Pixels of the Week – March 14, 2021

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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

Screenshot of the miro board for the workshop

What a week people! In case you were wondering why the site was down for a few days: 🔥 my OVH data center burnt down a few days ago. I had backup for the wp-content. But I was super busy preparing and giving a workshop on “different flavors of Designer” (slides not available but I kept the miro board public if you are curious), then a talk for the Google Students’s Club Warwick.

So it took me (with some help of Geoffrey) a little time to bring it back. In theory everything is here, I salvaged the rest for different other backups, even found my nginx redirections config, but if you see broken links please send me a message. On the bright side: I have been complaining for more that a year about how I hated EasyEngine V4 (because docker made it super complex and I don’t have time to become a docker expert on top of everything I am already doing). So, this was a good time to switch to WordOps. Love it so far, the structure makes more sense for my small little needs. So yeahy! Also there will be some 🔥 jokes in this edition, because, catharsis.

Also David Dylan Thomas’s awesome book on cognitive biases was added to the psychology section of my design book selection. I also restructured a little bit the article because it’s super long now & had fun with the colors in the heading^^

Women in Computer Science (and tech)

This Monday was March 8, Internation Women’s day (also know as “day were companies and big tech blogs / podcast showcase a few women while not giving a **** the rest of the year”). To honor of that day, here is a selection on content on “I wonder why there are so few women in computer science”

Interesting article

#Good Design

  • “Why Does a Design Look Good?” by @NNGroup, of course “good design” is more complex than typography, colors, hierarchy and alignments, but this is a good introduction to explain that there’s rules and reasons why we do it that way.
  • To stay on the topic of good design: “Good design is science, not art“, interesting read on problem solving and scientific method, not fan of the empathy part, but this is because I often see empathy as a “tool” to avoid doing user research.

#UI #Retro

“A Look Back on 20 Years of The Skins Factory – Part 1: Origin (1998-2003)” I’m sooo onboard for such retrospectives of UIs

#Typography

#Usability #Buttons

“Disabled buttons don’t have to suck” Justine Win presents 3 alternative solutions other than just using a “disabled” button. It depends a lot on the context and what users tries to accomplish here, but all 3 are quite interesting.

#Psychology

Anchoring, survivorship bias, decoy effect, curse of knowledge, recognition or recall, 5 biases that might affect users and designers explained

#Icons #SVG

Why we should stop using icon fonts and replace them by SVG. Interesting arguments, I think a lot of people still use icon-fonts because of technical debt and old habits. I find styling with font-size super frustrating with those as well.

#Conference #Safety

“Safety at conferences“, a blog post by Laura Kalbag where she explains why she doesn’t feel safe at conferences and what people and organisers can do about that

#Crypto #NFT

I Sold a Tweet About My Future Cat on the Blockchain and Helped Kill the Earth in the Process, a tale about NFT, how amazing capitalism became at putting a price on everything and how we burn resources in the process (she wrote on a blog that also needs data centers to burn resources for that, the irony?)

Also a few tweets about how people are steal paintings from twitter and tag the with NFT

#AI

To get skin tones right, Pinterest’s AI went way beyond facial recognition (via Myriam Jessier)

Inspiration, fun experiments and great ideas

#SVG
A generative SVG drawing made with React. Plants are drawn on page load and then animated with GSAP. Awesome demo by Natalia (@natszafraniec)

#JS #Chess

This is awesome: “The Kilobyte’s Gambit 1k Chess Game”

#SVG #Webcam

A colour changing illustration SVG that changes based on the color shown by your webcam. By Natalia (@natszafraniec)

#Song

The pandemics isn’t over just because you’re over it, this is my 2021 song people.

#Painting

I love Aaron Blaise‘s I see Spots painting

Videos

#DecisionMaking

“How the day of the week affects your decisions” an interesting TED talk by Jet Sanders

Tutorials

#CSS #Animations

“Exploring @property and its Animating Powers” this is a really cool by Jhey Tompkins (@jh3yy) (warning : contains motion sickness triggering demos and colourful demos that might trigger seizures)

#CSS

Amit Sheen (@amit_sheen) uses CSS custom properties to map the position of the mouse without JS and build some interesting effects. As a CSS lover, I love how smart this is, but please be careful those might trigger motion sickness for some people.

Useful tools and resources that will make your life easy

#eBook

This month only James Victore’s book, ‘Feck Perfuction’ is on sale for just $1.99 across a variety of ebook retailers.

Other articles you might enjoy:

Published on 14 March 2021

in Pixels of the Week (curated newsletter)

By Stéphanie Walter