thoughtbot Design Link Pack: April 2022

Elaina Natario and Alex Chen

thoughtbot April 2022 design links cover image

It’s gonna be May! Or rather, it already is! Here’s a list of what we’ve been reading in April!

Typography

Best Font for Online Reading: Among high-legibility fonts, a study found 35% difference in reading speeds between the best and the worst. People read 11% slower for every 20 years they age.

GT Planar: GT Planar tests the limits of a 90-degree range, combining Retalic, Upright, and Italic styles into one continuous design space.

Google webfonts helper: A hassle-free way to self-host google fonts.

Design + Dev

The Future of CSS: CSS Toggles: Chromium will start prototyping with CSS Toggles.

CSS :has parent selector: Ahmad Shadeed muses about the amazingness of the new :has selector in CSS.

Those HTML elements you never use: Louis Lazaris describes and demonstrates some interesting HTML attributes that you may or may not have heard of and perhaps find useful enough to personally use in one of your projects.

11ty Edge: A plugin to run Eleventy in an Edge Function to add dynamic content to your Eleventy sites.

Web color is still broken: The web is still doing color wrong.

Putting the System back in our Design System: Evolving Polaris tokens to build products at scale and speed.

Tools

Stark Mac App Beta: Signup for the Beta launch of Stark, an accessibility optimizer.

Shortcuts.design: Every shortcut for designers, centralized and searchable.

Theme builder: Parametric and generative design tools.

Smart meetings in Miro: Miro Smart Meetings is a new bundle of tools that lets you run engaging and effective meetings and workshops.

Staybl: “The first browser to compensate for tremors. Reconnecting Parkinson’s patients with the digital world.”

Figma plugin for Storybook: Integrate design and code to speed up your team.

Events

Workshop: How to Develop Strategic Skills as a Product Designer: A workshop with Frank Bach, lead designer at Headspace.

Config 2022: Config is happening in May!

Fun Stuff

Tetrageddon: A workshop with Frank Bach, lead designer at Headspace.

Home Sweet Homepage: A scrollable narrative about the authors journey into websites and the joy of making them.

Surveys

Design Ops Report: Invitation to be a part of the 2022 State of Design Ops, as well as the report from 2021.

Sparkbox Design Systems Survey: It’s another survey!

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