18F user experience (UX) designers join cross-functional teams to improve interactions between government agencies and the people they serve. The 18F UX Guide helps us get this job done. It’s a starting point for UX design at 18F: doing it, discussing it, and ensuring it’s done to a consistent level of quality.
Another useful open source guide from the incredible team at 18F.
Another great collection from Reagan Ray, this time pulling together beautiful lettering from science fiction films released prior to 2000.
Previously: Famous Mid-Century Homes
Author Austin Kleon has been keeping busying during The QuaranTimes by making the tiniest of zines. He’s collected thirty of them here. I haven’t looked through all of them yet, but The New Book is an early favorite.
the Eameses’ massive archive—one million items, including their films—went to the Library of Congress after Ray died in 1988. Now the stewards of The Work of Charles and Ray Eames, the Library of Congress is at work creating preservation-quality copies of their films. They’ve done 20 already with more to come.
In this article, Herman Miller’s WHY Magazine details three recently preserved Eames films: S-73 Sofa Compact, Soft Pad, and Fiberglass Chairs—Something of How They Get the Way They Are.
Also worth watching, Eames: The Architect and the Painter.
Reagan Ray pulls together a stunning, thematically-organized collection of mid-century modern homes from around the country and across the decades.
Illustrator Pam Wishbow shares some stellar mid-century modern-esque sketches for use as backgrounds for your video chats. Delightful!
The A11Y style guide comes with pre-populated accessible components that include helpful links to related tools, articles, and WCAG guidelines to make your site more inclusive. These components also serve as a guide for both HTML markup and SCSS/CSS code, to inform designers, front-end and back-end developers at every stage of the website’s creation.
Frend components are modest and dependency-free. They are built with web standards as a priority and aim to avoid assumptions about tooling or environment. Care has been taken to make sure each component is compliant, keyboard navigable and properly interpreted by assistive technologies.
The how, where, why, and when we communicate. Long form asynchronous? Real-time chat? In-person? Video? Verbal? Written? Via email? In Basecamp? How do we keep everyone in the loop without everyone getting tangled in everyone else’s business? It’s all in here.
An unsurprisingly blunt, plain language set of guidelines from the Basecamp team. Useful as a guide for other teams looking to build or improve upon their internal communication habits.
Add a reacji (emoji reaction) to a message to send it zipping through the microscopic pipelines inside Slack, popping out into another channel—where the right people can see and act upon it.
Found this useful Slack integration via Mina Markham’s tweet:
Protip: I have a channel in my work Slack (or Slack’s Slack, if you will) that catalogs anything with my custom :mina: reacji.
Definitely came in handy during promo cycle :thumbsup:
The BBC Global Experience Language (GEL) Technical Guides are a series of framework-agnostic, code-centric recommendations and examples for building GEL design patterns in websites. They illustrate how to create websites that comply with all BBC guidelines and industry best practice, giving special emphasis to accessibility.
This technical companion to the BBC’s Global Experience Language serves as a reference for developers implementing GEL’s user experience recommendations.
Jordan shared this Harvard Business Review article on Twitter recently. There’s a lot of great advice that leaders within organizations should take to heart.
This particular passage hit really close to home:
Problem spotters don’t especially enjoy bearing bad news, but they do it to advance the organization. To help you, the leader. Maybe it’s because they have a different perspective, or a fresh take based on that spot in the world where only they stand. Maybe it’s that they are better at expressing the issue, where others struggle. Stop making it so hard on them to help you.
Address the message not the messenger.
A useful, regularly updated post here from Vladimir Dementyev on configuring Docker for use with Ruby on Rails development. Also worth checking out the author’s RailsConf 2019 slides and the associated GitHub repository.
Putting to rest some of the most persistent falsehoods about passwords and what it takes to come up with strong passwords and practice good password security in 2019.
This is a very helpful, easy-to-read guide covering current best practices for keeping your passwords and accounts secure.
This in depth post details Bugsnag’s thought process where they arrive at using Google’s gRPC and Protocol Buffers to power their microservices architecture.
The other two articles in this series are also quite useful (and equally thorough):
An elegant—though technically complex—solution by Søren Birkemeyer that adds a timeline of changes to the bottom of blog posts.
2018 is the year of HyperCard.
…and 2020 will be the year of Gopher.
User Experience Designer Matthias Ott encouraging a return to personal websites:
There is one alternative to social media sites and publishing platforms that has been around since the early, innocent days of the web. It is an alternative that provides immense freedom and control: The personal website.
💯
Submit a URL to generate a node map of all of the requests on the page. Rapidly identify what third-parties are on your site, where your transmitted bytes are coming from and how slow your domains are!
I can’t believe I haven’t saved this useful website before, but it made its way back into my timeline via Jeffrey’s notes from An Event Apart Chicago. Learn more about Request Map Generator by reading Simon Hearne’s introductory blog post.
“When can I start using CSS grid layout?” “Too bad that it’ll take some more years before we can use grid in production.” “Do I need Modernizr in order to make websites with CSS grid layout?” “If I wanted to use grid today, I’d have to build two to three versions of my website.” The CSS grid layout module is one of the most exciting developments since responsive design. We should try to get the best out of it as soon as possible, if it makes sense for us and our projects.
This 2017 article from Manuel Matuzović goes deep on how to creatively use CSS Grid Layout in a progressively-enhanced manner. Naturally, the baseline techniques we use will change over time, but Manuel’s demo illustrates how you might think about design and layout as experience layers.
Looking for more great links organized by year? Browse the archives.