Dan's Interesting Design Links

Automate your Figma tasks in one click.

Maintaining a design system is a lot of work. In this article, Atila Fassina shares his lessons learned and how a platform such as Backlight can help put together a series of tools to speed up your architecture setup.

Are “accessible” fonts actually as accessible as they claim? If not, what are the things we need to know when choosing a font that responds to different reader needs? This session will explore what dyslexia is, what cognitively happens when we read, and what elements of a typeface make a difference to how accessible it is, and to whom. Bruno, David, and Gareth have decades of experience between them. Bruno as a Typeface Designer, David as a Typographer, and Gareth as a UX Design/Accessibility expert. Together they spent over 3 years researching and steering the creation of BBC Reith family, the BBC’s corporate accessible typeface. This session is from the Design track. About the speaker: Gareth Ford Williams, BBC, Head of User Experience Design, Accessibility Preferred Pronoun: He/Him Gareth Ford Williams In 2005 Gareth founded the BBC’s Digital Accessibility Team. Over the course of the first 3 years the Accessibility Team worked as an integral part of iPlayer’s core Product Team ensuring BBC iPlayer V1.0 launched as an accessible product. The accessibility team became part of UX when the BBC’s UX Design Team was founded in 2008. Gareth established the Design Research Team in 2010 and subsequently became a Head of UX Design. His team manages a network of over 200 Accessibility Champions, the oldest network of its kind in the industry. His team has also pioneered Mobile Accessibility Guidelines, BBC MAG, which were the first in the industry which have been used by thousands of organisations around the world. He has an interest in accessible typography going back his time on attachment as a product manager at YouView where he led the work on selecting the UI typeface, and since then he was a key stakeholder in the delivery of BBC Reith and BBC Qalam. About the speaker: David Bailey, BBC, UX Principal Preferred Pronoun: He/Him David cut his teeth as a designer in the nineties working with world-renowned agency The Designers Republic. In 2005 he formed his own studio, Kiosk, which produced cutting-edge design and branding for the music, arts, fashion and broadcast industries. He joined the BBC as a design director in 2013, spearheading the development of its digital design framework, GEL, and the introduction of their corporate typeface ‘BBC Reith’. This work helped inspire the formation of The Readability Group, alongside Bruno Maag and Gareth Ford Williams. About the speaker: Bruno Maag, Dalton Maag, Typeface Designer Preferred Pronoun: He/Him Bruno Maag is an expert typographer with over forty years of expertise in his field. He founded and led Dalton Maag Ltd, the world’s leading studio for typeface design where he worked with some of the best known brands: Amazon, Nokia, Intel, HP, AirBnB, Netflix, Facebook, DHL, FedEx, ABB, BBC, Rakuten amongst many others. All these brands have in common that their typography needs to be as accessible as possible to the clients’ audiences. 00:00 Don’t Believe The Type! 38:18 Q&A Learn more about axe-con at: https://www.deque.com/axe-con/

Figma Community plugin — Create, save and reuse prototype interactions.

Loading critical assets as fast as possible is vital for improving page speed. Learn how to optimise what’s essential and signal it to browsers.

Shift Nudge is a new online course that covers all the nitty-gritty details of crafting the visual side of UI. The course is taught through the lens of UX, with a focus on designing beautiful and functional user interfaces.

Useful Figma plugins that will help you fix all the little slowdowns and boost your productivity. From color management and image assets to SVG shapes and animation. That’s our new guide to Figma.

All the reasons you don't need a modal — and what to use instead.

Shimmering text that animates and looks a bit like it's irridescent foil stamped

Why, what and how designers should document accessibility requirements and user interactions to make product better and more inclusive

SocialSizes provides designers with the best sizes to use for Image and Video content on Social Media. Get downloadable templates for Sketch, Figma, Photoshop and Adobe XD (no more googling for everything).

Recently I have went through the process of adding support for the new watch face complication sizes on the Apple Watch Series 7. Previously, I have used PNG images for …

Create beautiful design system documentation collaboratively with zeroheight

Specify helps you unify your brand identity by collecting, storing and distributing design tokens and assets for your design system — automatically.

A little thing like capitalization can be a big deal

What we learned from 15 days of prototypes

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.

Browse the world’s UI components to discover techniques that work

In this article, we’ll take a look at the best ways to handle colors in CSS today, some tips for using them in a design system, and what we can expect from our colors in the not-too-distant future.

How we designed a color system with hand-picked, vibrant colors that also met standards for accessibility and contrast.

Easy-to-follow guidelines can make accessibility part of your everyday design process

It’s more important than ever to consider mental health while designing.

An open-source checklist to help you plan, build and grow your design system.

We've opened up the music box and described how we've shaped the tool to suit our needs and culture at Spotify.

Monzo are building a smart bank on your smartphone and we need your help to create the bank of the future.

90-minute Design course: Accessible design is a design process that specifically considers the needs of people with disabilities. In this course, you’ll learn about the standards in place to guide designers in creating experiences that are accessible to all users as well as techniques to help bring your projects up to those standards.

by Nick Babich