July 22, 2025

Craft & Practice #5

Dear humans,

It’s been a month, this time, since my last update—leaning more towards every few weeks than every week. If you would like more consistently frequent, let me know <3.

Jenny Zhang, of @phirephoenix.com fame, shared a “one like, one opinion” opinion on Bluesky yesterday:

That’s been quite a bit of what I’ve been doing with this once every-few weeks: sharing my top things rather than all.

That’ll be part of this practice moving forward.

Building

I’ve been busy continuing to build my digital garden. Since late June, there’s been a number of features and improvements that have gone down:

• In April, my website scored an A carbon rating, with 0.16g of CO2 produced when someone visits the homepage. I re-tested this weekend, scoring an A+! My site’s now cleaner than 97% of all webpages globally with 0.02g of CO2 produced when visiting my homepage.

• Last week, rolled out my new brandmark and an accessible, animated site-level navigation.

  

• Two weeks ago, I launched my collated Endorsements page—where I’ve collected Recommendations from LinkedIn and ADPList to host on my website.
  

  

• I’ve also refactored all my svg files so that everything’s more manageable, longer term; cleaned up and optimized my website fonts; got my case studies pages up and running (looking to publish this week); and replaced .scss @import tags with @use because deprecation.

Gardening

I’ve written 14 new entries in my /journal, but have only published 3. I wrote my first /article too! I’m only sharing the published ones.

• Craft & Practice: directly related to this newsletter practice. I want to have consistent themes for different content-types, pulling from the list of headers depending on content of update. This defines those headers, that I’m using today, and some I’ll be using in the future. ~470 words; 2–3 min read.

• AuDHD & Motivation: I write insights and share useful resources I’ve consumed, as I’ve sought to dismantle neuro-normative concepts of productivity. ~2,500 words; 10–16 min read.

• Depth × Breadth × Contribution Axes: Communicating a multi-disciplinary career of diverse, atypical roles & responsibilities makes job searching rough. This is an initial thought exploring how to “plot storytelling skill-shapes” with an xyz-axis. Evergreen. ~700 words; 3–5 min read.

• Prose Footer Call-to-Action: I found a lovely call-to-action card from/on Ariel Salminen’s website and recent post, On Freedom, Curiosity & Happiness. I take a look at its structure & style, inspired to do something similar one day. ~400 words, 2–3 min read.

Composting

A bit of what I’ve been reading and digesting. Since I’ve been focused on more Building this month, I’ve fallen behind on an ever growing list of links to read and put up on my site.

Today, you get my top five since last month:

• Shinto Beginner Guide
  I enjoy learning about ways of being and flowing through one's life-stream. I have never really looked into Shinto, nor know much of anything about it. This was an interesting, helpful, beginner guide that’s written by a Shinto priestess of Konko Faith—Olivia Bernkastel.

• Racebox
  A fantastic collection of the United States' census "check what race you are" design, going back to 1790. There are images, but also links to the full .pdfs.

• Awesome Accessibility
  A massive list of accessibility resources that cover a wide range of accessibility topics.

• Can’t take it with you
  A powerful post. I came across it as people shared of the author's passing—Helen De Cruz. This was her last post. Her website’s homepage now shares stories of her life & passing.

• Layoutit!
  I may have found a new favorite CSS Grid design tool. It uses grid-template-areas that you can name, and all sorts of useful things for responsive, adaptive layouts on the web.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading, appreciate your time and attention greatly.

Be safe; take care,

Jonathan