Hey friends,

Summer is almost over, even though it's still fiendishly hot outside 🥵... I remember as a kid, these summer months felt like they took forever, but time passes differently as an adult—even if I'm still just a kid inside... 😏

Words I Wrote:

Building Motion for the Web: Creating a Motion 'Volume' Scale

Building off the previous motion post at Viget, we create a framework that helps plan for the correct AMOUNT of motion. It's a long article, but this framework tries to help do three things: pick the right amount of motion, create estimate scales to preserve space in a project, and create soft boundaries to help improve collaboration between designers and developers.

Things I Made:

The web lava-lamp-with-floating-bunny that no one asked for...

I've been poking around the edges of PIXI.js this week. I had originally thought it was just for making games, but I can see it's much more. It's surprisingly hard to find good examples, but I've started a collection over on CodePen.

Thinking Too Hard:

There was a great long-form response from Julie Zhou on Brian Chesky’s (CEO of AirBnB) Config talk on leading through uncertainty.

One quote I really liked from Brian’s talk was:

“Design challenges technology, and technology inspires art … a perfect harmony from the very beginning.”

I think Brian's correct in that there's a healthy two-way tension between the two disciplines that if correctly balanced can lead to amazing work. If out of balance though, it breeds resentment: developers overworking to create an overly ambitious project on an ambitious timeline, designers crushed by technical 'constraints'.

Julie’s response awesome and though provoking, she talks about how drawing tidy lines around roles/titles can be detrimental because we’re bad at both understanding what the outcome needs and what problem to actually work on.

There’s a quote/example that hit home from experiences early in my career:

“Product designer John is upset that he isn’t invited to strategy brainstorms, and that there isn’t a single designer on the exec team or board. He feels this is a sign The company doesn’t appreciate design. At the same time, he has never taken an interest in learning the ins-and-outs of his company’s key health metrics, which is why his peers don’t see him as a strategic thinker (example of roadblock #2).”

I also remember trying to dig into the WHY of a problem and seriously irritating everyone who had a hand in the project up to that point. How do you dig in and identify the correct problem without becoming an ‘agent of chaos’?

Interesting Web Bits:

• Vim creator Bram Moolenaar just recently passed away...
• Apple just joined the Alliance for OpenUSD, a newly formed group converging around Pixar's Universal Scene Description platform which (from what I can tell) is a open-source format that allows specialist 3D applications to all use the same data. VisionPro applications, anyone?
• Good rundown on when and when not to use accordions in design
• Overview of the new linear() easing function
• Building SVG sprites in React
• “Lull yourself to sleep with the soothing white noise of your favorite tech giant’s terms of service.”
• Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
• Sometimes 'busyness' is the enemy of productivity