Posts by Matthew Lettini
A Good Enough Designer
More about Matthew:
https://matthewlettini.com
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Lettini is Good Enough
We put a lot of ourselves into our work, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know much about us. So we’re starting a new Q&A column to introduce ourselves, one-at-a-time, starting with our resident designer…
Who the hell do you think you are?
👋 Hello, I’m Matthew Lettini, but my friends just call me Lettini. You can too, if you want. I’m from the longest island in New York, and have lived in Brooklyn for over a decade. My dog is reeeally trying to get me to move to a place with a yard, though. I’ve been designing things for the web for over 15 years. -
Adding Social Preview Images To Our 11ty Blog
TwitterX recently removed headlines and descriptions from link previews, in the name of “esthetics.” Inspired by Steph Ango, while we try not to run our business on the whims of a social media platform, this change did push us into making a change we’ve been meaning to for awhile: adding social preview images for our blog posts.For example, this is now what you’ll see when you share this post:
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· Matthew Lettini · TIL
TIL: Use touch-action: manipulation; to avoid double-tap-to-zoom
Recently we built and launched A Good Enough Guestbook, a place where you can send us doodles and they’ll print out on our little printer. It’s quite lovely and fun, and you should send us a doodle. We might also have more in store for these printers in the future.
In the meantime, it took a bit of finagling to get the doodle interface feeling just right. One issue we ran into was that users would sometimes tap “Undo” a whole bunch in rapid succession. This undo’d just fine, but on mobile devices it would also unexpectedly zoom the page in. While this is often a good accessibility behavior of double-tapping a webpage, it’s unwanted in this interface.
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· Matthew Lettini · TIL
TIL: System Colors are supported in CSS, but they’re unreliable
I’ve said this before: We’re primarily a web shop here at Good Enough, but occasionally we come up with ideas that we think would work really well as a native desktop or mobile application. Still, we prototype those ideas on the web first.
Recently, I wanted to try and make one of these web prototypes look and resemble a native Mac app as much as possible. My first inclination was just not to use any CSS at all, but that’s pretty limiting. Then I found CSS System Colors.
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That time Marvel secretly endorsed my podcast with “the greatest comic book cover of all time”
This is a blog post that has nothing to do with Good Enough, but I was told “There needs to be a record of this somewhere on the internet!” and I don’t have my own blog.
Years ago my friend and I ran a radio show called Gorilla Madness, which we also spun out into a podcast after we graduated. It was a half-decade of silly stupid fun that I miss dearly. No, you can’t listen to it, it’s very embarrassing and I like my job.
Anyway, one of our friend-fans was an editor at Marvel, and he was the only member of the street team (inside joke) that actually engaged in
gorillaguerilla marketing tactics: he snuck us into a comic book. -
· Matthew Lettini · TIL
TIL: Don’t forget your Web Manifest file
We’re primarily a web shop. We’re dipping our toes into mobile app development, but our collective expertise is in making products and services for the web. And like everyone else, our use of the web has shifted from our desktops and laptops to our phones.
As we’re creating and prototyping new ideas, we keep developing websites that we think might also be good apps. So a few of us are using “Add to Home Screen” on these products, which has mostly been great, but we ran into something annoying: we couldn’t figure out how to hide the Safari toolbars as we navigate this new website-as-app.
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My Tears of the Kingdom Addiction
I don’t know how big my internet social bubble really is, but it feels like everyone in
the worldthat bubble has been playing a lot of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom lately. Me included! It’s amazing, and I’m thoroughly engrossed—I think I’ve stayed up playing until 3:00am multiple nights in the past two weeks. That was easier when I was younger, but now my late-30s body and mind feels like mush the next day. My Switch says I’ve put in over 55 hours so far…Why am I staying up playing so late? Can I sue Nintendo for making this game too addicting? (Feel free to reach out with legitimate legal advice.)
For those outside the Zelda Zeitgeist, Tears of the Kingdom is yet another game where you control the hero (Link) and traverse the world and story to save the princess. It’s a franchise known for using pretty much the same story arc, but set in different places and with different mechanics. What makes TOTK a 10/10 game of the year award winner and making me addicted is two-fold:
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· Matthew Lettini · TIL
TIL: Use randomness to prevent email trimming
With conversation threading (which almost everyone has enabled), Gmail was trimming the bottom of the emails we send with our new app because they were too similar to the other emails in the conversation thread.
They’re similar because that’s just the link to get back into the app—you know, the important bit to keep our users engaged! Having that trimmed is bad.
The solution to this is silly: Gmail will not trim content if it’s always unique, so now we add a unique/random number to the bottom of every email we send. Insert eye roll.
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All About CSS: Alphabetize, Normalize, and Dark-mode-itize
Hello reader, I’m Matthew, the newest member of Good Enough (LLC). The rest of the team are avid writers and sharers… I’m not. But they keep chanting “One of us. One of us.” so I suppose you’ll see me around here sometimes.
For my inaugural post, I thought I’d quickly share what I did in my first few days to win their affection.