Prescriptive and Descriptive Information Architectures | Jorge Arango
Interesting—this is exactly the same framing I used to talk about design systems a few years ago.
Link tags: ico
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THE AI CON - How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want
A shame that this must-read book won’t be out in time for Christmas—’twould make a great stocking filler for a lot of people I know.
A smart, incisive look at the technologies sold as artificial intelligence, the drawbacks and pitfalls of technology sold under this banner, and why it’s crucial to recognize the many ways in which AI hype covers for a small set of power-hungry actors at work and in the world.
Small dents in the IndieWeb · Paul Robert Lloyd
Paul has been doing so much fantastic work with the indie web community, not least of which is co-organising Indie Web Camp Brighton—just ten days away now!
A cohesive and unified identity for IndieWeb protocols · Paul Robert Lloyd
I really enjoyed hanging out with Paul at Indie Web Camp in Nuremberg last weekend. And I like the iconography he’s proposing:
This design attempts to bring together a set of icons that share the concept of a node – a line and a point – and use this to add counters to each letter shape.
Using Web Components on My Icon Galleries Websites - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Because I want my site to be progressively-enhanced (e.g. the core feature of the site — viewing icons — works without JS), I didn’t want a “shell” web component that’s merely an empty HTML tag in the initial HTML that later renders everything.
Jim seems bashful about calling what he’s built a true web component:
Maybe I shouldn’t be using the term “web component” for what I’ve done here. I’m not using shadow DOM. I’m not using the templates or slots. I’m really only using custom elements to attach functionality to a specific kind of component.
Au contraire! For me, this exemplifies the best mindset to have when wielding this technology.
Privacy in the product design lifecycle | ICO
A very handy guide to considering privacy at all stages of digital product design:
This guidance is written for technology professionals such as product and UX designers, software engineers, QA testers, and product managers.
Privacy, Seriously | ICO
This looks like an excellent—and free!—online event centred on privacy and safety. It’s got Eva PenzeyMoog, Robin Berjon and more!
You don’t need HTML!
View source on this bit of tongue-in-cheek fun from Terence.
Remix Icon - Open source icon library
I love how easy it is to use these icons: you can copy and paste the SVG or even get it encoded as a data URL.
UK ICO: surveillance advertising is dead
Behavioral ads are only more profitable than context ads if all the costs of surveillance – the emotional burden of being watched; the risk of breach, identity-theft and fraud; the potential for government seizure of surveillance data – is pushed onto internet users. If companies have to bear those costs, behavioral ads are a total failure, because no one in the history of the human race would actually grant consent to all the things that gets done with our data.
11ty/api-indieweb-avatar: Return an optimized avatar image from a domain name input.
Here’s a nifty little service from Zach: pass in a URL and it returns an image of the site’s icon.
Think of it as the indie web alternative to showing Twitter avatars.
Computers should expose their internal workings as a 6th sense (Interconnected)
What about a scarf or collar so the back of your neck prickles when somebody is talking about you on Twitter.
Or a ghost detector for homes, restaurants, etc that glows when someone is “visiting” in Google Maps/Facebook Pages or looking through a webcam? Maybe it would be better to control the air conditioning to produce a chill, or play barely audible infrasound, indications that there is a haunting in progress and the veil here is thin.
This Word Does Not Exist
This is easily my favourite use of a machine learning algorithm.
supercookie • workwise
Favicons are snitches.
Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction
A fascinating crowdsourced project. You can read the backstory in this article in Wired magazine.
Beyond Smart Rocks
Claire L. Evans on computational slime molds and other forms of unconvential computing that look beyond silicon:
In moments of technological frustration, it helps to remember that a computer is basically a rock. That is its fundamental witchcraft, or ours: for all its processing power, the device that runs your life is just a complex arrangement of minerals animated by electricity and language. Smart rocks.
Works offline
How do we tell our visitors our sites work offline? How do we tell our visitors that they don’t need an app because it’s no more capable than the URL they’re on right now?
Remy expands on his call for ideas on branding websites that work offline with a universal symbol, along the lines of what we had with RSS.
What I’d personally like to see as an outcome: some simple iconography that I can use on my own site and other projects that can offer ambient badging to reassure my visitor that the URL they’re visiting will work offline.
Round 1: post your ideas / designs · Issue #1 · works-offline/logo
This is an interesting push by Remy to try to figure out a way we can collectively indicate to users that a site works offline.
Well, seeing as browsers have completely dropped the ball on any kind of ambient badging, it’s fair enough that we take matters into our own hands.
Et In Silicon Valley Ego – Dr Beth Singler
The parallels between Alex Garland’s Devs and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.
The Worm is Back! | NASA
The return of NASA’s iconic “worm” logo (for some missions).