Design

Your knowledge is more valuable than you think it is! Share what you know by documenting it and finding opportunities to mentor and teach.

This project from James Stanley generates seasonal CSS color schemes for every day of the year: seasonal-css.incoherency.co.uk

This @kevinkirchner app lets you generate color palettes from scratch or from images, with precise control over contrast ratios: grayscale.design

Recently I’ve heard from some folks who read my blog posts and incorporated some of my projects’ ideas into cool projects of their own.

When I learn something new, I tend to assume everyone else already knows it. But I try to share my discoveries anyway.

In case you missed this over the weekend and could use a little distraction today. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

oh no i lost ken twitter.com/KenHatesSoftwa…

Every October, I make a schedule of dozens of horror films, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. I call it Robtober, only half-ashamedly. It’s fun! For the past few years, I’ve announced the schedule’s contents via blog posts with increasingly elaborate designs, effectively dressing my site up for Halloween. This year, I wanted to harness some of my favorite visual themes from horror movie marketing (such as posters and trailers), and distorted hand-lettering… See more →

The terrifying title lettering is a handmade @jenmussari special. I’ll share details soon about the super fun process of working with her. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

It doesn’t look like it, but this is a blog post! Personal sites are fun and I wish everyone had one. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

My site’s loud background color on large viewports never felt right, and I just realized another color in my system works much better. 👍🏻

The year is 2020. Summer is giving way to autumn. COVID-19 will have killed a million people by the year’s end, a fifth of them Americans. Unemployment is soaring. Millions have taken to the streets to protest police brutality and its disproportionate effect on Black people. The west coast is engulfed in the fiercest wildfires it’s ever seen. The sky is orange.

In the face of all this, the President of the United States denies… See more →

Easing back into my site redesign and thinking about individualism and collectivism in the context of making the web. v7.robweychert.com/blog/2020/06/v…

I might have expected quarantine life to be a boon to my site’s redesign process since most of my preferred social distractions were nullified. Instead, I’ve been using the time in isolation to make music videos, finalize a home purchase, move into said home, and try to find my place in our national reckoning on racism and public safety reform. But as I slowly shift some of my attention back to the redesign, I’ve been… See more →

Added documentation to the tinnitus.robweychert.com repo because by the time there’s live music again, I may have forgotten how to update the site. 😞

remember when front end web development did not require a computer science degree

I’ve never watched Schitt’s Creek, but this is the kind of internet I signed up for. twitter.com/lynnandtonic/s…

My site redesign is starting to look like a thing! v7.robweychert.com/blog/2020/03/v…

Though it’s mostly taken place in scattered, stolen moments, I’ve made a lot of progress on the UX of the timeline section, much of which was still a disconcerting mystery not so long ago.

With the help of the data categories and content inventory I established in the previous post, I’ve settled on a binary timeline concept: each post is either small or large. Small posts consist of up to 100 words and/or up to… See more →

our hearts go out to the owner of those raster and vector production files from 2017–2020 and we urge congress to enact tougher backup laws

Resuming redesign activities by taking inventory on content and wondering if I’m overdoing it. v7.robweychert.com/blog/2020/02/v…

Progress on the redesign has slowed, partly because I’ve been busy with other things, and partly because, frankly, the open questions about the timeline section enumerated in my previous post are an intimidating mess, a perfect example of the early stages of the Design Squiggle.

In a fight or flight situation like this, here are the arguments for flight:

• “Uh, the timeline isn’t even your top priority for the site, remember? What’s more important: working on… See more →

Trying to use Avant Garde Gothic as a text face and it is putting up quite a fight.

Folks, @naconf is next week. It’s put on by some pretty great people. I can’t go, but if you can, you should. newadventuresconf.com/2020/

AP style is particular about how dates are formatted in various circumstances. strftime uses %b for month abbreviations, but its format (the first three letters of the month: Jan, Feb, etc) differs from AP style’s preferred abbreviations for some months. This Liquid snippet converts strftime’s month abbreviations to AP style:

{{ object | date: '%b. %e, %Y' | replace: 'Mar.', 'March' | replace: 'Apr.', 'April' | replace: 'May.', 'May' | replace: 'Jun.', 'June' | replace:… See more →

It’s that time of year again. features.propublica.org/cabinet-cards/…

A great read from @frank_chimero on evaluating typefaces. frankchimero.com/blog/2020/look…

So many lovely little details on @destroytoday’s excellent new homepage! twitter.com/destroytoday/s…

Enumerating some of the structural challenges of the timeline section I have in mind for my site redesign: v7.robweychert.com/blog/2020/01/v…

Most of this redesign’s structural challenges pertain to the timeline section, previously described thusly:

• Timeline: The blog on the current version of my site, V6, collects most of what I’ve written for public consumption since 2001 across nearly 40 different sources. I’d like to expand that to include even more sources and content types, collecting virtually everything I’ve shared online in one sprawling, sortable/filterable timeline.

Since the projects section is a higher priority and the new… See more →

A brief overview of my content priorities for my site redesign. v7.robweychert.com/blog/2020/01/v…

I added a tiny bit of CSS to aid readability by keeping line lengths in check on larger viewports:

body {
  margin: 0 auto;
  max-width: 75ch;
  padding: 1rem;
}

When calling the CSS file from the page head, I include a query string based on today’s date, which I’ll update when the CSS is updated. This will let updates get past the browser’s cache.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/css/main.css?20200108" />

Hopefully this small stylistic addition will keep things tidy enough until I properly begin the visual… See more →

Apparently <meta name="viewport"> is still necessary. v7.robweychert.com/blog/2020/01/v…

The first thing I did when setting up this new version of my site was to put together some minimum viable HTML templates. Here’s the blog post template:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title><!--POST TITLE--> | RobWeychert.com V7</title>
    <meta name="description" content="<!--POST DESCRIPTION-->" />
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RobWeychert.com V7" href="/index.rss"/>
  </head>

  <body>
    <… See more →

Kicking off 2020 by redesigning my site in public from the ground up and blogging every step of the process. v7.robweychert.com/blog/2020/01/v…

My immune system didn’t do me many favors in 2019. I was sick on five or six separate occasions in the first half of the year, including an obnoxious bout of bronchitis that lasted the entire month of February. Luckily that didn’t stop me from having an adventurous and fulfilling year, and for the first time in my four years at ProPublica, I used every single one of my vacation days.

Projects

My first three… See more →

Welcome to RobWeychert.com V7! There are a number of new things I want to try with my site, from structure to aesthetics to code, and so it’s time to begin a fresh redesign. Inspired by my friends Jonnie and Frank, I’ve decided to do it in public from the ground up. I’m starting with bare-bones HTML and as the design process unfolds, each step will be reflected on the site in real time and documented… See more →

@teleject @24accessibility You can see some of these concepts in action in my recent post on dynamic color. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

From @teleject and @24accessibility, an excellent crash course on color theory and accessible contrast ratios. 24a11y.com/2019/color-the…

I put the Sass typographic scale generator from my @24ways article into a handy gist: gist.github.com/robweychert/46…

just chillin while my magic mouse charges because why should design solve old problems when it can introduce new ones

I’ve been reading @24ways every December since 2005. Always wanted to contribute. This year, I did! 24ways.org/2019/a-modern-…

I’ve been studying music theory this year. While some of its core concepts were already familiar to me, much of their specifics were not. Or so I thought. A funny thing happened when I was learning the major scales. While playing through a song I had written some years before, I started picking it apart to see how it correlated with the theory I was learning. I had composed the melody without any thought to… See more →

Keeping this in mind for the next time I do something with color changing/fading over time: youtube.com/watch?v=hH_yvD…

Sometime during the development of Tinnitus Tracker, it occurred to me that color would be a good way to give its many entries—which span nearly three decades—a sense of time and place. Colors would change with the seasons and fade over time. In effect, every single day of the past 30 years would have a unique color scheme, each day looking slightly different than the day before. As a bonus, the color’s constant flux as… See more →

Beautiful work from @fictivekin! 🍻 twitter.com/FictiveCameron…

sometimes i worry that i’m not good at designing websites but then i try to use almost any website

One of my favorite days of the year, ahead of schedule! @lynnandtonic never disappoints, and this year is no exception. twitter.com/lynnandtonic/s…

What’s your favorite design publication/blog/etc with an RSS feed and/or newsletter?

If you need me this week, I’ll be waiting by my mailbox for @yeseniaa’s new design systems book from @abookapart. abookapart.com/products/expre…