Here's a cool article from the Polypane blog that looks at different ways of fading out text using CSS in a way that preserves the ability to highlight and copy text.
Used a curved monitor at the office today for the first time. Seems silly/obvious now that I've used one, but it didn't really occur to me that horizontal lines on the screen are slightly curved and I'm not sure I like it. Won't be rushing out to buy one anytime soon.
I find engineering videos like this fascinating. But it was the video thumbnail that piqued my interest because it just looks so wrong.
In the 1950’s Robert Thomas Jones, a brilliant NASA engineer, began developing a radical new wing arrangement called an oblique wing (also referred to as a skewed wing). The wing design was characterized by a wing that could pivot into a unique angled configuration in relation to the aircraft’s fuselage. The design offered several advantages over more conventional swept wings. An oblique wing’s ability to pivot into a straight wing made it ideal for low speed flight (improving efficiency and take-off/landing performance), but at transonic and supersonic speeds, the angled orientation minimized both wave and induced drag, leading to improved overall aerodynamic efficiency. With lower drag at higher speeds, oblique wing aircraft would require less thrust to maintain a given speed, resulting in reduced fuel consumption and operating costs. Compared to other variable geometry wings, oblique wings would also be lighter, less complex and have fewer drawbacks like a shifting center of lift.
A shoutout to the production quality of the Mustard YouTube videos, too. Well worth a subscribe.
I love this recent note from Adam Stoddard about generalist designers because it describes me so accurately:
A generalist designer, axiomatically, is someone who doesn’t specialize in any particular area of design. They’re not UX designers, UI designers, content strategists, illustrators, product designers, copywriters, graphic designers, front-end developers, or animators, even though their work may touch every single one of those roles. The proverbial “jack of all trades, master of none”.
I'm curious to know if generalists suffer more regularly than specialists do from imposter syndrome. It's something that I have experienced a lot (and still do, to be honest) because when working with specialists I constantly think I'm less knowledgeable or skilled than they are.
However, as Adam mentions in his full post, working as a generalist is satisfying because of the variety of jobs that you get to do. I think one of the biggest benefits is that being a generalist also makes you more valuable to a company. I can think of many occasions during my career where being a generalist has allowed me to keep my job when specialists were losing theirs. For example, during COVID-19, a lot of the specialist designers I was working with were put on furlough and were eventually let go because there wasn't enough billable design work coming in for them to do. Fortunately, there was always plenty of dev work to do and I was able to switch to doing front end and keep myself busy.
