Poll articles

The hardest part of designing websites for a living is setting your prices. Setting a fair price for your services is something that nearly all of us struggle with. If you’re lucky, you’re part of an agency that has experienced design leads who can assess projects objectively. But if you’re a freelancer — or if you’re one of those design leads — you have to set your own rate. It’s a challenge to find a sweet spot in the market. You...

Few fonts in the world have become a part of the cultural landscape that they have an entire documentary film and a MOMA exhibition made about them. Helvetica, however, is different. It has been the go-to font for everyone from government agencies to hip pop-up shops whenever clean and modern text is called for. It has become so much a part of our daily lives that it has created a long list of detractors.  It is strange for a humble font to be so used...

On June 29th, GitHub announced Copilot, an AI-powered auto-complete for programmers, prompting a debate about the ethics of borrowed code. GitHub is one of the biggest code repositories on the Internet. It hosts billions of lines of code, creating an unparalleled dataset with which to train a coding AI. And that is exactly what OpenAI, via GitHub, thanks to its owners Microsoft has done — training Copilot using public repositories. The...

It’s only been a few days since Microsoft officially followed Apple past the $2 Trillion valuation mark, and having done so it appears to be mimicking more of its long-term rival’s approach with hardware cut-offs and a macOS-style GUI refresh.  Hardware Shock The first surprise for fans of Windows is that there is a Windows 11; the push for Windows 10 adoption was widely expected to all but eliminate numbered versions; creating a landscape...

It’s fair to say that AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a controversial topic among web developers. AMP is a Google-guided technology that strips down web pages to a limited sub-set of tags to serve pages faster. It was developed as a web-based rival to native news apps from vendors like Apple. The controversy first arose when it was clear how much influence Google had over the conventions, essentially creating a tiered Web overseen by a single...

This week, a significant portion of the Web fell over when on Tuesday, sites powered by Fastly were impacted by a massive outage that affected around 85% of the network. The near-total collapse — which was quickly identified and remedied — took out sites including GitHub, Stack Overflow, PayPal, Shopify, Stripe, Reddit, Amazon, and CNN. Furthermore, it was all but impossible to express rage on Twitter because the server that handles...

This week at I/O, Google unveiled the latest version of its Material Design design system, Material You. Initially presented as an upgrade for Android 12, Material You is the biggest revision to Material Design since its launch in 2014 and will be rolling out across all Google products in the coming year. Material You is an adaptable system that takes the building blocks of Material Design — the spacing and component approach — and skins...

This week, in a move like something from a particularly eventful episode of The Office, popular project management app company Basecamp banned political and societal discussion in the company's internal communications. In a post that has been revised for “clarification,” the company’s co-founder Jason Fried listed six rules for employees: No societal or political discussions at work; No more ‘paternalistic’ benefits;...

We’re no longer arguing about whether climate change exists because climate change is now extensively documented. Instead, we’re arguing over whether climate change is a natural cycle or human-accelerated. At this point, the reasonable best-case (yes, best-case) scenario is that global temperatures will rise by 2˚C — if we don’t meet our global emissions targets, then it will be higher. A 2˚C rise in temperature means a rise...

We all get excited about new projects; we're daydreaming about possibilities from the first contact with a potential client. Most professionals have an established onboarding process, with contracts to sign and business assets to acquire; if you’re a coder, you probably set up a fresh new repository; if you’re a designer, you create a new project folder. All of us start imagining how the case study will look in our portfolio. But few,...

We tend not to think about it, but the Internet has a physical dimension. It’s a complex network of wires, cables, servers, and technical odds and ends — if you really want to, you can track it down; doing so is particularly easy on small islands because there tends to be a single cable tethering the region to the wider world. Those physical cables run all the way to your building, and although an ISP manages them, they are normally rented from...

Since the skeuomorphism of the early 00s, the design trend of choice has been minimalism. In fact, minimalism has been de rigueur for substantially longer than that. You can make a fair case that minimalism was the defining theme of the 20th century. Beginning with the widespread adoption of grotesque typefaces in mass advertising the century before, continuing through the less-is-more philosophies of the middle part of the century, and...