Mark Boulton / Reading

  • The Real Danger of the Coronavirus - Fiona Cameron Lister - Medium

    This article reminds me of a book I read a while ago on fear. And fear of an unknown pathogen is as deep rooted in us as a fear of snakes. But fear itself – spread by 24/7 news – can have a serious impact on our mental health, which will lead to a decrease in immune system efficiency.

    The Coronavirus will definitely affect you if you succumb to fear. Writing this, I know it has already affected me. I have a little knot in my solar plexus. I woke up at 3 am this morning thinking about it.

  • Advice from Ten Years of Leading Remote Teams.

    So much this:

    It doesn’t take much for the volume of messages in Slack (or Teams) and email to pile up. To top it off, most people don’t care enough to practice proper etiquette when communicating digitally. My personal favorite is the three-foot-tall email-chain that’s been going on for weeks until you’re CC’d with zero context, only a “FYI.” Yet you’re expected to digest the “conversation” and make a quick decision. My next favorite: The impromptu question in Slack that generated a twenty-minute exchange of messages, emoji, and animated GIFs that you’re brought into with a simple @gregstorey followed by “scroll up.” Neither are these exchanges positive or an effective way to communicate, but they’re done all the time. Talk about communication needs and requirements as a team because you need to develop some empathy for what it’s like to be at the end of that shit stick, and then create a shared definition of what proper communication is and how to ensure it happens. Without this discussion and decision making, a remote team is always one Slack thread away from turning into Lord of the Flies.

  • MonoLisa - A font family designed for software developers. Font follows function.

    Lovely mono typeface designed for coding. The website is delightful, especially the little theme swtcher at the top.

    As software developers, we always strive for better tools but rarely consider font as such. Yet we spend most of our days looking at screens reading and writing code. Using a wrong font can negatively impact our productivity and lead to bugs. MonoLisa was designed by professionals to improve developers’ productivity and reduce fatigue.

  • OpenRefine

    A free, open source, powerful tool for working with messy data

  • Wash Your Lyrics

    I will now be washing my hands to lyrics of Master of Puppets by Metallica.

  • How to cross post to Medium

    Nifty little service from a while ago from Remy on how to automatically cross-post from to Medium from your RSS feed.

  • Radical Design

    Refreshing site for Jack's upcoming design course.

  • New Google Fonts

    As you'd expect. Clean, functional, a bit delightful. Impressive offering from Google just got a little bit better. Oh, and, Variable Fonts!

  • An old and stable font format

    This, we hope, will serve not only to highlight forward capabilities that are possible with our suggestions, but also to assure web typographers that there is a way for typographic code on the web to fall back, since many conditions—slow connections, older systems, and so on—will force the presentation to do so.

  • The Markup

    Refreshing design from The Markup. Not only is the typography solid, but they are doing some interesting things with images and hover states.

  • Funnel Teardowns

    Like many people, I can shy away from funnels, multi-variant testing, and hyper optimisation. Lots of reasons why I do it, but mostly because I find it pretty boring. This website does a good job at very quickly critiquing successful funnels.

  • Tailwind UI

    Now this is interesting. Tailwind has been on my radar for ages. A 'utility-class first' framework, it allows for rapid creation of interfaces. I know several people who are big fans. However, my web standards, old skool 'content and presentation' alarm bells go off about every three seconds. Maybe I should get over myself.

  • Running a Paid Membership Program — by Craig Mod

    Craig's documented his first year running his membership program. There are many nuggets to digest. I'd love to sit down with him over a cup of tea and dig through each and every point.

  • Leading Design in remote and distributed teams - Rob Boynes - Medium

    Lots of good, practical advice in this article. The conclusions nailed it though. Remote working is as much about inclusivity as it is about flexibility.

    If you have a family you care for, elderly parents, children, a non-affluent family history, or are a minority for whom opportunity is less accessible — which let’s face it is a lot of people — you can’t just up and leave to New York, London or San Francisco to throw down $3K on an apartment rental. And why should that sacrifice — or attainment — be the defining factor in your career success? Is it because the role you are qualified for, for whatever reason, requires you to be present in an expensive city, despite the fact that it — if we are all really honest — could be done from anywhere?

  • Smashing Podcast With Amy Hupe

    Amy goes into depth on the GDS design system work she did. So much good stuff in here. What I particularly like is the continued reference to user research and how it directly affects the roadmap for the system. Not suprising in GDS, but non-the-less refreshing.

    And that’s for them it’s just about getting that evidence-based backing for the decision that they’re trying to kind of push through. But then there’s other people who really care about understanding the research and whether it’s appropriate for their context and what additional research they might need to fill in to fill any gaps that have been missed or perhaps that they are dealing with in their unique situation. So I think the approach was to try and understand all of those different needs and to try and get a sense of priority amongst those and understand like how we could cater to all of the various different requirements that people had from the documentation. It’s not just one kind of one thing that fits everybody.

  • Frank Chimero · Redesign: Perfecta Trifecta

    This is an excellent read from Frank on his considerations for type choice on his new website design. What I like about it is the mixture of rational, functional decision making mixed with the less rational, emotional, vague points...

    something Caslon-ish, Georgia-y, or Times-esque. Even though these are different classifications of serif typefaces, they hold together as a list, because I’m looking for the quotidian here—something “normal” without much of an evident hand in the design.