Flexibly Centering an Element with Side-Aligned Content – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

This is a great little tip from Eric for those situations when you want an element to be centred but you want the content inside that element to remain uncentred:

max-inline-size: max-content;
margin-inline: auto;

And I completely concur with his closing thoughts on CSS today:

It’s a nice little example of the quiet revolution that’s been happening in CSS of late. Hard things are becoming easy, and more than easy, simple. Simple in the sense of “direct and not complex”, not in the sense of “obvious and basic”. There’s a sense of growing maturity in the language, and I’m really happy to see it.

10 Year Challenge: How Popular Websites Have Changed

Side by side screenshots of websites, taken ten years apart. The whitespace situation has definitely improved. It would be interesting to compare what the overall page weights were/are though.

Cognitive Overload - daverupert.com

From Scott McCloud to responsive design, Dave is pondering our assumptions about screen real estate:

As the amount of information increases, removing details reduces information density and thereby increasing comprehension.

It reminds me of Edward Tufte’s data-ink ratio.

18F: Digital service delivery | Building a large-scale design system: How we created a design system for the U.S. government

Maya Benari provides an in-depth walkthrough of 18F’s mission to create a consistent design system for many, many different government sites.

When building out a large-scale design system, it can be hard to know where to start. By focusing on the basics, from core styles to coding conventions to design principles, you can create a strong foundation that spreads to different parts of your team.

There’s an interface inventory, then mood boards, then the work starts on typography and colour, then white space, and finally the grid system.

The lessons learned make for good design principles:

• Talk to the people
• Look for duplication of efforts
• Know your values
• Empower your team
• Start small and iterate
• Don’t work in a vacuum
• Reuse and specialize
• Promote your system
• Be flexible

minimalsites | minimal design css gallery

A gallery of minimally designed websites. There are some lovely grid/type-based designs on view here.

SpiekermannPartners › Le Monde Diplomatique

The newly-launched redesign of Le Monde Diplomatique is absolutely gorgeous. Whitespace on a newspaper: finally!

A List Apart: Articles: Whitespace

Mark has written a great article for ALA, focusing on one aspect of good typography: whitespace.