Design

If you’re a web designer and/or dev, @mozilla’s Layout Land channel on YouTube with @jensimmons is a wonderful gift. youtu.be/7msERxu7ivg

How great is this 1980s “decade of cards” from Second Marriage Studio? @alyankovic and @FlavorFlav are the jokers! etsy.com/listing/585603…

Sometimes I want to express CSS animation keyframes in terms of actual frames, so I wrote a Sass function for that. gist.github.com/robweychert/5b…

If you have experience with animation in other media, CSS animation’s percentage-based keyframe syntax can feel pretty alien, especially if you want to be very precise about timing. This Sass function lets you forget about percentages and express keyframes in terms of actual frames:

@function f($frame) {
  @return percentage( $frame / $totalframes )
}

When you create a new @keyframes at-rule, put the following three variables above it (customize the values for $seconds and $framerate but leave $totalframes as-is):

$seconds: 3;
$framerate: 30;
$totalframes: $seconds * $framerate;

Now just invoke the f function… See more →

Meet Column Setter, a Sass tool that helps you build custom responsive grids for float- and flexbox-based layouts, with squeaky-clean code. twitter.com/ProPublica/sta…

Grid systems are fundamental to many visual design processes. They govern the spatial relationships in a layout by establishing a set of standard sizes and positions for various elements. In addition to helping achieve a visual harmony between components, they make the design process faster and more efficient and help ensure decisions aren’t made arbitrarily. If you’re reading this post on ProPublica’s website, you’re looking at a page that was built using one.

Grid systems… See more →

Apparently @NewsHour redesigned recently, and it looks pretty great. pbs.org/newshour/

One year into the Trump Administration, we’ve updated our Cabinet Cards to see who’s still standing. propublica.org/article/the-ch…

Catching up on conference talks. I’ve long been a @jensimmons fan but somehow never saw her speak. She’s so great! vimeo.com/147950924

Looks like I’ll be spending a good chunk of the day digging through all the goodies on the fantastic new @Slate redesign. twitter.com/jasonsantamari…

Web devs may be interested in this post’s tables styled as bar charts. I made a @jekyllrb include to generate them from CSVs. More to come! twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Projects

Since 2011, working with A Book Apart was my way of contributing to the design community while my own direction as a designer was uncertain. Over the course of 2016, as my new job at ProPublica restored my enthusiasm for design, I wanted to get back to working on my own projects and sharing what I learned in the process. Making time for that meant something had to give, so after producing the paperback/PDF… See more →

Everyone please continue making colorful geometric confections and I will continue admiring them. thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/comple…

Happy New Year, dear reader!

December is gone, but its links remain.

I did some more film writing this month, most notably on The Disaster Artist and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and I also published a collection of all the shorter film reviews I wrote in 2017.

This month’s links are a good mix of the topical (net neutrality, sexism, the new tax bill), year-end reflections, inspiring art and design, and more. I hope… See more →

Closing out 2017 with this killer find at an Asbury Park vintage shop.

A nice roundup by @stuntbox of our interactive and visually-oriented work at @propublica this past year. features.propublica.org/2017-year-in-r…

One last bit of 2017 work to share: this troubling story of Mississippi’s systemic failures with mental illness. features.propublica.org/tyler-haire-mi…

Mark inspired me to subscribe to more design/dev blogs, but I’m disappointed to find that some don’t have RSS feeds. 😕 twitter.com/markboulton/st…

Just when you think the web has run out of surprises, something like this comes along. So fun. Try it at all the viewport sizes. 💫 twitter.com/lynnandtonic/s…

This is great. Creative prompts à la Oblique Strategies. twitter.com/mgoldst/status…

I love these so goddamned much. mymodernmet.com/math-cake-dina…

I have some issues with the design, but this is an outstanding breakdown of millennials’ uphill economic battle. highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/po…

Loving @shiflett’s dual launch today: very handsome new sites for himself and his new company. shiflett.org/blog/2017/facu…

@meyerweb Aaaaaand here’s my uncle and my dad, both of whom passed away years ago. Not quite the same thing, but still.

After he’s written and spoken extensively on how design/tech can be more humane, FB gifts @meyerweb a photo of his dead daughter AGAIN. twitter.com/meyerweb/statu…

Now the exports appear to have given up entirely. 28 minutes and counting. WTF.

Illustrator SVG exports are now taking several minutes to appear in my Finder after I save them. Anyone else having this issue?

Hello, dear reader!

November is gone, but its links remain.

Most of my writing energy this month went toward a post about the typography and spatial relationships underpinning my site’s recent redesign. I also wrote a handful of film reviews, the most substantial of which outlines my disappointment with the ambitious Loving Vincent, an animated film made from thousands of oil paintings.

Unsurprisingly, a fair amount of this month’s links are devoted to thinking through… See more →

Product designers, here’s your chance to work with the great team at @oakstudios. oak.is/hiring/product…

Here’s @the_completist living up to its name with a thorough dissection of Hammer Films’ Frankenstein franchise. thecompleti.st/no4

Once I solidified my V6 redesign’s reason for being and wrestled its content into some semblance of order, it was time to create a system to govern its appearance. The site consists almost entirely of things to read, so typography would be the core of that system. Tasked with satisfying the site’s various functional requirements as well as establishing visual character, it would be a necessarily multifaceted typographic core. So where to begin?

The typographic… See more →

I also like the album art by @NicolasMenard, who made one of my favorite films at this year’s @OIAF_Animation. vimeo.com/208812809

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Hello, dear reader!

October is gone, but its links remain.

For my part, I wrote a bit about my first ten years on Twitter, dusted off the ol’ dream journal, and published the full calendar for Robtober, my annual horror movie binge. I also wrote a bit about each of the 31 movies included in Robtober this year. They’ll all be collected on my site later, but for now they’re available on Letterboxd.

With Robtober keeping… See more →

Is there a person on earth who responds positively to passive aggression when unsubscribing from a service they didn’t consent to receiving?

brb

I can now confirm that getting a nod from Thanks for Making is a really great way to start your day. Thanks, @FictiveCameron! twitter.com/FictiveCameron…

This is some handsome work. Looking forward to seeing how it’s implemented. Congrats to all involved! twitter.com/AaronRobbs/sta…

Down the Breitbart Hole

This is a current in American life we’ve not yet fully processed, but history will record a preponderance of today’s right-wing leaders who emerged in the toniest quarters of the nation’s bluest states. Apart from the obvious examples of Andrew Breitbart and Steve Bannon, annealed in Hollywood, you can think of Julia Hahn, who attended Alex’s high school and is now working with Bannon in the White House, and Ben Shapiro,… See more →

Looking forward to computering with the people of @indiewebcamp in NYC 9/30–10/01! 2017.indieweb.org/nyc

Currently powering through that thing where you launch a new site and kind of wish no one would look at it. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Twenty years ago, techno-utopians rightly recognized that the internet in general and the web in particular would democratize the distribution of self-expression in a revolutionary way. Over the next decade, the number of blogs sharing art and recipes and poetry and personal stories grew seemingly exponentially, and their proliferation in the wake of the dot-com crash was a testament to the noncommercial, grassroots nature of the movement. As hand-coded sites gave way to hosted blogging… See more →

I get pretty nerdy about typography, but this exhaustive takedown of a typographic myth is some next-level nerding. heracliteanriver.com/?p=324

It’s hard to imagine what the web would be without ALA. All people who make the web are encouraged to participate and/or become a member. twitter.com/alistapart/sta…

Why Hollywood Is Trying to Turn Everything Into Movies — Even Mindless Games Like ‘Fruit Ninja’

Vinson then realized that he was faced with a formidable predicament. There are no protagonists or antagonists in Fruit Ninja.

Goldner says the key to making movies from board games and toys is to “focus on understanding the universal truth about the brand.”

The film’s director and co-­writer, Tony Leondis, told me that “The Emoji Movie” actually began with… See more →

We’ve given the @propublica site a facelift. Revised logo, responsive design, new CMS. More improvements to come! propublica.org/nerds/welcome-…

I typeset many @abookapart books. I’m not so starved for validation to think an author taking credit for her work somehow diminishes mine. twitter.com/espiekermann/s…

“There’s a place for variety and richness in typography, for colorful […] creatures that live at abyssal depths.” typography.com/blog/the-lovel…

On the rare occasion a sly ad placement catches my notice and actually makes me smile, I have to give it its due.

Makin’ websites.