Jan Constantin has created another very complete and well curated event list for the second half of 2017 over there at Smashing Magazine. Thanks Jan!

⇾ Visit: A good and well curated list of events

Bastian Allgeier announced, that he and his team started working on Kirby 3. Similar to what Kai Brach did for his Offscreen Magazine, Kirby started the Kirby Next project and website. The idea of a move like this is to fund the time, where you focus on the work you are diving into for the next couple of months. So in a way it is a bit like running a Kickstarter, but without a goal that has to be reached to have this project become reality.

Kai, back then, answered the question of ”What if the funding goal is not reached or exceeded?” with

[…] If we fall short, we will have to limit the feature set of our website and the scope of the rebrand. If we exceed our goal, we can even include some of our 'nice-to-have' features.

So the benefit is, that you are not dependent on the goal to be reached and you have money you can work with. Often products like his, my event, or – and that is what I am writing about here actually – Kirby, only exist, because the support that people using, reading or attending is massive and they also do a huge part of the marketing for people like Kai, Bastian or me.

Next to the monetary support and benefit for the product owner there is a benefit for the people supporting things like this. If done nicely, you get insights in to the process of something like rebranding Offscreen or the development of Kirby 3. This is valuable information, a nice read and – at least for me – inspiration to see how other people running a business on their own do this. As you know I am a big fan of Kirby (and Offscreen) and I am excited already to follow Bastian, Sonja, Lukas, Nils, Fabian and Nico what they will come up with and – even more exciting – what happens on the way to Kirby 3, how is the decision process for certain task and so forth.

So, if you are generally interested in …

1. … supporting a software like Kirby (and maybe even planning to use or using it already) …
2. … supporting an independent system like Kirby and its development …
3. … how a product development process looks behind the scenes …
4. … how decisions for or against a feature/way of developing software are made …
5. … testing the new features and the new UI Kit for the Panel of Kirby 3 first …
6. … help the Kirby team financially …

… then you should check Kirby Next. Bastian describes in detail what you get and what the money is used for, when states, for example:

[…] Kirby has become a sustainable full-time job for Bastian, but there's still a very limited budget for the other team members. With your help, we can spend more time on Kirby together and release Kirby 3 faster.

On a side note: Bastian is running a Kirby workshop during beyond tellerrand in Berlin as well, which is targeting beginners and experts in the same way. For this workshop we make sure to keep the number of attendees to a reasonable amount of people, so that everybody is able to not only enjoy the hands-on experience, but also ask the questions she/he always wanted to ask Bastian.

I have seen Rachel Andrew speak at Patterns Day last Friday in Brighton and many times before. She is known for her well delivered practical talks with a lot of insights on the topic she is speaking about. During the last weeks, I have seen her mentioning, that she already asked the question if websites have to look the same in every browser back in 2002. If you take this in consideration and read her article, where she mentions this again, then you can definitely play around with CSS Grid Layouts. Rachel gives many useful reasons you can quote 1:1 for your boss or client. And she is right when stating:

Your job is to learn about new things, and advise your client or your boss in the best way to achieve their business goals through your use of the available technology.

So it is our job to actually educate the people we build websites for and not to justify things after we built them. We should get to a point, where a client or your boss is not even asking “Why isn’t this looking the same in this browser” anymore, right?

The tradeoff will be the requirement to present a simplified layout for older browsers. However that doesn’t mean “no layout”. […]

This is it and this it what should be common sense already. So don’t be quite about it at your job or project anymore. Read Rachel’s article and if you are not already trying to convince the people you work for and with, then start now.

I have mixed feelings about sticky headers on web pages, but it annoys me more when the implementation causes scroll jank or contributes to it.

This is what Remy says in the first few lines of his blog post about sticks headers. And, I think, the reason for writing three parts worth ready, which explain how

And even though Remy says, it is ”[…] stuff that's been said before, but is worth saying again.” I can only highly recommend reading this, if you want to use sticky headers on a page.

The three parts are

• Sticky headers
• Smooth scroll & sticky navigation
• CSS sticky nav & smooth scroll

Leaving for Berlin tomorrow to run Elliot’s Advanced Typography workshop on Wednesday and Erik’s Letterpress workshop on Thursday. Still seats left for both of them, if you want to joy the fun.

Then, on Thursday, I gonna hop over to Brighton to attend Patterns Day and cover the event with making photos for Jeremy.

Would be lovely to meet you either in Berlin or Brighton. Just ping me.

On June 5th already, Una Kravets published a blog post called Locally Scoped CSS Variables: What, How, and Why in which she explains how they work, what’s possible already and why CSS Variables, aka CSS Custom Properties, are better than what was there before.

⇾ Visit: Locally Scoped CSS Variables: What, How, and Why

Feather is a very nice looking outline icon SVG set. All open source and by Cole Bemis.

⇾ Visit: Feather – open source SVG icons

So, that was another Smashing Conference in New York. I think, having been to all of them, I have to say, that this was maybe the best one so far. Not actually content wise, because that often also is a matter of taste and interest, but the atmosphere was really good. People have been very open and mindful, friendly and chatty. If you ask me what makes me think that it was like this: I can give you no facts. It is this kind of feeling that you maybe develop during the years of running and event and my stomach says “This was a good event”.

If you want to get an idea of how it was, maybe my photos give you an impression.

Marina Yalanska of Tubikstudio has written a nice to read article with tips and best practices on website header design.

⇾ Visit: Best Practices for Website Header Design

Don’t get me wrong: I also use Facebook. For many reasons it is quite nice and useful for me. But the reason why Gruber says this, and why I say “Yes, that’s right” are things like this:

Treat Facebook as the private walled garden that it is. If you want something to be publicly accessible, post it to a real blog on any platform that embraces the real web, the open one.

or

The Internet Archive is our only good defense against broken links. Blocking them from indexing Facebook content is a huge “fuck you” to anyone who cares about the longevity of the stuff they link to.

Read the full post here. Well spoken, Mr. Gruber.

⇾ Visit: Fuck Facebook