Years ago we organised a series of meetups at CMD Amsterdam around the question what makes a thing a good thing. We’ve let that question rest for a few years. But it kept itching. So we’re starting a new series of events around an updated variant of this same question. This time we are less interested in the thing, and more interested in the person. So the question we want to investigate is what makes a designer a good designer? And related questions like what makes a designer a critical designer?
Interesting!
Yesterday I received a message from the person who used to write the transcripts for my podcasts. We chatted a bit and then she told me that her google ad campaign got hacked (or something) and that now it’s hard to find her website on google
. So in order to be found on google you have to pay them. Which means that if I, as someone who searches, am looking for something I end up at the website with the largest marketing budget. Not necessarily at the website with the best content. That’s bad. That very bad. But it gets worse.
Worse than that?!
Recently when I gave a coding assignment — an art directed web page about a font — a student asked: does it have to be semantic and shit? The whole class looked up, curious about the answer — please let it be no! I answered that no, it doesn’t have to be semantic and shit, but it does have to be well designed and the user experience should be well considered. Relieved, all of my students agreed. They do care about a good user experience.
Glad they do
I’ve been making lists this year, lists of things I like. They are part of my website, and I guess the end of the year is a pretty good time to share them. Here’s my list of lists:
What? Where is it?
Yesterday I gave a talk at the border:none event in Nürnberg. It was a wonderful event. A beautiful mix of personal, reflective, technical, inspiring talks. I talked about clocks, about our design tools, about HTML, about accessibility, about CSS and about the problem I have with our industry. A small warning: I find this to be a bit of a depressing post. I’m glad that the talk itself was received as a highly entertaining talk about the rather sad state of our industry.
What’s the problem with our industry?
Yesterday I read a toot about google’s new privacy policy: google reserves the right to use any public content to train their AIs. The crazy thing about this change in their privacy policy is, of course, that it somehow gives them permission to do so, even if you never use any of their services. Simply by existing they think they have the right to use content on my website.
That’s ridiculous
My colleague Yuri Westplat showed me an AI that could generate a working website by following a few commands that you type into a textarea. He also showed me a tool that could generate a pretty complicated interactive web thing, again by typing a few descriptive sentences into a textarea. And the results weren’t even much worse than the sites we use today. So should we worry?
Should we?
When I was still working as a frontend developer, a long long time ago, all the designers I worked with used photoshop to create images of websites. Back then, photoshop had all kinds of features that were not native to the web, like border-radius, gradients, blend-modes and shadows. We had to use hacks in order to make our websites look like photoshop. Nowadays people use tools like figma. These tools use a subset of CSS, which means that it is much easier to build a working website from a figma mockup, without using any hacks. These new tools are holding us back though.
What tools do we need then?
In 2019 I published my thesis called Exclusive Design. In it I describe my design research project about designing websites for and with people with disabilities. This whole project was structured around four Exclusive Design Principles: study situation, ignore conventions, prioritise identity, and add nonsense. These principles are based on the idea that people with disabilities have been ignored in the first 30 years of the web, and that we need to actively involve them in the design process if we are serious about inclusive design. Another very important part of Exclusive Design is that it is about tailor made design. It means designing for, and with one single person at a time. Not a target audience, not all blind people, but with full focus on one single person.
Let’s see those principles
Yesterday, at my father’s request, two so called Stolpersteine were placed in front of the house at the Herengracht 522 in Amsterdam. This was the house where Paul Auerbach and Sophia Charlotte Auerbach-Seligsohn lived before they were killed in 1944. Paul was killed in Dachau and his wife Charlotte was killed in Auschwitz.
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Many people have tried to recreate a work of art by Mondriaan with CSS. It seems like a nice and simple exercise: rectangles are easy with CSS, and now with grid, it is easy to recreate most of his works. I tried it as well, and it turned out to be a bit more complicated than I thought. And the results are, well, surprising.
Okay, show me
Today we discussed sectioning elements with my colleagues here at the University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam. Some of them really like the idea, they really understand the theory behind them, and they want our students to really understand this as well. And now I wonder: do designers (or web developers) really need to understand these rather complicated semantics? And if so, why exactly?
Your expert opinion would be appreciated
Today I read this interesting post which proposes a way to standardise skip links. Instead of adding a link to the content, which is then carefully hidden for people that don’t need it, it should be a meta-tag, or a link with a rel attribute in the head. A very interesting idea, since the browser can then decide how to present it to people.
But I would like to propose to stop using skip links
I like to build stuff myself. I made my own speakers, both in the kitchen and in the living room for instance. And to stream music to these speakers I also made my own streaming devices with a DAC using a Raspberry Pi. This gives me the freedom to implement any streaming protocol I need. Right now I need Spotify Connect and Airplay, but if any time in the future I need some other protocol I can implement that as well.
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