Blog posts from the personal website of James Nash.
The first DTCG Editors call, June 2020 This Tuesday, the Design Tokens Community Group (DTCG) published the first stable version of their spec: 2025.10 (they've adopted calendar versioning as of this release). The three previous versions were Editor's Drafts , so that announcement is a significant milestone. Well done team! While several tools and design systems have already been using the draft…
Photo credit: " Portrait Photo of Shocked Woman " by Andrea Piacquadio. In an ideal world, our CSS code is beautifully organised and easy to maintain. Reality is often quite different though. Of course, your CSS code is perfect. But, other people's pesky CSS is often also present and might be conflicting with yours or is applying styles you don't want. Furthermore, the chances are that you can't…
I recently ran across a gotcha when working with file paths in Node.js scripts across macOS, Linux and Windows, so sharing details and the solution here in case it helps someone else. TL;DR Problem : When converting file URL objects to absolute path strings, the pathname part works fine on POSIX systems like macOS & Linux, but causes problems on Windows. Solution: Use fileURLToPath() from node:url…
I needed a new phone and recently decided to treat myself to Samsung's latest Galaxy S24 Ultra. Like most smartphones today, it's mostly an incremental improvement over its predecessor - a slightly faster CPU, a slightly better camera, etc. - and yet, when I think back to my first ever smartphone, the Nokia 6600, it's quite amazing how far we've come. Both phones were high-end models at the time…
While working at Wipro Digital I contributed a few posts to their blog. They're mostly about web design and one about Atomic Design (which was my gateway drug into the world of design systems!). Unfortunately, that blog no longer exists. It now redirects to another blog on Wipro's main website which doesn't contain those posts or any of the others from the early days of Wipro Digital. Luckily, I…
I've just finished copying a batch of old blog posts covering the Symbian Smartphone Show 2008 to this blog. That's all 25 posts I contributed to the original Smartphone Show blog . As with the Mobile World Congress posts I previously copied here , I've replaced broken links with ones to Internet Archive copies, and set an appropriate <link rel="canonical" href="..."> on each post, to acknowledge…
...you wait for ages and then two come along at once! That's right folks, I finally pulled my finger out and added a feed to this website — in two formats: RSS and Atom . You can now subscribe to my blog in your favourite feed reader. I link to them from the <head> of this site's pages too, so most feed readers should be able to auto-discover them from the URL of any page on this site too. While I…
Artwork I made sometime in the early 2000's titled "Cirrus's Realm" As of today, I've renamed this site (back) to Cirrus's Realm. When I originally created my little slice of cyberspace in 2002, it was titled "Cirrus's Realm" because "cirrus" was - and still is - my go-to username online, and I liked the idea that visiting my site would be like entering some kind of fantastical realm. As you can…
Have you ever worked on a web project using web fonts where you had to set different font-family names in order to display different weights (normal, bold, etc.) or styles (normal & italic) of a font? Or have you had browser apply an unwanted faux bold effect to an already bold font? An anti-pattern to setting up @font-face rules that I've encountered a number of times over the years is likely to…
When I launched this blog last month, I mentioned I wanted to republish posts I had made elsewhere here. The first batch is now here: All my posts covering the 2008 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. While copying the posts over, I've taken the liberty of updating broken links to the relevant Internet Archive copies and improving some of the alt texts for images. Other than that, the content is…
For someone who regularly works on other people's websites and apps, my own one is pretty old-fashioned and basic. The markup is still XHTML . Since I redesigned this site in 2009, the design has barely changed (although, I did at least retrofit a responsive layout in 2017). The content has hardly been updated over that 11 year period either. I suppose it's true what they say about the cobbler's…
(Original image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech ) To support the creation of our recently redesigned Buildit @ Wipro Digital website, we have also created a nascent design system and its name is Gravity . This is the story of how Gravity came to be and where it is headed next. The motivation Buildit has had a website and a small number of internal web applications for some time. All of them had been…
If my full-fat post about Design System Architecture is too long for your taste (Medium estimates it’s a 12 minute read), then you might prefer this summarised version… At Buildit we’ve done a fair amount of work on design systems. We’ve noticed certain types of tools and integrations between them recur and figured it would be useful to call them out. This is the overall architecture for a design…
This ended up being a lengthy post. If you’re in a hurry you can check out the TL;DR version to get the gist of it and come back to this one later. I recently attended WEBdeLDN ’s “ The Evolution of Design Systems ” meet-up (great event, btw!), where I was fascinated by Alla Kholmatova ’s talk. Having worked on and researched numerous design systems, she’s identified three dimensions, against…
Now that my clickbaity headline got your attention, I should qualify my inflammatory statement a little: “WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) in the context of producing interactive user interfaces Must Die”. Pixel Perfect Dreams The idea that you could visually design your app or website in a tool and then, at the click of a button, have it export a fully functional, interactive user interface…
I recently got a Samsung Gear 360 on loan courtesy of The Insiders . It’s a camera that can record 360º photos (up to 30 megapixels) and 360º videos (up to 4k 30fps). When viewed via appropriate software or online services, you can interactively pan around the photos or videos in all directions to observe the scene as though you were where the camera was. This is especially impressive and…
Back in October I had the good fortune of being able to attend the excellent An Event Apart 2016 Orlando , a three day web design conference. The speakers were all well known and highly respected figures in the web design community. The kind of people who have literally written the book on everything from web standards over Responsive Web Design through to the latest CSS animation and layout…
“The Atomium”. Original photo by O. Palsson, some rights reserved . We’ve been applying Atomic Design to various client projects for well over a year now at Wipro Digital & Buildit . In that time we have learnt a lot and it’s high time we shared that with you. So, pour yourself a coffee, grab a cookie and get comfortable — this is gonna be a big one… First steps Our first foray into Atomic Design…
I’ve wanted to set up a blog of my own for years. There are things about the Web, design, user experience, mobile technology and more that I have wanted to write about for a long time. The reason I haven’t so far is that I had always intended to build my own, bespoke blogging platform to do it. The trouble is, I never actually made the time to go ahead and, y’know, build it. I still intend to…
As more and more of our work is done entirely digitally, it’s become necessary to rethink “tried and-true” methods of communicating ideas in favor of something different. Navigating both the technology and design worlds, I am always on the lookout for ways of smoothing the transitions between design and development. I first came across Atomic Design about 2 years ago and it immediately struck me…
“Won’t someone please think about URLs?!” Web design is a vast and complex field. Much ink has been spilled, tackling the latest technologies for front and back end, the latest visual and interaction design trends, the latest usability best practices, the latest methodologies for building and project-managing, the latest marketing and SEO techniques, and so on. However, what’s rarely talked about…
This is the 2nd part of “Weaving a Better Web”. If you missed it, check out part 1 . What if… Imagine an alternate reality, where web designers stayed true to the intent of the Web from the beginning. What if rigidly sized designs were frowned on, because we refused to rely on particular screen sizes? What if ActiveX and Flash never caught on, because we rejected proprietary technologies that…
When it comes to commissioning, designing or building websites, we’re often reactive to new trends instead of proactive. By itself, updating the technology we use to build websites won’t help us. We need to change perspective as well. Once upon a time on the Web… Not that long ago, it was assumed that most websites would be consumed via Internet Explorer, on a Windows PC, with a screen resolution…
Mobile World Congress 2009 is almost upon us. The Symbian Foundation will have a stand with some fun demos (and free coffee!) so please pop by and say hello! They have also set up a Symbian Foundation Blog where they will be posting news and coverage from the show. Please go visit it, bookmark it, subscribe to it and share it with the world!
Mobile World Congress 2009 is almost upon us. The Symbian Foundation will have a stand with some fun demos (and free coffee!) so please pop by and say hello! They have also set up a Symbian Foundation Blog where they will be posting news and coverage from the show. Please go visit it, bookmark it, subscribe to it and share it with the world!