Two Years — Paul Robert Lloyd

Everything Easy is Hard Again – Frank Chimero

I wonder if I have twenty years of experience making websites, or if it is really five years of experience, repeated four times.

I saw Frank give this talk at Mirror Conf last year and it resonated with me so so much. I’ve been looking forward to him publishing the transcript ever since. If you’re anything like me, this will read as though it’s coming from directly inside your head.

In one way, it is easier to be inexperienced: you don’t have to learn what is no longer relevant. Experience, on the other hand, creates two distinct struggles: the first is to identify and unlearn what is no longer necessary (that’s work, too). The second is to remain open-minded, patient, and willing to engage with what’s new, even if it resembles a new take on something you decided against a long time ago.

I could just keep quoting the whole thing, because it’s all brilliant, but I’ll stop with one more bit about the increasing complexity of build processes and the decreasing availability of a simple view source:

Illegibility comes from complexity without clarity. I believe that the legibility of the source is one of the most important properties of the web. It’s the main thing that keeps the door open to independent, unmediated contributions to the network. If you can write markup, you don’t need Medium or Twitter or Instagram (though they’re nice to have). And the best way to help someone write markup is to make sure they can read markup.

Resilient Web and Tools — David Larlet

David picks up on one of the closing themes of Resilient Web Design—how we choose our tools. This has been on my mind a lot; it’s what I’ll be talking about at conferences this year.

That’s part of my job to ease processes and reduce frictions. That’s part of my job to take into account from the early beginning of a product its lasting qualities.

There’s a very good point here about when and how we decide to remove the things we’ve added to our projects:

We spend our time adding features without considering at the same pace the removal of useless ones. And still the true resilience (or is it perfection Antoine?) is when there is nothing more to take away. What are you removing on Monday to make our Web more resilient?

The Web’s Grain by Frank Chimero

Superb. Absolutely superb.

A magnificent tour-de-force by Frank on the web’s edgelessness.

Read. Absorb. Read again. This is the essence of responsive web design, distilled.

Code for America — Responsive Web Design on Huffduffer

This was a fun podcast—myself and Cyd from Code For America talk to Karen and Ethan about how we worked together. Good times.

The audio is available for your huffduffing pleasure.

Jon Aizlewood · Agile and design — How to avoid Frankensteining your product

Jon’s ranting about Agile here, but it could equally apply to design systems:

Agile and design is like looking at a picture through a keyhole. By slicing big things into smaller things, designers must work incrementally. Its this incrementalism that can lead to what I call the ‘Frankensteining’ of a digital product or service.