The Accidental Side Project

Drew McLellan puts the chairs up on the tables, sweeps the floor, and closes off our season, and indeed the entire 24 ways project with a look back at what it’s meant to run this site as a site project, and what impact side projects can have on the work we do. Will the last one out turn off Christmas the lights? Brought to you by The...

Dec 2019

Four Ways Design Systems Can Promote Accessibility – and What They Can’t Do

Amy Hupe prepares a four bird roast of tasty treats so we can learn how the needs of many different types of users can be served through careful implementation of components within a design system. Design systems help us to make our products consistent, and to make sure we’re creating them in the most efficient way possible. They also help...

Dec 2019

Usability and Security; Better Together

Divya Sasidharan calls into question the trade-offs often made between security and usability. Does a secure interface by necessity need to be hard to use? Or is it the choice we make based on years of habit? Snow has fallen, snow on snow. Security is often synonymous with poor usability. We assume that in order for something to be secure,...

Dec 2019

Flexible Captioned Slanted Images

Eric Meyer gift wraps the most awkwardly shaped of boxes using nothing but CSS, HTML and a little curl of ribbon. No matter how well you plan and how much paper you have at your disposal, sometimes you just need to slant the gift to the side. We have a lot of new layout tools at our disposal these days—flexbox is finally stable and interoperable,...

Dec 2019

There Is No Design System

Jina Anne silences the night to talk about how we talk about Design Systems. Can the language we use impact the effectiveness of the solution? Fear not, if mighty dread has seized your troubled mind. Design systems of great joy we bring to you and all mankind. Ooh, clickbaity title. Why on earth would I, a self-proclaimed “design systems...

Dec 2019

A Modern Typographic Scale

Rob Weychert reaches for the top notes to sing us a song of typographic scale. A little attention to scale and to the mathematics will help you to hit a high note with your designs this Christmas and beyond. I’ve been studying music theory this year. While some of its core concepts were already familiar to me, much of their specifics were...

Dec 2019

Five Interesting Ways to Use Array.reduce() (And One Boring Way)

Chris Ferdinandi turns the heat down low and lets the sauce reduce while we take a look at how to add spice to our source with a sprinkling of Array.reduce(). Just a little ingenuity with the humblest of functions. Of all the modern array methods, the one I had the hardest time wrapping my head around was Array.reduce(). On the surface,...

Dec 2019

Building a Dictaphone Using Media Recorder and getUserMedia

Chris Mills brushes up his shorthand and shows how the MediaStream Recording API in modern browsers can be used to capture audio directly from the user’s device. Inching ever closer to the capabilities of native software, it truly is an exciting time to be a web developer. The MediaStream Recording API makes it easy to record audio and/or...

Dec 2019

A History of CSS Through Fifteen Years of 24 ways

Rachel Andrew guides us through a tour of the last fifteen years in CSS layout, as manifested in articles here on 24 ways. From the days when Internet Explorer 6 was de rigueur, right up to the modern age of evergreen browsers, the only thing you can be sure of is that the web never stands still for long. I’ve written nine articles in the...

Dec 2019

Microbrowsers are Everywhere

Colin Bendell gets into the minutia of microbrowsers - the small previews of your site that are pervasive all around the web and through social media apps and search engines whenever an item of content on your site is referenced. You’ve seen it everywhere - that little thumbnail preview of a website mentioned in a tweet, the expanded description...

Dec 2019