Items of Interest

Collecting amazing and interesting things on the web.

Page 18

Ways White People Of Goodwill (and anyone else) Can Help End Racism

February 22, 2014

baratunde / race

I meant to share this when it was written, but accidentally left it lingering. So here it is:

Over the following weeks, especially after the not guilty verdict in the murder trial of George Zimmerman, I received emails, tweets, and Facebook tags from others with a similar interest in how white people who wanted to be part of the solution could constructively engage. Many of these people were angry at what they saw in their own country.

Cook Dinner

February 21, 2014

cooking

How many hours a day do you sit in front of a keyboard and screen? When you cook, it gives you something to do with your hands that doesn’t involve a smartphone. When you cook, it gets you away from your computer and hyperconnectedness, if just for a moment, and forces you to do something primal, something humans have done for eons. And when you switch modes like that, when you disconnect even for twenty minutes, it gives your brain some room to think.

Kids Are Addicted to Social Media Because Parents Are Addicted to Control

February 12, 2014

culture / parenting / technology

But new data suggests that while the often heard complaint, ”Kids these days spend all their time online rather than face-to-face,” may be true, it’s not true for the reasons we think. No, today’s under-18 crowd is not made up of degenerates who don’t like human contact. Rather, they want face-to-face time as much as we did, it’s just that their parents won’t let them have it.

Web Animation at Work

February 11, 2014

a list apart / animation / css / design / user experience

Whether you’re a web designer or a front-end developer, investing in animation skills and theory will help you finesse your designs and interfaces. Fortunately, old-school animation has had decades to mature into an art form replete with educational materials and techniques handed down from the masters.

From Google Ventures: 4 Steps For Combining The Hacker Way With Design Thinking | Co.Design | business + designFrom Google Ventures: 4 Steps For Combining The Hacker Way With Design Thinking | Co.Design | business + design

February 10, 2014

design / design studio / prototyping / startup / user experience

While I’m not a fan of the title’s list-all-the-buzzwords format, I do really like the way the Google Ventures folks approach design work with startups. They do it like the best UX firms, it’s true, but there aren’t very many of these, and the more we share processes from them the better we all get.

One of the best lines:

People like the experience they have in our shops for whatever reason, and a lot of yesterday was figuring out how to get them not a similar experience but at least an analogous experience when they become a guest on our website. … How do we host people in a non-Internet way while they’re on the Internet?

The Cruciform Center Part 4: How Revelation Reveals a Cruciform God

February 8, 2014

bible / greg boyd / new testament / revelation / theology

Our job is to try to understand Revelation the way this first century audience would have understood it. And, as an increasing number of scholars are arguing, when we do this, we’ll find that John has masterfully taken violent images from the Old Testament and other apocalyptic literature and turned them on their head. In other words, in John’s hands, these violent images become violently anti-violence.

25 Baby Steps Toward Simplicity

February 8, 2014

simplicity

While we’ve established that simplicity is a practice and not a destination, there are practical things you can do every day to simplify your life. And the good news is, there are practical things you can do quickly.
Set a timer for 10 minutes. Choose any of the following tasks. Stop after 10 minutes. Then celebrate your simpler life.

Getting Started With Pattern Libraries

February 8, 2014

a list apart / design / pattern-libraries

By breaking the site up into patterns, it’s easier to find those bits of markup. I noticed an issue on GitHub about there being no styles for dl, dd, and dt elements, and it took a while to find an example of them being used on the site. With a pattern library, all the elements that appear on the site are in one place so you don’t have to go searching round for them.

★ Along the same lines

February 7, 2014

andy clarke / design / responsive design

I imagine that a graphics editor will likely always be better than a code editor when it comes to creative expression and implementation, but a tool that produces static visuals cannot easily help us communicate the nuances of a design, especially a responsive one. Photoshop is “bringing a knife to a gunfight.” So the answer must lie somewhere in-between.

Andy Clarke explains some of his current process.