• Writing

    Follow the Grain

    Spend less time trying to fix things, and more time trying to understand them.

  • Writing

    Cutouts with CSS Masks

    Creating a button with a notch cut out using composited CSS masks.

  • Writing

    Bulletproof flag components

    A resilient take on a flag-like media object.

  • Writing

    Contained aspect-ratio boxes

    A modern attempt at creating a CSS-only aspect-ratio box that fills its wrapper.

  • Writing

    React Portals with Hooks

    Since Hooks have just been introduced into the latest stable build of React, it's a great time to play around with them and think about how previous component structures and paradigms (including classes and HOC's) can fit within them.

  • Writing

    Text Wrapping & Inline Pseudo Elements

    A really common pattern on the web is adding an icon or indicator using a pseudo element so it appears before or after an element, such as an external link indicator.

  • Writing

    ES6 Proxies

    I recently discovered ES6 proxies, essentially a means to intercept properties accessors and methods and either override or extend them.

  • Writing

    Entanglement

    Starting the design process nowadays is overwhelming. There are dozens of methodologies and hundreds of 'best-practices'.

  • Writing

    Perils of Atomic Design

    Modular design methodologies, such as Brad Frost's Atomic Design, offer consistency and maintainability. But do they also foster fragmentation?

  • Writing

    Extremes

    Print often encourages us to design around everyman data, while the web forces us to do the opposite.

  • Writing

    Masking Bitmaps with SVG

    Peter’s trick involves leveraging SVG’s support for masking to provide JPEGs with a means to transparency, and therefore the best of both worlds.

  • Writing

    Design Differently

    MengTo's article on how designers approach code made me wonder about how my coding affects the way I design.

  • Writing

    Tree Felling

    At Responsive Day Out Oliver Reichenstein introduced the Container Model, a new means of information architecture that recalls the origins of the web.

  • Writing

    Access

    Good design, UX and otherwise, has always been about improving the content's accessibility. The difference is that in designing a box to fit any object we have failed to design anything at all.