Twice as nice: Introducing the NHS.UK Eleventy Plugin
With the NHS.UK Eleventy Plugin you can focus on writing content instead of writing code.
With the NHS.UK Eleventy Plugin you can focus on writing content instead of writing code.
As teams at GDS prepare to launch a refreshed brand for GOV.UK on 25 June, so the X-GOVUK community has been updating its projects in preparation for this go-live date.
Goodbye Dribbble.
I’ve been on a bit of a mission lately.
Noodling on nodes.
What fresh hell is this?
Introducing a plugin for the GOV.UK Prototype Kit that adds a helpful collection of Nunjucks template filters. Rapidly modify and transform data while ensuring it follows the GOV.UK style guide.
My as yet unpublished interview for the website Me, But Online.
The GOV.UK Eleventy Plugin makes it easy to start writing documentation rather than spend time building a website for it.
Good things come to those who wait.
A remarkable present for my 40th birthday.
The first season of the Clearleft podcast concluded this week, and in what feels like a rare event these days, I need to have a little rant about what I heard.
Only one thing determines the quality of software.
For all their claims of changing the world, it would seem designers have not only failed to address its more pressing problems, but exaggerated many of its existing ones.
Slack has a new logo, and everyone hates it.
If design is the application of ethics, then anyone designing digital products should see their role in a new light after reading this book.
Some wise words from Danielle:
The end result of our attempts to work together efficiently by breaking things down is that the topologies of our workplaces are left with gaps and overlaps.
I love this post, not least because it offers a new perspective on the work we do and provides a model for talking about how different teams can better collaborate with each other. There’s much to agree with in this piece, although I found the following to be especially true:
Recognising the gaps and overlaps is only half the battle. If we apply tools to a people problem, we will only end up moving the problem somewhere else.
Some issues can be solved with better tools or better processes. In most of our workplaces, we tend to reach for tools and processes by default, because they feel easier to implement. But as often as not, it’s not a technology problem. It’s a people problem. And the solution actually involves communication skills, or effective dialogue.
Another identity from the offices of Pentagram that elicits a feeling somewhere between despair and indifference.
An appreciation for identity programmes that seek to refine rather than reinvent.
Ben Holliday:
Buying your fresh fruit and veg at local market is a valuable social connection. When I take my daughters to our local food market on Saturday’s they get to interact with our local community. The market sellers always chat to them. They often count the money (cash) when we pay, and help work out the change. One lady that serves us asks them what they’re doing for the rest of the weekend, and they learn to interact with other adults that aren’t their family or school teachers.
I can get supermarket fruit and veg delivered to my door (probably more cheaply), but this convenience comes at a cost of social value.
There is always a cost to convenience. As a business, the question is where you offset your costs. It’s 2017, and Amazon have just bought Whole Foods Market. What does that really say about our interactions with our local shops and markets?
My question for companies like Amazon is how will they think about the social value of what they sell in the future? Or, how will they think about offsetting the social cost of the speed and convenience they’re prepared to offer? My expectation is that they won’t think about these things at all.
Amazon’s answer appears to be unmanned stores where your every move is tracked, all for the supposed convenience of not having to use a checkout.
The real potential of emerging technology should be how it helps us to design for increased social value. I don’t want to live in a world where everything is so seamless and so fast that most moments pass me by.
Amen to that.
Three aspects of my personality have proven pertinent.
Why do some designers choose to work for ‘evil’ corporations – and what happens to them when they get there?
The final part of my three-part essay based on the talk I gave at Smashing Conference. I look at how we might build components and consider their wider composition.
In this second part of my three-part essay based on the talk I gave at Smashing Conference, I propose a model for thinking about design systems.
In the first part of a three-part essay about design systems, I review two approaches for the creation of something equally as complex: a city.
I run my finger along the seam between interface patterns and design systems, exploring how a visual design language can underpin and inform a web style guide, with judicious use of CSS preprocessing. Like a good Christmas jumper, sometimes you need to get creative with the rules.
There’s a lot of them around. Here are some more.
Having lived in my current flat for just over two years, I’m determined for this to be the year I finally make it feel like a home.
Canadian design super-duo Hulse&Durrell, worked on what could only be described as my dream project. Researching 120 years of Olympic design heritage, they then documented and digitised hundreds of assets for use on officially licensed merchandise:
Beginning with the core elements of each Olympic Games identity (emblems, pictograms, mascots, and official posters), we set out to find their most authentic sources. The journey took us from the Olympic Museum archives in Switzerland to Olympic historians, private collections, and past-Games design directors around the world.
Where possible, emblems, mascots, and pictograms were re-created with the original techniques of their time. Design manuals originally intended for use with protractors, compasses and paintbrushes became blueprints once again – this time with a digital toolset in mind.
For wordmarks, classic typefaces like Univers, Helvetica, Times, and Futura were adapted to reflect the movable type printing process of their respective times and places. Physical artifacts were also referenced against the modern Pantone colour matching system to ensure tonal authenticity.
The result is the most comprehensive, authentic Olympic art and design collection ever created.
Jealous? I’m green with envy.
I’ve yet to see a full episode of The Late Show (which I wrote about shortly after its debut), but thanks to clips posted online, I’ve still been able to get my regular Colbert fix.
One of my favourite aspects of the show is the opening titles, which feature shots taken from this extended version. Fernando Livschitz’s vivid tilt–shift photography pairs well with Jon Batiste & Stay Human’s signature tune, and showcases New York City to the extent that I now want to make a return visit.
Cennydd has written a short piece for the Design Council about ethics within the realm of digital technology:
Disruption is Silicon Valley’s current watchword. Startups are optimised for shaking up vulnerable industries rather than assessing the resulting social, legal and ethical impact. Progress itself is the yardstick; whether that progress is in a worthwhile direction is sometimes secondary.
Beyond advocating that designers should have a central role in empowering and protecting users, Cenyydd suggests that we should also push for increased diversity within our product teams as well:
As ambassadors for global userbases, designers know well the range of mentalities and approaches people bring to technology. Homogenous teams are too easily swept up in camaraderie, seeing only exciting gains for people like them, yet blind to potential harm for people not like them. The broad perspective of diverse teams offers better insight on tough choices: early warning of ethical issues that may disadvantage particular groups.
I couldn’t agree more. Go read, it’s a good one.
For the last year I’ve been working at the Guardian under the leadership of a creative director.
Last Thursday I was in Belfast for Break Conference, the spiritual successor to Build.
As a unique human endeavour, imbued with all the complexities of our species, it is about discovering the most appropriate solution within a fog of differing constraints, opinions and desires. The compromise therefore, lies somewhere between the world we wish for, and the one we currently inhabit.
Mills Baker:
Much of the work for which we express the most enthusiasm seems superficial, narrow in its conception of design, shallow in its ambitions, or just ineffective.
A necessary critique of the state of design emanating from Silicon Valley. It would seem its best designers are putting lipstick on pigs; adding gloss to products that most people outside San Francisco neither want or need. Also, this:
Design is about solving problems that humans have, not problems that products have.
Possibly the most important design talk you’ll hear this year:
For decades, the spaces we live in have been built by consensus. Planners, architects, councils, consultation; and always the watchful eye of the regulators and elected officials. But the world’s favourite digital spaces are largely in the hands of people like you and me. We have to oversee ourselves – and it’s not going very well.
Are we focusing on the right problems? Or just aggrandising the mundane? How do we know what the right problems are? How can we guide ourselves to appreciate the cultural and personal impact of the decisions we make?
It’s time for our industry to become ethically aware, if we’re to have a chance of doing the right thing.
With the British government now able to count itself among the few countries sporting a coherent identity programme, a follow up to my 2009 post on the subject.
Whereas the world’s foremost architects, graphic artists, typographers, iconographers and illustrators are asked to create their best work to celebrate each Olympic Games, still we wait for the Olympic movement to give equal consideration to the design of its websites.
My interview with Workspiration.
The tail end of this year has been rather hectic. If moving house and changing jobs weren’t enough to be getting on with, I was also busy redesigning 24 ways.
Since Mikey joined us in February, the number of designers working at Clearleft is at an all time high. As the company grows, we want to maintain the same level of knowledge sharing and collaboration that happened more spontaneously with a smaller team.
John Gruber:
The trend away from skeuomorphic special effects in UI design is the beginning of the retina-resolution design era. Our designs no longer need to accommodate for crude pixels. Glossy/glassy surfaces, heavy-handed transparency, glaring drop shadows, embossed text, textured material surfaces – these hallmarks of modern UI graphic design style are (almost) never used in good print graphic design. They’re unnecessary in print, and, the higher the quality of the output and more heavy-handed the effect, the sillier such techniques look.
John’s article forms part of a larger discussion about the possible emergence of a truer digital aesthetic. Flat interfaces, such as those seen in Microsoft’s Metro UI and the BBC’s GEL project are certainly fashionable, and thankfully, to my taste. Simpler interfaces are particularly suited to the web; high-fidelity interfaces can require a large number of image assets or many lines of CSS, reducing overall performance.
I’m not sure this trend has much to do with HiDPI displays though. I suspect, like most design movements, it’s just a reaction to what proceeded it. Skeuomorphism is to Art Nouveau what flat design is to minimalism. What goes around, comes around.
Be sure to read Max Rudberg’s counter argument, too.
When every device begs to be connected, it has become easier – almost necessary – to accept the adaptable nature of the web. Responsive web design is an emerging best practice, and our layouts are becoming more flexible. But often, innovation is focused on technical implementations while the visual aesthetic remains ignored. To put it another way, we’re embracing “responsive” but neglecting the second part: “design.” Now is the time to seek out an aesthetic that is truer to the medium.
Rian van der Merwe for A List Apart:
A “shiny citadel” from far away, as The Guardian once wrote, up close Brasília has “degraded into a violent, crime-ridden sprawl of cacophonous traffic jams. The real Brazil has spilled into its utopian vision.”
This problem echoes across today’s web landscape as well, where the needs of ordinary users spill constantly into designers’ utopian vision. All around us we see beautiful, empty monuments erected not for their users, but for the people who built them – and the VCs who are scouting them.
“Digital Brasílias” is a great term for all the beautiful – yet ultimately useless – products emerging from the Valley. Product discovery can help us not only design things better, but design better things.
Earlier this month, Team Clearleft headed up to London for a day of design related exhibitions: Bauhaus: Art as Life at the Barbican and (after a ride across the city on a ‘Boris Bike’) British Design 1948-2012 and Heatherwick Studio: Designing the Extraordinary at the V&A.
Andrew Mitchell, the International Development secretary, has unveiled a new logo that will appear on overseas aid provided by his department; be it grain packets, schools or water pumps.
With a worsening financial crisis and continued destruction of the world’s natural resources, there are undoubtedly more important things to worry about than Twitter’s slightly tweaked bird logo. Yet here we are.
Rather than showcase British interactive design talent, the biggest cultural event of our generation has been represented online by an uninspired mess that flies the flag for the status quo.
Bret Victor talks about why he is motivated to create creative tools, during his presentation at CUSEC 2012:
Ideas are very precious to me, and when I see ideas dying, it hurts. I see a tragedy. To me it feels like a moral wrong, it feels like an injustice. And if I think there is anything I can do about it, I feel it’s my responsibility to do so. Not opportunity, but responsibility.
He also asks a good question; what’s the guiding principle behind everything you create?
(Via Tim Van Damme)
Eliel Saarinen:
Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.
Marissa Mayer addressing Google designers, as quoted in In The Plex by Steven Levy:
“It looks like a human was involved in choosing what went where,” Marissa told them. “It looks too editorialized. Google products are machine-driven. They’re created by machines. And that is what makes us powerful. That’s what makes our products great.”
This explains everything.
(via Buzz Andersen)
With three years of iPhone ownership I’ve become accustomed to the design and behaviour of iOS, yet at the same time ignorant of other smartphone platforms. Thanks to Clearleft’s new mobile testing environment, I can now spend a week or so with different operating systems to get a feel for how they differ. First up; Windows Phone 7.
Facebook’s continuing hoovering up of top design talent has been worrying me for some months. The shopping spree continued earlier this month with the acquisition of Push Pop Press, a promising start-up building an innovative digital publishing platform.
Clayton Miller:
Microsoft’s Metro UI owns the square. Apple has a corner on the roundrect, from the Springboard launcher to the iPhone hardware itself. Nokia, despite its late entry with MeeGo’s Harmattan UI, found the squircle unclaimed and ran with it beautifully. Palm has used the circle from the early days of PalmOS, and in WebOS, HP continues the tradition with care (one might even note that both Palm and HP structure their wordmarks around the circle).
I have a nagging feeling this observation will become useful on future projects. (Via John Gruber)
Following the latest trends is fun but can also encourage laziness; you should think about design in terms of a particular brief rather than the particular fashion of the day. Yet it can be useful to focus on underlying trends: how we work, how we communicate with clients and how we’re now starting to appreciate the web as a medium in its own right.
I’ve been thinking about redesigning this website for the last six months, but haven’t been able to find a strategy for making these changes happen. To keep this project on course, I’ve defined a set of design principles.
Clearly communicating the fundamental aspects of your design at the different stages of a project can help you better communicate with clients, developers and your peers, ensuring your vision doesn’t get lost in the transformation from static comp to dynamic ever changing website.
There is often talk of there being no landmark design on the web, but I suggest it won’t be long before BBC News is considered one of the greatest design icons online today.
With Dave Gray speaking at this year’s UX London, Andy asked if he would then visit Brighton and run a sketching workshop for everyone at Clearleft.
I’m a huge supporter of the BBC, yet for many years I was unimpressed with much of it’s online output, where inconsistent design and poor implementation reflected badly upon one of our country’s greatest institutions.
My love of detail is often reaffirmed by my noticing the almost inconsiderable tweaks in the designed environment around me.
The humble URL has been on my mind a lot recently.
With an escalating national debt, the talk at this months party conferences is of cuts to public spending and smaller, more efficient government. I believe one clear way of achieving this would be to introduce a single unified brand across government.
The appointment of Fabio Capello has brought about a more stylish and confident England. Now they have a kit to match.
In a recent conversation with a client, he asked why I got into design. Its something I’ve been meaning to write about for sometime, so I’ll try to publish my answer here.
Influenced by the launch of Britain’s first new television station in almost 20 years, Channel 4, television design in the eighties saw experimentation with computer originated graphics. The graphic style during the nineties was also influenced by the launch of new channels – this time hundreds. The advent of multi-channel television meant the traditional terrestrial broadcasters, who for years had little competition, quickly needed to re-invent themselves, and branding played a key role.
The development of graphic design on the Internet, the problems associated with designing for this medium and some of the solutions.
The launch of television in 1936 saw the birth of a medium that could be easily exploited and enhanced by graphic design. However the early story of graphic design in television was one of limited resources and under investment.