Tag: Some

Some Links on AI-Related Stuff

Posted on December 14, 2022 in Design

Every so often, I find that the links I save to read later fall into natural groups or patterns that reveal common threads of interest. The past couple of weeks have produced a lot of thoughts about ChatGPT, an AI-powered interface that responds to requests in a chat-like exchange. Sorta like a “Hey Siri” request, but in a Discord channel.

ChatGPT is just one of several AI-flavored tech, including GitHub’s CoPilot (writing code) and Dall-E (generative images and art).

Is it the end of human development? A new and exciting way to produce art? Just cocktail party conversation fodder? There are lots of opinions…

  • A Conversation With ChatGPT (Matthias Ott) — Matthias has a conversation with ChatGPT about typography that delves into deeply theoretical thoughts on design process. My favorite is in response to whether designers should learn to code: “Ultimately, whether or not designers should learn to code is a decision that each individual designer must make for themselves, based on their own goals and circumstances. Some designers may benefit from learning to code, while others may be better served by focusing on design principles and concepts.”
  • They were supposed to replace the creative jobs last (Dave Rupert)— “As interesting a future this creates, I’m a member of an old caste of people that still believes massive gains don’t come without realized costs; or more explicitly, electricity isn’t the only cost. What if the cost we’re paying is our perception of reality itself? It’s increasingly likely that the next thing you read or watch is the product of a content extruder.”
  • I just used ChatGPT to help with a complicated equation. — A reddit user used ChatGPT to write a complex equation in Notion. There were a couple hiccups, but it worked in the end.
  • ChatGPT Creates a Working WordPress Plugin – On the First Try (WP Tavern) — Sarah Gooding reporting on a ChatGPT experiment where Johnathon Williams was able to spit out a fully-functional WordPress plugin with a simple chat command. This is the sort of thing that both terrifies me but also blows my mind-hole.
  • ChatGPT Is a Smart Computer’s Impression of a Know-It-All (Pixel Envy) — Nick Heer points to an article on The Atlantic about ChatGPT that opens with three paragraphs written by ChatGPT. It’s crazy that it comes off as naturally as it does, even if it smells slightly fishy at first.
  • Use of ChatGPT1 generated text for content on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned. (Stack Overflow) — A mild dose of #HotDrama as far as Stack Overflow users posting ChatGPT-produced code as answers.
  • Midjourney vs. human illustrators: has AI already won? (Evil Martians) — I love the experiment in this post because it’s a clear example that AI doesn’t *just* work. In its current state, at best, AI is a junior designer when put to the task of creating an image: “After two and a half hours of back and forth with the AI, I was completely exhausted and decided to just upscale the most promising result.” A bonus is that the post concludes with a list of situations where AI might realistically help the team with future work — and it ain’t an entire person’s job.
  • Quick Thoughts on AI (Collaborative Fund) — Ha! Crazy to see a chart comparing how fast ChatGPT reached one million users to other popular services. It took Facebook 10 months, but only five days for ChatGPT.

Dall-E, I want a photo of a developer sitting at a desk with his head exploding while having a chat conversation on a desktop computer with an artificial intelligence algorithm.

Not bad, not bad.

Some Links on AI-Related Stuff originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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Some Links About CSS Gradients

Posted on November 2, 2022 in Design

Every once in a while, the blogging zeitgiest seems to coalesce around a certain topic and it’s like the saved articles in my bookmarks folder are having a conversation. The conversation sitting in there now is all about CSS Gradients and I thought I’d link some of the more interesting pieces.

  • Day 22: conic gradients — Manuel Matuzovic looked at conic gradients on Day 21 of his 100-day series about modern CSS, providing a nice high-level look at colors, angles, placement, and color stops. Then, on Day 22, he puts it use on the ::backdrop pseudo-element. (By the way, Twitter unexpectedly suspended his account — let’s help right that ship if we can.)
  • Do you really understand CSS radial-gradients? — Patrick Brosset has done guide-worthy work here and I’m honestly still working my way through it. But I apready appreciate his clear explanations and demos of things that I still muff up, like keywords for the size and shape of a radial gradient. I’m already linking this up in our own CSS Gradients Guide!
  • Highly Customizable Background Gradients — Hey, speaking of radial gradient, Scott Vandehey‘s recipe for one with multiple color stops made the rounds last week. His challenge was to create a gradient pattern that could support different color variations, which would normally be a hot mess of CSS classes and color values for each variation if not for using custom properties. This way, he can assign a custom property for the different colors and placement values for each color stop, then simply update the values depending on the context. And what’s more is that the way custom properties can be updated with JavaScript allowed Scott to build a tool for customizing his gradient pattern, which is generously shared at the end of the post.
  • CSS Halftone Patterns — Michelle Barker with a detailed breakdown of Ana Tudor’s “halftone” patterns. The effect is sorta like the dotted ink print of old school newspapers. While Ana uses Houdini under the hood for animation and hover effects, Michelle looks specifically at the halftone effect itself and how it’s constructed with a radial gradient. I especially love the way Michelle shows how to get from a straightforward grid of dots to one where the pattern is staggered a bit. And stick around to the end to see how she punctuates the effect with a mask-image that uses a linear gradient to create a fading effect. I riffed with this pattern a bit, too, and wound up with something neat that looks like a runny ink blot filter.
  • A Dashing Navbar Solution — Eric Meyer was given an interesting design challenge for a menu where a dotted line comes out of the “current page” link and becomes part of a larger dotted border along the left edge of the content container. Eric is always a great example of how to think like a front-end developer, and he does it here as he describes the alternate route he took using a linear gradient when he hit a snag with the standard approach of setting border-style: dotted on the element.
  • Masked Gradient Dashed Lines — Eric with a follow-up to that last link showing not only how he connected the dashes of a left border to the dashes of a raster image, but how his persnickety design eye convinced him to change his solution to mimic the lower resolution of the image’s dashes using two repeating linear background gradients as a mask-image on the background gradient. So nerdy and great!

Some Links About CSS Gradients originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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Some Things I Took Away From An Event Apart 2022 in Denver

Posted on October 13, 2022 in Design

An Event Apart 2022 Denver wrapped up yesterday. And while I was unable to make it to all three days this time, I did catch yesterday’s action — and it was awesome. I’m not very social or outgoing, but this was the first conference I’ve been to in at least a couple of years, and seeing folks in person was incredibly refreshing.

I took notes, of course! I thought I’d post ’em here because sharing is caring. At least, that’s what my six-year-old told me the other day when asking for a bite of my dessert last night.

I’ll break this down by speaker. Fair warning: I’m all about handwritten notes and a pretty visual fella, so my notes tend to be less… structured than most. And these notes are just things that stood out to me. They may not even be the presenter’s main idea, but they caught my attention!

Chris Coyier: Websites Are Good Now

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Chris has given this talk before (we linked it up just last week), but this time expanded it substantially, particularly with details on container relative units which, when combined with clamp(), make for more accurate responsiveness because the values are relative to the container rather than the viewport. So, you know how we often use viewport width (vh) units for fluid type?

font-size: clamp(1rem, 1rem + 2vw, 2rem);

Well, we can use a container relative unit like container query inline-size (cqi) instead, where 1cqi is equal to 1% of the container’s inline size (here’s the draft spec on that):

font-size: clamp(1rem, 1rem + 1cqi, 2rem);

Chris also talked quite a bit about the performance benefits of hosting at the edge. Probably no surprise because he’s written about it here more than a few times. Even as someone who had already read those articles, I honestly didn’t realize the complete concept of computing at the edge.

The idea is deceptively simple: global CDNs can serve assets quickly because they host them geographically close to the user. That’s pretty standard practice for serving raster images. But it has extended to static files, such as the same HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that power a site — build them in advance and serve the already compiled and optimized files from the speedy global CDN. That’s the whole Jamstack concept!

But what if you still require a server response from it? That ain’t very edge-y, is it? Well, now we have handlers capable of running on a single URL fetching data in advance, and injecting it ahead of render — directly from the CDN. Sure, there’s extra work happening in the background. Still, the fact that we can dynamically fetch data, inject it, pre-build it, serve it statically on demand, and have it run geographically closer to the user makes this blazingly fast.

Tolu Adegbite: How to Win at ARIA and Influence Web Accessibility

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Good gosh was this an excellent presentation! Tolu Adegbite schooled me so hard on WAI-ARIA that I had a hard time jotting down all the gems she shared — Roles! States! Labeling! Descriptions! Everything was extraordinarily well-covered, and stuff that I know I’ll be coming back to time and again.

But one specific thing that caught my attention is the accessibility of inline SVG. Even though SVG is related to other types of design assets, the fact that it is markup at the end of the day sets it apart because it isn’t always identified as an image.

<!-- Image tag is easily recognized as an image --> <img src="cat.svg" alt="An illustrated brown and white tabby kitten looking lovingly into the camera.">  <!-- Could be an image, maybe not? --> <svg viewBox="0 0 100 100">   <!-- etc. --> </svg>

Assistive tech is more likely to read inline SVG as an image by giving it a proper accessible role and label:

<svg    role="image"    aria-label="An illustrated brown and white tabby kitten looking lovingly into the camera."   viewBox="0 0 100 100" >   <!-- etc. --> </svg>

Miriam Suzanne: Cascading Layers of !mportance

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Hey, another CSS-Tricks alum! Miriam has been spending a bunch of time and effort on the Cascade Layers specification. She also wrote a big ol’ guide about them here at CSS-Tricks and talked about them at An Event Apart.

What has stuck with me most is how big of a mental shift this is. The concept isn’t complicated, per se. Declare @layer at the top of the CSS document, list the layers in order of specificity, then write styles in those layers. But for an old dinosaur like me who has been writing CSS for a while, I’m going to have to get used to the fact that Cascade Layers make it possible for a simple class selector to beat out something that usually wields a higher specificity, like an ID.

🤯

Miriam also reminded the room that Cascade Layers are just one tool we have in our specificity-managing toolbelt, in addition to selectors that affect specificity (e.g., :is(), :where(), and :has()).

Oh, and this is an interesting tidbit. As Miriam walked through the history of specificity in CSS, she recalled that !important was initially designed as a tool for users to override user agent and author styles. But somewhere down the line, we’ve adopted it to force author styles to the top. Cascade Layers help remove the excuse need to use !important because they provide us the power to “prioritize layers and protect inheritance.”

That is beautifully said, Miriam!

Dave Rupert: Unblocking Your Accessibility Backlog

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Imagine waking up one day to hundreds of GitHub notifications about reported issues on your site. Where do you even begin? Maybe close your laptop and get a root canal instead? That happened to Dave! An automated accessibility audit returned a massive pile of errors and assigned them as tickets for Dave to fix.

But he noticed a pattern after taking an Excel spreadsheet of those issues, moving them to Notion for a better view, hiding unnecessary columns, categorizing everything, and displaying the results in logical groups. Many of the reported issues were the same issue repeated on multiple pages. Just because an automated test returns a handful of errors doesn’t mean they’re all unique. That reduced a nice chunk of the tickets.

He went on to show how — with relatively little effort — the backlog of issues dwindled by nearly 50%.

There’s a lot to glean there, especially regarding how we process and organize our work. The biggest takeaway for me is when Dave said we have to emphasize individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Tools like the one scanning for accessibility errors are helpful, but they might not tell the entire story. Rather than take them at their words, it’s worth asking questions and gaining more context before diving into the mess.

As a bonus, reorganizing the issues in Notion allowed Dave to group issues in a way that clearly shows which impairments his product was actively discriminating against, giving him greater empathy for those misses and how to prioritize them.

One more virtual session by Hui Jing Chen capped the day, but admittedly, I missed about half of it because I was having a hallway conversation. The conversation was worth it, even though I am bummed I missed the presentation. I’ll be watching the video of it when it’s published!

Some Things I Took Away From An Event Apart 2022 in Denver originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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Please Give Me Some Space

Posted on June 3, 2022 in Design

There’s all kinds of ways to do that. Some more advisable and better-suited for certain situations than others, of course.

We could do it directly in HTML:

<p>We go from one line...<br><br> down a couple more.</p>

But that’s what CSS is really for:

<p>We go from one line...<span>down a couple more.</span></p>
span {   display: block;   margin-block-start: 1.5rem; }

Line height can also give us extra breathing room between lines of text:

p {   line-height: 1.35; }

Since we’re talking text, there’s also letter-spacing and word-spacing, not to mention text-indent:

But let’s talk boxes instead of text. Say we have two simple divs:

<div>Twiddle Dee</div> <div>Twiddle Dum</div>

Those are block-level so they’re already on different lines. We can reach for margin again. Or we could create the impression of space with padding. I suppose we could translate those suckers in either direction:

div:nth-child(2) {   transform: translateY(100px); }

But maybe those elements are absolutely positioned so we can use physical offsets:

div {   position: absolute; } div:nth-child(1) {   inset: 0; } div:nth-child(2) {   inset-inline-start: 100px; /* or top: 100px; */ }

If we’re working in a grid container, then we get gap-age:

<section>   <div>Twiddle Dee</div>   <div>Twiddle Dum</div> </section>
section {   display: grid;   grid-template-columns: 1fr 1fr;   gap: 100px; }

Same deal with a flexible container:

section {   display: flex;   gap: 100px; }

While we’re working in grid and flexible containers, we could call on any alignment property to generate space.

section {   display: flex;   align-items: space-between;   justify-content: space-between; }

There are tables, of course:

<table cellspacing="100">   <!-- etc.  -->   <tbody>     <tr>       <td>Twiddle Dee</td>       <td>Twiddle Dum</td>     </tr>   </tbody> </table>

Or the CSS-y approach:

/* We could use `display: table` if we're not working in a table element. */ table {   border-spacing: 100px; }

Let’s go deeper into left field. We can make one element look like two using a linear gradient with a hard color stop:

div {   background-image:     linear-gradient(       to right,       rgb(255 105 0 / 1) 50%,       rgb(207 46 46 / 1) 50%,       rgb(207 46 46 / 1) 100%     ); }

Then we do a head fake and insert a hard transparent color stop between the two colors:

As long as we’re fakin’ bacon here, might as well toss in the ol’ “transparent” border trick:

Let’s go back to text for a moment. Maybe we’re floating an element and want text to wrap around it… in the shape of the floated element while leaving some space between the two. We have shape-margin for that:

Dare I even mention the spacer.gif days?

<div>Twiddle Dee</div> <img src="spacer.gif"> <!-- 🤢 --> <div>Twiddle Dum</div>

There’s gotta be more

You’re all a smart bunch with great ideas. Have at it!

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Some notes on using esbuild

Posted on December 15, 2021 in Design

This is a fantastic article from Julia Evans about duking it out with modern front-end tooling. Julia has made a bunch of Vue projects and typically uses no build process at all:

 I usually have an index.html file, a script.js file, and then I do a <script src="script.js"> and that’s it.

Which I think is awesome and probably means those projects will last a damn long time. But, I understand a desire to move into some more modern dev tools, if nothing else to unlock the whole npm ecosystem. Basically, Julia wanted to do:

import Vue from 'vue';

That straight up implies npm and a bundler, because that syntax is bundler-specific (it’s invalid ES modules syntax). This used to pretty much imply webpack, rollup, or Parcel, but that’s starting to change and heavily suggest Vite instead.

But Julia didn’t want to reach for tooling that did too much ():

But I stopped using those tools and went back to my old <script src="script.js"> system because I don’t understand what those vue-cli-service and vite are doing and I didn’t feel confident that I could fix them when they break. So I’d rather stick to a setup that I actually understand.

So, with Vite being too much, Julia reached for esbuild. I can’t say I understand the details, but Vite uses esbuild internally for some things:

Vite uses esbuild instead of Rollup for dependency pre-bundling. This results in significant performance improvements in terms of cold server start and re-bundling on dependency invalidations.

So reaching for esbuild directly is a bit of a step down the complexity ladder.

It was so close to being a home run, but of course the dang complex nature of the front-end ecosystem struck again. The assumed copy of Vue that esbuild grabbed from the import Vue from 'vue'; was vue.runtime.esm.js, which is the version of Vue designed to be run in the browser, not the version that includes a compiler. Ughghk. Feels like they should be two separate packages or something. But Julia ultimately battled through that and it was a win:

I don’t understand everything esbuild is doing, but it feels a lot more approachable and transparent than the [webpack]-based tools that I’ve used previously.

All this is one more reason I’m still bullish on Skypack. You can use modern import statements like that and still not need a build process at all.

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Some Articles About Accessibility I’ve Saved Recently IV

Posted on October 29, 2021 in Design
  • A guide to designing accessible, WCAG-compliant focus indicators — Sara Soueidan says you can make more accessible focus outlines by doing your own, rather than leaving it to the browser — as long as you do it right. Deep dive!
  • a11y-syntax-highlighting — Eric Bailey’s repo of code syntax highlighting themes for a variety of software that are both attractive and meet WCAG color contrast guidelines (including support for Windows High Contrast mode as well).
  • Respecting Users’ Motion Preferences — Michelle Barker with a guide on when and how to honor people’s prefers-reduced-motion setting. While there is no one right way, it should be done. It’s interesting how many things might apply. Properties like transition and animation are fairly obvious, but did you think of scroll-behavior or things specifically in JavaScript (where you can also test for a preference)?
  • Accessibility testing — Jeremy Keith: “When you commission an accessibility audit, you should hope to get feedback that’s mostly in that third category—interactive widgets.” Don’t waste an accessibility expert’s time telling you about color contrast problems because you can find and fix those yourself fairly easily.
  • The effect of CSS on screen readers — Part of me wishes the effect of CSS on screen readers was “nothing” but Jozsef Polgar notes there are some things CSS does affect. A classic is setting list-style: none on lists will force them to not read as lists in VoiceOver. Jozsef points to Ben Meyer’s article covering similar ground.
  • In Quest of Search — Sara again, this time weighing in on <search>. I’ve heard mostly negative things (like, why the focus on this when there are so many bigger fish to fry, like <dialog> and inert), but Sara is all for it. I agree that we might as well have an element that gives us a free role="search" like we get with <nav> and <main>.
  • Accessible Palette: stop using HSL for color systems — Eugene Fedorenko says, “While HSL and HSV are fine choices for choosing a single color, they’re not suitable for building a color system, as they simply transform the RGB model and ignore the complexities of human perception.” It seems like everyone who has looked into next-gen color formats is a fan, but I haven’t wrapped my mind around them yet. Things like LCh, Lch(ab), HCL, LCH(uv)… There is starting to be some trickles of browser support.
  • One last time: custom styling radio buttons and checkboxes — Scott O’Hara notes that you can entirely replace these inputs with custom styling, and do it accessibly. Part of doing it right is dealing with every possible state. Worth noting: without replacing everything, you can get pretty far in styling checkboxes/radios by just changing width/height and the accent-color, as Dave and I noted here.
  • Understanding Logical Focus Order — Rachel Leggett explains it is “the idea that someone navigating your webpage with a keyboard (i.e. without a mouse) will encounter elements in an order that makes sense.” Nearly anytime you use the order property, you’re probably interferring here. But less obviously, hidden elements that remain interactive can confuse logical focus order.
  • Assistiv Labs — I didn’t realize there was a tool in the vein of CrossBrowserTesting or BrowserStack that allowed you to test in JAWS and NVDA and stuff — but there is! Just the other day I wanted to test in JAWS, so I spun up a (paid) copy of Parallels with my (paid) copy of Windows 10 and used my (40-minute test version) of JAWS to test. While it worked, it was not particularly cheap or without significant technical debt. This seems easier, although I haven’t actually tried it yet.

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Some Typography Links VIII

Posted on October 21, 2021 in Design

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Some Typography Links VII

Posted on September 1, 2021 in Design
  • SKWAR — Heydon Pickering made a hard-edged monospaced variable font. The axes are width and weight.
  • Twenty Bits I Learned About Making Fonts Book — Dan Cederholm has been making fonts, like Captain Edward and Ship Whistle and has turned his learnings into a book.
  • The perfect cross-platform serif and sans-serif font stacks — Daniel Aleksandersen has lots of details about pre-installed fonts across operating systems, like: Mac and iOS also come with Helvetica Neue preinstalled. It addresses some of Helvetica’s legibility issues … On Windows, you might find a more modern version of Arial called Arial Nova. Arial Nova makes much the same legibility improvements and compromises as Helvetica Neue.
  • Pairing fonts – 3 ways to find great typeface combinations — Oliver Schöndorfer says it’s an artistist decision so don’t be afraid to try stuff. But also, do you even need more than one? If so, have a reason. Repeat your font choices as often as you can, and only when something does not work in a given situation, add a new style.
  • Twitter thread about Really Sans — Riley Cran gets into optical sizing and how Really Sans […] is a sans serif typeface with two optical sizes. The small optical size works for text. The large optical size revives the tone of the 1970s headlines. I see Riley is using the pricing model based on # of employees rather than pageviews which I love.
  • Helvetica® Now Variable — I think having major fonts like Helvetica, that a lot of brands rely on, is the kind of thing that pushes the needle on variable fonts forward.
  • Fonts in the Twilight Zone — John Boardley looks at some rather unclassifiable fonts: Among my favorite kinds of typefaces are those that don’t fit neatly into predefined or existing categories; those that dip their toes into more than one genre, or take their cues from disparate historical periods.
  • Coding with Character — Doug Wilson looks at coding typefaces: If you spend all day looking at code, letters, and characters—why not make it fun? I’m down.

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Some Articles About Accessibility I’ve Saved Recently III

Posted on August 26, 2021 in Design
  • The perfect link — Rian Rietveld defines them: “When you click on them, they take you somewhere else.” Not much code in here (we’ve got that), just a lot of practical accessibility advice. For example, the alt text for a linked image can allude to the fact that it is a link. Just an image: “A cherry tree in full bloom.” Link: “Wikipedia on cherry blossoms.”
  • Google Announces Seismic Change to Docs — George Joeckel covers the unfolding news that Google Docs is going to be rendered in <canvas>, which feels like a massive WTF moment when it comes to accessibility. At one point, the vibe was that there would be a separate product for people with screen reader needs. Separate but equal isn’t a good situation. Looks like the <canvas> based rendering stuff is on hold for now, so community feedback FTW?
  • Don’t use custom CSS mouse cursors — Eric Bailey: I believe that letting CSS load a custom cursor was a mistake.
  • Web Designers Grapple With Downside to Flashy Animation: Motion Sickness — Katie Deighton covers the idea that things like preference toggles and prefers-reduced-motion exists (although not by name). Always interesting to see a topic like this makes its way to a major publication like The Wall Street Journal.
  • prefers-reduced-motion and browser defaults — Speaking of prefers-reduced-motion, Bruce Lawson on the paragraph-of-the-year: Yes, it was a meeting request from Marketing to discuss a new product page with animations that are triggered on scroll. Much as a priest grasps his crucifix when facing a vampire, I immediately reached for Intersection Observer to avoid the browser grinding to a halt when watching to see if something is scrolled into view. And, like an exoricst sprinkling holy water on a demon, I also cleansed the code with a prefers-reduced-motion media query.
  • Using CSS to Enforce Accessibility — Adrian Roselli covers this great tactic where you don’t get the proper CSS styling unless you’ve also implemented the appropriate accessibility attributes (e.g. [role="region"][aria-labelledby][tabindex] for a scrolling table). This is a powerful idea and happens to showcase the power of CSS nicely in a way that styling solutions that avoid using selectors don’t benefit from.
  • Accessibility testing with Storybook — Varun Vachhar covers how you can run Axe over your component library even as you code. Accessibility issues, like color contrast problems, are bugs. Might as well give yourself the same tooling opportunities to fix them at the same time you’d fix any other bug.
  • Making A Strong Case For Accessibility — Todd Libby covers how you can fight for accessibility at work. Attempt 1.) Ethical. Attempt 2.) Financial. Attempt 3.) Legal. 4.) Humanization. Attempt 5.) Don’t ask, just do it.
  • Your Image Is Probably Not Decorative — Eric Bailey covers that most images with an empty alt attribute (literally alt="", no space) probably should have had one, and that when and alt description isn’t available, there are other options (e.g. make it available as an inline image (spacer.gif) even if it isn’t one otherwise, <title> in SVG, etc.).
  • Writing great alt text: Emotion matters — Annnnd speaking of alt, Jake Archibald learns from a 2011 Léonie Watson article: The relevant parts of an image aren’t limited to the cold hard facts.

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Some Typography Links

Posted on July 16, 2021 in Design
  • Glitter text — whO (I learned a name for people who go by a one-word moniker like that: Mononymous) created a builder for fancy SVG-based type. It’s a custom font with <text>, and the fancy comes in with a gradient and somewhat exotic filters that make noise and blend the noise into the color.
  • Optical Size tweaking for dark mode — Mark Boulton opens by questioning the usefulness of variable fonts (blaspheme!) but then finds a nice use case in adjusting the optical size in dark mode. Robin covered that right here not too long ago.
  • Optical size, the hidden superpower of variable fonts — Speaking of optical size, Roel Nieskens digs into that here. It’s not just a weight thing… This feature will make letters actually change the way they look when shown in small or large sizes. It all happens automatically in the browser.”
  • Updates to v-fonts.com — Annnnd speaking of variable fonts, Piper Haywood talks about some updates to v-fonts.com, introducing some browsable taxonomies. It takes me about 20 seconds browing this site to want to redesign everything using variable fonts.
  • All you need is 5 fonts — (Matej Latin) I’ve been hearing about these mythical designers who focus all their creative energy on deep-learning how to use a very limited set of fonts. Maybe it’s kinda the same as us web nerds who only know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and leave it at that.
  • Best practices for fonts — Just like CSS, fonts affect Web Core Vitals in big ways (e.g. layout shifts and paints). Katie Hempenius is at it again here covering how to make fonts faster. I think these best practices are starting to set in a bit… preconnecting to the font host, subsetting, font-display, etc.
  • Sans Bullshit Sans — Kinda like the Cloud to Butt browser plugin, only the text replacements are done via ligatures (🤯) converting them into little Comic Sans badges. Some of them are angled? How the heck does that work?
  • Bryan Font — Jon Hicks builds a font for his father, John Bryan Hicks, who passed away. What a loving tribute.
  • Inherit ancestor font-size, for fun and profit — Lea Verou finds yet another use case for @property. I wonder if it’s an emerging best practice to register all your custom properties, since it unlocks possibilites and makes them behave more like you expect them to behave. Lea shows how you can browser test for @property in JavaScript, but if you for some reason you can’t do that and don’t mind pretty mind-bending CSS, Jane has pure CSS way.

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