💥Design Brief #110: Website Accessibility, Text Rendering in Sketch, Typography Design Systems, Anti-Notifications and Design Sprints at The New York Times

How to Get Started with Website Accessibility

Although web accessibility has long been an important web standard, it’s attracted a lot of attention only recently. Accessibility brings many benefits to your users and your business. Ben Robertson, a Frontend developer at Mediacurrent, shares four basic principles that will help you build accessible websites. Read more

Get Down to the Nitty-Gritty of Text Rendering in Sketch

Have you ever worked with text layers in Sketch and didn’t understand what was going on? Many designers have encountered the same problem, and it’s probably because text rendering is a complex thing with many layers of abstraction. In this article, Yakim shares insights about Text Rendering in Sketch. Read more

A Better Way to Create Typography Design Systems

Martin Ollivere, a product designer at Our Own Thing, shares a much more efficient and effective way of creating a typographic design system for your next project. How is it possible? Together with Jamie Gilman (the dev half of Our Own Thing), Ollivere built a browser-based tool called Archetype that enables you to do the work otherwise worth hours of your time in a matter of seconds. Read more

Visual Breaking Change in Design Systems

Design systems establish a baseline visual style that’s an essential dependency. Color, typography, space, and more are robustly specified and expected to change in a stable and predictable manner from a release to release. When an adopter upgrades, a design system shouldn’t break their stuff unexpectedly. Here’s why you ought to care about visual breaking change in design systems. Read more

The Rise of Anti-Notifications

Few inventions affected our relationship with technology as much as push notifications. Push notifications are a technology that now largely makes decisions for us on what and when to see, and the amount of incoming information leaves many of us frustrated and overwhelmed. This changed when a new type of notifications entered the scene: anti-notifications. Here is what you should know about anti-notifications. Read more

How to Run 13 Design Sprints at Once: Inside Maker Week at The New York Times

Jake Knapp shares some impressions from The New York Times’s project, called Maker Week, which he was involved in this summer. For one week every summer, NY Times’ staff are encouraged to step away from their regular work and experiment with new projects that result in new prototypes shared at the end of the week. See how it all went. Read more