There’s an artist in everyone. Some bring their ideas to life with digital tools, others capture the perfect moment with a camera or love to grab pen and paper to create little doodles or pieces of lettering. And even if you think you’re far from being an artist, well, it might just be hidden deep inside of you. So why not explore it? For more than...

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the basics of web development. Actually, I’ve been thinking about them for some time now, at least since I started teaching beginning web development in 2020. I’m fascinated by the basics. They’re an unsung hero, really, as there is no developer worth their salt who would be where they are without them. Yet, they often...

How do you know what UI component to choose? Decision trees offer a systematic approach for design teams to document their design decisions. Once we’ve decided what UI components we use and when, we can avoid never-ending discussions, confusion, and misunderstanding. Let’s explore a few examples of decision trees for UI components and how we can get...

This article is a sponsored by Netlify In the past, the web ecosystem moved at a very slow pace. Developers would go years without a new language feature or working around a weird browser quirk. This pushed our technical leaders to come up with creative solutions to circumvent the platform’s shortcomings. We invented bundling, polyfills, and transformation...

The web is no stranger to taking HTML elements and transforming them to look, act, and feel like something completely different. A common example of this is the switch, or toggle, component. We would hide a checkbox beneath several layers of styles, define the ARIA role as “switch,” and then ship. However, this approach posed certain usability issues...

Naming is hard. As designers and developers, we often struggle finding the right name — for a design token, colors, UI components, HTML classes, and variables. Sometimes, the names we choose are too generic, so it’s difficult to understand what exactly is meant. And sometimes they are too specific, leaving little room for flexibility and re-use. In...