Drop #116 (2022-10-11): D³: Design, Discern, and Diagram

colorsandfonts; Logical Fallacies; Kroki

Before hitting today's links, I wanted to point your attention back to a resource we covered in August: OkSo. The OkSo folks have a new showcase section that has examples of what you can do with the drawing app. If you've been playing with OkSo and have some gaze-worthy creations, make sure to submit them, so they can be added to the showcase.

colorsandfonts

When folks with keen creative eyes publish resources to make it easier for us mere mortals to make content look good, we'd be fools not to take advantage of them.

Colorsandfonts is one such resource that provides a plethora of, well, colors and font-pairing resources for us to riff from. It's quite the collection:

• Color System – Unwrapped's color system: click any displayed color to grab the hex code for it or scrape the page and extract the data-clipboard-text attribute from each anchor element.

• Palettes – If you need the above colors to work together, then these curated color palettes will help your designs look more unified. Use the same tap or scrape idiom to grab the individual palettes’ member color values.

• Gradients – When plain fills aren't enough, you can tap or scrape color pairs from this section to help you build professional-looking gradients.

• If Tailwind is your bag, then you should check out Tailwind Colors and Tailwind Palettes.

• Font Pairings will help you stand out from sites that pay less attention to how fonts work together.

• Finally, Glyphs, is a handy resource of Unicode glyphs that you should bookmark if you're not wont to remember which key combos make useful characters like ₤, ℃, ⇥, ¼, and many more.

Logical Fallacies

A fallacy is a "misconception resulting from flaws in reasoning, or a trick or illusion in thoughts that often succeeds in obfuscating facts/truth."

These can be either formal — an error that can be seen within the argument's form. Every formal fallacy is a non sequitur (or, an argument where the conclusion does not follow from the premise.

They can also be informal — where each fallacy refers to an argument whose proposed conclusion is not supported by the premises. This creates an unpersuasive or unsatisfying conclusion.

We're awash in fallacies thanks to the degeneration of politics (which is happening globally), so it might be a good idea to hit up this collection of Logical Fallacies before engaging in any type of such discourse.

Hit up the common ones first, though the entire list is short enough to digest over your next lunch break.

Kroki

There are so many diagramming/charting/drawing apps and ecosystems out that it can be difficult to settle on one, or even know where to start if you're in need of such a tool. If you're one to favor text-to-diagram utilities (don't worry, this isn't some new unethical AI gizmo) over point-and-click setups, then you really don't have to pick just one ecosystem thanks to Kroki [GH].

Kroki provides both a free online tool, along with locally installable containers, that unifies the most popular text-serialized diagramming tools and formats out there, including:

• BlockDiag, SeqDiag, ActDiag, NwDiag PacketDiag, and RackDiag

• bpmn-js

• Bytefield

• C4 model

• Ditaa

• Erd

• Excalidraw

• GraphViz

• Mermaid

• Nomnoml

• Pikchr

• PlantUML

• Structurizr

• Svgbob

• UMlet

• Vega

• Vega-Lite

• WaveDrom

The "zoo" in the section header provides a small cheat sheet, that you can also download as PDF. Both the service and containers are accessible via an HTTP API. In a real platform (unlike Substack), the Vega-Lite image below can be embedded on any web page with this base-64 encoded src URL:

https://kroki.io/vegalite/svg/eNrtVktz2yAQvvtXMEyOqt9pnNz6To-d6c3jA5ZWEg0CF7Ba26P_3gVb2JJSN8mhTWdyMIb92CffCnY9QuiFiXMoGL0hNLd2ZW4GgxIy1s-4zdfLPleD_QYvfSW4hUE57X8zStLI6SdgYs1XlqMAbdwqzbdKWibEhsRKxsyCxF9C4pxpa4jNmSUmVz9IwtMUNEhL7GYFhqgURWgMLN9ymRETMwGmf3DDrItxh3NclUysweB67teE7KjP4A2NCF3ibDyroib0toYuL9vQuxqaTtrQ-xq6HrWhDzU060Afg6-OwU81NLpuQ7fB4FUb-hwMjiuPLHD0m2i-L3Koxe6gSQum75xuzHUsgNYWKchYJVjfUE0v3TSWKEg5iMTpL4Oql7uzcmKpCi6ZaIJGaReJXAvRkLOf3LQcOFM8vnPilAkDURNLVMG4_A1ouRVw8HOCVGFeHRWo4Vt4bHLf10yiE2Z5Ca0MHSnvSaWhiA7_GFashNJ_P65WJbegFeJWr-E04oZpARnI5L7j258C_XI-6d7p_8H0C0v_PUtFhw2aycxtmM-GERm9xmE8xWEyxmE6HC6eJam7afgLy-8oWIZX26OZnSpd-E8qTWh0lvTihfT_C-ltrgHfHaJzpCGf-QR5fjVcnOuK8XDfEM-tF56c3bFZSq45PsDo0y-CryGIhzQFjj4YikpKlMfkOrmGWlIuE1hhEPhqPLbNgUYNMLioelXvF-H7eDo=

It's super clever, well-executed, and is definitely something you should keep in your digital toolbox.

FIN

Make sure to drop a link to your fav Kroki creations in the comments. ☮