Josh Clark’s Only One Deliverable Matters hits on a lot of important points (e.g. design tokens!!!).

…we are clear-eyed that those artifacts are merely drawings of websites—aspirational watercolors of imagined interfaces.

The best products are created when everyone is focused on the thing rather than the interim artifacts. I’ve found that the bigger the team, the easier it is for everyone to concentrate on polishing their deliverable rather than putting that energy into the actual end product. Regardless of team size, this is a good reminder that we should pay more attention to the end result than our design artifacts.

via Brad Frost

This little browser feature might change my life:

document.designMode = 'on';

Turning design mode on by entering the this line in the console will make all the text in the target element (the whole page in this case) editable. Sweet!

via CSS Tricks :: Brad Frost

Crafting an accessible site is a multidisciplinary task for sure. One of the things that designers can do early in the process is ensure readability. A big part of this is font size and color choices that are contrasty enough to read.

Here are two (Mac) tools that can help:

• Contrast A helps pick foreground and background colors that meet minimum contrast standards
• Frank DeLoupe gives you an eyedropper anywhere–awesome

I heard about both of these from Brad Frost and Dan Mall’s designer/developer workflow video.

Brad Frost and Dan Mall posted a video of them collaborating on a site redesign. For nearly two hours, they are live designing, coding and narrating their process–I watched the whole thing. I imagine that this is what it’s like for gamers watching a great team on YouTube or Twitch.

Here are several points that really stood out to me:

• On designing in the browser
• “Everything that I make is discardable”
• “The tools don’t matter, its all means to an end”
• Dev shouldn’t be paralyzed, iterating on the real stuff
• Do all things, all of the time
• Designers can own some of the code (e.g. variables, design tokens)
• Use the right tool for the job
• “Clients need to see the comp to sign off”
• Not all code is implementation
• On designer/developer collaboration
• Everybody’s energy should be going into building the best product possible
• Overview of the collaborative process