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When I was playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, I kept thinking of the word” Tumors and all.” Despite the game’s remake-worthy graphics, audio, and delicate gameplay, it still has the same old 2006 RPG core. Awkwardly damaged character designs continue to wander through frequently repeated dungeons. You continue to do your best to [ …] […]
The second article on Den of Geek was Oblivion Remaster Rescues Classic RPG From Skyrim’s Shadow.
ConanO’Brien Must Go, a travel writer, returns to Max for a next time on May 8th. He will follow the artist as he explores different cultures, interacts with fans he originally met on his podcast, and connects with fans he originally met on his podcast. The Sex and the City subsidiary And Just Like That returns for a second year [ …]…
The first article on Den of Geek was HBO and Max New Releases: May 2025.
Sunrise on the Reaping has trailers in this article. The Hunger Games has never been quiet about the horrors of war since its inception. Suzanne Collins was stoked by the conflict in Iraq that was being covered by the ever-popular television show [ …] while watching her blockbuster series at night.
The article The Strength of Hunger Games Stories Is Their Refusal of Hollywood Happy Endings initially appeared on Den of Geek.
Episodes 4 through 6 of Andor year 2 are clues in this article. Star Wars films have historically struggled to get the potential of a diverse story world, especially when it comes to [ …] despite the fact that Star Wars takes place in a galaxy far, far away and is populated by a large number of different humanoid species.
The first post Andor Season 2 Represents a Win ( and a Loss ) for Queer Representation in Star Wars first appeared on Den of Geek.
There are a lot of spoilers in this article for Another Easy Pursuit. Another Easy Prefer surpasses its 2018 predecessor by a lot, like most sequels. The wooden A Simple Favor summer camp in northern Michigan has been replaced by Capri, an island in Italy. Luxury murderer Emily Nelson ( Blake Lively ) has lived there since [ …].
The first article on Den of Geek was Another Basic Favor’s Most Shocking Touch Underscoring Its Biggest Issues.
Watch Free+ is giving you a front-row seats to all the violent excitement, completely free! May is bringing the temperature with high-octane activity. You have a chance to experience the wildest ride in entertainment in May [ Watch Free+ offers thousands of free premium movies and shows that can be streamed on demand]…
The first article on Den of Geek was Link Tank: Vizio Announces Free Hollywood Strikes in May on Watch Free+.
This article naturally contains EVERY SPOILER FOR THE THUNDERBOLTS*! I’m not sure if it’s true, but I do think Alexi Andreovitch Shostakov, also known as David Harbour’s charming Red Guardian, is a New Coke person. This Super Santa has an affection for all things, like many other blokes of a certain time.
On Den of Geek, the first post Thunderbolts * Post-Credit Scenes Explained appeared.
Feedback, in whichever form it takes, and whatever it may be called, is one of the most powerful sweet skills that we have at our disposal to jointly get our models to a better position while growing our own skills and ideas.
Feedback is also one of the most underestimated equipment, and generally by assuming that we’re now great at it, we settle, forgetting that it’s a skill that can be trained, grown, and improved. Bad feedback can make confusion in projects, send down confidence, and change faith and team collaboration over the long term. Quality opinions can be a revolutionary force.
Practicing our knowledge is absolutely a good way to improve, but the learning gets yet faster when it’s paired with a good base that programs and focuses the process. What are some foundational aspects of giving good feedback? And how can feedback be adjusted for remote and distributed work environments?
On the web, we can identify a long tradition of asynchronous feedback: from the early days of open source, code was shared and discussed on mailing lists. Today, developers engage on pull requests, designers comment in their favorite design tools, project managers and scrum masters exchange ideas on tickets, and so on.
Design critique is often the name used for a type of feedback that’s provided to make our work better, collaboratively. So it shares a lot of the principles with feedback in general, but it also has some differences.
The foundation of every good critique is the feedback’s content, so that’s where we need to start. There are many models that you can use to shape your content. The one that I personally like best—because it’s clear and actionable—is this one from Lara Hogan.
While this equation is generally used to give feedback to people, it also fits really well in a design critique because it ultimately answers some of the core questions that we work on: What? Where? Why? How? Imagine that you’re giving some feedback about some design work that spans multiple screens, like an onboarding flow: there are some pages shown, a flow blueprint, and an outline of the decisions made. You spot something that could be improved. If you keep the three elements of the equation in mind, you’ll have a mental model that can help you be more precise and effective.
Here is a comment that could be given as a part of some feedback, and it might look reasonable at a first glance: it seems to superficially fulfill the elements in the equation. But does it?
Not sure about the buttons ‘ styles and hierarchy—it feels off. Can you change them?
Observation for design feedback doesn’t just mean pointing out which part of the interface your feedback refers to, but it also refers to offering a perspective that’s as specific as possible. Are you providing the user’s perspective? Your expert perspective? A business perspective? The project manager’s perspective? A first-time user’s perspective?
When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back.
Impact is about the why. Just pointing out a UI element might sometimes be enough if the issue may be obvious, but more often than not, you should add an explanation of what you’re pointing out.
When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an” ×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow.
The question approach is meant to provide open guidance by eliciting the critical thinking in the designer receiving the feedback. Notably, in Lara’s equation she provides a second approach: request, which instead provides guidance toward a specific solution. While that’s a viable option for feedback in general, for design critiques, in my experience, defaulting to the question approach usually reaches the best solutions because designers are generally more comfortable in being given an open space to explore.
The difference between the two can be exemplified with, for the question approach:
When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an” ×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Would it make sense to unify them?
Or, for the request approach:
When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an” ×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same pair of forward and back buttons.
At this point in some situations, it might be useful to integrate with an extra why: why you consider the given suggestion to be better.
When I see these two buttons, I expect one to go forward and one to go back. But this is the only screen where this happens, as before we just used a single button and an” ×” to close. This seems to be breaking the consistency in the flow. Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons so that users don’t get confused.
Choosing the question approach or the request approach can also at times be a matter of personal preference. A while ago, I was putting a lot of effort into improving my feedback: I did rounds of anonymous feedback, and I reviewed feedback with other people. After a few rounds of this work and a year later, I got a positive response: my feedback came across as effective and grounded. Until I changed teams. To my shock, my next round of feedback from one specific person wasn’t that great. The reason is that I had previously tried not to be prescriptive in my advice—because the people who I was previously working with preferred the open-ended question format over the request style of suggestions. But now in this other team, there was one person who instead preferred specific guidance. So I adapted my feedback for them to include requests.
One comment that I heard come up a few times is that this kind of feedback is quite long, and it doesn’t seem very efficient. No… but also yes. Let’s explore both sides.
No, this style of feedback is actually efficient because the length here is a byproduct of clarity, and spending time giving this kind of feedback can provide exactly enough information for a good fix. Also if we zoom out, it can reduce future back-and-forth conversations and misunderstandings, improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of collaboration beyond the single comment. Imagine that in the example above the feedback were instead just,” Let’s make sure that all screens have the same two forward and back buttons”. The designer receiving this feedback wouldn’t have much to go by, so they might just apply the change. In later iterations, the interface might change or they might introduce new features—and maybe that change might not make sense anymore. Without the why, the designer might imagine that the change is about consistency… but what if it wasn’t? So there could now be an underlying concern that changing the buttons would be perceived as a regression.
Yes, this style of feedback is not always efficient because the points in some comments don’t always need to be exhaustive, sometimes because certain changes may be obvious (” The font used doesn’t follow our guidelines” ) and sometimes because the team may have a lot of internal knowledge such that some of the whys may be implied.
So the equation above isn’t meant to suggest a strict template for feedback but a mnemonic to reflect and improve the practice. Even after years of active work on my critiques, I still from time to time go back to this formula and reflect on whether what I just wrote is effective.
Well-grounded content is the foundation of feedback, but that’s not really enough. The soft skills of the person who’s providing the critique can multiply the likelihood that the feedback will be well received and understood. Tone alone can make the difference between content that’s rejected or welcomed, and it’s been demonstrated that only positive feedback creates sustained change in people.
Since our goal is to be understood and to have a positive working environment, tone is essential to work on. Over the years, I’ve tried to summarize the required soft skills in a formula that mirrors the one for content: the receptivity equation.
Respectful feedback comes across as grounded, solid, and constructive. It’s the kind of feedback that, whether it’s positive or negative, is perceived as useful and fair.
Timing refers to when the feedback happens. To-the-point feedback doesn’t have much hope of being well received if it’s given at the wrong time. Questioning the entire high-level information architecture of a new feature when it’s about to ship might still be relevant if that questioning highlights a major blocker that nobody saw, but it’s way more likely that those concerns will have to wait for a later rework. So in general, attune your feedback to the stage of the project. Early iteration? Late iteration? Polishing work in progress? These all have different needs. The right timing will make it more likely that your feedback will be well received.
Attitude is the equivalent of intent, and in the context of person-to-person feedback, it can be referred to as radical candor. That means checking before we write to see whether what we have in mind will truly help the person and make the project better overall. This might be a hard reflection at times because maybe we don’t want to admit that we don’t really appreciate that person. Hopefully that’s not the case, but that can happen, and that’s okay. Acknowledging and owning that can help you make up for that: how would I write if I really cared about them? How can I avoid being passive aggressive? How can I be more constructive?
Form is relevant especially in a diverse and cross-cultural work environments because having great content, perfect timing, and the right attitude might not come across if the way that we write creates misunderstandings. There might be many reasons for this: sometimes certain words might trigger specific reactions, sometimes nonnative speakers might not understand all the nuances of some sentences, sometimes our brains might just be different and we might perceive the world differently—neurodiversity must be taken into consideration. Whatever the reason, it’s important to review not just what we write but how.
A few years back, I was asking for some feedback on how I give feedback. I received some good advice but also a comment that surprised me. They pointed out that when I wrote” Oh, ]… ]”, I made them feel stupid. That wasn’t my intent! I felt really bad, and I just realized that I provided feedback to them for months, and every time I might have made them feel stupid. I was horrified … but also thankful. I made a quick fix: I added “oh” in my list of replaced words (your choice between: macOS’s text replacement, aText, TextExpander, or others ) so that when I typed “oh”, it was instantly deleted.
Something to highlight because it’s quite frequent—especially in teams that have a strong group spirit—is that people tend to beat around the bush. It’s important to remember here that a positive attitude doesn’t mean going light on the feedback—it just means that even when you provide hard, difficult, or challenging feedback, you do so in a way that’s respectful and constructive. The nicest thing that you can do for someone is to help them grow.
We have a great advantage in giving feedback in written form: it can be reviewed by another person who isn’t directly involved, which can help to reduce or remove any bias that might be there. I found that the best, most insightful moments for me have happened when I’ve shared a comment and I’ve asked someone who I highly trusted,” How does this sound”?,” How can I do it better”, and even” How would you have written it” ?—and I’ve learned a lot by seeing the two versions side by side.
Asynchronous feedback also has a major inherent advantage: we can take more time to refine what we’ve written to make sure that it fulfills two main goals: the clarity of communication and the actionability of the suggestions.
Let’s imagine that someone shared a design iteration for a project. You are reviewing it and leaving a comment. There are many ways to do this, and of course context matters, but let’s try to think about some elements that may be useful to consider.
In terms of clarity, start by grounding the critique that you’re about to give by providing context. Specifically, this means describing where you’re coming from: do you have a deep knowledge of the project, or is this the first time that you’re seeing it? Are you coming from a high-level perspective, or are you figuring out the details? Are there regressions? Which user’s perspective are you taking when providing your feedback? Is the design iteration at a point where it would be okay to ship this, or are there major things that need to be addressed first?
Providing context is helpful even if you’re sharing feedback within a team that already has some information on the project. And context is absolutely essential when giving cross-team feedback. If I were to review a design that might be indirectly related to my work, and if I had no knowledge about how the project arrived at that point, I would say so, highlighting my take as external.
We often focus on the negatives, trying to outline all the things that could be done better. That’s of course important, but it’s just as important—if not more—to focus on the positives, especially if you saw progress from the previous iteration. This might seem superfluous, but it’s important to keep in mind that design is a discipline where there are hundreds of possible solutions for every problem. So pointing out that the design solution that was chosen is good and explaining why it’s good has two major benefits: it confirms that the approach taken was solid, and it helps to ground your negative feedback. In the longer term, sharing positive feedback can help prevent regressions on things that are going well because those things will have been highlighted as important. As a bonus, positive feedback can also help reduce impostor syndrome.
There’s one powerful approach that combines both context and a focus on the positives: frame how the design is better than the status quo ( compared to a previous iteration, competitors, or benchmarks ) and why, and then on that foundation, you can add what could be improved. This is powerful because there’s a big difference between a critique that’s for a design that’s already in good shape and a critique that’s for a design that isn’t quite there yet.
Another way that you can improve your feedback is to depersonalize the feedback: the comments should always be about the work, never about the person who made it. It’s” This button isn’t well aligned” versus” You haven’t aligned this button well”. This is very easy to change in your writing by reviewing it just before sending.
In terms of actionability, one of the best approaches to help the designer who’s reading through your feedback is to split it into bullet points or paragraphs, which are easier to review and analyze one by one. For longer pieces of feedback, you might also consider splitting it into sections or even across multiple comments. Of course, adding screenshots or signifying markers of the specific part of the interface you’re referring to can also be especially useful.
One approach that I’ve personally used effectively in some contexts is to enhance the bullet points with four markers using emojis. So a red square � � means that it’s something that I consider blocking, a yellow diamond � � is something that I can be convinced otherwise, but it seems to me that it should be changed, and a green circle � � is a detailed, positive confirmation. I also use a blue spiral � � for either something that I’m not sure about, an exploration, an open alternative, or just a note. But I’d use this approach only on teams where I’ve already established a good level of trust because if it happens that I have to deliver a lot of red squares, the impact could be quite demoralizing, and I’d reframe how I’d communicate that a bit.
Let’s see how this would work by reusing the example that we used earlier as the first bullet point in this list:
What about giving feedback directly in Figma or another design tool that allows in-place feedback? In general, I find these difficult to use because they hide discussions and they’re harder to track, but in the right context, they can be very effective. Just make sure that each of the comments is separate so that it’s easier to match each discussion to a single task, similar to the idea of splitting mentioned above.
One final note: say the obvious. Sometimes we might feel that something is obviously good or obviously wrong, and so we don’t say it. Or sometimes we might have a doubt that we don’t express because the question might sound stupid. Say it—that’s okay. You might have to reword it a little bit to make the reader feel more comfortable, but don’t hold it back. Good feedback is transparent, even when it may be obvious.
There’s another advantage of asynchronous feedback: written feedback automatically tracks decisions. Especially in large projects,” Why did we do this”? could be a question that pops up from time to time, and there’s nothing better than open, transparent discussions that can be reviewed at any time. For this reason, I recommend using software that saves these discussions, without hiding them once they are resolved.
Content, tone, and format. Each one of these subjects provides a useful model, but working to improve eight areas—observation, impact, question, timing, attitude, form, clarity, and actionability—is a lot of work to put in all at once. One effective approach is to take them one by one: first identify the area that you lack the most (either from your perspective or from feedback from others ) and start there. Then the second, then the third, and so on. At first you’ll have to put in extra time for every piece of feedback that you give, but after a while, it’ll become second nature, and your impact on the work will multiply.
Thanks to Brie Anne Demkiw and Mike Shelton for reviewing the first draft of this article.
Are you like me, reading about people fading away as they burn out, and feeling unable to relate? Do you feel like your feelings are invisible to the world because you’re experiencing burnout differently? When burnout starts to push down on us, our core comes through more. Beautiful, peaceful souls get quieter and fade into that distant and distracted burnout we’ve all read about. But some of us, those with fires always burning on the edges of our core, get hotter. In my heart I am fire. When I face burnout I double down, triple down, burning hotter and hotter to try to best the challenge. I don’t fade—I am engulfed in a zealous burnout.
Imagine a woman determined to do it all. She has two amazing children whom she, along with her husband who is also working remotely, is homeschooling during a pandemic. She has a demanding client load at work—all of whom she loves. She gets up early to get some movement in (or often catch up on work), does dinner prep as the kids are eating breakfast, and gets to work while positioning herself near “fourth grade” to listen in as she juggles clients, tasks, and budgets. Sound like a lot? Even with a supportive team both at home and at work, it is.
Sounds like this woman has too much on her plate and needs self-care. But no, she doesn’t have time for that. In fact, she starts to feel like she’s dropping balls. Not accomplishing enough. There’s not enough of her to be here and there; she is trying to divide her mind in two all the time, all day, every day. She starts to doubt herself. And as those feelings creep in more and more, her internal narrative becomes more and more critical.
Suddenly she KNOWS what she needs to do! She should DO MORE.
This is a hard and dangerous cycle. Know why? Because once she doesn’t finish that new goal, that narrative will get worse. Suddenly she’s failing. She isn’t doing enough. SHE is not enough. She might fail, she might fail her family…so she’ll find more she should do. She doesn’t sleep as much, move as much, all in the efforts to do more. Caught in this cycle of trying to prove herself to herself, never reaching any goal. Never feeling “enough.”
So, yeah, that’s what zealous burnout looks like for me. It doesn’t happen overnight in some grand gesture but instead slowly builds over weeks and months. My burning out process looks like speeding up, not a person losing focus. I speed up and up and up…and then I just stop.
It’s funny the things that shape us. Through the lens of childhood, I viewed the fears, struggles, and sacrifices of someone who had to make it all work without having enough. I was lucky that my mother was so resourceful and my father supportive; I never went without and even got an extra here or there.
Growing up, I did not feel shame when my mother paid with food stamps; in fact, I’d have likely taken on any debate on the topic, verbally eviscerating anyone who dared to criticize the disabled woman trying to make sure all our needs were met with so little. As a child, I watched the way the fear of not making those ends meet impacted people I love. As the non-disabled person in my home, I would take on many of the physical tasks because I was “the one who could” make our lives a little easier. I learned early to associate fears or uncertainty with putting more of myself into it—I am the one who can. I learned early that when something frightens me, I can double down and work harder to make it better. I can own the challenge. When people have seen this in me as an adult, I’ve been told I seem fearless, but make no mistake, I’m not. If I seem fearless, it’s because this behavior was forged from other people’s fears.
And here I am, more than 30 years later still feeling the urge to mindlessly push myself forward when faced with overwhelming tasks ahead of me, assuming that I am the one who can and therefore should. I find myself driven to prove that I can make things happen if I work longer hours, take on more responsibility, and do more.
I do not see people who struggle financially as failures, because I have seen how strong that tide can be—it pulls you along the way. I truly get that I have been privileged to be able to avoid many of the challenges that were present in my youth. That said, I am still “the one who can” who feels she should, so if I were faced with not having enough to make ends meet for my own family, I would see myself as having failed. Though I am supported and educated, most of this is due to good fortune. I will, however, allow myself the arrogance of saying I have been careful with my choices to have encouraged that luck. My identity stems from the idea that I am “the one who can” so therefore feel obligated to do the most. I can choose to stop, and with some quite literal cold water splashed in my face, I’ve made the choice to before. But that choosing to stop is not my go-to; I move forward, driven by a fear that is so a part of me that I barely notice it’s there until I’m feeling utterly worn away.
So why all the history? You see, burnout is a fickle thing. I have heard and read a lot about burnout over the years. Burnout is real. Especially now, with COVID, many of us are balancing more than we ever have before—all at once! It’s hard, and the procrastinating, the avoidance, the shutting down impacts so many amazing professionals. There are important articles that relate to what I imagine must be the majority of people out there, but not me. That’s not what my burnout looks like.
A lot of work environments see the extra hours, extra effort, and overall focused commitment as an asset (and sometimes that’s all it is). They see someone trying to rise to challenges, not someone stuck in their fear. Many well-meaning organizations have safeguards in place to protect their teams from burnout. But in cases like this, those alarms are not always tripped, and then when the inevitable stop comes, some members of the organization feel surprised and disappointed. And sometimes maybe even betrayed.
Parents—more so mothers, statistically speaking—are praised as being so on top of it all when they can work, be involved in the after-school activities, practice self-care in the form of diet and exercise, and still meet friends for coffee or wine. During COVID many of us have binged countless streaming episodes showing how it’s so hard for the female protagonist, but she is strong and funny and can do it. It’s a “very special episode” when she breaks down, cries in the bathroom, woefully admits she needs help, and just stops for a bit. Truth is, countless people are hiding their tears or are doom-scrolling to escape. We know that the media is a lie to amuse us, but often the perception that it’s what we should strive for has penetrated much of society.
I love men. And though I don’t love every man (heads up, I don’t love every woman or nonbinary person either), I think there is a beautiful spectrum of individuals who represent that particular binary gender.
That said, women are still more often at risk of burnout than their male counterparts, especially in these COVID stressed times. Mothers in the workplace feel the pressure to do all the “mom” things while giving 110%. Mothers not in the workplace feel they need to do more to “justify” their lack of traditional employment. Women who are not mothers often feel the need to do even more because they don’t have that extra pressure at home. It’s vicious and systemic and so a part of our culture that we’re often not even aware of the enormity of the pressures we put on ourselves and each other.
And there are prices beyond happiness too. Harvard Health Publishing released a study a decade ago that “uncovered strong links between women’s job stress and cardiovascular disease.” The CDC noted, “Heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States, killing 299,578 women in 2017—or about 1 in every 5 female deaths.”
This relationship between work stress and health, from what I have read, is more dangerous for women than it is for their non-female counterparts.
That might not be you either. After all, each of us is so different and how we respond to stressors is too. It’s part of what makes us human. Don’t stress what burnout looks like, just learn to recognize it in yourself. Here are a few questions I sometimes ask friends if I am concerned about them.
Are you happy? This simple question should be the first thing you ask yourself. Chances are, even if you’re burning out doing all the things you love, as you approach burnout you’ll just stop taking as much joy from it all.
Do you feel empowered to say no? I have observed in myself and others that when someone is burning out, they no longer feel they can say no to things. Even those who don’t “speed up” feel pressure to say yes to not disappoint the people around them.
What are three things you’ve done for yourself? Another observance is that we all tend to stop doing things for ourselves. Anything from skipping showers and eating poorly to avoiding talking to friends. These can be red flags.
Are you making excuses? Many of us try to disregard feelings of burnout. Over and over I have heard, “It’s just crunch time,” “As soon as I do this one thing, it will all be better,” and “Well I should be able to handle this, so I’ll figure it out.” And it might really be crunch time, a single goal, and/or a skill set you need to learn. That happens—life happens. BUT if this doesn’t stop, be honest with yourself. If you’ve worked more 50-hour weeks since January than not, maybe it’s not crunch time—maybe it’s a bad situation that you’re burning out from.
Do you have a plan to stop feeling this way? If something is truly temporary and you do need to just push through, then it has an exit route with a
defined end.
Take the time to listen to yourself as you would a friend. Be honest, allow yourself to be uncomfortable, and break the thought cycles that prevent you from healing.
What I just described is a different path to burnout, but it’s still burnout. There are well-established approaches to working through burnout:
Those are hard for me because they feel like more tasks. If I’m in the burnout cycle, doing any of the above for me feels like a waste. The narrative is that if I’m already failing, why would I take care of myself when I’m dropping all those other balls? People need me, right?
If you’re deep in the cycle, your inner voice might be pretty awful by now. If you need to, tell yourself you need to take care of the person your people depend on. If your roles are pushing you toward burnout, use them to help make healing easier by justifying the time spent working on you.
To help remind myself of the airline attendant message about putting the mask on yourself first, I have come up with a few things that I do when I start feeling myself going into a zealous burnout.
OK, I am a “food-focused” individual so cooking for someone is always my go-to. There are countless tales in my home of someone walking into the kitchen and turning right around and walking out when they noticed I was “chopping angrily.” But it’s more than that, and you should give it a try. Seriously. It’s the perfect go-to if you don’t feel worthy of taking time for yourself—do it for someone else. Most of us work in a digital world, so cooking can fill all of your senses and force you to be in the moment with all the ways you perceive the world. It can break you out of your head and help you gain a better perspective. In my house, I’ve been known to pick a place on the map and cook food that comes from wherever that is (thank you, Pinterest). I love cooking Indian food, as the smells are warm, the bread needs just enough kneading to keep my hands busy, and the process takes real attention for me because it’s not what I was brought up making. And in the end, we all win!
Be careful with this one!
I have been making an effort to practice more gratitude over the past few years, and I recognize the true benefits of that. That said, sometimes you just gotta let it all out—even the ugly. Hell, I’m a big fan of not sugarcoating our lives, and that sometimes means that to get past the big pile of poop, you’re gonna wanna complain about it a bit.
When that is what’s needed, turn to a trusted friend and allow yourself some pure verbal diarrhea, saying all the things that are bothering you. You need to trust this friend not to judge, to see your pain, and, most importantly, to tell you to remove your cranium from your own rectal cavity. Seriously, it’s about getting a reality check here! One of the things I admire the most about my husband (though often after the fact) is his ability to break things down to their simplest. “We’re spending our lives together, of course you’re going to disappoint me from time to time, so get over it” has been his way of speaking his dedication, love, and acceptance of me—and I could not be more grateful. It also, of course, has meant that I needed to remove my head from that rectal cavity. So, again, usually those moments are appreciated in hindsight.
There are many books out there that aren’t so much self-help as they are people just like you sharing their stories and how they’ve come to find greater balance. Maybe you’ll find something that speaks to you. Titles that have stood out to me include:
Or, another tactic I love to employ is to read or listen to a book that has NOTHING to do with my work-life balance. I’ve read the following books and found they helped balance me out because my mind was pondering their interesting topics instead of running in circles:
If you’re not into reading, pick up a topic on YouTube or choose a podcast to subscribe to. I’ve watched countless permaculture and gardening topics in addition to how to raise chickens and ducks. For the record, I do not have a particularly large food garden, nor do I own livestock of any kind…yet. I just find the topic interesting, and it has nothing to do with any aspect of my life that needs anything from me.
You are never going to be perfect—hell, it would be boring if you were. It’s OK to be broken and flawed. It’s human to be tired and sad and worried. It’s OK to not do it all. It’s scary to be imperfect, but you cannot be brave if nothing were scary.
This last one is the most important: allow yourself permission to NOT do it all. You never promised to be everything to everyone at all times. We are more powerful than the fears that drive us.
This is hard. It is hard for me. It’s what’s driven me to write this—that it’s OK to stop. It’s OK that your unhealthy habit that might even benefit those around you needs to end. You can still be successful in life.
I recently read that we are all writing our eulogy in how we live. Knowing that your professional accomplishments won’t be mentioned in that speech, what will yours say? What do you want it to say?
Look, I get that none of these ideas will “fix it,” and that’s not their purpose. None of us are in control of our surroundings, only how we respond to them. These suggestions are to help stop the spiral effect so that you are empowered to address the underlying issues and choose your response. They are things that work for me most of the time. Maybe they’ll work for you.
If this sounds familiar, it’s not just you. Don’t let your negative self-talk tell you that you “even burn out wrong.” It’s not wrong. Even if rooted in fear like my own drivers, I believe that this need to do more comes from a place of love, determination, motivation, and other wonderful attributes that make you the amazing person you are. We’re going to be OK, ya know. The lives that unfold before us might never look like that story in our head—that idea of “perfect” or “done” we’re looking for, but that’s OK. Really, when we stop and look around, usually the only eyes that judge us are in the mirror.
Do you remember that Winnie the Pooh sketch that had Pooh eat so much at Rabbit’s house that his buttocks couldn’t fit through the door? Well, I already associate a lot with Rabbit, so it came as no surprise when he abruptly declared that this was unacceptable. But do you recall what happened next? He put a shelf across poor Pooh’s ankles and decorations on his back, and made the best of the big butt in his kitchen.
At the end of the day we are resourceful and know that we are able to push ourselves if we need to—even when we are tired to our core or have a big butt of fluff ‘n’ stuff in our room. None of us has to be afraid, as we can manage any obstacle put in front of us. And maybe that means we will need to redefine success to allow space for being uncomfortably human, but that doesn’t really sound so bad either.
So, wherever you are right now, please breathe. Do what you need to do to get out of your head. Forgive and take care.
Although I’m not sure when I first heard this statement, it has over the centuries stuck in my mind. How do you generate solutions for scenarios you can’t think? Or create items that are functional on products that have not yet been created?
When I first started designing sites, my go-to technology was Photoshop. I set about making a layout that I would eventually fall content into a 960px cloth. The growth phase was about attaining pixel-perfect precision using set widths, fixed levels, and absolute setting.
All of this was altered by Ethan Marcotte’s 2010 content in A List Off entitled” Responsive Web Design.” I was sold on reactive style as soon as I heard about it, but I was even terrified. The pixel-perfect models full of special figures that I had formerly prided myself on producing were no longer good enough.
My first encounter with reactive style didn’t help my fear. My second project was to get an active fixed-width website and make it reactive. What I discovered the hard manner was that you can’t really put adaptability at the end of a job. To make smooth design, you need to prepare throughout the style phase.
Making information accessible to all devices a priority when designing responsive or smooth websites has always been the goal. It relies on the use of percentage-based design, which I immediately achieved with local CSS and power groups:
.column-span-6 { width: 49%; float: left; margin-right: 0.5%; margin-left: 0.5%;}.column-span-4 { width: 32%; float: left; margin-right: 0.5%; margin-left: 0.5%;}.column-span-3 { width: 24%; float: left; margin-right: 0.5%; margin-left: 0.5%;}Therefore with Sass but that I could use @includes to re-use repeated blocks of code and transition to more semantic premium:
.logo { @include colSpan(6);}.search { @include colSpan(3);}.social-share { @include colSpan(3);}The next ingredient for flexible design is press queries. Without them, content would shrink to fit the available space, regardless of whether it remained readable ( The exact opposite issue resulted from the development of a mobile-first approach ).
Media concerns prevented this by allowing us to add breakpoints where the design could adapt. Like most people, I started out with three breakpoints: one for desktop, one for tablets, and one for mobile. Over the years, I added more and more for phablets, wide screens, and so on.
For years, I happily worked this way and improved both my design and front-end skills in the process. The only problem I encountered was making changes to content, since with our Sass grid system in place, there was no way for the site owners to add content without amending the markup—something a small business owner might struggle with. This is because each row in the grid was defined using a div as a container. Adding content meant creating new row markup, which requires a level of HTML knowledge.
String premium was a mainstay of early flexible design, present in all the frequently used systems like Bootstrap and Skeleton.
1 of 7 2 of 7 3 of 7 4 of 7 5 of 7 6 of 7 7 of 7 Another difficulty arose as I moved from a design firm building websites for smaller- to medium-sized companies, to larger in-house teams where I worked across a collection of related sites. In those capacities, I began to work more with washable pieces.
Our rely on multimedia queries resulted in parts that were tied to frequent window sizes. If the goal of part libraries is modify, then this is a real problem because you can just use these components if the devices you’re designing for correspond to the viewport sizes used in the pattern library—in the process never really hitting that “devices that don’t already occur” goal.
Then there’s the problem of space. Media concerns allow components to adapt based on the viewport size, but what if I put a component into a sidebar, like in the figure below?
Container queries have long been touted as an improvement upon media queries, but at the time of writing are unsupported in most browsers. Workarounds for JavaScript exist, but they can lead to dependencies and compatibility issues. The basic theory underlying container queries is that elements should change based on the size of their parent container and not the viewport width, as seen in the following illustrations.
One of the biggest arguments in favor of container queries is that they help us create components or design patterns that are truly reusable because they can be picked up and placed anywhere in a layout. This is an important step in moving toward a form of component-based design that works at any size on any device.
In other words, responsive elements should be used to replace responsive layouts.
Container queries will help us move from designing pages that respond to the browser or device size to designing components that can be placed in a sidebar or in the main content, and respond accordingly.
My issue is that layout is still used to determine when a design needs to adapt. This approach will always be restrictive, as we will still need pre-defined breakpoints. For this reason, my main question with container queries is, How would we decide when to change the CSS used by a component?
A component library that is disconnected from context and real content is probably not the best place to make that choice.
As the diagrams below illustrate, we can use container queries to create designs for specific container widths, but what if I want to change the design based on the image size or ratio?
In this example, the dimensions of the container are not what should dictate the design, rather, the image is.
Without reliable cross-browser support for them, it’s difficult to say for certain whether container queries will be successful. Responsive component libraries would definitely evolve how we design and would improve the possibilities for reuse and design at scale. However, we might always need to modify these elements to fit our content.
Whilst the container query debate rumbles on, there have been numerous advances in CSS that change the way we think about design. The days of fixed-width elements measured in pixels and floated div elements used to cobble layouts together are long gone, consigned to history along with table layouts. Flexbox and CSS Grid have revolutionized layouts for the web. We can now create elements that wrap onto new rows when they run out of space, not when the device changes.
.wrapper { display: grid; grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, 450px); gap: 10px;}The repeat() function paired with auto-fit or auto-fill allows us to specify how much space each column should use while leaving it up to the browser to decide when to spill the columns onto a new line. Similar things can be achieved with Flexbox, as elements can wrap over multiple rows and “flex” to fill available space.
.wrapper { display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; justify-content: space-between;}.child { flex-basis: 32%; margin-bottom: 20px;}The biggest benefit of all of this is that you don’t need to wrap any containers in rows. Without rows, content isn’t tied to page markup in quite the same way, allowing for removals or additions of content without additional development.
This is a big step forward when it comes to creating designs that allow for evolving content, but the real game changer for flexible designs is CSS Subgrid.
Remember the days of crafting perfectly aligned interfaces, only for the customer to add an unbelievably long header almost as soon as they’re given CMS access, like the illustration below?
Subgrid allows elements to respond to adjustments in their own content and in the content of sibling elements, helping us create designs more resilient to change.
.wrapper { display: grid; grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(150px, 1fr)); grid-template-rows: auto 1fr auto; gap: 10px;}.sub-grid { display: grid; grid-row: span 3; grid-template-rows: subgrid; /* sets rows to parent grid */}CSS Grid allows us to separate layout and content, thereby enabling flexible designs. Meanwhile, Subgrid allows us to create designs that can adapt in order to suit morphing content. Subgrid is only supported by Firefox at the time of writing, but the above code can be implemented behind an @supports feature query.
I’d be remiss not to mention intrinsic layouts, a term used by Jen Simmons to describe a mix of contemporary and traditional CSS features to create layouts that respond to available space.
Responsive layouts have flexible columns using percentages. Intrinsic layouts, on the other hand, use the fr unit to create flexible columns that won’t ever shrink so much that they render the content illegible.
frunits is a statement that says I want you to distribute the extra space in this manner, but never that it should be smaller than the content inside.
—Jen Simmons,” Designing Intrinsic Layouts”
Intrinsic layouts can also make use of a mix of fixed and flexible units, letting the content choose how much space it occupies.
What makes intrinsic design stand out is that it not only creates designs that can withstand future devices but also helps scale design without losing flexibility. Without having the same breakpoints or the same amount of content as in the previous implementation, components and patterns can be lifted and reused.
We can now create designs that adapt to the space they have, the content within them, and the content around them. We can create responsive components using an intrinsic approach without relying on container queries.
This intrinsic approach should in my view be every bit as groundbreaking as responsive web design was ten years ago. It’s another instance of “everything changed,” in my opinion.
But it doesn’t seem to be moving quite as fast, I haven’t yet had that same career-changing moment I had with responsive design, despite the widely shared and brilliant talk that brought it to my attention.
One possible explanation for that is that I now work for a sizable company, which is quite different from the design agency position I held in 2010. In my agency days, every new project was a clean slate, a chance to try something new. Nowadays, projects use existing tools and frameworks and are often improvements to existing websites with an existing codebase.
Another possibility is that I’m now more prepared for change. In 2010 I was new to design in general, the shift was frightening and required a lot of learning. Additionally, an intrinsic approach isn’t exactly new; it’s about applying existing skills and CSS knowledge in a unique way.
Another reason for the slightly slower adoption of intrinsic design could be the lack of quick-fix framework solutions available to kick-start the change.
Ten years ago, responsive grid systems were everywhere. With a framework like Bootstrap or Skeleton, you had a responsive design template at your fingertips.
Because having a selection of units is a hindrance when creating layout templates, intrinsic design and frameworks do not work together quite as well. The beauty of intrinsic design is combining different units and experimenting with techniques to get the best for your content.
And then there are design tools. We probably all used Photoshop templates for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices to drop designs into and show how the site would appear throughout our careers at some point.
How do you do that now, with each component responding to content and layouts flexing as and when they need to? This kind of design must take place in the browser, which is something I’m very fond of.
The debate about “whether designers should code” is another that has rumbled on for years. When designing a digital product, we should, at the very least, design for a best- and worst-case scenario when it comes to content. It’s not ideal to do this in a graphics-based software package. In code, we can add longer sentences, more radio buttons, and extra tabs, and watch in real time as the design adapts. Still in use? Is the design too reliant on the current content?
Personally, I look forward to the day intrinsic design is the standard for design, when a design component can be truly flexible and adapt to both its space and content with no reliance on device or container dimensions.
Content is not constant. After all, to design for the unanticipated or unexpected, we must take into account changes in content, like in our earlier Subgrid card illustration, which allowed the cards to modify both their own content and that of their sibling components.
Thankfully, there’s more to CSS than layout, and plenty of properties and values can help us put content first. Subgrid and pseudo-elements like ::first-line and ::first-letter help to separate design from markup so we can create designs that allow for changes.
Instead of the dated markup tricks below,
First line of text with different styling...
—we can target content based on where it appears.
.element::first-line { font-size: 1.4em;}.element::first-letter { color: red;}Much bigger additions to CSS include logical properties, which change the way we construct designs using logical dimensions (start and end) instead of physical ones (left and right), something CSS Grid also does with functions like min(), max(), and clamp().
This flexibility allows for directional changes according to content, a common requirement when we need to present content in multiple languages. In the past, this was often achieved with Sass mixins but was often limited to switching from left-to-right to right-to-left orientation.
Directional variables must be set in the Sass version.
$direction: rtl;$opposite-direction: ltr;$start-direction: right;$end-direction: left;These variables can be used as values—
body { direction: $direction; text-align: $start-direction;}—or as real estate.
margin-#{$end-direction}: 10px;padding-#{$start-direction}: 10px;However, now we have native logical properties, removing the reliance on both Sass ( or a similar tool ) and pre-planning that necessitated using variables throughout a codebase. These properties also start to break apart the tight coupling between a design and strict physical dimensions, creating more flexibility for changes in language and in direction.
margin-block-end: 10px;padding-block-start: 10px;There are also native start and end values for properties like text-align, which means we can replace text-align: right with text-align: start.
Like the earlier examples, these properties help to build out designs that aren’t constrained to one language, the design will reflect the content’s needs.
We briefly covered the power of combining fixed widths with fluid widths with intrinsic layouts. The min() and max() functions are a similar concept, allowing you to specify a fixed value with a flexible alternative.
For min() this means setting a fluid minimum value and a maximum fixed value.
.element { width: min(50%, 300px);}The element in the figure above will be 50 % of its container as long as the element’s width doesn’t exceed 300px.
For max() we can set a flexible max value and a minimum fixed value.
.element { width: max(50%, 300px);}Now the element will be 50 % of its container as long as the element’s width is at least 300px. This means we can set limits but allow content to react to the available space.
The clamp() function builds on this by allowing us to set a preferred value with a third parameter. Now we can allow the element to shrink or grow if it needs to without getting to a point where it becomes unusable.
.element { width: clamp(300px, 50%, 600px);}This time, the element’s width will be 50 % of its container’s preferred value, with no exceptions for 300px and 600px.
With these techniques, we have a content-first approach to responsive design. We can separate content from markup, meaning the changes users make will not affect the design. By making plans for unanticipated changes in language or direction, we can begin to future-proof designs. And we can increase flexibility by setting desired dimensions alongside flexible alternatives, allowing for more or less content to be displayed correctly.
Thanks to what we’ve discussed so far, we can cover device flexibility by changing our approach, designing around content and space instead of catering to devices. But what about that last bit of Jeffrey Zeldman’s quote,”… situations you haven’t imagined”?
Rather than someone using a mobile phone and moving through a crowded street in glaring sunshine, it’s a very different design to be done for someone using a desktop computer. Situations and environments are hard to plan for or predict because they change as people react to their own unique challenges and tasks.
This is why making a decision is so crucial. One size never fits all, so we need to design for multiple scenarios to create equal experiences for all our users.
Thankfully, there is a lot we can do to provide choice.
” There are parts of the world where mobile data is prohibitively expensive, and where there is little or no broadband infrastructure”.
” I Used the Web for a Day on a 50 MB Budget“
Chris Ashton
One of the biggest assumptions we make is that people interacting with our designs have a good wifi connection and a wide screen monitor. However, in the real world, our users may be commuters using smaller mobile devices that may experience drops in connectivity while traveling on trains or other modes of transportation. There is nothing more frustrating than a web page that won’t load, but there are ways we can help users use less data or deal with sporadic connectivity.
The srcset attribute allows the browser to decide which image to serve. This means we can create smaller ‘cropped’ images to display on mobile devices in turn using less bandwidth and less data.
The preload attribute can also help us to think about how and when media is downloaded. It can be used to tell a browser about any critical assets that need to be downloaded with high priority, improving perceived performance and the user experience.
There’s also native lazy loading, which indicates assets that should only be downloaded when they are needed.
With srcset, preload, and lazy loading, we can start to tailor a user’s experience based on the situation they find themselves in. What none of this does, however, is allow the user themselves to decide what they want downloaded, as the decision is usually the browser’s to make.
So how can we put users in control?
Media concerns have always been about much more than device sizes. They allow content to adapt to different situations, with screen size being just one of them.
We’ve long been able to check for media types like print and speech and features such as hover, resolution, and color. These checks allow us to provide options that suit more than one scenario, it’s less about one-size-fits-all and more about serving adaptable content.
The Media Queries Level 5 spec is still being developed as of this writing. It introduces some really exciting queries that in the future will help us design for multiple other unexpected situations.
For instance, a light-level option lets you alter a user’s style when they are in the dark or in the sun. Paired with custom properties, these features allow us to quickly create designs or themes for specific environments.
@media (light-level: normal) { --background-color: #fff; --text-color: #0b0c0c; }@media (light-level: dim) { --background-color: #efd226; --text-color: #0b0c0c;}Another key feature of the Level 5 spec is personalization. Instead of creating designs that are the same for everyone, users can choose what works for them. This is achieved by using features like prefers-reduced-data, prefers-color-scheme, and prefers-reduced-motion, the latter two of which already enjoy broad browser support. These features tap into preferences set via the operating system or browser so people don’t have to spend time making each site they visit more usable.
Media concerns like this go beyond choices made by a browser to grant more control to the user.
In the end, we should always anticipate that things will change. Devices in particular change faster than we can keep up, with foldable screens already on the market.
We can design for content, but we can’t do it the same way we have for this constantly changing landscape. By putting content first and allowing that content to adapt to whatever space surrounds it, we can create more robust, flexible designs that increase the longevity of our products.
A lot of the CSS discussed here is about moving away from layouts and putting content at the heart of design. There are still many more things we can do to adopt a more intrinsic approach, from responsive to fluid and fixed. Even better, we can test these techniques during the design phase by designing in-browser and watching how our designs adapt in real-time.
When it comes to unexpected circumstances, we must make sure our goods are accessible whenever and wherever needed. We can move closer to achieving this by involving users in our design decisions, by creating choice via browsers, and by giving control to our users with user-preference-based media queries.
Good design for the unexpected should allow for change, provide choice, and give control to those we serve: our users themselves.