tl;dr #013
Definitely learning...
Unlucky number #013, for anyone not getting this newsletter – are we right? Talking in the collective first person is hard. What’s not is sharing this with a pal or two… no pressure.
We’re realising that this has gotten a bit indulgent, a bit of an intimate caress, only to push you away at the last moment with in-jokes, insults and iridescence (alteration, ay?). So, we’re course correcting - we’re going to focus on what we’ve been learning as opposed to just roasting Dog, or Lane. Anyway, here’s to promises on the Internet!
#graphic-design-is-my-passion
Recently we spoke with the Hamish from standards.site, and it was a good time. Have you seen standards.site? If you haven’t, you should, cause it’s pretty cool.
Hamish took us through how a brand guideline document can be whipped up in 30 minutes, and his thoughts on how the site has potential to adapt beyond being a brand-guidelines builder. The alpha test is going to be released soon, and we’re excited to get our hands on it.
We try and focus on making our brands as accessible and usable as possible, we think any sort of guide should be actionable for the client, making for a brand that can truly belong to the organisation it’s designed for.
We have seen that through a gradual trend in the design world, shifting from static brand guide PDFs to more dynamic systems online (as seen with Twitch, Audi and IBM, for example). No one wants to be building a 200 page PDF for every project, and no one wants to follow them either.
What’s good about building a guidelines site is that it’s accessible to anyone. The client doesn’t need to have any special software installed, and they can instantly share the brand with their internal teams. It’s also useful for designers and developers coming in and out of the project, as they can be kept updated from iteration to iteration
Before the standards Alpha came along, we decided to try building one ourselves for a client. Though it’s still a work in progress, it turned out pretty cool and extremely useful! In considering the system we went with we looked for inspiration in Standards, Brandpad and Grids (Obys Agency). All of which are really good times.
We’re excited to see where this takes us, and what the best practice might be. We love to see it, how about you?
#code-city
Hello, good morning cool dudes and dudettes 😎
This week we're gonna have a quick chat about something cool and definitely not nerdy: Nullish coalescing.
We know what you’re thinking, ‘those aren’t real words’. We’re certain, they definitely are. So… what is nullish coalescing??
Nullish coalescing is an operator written as two question marks '??' and returns the first truthy value.
It can be used as a shorthand way for checking and evaluating null or undefined values and helps with writing clean and efficient code.
For example in the following expression:
If x is null or undefined then z will equal to y
If x is not null or undefined then z will equal to x
Nullish coalescing can also be used as a sequence:
Pretty fucking cool right?
Support for nullish operators is currently sitting at a decent 90.86%:
So fuck Internet Explorer and get on it.
#processes-and-platforms
As a relative newcomer to the digital game, Simon has made public his gripes with the lack of features Figma contains, only to be promptly rebuffed by the Figma flag flyers up in the channel. It has since become fairly clear to him that Figma, with all its fancy plugins can really offer a fairly similar experience to the old Adobe workhorses, and auto-layouts. This week helped to cement that.
So, with guidelines at the front of our minds, this plugin find by Zoe was highly lauded for its assistance to our dispatch workflow. Styler is a plugin for Figma that generates styles based on selected layers (see their plugin description). Sounds cool, but the real efficiency created was in how quickly it might be able to replace our style sheeting. This image was generated with a single.
Maybe Si might have a flag to fly soon.
#vibe
Tidal: a dream that isn’t quite over. Not, like, fully over, anyway.
Jay-Z acquired Tidal for $56 million in 2015. You might remember the hype video that preceded the launch. A bunch of world-class musicians, gathered at some boujee hotel, all hanging out and trying to ‘act natural’ talking about music streaming. The video scored dramatically by just the sound of a reverberant heartbeat.
It was going to be the first artist owned streaming service, the goal being more money for more artists. Something like that, anyway. So they made the prices premium, the quality high, and the music exclusive. It didn’t work though. The public didn’t buy it. Literally. Did not buy the app. If anything, the failed experiment merely revealed that most people are more interested in convenience than quality when it comes to music.
So how was Tidal acquired for $300 million this year? Because, friends, the dream isn’t over. It’s just in another iteration. This time, though, it’s NFTs that are going to do the differentiating. And there’s evidence to suggest it’s a slightly (?) safer bet. Square acquired Tidal in March, and a lot of people think a subsidiary label (let’s call it “Square for Artists”) could be JayZ’s dream finally realised. A dream built on blockchain, that’s all.
tl;dr
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