Eugene Fedorenko is Designing, Writing, Reading, and Traveling
Published at Wildbit
Recently, I set out on a mission to reconstruct a color system in Postmark. This project addressed several problems with our design system, involved a lot of research, and even required building a few custom tools. Now that this project is finished, I want to share the most important lessons I learned about color and present a new design and accessibility tool Accessible Palette born out of this work.
A few weeks ago, I worked on a website refresh and wanted to outline text in a few titles. This is not the effect I’d normally use, but in this case, the titles were on top of a patterned background, and a thick outline in the same color as a background helped with the readability. It took me a while to believe that there is no good way to do this with pure CSS.
On November 5th of 2019, I announced Figmalion, my regular newsletter about Figma, and a week later sent the first issue to 19 subscribers. I started it with zero expectations, but during this year it helped me connect with new people, created a small source of side income, and helped write a book. I want to look back at this year and share a few things that I learned.
Published at Wildbit
Earlier this year, our design team spent a few weeks analyzing and improving the performance of the Postmark product website. Our app is known for lightning-fast email delivery, and we wanted to provide a similar experience to the visitors of the website. Conveniently, what’s good for people is also good for robots — search engines increasingly use performance and user experience metrics as a ranking factor in search results. Once completed, this project made the Postmark site significantly faster and increased our Lighthouse Performance score from 68 to a perfect 100.
Published at Medium
While working with Figma, I discovered a powerful way to lay out objects using a combination of Layout Grid and Constraints. The interface of Figma does not indicate a connection between the two, so it can be discovered either by a happy accident or from reading a help article. Luckily, the latter is my kind of fun pastime.
In the early 2000s, an acquaintance mentioned that he’s been working in an IT department of a large organization for 10 years, starting right after college. My only reaction was a horrified “Fuck this!” The idea of a long career in the same place was something from a generation of my grandfather, who was building the USSR’s biggest warships for 35 years. I was skeptical of traditional employment and instead freelanced for American and European companies that outsourced design and development to Ukraine.
Soon after that conversation, I was introduced to Chris Nagele from Wildbit. We started working on a project, then on another one, and another one…
I've been getting annoyed with Dropbox lately. First, this summer they redesigned the app to act as a "productivity launchpad" instead of a simple synced folder. I have nothing against this direction by itself, but this is not what I signed up for. Second, I've been paying both for Dropbox to store my files and iCloud to store my photos, so it felt a little redundant and wasteful. And last but not least, I had some privacy concerns as it's yet another company having access to all my documents and files. The fewer companies and apps can reach them the better.
Published at Wildbit
A few weeks ago on our annual Wildbit retreat we had a group discussion on what works and what doesn’t in our internal process. A few developers mentioned the same problem — a lack of shoptalk with their peers when working remotely. They came up with different solutions, from participating in local meetups to weekly lunches with other developers, but it reminded me of a time when the same problem was very acute in our design team.
Published at Wildbit
A little over a year ago, we had 4 marketing websites built with 4 different frameworks or CMSs, and it was a mess. As the team had grown, publishing became a nightmare — nobody really knew how to access or update any specific page or a part of a website. We had some work to do. Within a few months we researched, picked, and migrated to a single CMS; moved marketing websites to a single hosting platform from multiple scattered services; and created a library of modules that is reused on all of them. This massive project isn’t completely over yet, but enough time passed both to confirm that we made a right choice and to see some of its issues.
Published at DeployBot
While working on a new Wildbit website last week I spent some time tweaking its performance. Caching CSS, JS, and images for a long period of time is one of the most important things you can do to create a fast loading website. It’s relatively easy to configure on most web servers, but comes with a downside — you’ll need to invalidate cached files whenever they change.