Opinion-driven design
– stitcher.io - submitted by Brent
Brent shares a few thoughts on open source software design
Read more [stitcher.io]
A new design for Ignition original
A couple of years ago, Ignition became the default error page in Laravel.
Ignition provided a vastly improved design over Whoops: it brought Laravel specific niceties (such as showing the routing, queries) and the ability to display and even run solutions (e.g. generating an app key).
At Spatie, we think we can improve the design of Ignition even more. Our initial plan was to release this new design in tandem with Laravel 9 as a big bang surprise release. We've changed our mind on this because we'd like to have feedback from the community.
In this blog post, I'd like to share our ideas and plans for Ignition.
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No, Utility Classes Aren't the Same As Inline Styles
An excellent post on the subject by Sarah Dayan.
Read more [frontstuff.io]
Simple Models, Scaffolding, Enabling Constraints
All models are wrong but simple models are more wrong than complex ones. Simple models are more appealing, easier to teach and spread and apply. Because of that, they can bring value faster, and they can cause harm faster.
Read more [verraes.net]
How to build a simple HTML landing page using Tailwind CSS
Justin Jackson created a cool tutorial on how to create a basic landing page.
Read more [justinjackson.ca]
Websites should be more like Star Wars
My colleague Brent makes the case for being more creative on the web
Read more [stitcher.io]
How we added favicons to our site list
I really like the simplicity of our solution.
Read more [ohdear.app]
Light colour schemes are better, based on science
Brent offers scientific arguments why a light color scheme is better. Personally, since I started using a light color scheme a few years back, I've sticked to it and never turned back.
Read more [stitcher.io]
Compound Colour Utilities with TailwindCSS
– liamhammett.com - submitted by Liam Hammett
An approach you can use to combine multiple tightly coupled utilities together into a new compound utility class.
Read more [liamhammett.com]
Time to upgrade your monitor
Nikita Prokopov shares some good insights on why having a good monitor is important. MacOS users: your fonts will look much better with font smoothing turned off.
Read more [tonsky.me]
Design Principles of Vue 3.0
Evan You explains the principles behind the changes coming in Vue 3.0
Name the Date
Kevlin Henney wrote a good post on the importance of naming things well.
Good naming is part of design. It sets expectations and communicates a model, showing how something should be understood and used. If you mean to tell the reader getMillisSince1970, don’t say getTime.
Read more [medium.com]
Extreme Object-Oriented Ruby
A cool talk by John Cinnamond, on how you can create a pure OO language and why you shouldn't do that.
Don't add an API too fast
Not adding an API until absolutely necessary lets us keep our model internal and lets us iterate as needed.
— Matthieu Napoli (@matthieunapoli) October 10, 2019
Read more [twitter.com]
Software Architecture is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design is Underrated
Gergely Orosz argues that you should start with a simple design and try your best to keep it simple. I don't necessarily agree with everything in the post, but it's an interesting opinion nonetheless.
Software architecture best practices, enterprise architecture patterns, and formalized ways to describe systems are all tools that are useful to know of and might come in handy one day.
Read more [blog.pragmaticengineer.com]
Stop designing products for random people
Some solid advice for when you're building a product.
Build a product with the help of a hacker. Design it for the benefiter. Sell it to an expert.
Read more [uxdesign.cc]
A new coat of paint for freek.dev original
It's funny that even something as simple as a blog app is never finished. One and a half years ago, I did a significant update my moving my blog from WordPress to a Laravel app. In August of last year, I also ditched my custom admin section in favor of Nova. Even though not that much time has passed, it was time for a refresh of the entire blog.
A few notes about the frontend of the renewed spatie.be original
Before we moved in to our new offices in 2014, we quickly set up a temporary one-page website, initially only in Dutch. It lasted for 4 years and bursted out of its frames ever since, because… hmm … no priority, no time. A new site was like a running joke for a long time, until Laracon US 2018…
A simple resource for finding and trying variable fonts
Nick Sherman created a cool site where you can play with variable fonts.
This site’s goal is to help designers and developers become more familiar with OpenType variable fonts in a way that isn’t overwhelming, while also providing straightforward info upfront about the font projects, who made them, and where to find more info or get the fonts to use.
Read more [v-fonts.com]
The art of the error message
Marina Posniak, UX writer at Spotify, shares some great tips on how to write error messages well.
To start, ask yourself if you even need the error message. Before writing anything, consider if there’s a way to redesign the experience so there’s no error at all. Is there a way to just make it work? (Really, the best error message is no error message.) But if you do need it, think carefully about the message. When things go wrong and the app “fails,” say something useful. The message should help the user solve the problem and move on.
Read more [thestyleofelements.org]
