Back to News Here are a few of the things our team found useful or interesting this past week.
Design
Font size is useless; let’s fix it
tonsky.me
This article has quite a lot of information about fonts and their sizes that I’d never considered or realized consciously. For example, that font size doesn’t control the actual height of the letters, from baseline to capital height, but rather the arbitrarily-sized boxes that surround them.
— Ian
Modify your design for global audiences: Crosscultural UX design
nngroup.com
Here is an interesting and thorough look at the factors to take into consideration when designing for different cultures.
— Anne
The dark UX patterns targeting children
uxdesign.cc
This article discusses the use of dark patterns that target children who, unlike adults, may not recognize an ad when they see it.
— Anne
Tech
Rails installations broken by dependency being yanked
github.com/rails
Last week people found their Rails apps would no longer bundle and thus blocked deploys and CI. The cause was one of it’s dependencies MimeMagic yanking its older versions due to it containing an incorrect GPL license, which forces all programs which use it, for example a Rails app, to be open source. It has since been replaced with the MIT license.
— Adam A
Time for Next-Gen Codecs to Dethrone JPEG
cloudinary.com
I knew about WebP of course, and I’ve been tripped up by HEIC when transferring images from my iPhone to my computer, but JPEG XL and WebP2 weren’t even on my radar. It’s very cool to see that JPEG XL beats both JPEG and PNG in terms of compression!
— Ian
Tip: Lazy-loading content with Turbo Frames and skeleton loader
boringrails.com
Certain pages in your web app can be data intensive and slow to load. For example, pages which often have multiple panes of content such as analytics or activity pages. A common pattern to speed things up is to load the page but only show dummy content for those panes and then use ajax to load the content for those frames asynchronously. Rail’s new Turbo Frames feature now makes this trivial to implement. You can learn how via this short tutorial.
— Adam A