Tags: starter

Grease

Grease is a website starter that makes building performant, accessible, aesthetic websites fast & frictionless.

Interestingly, this starter kit uses cascade layers for managing CSS.

Shift Happens

Marcin’s book is coming along nicely—you just know it’ll be a labour of love.

You’ve never seen a book on technology like this. Shift Happens is full of stories – some never before told – interleaved with 1,000+ beautiful full-color photos across two volumes.

The Kickstarter project launches in February. In the meantime, there are some keyboard-based games here for you to enjoy.

Utopian project kickstarter — Figma

Do you like the ideas behind Utopia? Do you use Figma?

If the answer to both those questions is “yes”, then James has made a very handy Figma community file for you:

This work-in-progress is intended as a starting point for designers to start exploring the Utopia approach, thinking about type and space in fluid scales rather than device-based breakpoints.

new.css

A minimal style sheet that applies some simple rules to HTML elements so you can take a regular web page and drop in this CSS to spruce it up a bit.

Kissa. Book. Launch. — Roden Explorers Archive

Own. Your. Nook. There’s power in owning your nook of the ‘net — your domain name, your design, your archives — and it’s easier than ever to do so, and run a crowdfunding campaign at the same time.

monica.css – Monica Dinculescu

Monica shares the little snippet of handy CSS she uses at the start of any project.

AccentDesign/Fractal-Atomic: An awesome starter point for your Fractal UI component library

If you want to use Brad’s Atomic Design naming convention—atoms, molecules, etc.—and you like using Fractal for making your components, this starter kit is just for you:

Keep what you need, delete what you don’t and add whatever you like on top of whats already there.

A simple starter kit for Eleventy - Hylia Starter Kit

Andy has made this very handy pre-configured starter kit for anyone who wants to get a blog up and running on Netlify with Eleventy.

Relaunching Pitas.com, a 20-year old blogging community by Andrew Smales — Kickstarter

This is so great! I don’t just mean the Kickstarter project itself, but this write-up of the origins of pitas.com—it’s a fascinating, heartfelt, genuine piece of web history.

The whole point behind Pitas was, and is, being a simple way to blog. You just open the site, type something into the entry box, and click POST.

And now it’s coming back …if this project gets funded.

I guess if the site gets infested by Nazis we’ll probably not do anything about it for 10 years, then make a bunch of wimpy statements, do nothing, maybe finally request free help from the community and still do nothing about it.

Just kidding, their asses will be kicked off immediately.

Shoelace.css: a back to the basics CSS starter kit

A starter kit of CSS that gives you some basic styles that you can tweak with custom properties.

For when you don’t need the whole boot.

Also:

Shoelace doesn’t ship with a grid system because you don’t need one. You should use the CSS Grid Layout instead.

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Improbable Botany by Wayward — Kickstarter

Improbable Botany is a brand-new science fiction anthology about alien plant conquests, fantastical ecosystems, benevolent dictatorships and techno-utopias.

This is the book plants don’t want you to read…

The illustrations look beautiful too.

100 Demon Dialogues – Lucy Bellwood

This is easily the most relatable 100 Days project I’ve seen:

I began posting a daily dialogue with the little voice in my head who tells me I’m no good.

Now you can back already-funded the Kickstarter project to get the book …and a plush demon.

Indie Microblogging: owning your short-form writing by Manton Reece — Kickstarter

Here’s an interesting Kickstarter project: a book about owning your notes (and syndicating them to Twitter) to complement the forthcoming micro.blog service.

The New Digital School - An Alternative to Design Education by Tiago and Cláudia Pedras — Kickstarter

You can back Tiago’s excellent New Digital School. It’s a fantastic project with the web at its heart, and I really hope it gets funded.

The Palate Deck: Playing Cards for Beer Tasting by Dave Shea — Kickstarter

Dave’s Kickstarter project looks like it could be very handy on Fridays a beer o’clock in the Clearleft office.

SpaceTime Coordinates Memento ~ your personal place in space by govy — Kickstarter

This is a rather lovely idea—a disc with eight rings, each marked with the position of a planet, the arrangement of which corresponds to a specific date.

I have lovely friends who are making lovely things. Surprisingly, lots of these lovely things aren’t digital (or at least aren’t only digital).

My friends Brian and Joschi want to put on an ambitious event called Material:

A small conference based in Reykjavik, Iceland, looking into the concept of the Web as a Material — 22nd July 2016, https://material.is

They’re funding it through Kickstarter. If you have any interest in this at all, I suggest you back it. Best bet is to pledge the amount that guarantees you a ticket to the conference. Go!

My friend Matt has a newsletter called 3 Books Weekly to match his Machine Supply website. Each edition features three book recommendations chosen by a different person each time.

Here’s the twist: there’s going to be a Machine Supply pop-up bookshop AKA a vending machine in Shoreditch. That’ll be rolling out very soon and I can’t wait to see it.

My friend Josh made a crazy website to tie in with an art project called Cosmic Surgery. My friend Emily made a limited edition run of 10 books for the project. Now there’s a Kickstarter project to fund another run of books which will feature a story by Piers Bizony.

An Icelandic conference, a vending machine for handpicked books, and a pop-up photo book …I have lovely friends who are making lovely things.

Cosmic Surgery by Alma Haser — Kickstarter

Well, here’s an art project with a difference: it comes with a web site built by Josh, a story written by Piers Bizony, and a book made by Emily.

Material Conference 2016 by Joschi Kuphal & Brian Suda — Kickstarter

I’m am soooo there!

Iceland, July 22nd: a conference about the material of the web …right up my alley.

You can get a ticket by backing the project on Kickstarter. Be sure to check out all the options.

See you in Reykjavík!

There’s an article in The New Yorker by Kathryn Schulz called The Really Big One. It’s been creating quite a buzz, and rightly so. It’s a detailed and evocative piece about the Cascadia fault:

When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries.

But there’s another hotspot on the other side of the country: the New Madrid fault line. There isn’t (yet) an article about in The New Yorker. There’s something better. Two articles by Maciej:

1. Confronting New Madrid and
2. Confronting New Madrid (Part 2).

The New Madrid Seismic Zone earned its reputation on the strength of three massive earthquakes that struck in the winter of 1811-1812. The region was very sparsely settled at the time, and became more sparsely settled immediately afterwards, as anyone with legs made it their life’s mission to get out of southern Missouri.

The articles are fascinating and entertaining in equal measure. No surprise there. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Maciej Cegłowski is the best writer on the web. Every so often I find myself revisiting Argentina On Two Steaks A Day or A Rocket To Nowhere just for the sheer pleasure of it.

I want to read more from Maciej, and there’s a way to make it happen. If we back him on Kickstarter, he’ll take a trip to the Antarctic and turn it into words:

Soliciting donations to take a 36-day voyage to the Ross Ice Shelf, Bay of Whales and subantarctic islands, and write it up real good.

Let’s make it happen. Let’s throw money at him like he’s a performing monkey. Dance, writer-boy, dance!