Web Developer Tools & Resources
In this episode, I reconnect with my former instructor, type designer and design coach Troy Leinster. Troy shares his journey from graphic design to type design, and explains why learning to make letters makes you a better designer.
This line-drawing tendency is often visible between design and engineering. Software development tools and workflows, which can take a long time to master, have helped harden divisions between the work of designers and developers. But in the age of AI, those divisions are starting to blur and even shift.
Each particle starts on a random color and changes hue as it fades out. This seems pretty straightforward, but appearances can be deceiving. In fact, I discovered a new CSS limitation I wasn’t aware of, and came up with a couple different workarounds.
Recently, on a whim, I posted about how I’ve been experimenting with Figma Make – building out a few page templates to help collaborators explore ideas. Below is an example I used in the post of how I leveraged Figma’s new AI tool to prototype at Dropbox and test ideas.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: salaries aren’t set by fairness. If they were, teachers and nurses would be paid a lot more than they are, and hedge fund managers would almost certainly be paid a lot less. Instead, salaries are set by markets — and by the business value and responsibility a role carries.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is, in fact, becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives, and it’s no longer a novelty. The magic will, of course, then happen behind the curtain. The best AI features won’t shout with flashy “AI-Powered” badges. Instead, they’ll quietly make products smarter, faster, and more intuitive, so that the user doesn’t even notice.
One of the top requests for Figma Make is the ability to bring generated ideas directly into Figma Design, so that they can be shaped, remixed, and built on in the canvas. Our goal is for Make outputs to be fully editable, contextual, and native. No extra steps naming, exporting, or switching modes. Copy design is the first step toward that vision. Now, teams can bring their Make previews into...
Scaling uploads isn’t just about adding storage; it’s about keeping your app fast, secure, and affordable.
Oliver Muñoz shares how leading creative teams across borders is less about control and more about trust, collaboration, and shaping digital experiences that transcend time zones and cultures.
Creating motion can be tricky. Too much and it’s distracting. Too little and a design feels flat. Ambient animations are the middle ground — subtle, slow-moving details that add atmosphere without stealing the show. In this article, web design pioneer Andy Clarke introduces the concept of ambient animations and explains how to implement them.
Every now and then I get an odd tendency to just go off and make something. It’s why I made a typeface. It’s why I made a mobile music app. And it’s why I made another mobile app, It Makes Noise.
Convert, generate OKLCH colors, and create a unique color palette for your next app.
I write, to think. More than anything this essay is an attempt to think through a bunch of hard, highly speculative ideas about how AI might unfold in the next few years. A lot is being written about the impending arrival of superintelligence; what it means for alignment, containment, jobs, and so on. Those are all important topics.
Here’s a nutty idea: designing terrible solutions makes you a better designer. I know that sounds backwards. Designer portfolios share only the most pristine of examples. And we’re taught about efficiency and time savings. Best practices tell us to move fast, fail fast, and get to good solutions quickly. So why waste your time thinking about the worst possible option?
With faster iteration cycles and AI tools helping people stretch further up the stack, more product builders are reinventing their roles.
It’s time to delve into a collection of the best beautiful, modern serif fonts. Serif fonts are ideal for printed literature, detailed typography, or for creating a more formal effect. And these popular serif fonts really stand out from the crowd.
This tool is a fantastic all-rounder and my personal starting point for many projects. What sets it apart is its intuitive multi-layer support. You can stack several shadow layers, each with its own offset, blur, spread, and color, which is the secret to creating incredibly soft and realistic depth. It’s perfect for mimicking the subtle shadows you see in high-end dashboards and component libraries.
With Molly joining Shopify, design takes center stage in shaping the future of AI and commerce.
Design tokens may be the latest incarnation, but software creators have been creating themeable user interfaces for quite a long time! As with all things, we can study history to learn from our past to inform our future. So let’s dig in!
The idea behind this is to share a full, unfiltered look at integrating CSS Cascade Layers into an existing legacy codebase. In practice, it’s about refactoring existing CSS to use cascade layers without breaking anything.
With every new technology platform, the concept of an application shifts. Consider the difference between compiled apps during the PC era, online applications during the Web, and app stores during mobile. Now with AI it’s happening again.
For a design system program where the goal is often stable, high quality, durable output, how much instability, lack of quality, or impermanence can we tolerate in our tools? That’s the question Nathan Curtis and I asked the design system community for Episode 060 of The Question.
I know estimates have a bad reputation. Most engineers hear “estimate” and immediately think of micromanagement, unrealistic deadlines, and that manager who asks “is it done yet?” every few hours. I’ve seen teams reflexively pad their numbers by 3x just to avoid the inevitable disappointment when reality doesn’t match the plan.
I think a lot of blogging is reactive. You read other people’s blogs and you’re like, no, that’s totally wrong. A part of what we want to do with this scenario is say something concrete and detailed enough that people will say no, that’s totally wrong, and write their own thing.
TV interface design is a unique, fascinating, and often overlooked field. It’s been guided by decades of evolution and innovation, yet still firmly constrained by its legacy. Follow Milan into the history, quirks, and unshakable rules that dictate how we control these devices.
For developers, working more efficiently isn’t just about being faster, but also reducing friction in their workflows. Forrester tells us how to save them time and headache—all in service of shipping better products.
We’ve all been there. You spend hours polishing a layout, only to end up with rows of blank grey circles staring back at you where faces should be. It feels dead. Lifeless.
First things first, this article isn’t exclusively for designers but it was written for them. If you aren’t a designer but interested in LLMs, you are free to stick around and learn something about how to shape the behind the scenes of the technology that you are very likely to interact with later today. Your call, no pressure.