Pixels of the Week – October 22, 2023

Designer are being gaslighted, rotating ramens, cute halloween cats & a WCAG 2.2 map

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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 processes, 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 currently up to

On the conferences side

I had an amazing time at Smashing conference last week. I talked about Enterprise UX, and Krisztina even drew a nice sketchnote from my talk. I also facilitate a whole day of my Accessibility for designers workshop. If you are curious, next sessions is remote, 4×2h + Q&A • Mon & Wed, November 6–15 2023. Get your ticket.

Last but not least, next on the conference agenda: November 23-24th, WeyWeyWeb in Malaga, where I will talk about designing beyond the pixel perfection. I’m also running an information architecture workshop on how to design adaptive reusable components.

Craft and cute halloween cats!

A A4 paper with "fuck patriarchy" written in black and red using small little pieces of stamps and different pictures of some halloween purple cats illustrations and sticker making of process

I was exhausted when I came back, so I just spent the weekend crafting! I got a blockface kit for my birthday, so I played around with some ink. And, I finished my Halloween cats illustrations. They turned out so nice once printed. Here’s a little behind the scene on Instagram on how I make my stickers. And, if you want some, I added them to my sticker buying page.

TL; DNR: the one you should not miss

Hey designers, they’re gaslighting you. (18min) Designers are being gaslighted into demonstrating impact, justifying value working just a little harder. My friends, we are being set up to fail in a giant, rotten system. Sara Wachter-Boettcher offers ways to reframe all of this, and stop beating ourselves up for failing to change something that it’s not in our control. Seeing her talk about this in Zurich resonated so much with me, I hope the article will resonate with you too.

This week’s dataviz

Ho, Intopia updated the WCAG map to add the 2.2 criteria. It’s a very nice cheat sheet and visual way to educate about accessibility.

Interesting articles that caught my attention

Design and UX

Accessibility

WCAG 2.2 and what it means for you (17min) a detail list of all the new criteria (and the removed parsing one)

The other interesting reads

  • Emergent best practices in AI-assisted design and research (14min): a couple of best practices to incorporate AI in your user research by Jane Davis. The main principles: don’t use AI for situation where you don’t feel confident evaluating the output and quality, make sure can mitigate biases (not just inaccuracy), be careful about privacy, and think about what you want AI to do for you, rather than what AI can do
  • Airlines Are Just Banks Now (10min) very insightful read on how airlines almost turned into banks, making more money from mileage programs than from flying planes. It’s a result of deregulation, which has allowed them to pursue profits in whatever way they can.
  • Actually, ‘Bed Rotting’ Can Be a Very Legit Form of Self-Care (5min) in case someone tries to stigmatize you for spending 1h scrolling Instagram on a Sunday morning

Curiosity cabinet: non-design/tech rabbit holes I enjoyed

there’dn’t’ve why do some contractions work in the English language, and some don’t, let’s talk about clitics (yes you read that right). Yup, I’m geeking around languages again this week!

Inspiration: fun experiments, beautiful art, and great ideas

  • RamenHaus: the home of 54 of rotating bowls of ramens, photographed, slurped and posted. I love such fun projects!
  • Huge entertainment ‘city’ in Tokyo transformed with variable typographic identity: I really love what they did with that variable font, so many possibilities!
  • South Pole Signage: a fascinated journey into different signs, official and unofficial ones to keep people safe and rhythm their lives.
  • Whole Earth Index: this is amazing if you love print and old magazines, a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, between 1970 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes.

Useful tools & resources

  • Trending Topics a site that uses Wikipedia traffic data to surface topics that are trending, or have been trending recently, and the data nerd in me loves this.
  • Footer if you ever need inspiration for great footers, well, here you go, a footer inspiration gallery
  • Clamp calculator: an online calculator to generate custom fluid tokens (with clamp) between a set min/max viewport.
  • Emoji generator: a fun tool to generate your own emojis. I’m not sure my pumpkin cat fits what I had in mind, but, it’s kind of cute, so, we’ll keep it.
  • Accessible Numbers: how to design services for people who need help with numbers (dyscalculia for example)
  • Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People: some very cool open source PDFs explaining different aspects of music theory
  • Digital Accessibility Blogs and Newsletters: oh, this is very nice, Ricky Onsman put together a nice list of people and resources to help you stay up to date and learn about accessibility.

Tutorials

Latest news in the industry

Adobe Firefly with the prompt "blog post article with a pen, a notebook and a computer keyboard; blogging content promotion concept" and one of the illustrations from my site as reference (and my site on the right with all the illustrations)