24: A Stark Difference in Design
Hey! Welcome to this week’s Stark Difference in Design. Last week’s Edition No. 23 had a 50% open rate. The most popular link was the Thinking in Systems for the bookworms. Also, there’s an extra Tidbit this weekend. 💌
Tidbits
+ Using Dynamic Type is pressing
Overcast maker re-shares a tweet about Dynamic Type, emphasizing how important it is that we no longer ignore supporting it. 40% of Overcast users have a non-default system font size set.
Do you support Dynamic Type in your app? If so, are there any interesting metrics worth sharing? We’d love to know!
+ Why don’t uppercase and lowercase numbers exist?
An interesting historical sidenote: For more than 500 years after Arabic numerals displaced Roman figures (I, II, III etc), lowercase numbers were the only ones that existed. The uppercase style we are used to seeing was introduced late in the 18th century.
+ New York City to Ban Discrimination Based on Hair
New guidelines in New York are a win (predominately for people of color in hopes of remedying the disparate treatment they’ve continually experienced) as they give legal recourse to anyone harassed, fired or punished because of their hair’s style, texture, etc.
The guidelines are based on the argument that hair is inherent to one’s race (and can be closely associated with “racial, ethnic, or cultural identities”) and is therefore protected under the city’s human rights laws, which outlaw discrimination on the basis of race, gender, national origin, religion and other protected classes.
+ Paint the picture, not the frame
Moving focus is fine so long as a person deliberately initiates an action that requires it […] I don’t come to your house and force you to click on things, so don’t move my keyboard focus unless I specifically ask you to.
For bookworms
+ What the Dog Saw
Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.
A solid lesson on communication design :) and the best glimpse into what you can expect from the book…
What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard-but only one variety of ketchup? What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20th century?
Love this book because it’s a compilation of (some of) Gladwell’s articles from his time at the New Yorker. You’re reading a different set of stories in each chapter, all with a common theme to thread them all together—the ability to see the world from another’s eyes. Hence, the title.
What’s new from Stark
+ Update to Stark in Sketch
With Stark 2.3, you can run the contrast check on a set of layers where one layer has opacity (again)! Go update now <3
+ Using Stark with dual windows
This is unintended but also a non-bug behavior. In order to fix this, we need drag action in Sketch and that’s not available at the moment. But it turns out, it doesn’t matter where you have your Sketch window, the plugin window will always open on your primary monitor/window.
Liked this newsletter? Let us know. And we’re always talking shop on Twitter @getstarkco or in our community chat.
–Team Stark