Retrofitting fluid typography | Clagnut by Richard Rutter
Here’s a taste of what Rich will be delivering at Patterns Day on Thursday—can’t wait!
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.
Related links
Link colors and the rule of tincture
When you think of heraldry what comes to mind is probably knights in shining armor, damsels in distress, jousting, that sort of thing. Medieval stuff. But I prefer to think of it as one of the earliest design systems.
This totally checks out.
Classic rock, Mario Kart, and why we can’t agree on Tailwind - Josh Collinsworth blog
I suspect most people on opposing sides of the Tailwind debate actually complete agree on Tailwind itself. I don’t think we disagree on atomic CSS, or utility classes; I think our contention comes from the valuations we made long before we ever chose our tools. Where one of us sees a selling point, the other sees a flaw.
This is very much in line with what I’ve been talking about in my presentation on declarative design.
As Jeremy Keith put it so well: where it comes to styling, Builders want imperative programming; they want to specify what they want, where they want, how they want it. No surprises.
Crafters instead want declarative programming; they understand how to wield the power of creating rules of governance within a complex system, and wish to use that power, rather than micromanaging the browser.
The machines won’t save your design system — Hey Jovo Design
Every day, a new marketing email, Medium post, or VC who will leave Twitter when they’re cold in a body bag tells us that machine learning (ML, which they call AI because it sounds more expensive) is going to change the way we work. Doesn’t really matter what your job is. ML is going to read, write, code, and paint for us.
Naturally, the excitement around ML has found its way into the design systems community. There’s an apparent natural synergy between ML and design systems. Design systems practitioners are tantalized by the promise of even greater efficiency and scale. We wish a machine would write our docs for us.
We are all, every single one of us, huge fucking nerds.
Pixel Pioneers Bristol 2023 Speaker Spotlight: Jeremy Keith
Oliver asked me some questions about my upcoming talk at Pixel Pioneers in Bristol in June. Here are my answers.
Related posts
Five questions
I gave five answers to Oliver, who’s organising the Pixel Pioneers event in Bristol.
Hard to break
Brittleness is the opposite of resilience. But they both share something in common.
Handing back control
An emergent theme at An Event Apart Seattle 2019.
Declaration
HTML. JavaScript. Why not both?
The schedule for Patterns Day
Just look at that line-up!