Really enjoyable post by Mono designer Johan Ronsse on how to design great web forms. I especially like the simple before and after animated gifs that illustrate exactly what changes to make and where.
I recently attended the third annual CSSConf here in NYC. The conference scheduled sixteen speakers over two days with varied content and subject matter. Some speakers talked about the gap between design and development. Others touched on coworker relationships and styling for the web’s future, “post CSS”. Most focused on CSS-based web development. Here are a few takeaways that are easy for almost anyone to integrate into their workflow.
Practical Typography’s Matthew Butterick on Medium and other similar writing platforms:
We can’t say that Medium et al. are offering minimalist design. Only the veneer is minimalist. What they’re re ally offering is a shift from design as a choice to de sign as a constant. Instead of minimalist design, a better term might be homogeneous design.
Matthew is clearly anti-Medium with his stance here, and he goes onto attack many fronts; lack of typographic customization is just the beginning. Pro or con Medium as a publishing platform for the future, it’s nevertheless an excellent read.
Mark Llobrera, writing on a wonderful post regarding Facebook’s Instant Articles and web performance over at A List Apart:
For most of us, even the ones I would describe as pro-performance, everything in the contemporary web design production pipeline works against the very focus required to keep the web fast. Unless you make some fundamental choices and set up clear constraints, you can—and will—build and ship beautiful sites without feeling a single ounce of the pain and frustration that your users encounter when all of that beautiful imagery, CSS, and JavaScript comes trickling down their mobile network.
From Medium, a one stop shop for everything about writing high quality text for the web. Everything from custom underlines to print styles, it’s all here. For web developers/designers, the best part is a technical supplement that outlines a lot of the CSS Medium uses to achieve its typography and layout.
Interesting piece from Alastair Coote on how to determine if a user is accessing your web property via either full browser or in-app web view. It effectively is a user agent string check, which by it’s nature means you’re not batting 100% accuracy, but it’s a cool idea nevertheless.
Object-fit is a CSS attribute that should have had widespread support a long time ago; super useful. It’s a bummer that Microsoft still lists the object-fit parameter as merely “Under Consideration”, but falling back for IE is easy and safe.
Wonderful to see the technology behind Slack’s Mac app get such a slick site and documentation from Github. Can’t wait to dive into this for side project work.
Essential reading by the Filament group on how to speed up the “critical path” of your web site’s load performance. The post includes coverage of asynchronous JavaScript loading and inlining critical CSS.
Excellent explanation of how the Flexbox CSS operator determines layout. I especially enjoy how the author breaks down the math calculations and proportion.
