Week Links #2

Links I found interesting this week… maybe you will too…

Links Worth Sharing

[[Week Links #1|Last week]], I was remiss in not sharing this link, since it’s the one that prompted me to actually start sharing links! I mentioned a few others that I follow who do this too, but it was reading this post by Matthias that inspired me to do this. It’s a great read!

Modern Font Stacks

A really useful and cool resource for choosing modern system font stacks. Stacks are organised by style and it highlights the fonts that are in use, available and not in your current browser.

Web Sustainability with Michelle Barker

This week’s episode of the Shop Talk Show podcast was great. Michelle’s someone I’ve followed for a while on her blog, CSS-IRL. They discuss some interesting topics on the show, like paying to support bloggers and the environmental impact of web design.

You don’t have to be a “content creator” to have a website.

Ana’s post is a good reminder that a personal website can be as simple as a single page with information on how to contact you.

In recent years, people have felt the pressure to monetise their hobbies, so there’s a constant state of hustle.

Ana Rodrigues

This “hustle culture” pressure is one of the reasons I didn’t have my own website for a number of years. I had analysis paralysis trying to decide what my “content machine” should be to bring me opportunities, so I never did anything with it. Letting go of that is much more fun and no pressure.

Piccalilli Links

Not the first time I’ve read this post by Andy, but re-read this week while thinking about the format I want to share links in. I do like it when a single post is about a single link, but that would slightly add to the upkeep for me I imagine… the nice thing about doing this on my own site is that I can change the format later to suit me at the time.

Tailwind marketing and misinformation engine

I don’t really have anything against Tailwind, but having tried it, it’s not really for me (in most cases anyway). There are things I liked about using it, and I can see the usefulness for rapidly prototyping or building a one-off interface, but it can feel like an unnecessary abstraction, and I normally prefer to keep tooling to what’s absolutely necessary to avoid headaches later.

Andy bell, who’s a Tailwind critic, has previously written about that when used appropriately, Tailwind can be a really useful tool – the idea is to just not use it for everything. I can see me using Tailwind for prototyping or one-offs, but for anything other than that, particularly long-term projects, I prefer sticking with CSS – where the best practices do work and is infinitely scalable… 😉

ECSS – an interesting CSS methodology

Another one surfaced by Andy Bell, an interesting CSS methodology. I haven’t had time to delve fully into the docs yet but I’m definitely going to. There’s some refreshing, eye-catching ideas straight off the bat, like this one:

CSS Selectors are vehicles for intention

This aligns very much so with my approach to design tokens, so I feel like some of this methodology might translate into my work well.

Building on that idea of semantic naming, Andy highlights a particular quote that also aligns with my mental model on design tokens.

“thumbnail as-circle with-border” is instantly understandable while “h-10 w-10 bdr-50 br-1 overh” is not. Code should communicate information. The clearer the information, the easier it is to understand the system. Mistaken semantics should give way to expressiveness. Expressive best practices work.

Again, not bashing Tailwind, but it’s difficult to argue against the idea that “code should communicate information”.