Dan Leatherman is a designer + developer living in Brooklyn, NY.
I made a mistake and posted this before testing in all browsers. For shame! This behavior is default in the latest versions Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. Unfortunately, this isn’t default behavior in any of the mobile browsers I tested. For shame! I’m a huge fan of the details disclosure element and I don’t think we talk enough about the benefits of using semantic HTML elements. Did you know a…
<device-frame> make it easy to add a fake device frame around content. Demo Source code on Github Features iPhone/Pixel device frame and icons Light/dark mode that respects prefers-color-scheme Ability to show a home bar at the bottom of the screen Set custom time displayed Hide time and icons if you desire Set padding to respect device safe area inset Use padding="top" in combination with…
<toasty-toaster> and <toasty-toast> make it easy to add temporary notification messaging on a page. Demo Source code on Github Features Vertical and horizontal positioning for the container timeout feature which will automatically hide the toast after x seconds Respects prefers-reduced-motion media query Simple CSS styling included
tl;dr I wanted a way to own my run data and display it on my website. I used fit-file-parser to convert all my fit files to separate json files so I could use them in my eleventy build. I used to walk around a lot near Union Square and there was a beautiful fenced-in park there called Gramercy Park . It is so exclusive that you have to know someone with a key to get inside . I can't help but think…
Add the following alias to your ~/.zshrc or ~/.bash_profile and then when you‘re in a directory, you can just type toLowerCase (thanks JavaScript for the camelcase syntax). alias toLowerCase = 'for f in *; do mv "$f" "$f.tmp"; mv "$f.tmp" "`echo $f | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]"`"; done' Make sure you reload your already open terminals with source ~/.zshrc or source ~/.bash_profile . References:…
As an incentive to get outside, our family started a shared note to keep score on the number of slug bugs, fiats, and vanity license plates we've seen while out and about. Once the kiddos started noticing license plates we got interested in keeping track of those, too! How many of the 50 license plates could we find in our time together? I'd wanted to experiment with a "standalone" web app, some…
While styling up a new project soon to be revealed, I started using accent-color to help easily style form inputs. Unfortunately, I set this accent color at the root and it was causing checkboxes to disappear on Safari. This led me to create a tiny code snippet for prefers-color-scheme: dark . Let me know if it's helpful to you! Add this to your VSCode by going to Code → Settings → Configure User…
It should not be easy for the average person to steal images from a site and claim them as their own, for fun or for profit. I have a client who is worried about their original graphics being stolen from their website. This particular client creates hand-made graphics and has had issues previously with other designers saving their images and tracing over them for their own use. In one particular…
Onboarding yourself to a new Shopify store can be difficult if you don't know where to start. By the end of this post, you should be up and ready with a theme development workflow to start making changes to an existing Shopify store. Table of Contents Shopify store access Theme file export Git init Branch setup (main/develop) Connect themes to Github 1. Store access If you have a Shopify Partner…
Test, Rinse, Repeat This was not my first dive into testing, but typically I've inherited the test environment and have been told to “make them green.” For this project I have multiple codebases with similar setups. I'd like to maintain quality across all codebases while working on them more efficiently, so I decided to write my own test suite using Cypress . The Requirements Environment variables…
There are so many elements I'm excited about in HTML including dialog and details . Both of which have functions we used to heavily rely on JavaScript to achieve. We can be pair these elements with css for endless possibilities. The details element expands content outside the child summary element when pressed. I've started to use these for a few things including dropdown menus and search forms.…
My plan is to use this space as a playground. To use this space as my personal jungle gym but adding small things as often as possible. I plan on writing more tutorials and creating small projects to keep my skills sharp, but to also explore more JAMstack capabilities. My first step in getting the site ready was to add syntax highlighting. Luckily this process is so easy thanks to the 11ty…
So I've started about 7 starter projects this week and it's been an entire year since I said I was going to build this new site in public. Ha! I keep thinking I have a hard time finishing things, but that's not really true. I'm learning new things every minute, which makes me want to do it right and start over again. The point I guess I'm trying to make is what you learn helps change you. I am not…
Starting to plan for the new site, one of the biggest factors I want to do is own my content. I want a single place online where I can store anything and everything—a digital garden perhaps. First things first, I've imported my Wordpress content and started in on some basic styling. I would like to experiment with some new things web-related and this will be its home (e.g. running information from…
We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all, to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before-that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a…
“The harm here isn’t just that Silicon Valley is trying to solve the wrong problem, which wastes brainpower and resources. The focus on innovating away death sets a cultural tone that directs attention from answers that might actually help, like infrastructure or education.” “Silicon Valley’s simplistic life extension arithmetic—you improve life by adding more years—glosses over the complicated…
I'm a dad of two kids. They are both very young and not in school yet. Explaining difficult concepts like sharing and selfishness can feel impossible. It forces me to think of the simplest words that break down the complex idea. I think about the exact words I need to use to get my point across before I say them. Sometimes we view simple things as negative. The simpler the toy my kids play with,…
Unity in diversity is the highest possible attainment of a civilization, a testimony to the most noble possibilities of the human race. This attainment is made possible through passionate concern for choice, in an atmosphere of social trust. —Michael Novak (1983)
How many times have I seen my kids get a gift, find up a toy, have a bowl of "chucky larms" or literally receive anything, immediately followed by the phrase, "It's not for you," (or similar gesture) to their brother. How many times do I receive a blessing and hold my arms so tightly around it with the same action? We can hold on to things so tightly sometimes that it prevents God from doing what…
Determining who you want to become can be a very daunting task, especially when we work for other people. Everyone wants us to learn any new thing that pops up within our wheelhouse. Am I a designer? Developer? UX Designer? UI Designer? Manager? Joel Califa walks through what "full stack anxiety" is and how we can combat it. The most valuable piece of advice I took from this talk was this: Most of…
"Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. —David Foster Wallace from This is Water
When I was five years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life. —John Lennon
I’m fascinated by sawdust. The byproducts of what you do—the byproduct of cutting 2x4s leads to sawdust—somebody realized one day, "Let me package that up and sell it." Figure it out for yourself —Gary Vaynerchuck (Watch the full video here )
People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway. The biggest men with the…
I absolutely love being a dad. I consider it one of the bigger parts of my identity. It's also where frustration breeds patience. It's where I practice unconditional love. See, when you have a two-and-a-half year old, this gets tested daily—maybe even hourly. My absolute favorite part of the day is bed time. I leave my phone on my desk and am fully present so that my kids know I want to engage…
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. —Steve Jobs via Business Insider
Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things , believes there are two critical pieces of a design: discoverability and feedback. With poor discoverability or feedback, we've failed the people that are ultimately using what we're creating. I recently came across a great Vox Media video that will haunt you once you watch it. It's crushing because you will start to see these design problems…
Remember: Even The Beatles started as a cover band. Paul McCartney has said, "I emulated Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis. We all did." McCartney and his partner John Lennon became one of the greatest songwriting teams in history, but as McCartney recalls, they only started writing their own songs "as a way to avoid other bands being able to play our set." As Salvador Dali said,…
The concept of branding has an incredibly long history. This mark of displaying ownership over something and branding animals has somehow in today's design community, morphed into something the similar but very different. Many design studios doing branding work are really just convincing the client to give them ownership. To trust them with the look and feel, logo, strategy, and messaging of the…
Important means: long-term, foundational, coherent, in the interest of many, strategic, efficient, positive...If you take care of important things, the urgent things don't show up as often. The opposite is never true. — Seth Godin From his blog post Deconstructing urgent vs. important
The science of business is the things that scale, the art of business is the things that don’t. — Scott Belsky _From On Escape Velocity, Necessary Ruckus, & Working At The Edge Of Reason: 6 Thoughts
How much is an idea worth? In my life so far, I've met people that both over value ideas and under value ideas. I come up with ideas all the time. Confession, I buy a lot of domain names. There is this great feature when you buy a domain that allows you to automatically renew your domain name for another year. When I register a new domain name, that is my declaration—my stake in the ground.…
...if you want to be successful and make a real contribution to the world, you have to be intrinsically motivated by the work you do, and you have to feel good about spending your days on it. Love might grow — and it’s a wonderful thing if it does — but you don’t need it up front. You can succeed just by wanting something to exist that doesn’t already. — Jason Fried via Signals vs. Noise
Being a father of two at 28 years old is a little ridiculous. I feel ill-equipped a lot (imposter syndrome is real with parenting, too.) With a two and a half year old (Simon) and a nearly one year old (Leo), my wife and I are having conversations and deciding the type of parents we'd like to be. We're not deciding who we want our kids to be but we're defining the values we want them to stand…
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. — Albert Einstein
I have come to realize, after over thirty years of studying human creativity, that the great divide is not between those who are artists and those who are not, but between those who understand that they are creative and those who have become convinced that they are not. — The Artisan Soul by Erwin McManus
We stand in a room full of doors. As highly curious people, we want to see what is behind every door. This is our desire as artists –to satisfy our curiosity and solve the problems we haven’t previously solved. On some level, however, we know that if we are to drastically reduce our competition and benefit from the resulting power shift, we must pick one door, walk through it and never look back.…
If you're in the North Jersey area or want to come talk about value and drink amazing coffee on Wednesday night, come out to Creative Community at Emergence. You can RSVP here .
I get so tired and frustrated of working within a vacuum sometimes. Like I'm the only one trying to navigate outer space by myself—you know, David Bowie style. These past few months, I've been meeting with other creative people like Evan Baum , Alfonso Sjogreen , or Evan Michael Rummel and attended a Ghostly Ferns happy hour where I chatted with fine folks like Erica Heinz , Brad Evans , or Meg…
There's something magical about monotony. Whenever I have a problem I am trying to solve or a rough decision I need to make, I wash the dishes. At some point in between putting more soap on my sponge and dumping out day-old whole milk from our 2 year old, I tend to get a revelation. It doesn't happen every time, but when it does it feels like magic. Seems a little suspicious, don't you think? The…
Since I was a kid, I knew I would run my own business someday. My dad ran his own manufacturing business for 15 years, and I was always working in and around "The shop". It started in our basement and moved from there to different facilities and different levels of growth & expansion. We solved all kinds of problems through experimenting, and tooling around. One of the lessons I learned was that…
I saw a woman drop a quarter the other day on the subway platform and was a little surprised at her response. She didn't bend down to pick it up, or really even glance back. The man walking behind her bent down to pick it up in stride and said, "Ma'am, you dropped this quarter." She said, "It's okay," and just kept walking. On the other end of the spectrum, my 2 year old son will find a penny on…
By responding to a tweet, meeting Cameron , and showing up, I had the opportunity to be an apprentice at Fictive Kin a few summers ago. The time I spent in Studiomates was invaluable and I am still learning lots of lessons from the short 3 months. Each project’s process should be unique. [Cookie cutters are for cookies] People want to see and hear you think. [But don’t just talk to talk, or think…
Loving and passionate husband, (father), brother, servant, and friend Lived with an incredible sense of determined purpose and agile surrender Had a contagious idealistic personality that positively influenced the world around In my life I’m trying to be more purpose-driven. I wrote this legacy statement almost a year ago and I’ve found that making life-altering decisions is so much easier if I…
Prioritize the needs of others and diminish the needs of self—continual giving makes room for abounding grace. — Dan Leatherman (@danleatherman) March 30, 2012 I used to think self-design was the best way to make a product someone else will use—because if you need it, surely someone else needs it. As I’m maturing I’m noticing more and more people (including myself) have based their life goals…
Many of us are hired by someone to increase value to a particular product or service. In these situations we’re asked to prove the value of our designs—through metrics or other tangible numbers. We really need to begin to understand the potential value we bring to the table as well as the impact and influence we have on people around us. I recently attended an NYU Tech event, “Designers as…
This weekend, I was staying in Jacksonville, North Carolina with my wife and some friends. It was the first of our friends to be having a baby and this was the weekend of her baby shower. Recently, she announced the name of her soon-to-arrive baby boy and this got me thinking about our names and titles; the way we identify ourselves and how much say we have in each of these things. What’s in a…
I am a firm believer in developing design processes shaped by our everyday experiences. I’ve seen many people directly mimic another’s process, techniques, elements and solutions without understanding how it ended up that way and never taking the time and make it their own. As designers we love to surround ourselves with things that are well designed. This can be great to a point, but how could we…