Pixels of the Week – February 19, 2023

On Twitter,  LinkedIn and Mastodon, I share curated articles I read, resources and tools about UX Design, User Research, UI and mobile design, HTML, CSS, the web industry, some process, some inspiration, etc. This is an archive of everything I shared this week. And some extra links that I decided to only share for the blog readers. Also, subscribe to the newsletter to get notified when those are published!

#Now – what I’m up to

I had an awesome time, talking about accessibility and design systems with Geri Reid, Laren Eatty, Aprile Elcich this Thursday. The video should be available soon, I’ll share it here and on social media.

I’m also currently having fun with some raccoons illustrations for Mastodon server, and I’ve started adding vectorizing them and picking the actual colors. I also baked gluten free cookies, you can get the recipe on Instagram (or at the end of the article).

TL;DNR the one you should not miss

Building Your Color Palette: I’m sharing this one again, it’s one of the best introduction to color palette for beginners I’ve found. It nicely shows that you don’t just need the “palette” you built, but greys and accent colors (it misses a part about accessibility though)

Interesting articles

UX design, research, inclusive design and ethics

• Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong? Interesting read on the issues of design thinking, how a lot of the things that came out of such workshops were actually never implemented (due to lack of budget and how far away from reality some solutions where).
• Ethical dilemmas around the study of human behavior for marketing: Interesting read on ethical dilemmas when studying human behavior, also applies to UX research, why we need to stop nagging with empathy, go beyond stereotypes and more, by Karla Paniagua R.
• Some principles for ethical user research that are used in academia and can work for other sectors: Respect people (consent, privacy), Do the most good and least harm, Practice inclusivity to foster justice (cognitive complexity, etc.)
• Interesting advice if you want to implement a user centric process for your startup. And trust me, you should want to, this is how you build better products that scale and fit your target audience needs!  By Nicole Gallardo
• Global UX: how to study beyond your bubble | by Daley Wilhelm interesting read on localisation and how attitudes towards a product might change for different culture
• Rethinking Authentication UX: great tips on how to make authentication more user friends for all.

CSS wish lists and the false promises of JS frameworks

• Some very cool ideas in all those 2023 CSS wish lists from: Eric Meyer, Dave Rupert, Ahmad Shadeed
• The Market for Lemons: Interesting notes from Alex Russell on JS frameworks, the false promises of how better developer experience (DX) was supposed to bring better UX (spoiler: it didn’t)

Spices, AI skills, training and all the other cool ones

• The Strangely Beautiful Experience of Google Reviews, a nice article on how people use Google reviews to connect with each other, to build stories, memories. It’s quite unexpected but nice to see it exists
• Can spicy foods cure colds? A neuroscientist reveals the encouraging truth: not really but it can make you feel warm and better which is always nice when you are sick
• Why you shouldn’t trust AI search engines: “ Essentially, we—the users—are now doing the work of testing this technology for free. We’re all guinea pigs at this point”, yeah this is what happens when you push to prod something not ready.
• How prompt writing could become an important skills: it takes expertise, creativity and a lot of guesswork
• Very interesting if you want to understand how an AI can be trained on a specific style. I kind of want to do a local test now and test it on some of my own, but I don’t think I have enough in the same style

Inspiration, fun experiments and great ideas

• This comics about being “customer obsessed” made me giggle
• Accessibility Memes: there aren’t any. So Sheri Byrne-Haber made some, and borrowed one she really liked.
• FlappyBirdle: I don’t know why anyone would mix worlde and flappy bird, this is the most stressful game ever, BUT, if you are up for a challenge, here you go

Useful tools and resources that will make your life easy

• ScreenplaySubs a browser extension for Netflix that syncs up movies with screenplays, displaying them side by side. It shows you if a dialogue was improvised, a scene omitted, etc. It can be a fun way to discover behind the scenes of your favorites movies (if they are on Netflix)
• The Micropedia: An awesome resource to better understand micro aggression marginalized groups face. Identifying those is a first step into avoiding them and building a more inclusive society, workplace, etc.
• Modern Ilustration Archive: Explore the archives or 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s illustrations (mostly print design, advertisement, etc.)
• Typetrials: a free platform to test and experiment with fonts, especially if those are variable fonts. You can upload yours (or use the platform fonts):
• Vikunja: an open-source, self-hostable to-do app that you can configure different way, including trello style.
• Stable Attribution: this website claims it shows you the human made images that were used to by an AI to generate an image. Interesting to see the dataset (and might interest some illustrators to see if their content is in datasets without their consent)
• AIcyclopedia, Another list of AI tools organised by categories

Tutorials

Testing Colour Accessibility with Dev Tools, that’s a very useful trick if you don’t have any tools you can install

News in the industry

• You can test out new native CSS nesting in Safari and Chrome
• Ohhh this is the best valentine gift ever: Container queries land in stable browsers
• Another death knell for accessibility on Twitter: how the change in Twitter API pricing will affect (as in, make disappear) some super important accessibility bots

The Gluten Free cookies recipe

Gluten free lactose free banana cookies for 2 (adapted from @owiowifouettemoi‘s recipe)

• Mix dry ingredients together
• 20 g almond flour
• 30 g glutinous rice
• 50g g maïzena (cornstach),  or any other gluten free flour you like
• 30g oatmeals
• 1/4 tps baking soda
• 1 pinch of salt

Mix wet ingredients together:

• 30g coconut oil
• 30g de Brown sugar (I use coconut sugar)
• 20g white sugar
• 1 egg yolk (if you are vegan replace it by one very ripe banana or fake egg powder)

Bring the wet to the dry mix. If it’s too dry to mix (sometimes with some flours it is), add vegetable milk.

Heat oven at 180°C

Then I add stuff inside or on top of it, here are a few examples, up to you.

• chocolate chips (inside)
• bananas (on top of it)
• peanuts (inside)
• grated coconut (on top)

Form 4 little balls.

Cook for 12 to 15min max, temp 180°C

Let them cool for 8-10min.