Thinking

Over the last year and a half Fractal has evolved from an internal prototype at Clearleft into an open source project that we (and now many others) are using to create and manage component libraries. It’s been exciting to get validation of the core ideas behind the project and great to see all the different ways that others have been pushing at the boundaries of what is currently possible with it.

Let me set the scene for you. It’s Monday 28th November and my brain is about to explode...

Are you a freelancer working in the design industry? To kick off 2017, we’re hosting a New Year get together here at Clearleft HQ in January.

Andrew Travers wrote about designing design principles at Co-op Digital. I’m somewhat obsessed with design principles—hence my collection—so I’m also obsessed with figuring out what makes for “good” design principles.

In addition to standard dialog ARIA-roles, focus management is crucial if you wish to build a more accessible modal dialog.

I wrote a thing. The thing is a book. But the book is not published on paper. This book is on the web. It’s a web book. Or “wook” if you prefer …please don’t prefer. Here it is:

​It’s been another busy year conference-wise here at Clearleft. But that’s certainly not an excuse to rest on our laurels. No indeed. We’ve been working away behind the scenes and our 2017 events calendar is shaping up nicely - first up to announce is UX London 2017.

24 Ways is back! That’s how we web nerds know that the Christmas season is here. It kicked off this year with a most excellent bit of hardware hacking from Seb: Internet of Stranger Things.

In a post called Side Effects in CSS that he wrote a while back, Philip Walton talks about different kinds of challenges in writing CSS:

Every front-end developer at Clearleft went to FFConf last Friday: me, Mark, Graham, Charlotte, and Danielle. We weren’t about to pass up the opportunity to attend a world-class dev conference right here in our home base of Brighton.

I spoke at the GOTO conference in Berlin this week. It was the final outing of a talk I’ve been giving for about a year now called Resilience.

Email newsletters are having quite the renaissance right now. We figured we'd throw our hat into the ring and introduce Clearletter.

In my previous article, I wrote about some of the misconceptions with “agile” that I see in organisations. This article will focus on one of them specifically – the common (mis)understanding that agile—and more recently lean start-up methods—are seen as operational and tactical, rather than strategic. Where does the confusion comes from? In particular, I want to acknowledge the role that the person who leads the project operations plays in realising the product vision and creating a context for the team to succeed. That person could be a Scrum Master, or an Agile Project Manager, or a Delivery Manager, depending on the context.

For the longest time I’ve maintained that Service Design was a specific discipline, distinct from UX Design. It’s true that they have a lot in common, like the way both fields approach problems through a user-centred lens. They also use many of the same tools, such as design games and personas. Even some of their distinctive tools, like the service delivery blueprint have similarities with our own user journey maps. But if you spent any time with a credible Service Design agency five or ten years ago, you’d easily spot the differences.

Thanks to progressive enhancement we can use lots of awesome CSS features right now, even though not everyone uses a browser which supports them.