Hi – I’m Laurence Hughes, a Glaswegian web developer creating responsive websites which balance design, technology and accessibility. I also make music, play records and ping pongs. This is my online home; a playground for coding fun and place to share thoughts on the web, music and more.
I recently signed up to Vitaly from Smashing Mag’s Smart Interface Design Patterns newsletter. This latest edition regarding “date of birth” inputs was interesting, and well timed as my work colleagues and I are about to revisit our form patterns. It’s a nice explainer on why we should approach UI for dates the user knows differently from UI for dates the user will choose.
Here’s a handy interactive tool for learning “the logic of great typography” from Erik Kennedy, the man behind the Learn UI Design course.
At work I have to think about complex HTML tables a lot. The challenge with doing tables well is that 99% of online table tutorials use fairly simple examples… whereas in reality design and product teams often want to squeeze in lots more. It’s really hard to balance those needs against accessibility, systemisation, styling and responsiveness.
Heads up: I’ve published this post early while it’s still a work in progress because it’s better for me to have it available for reference than languishing in drafts and forgotten. Apologies if you read it in a temporarily rough state.
A while back I bookmarked Michelle Barker’s CSS Grid based overlay technique which neatly allows layering one element atop another using CSS Grid rather than absolute positioning. Now, Stephanie Eckles has taken the idea a step further with her Smol Stack Layout which offers a more flexible markup structure, some intuitive grid area naming and a neat aspect-ratio API.
GitHub have recently done some good work on improving keyboard navigation for (and general usability of) their focusable elements such as links, buttons and form controls by improving focus indication. And then they wrote a short-but-sweet article about it, then tweeted to share that and their work is getting lots of positive recognition from all the right people. Nice job all round, GitHub!