Journal

I really enjoyed this book, recommended to me by Gillian and Tom.

It’s set primarily in New York and tells the stories of a cast of interconnected characters (and their children) linked by the music industry, taking in themes of youth and ageing, loss and regret, insecurity, celebrity and image.

There are some great moments including Rob’s story which called to mind The Talented Mr Ripley; Jules’s unpublished and unhinged newspaper article on the celebrity interview which sent him to jail; and the dystopian final chapter which suggests where the internet and the world of influencers might be headed if we don’t watch out.

I loved author Jennifer Egan’s storytelling, dark humour and also the way she switched her writing style dependent on the era or character.

Recommended!

Evan Minto notes that flexible grids created with CSS Grid’s repeat, auto-fill, and minmax are only intrinsically responsive (responsive to their container rather than the viewport) up to a point, because when the container width is narrower than the minimum width specified in minmax the grid children overflow.

Applying media queries to the grid is not a satisfactory solution because they relate to the the viewport (hence why Every Layout often prefer Flexbox to CSS Grid because it allows them to achieve intrinsic responsiveness).

However we’ll soon be able to suggest grid item width as a percentage of the parent container, avoiding the overflow problem. The new “CSS Math functions” to help us achieve this are min(), max() and clamp(). At the time of writing, these are only supported in Safari however Chrome support is in the pipeline.

Use this design system to make your service consistent with GOV.UK. Learn from the research and experience of other service teams and avoid repeating work that’s already been done.

Excellent tutorials by David DeSandro. I’ve already used the card flip and it worked really well.

This slider/carousel certainly looks nice, and I like author David DeSandro’s work, having taken inspiration from his 3d Card Flip tutorial for a recent project. I’d just like to dig into it a little further to see how it fares in terms of accessibility before using it in the wild.

This is a nice whistle-stop tour of the the Guardian’s current digital design system. Apart from looking great, some of the terminology is interesting (fronts, kickers and thrashers) and I like the way they have different Card types for different types of article, “each having its own flavour and tone”.

Some simple but inspiring work here from Seattle-based web developer Katherine Kato. I really like the use of space, the typography, the colour palette and the use of CSS grid for layout.

Previously classified cockpit audio, recorded by the astronauts themselves, gives a unique insight into their fears and excitement as they undertake the mission. And dramatic reconstruction brings those recordings to life, recreating the crucial scenes that were never filmed - the exhilarating launch, the first sight of the moon, the dramatic touchdown and nail-biting journey home.

Original archive footage from the Apollo programme is combined with newly shot film and cinematic CGI to create the ultimate documentary of the ultimate human adventure.

This can only be described as a stunning audiovisual experience and a fantastic tribute on the 50-year anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission!

Farewell Rutger Hauer; famous for his roles in Bladerunner, The Hitcher and the Guinness ads. And those were undoubtedly great, however… in 1989, for 13-year-old me at the height of my ninja obsession, he was the man as Nick Parker in Blind Fury, a film about a blind war veteran who is implausibly handy with a samurai sword and goes on to defeat Sho Kuzugi in the final showdown. It was daft, but I loved it.

Over 8,400 NASA Apollo moon mission photos, online, in high-resolution.