Pixels of the Week – June 3, 2021
Every day, I share on Twitter and LinkedIn a list of 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.
#Now – what I’m up to
I took a nice week of holidays last week and visited the north of Luxembourg. And, it’s gorgeous! I also enjoyed the bran new “Extra Bold – A feminist inclusive anti racist non binary field guide for graphic designers” that arrived just on time for my holidays!
So, back to business, sorry non French speaking followers, but in June I mostly only have French speaking events for now. So here’s the list:
- June 11: I’ll co-host a workshop on cognitive biases for FlupaUXDays with my dear friend Laurence
- June 8: I’ll talk about “enterprise UX” (working internally in a companies on the tools they build for their internal employees) in the “Les briques du web” podcast
- June 17: I’ll talk about what I learned what I learned in the last 10 years as a designer at Ladies that UX – Paris
- June 29: unannounced surprise (that has someone to do with design systems)
If you are interesting in such talks and workshops in French or English, please reach out!
TL;DNR the one you should not miss
This week, I encourage you to read 2 interesting articles on the state of our UX industry
- “I (Jesse James Garrett) helped pioneer UX design. What I see today horrifies me. Where did we go wrong?” It’s hard to not sadly node at every sentence. Is there still hope?
- “The fetishisation of UX design, Is our showboating doing us more harm than good?” by Amy Rogers articulates nicely a lot of things that are wrong with the current “UX theater” industry
Interesting article
#CSS #Responsive #ContainerQueries
- CSS Container Queries For Designers by @shadeed9, a nice overview of all the awesome things designers will be able to achieve with this. I can’t wait, for the moment we rely on JS to do this kind of adaptation, and it’s a little bit of a performance issue
- From specific media queries to target and adapt to specific user preferences to container queries, there’s a lot of new things coming in the browser that will bring responsive web design to the next level: video and article by @una
- Are layouts using container queries but no media queries responsive? “Yes, absolutely” says @beep, a great piece on how responsive evolved with every technology and experiments from the community.
#Accessibility
- A great article by Rian Rietveld (@RianRietveld) on how to design the perfect (accessible) link with guidelines on format, anchor, color contrast, states, semantic, HTML, etc.
- “Listening to Poo, Your Emoji and You” interesting read on how emojis in names might be annoying to screen reader users
- “Don’t use custom CSS mouse cursors” by @ericwbailey, yes to all of this, I really don’t understand why we brought this trend back but it is quite annoying and has a lot of damage potential when it comes to accessibility
- A nice list of Accessible Speaking Best Practices to make your in person and online events more accessible.
- Spotify changes their button color for more contrast, that’s nice: “Better in black: Rethinking our most important buttons“
#Design
Design is free : analysis on how icons fonts & even software are becoming a digital commodity how cost reduction via automation tools & reorganization brings costs of tactical design down (almost free). What’s left? The Strategic parts!
#UXDesign
“Overcoming UX Misdirection” by Darren Hood, a good quick read on how UX is not UI or Design thinking and other misconceptions about our job and what UX Design actually is
#MeasuringUX
NPS is The Worst (via @Wisounet), a collection of articles that explains what is wrong with NPS and some alternatives
#UI
“Improve Your Interaction Design with 6 Principles” by Malika C., a good short read to demystify a few principles behind UI and interaction design.
#Society
“The game is no longer optional. Everyone must play. We have little to lose because we already lost everything (…) and even the when we win, the rewards tend to be fleeting, algorithms might change” sadly true, especially in the US
#Disability
“I’m Tired of Begging Strangers to Stop Touching Me Wherever I Go” don’t touch blind people without their consent just because you think they need help, there’s a chance they actually don’t need any (also don’t touch anyone without their consen
Inspiration, fun experiments and great ideas
#Inspiration #Illustrations
- If you like animals and illustrations, you should take a look at the inspiring work of @anaisfae I am obviously a big fan of the stellar fox ^^
- This week, I want you to discover the work of @dedouze_ who creates amazing neon colorful 3D illustrations (with Blender): Instagram and Website
- Here’s some inspiration to start the week: meet Bryndon Díaz, an illustrator in Guatemala with a an awesome and surreal colorful style: Behance and Instagram
- Morning Monday Inspiration, discover the work of Jinhwa Jang with some colorful neon and back and white illustrations
#Accessibility #Comics
A comic teaching you how to write alt text for you comics!
#GothicFiction
2 hilarious guides to gothic fiction: a gentleman’s guide and a ladie’s guide
Podcasts & Videos
#Podcast #Journey
Why do we call a 6 clicks interaction a “journey”? Another great podcast (with transcript!!!) by @katerutter and @lauraklein on how we tend to get a little bit grandiose about some of our terminology
#UX #Talk
“Ethics & Power: Understanding the Role of Shame in UX Research” a great talk by @vcastillo630 (you need to create an account but it’s free and there’s a lot of other great talks on the platform so 100% worth it trust me)
Tutorials
#CSS
This is cool: How to Create Neon Text With CSS (by Silvia O’Dwyer)
#AccessibilityTest
A youtube playlist with short videos on quick accessibility tests
Useful tools and resources that will make your life easy
#Avatar
A fun avatar generator tool that generates rounded SVGs in different styles for your apps. I like beam because of the little faces and the bauhaus abstract ones.
#JavaScriptCourse
Yeah, @wesbos launched a Beginner JavaScript text guide based on his video content course. All 15 chapters are free and available online, how awesome is that?
#ImageResize
A little online tool to help you resize images for different social media platforms, that’s nice if you don’t have a design tool at hand and need a quick resize.
#FigmaPlugin
All Hands Mockup Generator, free device mockups featuring hands of all shades shapes and sizes
#Productivity
yourweek.app I’m always bad at those productivity apps but I like the “this week / later” concept here so I might give this one a try. I already have paper cards like that on my desk and they tend to work nicely ^^
#Deception
A website where you can report deceiving patterns. I have a whole folder of those, maybe I should send a few ^^
#Accessibility
Little reminder that both Chrome and Firefox inspect have built in tools to check color contrast and simulate colorblindness: Chrome dev tool, FF color vision simulation, FF contrast checker
#CSS
An interactive lesson in the browser that teaches you grid layout!
#deceivingpatterns
Another one of those “let’s make the worse user experience possible”, this time with some terms and conditions pop-ups
#CSS
My kind of adventure: a game to learn CSS with a cute little pixel art adventure
#VideoChat
Hum, I think Around nailed what annoys and distracts me in calls: stressful backgrounds but mostly noise background. It’s next to impossible for me to concentrate when people have background noise and poor audio. I need to give that a try! (update: I gave it a try and loved it ^^)
#Audio
A free peer-to-peer spatial audio environments where people can put furniture, virtually sit on it and have a conversation
