Pixels of the Week – August 4, 2019
Every week I share a list of curated articles, resources and tools about UX, UI and mobile design, HTML, CSS, the web industry, process inspiration and more…
This week’s selection: the invisible majority of developers, a bill to regulate addictive design patterns, accessibility law-suite, truths about digital accessibility, fast softwares and quality perception, dataviz styleguides, video recording tool, Facebook tracking, science fiction interfaces, user flows inspiration, a printable mobile mockups generator, a fake news game, a blogging platform, gradient gallery, 3 free ebooks (on UI design and on HTML and productivity), 2 pastel amazing websites and there’s also a collection of butts and penises this week.
#Now – what I’m up to
I start working for a new client next week as a Lead UX Designer. Part of my role will be to promote design within the company, help them find some process that work with them and conduct user research. I start tomorrow. This means that I might not post a lot of ressources (or the bus will be super long and late and I might post even more while waiting for the bus). Wish me luck 🙂
TL;DNR the one you should not miss
#Development
“The Real Dark Web – We rarely acknowledge the vast majority of web developers.” 99% of devs quietly building sites & apps, rendered invisible as they are not making use of the cutting-edge technologies that the 1% of the bleeding edge love to talk about.
Interesting article
#Research #UX
The Importance of Replicating Research Findings: 9 examples of claims or methods that MeasuringU attempted to replicate. Some got similar results, and they failed to replicate others. Interesting results.
#UX #AntiPatterns
The Possibility Gap: It’s Time to Label This deceptive Pattern – Unknown unknowns and the choices we make in our products and experiences.
#Robots #AI
Humans keep directing abuse — even racism — at robots
#Performance #Perception
“Fast Software, the Best Software“, an interesting read on performance, speed and how perception of speed and speedy software affects user perception of engineering quality and overall usability
#Accessibility #ScreenReaders
Long important article to demystify a few things about accessibility: “Truths about digital accessibility”
#Photography
“Photographers, Instagrammers: Stop Being So D*mn Selfish and Disrespectful“, this is really depressing 🙁
#Dataviz
“What Are Data Visualization Style Guidelines?” extending design systems to include standards specifically for data visualization with a few really nice examples
#FrontEnd #Index
Index fun: the author extracted and analyzed the z-index values from a lot of sites and presents the data. I was expecting 1337 or 42 to be on the list, kind of disappointed by my geek dev friends here.
Inspiration, fun experiments and great ideas
#Inspiration #UI
Science Fiction Interfaces for your inspiration
#AI #Patterns
Components AI – Experimental platform for exploring generative design systems
#Inspiration #Pastel #Website
The Macindows T-shirt website is awesome, I love those kind of unusual fun experience
#music #inspiration #pastel
Poolside, the site of this radio station playing summer music is awesome
#FakeNews
It’s Sunday, how about playing a game? In Bad News, you take on the role of fake news-monger. Drop all pretence of ethics and choose a path that builds your persona as an unscrupulous media magnate!
(this is both fun and scary)
#Liquid
Splotch, fun liquid experiment
#NSFW #butts #penis
Not sure why you would need those, but it’s still fun: “A collection of beautiful round butt illustrations“. You also might not need this: “Do Not Draw a Penis“, a site that functions as an agent to collect inappropriate doodles from people who are not willing to stay within the moral guidelines set by our social network providers.”
News in the industry
#Accessibility
A big bad news for accessibility if this passes: A blind man couldn’t order pizza from Domino’s. The company wants the Supreme Court to say websites don’t have to be accessible
#Facebook #Tracking
Sites could be liable for helping Facebook secretly track your web browsing, says EU court, YEEEEESSS!!!
#Addictive design
“New bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrolling, taking aim at features that are designed to be addictive” yup, we need people to pass bills to stop tech companies from harming the users, that’s how shitty we’ve become as an industry.
Ebooks
#Design #UI #Beginners
Building Beautiful UIs, a work in progress ‘course in a book’ to learn how to design interfaces. Chapter 1 and 2 available.
#HTML #ebook #learn
Students, beginners, here is “The HTML Handbook“, a free ebook to help you learn HTML (online, PDF, ePub/Mobi)
#Ebook #Productivity
“Shape Up, Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters“, a free online ebook by the people at Basecamp to help you get organised and ship products
Useful tools and plugins that will make your life easy
#Blog
If you like the minimalism of Medium but not the model and what it’s becoming, here is a nice alternative for a privacy-focused, writing and publishing platform: write.as
#UI #UserFlow
userflows.design a gallery of different user flows for your inspiration, from subscription to delete, sign up, etc.
#Video #Tutorials
loom.com, a screen recording tool that also lets you record your webcam, really nice tool to create tutorials for example
#Icons
Introducing Duotone in FontAwesome, this is really cool!!!
#Mockups #Sketching
This cool online tool lets you create your own printable mockups sheets.
#History
Version Museum showcases the visual history of popular websites, operating systems, applications, and games that have shaped our lives.
#UX
Have you ever heard the phrase just add some UX like it was an ingredient? Time to serve ’em a real UX cooking.
#UX #TED
“6 TED Talks Every UX Professional Should Watch” if there’s nothing left for you to watch on Netflix 😀
#UX #ServiceBlueprint
“Download Our Guide to Service Blueprinting” by By Nick Remis. A service blueprint is an operational tool that visualizes the components of a service experience in enough detail to analyze, implement, and maintain it.
#Gradient
Gradient Magic, A Gallery of Fantastic and Unique CSS Gradients
#CSS
Here is another CSS cheat sheet to help you with your front-end work this week
