Delyo's garden

Link Dump 03 - November 2024

Link dump 3 is all about design and restrictions. We're getting thematic here so fasten your seat belts.

On today's menu, a selection of not-so-bumpy rides into the question of how we can design beautiful, usable and accessible things, while keeping in mind limitations, and steering away from ultimate power workstation and do-everything programs. You can do everything with anything, but nothing will be made in the same way.

Thinking Different - Using Linux in Design is Tim Rodenbröker's quick read about refusing the "industry standards" of design and switching over to a system designers avoid for absolutely no reason. Or that's my opinion.

Designing Friction is a call to turn away from the idea of "seamless" and "frictionless" productivity-doped workflow, to enter a bumpy road, for which we care more and in which we engage deeper. A plea for technology that gives space to the user as fully human, not just a swiping finger. It's a friction lickin' good article.

How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops is an article in Low-Tech Magazine, exploring the conscious choice of turning to second-hand laptops instead of power-hungry shiny monsters that we replace every two years and throw in the always-growing pile of electronic garbage. Old laptops are limited, but not everyone needs the computing power of a thousand suns. Most people don't. Buy an old laptop, or better: keep your existing one for years to come.

Lowtech Manifesto is a proud middle-finger gesture to the gadget-hungry, shiny, AI-compatible, colorful, everything-is-provided, 3-in-1, product-loving circlejerk of geeks. Or it's a manifesto for lower, slower, quieter, but more than sufficient technology.

This Page is Designed to Last is a page describing itself. Or rather, it's a page describing practices to adopt to create content that can last long. Content and form that can outlast updates, design trends, programming trends, dependencies, other websites going down, and a transplant from a server to another. Don't make your stuff depend fully on other stuff you don't control.

Designers Ethiques (French) est "une association qui explore les pratiques de conception numérique. Nous travaillons à la capacitation des designers et des professionnels du numérique pour produire un numérique émancipateur, durable et désirable." Parce que oui, le design a sa/ses politique/s.

And then there is the Motherfucking website battle where we explore or scream at eachother about web design:

And a final favorite of mine:
no-ht.ml (Archived because it's gone) where you DON'T NEED HTML FOR YOUR WEBSITE.

Final word: SUCK IT, BLOATED WEB! Goodbye.

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