David Heinemeier Hanson, CTO at 37 Signals, argues in his blog that is Figma is a cool tool to do some sketching, but when you design for the web you ultimately do this with HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Freefaces.gallery is a collection of free fonts. I really like Outward.

Interesting approach by Chris How of Clearleft to start in a spreadsheet when doing a redesign. He shares a method to first index the current content (text and images) and base design choices for the new design on this index.

A collection of handy ‘UX laws’ which you should keep in mind while designing.

Louise North gives a detailed explanation on Web Designer Depot about the new Bento UI trend. Components are neatly tucked in square compartments just like the Japanese meal boxes, where the name Bento originates from.

I always try to create something first, then learn something, and finally consume something. In this blog, I'll delve deeper into how and why I apply these principles.

SVGmix is a collection of free SVG icons and illustrations.

Redmine is a free open source project management tool which can be used to replace similar tools like JIRA.

The Martime Deftons Type Foundy is a reasonable priced (starting a 19 euros) alternative for Google Fonts if you’re looking for some unique fonts for your next project.

Do you really need to show a progress indicator above your form? Maybe not as GOV.UK found out when omitting it didn’t result in any chance concerning completion rate and time.

The Future of (web) fonts? Google just released Roboto Flex, a customizable web font. There are 12 different ways to tweak it, like thickness, stroke width and case heights. Try it out.

“Quirky and minimalist interfaces don’t make users feel awesome — obvious, inclusive, and robust interfaces do.” Adam Silver in Form Design Patterns

Nathan Baschez makes an observation about how (web) design is evolving from using photo’s to illustrations. High quality photo’s are (now) cheap where creating costly custom illustrations/animations signals the organisation is wealthy and fit to survive.

Want to remember what you learned while reading? The moment you close a book most of the learned knowledge is gone. Not if you use Readwise. It will send you a daily digest with of all the highlights you’ve made.  Easily worth the $4.49 a month.

Figma is not your Design System, according to Robin Rendle. The front-end is your source of truth. And I have to  agree. Nothing works better than just building components in HTML/CSS giving the best insight in how components will eventually work in the wild.

What needs to be in your Design System? Brad Frost argues that a Design System is meant for User Interfaces. If we’re talking about branding, tone of voice, content, performance, persona’s etc. it only gets a place in a Design System as it pertains to User Interfaces.

Is Google dying? According to dkb.io it is. Because of Ads (increasingly more) and SEO (quality of SERP deteriorates). People are adding reddit to their search to get more ‘human’ results. I caught myself doing this as well lately.

SVG illustrations have the future. They are the lightweight (less KB) alternative to images and videos meaning they will load quicker and waste less bandwidth making them more sustainable. You can also do very cool things with them as portrayed by Smashing Magazine.

An interessting technique which uses system fonts instead of external webfonts.

The advantages:

• Fonts are directly loaded so quicker and more sustainable
• Uniform user experience as the font is similar to font used by the device
• System fonts have a broad range of style and unicode compared to webfonts

Very cool CSS-only technique using blend modes to creating a hologram effect on images.

As a teenager I used to read a lot. Then smartphones came into existence and my annual number of books read plummeted to a couple while on holiday. I was always looking forward to my holidays because that meant I could read, which is kind of absurd. So I decided to start to read more often as of 2019. Here are some things about reading I picked up in the last few years.

Interesting discussion happening in this Hacker News post about the scalability of Penpot, the open source Figma alternative. Even the CEO of Penpot chimes in with some reassuring comments.

Matthias Ott confirms in this blog post what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: HTML/CSS prototypes are the best way to design. Figma, Penpot and Adobe XD are nice but nothing beats a ‘shitty’ prototype in HTML/CSS when it comes to interactivity and responsiveness.

CSS Doodle is a JavaScript library which enables you to create patterns and illustrations based on CSS.

A good alternative for (big) images and video’s reducing the CO2 footprint of a website.

Extensive guide by Andy Chan on all the skills you need in order to become a self-taught UI/UX designer.

First batch of color fonts released on Google Fonts. Not widely supported yet, but a good first step in a more colorful web.

See the fonts in action by going over to Google Fonts and ticking the ‘Show only color fonts’ box.

Scott VandeHey displays a collection of inspiring demo’s to showcase the power of CSS blend modes. I’m especially intrigued by the halftone filter which can give images comic book feel.

When do you use a link and when do you create a button? Normally a link points you to a new place and a button submits a form. But it’s not always that obvious as Killian Valkhof explains in this blog.

Lucide: a clean looking set of open source line icons.

Chris Coyer celebrates the demise of proprietary syndication formats such as Google’s AMP or Facebook’s Instant articles forcing publishers to jump through hoops. What still remains? Plain old HTML.