Brad Frost

http://bradfrost.com
Web Design, Workshops, Consulting, Music, and Art
Updated at: 2018-08-10T13:28:08Z


Designer + Developer Workflow

I’ve had the extreme privilege of collaborating on a bunch of projects with my friend Dan Mall (@danmall) over the last five and a half years. Dan is a designer. I’m a developer. And together, we’ve been refining our process to […]

2018-08-10T13:28:08Z


3 Years of Ian

Yesterday marked Ian‘s 3-year anniversary working with me. I’m 5 and a half years into running my own business, so that means that my brother has been with me on this journey more than I’ve been going it alone. It’s […]

2018-08-06T14:11:31Z


Yes, Alan, There Is An ROI For UX Design

The obvious place designers go when trying to calculate the bottom line is to ask the question, If I change the design, how much more income could we generate? But there’s another way design can help: reducing the costs. A much-overlooked portion of […]

2018-07-17T19:35:04Z


CSS: A New Kind Of JavaScript

Love how Heydon flips this all on its head.

2018-07-16T14:48:59Z


Working With Atomic Design and Pattern Lab Online Course

I’m excited to share an online course called Working With Atomic Design and Pattern Lab for Gymnasium. Here’s what the course covers: This course will teach students the atomic design methodology, setting up Pattern Lab, building & using UI components […]

2018-07-09T16:10:36Z


Disposable America

Here’s a fascinating read about the history of the drinking straw. It’s very much a story of American consumerism.

2018-07-09T04:09:52Z


Itty bitty sites

Itty bitty sites are contained entirely within their own link.

2018-07-09T03:33:05Z


The Last Conversation You’ll Ever Need to Have About Eating Right

I knew I was opening pandora’s box, but I asked for diet advice on Twitter. I knew people tend to get a bit religious about dieting and are colored by their own experiences. That said, it’s a very difficult terrain […]

2018-06-27T15:42:04Z


Distinct Design Systems

Here’s Dan with some smart words about the importance of baking the organization’s specific points of view, principles, and ingredients into their design system. In our work together, we’ve often used “better than Bootstrap” as a rallying cry. Dan explains: […]

2018-06-25T17:11:10Z


I Don’t Believe In Full Stack Engneering

Here’s a good rant about the concept of full-stack developers. I tend to agree. In my experience, “full-stack developers” always translates to “programmers who can do frontend code because they have to and it’s ‘easy’.” Although I think the concept of […]

2018-06-24T17:06:45Z


VS Code Can Do That?!

All the best things about Visual Studio Code that nobody ever bothered to tell you There’s some good stuff in here that I’ll be trying out. I switched to VSCode a while ago and it’s been quite enjoyable.

2018-06-24T16:38:13Z


Reflections on building an MVP design system in 3 months

This post lays out a lot of the first steps of creating a design system in short order. I enjoy how the author reflected on some of the initial tool and process churn as the team found their bearings. This […]

2018-06-24T16:36:16Z


Sketch.systems

Unfortunate name (confusion with Sketch seems inevitable), but this seems like a cool concept. I like the idea of a nimble “Markdown-like notation” that helps teams play out a lot of different scenarios and states without having to create a […]

2018-06-15T04:20:13Z


Tools In The Basement

After putting my daughter to bed last weekend, I crept downstairs to finally hang pegboard and organize the jumble of tools scattered around my basement. And wow, what a therapeutic, enjoyable experience that was! As I was performing this strangely […]

2018-07-16T16:36:40Z


Resilient, Declarative, Contextual

This is a fantastic article by Keith J. Grant that breaks down CSS’s unique qualities that makes it powerful, but also perhaps a bit confusing to people coming at it from a programmatic background. It’s a great reminder as to […]

2018-06-14T04:58:39Z


GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5 Billion Undo Button

Here’s the great Paul Ford with a great breakdown of what git and Github actually are. Much like his epic What Is Code? article, he’s able to translate the world of geeky programming stuff into something that’s palatable and entertaining […]

2018-06-14T04:28:18Z


Your Brain on Front-End Development

Here’s Chris with a wonderful walkthrough of how his frontend developer brain looks at a design comp. It’s extremely insightful When confronted with a design comp, My brain tends to gravitate towards some of the non-obvious implementation solutions. In other […]

2018-06-13T17:53:18Z


Inclusive Components – Cards

Here’s Heydon Pickering with a metric ton of great advice about creating accessible, flexible, robust card components.

2018-06-13T17:31:08Z


Style Guide Guide, Gatsby Edition

We’re happy to announce Style Guide Guide, Gatsby Edition! You can check out the demo here. The workshop and the storefront There are lots of moving parts, tools, and environments involved in making a design systems take shape. We’ve found […]

2018-06-13T15:52:03Z


Where to put one-off components?

A while back, Harry Roberts introduced the concept of shame.css: a stylesheet dedicated to housing your nasty, hacky, quick-fix CSS The idea is to isolate all the stuff that doesn’t belong in your beautiful, well-architected CSS architecture, in order to […]

2018-06-11T17:22:29Z


Vue.js or React ? Which you would chose and why?

This response to the question “Vue.js or React” is interesting and thoughtful.

2018-06-11T14:44:08Z


How To Ask For Advice Over Email

Holy shit I think I need to add this to my contact page. When I redesigned my site, I redesigned the contact page to make the user do a bit of work to get my contact info. It sounds counter-intuitive, […]

2018-06-08T02:24:09Z


Presentational and Container Components

Dan Abramov talks about a convention for structuring React components, which resonates with me very much. I talked about how I tend to be frustrated with a lot of the React demos, projects, and boilerplates I come across: In a […]

2018-06-08T02:08:09Z


I dunno

Hi, I’m a web designer. I make websites for a living. I try to keep up with how things are getting done in the industry in order to continue to make websites. That means I learn new things. I’m fortunate […]

2018-06-08T00:46:41Z


Encouraging Play in Design Systems

Here’s Tyler Sticka with a great article about how important it is for a UI design system to continue to evolve and improve over time. You can’t just get things built and then say, “That’s it! Things must stay this […]

2018-06-01T17:42:49Z


React.js Introduction For People Who Know Just Enough jQuery To Get By

Related to Sarah’s post about migrating from jQuery to Vue, there was a great post a while ago about migrating from jQuery to React.

2018-06-01T17:22:36Z


Replacing jQuery With Vue.js: No Build Step Necessary

I absolutely love this article by Sarah Drasner about replacing jQuery with Vue.js. We need more articles like this. “Here’s how to replace the once-new hotness with the new hotness.” I’ve been neck-deep in React-land for a while, and I’m trying […]

2018-06-01T16:22:29Z


Presentational and Container Components

In my post about struggling to learn React, I talk about how I’ve been frustrated by a lot of examples, tutorials, and projects where presentation code and business logic are all kludged together. I’d love to see projects that feature […]

2018-05-30T03:17:22Z


Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria

Absolutely fascinating read about the fate of Google’s project to archive the world’s books. It’s a story of ambition and legal jujitsu.

2018-05-29T12:01:59Z


The Slow Death of Internet Explorer and the Future of Progressive Enhancement

Regardless of how perfectly formed and well-written your code, sometimes things break through no fault of your own, even in modern browsers. If you’re not actively testing your site, bugs are more likely to reach your users, unbeknownst to you. […]

2018-05-29T11:55:49Z