Type scales that survive real content
A ratio that looks perfect in the specimen falls apart at 40 characters. What to check instead.
Design
The return of the sidebar
Everyone spent a decade removing them. Now they are back, and the reasons are better than last time.
More from the magazine
Reported and written by people who do this work for a living.
What a cookie banner costs you
Measured on six client sites: bounce, scroll depth, and the number people never mention.
How to read a Lighthouse score without lying to yourself
A 98 that means nothing, and a 74 that matters. Telling them apart.
When not to use a modal
Four situations where the dialogue is the wrong container, and what replaces it.
CSS nesting, six months of using it properly
It shipped, it works, and it makes stylesheets worse unless you set a rule about depth.
Dark mode is not an inversion
The five values that need their own dark definitions, and the one that breaks everything.
Topics
Five areas we cover properly rather than occasionally.
Design
Layout, type, colour, and the craft of making a page look like someone decided how it should look.
3 articles
UX
How people actually use what we build, and what they do when it gets in their way.
3 articles
AI Tools
What the new tools are good at, what they are bad at, and how to tell the difference before you ship.
2 articles
Development
Browser features, performance, and the parts of the platform that quietly got better while you were busy.
3 articles
Trends
What the industry is doing this year, and which parts of it are worth copying.
1 articles
Guides
Longer pieces meant to be worked through rather than skimmed. Each one ends with something you can use on Monday.
UX
Accessible forms, end to end
Labels, errors, focus order, and the keyboard path through a checkout. Written to be worked through, not skimmed.
DesignThe web typography checklist
Twenty-two checks between a font choice and a page that reads well on a phone in daylight.
DevelopmentSetting a performance budget that holds
How to pick the numbers, where to enforce them, and what to do when marketing wants another script.
Who writes this
Four people, all of whom do the work they write about. We do not run guest posts from agencies.
MV
Maren Vaas
Editor · Rotterdam
Spent nine years designing for newspapers before moving to the web, which she still describes as “a newspaper that argues back”. Writes about type and layout, mostly.
TR
Tobias Ruiz
Senior writer · Austin
Front-end developer who got tired of watching good designs die in implementation. Covers browser features and the unglamorous work of making pages fast.
AO
Ada Okonkwo
Contributing editor · Lagos
Runs usability sessions for banks and health services, which means she has watched more people fail to complete a form than almost anyone alive.
JH
Jonas Hale
Contributor · Glasgow
Tests AI tools on real client work and reports what breaks. Keeps a spreadsheet of every generated component he has had to rewrite.
Thursday mornings, one email
What we published, plus the two or three things elsewhere on the web that were worth the time. No round-ups of round-ups.
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