Robin Rendle

Here’s a wonderful reminder from Charlie Owen that everyone in the web design industry isn’t using the latest and greatest technology. And that’s okay! Charlie writes:

Most web developers are working on very "boring" teams. They're producing workhorse products that serve the organisation needs. They aren't trying to innovate. They aren't trying to impress the next recruiter with their CV. They simply want to get paid, produce a solution that works, and go home.

Yet they are told, mostly implicitly,

Here’s a fascinating look at The Guardian’s design system with a step-by-step breakdown of what's gone into it and what options are available to designers and developers. It shows us how the team treats colors, typography, layouts, and visual cues like rules and borders.… Read article

Dave Rupert digs into some of his favorite Vue features and one particular issue that he has with React:

I’ve come to realize one thing I don’t particularly like about React is jumping into a file, reading the top for the state, jumping to the bottom to find the render function, then following the method calls up to a series other sub-rendering functions only to find the component I’m looking for is in another castle. That cognitive load is taxing

Zach Leatherman worked closely with Chris to figure out the font loading strategy for this very website you're reading. Zach walks us through the design in this write-up and shares techniques that can be applied to other projects.

Spoiler alert: Font loading is a complex and important part of a project.

The really interesting part of this post is the way that Zach talks about changing the design based on what’s best for the codebase — or as Harry Roberts … Read article

Here’s an interesting post by Rich Harris where he’s made a list of some of the problems he’s experienced in the past with web components and why he doesn’t use them today:

Given finite resources, time spent on one task means time not spent on another task. Considerable energy has been expended on web components despite a largely indifferent developer population. What could the web have achieved if that energy had been spent elsewhere?

Rachel Andrew’s talk at CSSconf is wonderful because it digs into one of the most exciting changes that’s coming soon to a browser near you: subgrid! That’s a change to the CSS Grid spec that allows for much greater flexibility for our visual designs. Subgrid allows us to set one grid on an entire page and let child elements use that very same grid tracks.

The reason why I’m very excited is because this solves one of the most … Read article

Ethan Marcotte has written up his process for how to make drop caps accessible for screen readers and browsers alike. All of that is very interesting and I’m sure I’ll use a technique like this in the near future, but the part that made me hop out of my seat is where Ethan notes his experience with design systems at Vox:

Since rolling out our new and improved drop caps, we’ve continued to iterate on them. (Including fixing a number

Every Layout is a new work-in-progress website and book by Heydon Pickering and Andy Bell that explains how to make common layout patterns with CSS. They describe a lot of the issues when it comes to the design of these layouts, such as responsive problems and making sure we all write maintainable code, and then they’ve provided a handy generator at the end of each article to create our own little frameworks for dealing with these things.

They also have … Read article