24 November 2024 Last week my friend, Rachael got married. I ordered her a gift using MoonPig and arranged delivery for Tuesday (the day she’d arrive back). But on Monday I received this email: Yes, MoonPig let me choose the date and then ignored it. Also the email was addressed to Rachael, not me.…

Generative AI features have a large climate impact and water consumption. We can weigh that impact against those features' benefits, but what if they are left unused? If lots of people don't in fact use the thing? That seems like lots of avoidable waste. Which matters, we're in a climate emergency…

Using the ':not()' pseudo-class to remove styles from ':last-child' Published on 01 Dec 2024 Tags css notes I was re-designing the footer for my blog when I added a list of social icon links. I needed to add some padding between them, as one does, and was preparing to apply padding to the left of…

Can it be done? This plucky front-end developer intends to find out. Can we do it? We looked at the Popover API and how it’s made it’s way across all browsers already just last week. One of the things I should have done is looked at the accessibility considerations more closely. Thanks to Melanie…

Have you ever wished there was a way to determine if your website’s UX/UI design is delivering the value it’s supposed to? Enter: The design audit. A website design audit is an in-depth analysis of your site. It considers everything from usability principles to visual storytelling. For UX designers,…

1 December 2024 On Friday, I met up with a friend for lunch. The day before, he’d been a research participant to taste-test 4 different brands of Jaffa cake. Let me tell you what happened (because this is exactly what you don’t want to do if you want good UX): Jaffa Cake #1: It tasted amazing. My…

Framing the problem is vital for designers. We need to be relentlessly talking about the core benefits that a product or service delivers, and why. I’ve found that framing the problem is something that teams really struggle with. This should be something we constantly refer back to as we look to…

Back then my approach to syndicating to Bluesky was to piggy-back off my micro.blog account (which is really just the RSS feed of my notes): Micro.blog can also cross-post to other services. One of those services is Bluesky. I gave permission to micro.blog to syndicate to Bluesky so now my notes…

Nov 24, 2024 · 1 minute to read Tags: 11ty performance Photo by Matthew Brodeur Ever since the Eleventy v3.0.0 came out and the new Eleventy Image plugin came out with the its new Transform capability, I had been wanting to give it a try. We'll I did that today and coverted my entire site into using…

CSS has an infinity constant. When I first learned about this, my brain lit up with all kinds of absurd possibilities. Let’s discuss! There might even be some practical use cases. No promises, though. Before we get into things, there’s one important ground rule: infinity can only be used inside a…

This post assumes some knowledge of view transitions. If you're looking for a from-scratch intro to the feature, see this article. When folks ask me for help with view transition animations that "don't quite look right", it's usually because the content changes aspect ratio. Here's how to handle it:…

I bet all of you have seen that little trick where an SVG path is animated to look like it’s drawing itself. It’s super cool. Jake Archibald pioneered the technique and has a super good interactive blog post on how it works. Brian Suda wrote about it on 24 Ways. Polygon used it to great effect on a…

When it comes to the core of CSS stuff, we do things very much the same each time at the studio. The output varies project-to-project, but the core principles stay the same regardless. Because of that, I recently created a boilerplate which I’ve made open to everyone. I thought it would be a good…

“Asterisk” (CC BY 2.0) by Steve Snodgrass When filling in a form—be it signing up for a newsletter or applying for a credit card—you must provide a minimum amount of information for the form to function. A newsletter sign-up form may only need your email address, whereas a credit card application…

Daily Tips My preferred style of authoring Web Components is to start with existing HTML and enhance it once the Web Component loads. For example, if I were building a show/hide component, I might start with a and some content that it controls. I’d also use the [hidden] attribute to hide the button…

A Design Tokens Workflow (part 2) Outputting to Different Formats with Style Dictionary 31st of October 2024 On This Page: In the first tutorial in this series I walked us through creating up a simple Style Dictionary setup that can transform your Design Tokens (in .json) to different formats (a…

What Else Can We Do With Design Tokens? 22nd of October 2024 Design Tokens are a solution in Design System that allow teams to define and use their design decisions across disciplines, codebases, and frameworks. Simply put they hold a name or ‘key’ for what the design decision is called and a…

A Design Tokens Workflow (part 1) Getting Started With Style Dictionary 24th of October 2024 On This Page: What are Design Tokens Design Tokens have become a widely-adopted method to store design decisions (such as colours, typography, spacing, border-radius, and other visual properties) across…

As we navigate through 2024, the world of graphic design is buzzing with new and exciting trends that are reshaping the industry. This year has brought a lively mix of fresh styles and classic element

Daily Tips That should be the goal when writing code. As little of it as possible. I don’t mean in the code-golf, how-short-can-I-make-this-line-of-code kind of way. I meant that we should prefer HTML over CSS, and CSS over JavaScript. We should prefer pre-rendered HTML over dynamic, and…

Bora 7 min read· Feb 13, 2024 -- Press enter or click to view image in full size Creating a successful design doesn't have to feel like wandering through a maze. There's a proven design process that keeps things smooth and helps you nail it every time. It's like a recipe with four steps to make your…

I will base this article on a list found at MDN as a reference but will add some extra upcoming things in the mix later on. The idea is that this is more than just an MDN copy and yes, there are a few units out there that I didn’t try out before writing this article. So take this little journey with…

Daily Tips Last week, Ryan Carniato, the guy who made SolidJS, wrote an article about how Web Components are not the future. The nicest thing I can say about it is that he’s just completely, utterly wrong. His article really boiled down to “Web Components are hard for me as a library author to…

Several times this year, I’ve answered variations of the following question: Is it strictly necessary for form fields and labels to have for/id association, or is it enough to wrap the around the The answer is — Wrapping is enough in theory, but isn’t quite in practice. What’s the difference? All…

21 September 2024 Removing link underline styles between icons and text Tags: css quick-tip I recently made a little update to my site with a blogroll that includes the linked site’s favicon. I think it’s good to have that icon be clickable, so I wrapped icon and label within a standard link. It…

Daily Tips I love ditching JavaScript for HTML and CSS whenever I can. It’s a core part of the Lean Web Club ethos. In particular, one of my favorite sets of HTML elements are and , which can be used to create a disclosure or expand-and-collapse component with absolutely no JS. But one of the…

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the debate around auto layout in Figma. On one side, you’ve got designers who say skipping auto layout makes their work faster—they don’t have to get bogged down in the details, and it speeds up their process. On the other hand, some argue that auto layout is…

Daily Tips When I start working with new consulting clients, one of the first things I like to do is an audit of their existing site. I’m primarily looking for performance issues, accessibility issues, and architecture issues. I put them all together into a nice report, and often helps guide a lot…

The Popover API has support across browsers now, and apparently the new way to say that is “landed in Baseline”, albeit as “newly available” rather than “widely available”, which may be an important distinction for you. A popover is very much like a in that you don’t have to worry about where it…

I’ve written previously about using --patch to interactively stage changes. But did you know that you can use --patch (aka -p) to similar effect with other Git commands? Let’s take a look… Selectively stashing changes git stash is great for temporarily stashing changes that you want to apply later,…

I work a lot with the Laravel framework, which scaffolds much of your initial setup and has conventions for where code should be stored. Starting a brand new Eleventy project from scratch doesn't give you this boilerplate and means you have to make decisions about where everything lives. When adding…

Daily Tips There’s a section of my yard where not much grows. We tried to get turf grass to grow for years. Wasted a ton of time, money, and resources on seeds, water, fertilizer and so on. But it’s too shady, the soil is too sandy and rocky, and the pines and oaks make it too acidic. So this…

The Secret Inside One Million Checkboxes Teens wrote me a secret. I found them. Aug 28, 2024 A few days into making One Million Checkboxes I thought I’d been hacked. What was that doing in my database? A few hours later I was tearing up, proud of some brilliant teens. But let’s back up. Note - I’m…

After organising Eleventy filters, shortcodes etc I had an idea to tidy the code even more and make it dynamic. I wanted to automatically import any new functions that were added, including new when using files. I wanted to find all the files in the specific folder – each set of filters, functions,…