Journal

My name is Laurence Hughes and I’m a perfectionist. But I’m working on it.

I’m just back from a fantastic couple of days in Brighton attending Ampersand – The Web Typography Conference – and also a Responsive Web Typography workshop with Richard Rutter at Clearleft.

Today I and my brother Martin and two nieces Sophie and Mia, made a first visit to the Mackintosh Church in Maryhill, Glasgow.

John Allsopp’s classic article in which he looks at the medium of web design through the prism of the Tao Te Ching, and encourages us to embrace the web’s inherent flexibility and fluidity.

It’s time to throw out the rituals of the printed page, and to engage the medium of the web and its own nature.

It’s choc-full of quotable lines, but here are a few of my favourites:

We must “accept the ebb and flow of things.”

Everything I’ve said so far could be summarized as: make pages which are adaptable.

…and…

The web’s greatest strength, I believe, is often seen as a limitation, as a defect. It is the nature of the web to be flexible, and it should be our role as designers and developers to embrace this flexibility, and produce pages which, by being flexible, are accessible to all. The journey begins by letting go of control, and becoming flexible.

Great resource from CSS Grid expert Rachel Andrew, with the Patterns and Examples sections which provide quick-start grid layouts being particularly handy.

Introducing dialog: a new, easier, standards-based means of rendering a popup or modal dialogue.

Léonie Watson explains how the HTML tabindex attribute is used to manage keyboard focus. Of particular interest to me was a clarification of what tabindex="-1" does (because I always forget).

In modern front-end development, we tend to use a number of JavaScript-based build tools (such as task runners like Gulp) which have been created using Node.js and which we install using NPM. Here’s the best way I’ve found for installing and maintaining Node and NPM on a Mac.