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 design attempts in CorelDRA...
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 our imagination and spea...
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 Brach’s excellent newslett...
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 natural sounds, musical s...
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 percent of respondents have u...
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 seen with modern images, v...
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 only. So it was time to fix...
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 Comics, when he decided t...
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 live audio in my little o...
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 feet from the record head, ...
I still remember that moment. Do You?
...
p code {
background: rgb(134 134 134 / 30%);
border-radius: 4px;
}
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...
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 the contrary – but beca...
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 the grain of the web, n...
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 conference, and beyond tel...
p:has(+ .quote) { margin-bottom: 0 }
.quote p { margin-bottom: 2rem; font-size: calc(var(--fluid-2)); line-height: 1.25 });
In 1986 – when I was four years old – three researchers at the University of California, ...
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, Bocoup, Google, Igalia, Micro...
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.
Let’s say you realise that ...
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 CSS, and — just like wi...
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 gone?
Especially when you are...
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 groundbreaking discovery:...
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 perspective, but also pose...
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 arrived in London and the en...
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 doing. Not the thing over ...
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, Blapril, Blay, Blune, Bluly, ...
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 why it happened, I’ve b...
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 the Wayback Machine. Each ti...
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 worki...
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 is kind of not walking th...
btconf 2025 speakers
IWC DUS 2025