A History of Design Systems on the Web - The History of the Web

This page is under construction - localghost

I see the personal website as being an antidote to the corporate, centralised web. Yeah, sure, it’s probably hosted on someone else’s computer – but it’s a piece of the web that belongs to you. If your host goes down, you can just move it somewhere else, because it’s just HTML.

Sure, it’s not going to fix democracy, or topple the online pillars of capitalism; but it’s making a political statement nonetheless. It says “I want to carve my own space on the web, away from the corporations”. I think this is a radical act. It was when I originally said this in 2022, and I mean it even more today.

Justified Text: Better Than Expected? – Cloud Four

Some interesting experiments in web typography here.

Progressive enhancement brings everyone in - The History of the Web

This is a great history of the idea of progressive enhancement:

It is an idea that has been lasting and enduring for two decades, and will continue.

Introducing TODS – a typographic and OpenType default stylesheet | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

This is a very handy piece of work by Rich:

The idea is to set sensible typographic defaults for use on prose (a column of text), making particular use of the font features provided by OpenType. The main principle is that it can be used as starting point for all projects, so doesn’t include design-specific aspects such as font choice, type scale or layout (including how you might like to set the line-length).

Bill Oddie taught me how to make web sites - Hicks.design

I remember Jon telling me this lovely story when we first met in person. I love the idea that we had already met in a style sheet.

I also love the idea of hosting your own little internet archive—that Bill Oddie site still looks pretty great to me!

It’s a lot like an embarrassing family photo, but I’m owning it!