A Design Enginer enjoying life.
Lumix Lament After reading about the ongoing discontinuation of Panasonic’s best Micro Four Thirds lenses, with no planned replacements, I think this is the end of the line for LUMIX Micro Four Thirds cameras with interchangeable lenses. Which is sad. My current camera, which I love to bits, is a LUMIX GX9. Their last rangefinder-style ILC. They released that in 2018. If they brought out a new one…
Front-end doesn't exist Full-stack is a term used in software development to refer to the combination of front-end and back-end development. However, the reason this term stuck wasn't efficiency, tooling, automation, or the rise of the magical, 10x faster, do-it-all developer; The Unicorn. It was about cost. Back-end development is deemed to be more expensive than front-end development. So the…
Employed, again Those who know me are often utterly convinced that I’m a freelancer, a gun-for-hire. Maybe it’s because I’ve worked successfully as a consultant for various IT firms that contracted me out to some great companies. I’ve been very fortunate in that regard. The consulting world is shifting and becoming less interesting for me to work in. So when the company that employed me went belly…
The resilient Web So many times has the death of the Web been predicted. Every five years or so, some pundit will pontificate that the end is nigh. Surely, AI will kill it. Right? Well, maybe. I ain’t holding my breath. Remember the "appification apocalypse"? That was going to shut out the open Web and leave nothing but walled gardens. Spoiler alert: it didn't. Instead, we witnessed an explosion…
Everything changes, always I once worked on a UI library for a company that resold their product via other brands and partners. That UI library needed to support existing implementations as another brand. The immediate reaction was to create the main style/brand first and then add the others. I understood their compulsion to do it that way (it’s easier, but not really) but also understood, and…
Mixins three ways Have you ever used Sass or LESS and their mixin features? Awesome right? We almost had @apply to do this—the OG of mixins in CSS. Tab Atkins, a Standards wizard expert, proposed the @apply rule, which, sadly, was scrapped. ( Tab's explanation why it was abandoned ). However, it turns out that the web community isn’t done with Mixins yet. Mixins or bust It may have seemed like a…
Heavenly Scaled The idea that the size of a font is flexible is still relatively new. At the turn of the century, the end of CRT monitors ushered in a new era of monitor sizes. The web was released from its 800 by 600 pixel prison. We've since only seen an ever-increasing number of pixels squished into ever-bigger screens. The iPhone didn't do anything to decrease the pixel count but did decrease…
The Singular Web The EU is making Big Tech jump through hoops and Apple is the most recent disgruntled vendor. They seem the most put out, going by their petulant press release . So much so you'd think the world and the Web were going to hell in a handbasket. The Web, the least of Apple's concerns, isn't dying; it's heading into a new chapter. Big Tech Of all the big tech companies, only one…
A Trip in CSS Space Cascading Style Sheets have rules, properties and values. They are specified in various ways. We shouldn't have any trouble using them. CSS is easy and declarative; to me, it feels intuitive. Except, it isn't, not entirely. Recent additions to CSS required a shift in my mental model. The Space Toggle Recently, I tripped over my intuitive side of writing CSS and the reality of…
20 years ago, I had an idea It's 20 years since I submitted my CSSZenGarden entry—062. As the CSSZenGarden was intended to demonstrate, and even inspire, what CSS could do, I decided to go all out. So, I made two completely different designs in a single stylesheet. One was visible in Internet Explorer 6 and lower and the other in all 'modern' browsers. CSS Zen Garden no. 062 Many thought it was a…
Shadow Themes Web Components have found their way into many websites, whether you like it or not. In fact, they're way more prevalent than you might think. I'm a big fan of Web Components libraries. My primary use case for them is Design Systems. Web Components are, by their very nature, framework-agnostic. This quality renders them exceptionally suitable for seamless reuse. Especially when…
Web Development, the back and front of it Do you remember when Front-end was simple? I'd never have classified it as simple, but let's say it was, for argument's sake: HTML , CSS and some JavaScript . Even the latter wasn't all that common. However, the practitioners of Front-end wanted more. They saw an opportunity in the rise of Web Development to adopt some of the approaches and tooling used to…
Web Components & Three questions I've been talking to developers about Web Components, and several questions have popped up. Where can I go to learn about Web Components? If you could name a flaw in Web Components, what would that be? ... "Isn't it very buggy?" Arent Web Components slow? I keep hearing these three, so let's address them here. Getting started The main issue is that Web Components…
Spacing Foundation With a modern layout using flex and grid, I see margin becoming a more explicit and incidental property for a specific use case. In general, I've stopped using margins to control positioning an element. This allows me to revisit the spacing model I use for design systems. I consider two types of spacing: Layout Content I apply these types of spaces across four layers in a…
Root Cause So, recently I came across a problem loading web components into a site that utilises the "62.5% sizing' hack. I remember seeing it in a post before thinking it was a nifty approach but not something I'd use in production, and I forgot all about it. Silly me, it turns out some believe that this is a good idea. So what's going on here? Playing with numbers The nice thing, and why it's so…
Automated color modes In both CSS Day and Fronteersconf the topic of colour came up. Colour on the Web, you may have noticed, is borked. Not badly, but it's not looking the best it can be. Well, it seems some of the webs finest are on the case. Two technologies jump out. Both are still in the experimental stage. Color Mix Color Contrast One is for creating colour in a colour space that looks like…
Stop the cascade? As you know, the CSS Cascade is a strange creature; all-seeing, ever-present, determining how everything will look, whether you like it or not. Great if it is a document, something you can keep in your head and reason about. However, a significant part of the Web isn't document based but is transpiled around applications with custom UI's that see the singular CSS Cascade as a…
25 years I'm still working on this thing called the Internet, or more specifically, the World Wide Web. It's been 25 years now. Working on this thing, once full of frontpages and directories of links that pointed to other frontpages. We'd be in awe of <blink> and <marquee> tags. Those were the days, well, not really. The web sucked. It sucked big time. It was utterly awful. But still, it was new…
CSS Day 2022, all aboard for Interop 2022 CSS day 2022 was two days, instead of just the one day when they started. What started small has now grown a bit, just like CSS has. From the outset, the organisers seemed to relish jumping into the deep end, which turned out to be the right move; the passion in this community is fantastic. Writing CSS is a part of creating anything on the web. For many…
A design system here, a design system there Generally speaking, in practice, a design system is singular. In that, it's created for one particular identity. This is a misnomer, as design goes beyond identity. You can look at design systems in a purely holistic manner. Still, the practical realities of implementation start with the understanding that a design system is a system of systems. The…
CSS Day is drawing nigh The past few years have seen a significant shift in implementing a design on the Web. Layout and custom properties signalled the way forward, but several seemingly minor tweaks have pushed CSS into new territory. We should expect a new wave of CSS libraries. Interestingly, the input of outside development is responsible for some of these long-awaited features. Obviously,…
The Gap Creating fantastic websites and applications is truly a delight. And when such products come together, it is a humbling experience. Especially when you know you didn't do it alone. Teamwork is at its best when the members augment each other and move toward a shared outcome. It's no secret that web designers and web developers don't always see eye to eye and tend to have different goals…