Things I Like
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I think we lose sight of the real value of a design system when we focus too much on the components. The components are the trees.
Jeremy nails this on the head. When I think about systems I think of them more as documentation, that beyond the code, colors, and more is the way in which you should be using all of it. What's the purpose and how is it used?
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There is a lot of really interesting information about design systems and how teams and organizations are creating them, maintaining them, and thinking about them in this survey. And it's no surprise that having executives who champion the system as well as all the various disciplines involved in creating and maintaining it makes it much more successful.
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Whenever someone asks me to do something that I think seems ill-conceived in some way, I ask them to write it down. That's it. Because writing is high effort. Making sentences is the easy bit, it's the thinking I want them to do. By considering their request it slows them down. Maybe 30% of the time or something, they come back and say 'oh, that thing I asked you to do, I've had a think and it's fine, we don't need to do it'.
This is such good advice. I find writing is the way I think, so even jotting things down in a notebook helps me to clarify what I'm thinking. And in a team environment, clarity is so helpful, it will cut down on the amount of time spent spinning to figure out what the other person means.
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It’s hard for me to understand how John was able to write with so much sensitivity, and also have such a glaring blind spot.
I found this piece really thought provoking, mainly because the John Hughes films were a major part of my teenage years. I can still recite entire scenes from memory with no additional prompting, especially from "Sixteen Candles." And I, like Ringwald, think about those films now with almost two minds, one is my teenage self relating too and glad for that, the other is my adult self somewhat appalled that I watched those films as many times as I did.
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Because frankly, I can’t stop thinking about how much automation has changed our industry already. And I know the rate of automation is only going to accelerate from here.
Ethan's been doing a lot of writing about our industry and how we are moving forward and I really love this post. Too often we think what we're doing is new and different, but is it really? Can we look at the mistakes made in the past and learn from them? And as he says, "what happens next?"
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The people in a system are seldom acknowledged as a component of a system. Instead, they are people who act on a system. I think this is a mistake. People take work. In most organisations, the people of a system represent continuity and sometimes the only thing stopping it from being rebuilt and redesigned from external HIPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) influence. How I'd define people would be any real person interacting with the system; the team building it, stakeholders, open source community etc.
The idea of layers in a system and organizing them by how fast and often they change is intriguing and very clever. This piece by Boulton is really great with a lot to think about in it.
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Great visual design or even the UX of a style guide isn’t anywhere near as important as the documentation being in a single location that everyone can easily find. And if our work saved an engineer or designer five minutes asking someone else on Slack about how to use component X then The Guide is a success, if only a small one.
There is so, so, so much great stuff in this post by Robin. The way in which how you make your style guide or the exact way you use it doesn't matter as much as the way it enables communication, needs to work for your team, and, in the quote above, how it can be ugly and messy and still be incredibly useful.
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This is not about being austere for the sake of austerity, but it circles back to the question: Am I’m giving time and focus to activities that I feel help cultivate a deeper respect for the short time we may have? Making sure my fixed cost of living is as low as possible immolates the issue of doing certain jobs just to pay for a particular lifestyle. Living in a country with good health care means that you don’t have to worry about bearing the expense of treatment if tragedy strikes. These details add up. They collude to create space for thinking about and exploring the world, a space which feels non-negotiable in the quest to be present and reflective.
I've long enjoyed Craig Mod's work and writing, but this interview really struck home with me. Especially the above quote, it's much the way I think about life and work. The less income I need, the more freedom I have. But they way he treats technology and using the internet also intrigues me, just shutting it out for most of the day.
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For me, our response to an increasingly digital world has to be more about connection than just convenience. What if HelloFresh connected me to my local shops and farmers market rather than just supplying me with ingredients to cook fresh food? In my opinion, this would support their underlying mission better than their current business model. But, arguably, it would also be less profitable, so these are hard business choices. To deliver human value, internet-era organisations need to learn to build more on existing social connections, rather than always looking to remove them. This is then convenience that recognises the importance of connection.
Really interesting and good points in this piece. I've resisted delivery of groceries and many other things that I can walk to get in my neighborhood for many reasons, but primarily because it gets me out of the house and among people, something I need since I work from home. But connections are harder and harder to come by in our siloed digital worlds and I wonder if maybe we need to rethink that going forward.
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Here’s what I finally figured out, 25 years in: What Silicon Valley loves most isn’t the products, or the platforms underneath them, but markets. “Figure out the business model later” was the call of the early commercial internet. The way you monetize vast swaths of humanity is by creating products that people use a lot—perhaps a search engine such as Google or a social network like Facebook. You build big transactional web platforms beneath them that provide amazing things, like search results or news feeds ranked by relevance, and then beneath all that you build marketplaces for advertising—a true moneymaking machine. If you happen to create an honest-to-god marketplace, you can get unbelievably rich.
As usual Ford looks back to help us understand the current situation and points out that maybe we should think about ethics from the get go rather than after it's too late, much as we're doing right now with fake news and social media and all ramifications we didn't think about in the beginning.
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I find HSL enormously liberating. Historical color wheel concepts map directly to the 360-degree hue system, and HSL’s three foundational attributes let me create and fine-tune color directly in code like never before. Let’s take a look at how I’m using it with Sass.
I've been looking at use of color in watercolor painting for the past several weeks, and the way Rob talks about color with HSL maps really well to the way I now think about color. This is a really excellent post on the ins and outs of color and how you can use it and I love the system Rob is using.
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It’s interesting to note that many of these apps are corporeal. Contrary to intuition, the way to better technology is through the body, because we do not leave our body behind when we log on. We may be striving to create a nourishing digital condition for ourselves, but it will always be informed by what’s happening on the ground. The place of technology in our lives begins and ends with the place where we find ourselves.
Frank's been doing some amazing thinking about technology and how we use it and this piece is really great. I love libraries, so I was hooked from the start, but I also find the research on what apps make people happy versus those that don't telling. We have control over how we use these things, even if the apps don't want us to think so.
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Let’s be more like that tortoise: diligent, direct, and purposeful. The web needs pockets of slowness and thoughtfulness as its reach and power continues to increase. What we depend upon must be properly built and intelligently formed. We need to create space for complexity’s important sibling: nuance. Spaces without nuance tend to gravitate towards stupidity. And as an American, I can tell you, there are no limits to the amount of damage that can be inflicted by that dangerous cocktail of fast-moving-stupid.
This piece resonated with me a lot, it's something I've been thinking about as well and I've even written about it. I'm not nostalgic for the way the web used to be, but I am, increasingly, concerned about the people we leave out with the complexity we've created. There are a lot of hard things on the web right now, this is a small piece that affects a lot of us every day in our work and, I think, makes our work less efficient and less accessible.
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There’s another theory floating around as to why Facebook cares so much about the way it’s impacting the world, and it’s one that I happen to agree with. When Zuckerberg looks into his big-data crystal ball, he can see a troublesome trend occurring. A few years ago, for example, there wasn’t a single person I knew who didn’t have Facebook on their smartphone. These days, it’s the opposite. This is largely anecdotal, but almost everyone I know has deleted at least one social app from their devices. And Facebook is almost always the first to go. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sneaky privacy-piercing applications are being removed by people who simply feel icky about what these platforms are doing to them, and to society.
The backlash on social media platforms is beginning and at the same time those same platforms are getting more and more desperate to keep our eyes glued to them. I don't have a Facebook account, but I do use Instagram a bit, and I'm bombarded with it wanting me to do something to make it easier for the app to bug me every time I open it up. These things have the opposite effect on me as I'm now close to leaving the platform altogether.
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I love Le Guin's writing and this is a great compilation of a bunch of various quotes from her books, speeches, and more. Well worth a read through if you're unfamiliar with her work.