Tabs’
Change for change’s sake alone is masturbatory. That with Safari 15 it actually makes usability *worse*, solely for flamboyant cosmetic reasons, is downright perverse.we
An interactive review of the Oklab perceptual color space
Blog of Raph Levien.
The Importance of Learning CSS
I know so many super-talented developers who share the same achilles heel: CSS. Instead of trying to “outrun” CSS, this article explores why leaning in and going deeper can be a tremendous boon for your development life and your career.
Make Patterns Pop Out of Heatmaps with Seriation (2018)
One of the easiest ways to start visualizing data is to turn a table into a heatmap: every cell gets a colour, the higher the number the brighter the colour. Unfortunately, this is often a fairly unrewarding exercise, yielding graphics that look like plaid or tartan fabric. Part of the problem is that the rows and…
PSD is not my favourite file format
This programmer does not like the PSD File Format:
Please Stop “Fixing” Font Smoothing (2012)
I wrote two posts on the topic of WebKit font smoothing before, but unfortunately the situation has grown worse since then. In allowing the designer to pick their own font smoothing mode with the -webkit-font-smoothing CSS property, WebKit developers have opened up an opportunity for typographic abuse, namely, the…
Opinion-Driven Design
Some of my personal thoughts on how we design open source projects
A collection of outlandish human-computer interaction papers
Homepage of Florian Echtler
Dithered images and websites (2020)
That's a lot of data. More bytes on average than html, css, fonts, and javascript combined.
What Is React: A Visual Introduction for Beginners
What is React? What is it used for? Why React? This is an interactive guide for complete beginners. The only prerequisite is some knowledge of HTML.
The Geometry of Color Perception
The previous pages have explained three very different methods for defining a color: (1) the measurement of the color stimulus as a spectral emittance or reflectance curve in colorimetry ; (2) the proportional responses to the stimulus by the L , M and S cones, represented as a chromaticity diagram ; and (3) the…
Fantasy Cartography: Just Add Something Blotchy
It's been a while since I've done a graphicky post, so here's a new one for the chilly weather. Over on the doomed platform of magnificen...