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Educational Sensational Inspirational Foundational

A historical record of foundational web development blog posts.

Every one of these 42 articles are gold!

It warms my heart to see Resilient Web Design included in this list.

The Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar 2022 · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

For 24 days this month, Matthias featured a different independent type foundry, writing about each one and selecting some lovely examplars of their typefaces.

“Dune,” “Foundation,” and the Allure of Science Fiction that Thinks Long-Term — Blog of the Long Now

Comparing and contrasting two different takes on long-term thinking in sci-fi: Dune and Foundation.

In a moment of broader cultural gloominess, Dune’s perspective may resonate more with the current movie-going public. Its themes of long-term ecological destruction, terraforming, and the specter of religious extremism seem in many ways ripped out of the headlines, while Asimov’s technocratic belief in scholarly wisdom as a shining light may be less in vogue. Ultimately, though, the core appeal of these works is not in how each matches with the fashion of today, but in how they look forward through thousands of years of human futures, keeping our imagination of long-term thinking alive.

The Flickr Foundation

A non-profit foundation dedicated to long-term digital preservation.

Imagine if we could place ourselves 100 years into the future and still have access to the billions of photos shared by millions of people on Flickr, one of the best documented, broadest photographic archives on the planet.

The Flickr Foundation represents our commitment to stewarding this digital, cultural treasure to ensure its existence for future generations.

Its first act is the renewal of the Flickr Commons.

Found Color schemes for web and UI

Accidental colour palettes captured in the wild.

Type Specimens

This is a lovely new project from Mark that gets very meta, cataloging specimens of type specimens:

This project will dig into specimens from these three perspectives: as artefacts made by and for font designers to evolve type culture; as tools for font users to make decisions about choosing and using type; and as effective marketing tools.

The Permanent Legacy Foundation

A non-profit that offers digital preservation services for individuals.

Permanence means no subscriptions; a one-time payment for dedicated storage that preserves your most precious memories and an institution that will be there to protect the digital legacy of all people for all time.

VOCAL

Each typeface highlights a piece of history from a specific underrepresented race, ethnicity, or gender—from the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Argentina to the Civil Rights Movement in America.

The Bureau of Suspended Objects

200 discarded objects from a dump in San Francisco, meticulously catalogued, researched, and documented by Jenny Odell. The result is something more revealing than most pre-planned time capsule projects …although this project may be somewhat short-lived as it’s hosted on Tumblr.

CSS Frameworks Or CSS Grid: What Should I Use For My Project? — Smashing Magazine

Rachel does some research to find out why people use CSS frameworks like Bootstrap—it can’t just be about grids, right?

It turns out there are plenty of reasons that people give for using frameworks—whether it’s CSS or JavaScript—but Rachel shares some of my misgivings on this:

In our race to get our site built quickly, our desire to make things as good as possible for ourselves as the designers and developers of the site, do we forget who we are doing this for? Do the decisions made by the framework developer match up with the needs of the users of the site you are building?

Not for the first time, I’m reminded of Rachel’s excellent post from a few years ago: Stop solving problems you don’t yet have.

Below the Surface - Archeologische vondsten Noord/Zuidlijn Amsterdam

A fascinating treasure trove of objects recovered from the canals of Amsterdam.

The Fast and Slow of Design

Prompted by his recent talk at Smashing Conference, Mark explains why he’s all about the pace layers when it comes to design systems. It’s good stuff, and ties in nicely with my recent (pace layers obsessed) talk at An Event Apart.

Structure for pace. Move at the appropriate speed.

The web is under threat. Join us and fight for it. – World Wide Web Foundation

What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms. This concentration of power creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared.

Tim Berners-Lee on the 29th anniversary of Information Management: A Proposal.

Two myths currently limit our collective imagination: the myth that advertising is the only possible business model for online companies, and the myth that it’s too late to change the way platforms operate. On both points, we need to be a little more creative.

While the problems facing the web are complex and large, I think we should see them as bugs: problems with existing code and software systems that have been created by people — and can be fixed by people.

The Law of Least Power and Defunct StackOverflow Answers - Web Directions

I love John’s long-zoom look at web development. Step back far enough and you can start to see the cycles repeating.

Underneath all of these patterns and practices and frameworks and libraries are core technologies. And underlying principles.

These are foundations – technological, and of practice – that we ignore, overlook, or flaunt at our peril.

Closing Communities: FFFFOUND! vs MLKSHK – Waxy.org

Andy compares the impending shutdowns of Ffffound and Mlkshk. They’re quite, quite different when it comes to handling data rescue.

The Sonos Pattern Library — zdfs

There’s a lot I disagree with here. I don’t think this pattern library process is very elegant or scalable, and it certainly wouldn’t work for me.

But I’m still linking to it. Why? Because I think it’s absolutely wonderful that people share their processes like this. It doesn’t matter one whit whether or not it would work for me.

Frontend development may have gotten a lot more complicated, but the simple premise of sharing what you’ve learned hasn’t.

I couldn’t agree more!

Tobias Frere-Jones: My Kind of Neighborhood

Some sleuthing uncovers an interesting twist in New York’s psychogeography:

All of the buildings have been demolished, and in some cases the entire street has since been erased. But a startling picture still emerged: New York once had a neighborhood for typography.

Link tags: found

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