My journal — Ethan Marcotte’s website

When I start talking with clients about creating a design system, this is often one of the first questions I get: What happens when someone deviates from what we’ve designed?

This little website’s currently powered by some software called Jekyll.

By most measures, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project had a pretty good day today.

Very infrequently, students ask me about my career — which means they’re asking about their career, as they start looking beyond course selection and final projects, and into getting a paying gig.

Note: In this post, I talk about the death of someone whose work meant a lot to me.

Hey, happy new year.

As of tomorrow, it’ll be two weeks since the FCC stripped net neutrality protections from the internet here in the United States.

It feels weird to sit here — writing, waiting — on the edge of something, to know with certainty that a bad thing’s about to happen.

I’m standing in a hotel room a few thousand miles from home, and grinning like an idiot.

I’ve been on vacation this week, having spent the last few days offline in the woods, immersed in good books, walkable trails, and the best New England foliage I could’ve hoped for.

With everything that’s been happening in the industry of late, more than a few lines by the late Ursula Franklin have been roiling about my head.

Today, you can preorder Alla Kholmatova’s Design Systems, a stellar book she’s written about, well, creating design systems.

If you’ve spent any time looking into Google’s “Accelerated Mobile Pages” (AMP) project, I’m sure you’ll agree: it’s wonderful to hear the AMP team talk about how using their framework (and hosting the output on servers owned or approved by Google) creates

Woke up sad this morning.

It’s a few hours before midnight, and I’m in a small town.

Read a rather excellent article this morning.

Over the last few months, Karen and I have been trying something new on our little podcast about responsive design.

Whether I’m designing a new site or auditing an existing one, nearly all my design projects from the last few years have culminated in a pattern library.

It’s easy, I think, to make the moral case for testing on old devices.

Went to the dentist’s today.

I’ve been excited for some time about the idea of designing offline-friendly experiences.

My computer’s out for repair this week.

At the turn of the year, my friend Frank unveiled a lovely responsive redesign of his already-lovely website.

the mother of all investments in mass transit; the mother of all funding initiatives for the arts; the mother of all avenues to affordable and quality housing; the mother of all lead-free water pipes; the mother of all educational institutions; the mother…

That Paul Robert Lloyd has written up a lovely, persuasively-argued response to my post on container queries.

Ran into a tiny little design bug yesterday.

Earlier, I got mad at the internet.

After some surgery yesterday morning, I’m facing down a week of couchbound recovery.

Over the last few years, a number of web designers, web developers, and agencies have been asking for “container queries,” saying they’d be a welcome addition to a responsive designer’s toolkit.

In January of 2017, I had the pleasure of working with the OpenNews team on a month-long design sprint.

Two consecutive weekends of protest.

Since the election, I’ve been doing some light consulting for a few area non-profits.

A note to the reader: In this post, I talk about losing a beloved family member.

If you spend any amount of time poring over pattern libraries, you’ll quickly see they fall into a fairly common [cough] pattern.

In the days and weeks since early November, Twitter has never felt more vital to me.

This little redesign, as with most redesigns, has been a series of compromises.

Oh.

In recent years, I’ve been lucky enough to do a lot of speaking.

Oh.

A few years back, I wrote a little article about something called “responsive web design.”

Jeremy said something yesterday that’s been rattling around in my head since he posted it: The web isn’t a “platform” like a native OS: it’s a continuum.

Hey so I’m a little excited about this: Karen McGrane and I are launching a responsive design workshop.

It seems to be the season for presentation tips.

A friend just sent this quote my way; it’s from Ben Schneiderman’s Leonardo’s Laptop, which I will be buying immediately: The second step toward the new computing is inclusiveness, what I call Universal Usability, enabling all citizens to succeed in using…

A confession: I love working in Keynote.

Saw a couple things on Twitter this morning that got me fairly excited.

Luke Wroblewski wrote a blog entry that’s been rattling around in my head for a couple days now.

I’ve always sucked at writing.

I’ve been working with The Boston Globe for the better part of this year on the design of a new site.

Oh.