Links from 2024 (394 links)

Good, brief JTBD primer.

In an age of shocking reversals, Yeats’s theory of historical cycles – “day & night, night & day for ever,” as he once put it – rings true. The only consolation the poem offers is the knowledge that, for one reason or another, every generation has felt the same apocalyptic shudder that Yeats did 100 years ago.

The company is guided by a simple idea—hook shoppers by offering high-quality products at the lowest prices. It does this by keeping markups low while charging a fixed membership fee and stocking fewer distinct products, all while treating its employees generously.

Or, if you want to put it into more practical language: simply spend 3x more on design and branding than any of your competitors.

Savouring my first post-fasting meal, I thought I had caught a glimpse of what Longo’s ideas could mean for improving my longevity. But I also knew how difficult it would be for me (or realistically, anyone) to commit to a lifelong regular fasting regimen – especially if that meant eating powdered mushroom soup until I reached 110 years old.

Baseline gives you clear information about which web platform features are ready to use in your projects today. When reading an article, or choosing a library for your project, if the features used are all part of Baseline, you can trust the level of browser compatibility. By aligning with Baseline, there should be no surprises when testing your site.

We wanted a browser support policy that would focus on outcomes for the user. Rather than being fixated on specific browsers, we needed to consider capabilities, using the mindset that sees modern coding use feature detection in preference to browser detection. It turns out there’s an initiative for that.

A good guide.

Whether you call yourself an advisor or consultant (or not), David has seven core ethical principles that should govern advisory work.

This is great.

Divesting from something has obvious symbolic value. But many protesters hope to have a real-world impact, too. Divestment campaigns may exert influence by starving their targets of capital. Scare enough investors from an industry or country and, so the argument goes, companies will find it harder to raise or borrow money, which will force them to change their behaviour [...] How likely is this to work?

Instead of making elements visually distinct to be noticed, designers should focus on integrating important elements seamlessly into the user interface. This ensures that crucial actions and information are perceived as part of the overall user experience, rather than distractions to be dismissed.

Hay was chosen as a soft target, in a campaign primarily relying on peer pressure and public moral intimidation, because the activists knew the festival management would have to give in, and so this was a campaign that could be won. But who really wins here? Not a dime has been divested from fossil fuels. Not a gram of CO2 has been reduced.

Let’s talk about dark mode and accessibility! There’s a myth that dark mode is good for accessibility, because it improves text readability (among other things). As always, when it comes to accessibility, it’s not black or white (haha, color pun intended). We can’t really generalize, so, the answer is often, “it depends”, dark mode can make it better for some users, but not all of them.

Small agencies with weak positioning tend to find new business tough.

I got into Pixies at the beginning of 1993, just before they broke up. Perfect timing, as ever. They were my first introduction to 4AD and set the tone for me. I was completely into the early/mid 90's era 4AD but 80's era 4AD - Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil - were completely uninteresting to the 16 year old version of me.

But now I'm older, I have a good-enough Celestial Jukebox and no desire to pogo I have the perfect set of circumstances to dig into early dreampop.

The most common first-time experience I come across is a developer coming from a classical component framework like React with JSX going straight to writing vanilla Web Components, becoming frustrated, and then deeming web components “not ready for primetime.”

Doesn't sound like it.

Amazing, creepy and disappointing all at the same time. Also, best comment:

This has the same vibe as two toddler's playing house and pretending that they're doing actual work

Zero-Click content is content that offers valuable, standalone insights (or simply engaging material), with no need to click. Clicking might be additive, but it’s not required [...] but how can we get value if we can’t get trackable visits? Just like our marketing forebears did: through hard-to-measure brand lift.

Users are more tolerant of minor usability issues when they find an interface visually appealing. This aesthetic-usability effect can mask UI problems during usability testing. Identify instances of the aesthetic-usability effect in your user research by watching what your users do, as well as listening to what they say.

For the sugggested re-reading order:

* Thousand Autumns * Cloud Atlas * Utopia Avenue * Black Swan Green * Ghostwritten * Number9Dream * The Bone Clocks * Slade House

This popped up in my radio for the first time in many years. From Raw Digits, by Jamie Lidell and Cristian Vogel's off-kilter, millennial glitch-funk Super_Collider project.

This song got stuck in my head after a rapid unscheduled disassembly of Aeropress all over the kitchen floor and my arm.

One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty but achievable goal.

Find people to talk to or collaborate with by searching across the /about, /ideas and /now pages of 1000s of personal websites.

Guess you had to be there.

Companies everywhere are investing heavily in paid social, websites and CRM programmes but agencies are increasingly using similar techniques, emulating each other’s functionality and using the same tonality. Done in the name of optimisation and best practice, it might deliver in the short term, but long term, brands are shedding their personality.

An open source collection of Design Principles and methods.