New work teams
For quite a while we've been aware of the plan to move frontend devs and designers into a consolidated design system team, but over the course of the last fortnight it's gone from "eventually" to "soon" to "NOW".
So with no ceremony whatsoever I find myself in a new team, with different work, and we're immediately going into our first sprint, which is week long (!) and it's all a bit, like… wut?
Don't get me wrong, I'm on board with the substance of all of this: a design system team, cross-product delivery, week-long sprints — these are all good things. It's just a shame that the execution has been so abrupt. If you want to create an environment in which people care about the work and care about each other need to be respectful of those relationships. A good gardener doesn't uproot plants and re-arrange them willy-nilly. I'm going to risk hyperbole and say that there's a violence to it. But hey ho. Needs must.
Following on from my recent
Fonts, themes, transitions
The first sprint of the new design team is concerned with the font scale. It's kind of amazing to me that we are where we are with the design system and not only is this not nailed down, it's not even vaguely defined. Feels like when your teenage band designs record sleeves and plans shows before they've written their first song.
So the confusion and discomfort we felt is probably natural and good, and I did my best to spin discussions in that direction, saying this, THIS is the moment! THIS is when we start making things real!
My task is to look at Utopia fluid typescale and see how that can fit our needs. I started out thinking it might be something for further down the line, but now I'm excited by how much it could simplify things.
Focusing on headings because they represent the font scale best, my top insights so far are:
- We need to decouple heading sizes from typescale sizes. We already kinda knew this, but it's now clear that even the naming should be separate.
- Sequential steps in our system don't need to be sequential steps on the generated scale. This was a penny-drop, though in retrospect it shouldn't have been. H1 can be
--step-4and H2 can be--step-2on an minor third scale … there's still a consonant relationship. - Just beacause our base size = 1rem = 16px doesn't mean our body copy has to be 16px. Again, choosing the scale is different than assigning values from that scale.
In my own time I've been messing around with my blog site a lot. I've got some random emojis appearing in the background to make it look less blank. I've tightened up the grid adherence and put scroll on some overflowing containers, and added a page-description <details> element in the sidebar. I'm slightly obsessed with the <details> element.
I've also had a play around with the new view transitions API, which is going to be great when it ships and has cross-browser support. Just by including a single CSS directive I get smooth snapshot transitions across pages in Chrome. Unfortunately it clashes with the darkmode JS I added last week, so results are unpredictable at best. My current plan is to suppress darkmode on Chrome-based browesers for the timebeing. Thinking about how and why these features interfere with each other, I started to wonder if I should bother with darkmode at all. There are browser extensions for that if someone really wants it; I'm not sure everyone rolling their own is a good thing 🤔.
First wobbles
My diet's still going well … no alcohol, sugar, bread, potatoes etc., and I'm still fasting a minimum of 18 hours a day, I reckon, and feeling good on it.
And although I'm much happier following absolute rules, a few wee cracks appeared this week. I had some of C's veggie tempura at Wasabi when we went for lunch. The content was asparagus and avocado but there was some tempura batter, obviously. No biggie, right?
I was in town yesterday and ended up ravenous and light-headed after like, 20 hours or something, so I ended up getting a bowl of beef chilli at a burrito place. Only when I started eating did I realise it had kidney beans. Oh, well, again, not a huge amount of carbs.
And my final infraction was, consciously and willingly, to drink a non-alchoholic beer in the bath. It shows how much my outlook has changed that I was horrified to read on the label: 20g carbohydrates, of which 13.6g sugars. 😰
Maybe it was psychosomatic, or the heat of the water, or maybe I really am sugar-sensitive now, but I felt super-buzzy after it and as if my teeth were throbbing. And I don't know if this is related, but the last couple of days I've had strong cravings for the pain au chocolate lying on the worktop, and the Tunnocks Caramel Logs that I know are in the cupboard. Resisting the urges so far.
I'm a couple of pounds under 14st now, and I reckon I'm past the early stage of losing lots of weight from water retention. Feels like the pace is slowing.
Clearing out a cupboard I found a load of old clothes that I never thought I'd fit into again … even some shirts that were a bit too snug when I bought them 10 years ago are now hanging nicely.
At this point I'm so used to making crazy good meals out of whatever scraps are lying around that I'm not really bothering to photograph them. This week's new trend has been digging out frozen fish (haddock, scallops) and turning them into delicious meals at short notice.
END