Link tags: stem

Default Isn’t Design

Framework monoculture is a psychology problem as much as a tech problem. When one approach becomes “how things are done,” we unconsciously defend it even when standards would give us a healthier, more interoperable ecosystem. Psychologists call this reflex System Justification.

The explains a lot about React-driven front-end development!

When a single toolset becomes the default, we don’t just prefer it, we build narratives that justify it. And that’s when a tool quietly becomes a gate or even a destructive force.

How to create a typographic hierarchy – Pangram Pangram Foundry

1. Start with the text
2. Use size intentionally
3. Contrast weights and styles
4. Play with spacing
5. Use colour, but don’t rely on it
6. Limit your font choices (but choose well and wisely)
7. Repeat, repeat, repeat
8. Test your system

Atlas of Space

A nifty interactive 3D map of our solar system

Frame of preference – Aresluna

Marcin has outdone himself this time. Not only has he created an exhaustive history of the settings controls in Apple interfaces, he’s gone and made them all interactive!

While it’s easy to be blown away by the detail of the interactive elements here, it’s also worth taking a moment to appreciate just how good the writing is too.

Bravo!

(optional.is) Latency and the Sea

Brian’s excellent comparison of network latency and the nervous system of animals:

If an earthquake occurs in California USA, halfway around the globe someone can find out faster than a blue whale detects something has touched its tail.

Bias in Design Systems - bencallahan.com

Thoughtful analysis from Ben (as always).

The Shape of a Mars Mission (Idle Words)

You can think of flying to Mars like one of those art films where the director has to shoot the movie in a single take. Even if no scene is especially challenging, the requirement that everything go right sequentially, with no way to pause or reshoot, means that even small risks become unacceptable in the aggregate.

We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It — The New Atlantis

Strong Deb Chachra vibes in this ongoing series by Charles C. Mann:

he great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work.

UI Pace Layers - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Every UI control you roll yourself is a liability. You have to design it, test it, ship it, document it, debug it, maintain it — the list goes on.

It makes you wonder why we insist on rolling (or styling) our own common UI controls so often. Perhaps we’d be better off asking: What are the fewest amount of components we have to build to deliver value to our users?

Prescriptive and Descriptive Information Architectures | Jorge Arango

Interesting—this is exactly the same framing I used to talk about design systems a few years ago.

CSS wants to be a system - daverupert.com

CSS wants you to build a system with it. It wants styles to build up, not flatten down.

Truth!

Something went wrong · molily

Debating complexity is pointless because it’s a subjective metric. Every developer has a different gut feeling about simplicity, complexity and the appropriate amount of complexity for a given task. When people try to find an objective definition, they come to wildly different results. And that’s okay.

Instead, we should focus on hard metrics from a user perspective. Performance, efficiency, compatibility, accessibility and fault-tolerance can be measured, tested and evaluated, automatically and manually.

Any amount of complexity is fine as long as these goals are met.

Information Architecture First Principles | Jorge Arango

• People only understand things relative to things they already understand
• People only understand things in context
• People rely on patterns and consistency
• People seek to minimize cognitive load
• People have varying levels of expertise and familiarity
• People are goal-oriented
• People often don’t know what they’re looking for
• Information is more useful when it’s actionable

Should this be a map or 500 maps? - by Elan Ullendorff

This is kind of about art direction and kind of about design systems.

There is beauty in trying to express something specific; there is beauty too in finding compromises to create something epic and collective.

My only concern is whether we are considering the question at all.

What would HTML do? - The Cascade

Whenever I confront a design system problem, I ask myself this one question that guides the way: “What would HTML do?”

HTML is the ultimate composable language. With just a few elements shuffled together you can create wildly different interfaces. And that’s really where all the power from HTML comes up: everything has one job, does it really well (ideally), which makes the possible options almost infinite.

Design systems should hope for the same.

HTMX Is So Cool I Rolled My Own! – David Bushell – Freelance Web Design (UK)

Call it HTMLX or call it Hijax, what matters isn’t the code so much as the idea:

Front-end JavaScript fatigue is real. I’m guilty myself of over-engineering JS UI despite preferring good old server templates. I don’t even think HTMX is that good but the philosophy behind it embarrasses the modern JavaScript developer. For that I appreciate it very much.

Invisible success – Eric Bailey

Snook’s Law in action:

Big, flashy things get noticed. Quiet, boring things don’t.

There isn’t much infrastructure in place to quantify the constant, silent, boring, predictable, round-the-clock passive successes of this aspect of design systems after the initial effort is complete.

A lack of bug reports, accessibility issues, design tweaks, etc. are all objectively great, but there are no easy datapoints you can measure here.

Robin Rendle — The Other Side

Robin describes his experience of using a design system, having previously been one of the people making and enforcing a design system:

However it’s only now as a product designer that I realize just how much I want the design system to carefully guide me instead of brute-forcing its decisions onto my work. I want to fall into the loving embrace of the system because I don’t wanna have to think about hex values or button sizes or box shadows. I don’t want to rethink padding and margins or rethink the grid each time I design a page.

But by golly if a design system says “no” to me then I will do my very best to blow it up.

Patternsday 2024 – Photos by Marc Thiele

Lovely photos by Marc from Patterns Day!

Patterns Day Patterns | Trys Mudford

Trys threads the themes of Patterns Day together:

Jeremy did a top job of combining big picture and nitty-gritty talks into the packed schedule.