8px's Clipped content #8
📚 Your dose of pixel-based stuff
Hello again happy design people,
Winter is arriving fast here in the UK, and that means way more time spent inside. That might sound like a bad thing, but it’s usually a chance where I (and I encourage you if you can!) spend a bit more time on hacky little projects in my spare time. Who knows what it’ll be this year, but I should probably get round to those 5 React courses I bought in 2020.
On the design side, Figma’s variables have been in the wild for a good few months now and people are pushing their UI kits and design systems to the max which is great to see. Buuuut, there is still a tonne of confusion about the where, how, who, what, and why. It’s a pretty tricky thing to wrap your head around if you’re brand new, so don’t hesitate to let me know if you’re stuck and I can try and help you out.
p.s. If you don’t remember what this is, it’s a quarterly ish (apparently) newsletter that I send out which includes a bunch of cool stuff that I find from being online a lot.
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💻 A catalogue of craft
A landing page with a tonne of really great visual interactions, perfect component creations, and graphic design examples. You will bookmark this, I promise you.
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📖 Creating a Design System to Prevent Problematic Colour Pairings
An article exploring colour pairings in journalistic data visualisation, and the ways you can get tripped up when trying to combine certain colours. Written by the Economist team, one that knows a thing or two about visualisations!
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☕️ A love letter to espresso
A one minute video showing the engineering precision behind a coffee puck, grinding, and extraction of an espresso. It’s just a delightful little video, give it a watch.
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📖 A book of Mac OS icons
I’m being serious! You can buy a book of beautiful icons designed for Mac OS over on Kickstarter. I dream of making one of these for components at some point.
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📖 Multiple layers of abstraction in design systems
Probably the nerdiest topic in today’s newsletter. It’s a deep dive by the Spotify engineering team, taking a look at the levels of complexity within their components.
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📖 A mega hub of career / hiring resources
This is an incredible resource created by Taylor Cashdan, with links to all sorts of things from how to interview, to how to create a great CV. All hosted on Notion.
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📺 The nerdiest video you’ve ever seen about how colour works in software
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See you next time