Chart Design Guidelines at City Intelligence

At the City Intelligence unit at City Hall almost anyone can create a data visualisation. To keep everyone in line they created Data Design Guidelines: Effective communication of evidence and data through information design and data visualisation, is obviously important to help inform policy internally, but it is also just as important to help boroughs …

Steve Schoger | Refactoring UI — Tips and tricks to make a site visually more interesting

As seen at the most recent CSS Day. I’m quite sure this will help many developers to make their POCs/experiments visually more interesting: Sometimes when we look at a polished interface we can acknowledge that it looks good but it’s hard to articulate why it looks good. In this practical session, Steve will be explaining …

How to deploy your first site onto Netlify (+ basic configuration)

About two months ago I developed the website for vBridge, a new company I’m participating in. As the website consists of only one static placeholder-like page, I decided to look into hosting the page directly onto a CDN. Having heard a lot of good things about Netlify, I decided to check that out. The site …

Google Street View is a Time Capsule

Recently the Google Street View footage for the area I live in got updated. This got me thinking: Google Street View is a time capsule. I’m quite sure that one day we’ll be able to time travel through the captured footage. GooBing Detroit is a project compares old and new GSV footage from the Detroit …

Relearn CSS layout with “Every Layout”

As just announced (on stage) at CSS Day by Heydon himself: If you find yourself wrestling with CSS layout, it’s likely you’re making decisions for browsers they should be making themselves. Through a series of simple, composable layouts, Every Layout will teach you how to better harness the built-in algorithms that power browsers and CSS. …

Reducing motion with the <picture> element

Great trick by Brad Frost, in which he combines prefers-reduced-motion? with the <picture> element <picture> <source srcset="no-motion.jpg" media="(prefers-reduced-motion: reduce)"></source> <img src="animated.gif alt="brick wall" /> </picture> Yes, that actually works! Reducing motion with the <picture> element → 💫 When taking prefers-reduced-motion into account in your CSS code, it becomes really powerful when combined with CSS Custom …

Ungoogled Chromium is Google Chrome, but without Google

If you’re not too fond of Google but do want a Chromium-based browser that is as close to Google Chrome as it can be (along with some extras), be sure to check out Ungoogled Chromium: ungoogled-chromium is Google Chromium, sans dependency on Google web services. It also features some tweaks to enhance privacy, control, and …

spatie/test-time – A PHP package to control the flow of time

Freek has created spatie/test-time, a package to easily freeze/rewind/advance time in PHP. Imagine you’re building that your app can notify your user, but you don’t want to send more than one notification in a timeframe of five seconds. How are you going to test the time aspect? Do you have to create a test that …

Resilient Management, an excerpt

On A List Apart you can read an excerpt from the book Resilient Management by Lara Hogan. It’s from chapter 2, entitled “Grow your teammates”: To spur this course-correction and growth in your teammates, you’ll end up wearing four different hats: Mentoring: lending advice and helping to problem solve based on your own experience. Coaching: …

Indicating focus to improve accessibility

Great article by Hidde. It totally rhymes with my Building Better Forms™ by not taking away affordances post. It’s a common, but fairly easy-to-fix accessibility issue: lack of indicating focus. In this post I will explain what we mean by focus and show you how focus outlines make your site easier to use. Indicating focus …