A wonderfully whimsical fantasy art project, Terra Ultima is a collection of natural world mashups by Raoul. There's a book and a Tumblr for more, but I wanted to save a handful of the more inventive creatures. Most are evolutionarily ridiculous chimaeras of real animals, but some (such as the sabertoothed toucan below) are just inventive reimaginings. Both camps are beautifully illustrated!
I love Andy's new design over on Stuff & Nonsense. A large part of that are the cleverly diverse page layouts. Turns out, underneath that perceived diversity is a consistent grid, made by overlaying a 4-column grid and a 5-column grid. Clever!
Overlapping a 4-column grid and 5-column grid results in eight columns with four different widths. This grid has a rhythmic pattern of 6|1|4|3|3|4|1|6...
👆 which (as Andy points out) can be represented easily using fr units in CSS grid:
display: grid; grid-template-columns: 6fr 1fr 4fr 3fr 3fr 4fr 1fr 6fr;
The latest breach of Google's old "do no evil" motto is here: FLoC. As ever, Jeremy has written a well-reasoned and nuanced take on why it's likely a bad idea, both for the web in general and Google in particular.
There's a lot of interesting points in his article, but I think one of the elements that really stood out is the combination of no-EU rollout and that Google have claimed that FLoC will ultimately be opt-in. The first highlights how the technology is likely a privacy concern in the first place; the second is a way around GDPR but one which I can't imagine many sites would go for. What's the incentive? Unless, of course, Google throws its weight around again *cough* AMP *cough*...
... one part of the business is building a user agent while a different part of the company is working on ways of tracking end users. It’s almost as if one company shouldn’t simultaneously be the market leader in three separate industries: search, advertising, and web browsing.
Now Google’s monopoly in advertising is compromising the integrity of its browser. In both cases, it makes it hard for Chrome devs claiming to have the web’s best interests at heart.
Another excellent tool for checking colour accessibility, but with the added bonus of creating viable palettes for you. These can then be filtered based on various criteria such as minimum WCAG level, background colour, and base hue (green, blue, red, etc.). Very clever 👍
Super useful walkthrough on taking a branch from one repository and publishing it to another repository entirely (great for creating test repos or stripped-down example repos for bug isolation).
The tl;dr is as follows:
git checkout --orphan clean-branch # this is when you delete all unwanted files, rename package.json, simplify code etc. git add * git commit -m "Example repository" git remote add origin2 https://github.com/org-name/project-title git push origin2 clean-branch:main
⬆ That will create a new branch without any Git history; commit all files to that branch (so make sure you simplify the repository between these steps 😉); add a new origin to the existing repository (here named origin2 and linked to a dummy GitHub repository, but any name can be used and create the remote repo first); and finally, pushes your stripped-down branch to the main branch of the new repo (again, if you use trunk or anything else, change that here). Simple 👍
The Daft Punk track Around the World performed on Tesla coils. Somehow this manages to be even more awesome than the summary, too (I still slightly think it's fake... somehow 😂):
Also, yes, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger does sound just as great:
"RC5-01 this is RC5-01" 😂 There's nothing specifically science fiction about this short, and that's what makes it great. Simple animation, a timeless plot, and excellent voice acting. As io9 put it:
In space, no one can hear you be a complete buffoon
An excellent summary of why providing help with language like "just" or "simply" can be demeaning, rather than helpful:
“Just” makes me feel like an idiot. “Just” presumes I come from a specific background, studied certain courses in university, am fluent in certain technologies, and have read all the right books, articles, and resources. “Just” is a dangerous word.
It also contains this absolute gem of a far-too-relatable quote 😂
Now there’s a damn good chance I’m actually an idiot, but the self-respecting part of me wants to challenge that notion.
It's a few years old, but I was blown away by Astartes. Sure, the lore is a bit dense so I didn't fully know what was going on, but the story was well crafted enough that it kept me hooked (and all without any real dialogue). More importantly, the animation, VFX, SFX, and direction are all astonishing. As in, easily Hollywood level (and noticeably better than a lot of Hollywood sequences). And it's all been made by one person (mostly). I can see why Games Workshop have actually brought it into canon.
(Coincidentally, this is how you do brand control. Fan makes amazing thing, community embraces it, you embrace it. One day fan film takedowns will be a laughable joke of an ancient mindset 🙄)
Coolors are generally my first stop for palette design anyway, but now that I've discovered this quick WCAG contrast checker they've become invaluable. There are a few similar tools out there, but this one has two key features:
#2 is a bit overzealous, but it does provide a quick way to find some interesting pairings.
Very useful tool: just upload an SVG and it will attempt to output the file as a single path 👍 Fantastic for converting icon libraries for design systems.
UPDATE 23/07/21
Some additional tips if an uploaded SVG can't be recognised:
fill values to use black (#000000)clip-path layers, group layers, etc. until only one layer is left (should be a path layer, possibly nested within a blank layer called something like "Layer 1", if using Illustrator)If that doesn't work, despair... 😉
A beautiful new serif font from Simple Bits based on old nautical typography. There's something about the alternate ligatures and subtle roundness to the serifs that I utterly adore. Plus, the pricing scheme is both clear and very fair, and they give 1% of sales to environmental causes, so triple win 👏👏👏