Hello 🙏
Another week, another (short) reading list.
Not much long form reading for me this week, though, as we are still covered in work for an urgent client project which goes live next week.
Frontend Development
👍 Buildless workflow
Heard the term “buildless” for the first time this week. Haven’t read it all, but if it means going back into the direction of using native browser features instead of the crazy webpack-treeshaked monsters that some of modern web development workflows created, I’m all for it.
✏️ Rough Notation
A lovely little JS library to create and animate annotations with a hand-drawn look and feel.
🔧 A handy URL-encoder for SVG
I was working with SVG files quite a bit this week, and this little converter helped me a lot in converting SVGs into background-image ready format for CSS.
WordPress
💎 Joost on the WordPress admin UI
While parts of this post read a little bit like an advert for their (Yoasts) new admin UI, the points Joost makes about the need for a WordPress UI design system are true. WordPress as a whole – and all its users – would benefit a ton, if the whole admin experience would get streamlined and if different screens wouldn’t look completely different from each other. And plugin or theme developers would benefit as well, because if there’s a shared library of reusable UI elements, there would be no need to reinvent the wheel from scratch.
As he mentions, to get this done there are possibly just too few people working on WordPress’ UI design at the moment, and those who are probably all concentrate their efforts on the block editor screens at the moment. I guess now that the editor seems to be getting more mature, it would be a good idea to invest time streamlining the new UI elements into a proper design system that could be reused. I just hope it gets built with HTML, CSS/SCSS and some JS sprinkled on top and not some some React component library that will force plugin-developers to use React to simply render a simple UI element in the backend.
Joost de Valk – WordPress’ admin UI needs to be better
Other
✏️ Doodle Icons
If you need some doodly icons with a hand-drawn look, this could be a handy icon-set to bookmark.
🖋 Typefacts
Oh, how many times I could have used this page as a reference. It’s a pure goldmine for questions about type and will be my go to bookmark from now on.
✌️Have a nice weekend!