Issue 32

Little Big City is generative art at its finest. 🌆🌐 Texter allows you to draw pictures with sentences. 📜

Jul 31, 2018

🕵️ CATCHING THE CAPITOL ST. BRAWLERS.

It is a world of infinite possibilities...
Would you like to draw a picture using a sentence?
You can and should.
Would you like to have fun with gradients?
Then this is truly the greatest of ages.
Would you like to see a Kardashian out-Googled by a programming language?
Then let's get goin'.

🕸️ The Cool Side of the Web

Little Big City is generative art at its finest. 🌆🌐

Seriously Cool
💓 this. Select a spot on a map and watch as it is rendered on its own little planet. You can manipulate the planet and make cosmetic changes to roads, buildings, land. Very cute.

github.io

Texter allows you to draw pictures with sentences. 📜

What the Why
I like it, but I am not sure why. The sentences actually make sense too.

tholman.com

Koalas to the max.

Mindless Entertainment
How do you make four circles into a koala?
You click 'em.

koalastothemax.com

Who'd have thought that vintage Russian circus ads would be so....awesome.

theoutline.com

🤖 Robots et. al.

Amazon’s facial recognition tech wrongly matched mugshots to 28 members of Congress. 🕵️

NottheOnion
It must have created a lot of anxiety on tha Hill because a few days later Congress started demanding explanations.

Meanwhile, in England, the Police are sneaking in facials like an older sister on a terrified little brother (It happens). The whole project was done on the sly with limited announcements and no arrests.

mic.com

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Rockstar is designed for creating computer programs that are also song lyrics. 👨‍🎤

I personally love that it is:

heavily influenced by the lyrical conventions of 1980s hard rock and power ballads.

The only thing that should be influenced by 80s power ballads is a law against 80s power ballads.

github.com

Gradient Joy is more than an emotional state beyond bliss. 🖌️

Year of the Gradient
If you need a placeholder image, and you are cool, then this is a great tool.
You just enter the image dimensions and you'll get an awesome gradient. There's also a gallery page with a ton of ready-made gradients for your projects.

gradientjoy.com

CSS Gradient Playground will give you a chance to play with gradients.

Year of the Gradient
An easy way to play with gradients and stay in touch with the cool kids.

css-playground.com

Reusable simple drawings for your projects.

Creative Commons
The Doodle Library is an ever-expanding resource with simple drawings and doodles in, everyone's favorite format, SVG.

thedoodlelibrary.com

Deploy a Cloudflare Worker to score users' new passwords with zxcvbn.

It will also check for matches against haveibeenpwned's +5.1 billion breached accounts.

github.com

🕷️ Design & Development Arena

A very impressive Flexbox tutorial. 💪

With Illustrations
The illustrations remind me of electronic schematics. If you like the tutorial, or if you need to be convinced, then here's a list of problems Flexbox can fix.

freecodecamp.org

Web typography resources for web designers and web developers.

Treasure Trove
A constantly growing list of web typography apps, tools, plugins, and more.

betterwebtype.com

Python is becoming the world’s most popular coding language.

Times are a Changin'
But remains one of the least popular animals. Most impressively, Americans have searched for Python on Google more often than for Kim Kardashian.

economist.com

Great demos of the weird things you can do with variable fonts.

Call Ripley's
Can they touch their descender with their ascender?

css-tricks.com

👩‍💻 Misc Tech

The DolphinView headset lets you ‘see’ like your favorite sea creature. 🐬

I See Fish People
I'm not sure what you know about dolphins, but they're extremely violent which makes me think the headset lets you see like the original, Terminator.

theverge.com

😱 Slightly Terrifying

The world economy runs on GPS. It needs a backup plan.

GPS is shockingly vulnerable, and there's a lot of "Thank God it's not my problem" going on.
Even the title of the article distances us from the problem. "It" needs a backup plan and if "it" doesn't find one, then we should register our dissatisfaction with the appropriate authorities.

bloomberg.com

🤔 Articles of interest

What happens when you take a week off from Slack?

Tighten the Slack
You unleash yourself from Social Strain Syndrome and get more Deep Work done. So, should you cut Slack loose? The article says no, and shares a few tips on how to improve your relationship with Slack.

wildbit.com