Tags: pacing

Typography Manual by Mike Mai

A short list of opinions on typography. I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, but it’s all fairly sensible advice.

Cole Peters — An Introduction to Constraint Based Design Systems

Design systems as codified constraints.

Building the new Utopia homepage | Trys Mudford

Trys has written up how he made that nifty little resizing widget on the Utopia homepage.

Tim Brown: CSS forces

Some interesting thoughts from Tim here. What if CSS could “displace” design decisions from one area to another?

For example, a flexible line spacing value in one container could influence margins that surround the text block. That change in spaciousness may mean that nearby headings need size or spacing adjustments to stay feeling connected.

This feels like the complete opposite way that most people approach design systems—modular, componentised, and discrete—but very in-line with the way that CSS has been designed—interconnected, relational and cascading.

Contextual Spacing For Intrinsic Web Design | Modern CSS Solutions

To complement her talk at Beyond Tellerrand, Stephanie goes through some of the powerful CSS features that enable intrinsic web design. These are all great tools for the declarative design approach I was talking about:

• clamp()
• min() and max()
• fit-content, min-content, and max-content
• grid functions like repeat() and minmax()
• custom properties for spacing

Flexibly Centering an Element with Side-Aligned Content – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

This is a great little tip from Eric for those situations when you want an element to be centred but you want the content inside that element to remain uncentred:

max-inline-size: max-content;
margin-inline: auto;

And I completely concur with his closing thoughts on CSS today:

It’s a nice little example of the quiet revolution that’s been happening in CSS of late. Hard things are becoming easy, and more than easy, simple. Simple in the sense of “direct and not complex”, not in the sense of “obvious and basic”. There’s a sense of growing maturity in the language, and I’m really happy to see it.

Thoughts on Exerting Control With Media Queries - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Some thoughts on CSS, media queries, and fluid type prompted by Utopia:

We say CSS is “declarative”, but the more and more I write breakpoints to accommodate all the different ways a design can change across the viewport spectrum, the more I feel like I’m writing imperative code. At what quantity does a set of declarative rules begin to look like imperative instructions?

In contrast, one of the principles of Utopia is to be declarative and “describe what is to be done rather than command how to do it”. This approach declares a set of rules such that you could pick any viewport width and, using a formula, derive what the type size and spacing would be at that size.

Utopia - an introduction - YouTube

James and Trys have made this terrific explanatory video about Utopia. They pack a lot into less than twenty minutes but it’s all very clearly and methodically explained.

Meet Utopia: Designing And Building With Fluid Type And Space Scales — Smashing Magazine

An excellent explainer from Trys and James of their supersmart Utopia approach:

Utopia encourages the curation of a system small enough to be held in short-term memory, rather than one so sprawling it must be constantly referred to.

Fluid Space Calculator | Utopia

Type and space are linked, so if you’re going to have a fluid type calculator, it makes sense to have a fluid space calculator too. More great work from Trys and James!

How Video Games Inspire Great UX – Scott Jenson

Six UX lessons from game design:

1. Story vs Narrative (Think in terms of story arcs)
2. Games are fractal (Break up the journey from big to small to tiny)
3. Learning loop (figure out your core mechanic)
4. Affordances (Prompt for known loops)
5. Hintiness (Move to new loops)
6. Pacing (Be sure to start here)

The Guardian digital design style guide

What a lovely way to walk through the design system underpinning the Guardian website.

Bonus points for using the term “tweak points”!

Pitfalls of Card UIs - daverupert.com

I’m going through a pattern library right now, and this rings true:

I’m of the opinion that all cards in a Card UI are destined to become baby webpages. Just like modals. Baby hero units with baby titles and baby body text and baby dropdown menu of actions and baby call to action bars, etc.

In some ways this outcome is the opposite of what you were intending. You wanted a Card UI where everything was simple and uniform, but what you end up with is a CSS gallery website filled with baby websites.

Juicy Studio: WAI-ARIA in HTML

How to get ARIA working in HTML (no namespaces in HTML, remember). Once again, Gez is providing superb documentation in the area of JavaScript and accessibility.