Posts in the Work Category

One of the things I’ve been doing at Igalia of late is podcasting with Brian Kardell.  It’s called “Igalia Chats”, and last week, I designed it a logo.  I tried out a number of different ideas, ran them past the Communication team for feedback, and settled on this one.

 

And there you have it, the first logo I’ve designed in… well, in quite a while.  My work this time around was informed by a few things.

• Podcast apps, sites, etc.  expect a square image for the podcast’s logo.  This doesn’t mean you have to make the visible part of it square, exactly, but it does mean any wide-and-short logo will simultaneously feel cramped and lost in a vast void.  Or maybe just very far away.  The version shown in this post is not the square version, because this is not a podcast app and because I could.  The square version just adds more empty whitespace at the top and bottom, anyway.
• I couldn’t really alter the official logo in any major way: the brand guidelines are pretty strong and shouldn’t be broken without collective approval.  Given the time that would take, I decided to just work with the logo as-is, and think about possible variants (say, the microphone icon in the blank diamond of the logo) in a later stage.  I did think about just not using the official logo at all, but that felt like it would end up looking too generic.  Besides, we hav e a pretty nifty logo there, so why not use it?
• A typeface for the word “Chats” that works well with Igalia’s official logo.  I used Etelka, which is a font we already use on the web site, and I think is the basis of the semi-serifed letters in the official logo anyway.  Though I could be wrong about that; while I definitely have opinions about typefaces these days, I’m not very good at identifying them, or being able to distinguish between two similar fonts.  Call it typeface blindness.
• Using open-source resources where possible; thus, the microphone icon came from The Noun Project.  I then modified it a bit (rounded the linecaps, shortened the pickup’s brace) to balance its visual weight with the rest of the design, and not crowd the letters too much.  I also added a subtle vertical gradient to the icon, which helped the word “Chats” to stand out a little more.  Gotta make the logo pop, donchaknow?

There are probably some adjustments I’ll make after a bit of time, but I was determined not to let perfect be the enemy of shipping.  As for how I came to create the logo, you’re probably thinking fancy CSS Grid layout and custom fonts and all that jazz, but no, I just dumped everything into Keynote and fiddled with ideas until I had some I liked.  It’s not a fantastic environment for this sort of work, I expect, but it’s Good Enough For Me™.

So, if you’re subscribed to Igalia Chats via your listening channel of choice, you should be seeing a new logo.  If you aren’t subscribed… try us, won’t you?  Brian and I talk about a lot of web-related stuff with a lot of really interesting people  —  most recently, with Kilian Valkhof about the web development application Polypane, with Stephen Shankland about undersea data cables, with Zach Leatherman about open-source work and funding, and many more.  Plus sometimes we just talk with each other about what’s new in Web land, things like Google Baseline or huge WebKit updates.  And, yes, sometimes we talk about what Igalia is up to, like our work on the Servo engine or the Steam Deck.

This is one of the things I quite enjoy about working for Igalia  —  the way I can draw upon all the things I’ve learned over my many (many) years to create different things.  A logo last week, a thumbnail-building tool the week before, writing news posts, recording podcasts, doing audio production, figuring out transcription technology, and on and on and on.  It can sometimes be frustrating in the way all work can be, but it rarely gets boring. (And if that sounds good to you, we are hiring for a number of roles!)

• Designing the Igalia Chats Logo was published on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2023.
• It was assigned to the Design and Work categories.
• There have been no replies.

Today marks one month at Igalia.  It’s been a lot, and there’s more to come, but it’s been a really great experience.  I get to do things I really enjoy and value, and Igalia supports and encourages all of it without trying to steer me in specific directions.  I’ve been incredibly lucky to experience that kind of working environment twice in my life — and the other one was an outfit I helped create.

Here’s a summary of what I’ve been up to:

• Generally got up to speed on what Igalia is working on (spoiler: a lot).
• Redesigned parts of wpewebkit.org, fixed a few outstanding bugs, edited most of the rest. (The site runs on 11ty, so I’ve been learning that as well.)
• Wrote a bunch of CSS tests/demos that will form the basis for other works, like articles and videos.
• Drafted a few of said articles.  As I write this, two are very close to being complete, and a third is almost ready for editing.
• Edited some pages on the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), clarifying or upgrading text in some places and replacing unclear examples in others.
• Joined the Open Web Docs Steering Committee.
• Reviewed various specs and proposals (e.g., Miriam’s very interesting @scope proposal).

And that’s not all!  Here’s what I have planned for the next few months:

• More contributions to MDN, much of it in the CSS space, but also branching out into documenting some up-and-coming APIs in areas that are fairly new to me.  (Details to come!)
• Contributions to the Web Platform Tests (WPT), once I get familiar with how that process is structured.
• Articles on topics that will include (but are not limited to!) gaps in CSS, logical properties, and styling based on writing direction.  I haven’t actually settled on outlets for those yet, so if you’d be interested in publishing any of them, hit me up.  I usually aim for about a thousand words, including example markup and CSS.
• Very likely will rejoin the CSS Working Group after a (mumblecough)-year absence.
• Assembling a Raspberry Pi system to test out WPEWebKit in its native, embedded environment and get a handle on how to create a “setting up WPEWebKit for total embedded-device noobs”, of which I am one.

That last one will be an entirely new area for me, as I’ve never really worked with an embedded-device browser before.  WPEWebKit is a WebKit port, actually the official WebKit port for embedded devices, and as such is aggressively tuned for performance and low resource demand.  I’m really looking forward to not only seeing what it’s like to use it, but also how I might be able to leverage it into some interesting projects.

WPEWebKit is one of the reasons why Igalia is such a big contributor to WebKit, helping drive its standards support forward and raise its interoperability with other browser engines.  There’s a thread of self-interest there: a better WebKit means a better WPEWebKit, which means more capable embedded devices for Igalia’s clients.  But after a month on the inside, I feel comfortable saying most of Igalia’s commitment to interoperability is philosophical in nature — they truly believe that more consistency and capability in web browsers benefits everyone.  As in, THIS IS FOR EVERYONE.

And to go along with that, more knowledge and awareness is seen as an unvarnished good, which is why they’re having me working on MDN content.  To that end, I’m putting out an invitation here and now: if you come across a page on MDN about CSS or HTML that confuses you, or seems inaccurate, or just doesn’t have much information at all, please get in touch to let me know, particularly if you are not a native English speaker.

I can’t offer translation services, unfortunately, but I can do my best to make the English content of MDN as clear as possible.  Sometimes, what makes sense to a native English speaker is obscure or unclear to others.  So while this offer is open to everyone, don’t hold back if you’re struggling to parse the English.  It’s more likely the English is unclear and imprecise, and I’d like to erase that barrier if I can.

The best way to submit a report is to send me email with [MDN] and the URL of the page you’re writing about in the subject line.  If you’re writing about a collection of pages, put the URLs into the email body rather than the subject line, but please keep the [MDN] in the subject so I can track it more easily.  You can also ping me on Twitter, though I’ll probably ask you to email me so I don’t lose track of the report.  Just FYI.

I feel like there was more, but this is getting long enough and anyway, it already seems like a lot.  I can’t wait to share more with you in the coming months!

• First Month at Igalia was published on Monday, March 15th, 2021.
• It was assigned to the Standards and Work categories.
• There have been no replies.

The first week on the job at Igalia was… it was good, y’all.  Upon formally joining the Support Team, got myself oriented, built a series of tests-slash-demos that will be making their way into some forthcoming posts and videos, and forked a copy of the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) so I can start making edits and pushing them to the public site.  In fact, the first of those edits landed Sunday night!  And there was the usual setting up accounts and figuring out internal processes and all that stuff.

To be perfectly honest, a lot of my first-week momentum was provided by the rest of the Support Team, and setting expectations during the interview process.  You see, at one point in the past I had a position like this, and I had problems meeting expectations.  This was partly due to my inexperience working in that sort of setting, but also partly due to a lack of clear communication about expectations.  Which I know because I thought I was doing well in meeting them, and then was told otherwise in evaluations.

So when I was first talking with the folks at Igalia, I shared that experience.  Even though I knew Igalia has a different approach to management and evaluation, I told them repeatedly, “If I take this job, I want you to point me in a direction.”  They’ve done exactly that, and it’s been great.  Special thanks to Brian Kardell in this regard.

I’m already looking forward to what we’re going to do with the demos I built and am still refining, and to making more MDN edits, including some upgrades to code examples.  And I’ll have more to say about MDN editing soon.  Stay tuned!

• First Week at Igalia was published on Monday, February 22nd, 2021.
• It was assigned to the Projects, Standards, and Work categories.
• There have been two replies.

Today is my first day as a full-time employee at Igalia, where I’ll be doing a whole lot of things I love to do: document and explain web standards at MDN and other places, participate in standards work at the W3C, take on some webmaster duties, and play a part in planning Igalia’s strategy with respect to advancing the web.  And likely other things!

I’ll be honest, this is a pretty big change for me.  I haven’t worked for anyone other than myself since 2003.  But the last time I did work for someone else, it was for Netscape (slash AOL slash Time Warner) as a Standards Evangelist, a role I very much enjoyed.  In many ways, I’m taking that role back up at Igalia, in a company whose values and structure are much more in line with my own.  I’m really looking forward to finding out what we can do together.

If the name Igalia doesn’t ring any bells, don’t worry: nobody outside the field has heard of them, and most people inside the field haven’t either.  So, remember when CSS Grid came to browsers back in 2017?  Igalia did the implementation that landed in Safari and Chromium.  They’ve done a lot of other things besides that — some of which I’ll be helping to spread the word about — but it’s the thing that web folks will be most likely to recognize.

This being my first day and all, I’m still deep in the setting up of logins and filling out of forms and general orienting of oneself to a new team and set of opportunities to make a positive difference, so there isn’t much more to say besides I’m stoked and planning to say more a little further down the road.  For now, onward!

• First Day at Igalia was published on Monday, February 15th, 2021.
• It was assigned to the Standards and Work categories.
• There have been thirteen replies.

I’ve been working from home for (checks watch) almost 19 years now, and I’d love to share some tips with you all on how to make it work for you.

Except I can’t, because this has been incredibly disruptive for me.  See, my home is usually otherwise empty during the day — spouse at work, kids at school — which means I can crank up the beats and swear to my heart’s content at my code typos.  Now, not only do I have to wear headphones and monitor my language when I work, I also am surrounded by office-mates who basically play video games and watch cat videos all day, except for those times when I really get focused on a task, when they magically sense it’s the perfect time to come ask me random questions that could have waited, derailing my focus and putting me back at square one.

Which, to most of you used to working in an office setting, I suppose might seem vaguely familiar.  I’m not used to it at all.

Here’s what I can tell you: if you’re having trouble focusing on work, or anything else, it’s not that you’re terrible at working from home or bad at your job.  It’s that you’re doing this in a set of circumstances completely unprecedented in our lifetimes.  It’s that you’re doing this while worried not only about keeping yourself and your loved ones safe from a global pandemic, but probably also worried about your continued employment — not because you’re doing badly, but because the economy is on the verge of freezing up completely.  No spending means no business income means no salaries means no money to spend.

We can hope for society-level measures to unjam the economic engine, debt leniency or zero-interest loans or Universal Basic Income or what have you, but until those measures exist and begin to work together, we’re all stumbling scared in a pitch-black forest.  Take it from someone who has been engulfed by overwhelming, frightening, pitiless circumstances before: Work can be a respite, but it’s hard to sustain that retreat.  It’s hard to motivate yourself to even think about work, let alone do a good job.

Be forgiving of yourself.  Give yourself time and space to process the fear, to work through it and you.  Find a place for yourself in relation to it, so that you can exist beside it without it always disrupting your thoughts.  That’s the only way I know to free up any mental resources to try to do good work.  It also puts you in a place where you can act with some semblance of reason, instead of purely from fear.

Stay safe, friends.  We have a long, unknown road ahead.  Adjustment will be a long time in coming.  Support each other as much as you can.  Community is, in the end, the most resilient and replenishing force we have.

• Trying to Work From Home was published on Wednesday, March 18th, 2020.
• It was assigned to the Commentary and Work categories.
• There has been one reply.

As longtime readers know, my professional focus has been very different the past couple of years.  Ever since the events of 2013-2014, I started focusing on design and meeting the needs of people — not just users, but complete people with complex lives.  I teamed up with Sara Wachter-Boettcher to write Design for Real Life, and  presented talks at An Event Apart called “Designing for Crisis” (2015) and “Compassionate Design” (2016; video to come).  I’m not done with CSS — I should have news on that front fairly soon, in fact — but a lot of my focus has been on the practice of design, and how we approach it.

To that end, I’ve been spending large chunks of the last few months creating and recording a course for Udemy called “Design for Humanity”, and it’s now available.  The course is based very heavily on Design for Real Life, following a similar structure and using many of the examples from the book, plus new examples that have emerged since the book was published, but it takes a different approach to learning.  Think of it as a companion piece.  If you’re an auditory processor as opposed to a visual processor, for example, I think the course will really work for you.

Who is the course for?  I put it like this:

This course will help you if you are part of the design process for a product or service, whether that’s a website, an app, an overall experience, or a physical product. You might be a product designer or product manager, an entrepreneur or work in customer service or user research, an experience designer or an information architect. If you have been impacted by bad design and want to do better, this course is for you.

I know a lot of courses promise they’re just right for whoever you are, no really, but in this case I honestly feel like that’s true for anyone who has an interest in design, whether that’s visual design, system design, or content design.  It’s about changing perspective and patterns of thinking — something many readers of the book, and people who’ve heard my talks, say they’ve experienced.

If you’ve already bought the book, then thank you!  Be on the lookout for email from A Book Apart containing a special code that will give you a nice discount on the course.  If you haven’t picked up the book yet, that’s no problem.  I have a code for readers of meyerweb as well: use MW_BLOG to get 20% off the sale price of the course, bringing it down to a mere $12, or slightly less than $3 per hour!  (The code is good through February 28th, so you have a month to take advantage of it.)

If you like the course, please do consider picking up the book.  It’s a handy format to have close to hand, and to lend to others.  On the flip side, if you liked the book, please consider checking out the course, containing as it does new material and some evolution of thinking.

And either way, whether it’s the book or the course, if you liked what you learned, please take a moment to write a short review, say something on the interwebs, and generally spread the word to colleagues and co-workers.  The more people who hear the message, the better we’ll become as an industry at not just designing, but designing with care and humanity.

• A New Online Course: Design for Humanity was published on Friday, January 27th, 2017.
• It was assigned to the Design, Projects, Web, and Work categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’m criminally behind in sharing this with everyone, so I’m jumping straight to the bottom line here: I’m teaching a workshop on advanced CSS layout techniques in October, and co-teaching another workshop on CSS animation in November with the inestimable Val Head.  Both are courtesy O’Reilly & Associates, and will be conducted at their offices in Boston.

A few more details:

• New CSS Layout (October 17-18) is two days of deep diving into flexbox, multicolumn, grid, and related technologies.  There will be a heavy emphasis on Things You Can Use Today, including bugs and how to handle them, with a keen focus on using everything in a progressively enhancing way.  In other words, you should walk away knowing how to use new technologies right away, without leaving behind users of older browsers, and have a good sense of what you’ll be able to do in the next 6-12 months.  This will be hands-on, interactive, and very much a dialogue with technical instruction.  If you’re looking for two days of watching me drone in front of a slide show, this is not that.  I’m not even sure I’ll have any slides at all — I’ll probably spend the entire time in BBEdit and a browser instead.  The class size is limited to 40 people.
• CSS Animation (November 17-18) is another two days of diving deep into the topic.  For this one, I’ll spend the first day going through every last piece of CSS transition and animation syntax, with generous helping of transform.  On the second day, Val will show how to put that syntax to use in a way that serves and strengthens your design, instead of undermining it.  It’s basically a day of learning how the tools work, and a day of learning how to properly use the tools.  Again, class size of 40; and again, very much hands-on and interactive.

So that’s what’s up.  Looking for ways to seriously expand your skills in layout or animation or both?  Come, join us!

• Workshopping was published on Wednesday, September 28th, 2016.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, CSS, Standards, and Work categories.
• There have been two replies.

I’ve recently had the odd experience of seeing from the outside something that I usually get to see from the inside: the schedules and workshops for the first three An Event Aparts of 2014 have been announced.  Those shows are:

• An Event Apart Atlanta 2014 (17–19 February 2014)
• An Event Apart Seattle 2014 (30 March – 2 April 2014)
• An Event Apart Boston 2014 (28–30 April 2014)

All the shows feature a great mix of veterans and new faces, all coming together to bring our usual blend of looking to the future while staying firmly grounded in the details of the here-and-now.  The shows include workshops from Luke Wroblewski (in Atlanta or Boston) or Josh Clark (in Seattle) about mobile and touch design.

Ordinarily, at this point I’d say “hope to see you there!” but I can’t be sure that I’ll be able to hold up my side of that.  The same family crisis that forced me to withdraw from the last four AEAs of 2013 has also kept me off the roster for at least the first three shows of 2014, and I don’t know that I’ll be able to travel even to visit.  I’ll continue to be a part of the show, but behind the scenes, at least for now.

And that crisis is why I got to experience the announcements from the outside.  While I was in Philadelphia, I was basically on extended medical leave from AEA, with the team picking up every scrap of my duties they could.  They pretty much soaked up 99%+ of what I do daily, sparing me the worry of day-to-day operations and leaving me free to focus everything I could on my daughter and family during a very difficult period.  I am forever indebted.  I can’t ever thank them enough for what they did for me.  I am beyond fortunate to have had such a strong team of friends and colleagues at my back.

I will say that it was a good thing for me to experience the process from the audience, as it were, gaining a new perspective on what we do and how we do it.  I certainly don’t recommend a major crisis as the best way to gain that perspective, but I have a newfound appreciation for the value of stepping outside of the process as completely as possible.  You might be very surprised by how things look from out there.

But back to the point: the complete agendas are up for the first three AEAs of 2014, so go check them out!  And if you’re at all interested, I wouldn’t wait to register any longer than absolutely necessary.  Every show for the past two or three years has sold out weeks or months in advance, and cancellation rates are low enough that it’s pretty rare for people on the waiting list to get in.  I hope you’ll be there!

• An Event Apart 2014 Schedules, Round One was published on Monday, November 25th, 2013.
• It was assigned to the An Event Apart, Observations, and Work categories.
• There have been no replies.