Writing
With over a decade working on the design and development of digital products I've learned a lot. I tend to write about things I find interesting or problems I've encountered.
2024
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Chasing the Spark: ADHD, Burnout, and Guilt
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It’s been roughly 4 weeks since my last post, not great for my “1 post a week” goal. Rather than pretending like it didn’t happen, I thought this would be a good opportunity to share what it’s like to live with ADHD and some of the troubles that come with it. The ADHD Superpower I’ve never been one
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Implementing Design Feedback
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Design feedback is a crucial part of the creative process, allowing designers to refine and improve their work. However, implementing feedback effectively can be challenging. This guide will explore some practices for incorporating design feedback into your workflow. 1. Understand the Feedback An ea
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Anfield Stadium Tour
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One of the highlights of my recent UK trip was a special meet-and-greet and tour of Anfield Stadium. If you're a soccer fan (or football, as it's called in the UK), you might be familiar with Anfield. It's the home of Liverpool Football Club, currently second in the Premier League and overall just a
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User-Centered Design Principles
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User-Centered Design is a common approach to creating products that truly resonate with users. By focusing on the needs, wants, and limitations of the end-user at each stage of the design process, we can ensure that the final product is not only functional but also enjoyable. In this post, we will e
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Fall Vibes
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Holy Pumpkin Spice Batman, it’s September! I feel like the last few months have been a bit of a blur. General Life Despite the title of this post, it’s distinctly un-fall like in TN right now. With highs in the 100s over the last few days, the brisk 83 we had for a high today felt like a break. Look
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CSS Architecture Archeology
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In web development, one of the most crucial aspects of creating efficient and maintainable CSS is the ability to reduce code duplication and establish a reliable system of reuse. This approach not only streamlines the development process but also enhances the overall performance and scalability of w
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Using Data to Improve Design
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When setting out to create a design for a new product or reimagine an existing product, how we decide what to focus on and how to know if a change is working are critical to understanding and discussing the work. Design by its very definition has to have intent behind it; there is a motivation and a
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Site Redesign Retrospective
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When I migrated my site from Eleventy to Astro I was more concerned with making sure everything was functional. The overall design of this site has been something that has bugged me for the last 8 months; the blue and gold didn’t really feel like me, it was more a placeholder than anything else. I w
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Site Rededesign is Live
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Shorter post today. After a few months of delays and reworks I finally decided on an overall theme for the site, put together the design, and got it out the door. I’ll write up a longer overview and breakdown later on, but I’m super happy with the final result and even more so that it’s finally out
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Evaluating Design Success
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Design is creativity with a specified purpose. Design always has goals and intention behind it. So how do we know when we’ve achieved those goals? Measuring the success of design can be incredibly simple, it can also be one of the most challenging aspects of a design career. With advertising, measur
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Leading Design Systems
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As I look to progress in my career one thing that I’ve had to grapple with over the last few months is the idea that I’d no longer be the one with the hands on the wheel of our design systems. Focusing on larger Design Operations and product leadership initiatives means I’m going to have less time t
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Design Operations Focus
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For the past few weeks, I've been contemplating the most valuable activities and practices to start a design operations practice. The key metrics I've focused on are team effectiveness, reduced time-to-money, reduced operational overhead, and overall product team health. Accessibility and Inclusive
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Data Over Dogma
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When working on design at scale one of the largest speedbumps you’re likely to encounter is a designer that feels like a design needs to change. Whether it’s something relatively small like the padding on a button or a heading’s font size, or something much larger like the layout of a card or the si
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Config 2024 Day Two
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Starting off day two strong, I was lucky enough to get upgraded access to the leadership collective, massive thanks to our Figma rep for pulling in that favor. Opening Keynote Leaving Fingerprints Karla and Nash kicked off the talks with Leaving fingerprints: product, design & stories at The Bro
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Config 2024 Day One
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Figma started off the day strong with their opening keynote. UI3 looks like a fresh take on the editor interface, and aims to solve a number of existing issues, from small improvements to massive overhauls that needed a refresh to tackle. The improvements to dev mode are a welcome addition given my
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Config 2024 Wishlist
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With Config 2024 right around the corner I figured I’d put together a little wishlist of things I’d like to see them announce, some more plausible than others. The Likely More Variable Support The most likely thing on this wishlist is additional advancements of Figma Variables. As a member of the De
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Understanding Outcomes
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As we look towards planning for Q3, the product teams I work with have started their quarterly product increment (PI) planning. One thing that came up this week was how to understand or find the outcome for a specific goal or problem. It’s easy to fall into old projects traps such as “we should add
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Chasing Two Rabbits
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A Swiss Army Knife is undoubtedly a useful tool, so much so that it has become the “go-to” item when referring to a product that can “do anything” or solve many needs. However, when we closely examine a Swiss Army Knife, it also becomes clear that none of the included items are a “best in class” for
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Product Discovery Toolkit
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In Product-Led organizations discovery is critical to understanding what users need and determining the right things to build. There are plenty of tools at our disposal to conduct discovery. In this post I want to highlight a few mentioned in Marty Cagan’s Inspired. What is Product Discovery? Before
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Shared Lexicon
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Our research team showcased Dovetail to our team this week. I’m looking forward to spending more time with the product, but something mostly unrelated to the product stood out in their demo. While walking us through the tool they kept having to specify that some of the words they were using meant di
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Research Beyond Usability Testing
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Often when I hear designers talk about user research they’re specifically referring to one of two things, usability testing, or validation testing. While there two types of testing are important, there’s so much more in the user testing toolkit that we can use. Usability and validation testing by th
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Using Object Maps in Design
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import PostLink from "@components/PostLink.astro"; Came across this post from Adobe and I've been tossing the idea around in my brain for the last few weeks. Using Object Maps in Design The core idea is simple, an object map is essentially a visual representation of the relationships betwe
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Native CSS Nesting
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With the release of Firefox 117 CSS nesting has full browser support coverage. Let’s take a look at how nesting works in CSS, how it compares to pre-processors like Sass, and some tips, tricks, and gotchas to watch out for. What is Nesting? In any programming language, when you have a declaration in
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Learning through Teaching
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Did you know that the DOM (Document Object Model) defines the web as objects? Or that this representation of web pages is object-oriented so that it can be modified by scripting languages? While these may seem like basic ideas it’s always interesting to dig into the details of the web that we work i
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Design for the web
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While catching up my my RSS feed, I read through Brad Frost’s recent post Should Designers Code? I’ve always agreed with the overall sentiment of the article, especially this bit: Designers need to understand and work with the grain of the medium for which they’re designing. For the web, that means
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Improving Team Alignment and Understanding
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As a part of looking to improve our the efficiency and effectiveness of our product and design teams I’ve been reading Discussing Design by Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry. I’d like to boost one of the concepts discussed in the book that I think could benefit a lot of teams I’ve worked with in the pa
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It's Autism Acceptance Month
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import PostLink from "@components/PostLink.astro"; In case you didn't know, April is Autism Acceptance Month. In this month we take time to recognize and celebrate the unique qualities and differences that make all of us who we are. No two humans are the same, and rather than look as those
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March 31st, Q1 Update
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Happy Easter! Can you believe March is over already? With the month coming to a close we’re officially 3 months into the year and Q1 is over, time to do a check in on goals, progress, and life. Writing I’ve managed to keep up with my desired 1 post a week. While some weeks are harder than others, I
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Leveraging AI to Improve Accessibility
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There’s been a lot of talk over the last few months about using AI to improve accessibility. I’ve seen and heard people talk about the potential for a browser or OS level AI to swoop in and solve “last-mile” accessibility issues for a user that a designer or developer has not considered or accounted
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Solving Complex Dynamic Problems with Systemic Design
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Over the past few weeks, I've been collaborating with a product team to create an interface for state and academic standards. The primary idea is that a user could select the standards document they want to view and then browse or filter the records for a specific standard. They could then view all
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The Box Model for Design
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Everything on the web is structured using the box model. HTML elements (e.g., paragraphs, div blocks, sections, etc.) are expressed in boxes. By default browsers stack these elements vertically, like boxes on top of each other. Through the use of modern CSS features we can organize and position thes
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Declarative Design and the Unknown Web
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This past week I got enticed into and pulled down a web design rabbit hole. Chris Coyier wrote on FrontendMasters back in mid February about part 2 of Jim Nielsen’s The Case for Design Engineers. The post Chris links to is a great argument for why we need people who can "bridge the gap" be
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How To Center a Div
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import PostLink from "@components/PostLink.astro"; Josh's tutorials are always a joy to read and interact with. Even as someone who is familiar with all of these methods Josh provides such an in-depth and details analysis, with incredible examples. For a long time, centering an element wi
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Indicating Link Posts
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As I read posts or see cool videos on the web I want to be able to write a short post and link to those resources. However, I want to be able to clearly indicate those posts and differentiate them from other blog posts that are primarily content to be read on this site. Thankfully that's relatively
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Taking Astro’s Starlight for a spin: Design System Documentation
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This past week I spent some time exploring using Starlight as a potential replatform for our design system documentation. The major reason I was drawn to starlight is that because it’s built atop Astro, it has support for all of the major players in the UI framework market. Our current system is bui
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Managing Change in your Design System: Workflows and Change Control at Enterprise Scale
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This past week Knapsack held a session with Nathan Curtis all about managing change in a design system. I took some notes on things I thought were interesting, figured it be worth sharing them here as well. How do I make this [Design Systems] a priority for my organization? Hitching your Wagon Often
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RSS Renaissance
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It sure seems like RSS is having a moment right now, with all the talk around slow social, human curation, etc. I think Chris put it really well in his post, so I wont rehash a lot of what has already been said. One this I did want to expand on was the experience he describes of RSS being either rea
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Systems of Harm
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import PostLink from "@components/PostLink.astro"; I've recently started listening to the Systems of Harm podcast by Amy Hupe. It's a short (6 episodes) series of podcasts discussing design systems and probing into how in addition to speeding up the design process they can also accelerate
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Chris Coyier - Exposed RSS
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import PostLink from "@components/PostLink.astro"; I doubt he was specifically talking about this blog; but after reading Chris' post I checked and realized that I am one of those sites taht does not auto-expose their RSS feed in the HTML. I've since added the relevant line in my head and
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Coding in Public - Import Aliases
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import PostLink from "@components/PostLink.astro"; One thing I've struggled with on many iterations of this blog is the constant ../../path/to/file string for references, whether imports, css, or images. I've never really understood how to set up import aliases and always just dealt with t
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Systemic Improvement is a Snowball
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Over the winter break from work I picked up a new game on Steam called Against the Storm. Against the Storm is a rogue-lite city-builder/management sim. Like many other city-builder or management sim games the goal of any specific “game” or “round” is to complete objectives and create a thriving set
2023
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Goals for 2024
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As this year comes to an end and we begin looking into the next one I’ve decided to publish my goals for the next year in a hope that this will help keep my accountable to reaching them. Visit Scotland We’ve planned a trip for this fall to visit England Scotland and Ireland. This is one of our major
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2023 in Review
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One Post a Week Back in September I set a challenge for myself to try and write one blog post a week through the end of the year. I figured, 7 days to write one single post? Peace of cake. Turns out that writing is a lot harder than I thought. I managed do to it though, and it’s something I plan on
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Taking off with Astro
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It's been about 3 years since I moved this site over to 11ty (Eleventy), and it's been a great ride. I still think 11ty is a fantastic static site generator, but I wanted to try out some new front-end frameworks and I feel like a personal website is always the playground to learn new things. The two
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Learning IndieWeb with Apple Annie
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I’ve been wanting to learn more about indieweb tech and how to incorporate more if it into my site. This past week Anne over at Apple Annie’s shared a post collecting her recent writing about her own indieweb adventures using indiewebify.me I plan on reading and learning from these over the next few
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Uses and Now
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Decided to jump on the /uses and /now bandwagons. What the heck are /uses and /now? From my own personal interpretations both of these ideas, pages, and products feel like they fall squarely into IndieWeb territory. They’re small ways you can share interesting information about yourself on your own
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Semantic HTML and Accessibility
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What is Semantic HTML? In programming, semantics refers to the meaning of a piece of code. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the backbone of the web, it is ultimately what is rendered in a browser when someone visits a website. Semantic HTML is the concept that markup should be coded to represent
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Learning Grid Thanks to Codepen Challenges
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This past week I partook in my very first Codepen Challenge. This month’s Codepen challenge is Style Trends. It’s an interesting “meta-challenge” where every week the HTML template provided is exactly the same and you need to create a unique design that matches the theme of the week. This past week
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Culture Eats Strategy
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Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast This famous quote from Peter Drucker has popped up a few times of the past couple weeks for me. We've been working on ways to improve our processes and strategy for design and how we work with other teams within our organization. I've spent countless hours of th
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Using Block Quotes for Social Embeds
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import { Picture } from "astro:assets"; import twitter from "@images/writing/social-block-message/twitter.png"; import mastodon from "@images/writing/social-block-message/mastodon.png"; Back at it again, Chris and Dave on the Shoptalk Show (ep. 590) mouth-blogged the id
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Why I'm Not an Accessibility Expert
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This past weekend Dave Rupert put out a blog post talking about being publicly shamed for having poor accessibility. In his closing thoughts he talks about how; despite his growing knowledge and experience designing accessible products, he stills finds “creating end-to-end accessible experiences dif
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Shoutout to Syntax Highlighting
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import { Picture } from "astro:assets"; import slidePreview from "@images/writing/syntax-shoutout/slide-preview.png"; import highlightExample from "@images/writing/syntax-shoutout/highlight-example.png"; Syntax highlighting is something I think most developers take for
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Brad Frost on Atomic Design
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Brad Frost recently posted this wonderful article reminding us all that Atomic Design is not a step-by-step process, and instead a mental model we should use to look at the parts and whole of a design at the same time. I know that I’ve been guilty of this myself. It’s very easy to fall into the trap
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Andy Bell updated his CSS reset!
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It seems I wasn't the only one who went to visit Andy Bell's post A Modern CSS Reset after it made an appearance on the Shoptalk podcast. He's since put out an updated post, so I figured since I commented on the first it was worth sharing the new one. A (more) Modern CSS Reset
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The Production-Ready Myth
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For years now there have been programs, tools and libraries that all claim to deliver on the same promise, delivering to you “Production-Ready” code. Dreamweaver was entirely based on the idea that you could design a website in their visual tool and it would generate all of the HTML for you, neat! A
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A Playbook for Accessibility
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In my work with Design Systems, accessibility often comes up as a topic. Questions can range from the incredibly basic, "What is accessibility?" to the more complex and nuanced, "Is the language of this modal clear enough?" Part of my job is to help guide the designers, developer
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Rendezvous with Cassidoo Newsletter 9/18 Interview Question
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Here's my answer to the Sept. 18th Rendezvous with Cassidoo newsletter interview question. It was a fun little coding challenge. It's a little more verbose than needed, but I liked the idea of calling out and explicitly naming the variables so that other people could follow the logic. I also adding
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Starting a Digital Garden
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This idea was inspired by a conversation at the end of the ShopTalk show Episode 583 with Maggie Appleton. Maggie’s essay on the Digital Garden concept really struck a cord with me. The idea of being more open and flexible with what is considered “blog worthy” is interesting to me as I am trying to
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CSS Reset, Normalize, and Base Styles
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Inspired by a conversation between Dave and Chris on the recent shoptalk show episode 582, I wanted to take a look at the history of CSS resets and see what I could put into a “reset” or “normalize” file that was tailored to my specific sensibilities. Why did we need to reset CSS? Since the earliest
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Diving into DesignOps
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Over the last few months I’ve been spending more of my time learning and thinking about how to implement a DesignOps practice across the teams I work with. Large portions of my work with Design Systems already relate to a number of DesignOps ideas and principles: helping teams solve for efficiency,
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Be a Design A11y: An Introduction to Accessibility
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import { Picture } from "astro:assets"; import { Icon } from "astro-icon"; import contrastExample from "@images/writing/design-a11y/contrast-ratio.png"; This is an introductory overview of Accessibility and how it relates to designing and building digital products and e
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Invest in Improvement
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I have been reading "The Making of a Manager" by Julie Zhou over the past few weeks. In chapter 5, titled "Managing Yourself," she emphasizes the importance of taking advantage of formal training opportunities. Zhou points out that even if a 10-hour training experience results in
2021
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Rethinking Buttons in a Production Design System
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import { Picture } from "astro:assets"; import originalButtons from "@images/writing/rethinking-buttons/original-buttons.jpg"; import buttonExamples from "@images/writing/rethinking-buttons/button-examples.jpg"; After two years of the Comet Design System being used by o
2019
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Extending CSS with Programmatic Selectors
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There are many powerful tricks in CSS that allow developers to apply styles in more nuanced ways than a simple class or id. The goal of this article is to introduce developers to some of the more obscure and nuanced selectors and how they can be used to apply styles in a more programmatic way. Intro
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Is 'Mobile-First' as an idea dead?
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Way back in January of 2016 Intercom wrote a blog post titled "Why mobile first is outdated". This post sparked a conversation over on the User Experience slack community Designer Hangout. I’m going to share some of that conversation. Mobile-First in a Device-Agnostic world The ideas behin
2016
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The Importance of UX and a Guided Introduction
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import { Picture } from "astro:assets"; import image1 from "@images/writing/pokemon-ux/pokemon_1.jpg"; import image2 from "@images/writing/pokemon-ux/pokemon_6.jpg"; import image3 from "@images/writing/pokemon-ux/pokemon_2.jpg"; import image4 from "@image
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I dont want a 'Smart' Home, I want a Smarter Home
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Living a simple, usable, connected life Knocki, Amazon Echo, Google Home, Amazon Dash (and Button), the Ikea Smart Kitchen Concept. All of these products and ideas share one core value; making daily tasks available instantly and on demand. Putting what you need where you need it without any addition
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Everyone has a Hammer, No one sees the Nail
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import { Picture } from "astro:assets"; import image1 from "@images/writing/hammer/ux-quote-1.jpg"; import image2 from "@images/writing/hammer/ux-quote-3.jpg"; import image3 from "@images/writing/hammer/ux-quote-4.jpg"; import image4 from "@images/writing
2015
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The Hamburger Menu Is Not The Enemy
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Another anti-hamburger menu article is making it's rounds again. This time from deep.design. A simple google search returns a number of articles about how the design pattern is a "useless tool" and should be avoided at all costs. I'm going to argue that the ideas behind the design pattern
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Blind3y3Design 3.0
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Welcome to the new Blind3y3Design! "3.0? What happened to 2.0?" you say? Here's the deal; after about 4 months of this site being on vanilla Jekyll I decided to switch over to using Octopress. It was great and I didn't have to change much to get it working. The one thing that kept nagging
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The High Horse Mentality
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Spurred by Lara Schenck's post on CSS-Tricks I have decided to toss my two cents in to the bountiful fountain of knowledge. It seems the age of 'Unicorns' has spawned a number of people who wind up simply being pricks sitting on their high horses. I'm not saying that people who claim to be unicorns
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The #Talkpay Hashtag
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Something interesting happened on twitter this week. The #Talkpay hastag went viral. This sparked a number of conversations I had with my peers. On the User Experience Design Slack channel we spent a good while talking about the idea, and it's potential ramifications or benefits to the community. So
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Bridging the Gap
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Bridging the ‘Handoff’ uxreactions.com While I appreciate a lot of what is on the site, I must say; seeing the number of developer complaints make me very sad. I also noticed this trend at a recent meetup I attended. A large number of designers; UX, visual, IxD, voiced a number of complaints about d
2014
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Designing a Workflow and Team Dynamic
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The idea behind designing a single workflow is that at any time someone else should be able to jump in to your workflow and know where in the process you are and pick up after you if needed. In our current development cycle this is imperative because we have people being added to and moved from one
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Scrum and the Agile Philosophy
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Developing our own Agile process is something that we should take pride in. We can take bits and pieces from frameworks and create something that works for our team. The point is not to go whole hog in to a single framework and force the team to work inside the constraints predefined for a different
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Blind3y3Design Version 1.0.0
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Yay! We're up and running using Jekyll. It took some time and has quite a learning curve, but if you're even remotely comfortable with the command line and you want to create a "simple, blog-aware static site" then it could be the thing for you. I am by no means a command line guru, and be