Published

October 3, 2021

Written by

Chris Gonzales

Photography

William Purser

Welcome to this week's edition of our Quality Linkage column. Please enjoy this week’s collection of interesting and entertaining links. Brew a fresh cup of coffee, find a comfortable place, and relax.

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??: User experience designer Elise Blanchard did a deep dive for the Mozilla blog on the history of blue hyperlinks and ponders why that color is still the default to this day:

It has been almost 30 years since Mosaic put the now ubiquitous blue in its release notes, but it is no longer the early 1990s. While it is quite fun to discover the secrets of how browsers are made, here in the present, we have accepted it as gospel truth that links can and should only be blue because these early pioneers said it should be so.

When the hyperlink was created, limited colors were available. Today we have almost every color option, so what should be the default color and state of links on the internet? When given every opportunity to deviate from tradition, do we do so for the sake of progress, or should we keep the blue because it’s an established visual pattern?

??: Daniel Geneen of Eater took a tour of the Lodge Cast Iron factory to get a look at how their famous skillets are made:


I love this bit:

“If you think about what we’re doing here,” says Lodge’s product commercialization manager, Larry Raydo, “we’re taking these raw materials that were nothing when they came into Lodge, and in a matter of a couple of hours, we’re making a brand new product that someone is going to take out of the box and cook a meal in for their family that night. That’s what drives a lot of us here.”

?: Give your brain a break from all the doomscrolling with Yuki Kawae's deeply calming zen garden videos:


Ahh, that's the stuff.

⌨️: Designer (and then some) Doug Wilson explores a bunch of fonts to make coding all day more aesthetically pleasing:

To me, there is a challenge of having a style of typography that is so specifically constrained: an M, W, :, and i have to have the same width and a user needs to easily differentiate between 1, I, |, and l along with 0 and O.

To do all of this and still create a typeface with style and a personal point of view is no easy task. But within those constraints, I’m happy to report that there is a great deal of creativity.

?: Once again, J. Kenji López-Alt has a simple but lifechanging cooking trick, this time for your charcoal grilling needs (especially when dealing with fish):

?: A year ago this month, Rosie Spinks wrote about what the pandemic has taught her about career ambition and how we all need to rethink what we spend our respective time on:

As our attention collectively went to our more elemental needs in lockdown, I wondered about the point of spending my days nestled behind a screen, furiously making myself look ever more successful and important to other people nestled behind their own screens. Where was I headed?

[…]

Facing a world that seems to get worse by the hour, an urgent climate emergency that is certain to dismantle our global supply chains in a way that makes Covid-19 look quaint, and a new understanding of how to live at a slower pace, we have to ask: Does following our personal and narrowly defined ambition, at the cost of all other skills and possibly our own health, make much sense anymore?

??: If you ever want to feel small, you don't have to watch videos comparing the sizes of celestial objects in the universe (although that certainly works); just watch a few of Little Big World's tilt-shift timelapses and you'll come away with a certain feeling that we all exist in a dollhouse-style world, living out our tiny toy-sized lives.

??: I love how Robin Rendle's essay on the state of newsletters and blogging is presented. Sort of like a slideshow that isn't annoying — replete with old-timey illustrations to keep things interesting — which has the benefit of keeping you from simply skimming over what it has to say. And I do like the message as well.

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Got any suggestions for articles, videos, stories, photographs, and any other links you think we should be posting in our weekly Quality Linkage? Please do let us know on Twitter.