There is only one law of web design: don’t mess with the scroll. Although there are infinite ways to mess with it, it’s possibly the most underestimated side effect of poor web performance. This might happen when an interface dips beneath the 60fps threshold when a user is scrolling around and a script causes a...

She spent her days ordering circles, squares and rectangles of color on a page. In her dreams however, in that alternate universe where she might become anything else at a moment’s notice, she believed that similar operations could be performed on breathing, heart-beating patients. Within those dreams she often...

Whenever I watch a movie or a tv show set in the past I like to wonder how the same event might take place but under more technically advanced circumstances. Take for example a show set in the 1920s in which a character passes away and, unfortunately, there is only a single photograph left on their desk. You know...

Much like a blog post, an article, or a book, you don’t need to show your entire life’s work to validate your ideas. It’s not really necessary to talk about that complex relationship that you have with your father and the name of your oh so cool cat that you’ve had since high school. Keep your biography at the...

This week I came across an interesting design problem: how do you make an SVG that’s being used as a background-image respond to the width of its container, yet also scale its height depending on the child elements within? For example this could be a strange shape that might be difficult or impossible to emulate...

This week the Erskine crew headed down to Brighton for dConstruct, an all day event that navigated the tumultuous and the sometimes frightening theme of communicating with computers. From cyborgs and toasters with personalities to community infrastructure and feeling the deep, moaning rumbles of an organ's...

There’s been various discussions about atomic design, OOCSS and BEM for several years now, but in all the ideas that gravitate around these topics there’s one in particular that hasn’t been fully recognised. As many developers cite efficiency, coding speed and legibility as the driving impetus behind breaking down...

My hometown was obliterated during the war. Hitler’s Luftwaffe destroyed the pier and the docks, hoping to eradicate the strong Navy presence in and around Plymouth, historically one of the main military ports in the south of England. In the shrieking darkness of the Blitz whole communities vanished and were...

In Atomic Design Brad Frost recently argued that front-end development could be improved by modularising particular aspects of design. Instead of coding a form as a component that is reused throughout a website, he suggested breaking it up even further into smaller modules like a placeholder, an input or a text...

As a developer I’m always on the lookout for the best applications, the fastest machines and the latest, most colourful updates to a product line. But sometimes I find that this can be unhealthy, addictive behaviour and so slowly, over the years, I’ve tried to become more critical of the tools around me. There are...

In the town where I grew up it was completely natural for everyone to ignore the machines that hunched in the corner at school and at home, never seeing the potential in them to make interesting things or to learn how they really worked. Computers were nothing more than loud, humming boxes, with wire tentacles that...

Written by Fred Smeijers and published by the Hyphen Press, the second edition of Counterpunch is one of the most mesmerising books ever written about the early stages of typography and printing. Originally the author sets out to describe how type was manufactured in the 16th century; how small pieces of steel were...