This is a terrific presentation from Paul. He gives a history lesson and then focuses on what makes the indie web such a powerful idea (hint: it’s not about specific technologies).
Exploring the graphic design history of Penguin books:
The covers presented on this site are all from my own collection of about 1400 Penguins, which have been chosen for the beauty or interest of their cover designs. They span the history of the company all the way back to 1935 when Penguin Books was launched.
Good advice for documentation—always document steps in the order that they’ll be taken. Seems obvious, but it really matters at the sentence level.
Another terrific interactive tutorial from Ahmad, this time on container queries.
This isn’t just a great explanation of :has(), it’s an excellent way of understanding selectors in general. I love how the examples are interactive!
This is a wonderfully in-depth interactive explainer on touch target sizes, with plenty of examples.
This is a terrific interactive explainer!
Michelle has written a detailed practical guide to container queries here.
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.
I like Jason’s guidelines—very in keeping with The Session’s house rules.
And I really like his motivation for trying out comments:
The timing feels right. Twitter has imploded and social sites/services like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon are jockeying to replace it (for various definitions of “replace”). People are re-thinking what they want out of social media on the internet and I believe there’s an opportunity for sites like kottke.org to provide a different and perhaps even better experience for sharing and discussing information. Shit, maybe I’m wrong but it’s definitely worth a try.
Yes! More experiments like this please! Experiments that aren’t just “let’s clone Twitter”.
No one says “information superhighway” anymore, but whenever anyone explains net neutrality, they do so in terms of fast lanes and tolls. Twitter is a “town square,” a metaphor that was once used for the internet as a whole. These old metaphors had been joined by a few new ones: I have a feeling that “the cloud” will soon feel as dated as “cyberspace.”
Mandy takes a deep dive into the treatment of altruism in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
I didn’t know the Washington Post had a design system or that the system has this good section on accessibility.
There’s a time for linguistics, and there’s a time for grabbing the general public by the shoulders and shouting “It lies! The computer lies to you! Don’t trust anything it says!”
Imagine a collaboratively developed, universal content style guide, based on usability evidence.
Stuart has written this fantastic concise practical guide to privacy for developers and designers. A must-read!
A very handy guide to considering privacy at all stages of digital product design:
This guidance is written for technology professionals such as product and UX designers, software engineers, QA testers, and product managers.
This is a great step-by-step guide to HTML by Estelle.
- Make the right thing easy
- Always answer “so what”?
- Close the gap between “something is wrong” to “we fixed it”
The primary goals of this strategy are to inform decision-making and enhance the success of accessibility-related activities within the GOV.UK Design System team.
Interestingly, accessibility concerns are put into two categories: theoretical and evidenced (with the evidenced concerns being prioritised):
- Theoretical: A question or statement regarding the accessibility of an implementation within the Design System without evidence of real-world impact.
- Evidenced: Sharing new research, data or evidence showing that an implementation within the Design System could cause barriers for disabled people.