On December 24, 1968, Christmas Eve, astronaut William Anders took what would become one of the most consequential photographs in human history. He was aboard Apollo 8, orbiting the Moon for the fourth time, when the spacecraft rotated and the Earth...
The new WebAIM Million report is out, the eighth annual accessibility analysis of the top one million home pages on the Web. And after eight years of data, the picture is as sobering as ever.
In 2019, 97.8% of home pages had detectable WCAG...
Dave Rupert just wrote a piece called People are not friction and I just had to write a short reaction blog post, because Dave names something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. His main argument: the AI marketing dream of a “frictionless”...
In November 1928, Georg Neumann and Erich Rickmann founded Georg Neumann & Co. in a Berlin workshop and by the end of that year, Neumann had debuted the CMV 3, the first mass-produced condenser microphone. The CMV designation stood for Condensator...
You might have seen the diagram before. The one Vincent Driessen put up on his website a few years ago to explain the concept of a Git branching model.
Source: Vincent Driessen’s original Git branching model diagram
A few days ago,...
A couple of weeks back, I’m sitting at my desk when a direct message from my frontend friend Kevin Powell pops up. Kevin’s a genuinely kind guy. He makes CSS videos on YouTube and he’s got this way of explaining things that never makes you feel stupid...
If there is one thing that I’ve learned in my roughly 30 years of working with design tools, it is that they come and go and that you should always stay curious and be open and ready to learn something new. As a teenager, I made my first clip-arty...
Humans love stories. Maybe that is because for thousands of years, stories were the way information was preserved and passed on to others, to the next generations. Maybe because they create community and collective culture. Maybe because they capture...
I have to confess that I am not reading that many books these days. Most of the time, I resort to listening to them in audio form. But every once in a while, a book comes along that is just too interesting not to at least give it a try.
Reading Kai...
In 1977, NASA launched two spaceships carrying two golden records into the void of interstellar space. The Voyager Golden Records contained instructions for playing its contents, finding Earth in the cosmos (oh my …), as well as images, a variety of...
My gut feeling tells me that not that many people have yet heard of or used the linear() easing function, one of the most exciting newer additions to CSS. Looking at the stats in the State of CSS survey, this is somewhat confirmed: only about 30...
Now that cross-document view transitions are gradually making their way into modern browsers, now seems like the perfect time to explore them, if you haven’t already. They are, in fact, surprisingly straightforward to implement. And just like we’ve...
Five years ago, I wrote about AVIF: A New Image Format (back then). Since then, I’ve implemented WebP and AVIF support on numerous client sites for considerable performance improvements – but my own site was still serving JPEG, PNG, and GIF images...
It’s the early nineties. Legendary comic book artist Frank Miller had just broken away from the major publishers, after creating titles like Daredevil: Born Again, Ronin, and The Dark Knight Returns. He was now working with the then-young Dark Horse...
Whether you are running online workshops, recording audio or video, or making music, it’s worth spending some time on acoustic treatment for your room. Shit in, shit out, as they say… In my case, I wanted to improve the sound of voice recordings and...
In the late 1960s, a young musician was recording the sounds he played on his synthesizer onto his Revox tape recorders, when he suddenly discovered: if you connect the two tape recorders together, so that the playback head is separated by several...
I still remember that moment. Do You?
For me, that was a moment I never thought I’d see. The leaders of the world, finding common ground – agreeing to limit global warming to 2°C, and aiming for 1.5°C. Everyone, finally, coming together....
One of the most amazing things about working on the Web is that you can have years of experience under your belt and there are still things you don’t know. Often, people associate this with a more quickly-moving language like JavaScript, but it...
My son, who is the violinist in our family, recently told me an interesting little fact about Augustin Hadelich, one of the greatest violinists alive: it’s hard for him to enjoy other people’s performances. Not because he’s critical or dismissive – to...
When it comes to web typography, I’m a sucker for fluid type. I love that it creates a harmonious rhythm for the typography of a project. I love how it speeds up the responsive design process in the browser. And that it feels like you are working with...
One Thursday in May, I was sitting in a slightly delayed train, heading home from Düsseldorf after three days of meeting good friends and making new ones at beyond tellerrand, my friend Marc Thiele’s wonderful conference. As usual, after visiting a...
In 1986 – when I was four years old – three researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) were working on an idea that would change the world of technology forever: they figured out an efficient way for smart computer systems they...
Have you ever wondered why new CSS features and other web technologies very often seem to just work across browsers these days? The reason is probably: Interop.
The Interop Project is a collaborative effort between major browser makers — Apple,...
Gregory Scott, founder of Kush Audio, shared an interesting insight about mixing music the other day: Sometimes, to bring something forward in the mix, instead of turning it up, it can be more effective to actually turn all the other things down....
For Blogtober, I dug up a draft about the two CSS pseudo-class functions :is() and :where() that I’d had lying around in my drafts folder for quite some time. Actually, when I originally started writing this post, :is() and :where() had just landed in...
We’ve all been there: You write a bit of CSS, check whether everything looks right. You deploy. Then someone sends you a screenshot: the mobile navigation is broken. And why is the size of those headings just a bit off? And where has that button...
Jane Goodall, the scientist, conservationist, and educator who died last Wednesday at 91, will always be remembered for her singular, field-defining work on wild chimpanzees. She lived with wild chimpanzees to study them, befriended them, and made a...
For a European with lots of friends and like-minded web folks in the US, it is both heartbreaking and bewildering to see how the political and societal climate in the country is changing right now. All of this is not only worrisome from a political...
When the people at EMI ordered a bunch of Altec 436B compressors in the late 1950s for Abbey Road Studios, they were hoping for that legendary American sound they had heard at their sister studio Capitol Records in Los Angeles. But when the units...
Age quod agis. This Latin phrase, attributed to Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order, translates to “do what you are doing.”
Do what you are doing. Like in: dedicate yourself wholeheartedly to whatever you engage in. Do what you are...
It’s Blogtober again. And this time, I’ve (more or less spontaneously) decided to take part in it. For those of you who don’t know what it is: Blogtober is a writing challenge that takes part every Oktober (similar to Bloguary, Blobuary, Blarch,...
I am convinced that it makes total sense to spend a certain amount of your (spare) time on this planet tinkering around and exploring stuff that seems totally useless or silly compared to what you normally do. And without having a real explanation for...
Now that the Webmention plugin is finally Craft 5 compatible after last week's update, I jumped at the chance and updated another plugin I had once written for my personal site.
The Internet Archive plugin automates the archiving of your posts to...
Imagine my surprise, when, roughly two weeks ago, I received a direct message on Mastodon from Brandon Kelly, the founder and head of the team behind Craft CMS, opening with:
👋 I spent today working on a Craft 5 port of your Webmention...
For the second time now, someone mentioned to me that it is kind of paradoxical that my newsletter, which is called “Own Your Web”, is not hosted on my own server or under my own domain but on Buttondown.
And yes, they are right. I realize that this...
I’ve been down in an audio plugin rabbit hole lately. More on that in a later blog post. But I just stumbled upon a set of free plugins that might be of interest to you, if you are doing voice recordings of any kind – be it a podcast, voice over, or,...
As Twitter is (far too) slowly falling apart and more and more people are looking for alternatives, Bluesky is enjoying a surge in popularity at the moment.
One neat little feature is that you can use your own domain as your handle on Bluesky. In a...
In what looks like a very smart move, the team at Mastodon just released a very nice new feature for media organizations, journalists and bloggers: when someone shares a link to an article by certain news outlets like The Verge, MacStories, or...
The Logitech Spotlight presentation remote is a sleek piece of hardware. It is comparatively small, fits nicely in the palm of your hand, and the buttons come with a very satisfying, albeit for my taste a tiny bit too loud, click. But most...
I just published the 11th issue of Own Your Web, my newsletter about designing, building, creating, and publishing on the Web. When I started the newsletter back in autumn of 2023, I didn’t yet know what form the newsletter would take on, if people...
Imagine you post and make new friends on an online network for more than a decade – and suddenly, your account gets suspended for no apparent reason. And there is nothing you can do about it.
Or imagine the online community you were an active part of...
Every day, we browse the Web and scroll our timelines. And every day, we find even more interesting websites, blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and other insights and ideas that we want to document, preserve, and share. The most obvious way to...
In the last issue of Own Your Web, we looked at blogrolls as one way to improve the visibility and discoverability of our sites. Whether or not you want to add a blogroll to your site is a matter of personal preference. But there is something else...
For my birthday, I got a new pair of speakers for my home office / home studio. After looking around for quite some time, I settled on the ADAM Audio T5V in the end. The T5Vs are affordable, entry-level studio monitors with a 5“ woofer that are...
I’m turning 42 today and yes, I am as surprised about that number as you are. If 42 really is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, then maybe it makes sense to look back on what the old lad actually learned in all those years. So, here is...
Whether you are running online workshops, hosting a live stream, or recording audio or video content, optimal audio quality is absolutely essential. People in your audience might tolerate if your video is noisy or not perfectly sharp. But if your...
The web platform is changing rapidly these days. With every major browser release, more and more powerful features get added, many of which are based on previous input about what web developers need to build better for the web. One way for
browser...
Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, recently sat down with Tim Ferriss to talk about a bunch of different things. One of those things: blogging.
It might not come as a surprise, but Matt described blogging as one of the most...
At the beginning of 2023, I wrote in a blog post which I titled The Year of the Personal Website:
In the search for a permanent home on the web, more and more people are now rediscovering the personal website as a place to share and document their...
It’s not going well.
After all-time heat records were shattered worldwide during heat waves across all continents and ongoing wildfires eradicated 5 % of the entire forest area of Canada, 2023 will be the hottest year ever recorded (1.43°C above the...
Where were you in 2013 and what were you doing back then? What have you done over those last ten years? How have the last ten years changed your life, your work, or what’s important to you? I don’t know about you, but I definitely don’t often pause to...
I just sent out the first issue of my new newsletter Own Your Web.
Own Your Web is a newsletter for anyone who wants to design, build, create, and publish on the Web. Every other week, I’ll send out an email full of actionable insights, best...
After three years, I finally replaced my old Intel MacBook Pro – and its cracked screen – with a new machine. I’m still holding back a bit with my excitement for this 16-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro, just because I was really disappointed with my previous...
In a recent project, the web fonts I bought and downloaded were only available as WOFF2 files. Staring in disbelief at the unpacked folder full of WOFF2 files, I wondered: Why did they not include WOFF files as well? Isn’t WOFF still needed? Or is it...
Don’t use your finger!”
Regardless of which country and school system you grew up in, chances are you have heard this sentence at least once from one of your teachers. I, for one, remember my elementary school teacher rebuking pupils who were...
Just like Google is constantly indexing the Web, OpenAI is now crawling the open Web to scrape content from websites for free to train their LLM (lucrative language model) “AI” products.
But, as I learned from a post by Ethan on Mastodon, you can...
Alright, let’s write more about CSS! CSS! CSS!
Change
I’ve been writing CSS since the early 2000s, shortly after we ditched building web layouts with tables and spacer GIFs in favor of hacking our designs together with floats. CSS has since become my...
This piece by Cory Doctorow about blogging, which I read a few days ago, is exceptional. Why?
I already knew that blogging – and having a personal website in general – is a superpower.
I had heard before of Vannevar Bush’s groundbreaking essay “As We...
Nobody knows you.
You are not entitled to anyone’s attention.
Be respectful, be helpful, be kind.
Your personal website isn’t a replacement for social media. It’s much more than that.
Who is your site for?
Document your life.
Your perspective...
Manuel asked:
Is there a good reason why we’re defining global custom properties on :root/html and not on body?”
It’s a great question: Everybody just seems to define most of their global custom properties (aka CSS variables) on the :root...
Today, I started a new project with Kirby CMS. (No, it’s not my personal site. That one’s still brewing…)
Kirby is a lightweight, no-fuzz content management system (CMS) created by Bastian Allgeier, which works well for projects of any size. It is...
A while ago, I wrote about what you could include in a README file for a project. Based on this post and a few practical examples of READMEs, I created and published a template that I will use in my own projects going forward.
It is available on...
Manuel shared how he approaches writing and publishing blog posts on his personal site. If you follow him, and especially if his RSS feed is on your list of feeds, you know that Manuel indeed does put out a lot of posts. Just recently, he completed...
Solid documentation of a project is important, especially if you’re working in a team. When all information about how to install, deploy, or contribute to a project is buried in only one person’s brain, you’re in trouble once you have to make changes...
Leonie Watson just shared an interesting audio snippet on Mastodon:
https://front-end.social/@tink/110007014963441869
What sounds like her speaking about accessibility is actually not Leonie, but an AI-generated synthetic voice, a cloned version of...
After about a year of living in our new home, after waiting for our neighbors to finish their driveway (life lesson: don’t expect gratitude from strangers), after our wholehearted horticulturist recovered from an acute illness, and after thaw had set...
Dave wrote about what he calls The Feature Work → Maintenance Work Loop: he often finds himself working in cycles of Feature Work and Maintenance Work, “balancing the growth and health of a product with a cycle of building and repairing”.
I’ve noticed...
Let’s call it what it is: Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) were a great idea full of potential but they never really caught on. One reason for that was that although you could add any website to the Home Screen in Apple’s iOS, it always felt like nothing...
As I noted yesterday, screen readers don’t convey the semantics of many HTML elements like strong or em.
When I shared my post on Mastodon, Stéphane Deschamps chimed in and pointed to an promising candidate recommendation fresh from the press that...
I always was under the impression that if I add emphasis to a piece of text in HTML by adding an em or a strong element, this emphasis would also be indicated to screen reader users in some way. For example, by a change of the tone of voice, much...
CSS Container Queries are now available in all major browsers. 🥳 With the release of Firefox 110 yesterday, the stable versions of Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Firefox all support them. There have been many major additions to CSS in recent years, but...
I want to start a little experiment: I want to see if I can reduce my TTFB, which is, of course, short for “time to fresh blogpost”.
Why? Because I think this is something where I can still improve a lot. Although I am aware that a few of you are...
Jeremy wrote a little something about streams, in particular about streams on personal websites. His home page actually is like a stream: links, notes, and blog posts all appear underneath each other in chronological order.
Many of us are now...
A lot of us are still working from home these days. Many are in meetings every day, more and more people are holding important customer presentations or running workshops from their little home office, and some are even joining podcasts and online...
When it comes to tracking and analyzing a website‘s traffic, Google Analytics (GA) seems to be the obvious choice: everyone knows it, it’s powerful, it’s free, it’s used by millions of sites. 53 % of sites worldwide, to be precise. No wonder many...
We all want to do our best work. We all want to create something of value. But what if you’re stuck? What if the solution just doesn’t show up, the idea just won’t come, the interesting just doesn’t want to happen? Writers sometimes call it writer’s...
I have a tip for everyone who’s now – or very soon – trying to find out whether a text was written by a human or an AI.
Sure, you could train another AI to look for clues and confidently call it a “classifier”. But chances are, your classifier won’t...
Today, I turned 41. It was a wonderful, relaxed day with my family – and my parents’ dog who is a bit of a maniac… 😅
I also got to try out my two “office” birthday presents: a new microphone for voice, the Røde Procaster, and an audio interface, the...
Alright. Enough talk. Let’s get to it.
One of my plans for 2023 is to redesign this website. Here is the thing: it is easy to promise things to yourself. It is much harder to deliver, especially when the project is quite large and you have to do it...
We all know that it is going to happen. It’s not a question of if, but when Twitter will collapse. By the way: one day, Medium will follow. So will Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Or Mastodon.
Many people are now desperately waiting for their Twitter...
For the last day of this year’s Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar, we’re back in Berlin. NaN is a foundry and type design practice “balancing weirdness and wisdom” that was founded by designer Luke Prowse. In late 2021, Luke was joined by...
Typotheque is a type design studio based in The Hague, Netherlands. Founded in 1999 by Peter Biľak, who also teaches typeface design at the renowned postgraduate course TypeMedia at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the foundry is well-known for...
205TF is a type foundry based in Lyon, France. It was founded in 2017 by Damien Gautier and Florence Roller who run the foundry together with foundry manager Rémi Forte. Collaborating with many independent type designers, they have built a library of...
For day 21, we’re back in Berlin, where a young graphic designer with a love for type decided in 2008 to make his passion his full-time job. Today, Hannes von Döhren’s type foundry called HvD Fonts sells a wide range of typefaces, some of them being...
Tobias Frere-Jones is one of the most accomplished type designers in the world. He worked at Font Bureau in Boston where he designed modern classics like Benton Sans or Interstate. He later returned to his hometown New York City and, at Hoefler &...
Fontwerk was founded in 2019 by Ivo Gabrowitsch in Berlin. Building on his excellent network and years of experience as marketing director at FontShop and Monotype, Ivo has assembled a permanent team of great designers and font engineers that also...
Vectro is a type design studio based in Portland founded in 2021 by Lizy Gershenzon and Travis Kochel. The two have been running the design studio Scribble Tone for several years but their most-noticed project (and company) is probably Future Fonts, a...
You probably have seen several of his typefaces on MyFonts before. Maybe you even purchased one or more of them. For almost 10 years, he was selling his fonts on Monotype platforms. This year, Berlin-born and -based designer René Bieder launched his...
R-Typography is a type foundry based in Lisbon Portugal, founded by Rui Abreu in 2008 and now run together with Catarina Vaz.
Rui drew his first type designs while still working as a designer in advertising agencies. One day, he decided to send a...
David Jonathan Ross (DJR) had been working with The Font Bureau for nearly a decade, when he decided to start his own type foundry in 2016, now located in the hills of Western Massachusetts.
David’s typefaces literally come in all shapes and sizes,...
Bonjour Paris! The type design community in Paris is buzzing and today, we’re looking at one of the younger foundries that has already received a lot of praise. Interval Type is the foundry of art director and type designer Ilya Naumoff. Before he...
Newglyph is a type design studio based in Lausanne, Switzerland, founded by Ian Party and his team in 2019. If that name rings a bell, it’s because just yesterday, we looked at another foundry Ian co-founded: Swiss Typefaces. Newglyph is his latest...
Many type foundries claim to be offering innovative designs and flexible type systems. But few deliver on this promise like Swiss Typefaces does. Founded in 2005 in Lausanne by Maxime Büchi and Ian Party (first as B&P type foundry), who were later...
Sharp Type is a digital type foundry based in New York City and was founded in 2015 by Chantra Malee and Lucas Sharp. Chantra is in charge of strategy, brand management, graphic design, sales, and communication for the foundry, while Lucas acts as...
Colophon Foundry is a foundry based on London founded by Anthony Sheret and Edd Harrington. The two designers started working together in 2009 in a shared graphic design studio in Brighton and began designing their own typefaces for the projects of...
Commercial Type is a custom type design studio founded in 2007 by Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz, based in New York City and London. They have worked to build a growing library of excellent quality with “a balance between highly versatile...
Hej! Time to look at the next type foundry and this time, we travel to Scandinavia. Letters from Sweden, founded by self taught type designer Göran Söderström in 2011, is based in Stockholm and designs retail and custom typefaces for local and...
Founded in 1993 by Cornel Windlin and Stephan Müller, Lineto is Switzerland’s first digital type foundry. Over the last three decades, Lineto has collaborated with type designers from all around the world and shaped one of the most impressive and...
Sometimes, it can take quite a while for a foundry to finally become sustainable. Sometimes, like in the case of James Edmondson, it can take 17 type families.
James Edmondson started Ohno in 2015, “born from a love of expressive typography and...
Milieu Grotesque was founded in 2010 by graphic and type designers Timo Gaessner and Alexander Colby in Zurich. Today, the foundry is based in Lisbon, Portugal. Milieu Grotesque’s typefaces are versatile and system-oriented but also have a distinctive...
TypeMates is a comparatively young foundry from Germany, founded in 2015 by Lisa Fischbach, Jakob Runge, and Nils Thomsen. Despite its young age, the foundry has already worked with large clients on custom typefaces and has managed to grow its...
For day three, we travel to New Zealand, where Klim Type Foundry was founded in 2005 by type designer Kris Sowersby. After having worked a while as a graphic designer, Kris was contacted by Chester Jenkins from Vllg who wanted to release Kris’ first...
Dinamo is another type foundry from Switzerland, founded by Fabian Harb and Johannes Breyer in Basel. After moving to Berlin for a few years, they now operate from different cities and via a network of satellite members across the globe. They don’t...
We’ll start the advent calendar with one of the most successful foundries of the last decade. Grilli Type is a Swiss type foundry that was founded in 2009 by Noël Leu and Thierry Blancpain. Today, the studio numbers eight people dispersed all across...
The independent type design community has grown tremendously over the last couple of years and the quality and variety of fonts is truly breathtaking. A little while ago, I started jotting down a few type foundries to have a list that I could come...
I just had a casual chat with ChatGPT that I wanted to share with you. Many of the things I asked and the answers I received are related to a talk I gave last week at CSS Café. I wanted to know what an algorithm might think about all of this.
Decide...
Websites, oh websites!
Thou art a vast and wondrous realm, filled with knowledge and information to be explored.
Thou art a tool for communication and connection, allowing us to share our thoughts and ideas with others across the globe.
Thou art a...
Since the first days of the Web, people have been thinking and debating hard about the best ways forward. The network, the protocols, the browsers, the documents, HTML, CSS, and Javascript – all those things are the result of years of countless...
Twitter is not well. Many of us were worried that Elon Musk might rapidly change the face of the platform. But only very few expected things to go down so rapidly. After the latest deadline to respond whether they want to stay, it looks like about 75...
The bird is not well. So it is time to request and download an archive of your Twitter data now, if you haven’t done this recently. After you have requested your archive, it can take a while until you receive it. I requested my archive on the day Elon...
When author Jim Collins first met his hero Peter Drucker, whom many regard as the greatest management thinker of all time, the two men where at very different points in their lives. Here, a man in his thirties, eager to start a new endeavor, a new...
It takes years to become good at it. So we read books, take classes, and visit workshops to become better. And still, it may take a lifetime to master it. But more than anything, it is one of the things that makes us human:
Writing.
But now, the...
The hellsite has a new king. And so, many are moving from Twitter to other social networks like micro.blog or Mastodon or are at least trying out those other options while waiting how things might develop.
Cross-posting – or not?
One of the first...
It could happen out of the blue, without any warning. It could happen without you knowing what you did wrong. It could happen today.
Twitter could just suspend you.
Gone. Your Tweets, your followers, your thoughts, your jokes, your conversations....
I bet you know this: You’ve created something – a drawing, a layout, a video, a piece of code, or a blog post – and after you’re more or less done, you pause and you look at it. And you don’t like it.
Maybe it is a little detail that is not right, or...
I love building prototypes. They allow me to explore and sketch ideas, test my assumptions, and try out things at an early stage to make better design decisions.
Prototyping is the single best tool we have in our toolbox as designers and developers....
I couldn’t agree more to what Dave wrote in his recent blog post about the increasing demands of the front-end web: the job of a front-end developer is getting ever more complex. From writing well-structured, semantic HTML to the latest (fantastic)...
Please use whatever tool gets the job done and makes sense for you.
But then again, I’ve seen so many frameworks and tools come and go that it can be dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket. You know what really is time well spent and a worthy...
There are many ways to adjust your CSS code to a browser’s support for a specific CSS feature. If you want to check if a certain property is supported, you can write a feature query using the @supports at-rule, for example:
@supports (display: grid)...
I’m right with Dave on this one! 💚
I’m tired of environmental responsibility always falling on the consumer. I know consumer demand bubbles up into societal change, I’m willing to do my part. But as a consumer it feels like I’m throwing...
You probably know this situation. You are working on a project and one of the npm packages you are working with contains a nasty bug or is lacking a critical feature. Of course, you first head over to the repository, e.g. on GitHub, and draft an...
You know what makes it so easy for many people to just dump their thoughts into a silo like Twitter instead of writing a post on their own site?
You don’t have to come up with a title for your post.
Providing a proper document outline is one of the most effective things you can do to improve the accessibility of your HTML. Like the headings of the chapters and subchapters in a book, the structure of the heading elements in our HTML should have a...
Yesterday, I shared how to test a whole website for accessibility issues with Pa11y and how to output the results as HTML. I also shared the link on Twitter, as I usually do, and Darek Kay chimed in, mentioning an alternative tool he created:...
This week, I’m doing an accessibility audit for a client. One of the first steps is to have a general look at the site. You can – and should – do that manually for sure, but another very useful way to get a good first impression of how good or bad...
The Cascade is legendary. Legendary because it is the C in CSS. Legendary in how well it works to determine which selector wins when browsers apply styles to HTML. And legendary in how little many of us really know about it.
Bramus van Damme recently...
What’s the single best thing you can do if you want to learn a new tool or evaluate a new technology? Right, it’s getting your hands dirty.
Only by building something tangible, like a realistic prototype or even a real project, you’ll get immediate...
Who should you write for? Your friends and family? Your colleagues and peers? The people you look up to? Everyone in the community? Everyone on the Internet?
The answer? None of those people. You should only write for one person and one person only:...
I love reading posts in which people talk about recent updates to their personal sites. It does three things:
It shows the person reading your post that you care about this little corner of the Web and that it is worth doing so.
It (most often)...
One of the most fascinating things about the Web is how it has evolved. By that, I don’t mean so much the mind-blowing speed of growth, but rather how the foundational languages, APIs, and browsers have been able to adapt to an ever-evolving,...
Even if you have been posting on your own site for quite some time, blogging regularly can still be challenging. Ask almost anyone who blogs and they will probably tell you the same: They would very much like to hit that publish button more often,...
Maybe you want to publish a project but don’t want everyone to see what mess you created before your initial release. Maybe you want to hand over a Git repository to a third party who should not peek into your complete git commit history. Whatever the...
Maybe you are afraid to start writing because you think that you can’t write.
I don’t believe that’s true. Everyone can write. You have written letters or email before, right? You are constantly writing coworkers, friends, and family text messages or...
One of the reasons you’re not blogging on your own personal website might be that you’re thinking: “Why would people listen to what I have to say? I’m not an industry expert, after all.”
I get that. You might not work for the Apples, Googles, or...
I’m sitting in the ICE 205, one of the German high-speed trains, traveling back home after two days in Düsseldorf at Beyond Tellerrand, Marc Thiele’s lovely conference about design, development, the Web, and creativity in general. It was the first...
I don’t remember the exact moment anymore. But I remember that it was with a mix of disbelief and disappointment that I realized one day that there was no way to select the parent of an element in CSS.
Wait, what? This can’t be. Why?
Obviously, I...
Hans Zimmer just won an Academy Award for his musical score for “Dune,” and if you have seen the movie or listened to the soundtrack, you know why. Zimmer’s soundtrack for Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel is an...
Why is it that although we are now in the millions building and creating for the Web, only very few share their knowledge and experience on their own websites? Or, in other words: Why doesn’t every one of us have a blog?
Zach Leatherman asked this...
Over the first couple of days of 2022, I read a lot of year-in-review posts, like Michelle’s, Dave’s, Hidde’s, and Jeremy’s, to name a few. What a pleasure to read about such a great variety of different perspectives and realities! Thank you,...
30 years ago, on August 6, 1991, a computer scientist working at CERN introduced a project to the public he had been working on for several months. The project, as he described, combined “the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make...
It was about the same time last year that I decided to change something. I hadn’t written and published as many posts on my site as I had wished to get done. And it was nagging me. If this site was meant to be a place of reflection and...
He played the piano like no other. Literally. When legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk sat down at the piano and started playing, he would hit the keys with his fingers held flat, almost attacking them to produce the ringing, percussive sound he...
I love to watch my children play.
How they invent things and stories. How they jump into roles and, just as quickly, change roles again. How they interact and react to each other’s ideas and the twists and turns of their play. Let’s cook something!...
You know that feeling when you are leaving a movie theater after having watched a superhero movie and it almost feels as if you had superpowers yourself?
I just had a similar experience, but this time with a feeling of calmness, focus, and...
It happened again. And I bet this has happened to you before, too. I’m talking of New Year’s resolutions. Every year we make them and tell ourselves that this time, yes, this time it is going to work, for sure. But then, suddenly, it is February, and...
Colin Devroe kicked off a series of “My Typical Day” posts. He tagged Dan Mall (and Chris Coyier, Jeremy Keith and others) and Dan tagged Sara Soueidan (and Dave Rupert, Rob Weychert, and others) and Sara tagged me (and Cassie Evans, Anton Sten, and...
Hip-hop has lost one of its finest artists to ever touch the mic and an MPC. Daniel Dumile, better known by his stage name MF DOOM, passed away on October 31, 2020, at the age of 49.
Dumile, who performed in a metal face mask, was a child of the...
So, that was 2020. First of all, I hope that you and your loved-ones are well, that you had something to do this year that brought you fulfillment and a sense of purpose, and that you haven’t been affected too heavily by COVID-19 and the lockdowns...
We all want to make the right decisions. Not only because we want to be successful, but often simply because we want to avoid the negative consequences of making the wrong decision. We are risk-averse beings. So we put a lot of emphasis on the...
Have you ever seen Gerhard Richter painting?
It is phenomenal to watch. He might start one of his large, abstract paintings by carefully applying oil paint to the canvas with a thick brush. Then, he begins to scrape, smear, or add new layers of paint...
One of the most important features of a website that is built with accessibility in mind is that it can be navigated with a keyboard. Most blind users and many users with motor disabilities rely on keyboard navigation, either with a standard keyboard...
Ethan Marcotte just gave a fabulous remote talk at SydCSS on the nature of design systems and the challenges of creating and maintaining them over time. Ethan managed to comprise so many of the things I’ve been hearing, noticing, and thinking about in...
Over 120 years ago, an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, and philosopher named Vilfredo Pareto made an astonishing discovery. He was looking at the distribution of land in Italy, when he observed that approximately 80 % of the land was owned...
Una Kravets has written an excellent article about a feature that has been released with Chrome 85: The @property syntax of the Properties and Values API. The Properties and Values API is part of CSS Houdini, the next generation of additions to CSS...
It doesn’t happen every day that a new image format comes along. So it’s not surprising that people are excited that Chrome 85 has been released with support for the new AVIF format. AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) is an open image format based on the...
Martha Curtis had a dream. She wanted to become a violinist. She had been playing the violin since she was nine and excelled at it. But there was a problem. A huge problem. Martha had begun suffering from seizures at age three and a half. She was...
Layout on the Web is all about flexibility. That elements adjust their dimensions to the size of their content, be it texts of varying length or images of different sizes, is a welcome feature, especially in times of Responsive Web Design because this...
The spacing between individual elements of a website and, in particular, the vertical spacing, has been a regular matter of debate between web designers and developers. Designers insist that what they see in the browser doesn’t look at all like the...
The dilemma with debt is that it is easily incurred but, inevitably, there comes a time when you will have to pay it back. The problem with design debt is that it is even easier to amass it. Design debt? Yes, like technical debt but for...
How do you feel about your work at the moment? Do you enjoy what you are doing? Do you feel excited about it? Does it give you a sense of accomplishment and significance? Do you feel valued and are part of a great team? Do you enjoy your role as a...
When it became increasingly clear that running in-person workshops would not be possible for the foreseeable future, the XDI team, which I am a part of, started to work on online versions of our Adobe XD workshops for beginners and advanced users. The...
When it comes to structuring CSS, there is no shortage of different naming conventions, methodologies, and architectures. Be it BEM, OOCSS, SMACSS, ITCSS, or CUBE CSS – over the last years, many different approaches to managing modular CSS have...
This is post number 50 of my 100-days-of-writing challenge. It’s halftime! Time for me to look at how this little (?!?) experiment worked out so far and what I might have learned or experienced since I started back in May.
First of all, the obvious:...
In 1963, the people at NASA needed a building. And not just any building. It had to be large enough to be able to assemble the enormous space vehicles NASA designed as part of their massive effort to send astronauts to the Moon. The building that was...
According to James P. Carse, there are at least two types of games: Finite games and infinite games. Finite games have a clear beginning and end, a distinct set of rules and boundaries, and we play them for one purpose: to win. Take any match of...
What is the right strategy to achieve greatness and succeed in a specific domain? If you believe the predominant narrative in many efficiency-oriented societies today, the answer is clear: Focus on one thing early in life to have a head start and...
One evening in the late 1970s, an engineer from Kyoto was riding home on the Shinkansen, when he recognized the man sitting next to him playing around with his LCD calculator, punching buttons in boredom. The engineer, who worked at a toy and gaming...
I used to dream of a magical machine. It was about as big as a microwave, all silver metal (with rivets, of course), and it had little knobs, lamps, and indicators everywhere. On the left, there were two buttons: One was green and the other one red....
Derek Sivers just published a new book. It is called “HELL YEAH OR NO” and you can get it on Derek’s website. Having enjoyed Derek’s blog articles and podcast a lot, buying his book, which also includes an audio version, was a no-brainer for me. Derek...
Ethan Marcotte wrote this on Twitter on Monday:
Nostalgia for the heyday of web design has to be balanced with the knowledge that much of what we did “in the old days” was woefully, thoroughly inaccessible. We should acknowledge what an...
It is clearly their fault.
The clients just don’t get design.
The designers only care about how it looks.
The developers have no sense for aesthetics.
CSS is broken.
The users are just too stupid.
It is clearly their fault. Is it,...
Jeremy Keith and the team at Clearleft have started a new podcast. In each episode, they are looking at a different theme related to design, development, and beyond. The first episode covered design systems and was already very worthwhile. But I...
Problems come in two flavors. There are the problems we know how to solve, or at least know that there is a solution to them. Like mathematical equations, for example, or beating another chess player in five moves. For those problems, the mission is...
Although you should not mess with scrolling unless it is really necessary, scrolling an element into view is something that is needed from time to time. In my case, I recently wanted to scroll to the top of a table after a user clicked on the...
Much like every other weekend, I spent several hours cleaning the apartment this Sunday. Although I enjoyed the result of it, I had always looked at cleaning as a tedious task. Yet, I have come to enjoy it over the last few years. This is because I...
I knew it would happen again. The fear. The tunnel vision. The blackout.
Only a few seconds left. I don’t want to be here.
“Next is Matthias, who will play the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 for us.”
Applause!
I can’t think straight....
The COVID-19 crisis has temporarily shifted our attention away from the most pressing and life-threatening of all challenges: Climate change. But while we – at least in Europe and other parts of the world with responsible leadership – are on a...
As we gain more and more experience in building digital products, we tend to think ever so often that we already know what a good solution looks like and how people will use our design. But that’s not true. Far too often, we are assuming that things...
Remember that thing you wanted to learn? You know what I mean. That thing that keeps on nagging in the back of your head. That thing that comes to mind now and then and reminds you that there are so many things that you could explore. You know it...
Ethan Marcotte just wrote a great piece about design systems and how the promise that design systems would hugely improve collaboration between designers and developers never really materialized. Many teams are still working in silos, which means...
The kids wanted pancakes. But there was only one egg left. Usually, I use four eggs to make pancakes. But the kids wanted pancakes. So I made pancakes. With only one egg.
They turned out delicious.
Sometimes, one egg is enough.
Sometimes, you should...
For me, 2020 started with a few posts about writing. I had read and listened to a lot of material on writing and wanted to share some of the things I had learned about how other writers approach writing as a craft, a process, and a passion. So I wrote...
As a child, teenager, and student, I used to play a lot of football (or soccer, for my American friends). I only played in a club for about two years and had to quit the team because of an injured knee, but I always loved playing with my friends...
Sarah Drasner just published a fabulous article, In Defense of a Fussy Website, in which she makes the case that we should all design and build websites again that are a joy to visit. Sites with those little details that make you smile, with small...
Milton Glaser, one of the greatest graphic designers of our time, passed away this Friday on his 91st birthday in New York City. Well known for his 1977 “I ❤️ NY” logo and his Bob Dylan poster with psychedelic hair, Glaser changed the visual culture...
If you have kids, you think a lot about how the world might look like when they grow up.
At the moment, the world is being transformed on so many levels and so rapidly that, as Seth Godin argues, we might be in the middle of a change that is as big as...
Do you know the feeling when you know an album so well that you always anticipate the next bar of a song and when the song ends, you can already hear the first beats of the next song playing in your head? The best albums are the ones, where it might...
Tim Ferriss just released the audiobook of his book “Tribe of Mentors”. The book contains the answers to 11 questions he sent out to hundreds of the world’s “top performers” from across all possible fields of expertise. In the introduction, which you...
Writing HTML is hard. At least writing semantically sound, valid HTML is. This might come as a surprise to those who only scratch the surface of what HTML really can do. What can be so hard about a few elements, right? At least it isn’t an...
It is one of the most emotional and finest moments in “The Last Dance”, Netflix’s documentary series about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls of the Nineties: The interviewer asks Michael Jordan if he thinks that the intensity at which he played the...
One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is how to know when something is ready. A website, an article, a song, a painting – whatever it is, how do you know that it is ripe for publication?
There are many answers to that question and maybe...
How many connections are there in a team of two? One, of course. In a team of three? Three, of course. A team of four? Six. A team of five? Ten, already. What about a team of ten people? A team of ten has 66 connections. Yes, sixty-six.
This basic...
There are books that you read once and never open again. There are even more books that you start to read and somehow never finish. I have a lot of them. And there are book with a lot of images in them, so there is not so much to read. I have a lot of...
Back in design school, I spent days – weeks even – trying to crack the secret code of a given topic. Typography? Once I know all the rules and all the typefaces, I’ll be a well-versed typographer. Logo design? Once I have looked at enough logos to...
There was this strange sound. Clack, clack, clack! Was it coming from the tires? Clack, clack, clack! Just a few minutes after we hit the Autobahn to drive back home all the way across Germany. Clack, clack, clack! Maybe I’ll better have a look. I...
My father likes to say: “Man gewöhnt sich an jeden Scheiß,“ which translates to something along the lines of “eventually, any shit grows on you.“ He often uses it jokingly and with a wink, yet there is much truth to it. As human beings, we are...
Today I learned! Jeremy Keith wrote about an interesting detail about CSS custom properties, also known as CSS variables, that he learned from Lea Verou: They don’t support the Cascade when a value is invalid. Or, as Lea writes in her article Hybrid...
It’s been over a year now that, after reading an article by Ethan Marcotte, I wrote about why we all need to do better to make the Web truly inclusive. Ethan had shared the results of WebAIM’s 2019 study covering the state of accessibility on the Web...
“Just be authentic!” I’m sure you’ve heard that advice before. Maybe you also know some people, who proudly proclaim that they always like to be authentic and always openly tell people what they are thinking.
There is only one problem with being...
My late grandmother was born in 1913. When she was my age, she had already lived through the Great Depression, the Spanish flu pandemic, hyperinflation, the fall of the Weimar Republic, two world wars, and, with the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, the...
Life is full of risks. The risk to make a wrong decision. The risk to lose. The risk to fail. The risk to mention too many risks in the first paragraph of a blog post.
There are some risks that most of us understandably want to reduce as much as...
Joschi Kuphal shared an amazing video on Twitter this morning. It is a documentary about an exercise that the school teacher, lecturer, and diversity trainer Jane Elliot devised in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The...
One of the reasons for Apple’s success in the years when they invented breakthrough products like the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, was the way they created their products. At the heart of the design process was the design studio where lots of...
I love shortcuts. Not only keyboard shortcuts but also those in real life: When there is the opportunity to solve a problem quicker and more easily by taking a different path. Such a shortcut might be a new technique that you discovered or a new tool...
Run the Jewels released “RTJ4” today, two days ahead of schedule because of recent events in the US. It is available on the streaming services, but also as a free download again. You can combine the download with a donation that will go to the...
Color on the Web has seen many iterations. When I started to fall in love with the Web in the late nineties, every self-respecting web designer was using web-safe colors. Although it can be argued that they never really worked, because colors still...
Let’s talk about web fonts. More specifically, about a mistake I have seen developers make in several projects for different agencies: Embedding a web font in the wrong way. In each of the cases, the service they were using was Fonts.com, and given...
Nature changes.
Culture changes.
Technologies change.
Societies change.
Markets change.
We change.
Change is everywhere around us. All the time. Inevitably. Change is a constant. The only problem with this is that human beings generally...
It is 1995. A 13-year old boy in Germany is playing basketball in his room. The walls are plastered with posters. Michael Jordan (life-sized), Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Shaq, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Sean Kemp, David Robinson, and many...
Ask any business owner or manager what could be improved about the operations of their company and they will very likely tell you that they are working on “improving efficiency”. They are switching from waterfall to agile to improve efficiency. They...
Type specimens are as old as printed typography. They were originally designed by printers and type foundries as documents that would show typefaces in use across different applications and with all available weights and styles, so that potential...
A few weeks ago, my son came up to me and asked if I wanted to guess which song he was about to clap. I agreed, sure that it couldn’t be so hard to guess. But as soon as he started, I didn’t have the slightest idea which song he was clapping. He...
So, I haven’t written in a while. Or, to be more precise: I haven’t finished a written piece in a while. That is not because I didn’t write at all, but in the current situation, I simply decided to prioritize family and work over writing, which is...
And then, the display of my MacBook Pro broke. So after five years, it was time to get a new machine, after all. Every time this had happened in the past, I took the opportunity to start from scratch and do a fresh install of all the software I in...
They say that writers come in two flavors: Diamond polishers and vomit drafters. Let me explain.
Have you ever been sitting at your desk, trying to write one single paragraph, but then found yourself meticulously fiddling with every single shred of a...
You might have heard of this quote from Marty Neumeier, author of The Brand Gap:
A brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.
What he means by that is that no matter how much you want your product or company to be perceived in a...
Yesterday, Chris Coyier asked a question on Twitter:
“Who’s gonna read your personal blog because it has an RSS feed? I’m gonna read your personal blog because it has an RSS feed.” Chris then attached a screen recording of him scrolling down his...
Now that a lot of people are publishing their year in review posts, I decided to write my first one, too, this time. And if only to be able to look back later on what I did and thought about in 2019.
Writing a full “decade in review” post seemed a bit...
I don’t know about you but many people seem to think that accomplished writers are able to sit down at their desks and immediately start writing in beautiful, fully formed sentences and paragraphs. In reality, though, nothing could be farther from the...
Since I started writing on this site about three years ago, I have been thinking a lot about writing as a craft. What are the qualities of good writing? Are there any recipes or best practices to become a better writer? What are the tricks and habits...
In a recent conversation with Tim Ferriss, Ben Horowitz, a co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, shared a line he likes to use in management:
Sharpen the contradictions.”
What he means by this line is that in an organization, you...
For those of us who work on and with the Web, the idea that the Web has its very own inherent qualities is not new. Whether you read John Allsopp’s seminal article “A Dao of Web Design” or watch Frank Chimero’s elaborate talk “The Web’s Grain”, the...
How often should you publish work on your site? Once a month? Once a week? Daily even? When you ask other creators or look on the Web for advice, you will get the most diverse answers to this question.
People who post daily will tell you that, of...
What would happen if we really accepted the fact that control is an illusion?
How would this change the way we approach projects?
Making plans would always imply the possibility of failure and the willingness to adapt to new insights and shifting...
With every project we start and every problem we are trying to solve, we are embarking on a journey. And although we might have a goal, this journey is still a journey into the unknown.
Even with the most proper planning we won’t be able to predict...
The best books are the ones that change your perspective, your view on the world, in such a profound way that you don’t look at it the same way ever again. To illustrate this fundamental switch, Jeremy Keith likes to give the example of ducks and dog...
Ernest Hemingway did it. Successful entrepreneurs like Richard Branson do it. And I’m quite sure, even most of the former US presidents did it: Taking notes. As I wrote earlier this week, note-taking is not only important because you get stuff out of...
Whenever you have an idea, write it down. Immediately.
It doesn’t matter how big or small you think the idea is. Just write it down. It doesn’t matter if you have other things to do, like changing diapers, fixing that horrible JengaScript bug, or...
Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. I enjoy the new perspectives they provide, especially interviews. Debbie Millman’s legendary design matters podcast, for example, is only one of many great shows where the host manages to stimulate a...
Social media in 2019 is a garbage fire.
What started out as the most promising development in the history of the Web – the participation of users in the creation of content and online dialogue at scale – has turned into a swamp of sensation, lies,...
Repetitio est mater studiorum.
Repetition is the mother of learning. You might have heard this old Latin proverb before, and it’s true: Repetition is key to memorizing something because with each iteration your brain builds up stronger...
Vulnerability is still highly stigmatized in our society, particularly in business. If you want to be successful in life you better be brave and don’t show any signs of weakness. And vulnerability is such a weakness. At least that’s what many of us...
It’s hard to decide what’s right and what’s wrong these days. There are so many people and so many organizations with so many different interests that it’s easy to get overwhelmed and to be fooled into believing the wrong things. And so it seems to be...
Although some designers dislike them, because, at a first glance, they seem to be too overwhelming and too densely packed with information: If you design them carefully, mega menus work really well for site navigation. They convey site structure,...
When I was in school our art teacher used to say:
Kopieren heißt kapieren.
Which translates to something along the lines of “copying something means understanding it.” What he meant is that if you want to understand how a piece of art was created,...
A few days ago, John Maeda, Head of Computational Design and Inclusion at Automattic, shared this tweet:
Good design is about clarity over style, and accountability over ego.— John Maeda (@johnmaeda) March 14, 2019
He is right. We are all responsible...
Yesterday, the Web turned 30.
Thirty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a document called “Information Management, A Proposal,” his formulation of an information network for sharing and exchanging information at CERN, marking the birth of the World...
People like to stick to their habits. Why? Because it is safer where they are now. Following a routine, a trusted pattern, reduces uncertainty about the future and thus alleviates fear. Everything is plannable and manageable. Tomorrow is safe.
The...
If you’re riding through the suburbs in a train, you might recognize that houses usually come in two flavors. For one, there are the townhouses: Tightly packed, not too large, repeatable, convenient. And then there are the individual single-family...
When you are developing a statement about something, this advice can be useful: If you can turn the statement into the opposite and it sounds like the most ridiculous thing on earth, chances are that your original statement isn’t that distinctive....
I spent the last days of 2018 listening to an amazing podcast: Stephen Fry’s Great Leap Years brilliantly tells the story of the evolution of information technology throughout human history – from Johannes Gutenberg inventing the printing press to...
We all know that we should backup our data regularly and ideally with some sort of backup strategy but let’s be honest: Many of us don’t. Over the years, I got a bit better, but after listening to one of the highly recommended episodes of the (mainly...
I have a confession to make. I’ve become utterly terrible at finishing books, especially non-fiction. I once even published a list of books I will definitely maybe read one day. The reasons why I don't finish them are manifold: For one, there is...
I recently listened to an interesting episode of the podcast “The Design of Business | The Business of Design”, in which Jessica Helfand and Michael Bierut talked with Mariana Amatullo, who teaches strategic design and management at Parsons School of...
This morning, I read a tweet by Dave Rupert that made me smile:
Hey, Internet. My son loves drawing. This is great. My house is filled with 1000s of pieces of paper tho. This is not so great. Has anyone converted a ~5yo to an iPad or Surface Go for...
Yesterday, I shared some advice by Seth Godin from an interview with Chase Jarvis. Today, I’ll do the same again, but not because I’m lazy (at least not this time) but because I think it’s a great follow up and just as actionable and useful advice.
It...
Last weekend, I listened to a highly interesting episode of the Chase Jarvis Live Show, a podcast featuring interviews with creators, innovators, and entrepreneurs. The episode’s guest was Seth Godin and as you might expect, he dropped a lot of...
I spent two weeks in August visiting my sister in New York. It was the first time for me in New York and one of the things that impressed me the most, was the perpetual movement of the city. This city really never sleeps. Everything seems to...
Recently, I read two posts within a few days that both resonated a lot with me. The topic of both pieces was the same: Writing. Or more specifically, writing on your own site. The first piece, “Just write.”, is by Sara Soueidan and if you haven’t read...
Prototyping has been captivating me for quite some time now. Since 2012, I teach Interface Prototyping at the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel, Germany and especially over the last few years, I could watch prototyping slowly...
Prototyping.news: For a monthly update on the latest articles, tools, and other resources about prototyping for the Web, sign up for my new newsletter prototyping.news.
The Illusion of Control
We have a problem. And I fear that many of us still...
Edit on 09-04-2022: This article is quite old and I have since realized that the conclusion I draw in the article was wrong. The upsides of using EMs as the unit in your media queries, especially in terms of accessibility, far outweigh the one...
In all of the posts I published on my site so far, I’ve never shared a single line of code. But since this is going to change with the next article on pattern libraries, I spent a little time over the weekend implementing syntax highlighting for my...
CSS Grid is here and I bet you also heard that it's a game changer that could once more completely change the way we approach web layout.
A New Kid on the Block
The new layout module is a great achievement for all people involved in the process...
Once more, net neutrality is under attack. This founding principle of the open web guarantees that all data packages are treated equally – regardless of content or the amount of money you pay your service provider. Net neutrality keeps the internet...
When we design and build things for the web, it’s tempting to fall into the trap of doing things the We-have-always-done-it-that-way™. And this doesn't necessarily have to be our fault alone. We are all part of project teams and work environments...
Despite the proclaimed death of RSS I know a lot of people who still love to read their feeds on a daily basis. So feeds are definitely here to stay and providing your readers with different ways of consuming your content is also an important part of...
This is the second article of a two-part series on digital citizenship. Part one was all about online privacy and how to protect it, this second part focuses on how we can build and promote tools that enable an open, independent, and resilient web.
“I...
This is the first article of a two-part series on digital citizenship. Part one is about online privacy and how to protect it, the second part focuses on how we can build and promote tools that enable an open, independent, and resilient web.
Invasion...
As we are moving from pages to patterns when creating and documenting websites and other digital design systems, pattern libraries are becoming increasingly popular. Ethan Marcotte, who famously coined the term responsive web design, recently...
Today, I added a basic weighted search to this site. You can find it here and in the footer below. Providing a search functionality is one of the pillars of an IndieWeb site, mainly because it offers improved access to the content you create and own...
Tantek Çelik wrote a post in 2015 called “js;dr = JavaScript required; Didn’t Read.”. It was about a fundamental problem regarding sites that depend on JavaScript for rendering content: Indexability. Although search engines got much much better at...
It’s that time of year when most people publish their „books I have read“ articles. Tim for example, and also Jeremy. I for myself am what you could call a book taster. There are a lot of books on my shelves that I started reading but somehow never...
In May 2016, I flipped the switch for the redesign of this site. My last site was never updated once it was online, so I wanted to do things differently this time. Inspired by numerous people who use their web presence to share and promote their...
Once again, beyond tellerrand, a great conference about design, development, and all things web, took place in the cold November air of Berlin. After walking over from Bahnhof Friedrichstraße to the Admiralspalast, an historical theater opened in...
Do you remember when you wrote your first line of HTML? Watching my students sweat blood while I introduce them to the basics of HTML and CSS always reminds me of my teenage self, learning the ropes of HTML back in the 1990s. Although I loved to...
Lately, I travelled to Düsseldorf and attended the IndieWebCamp and also beyond tellerrand, a conference about design, development, and all things web. I’ll say it plain: If you never have been at a conference, you should go. If you never have been at...
Far too long, we have thought of web projects like rocket launches: You plan, design, and build the thing, maybe you train people how to steer it, and most of all you sweat blood only to be prepared on that magical date: launch day. That one decisive...