An ongoing stream of what the Autogram team is writing, reading, and discussing.
Down in the dumps over the turnaround time for your enterprise content initiatives? “According to internal Pentagon communications, it took U.S. Cyber Command 22 days to finalize and post the meme.” Metrics are hard for the government, too: according to the report, “the graphics may not be shaping adversary behavior.”
ProPublica breaks down the elements of their new article page template. Key features included a smorgasbord of header variations, editorial control over treatment and placement for embedded media, and automated generation of image variations based on focal points with optional per-breakpoint overrides. It’s a good look at their efforts to polish the key elements of their primary content type.
The old joke is that every successful organization has at least one secret, load-bearing spreadsheet. Custom spreadsheets are often the spackle and Krazy Glue of enterprise, plugging the gaps that “real software” isn’t nimble enough to fill. “If you want to see the future of B2B software, look at what Excel users are hacking together in spreadsheets today.”
Karen, 
Ethan and 
Jeff examine the quality of well-structuredness.
The goal of structured content isn’t more structure; it’s to put handles on bits of information that live inside of other content so software can do useful stuff with that information on demand.
What do we call the quality that makes it easier for software to do that? Parsability touches on how easily data can be teased out by algorithms, but isn’t quite right. Accessibility feels close, but collides with the broader concept of web accessibility. Availability might work, but it’s important to focus on goals and audience rather than technical criteria. “Who is the data accessible to, and for what purpose?” is a better question to ask than “How accessible is it?”
John Cutler’s This Beautiful Mess blog is a treasure chest of insights into process and collaboration. This post breaks down the seductive danger of an ‘everything process’ that makes multiple workstreams look aligned on paper, but doesn’t account for their distinct rhythms and needs.
When tackling complicated topics and ideas, it’s important to study not only the thing itself but the space around it. “Reading around the subject,” as Cottom puts it, is where we find the contextual insights that lead to a nuanced, layered argument.
It’s an old joke that naming things is one of the hard problems of computer science. Design systems are no different, and the names given to components can affect a team’s understanding and ability to collaborate effectively.
Alex Russell breaks down the current state of front-end performance for real world users, from technical advances to usage trends and the importance of Reliance Jio’s 4G rollout across India. The picture is improving, but developers continue to burden average user devices.
A design system for building faithful recreations of old UIs — as in, Windows 98 Visual Basic applications.
“This apparent lack of structure too often disguised an informal, unacknowledged and unaccountable leadership that was all the more pernicious because its very existence was denied.”