Steph Notes#
I hope you picked up on our enthusiasm for the topic of color contrast in this episode.
It's something that is so easy to get right, but also so easy to get wrong.
By easy to get right, I mean it's technically easy to arrive at appropriately contrasting colors thanks to the tooling available to help you check. But I come from a background of 8+ years as a developer in a marketing/advertising. So I very much know the struggle of communicating back to designers (that may not typically do web stuff) that yes, you need to fix this, I understand you have a brand toolbox with precisely predefined color values.
Sometimes this means flipping the light/dark values. You can get a softer palette of text if you use a dark background. I actually went this direction on ModernCSS.dev specifically because I wanted to use a rainbow palette.
It may involve extra creativity and collaboration but it absolutely both can and should be resolved.
Here is a Twitter thread of contrast utilities that I compiled a few months ago - share widely, and let's make the web more contrast friendly in 2021!
Claire Notes#
As I mentioned in the episode, I struggle with contrast myself - so this topic is pretty personal to me. However, that doesn't mean I've been perfect with it either! We can always strive to be better. We have the tools to do these things - so we should use them!
That attitude extends to my resolutions I mentioned - being less judgy about new technology. I almost wrote a blog post about Hotwire because as someone who works in a Ruby on Rails environment, I get the feeling that Rails is this "all in one" technology that is just supposed to do everything. If you've listened to previous episodes of this show, you'll know that I cast doubt on things that are "do it all solutions" such as that proposal to roll HTML and CSS in JS and did the same thing for Hotwire.
I have my own specific criticisms of it, such as the fact that Stimulus JS is a part of Hotwire's solution, and although it is written in TypeScript, you can't write Stimulus controllers in TypeScript among other things. However, that doesn't mean the idea at its core - sending HTML snippets via WebSockets, is a bad idea. This is what I mean by letting ideas marinate in my mind just a little bit longer.
Thanks for listening, and have a happy and safe 2021!