Here’s a real interesting piece about gifts and software: Not every project on github is the same. Not everyone has the same motivations. Giving them money won't change their motivations. Trying to pay them or regulate them taints the gift. If you wanted to pay someone to fix some software, you didn't want a gift....

Today I fixed a few bugs and updated the colors and spacing; the little things, stuff no-one will notice. But dang, it feels so very good to tweak my website and watch 12 hours straight of The Lord of the Rings. It shakes off the cobwebs, awakes something dormant, reminds me that websites don’t require a review or...

I reckon 2021 was the best year for CSS since…2015? I haven’t felt this level of excitement and momentum in years. In the last twelve months container queries and the :has pseudo selector went from a pipe dream to almost-shipping in browsers. My hunch is that these two (along with subgrid) will reshape the way we...

Dan Brooks: This is how NFTs make me feel: like the future is useless but expensive, and world-altering technology is now in the hands of a culture so aesthetically and spiritually impoverished that it should maybe go back to telling stories around the cooking fire for a while, just to remember how to mean...

I wrote a lil thing about why we should care about writing, even as front-end developers and designers: How do you make a great website? Everyone has an answer at the ready: Flashy animations! The latest punk-rock CSS trick! Gradients! Illustrations! Colors to pack a punch! Vite! And, sure, all these things might...

Elaina Natario on the perceived femininity of CSS and the sexism that haunts our industry: There are surely plenty of people of marginalized gender experience in all programming spaces, but they don’t have as much opportunity to surface new ideas. CSS is only allowed some slight breathing room simply because other...

I know I’m somewhat biased, but oh boy oh man howdy do I love this collection of end of year thoughts over on CSS-Tricks. I especially love this note from Geoff when he argues to carefully read your website: If there’s only one thing you can do to make your website better, then you could do a heckuva lot worse than...

Vectro Type is a heckin’ neat website and type foundry from the folks that made Chartwell—a somewhat revolutionary font from back in the day that let you type in a series of numbers (c+67+33 for example) and it’s OpenType magic would then convert that string into a bar, line, or pie chart. I remember seeing...

I’ve only just started this excellent book called Web Browser Engineering but it’s already so dang good that I have to stop reading it in order to quote this section: The web is a grand, crazy experiment. It’s natural, nowadays, to watch videos, read news, and connect with friends on the web. That can make the web...

Everyone shut up, Saunders is talking: In my early thirties I saw myself as a Hemingwayesque realist. My material: the time I'd spent working in the oil fields in Asia. I wrote story after story out of that material, and everything I wrote was minimal and strict and efficient and lifeless and humor-free, even...

One thing I love about Retail by OhNo Type Co. is that the type specimen is sort of like an essay. As you scroll through and see each of the designs for the bold, the thin, and the display styles, you also get a story about the design of the type family. Also, I love the design of Retail and this lil snippet: The...

For some daft reason I keep forgetting that you can buy fonts from I Love Typography now. They have a growing catalogue of foundries with buck wild designs and it’s worth coming back to see what just released. Take Platia by Omega Type Foundry for example. Lots of swirling, beautiful numerals and short, compact...