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 positioning with CSS vari...
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 and the results were dev...
“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 authentic: It can be highly d...
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 darkest chapter in Germa...
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 possible. The risk to die, fo...
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 exercise is called “Blue...
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 models and prototypes of ever...
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 that makes your life eas...
Run the Jewels released “RT...
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 looked different on differ...
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 the service’s popularity, ...
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 don’t like change that m...
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 more are all watching him p...
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 are tracking tasks and me...
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 customers could evaluate a t...
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 became a bit frustrated and i...
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 still kind of a hobby for m...
This is going to be a very short article, because it turns out working with design tokens in Eleventy is a partition of urine (very easy).
Eleventy’s root /_data folder lets you define some global (you guessed it) data that can be accessed in templates anywhere in the site/p...
I recently converted this site from an old Wordpress to Eleventy. I then promised I’d share how I did it, because it really doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, with the small node script to follow, you should have everything set up in about 5 minutes.
Step 1: Get the old ...
I just released Ga11ery, a minimalist kit for sharing photos, illustrations, or your web comic. I figured a lot of folks are diving into their art right now, as a way to find purpose and peace during isolation. I wanted to make it as easy as possible to share the output.
Ga1...
