Labnotes
May 3rd, 2014 2 min read

Weekend Reading — r > g

Design Objective Adaptive Placeholders I love this concept: placeholders that double as labels. Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses Whether made by programmers or others, these are all design mistakes. The Great Works of Software If there was a software canon, clearly Office, Photoshop, Pac-Man, Unix and Emacs will be there.

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April 27th, 2014 3 min read

Weekend Reading — Client brief

Design Objective Stop Wasting Users’ Time Examples for design anti-patterns that do little more than waste our most precious resource. Labelmask Interesting way to add input masks to form fields, but without the accessibility issues. Responsive Design: Why and how we ditched the good old select element "The concept

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April 19th, 2014 2 min read

Weekend Reading — The Bread of Affliction

Design Objective The Cassette Tape as Responsive Design This is how we tackled responsive design in the 70's. Favor the Simple over the Complex An all time favorite: Simplicity doesn’t happen accidentally. It needs to be actively cultivated. Complexity is what happens when you aren’t paying

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April 12th, 2014 3 min read

Weekend Reading – Bleeding Hearts

This was big enough to warrant a second Weekend Reading. FAQ Is this a big deal? Should I be concerned? Yes. If you like to sleep better at night, I suggest not reading the rest of this FAQ. What was stolen? We have no idea what was stolen, but we

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April 12th, 2014 4 min read

Weekend Reading – Smart tipping

Design Objective The State of In-Car UX TL;DR your $200K ride is fitted with a $50 tablet, designed by people who'll never drive that car. Generating visual designs with code Examples of programmatic art work at Github. Design Can Drive Exceptional Returns for Shareholders: To better understand

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April 5th, 2014 3 min read

Weekend Reading – Should I deploy on a Friday at 5pm?

Design Objective Should “Yes, delete it” be red, or green? When in doubt, remove the text and ask again. Use autocapitalize to make input faster & format appropriate: Four things I wish every chart did: annotate the data, annotate the slopes, exclude incomplete periods, and enable projections. Now can we

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March 30th, 2014 3 min read

Weekend Reading – The Expert

Design Objective Automating Layouts Bring Flipboard’s Magazine Style To Web And Windows Remarkable technology by Flipboard to automate page layout for multiple content types and devices. I love how it pays attention to every little detail. Really Good Emails "The Best Email Designs in the Universe (that came

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March 22nd, 2014 3 min read

Rounded Corners - apt-get remove emacs

Design Objective We make the web – let’s make it accessible It's our responsibility: It leaves a lost opportunity by not being inclusive. And heck, it’s even the law now in several countries. So I think we ought to spend a little time learning the basics of

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March 20th, 2014 2 min read

Zero downtime deploy with Dokku

TL;DR we hacked Dokku to check-list new deployments before switching traffic over, eliminating down time. Here's our fork. Dokku is a wonderful tool for quickly deploying apps to production, but it's missing zero downtime deploys. Not anymore! Even our svelte Node.js app needs a

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