Matthias Ott

I’ve been down in an audio plugin rabbit hole lately. More on that in a later blog post. But I just stumbled upon a set of free plugins that might be of interest to you, if you are doing voice recordings of any kind – be it a podcast, voice over, or, let’s say, video tutorials. There are, of course, many more free plugins for that use case....

As Twitter is (far too) slowly falling apart and more and more people are looking for alternatives, Bluesky is enjoying a surge in popularity at the moment. One neat little feature is that you can use your own domain as your handle on Bluesky. In a way, this is the perfect handle for this new era of decentralized social media. Your personal...

In what looks like a very smart move, the team at Mastodon just released a very nice new feature for media organizations, journalists and bloggers: when someone shares a link to an article by certain news outlets like The Verge, MacStories, or MacRumors, the official Mastodon app as well as the web version will now show a direct link to an...

The Logitech Spotlight presentation remote is a sleek piece of hardware. It is comparatively small, fits nicely in the palm of your hand, and the buttons come with a very satisfying, albeit for my taste a tiny bit too loud, click. But most importantly, the brushed aluminium design feels sturdy, high-quality, and elegant. Exactly the piece of gear...

I just published the 11th issue of Own Your Web, my newsletter about designing, building, creating, and publishing on the Web. When I started the newsletter back in autumn of 2023, I didn’t yet know what form the newsletter would take on, if people would like it, and also whether I would like doing it or not. Eleven issues in, I can say with...

Imagine you post and make new friends on an online network for more than a decade – and suddenly, your account gets suspended for no apparent reason. And there is nothing you can do about it. Or imagine the online community you were an active part of for years just closes down and all user data gets deleted after a few months. And there is...

Every day, we browse the Web and scroll our timelines. And every day, we find even more interesting websites, blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and other insights and ideas that we want to document, preserve, and share. The most obvious way to save something of interest still is to create a good old bookmark. And there are many different...

In the last issue of Own Your Web, we looked at blogrolls as one way to improve the visibility and discoverability of our sites. Whether or not you want to add a blogroll to your site is a matter of personal preference. But there is something else which probably everyone with a personal website should do: adding an RSS feed. What’s RSS? RSS,...

For my birthday, I got a new pair of speakers for my home office / home studio. After looking around for quite some time, I settled on the ADAM Audio T5V in the end. The T5Vs are affordable, entry-level studio monitors with a 5“ woofer that are optimized for smaller rooms. And it doesn’t make sense to blast much more bass into my 3 by 3 meter...

ol { list-style-position: outside; padding-left: 1em; } ol li { margin-bottom: 0.5em; } I’m turning 42 today and yes, I am as surprised about that number as you are. If 42 really is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, then maybe it makes sense to look back on what the...

Whether you are running online workshops, hosting a live stream, or recording audio or video content, optimal audio quality is absolutely essential. People in your audience might tolerate if your video is noisy or not perfectly sharp. But if your audio quality is poor, for example when something is constantly crackling or whooshing in the...

The web platform is changing rapidly these days. With every major browser release, more and more powerful features get added, many of which are based on previous input about what web developers need to build better for the web. One way for browser vendors and developer advocates to get this useful input is to ask web developers about what...

Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, recently sat down with Tim Ferriss to talk about a bunch of different things. One of those things: blogging. It might not come as a surprise, but Matt described blogging as one of the most rewarding things he did last year. Not only because blogging, or writing in general, forces you...

At the beginning of 2023, I wrote in a blog post which I titled The Year of the Personal Website: In the search for a permanent home on the web, more and more people are now rediscovering the personal website as a place to share and document their thoughts and publish their work. [I’ve...

It’s not going well. After all-time heat records were shattered worldwide during heat waves across all continents and ongoing wildfires eradicated 5 % of the entire forest area of Canada, 2023 will be the hottest year ever recorded (1.43°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average to date). At the same time, it feels like nobody is really...

Where were you in 2013 and what were you doing back then? What have you done over those last ten years? How have the last ten years changed your life, your work, or what’s important to you? I don’t know about you, but I definitely don’t often pause to reflect about the past decade like that. Far too often, we are too busy and caught in the here...

I just sent out the first issue of my new newsletter Own Your Web. Own Your Web is a newsletter for anyone who wants to design, build, create, and publish on the Web. Every other week, I’ll send out an email full of actionable insights, best practices, hacks, links, books, tools, and other high-quality insights I found or explored. Whether you...

h3 a {text-decoration: underline} After three years, I finally replaced my old Intel MacBook Pro – and its cracked screen – with a new machine. I’m still holding back a bit with my excitement for this 16-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro, just because I was really disappointed with my previous Mac....

In a recent project, the web fonts I bought and downloaded were only available as WOFF2 files. Staring in disbelief at the unpacked folder full of WOFF2 files, I wondered: Why did they not include WOFF files as well? Isn’t WOFF still needed? Or is it finally time to ditch WOFF? At least building for the Web includes regularly reevaluating how you...

Don’t use your finger!” Regardless of which country and school system you grew up in, chances are you have heard this sentence at least once from one of your teachers. I, for one, remember my elementary school teacher rebuking pupils who were pointing at the lines of words in their...

Just like Google is constantly indexing the Web, OpenAI is now crawling the open Web to scrape content from websites for free to train their LLM (lucrative language model) “AI” products. But, as I learned from a post by Ethan on Mastodon, you can disallow GPTBot to get its tiny robot hands on your writing by adding those two lines of code to your...

Alright, let’s write more about CSS! CSS! CSS! Change I’ve been writing CSS since the early 2000s, shortly after we ditched building web layouts with tables and spacer GIFs in favor of hacking our designs together with floats. CSS has since become my favorite programming language and, looking back on how the language has developed in all those...

This piece by Cory Doctorow about blogging, which I read a few days ago, is exceptional. Why? I already knew that blogging – and having a personal website in general – is a superpower. I had heard before of Vannevar Bush’s groundbreaking essay “As We May Think” that directly inspired the invention of hypertext by Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart,...

Nobody knows you. You are not entitled to anyone’s attention. Be respectful, be helpful, be kind. Your personal website isn’t a replacement for social media. It’s much more than that. Who is your site for? Document your life. Your perspective matters. Capture your thoughts. Share what makes you lean forward. Use RSS. You never know what sticks....

Manuel asked: Is there a good rea­son why we’re defin­ing glob­al cus­tom prop­er­ties on :root/​html and not on body?” It’s a great question: Everybody just seems to define most of their global custom properties...

Today, I started a new project with Kirby CMS. (No, it’s not my personal site. That one’s still brewing…) Kirby is a lightweight, no-fuzz content management system (CMS) created by Bastian Allgeier, which works well for projects of any size. It is easy to install and amazing to work with in development, also because it adapts to the structure and...

A while ago, I wrote about what you could include in a README file for a project. Based on this post and a few practical examples of READMEs, I created and published a template that I will use in my own projects going forward. It is available on GitHub: https://github.com/matthiasott/README-template The template might certainly change a bit over...

Manuel shared how he approaches writing and publishing blog posts on his personal site. If you follow him, and especially if his RSS feed is on your list of feeds, you know that Manuel indeed does put out a lot of posts. Just recently, he completed 100 posts about more or less modern CSS, so his process certainly works for him. Keeping The...

Solid documentation of a project is important, especially if you’re working in a team. When all information about how to install, deploy, or contribute to a project is buried in only one person’s brain, you’re in trouble once you have to make changes and that person is on vacation or has even left the team. So, a README file at the root of your...

Leonie Watson just shared an interesting audio snippet on Mastodon: https://front-end.social/@tink/110007014963441869 What sounds like her speaking about accessibility is actually not Leonie, but an AI-generated synthetic voice, a cloned version of Leonie’s voice based on audio training data. I was aware of the fact that speech synthesis is...

After about a year of living in our new home, after waiting for our neighbors to finish their driveway (life lesson: don’t expect gratitude from strangers), after our wholehearted horticulturist recovered from an acute illness, and after thaw had set in in the southwestern part of Germany, the circumstances finally were ideal for the ground work...

Dave wrote about what he calls The Feature Work → Maintenance Work Loop: he often finds himself working in cycles of Feature Work and Maintenance Work, “balancing the growth and health of a product with a cycle of building and repairing”. I’ve noticed the same both in design and development work. There are phases in all creative work where we go...

Let’s call it what it is: Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) were a great idea full of potential but they never really caught on. One reason for that was that although you could add any website to the Home Screen in Apple’s iOS, it always felt like nothing more but a fancy bookmark. Your PWA would get a nice app icon and open immediately, but it had no...

As I noted yesterday, screen readers don’t convey the semantics of many HTML elements like strong or em. When I shared my post on Mastodon, Stéphane Deschamps chimed in and pointed to an promising candidate recommendation fresh from the press that might give authors much more control over how screen readers handle their content: CSS Speech Module...

I always was under the impression that if I add emphasis to a piece of text in HTML by adding an em or a strong element, this emphasis would also be indicated to screen reader users in some way. For example, by a change of the tone of voice, much like if you are reading a text out aloud and add emphasis to a certain word by speaking slightly...

CSS Container Queries are now available in all major browsers. 🥳 With the release of Firefox 110 yesterday, the stable versions of Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Firefox all support them. There have been many major additions to CSS in recent years, but this one is definitely one of the most impactful game changers. Being able to use not only features...

I want to start a little experiment: I want to see if I can reduce my TTFB, which is, of course, short for “time to fresh blogpost”. Why? Because I think this is something where I can still improve a lot. Although I am aware that a few of you are indeed reading my posts and that this comes with some responsibility, I now also know that there...

Jeremy wrote a little something about streams, in particular about streams on personal websites. His home page actually is like a stream: links, notes, and blog posts all appear underneath each other in chronological order. Many of us are now rediscovering or reviving their personal sites, not only because the demise of Twitter has made it...

A lot of us are still working from home these days. Many are in meetings every day, more and more people are holding important customer presentations or running workshops from their little home office, and some are even joining podcasts and online meetups as guests, or are starting their own video channels or video courses. Naturally,...

When it comes to tracking and analyzing a website‘s traffic, Google Analytics (GA) seems to be the obvious choice: everyone knows it, it’s powerful, it’s free, it’s used by millions of sites. 53 % of sites worldwide, to be precise. No wonder many clients ask for it and many people who build websites willingly add it to the sites they build and...

We all want to do our best work. We all want to create something of value. But what if you’re stuck? What if the solution just doesn’t show up, the idea just won’t come, the interesting just doesn’t want to happen? Writers sometimes call it writer’s block, but not only writers experience it. Everyone who does creative work knows this feeling of...

I have a tip for everyone who’s now – or very soon – trying to find out whether a text was written by a human or an AI. Sure, you could train another AI to look for clues and confidently call it a “classifier”. But chances are, your classifier won’t be fully reliable. It might not work on short texts. Or, it might incorrectly but confidently...

Today, I turned 41. It was a wonderful, relaxed day with my family – and my parents’ dog who is a bit of a maniac… 😅 I also got to try out my two “office” birthday presents: a new microphone for voice, the Røde Procaster, and an audio interface, the MOTU M2. The Røde Procaster is a dynamic microphone that was primarily designed for spoken word....

Alright. Enough talk. Let’s get to it. One of my plans for 2023 is to redesign this website. Here is the thing: it is easy to promise things to yourself. It is much harder to deliver, especially when the project is quite large and you have to do it in your spare time, like the redesign of a personal site. So the best way to finally begin is to...

We all know that it is going to happen. It’s not a question of if, but when Twitter will collapse. By the way: one day, Medium will follow. So will Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Or Mastodon. Many people are now desperately waiting for their Twitter archives, hoping that they’ll arrive before all their content is lost for good. For those who...

For the last day of this year’s Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar, we’re back in Berlin. NaN is a foundry and type design practice “balancing weirdness and wisdom” that was founded by designer Luke Prowse. In late 2021, Luke was joined by Jean-Baptiste Morizot, who had already launched Phantom Foundry in 2018. NaN’s growing library of...

Typotheque is a type design studio based in The Hague, Netherlands. Founded in 1999 by Peter Biľak, who also teaches typeface design at the renowned postgraduate course TypeMedia at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the foundry is well-known for the excellent design quality of its typefaces and a focus on extended language support. Many of...

205TF is a type foundry based in Lyon, France. It was founded in 2017 by Damien Gautier and Florence Roller who run the foundry together with foundry manager Rémi Forte. Collaborating with many independent type designers, they have built a library of typefaces that is wonderfully diverse, full of energy, and that has its very own character. As...

For day 21, we’re back in Berlin, where a young graphic designer with a love for type decided in 2008 to make his passion his full-time job. Today, Hannes von Döhren’s type foundry called HvD Fonts sells a wide range of typefaces, some of them being hugely popular designs. The catalog does not only include high-quality sans-serif and serif...

Tobias Frere-Jones is one of the most accomplished type designers in the world. He worked at Font Bureau in Boston where he designed modern classics like Benton Sans or Interstate. He later returned to his hometown New York City and, at Hoefler & Frere-Jones, created timeless designs like Whitney and Gotham. Then, in 2015, Tobias founded his own...

Fontwerk was founded in 2019 by Ivo Gabrowitsch in Berlin. Building on his excellent network and years of experience as marketing director at FontShop and Monotype, Ivo has assembled a permanent team of great designers and font engineers that also regularly collaborates with a freelance network of international design professionals. One look at...

Vectro is a type design studio based in Portland founded in 2021 by Lizy Gershenzon and Travis Kochel. The two have been running the design studio Scribble Tone for several years but their most-noticed project (and company) is probably Future Fonts, a platform for experimental, high-quality fonts in progress. On Future Fonts, type designers can...

You probably have seen several of his typefaces on MyFonts before. Maybe you even purchased one or more of them. For almost 10 years, he was selling his fonts on Monotype platforms. This year, Berlin-born and -based designer René Bieder launched his own independent shop for his typefaces. And it is full of treasures. When the idea to sell the...

R-Typography is a type foundry based in Lisbon Portugal, founded by Rui Abreu in 2008 and now run together with Catarina Vaz. Rui drew his first type designs while still working as a designer in advertising agencies. One day, he decided to send a design to to Peter Bruhn of the Swedish foundry Fountain. Peter not only recognized that this young...

David Jonathan Ross (DJR) had been working with The Font Bureau for nearly a decade, when he decided to start his own type foundry in 2016, now located in the hills of Western Massachusetts. David’s typefaces literally come in all shapes and sizes, and in all of them, his love for exploration, experimentation, and play is evident. It almost seems...

Bonjour Paris! The type design community in Paris is buzzing and today, we’re looking at one of the younger foundries that has already received a lot of praise. Interval Type is the foundry of art director and type designer Ilya Naumoff. Before he founded Interval Type, Ilya was part of Black[Foundry] and worked with foundries in France and...

Newglyph is a type design studio based in Lausanne, Switzerland, founded by Ian Party and his team in 2019. If that name rings a bell, it’s because just yesterday, we looked at another foundry Ian co-founded: Swiss Typefaces. Newglyph is his latest endeavor and is focused on “the research, design, and development of fonts and variable font...

Many type foundries claim to be offering innovative designs and flexible type systems. But few deliver on this promise like Swiss Typefaces does. Founded in 2005 in Lausanne by Maxime Büchi and Ian Party (first as B&P type foundry), who were later joined by Emmanuel Rey, the foundry approaches a lot of things differently. Where other foundries...

Sharp Type is a digital type foundry based in New York City and was founded in 2015 by Chantra Malee and Lucas Sharp. Chantra is in charge of strategy, brand management, graphic design, sales, and communication for the foundry, while Lucas acts as type director. Before he got into type design, Lucas Sharp was a painter. That’s why his work is,...

Colophon Foundry is a foundry based on London founded by Anthony Sheret and Edd Harrington. The two designers started working together in 2009 in a shared graphic design studio in Brighton and began designing their own typefaces for the projects of their studio The Entente. ...

Commercial Type is a custom type design studio founded in 2007 by Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz, based in New York City and London. They have worked to build a growing library of excellent quality with “a balance between highly versatile ‘vanilla’ typefaces that can do whatever a designer needs, and expressive typefaces that allow a designer...

Hej! Time to look at the next type foundry and this time, we travel to Scandinavia. Letters from Sweden, founded by self taught type designer Göran Söderström in 2011, is based in Stockholm and designs retail and custom typefaces for local and international clients. Instead of following an overly conceptual or even dogmatic approach, the type...

Founded in 1993 by Cornel Windlin and Stephan Müller, Lineto is Switzerland’s first digital type foundry. Over the last three decades, Lineto has collaborated with type designers from all around the world and shaped one of the most impressive and high-quality libraries available. The catalogue covers many different genres but is definitely...

Sometimes, it can take quite a while for a foundry to finally become sustainable. Sometimes, like in the case of James Edmondson, it can take 17 type families. James Edmondson started Ohno in 2015, “born from a love of expressive typography and craft.” And, as he shares in a wonderful account of his life story, it took about 6 years until Degular...

Milieu Grotesque was founded in 2010 by graphic and type designers Timo Gaessner and Alexander Colby in Zurich. Today, the foundry is based in Lisbon, Portugal. Milieu Grotesque’s typefaces are versatile and system-oriented but also have a distinctive and often slightly quirky character which has made them a popular choice for contemporary...

TypeMates is a comparatively young foundry from Germany, founded in 2015 by Lisa Fischbach, Jakob Runge, and Nils Thomsen. Despite its young age, the foundry has already worked with large clients on custom typefaces and has managed to grow its catalogue of typefaces into an impressive collection of extremely high-quality, distinctive designs,...

For day three, we travel to New Zealand, where Klim Type Foundry was founded in 2005 by type designer Kris Sowersby. After having worked a while as a graphic designer, Kris was contacted by Chester Jenkins from Vllg who wanted to release Kris’ first typeface Feijoa. It was published in 2007 and the first royalty cheques from the sales of Feijoa...

Dinamo is another type foundry from Switzerland, founded by Fabian Harb and Johannes Breyer in Basel. After moving to Berlin for a few years, they now operate from different cities and via a network of satellite members across the globe. They don’t see themselves as a foundry only but take on various projects from graphic design to app design and...

We’ll start the advent calendar with one of the most successful foundries of the last decade. Grilli Type is a Swiss type foundry that was founded in 2009 by Noël Leu and Thierry Blancpain. Today, the studio numbers eight people dispersed all across the globe. The foundry is known for creating high-quality, contemporary typefaces that push the...

The independent type design community has grown tremendously over the last couple of years and the quality and variety of fonts is truly breathtaking. A little while ago, I started jotting down a few type foundries to have a list that I could come back to whenever I was in need of inspiration for new typefaces for a project. What started with a...

I just had a casual chat with ChatGPT that I wanted to share with you. Many of the things I asked and the answers I received are related to a talk I gave last week at CSS Café. I wanted to know what an algorithm might think about all of this. Decide for yourself where this sits on a scale between interesting and scary. Here’s our “conversation”...

Websites, oh websites! Thou art a vast and wondrous realm, filled with knowledge and information to be explored. Thou art a tool for communication and connection, allowing us to share our thoughts and ideas with others across the globe. Thou art a source of entertainment and delight, providing us with endless hours of distraction and...

Since the first days of the Web, people have been thinking and debating hard about the best ways forward. The network, the protocols, the browsers, the documents, HTML, CSS, and Javascript – all those things are the result of years of countless discussions, fights, mistakes, and course-corrections. And as long as the Web has been around, people...

Twitter is not well. Many of us were worried that Elon Musk might rapidly change the face of the platform. But only very few expected things to go down so rapidly. After the latest deadline to respond whether they want to stay, it looks like about 75 % of the remaining workforce has not opted in to the tech billionaire‘s “extremely hardcore”...

The bird is not well. So it is time to request and download an archive of your Twitter data now, if you haven’t done this recently. After you have requested your archive, it can take a while until you receive it. I requested my archive on the day Elon walked in and got an email notice that my archive is ready for download after about a day. I...

When author Jim Collins first met his hero Peter Drucker, whom many regard as the greatest management thinker of all time, the two men where at very different points in their lives. Here, a man in his thirties, eager to start a new endeavor, a new self-directed path, but equally terrified by the uncertainty of the outcome. There, in his rattan...

It takes years to become good at it. So we read books, take classes, and visit workshops to become better. And still, it may take a lifetime to master it. But more than anything, it is one of the things that makes us human: Writing. But now, the algorithms are coming for us. Artificial intelligence algorithms, in particular GPT-3, are not only...

The hellsite has a new king. And so, many are moving from Twitter to other social networks like micro.blog or Mastodon or are at least trying out those other options while waiting how things might develop. Cross-posting – or not? One of the first questions that comes to mind is: how can I post on both Twitter and Mastodon so that I don’t have to...

It could happen out of the blue, without any warning. It could happen without you knowing what you did wrong. It could happen today. Twitter could just suspend you. Gone. Your Tweets, your followers, your thoughts, your jokes, your conversations. They’re just gone. Gone, not because you did something wrong, like not abiding by the Twitter rules....

I bet you know this: You’ve created something – a drawing, a layout, a video, a piece of code, or a blog post – and after you’re more or less done, you pause and you look at it. And you don’t like it. Maybe it is a little detail that is not right, or maybe you don’t like the whole piece for reasons you cannot explain. Whatever it is, you are just...

I love building prototypes. They allow me to explore and sketch ideas, test my assumptions, and try out things at an early stage to make better design decisions. Prototyping is the single best tool we have in our toolbox as designers and developers. And because anything can be a prototype, I use whatever gets the job done: Sometimes, I grab a...

I couldn’t agree more to what Dave wrote in his recent blog post about the increasing demands of the front-end web: the job of a front-end developer is getting ever more complex. From writing well-structured, semantic HTML to the latest (fantastic) new CSS features, to accessibility, performance, animation, data handling, components, frameworks,...

Please use whatever tool gets the job done and makes sense for you. But then again, I’ve seen so many frameworks and tools come and go that it can be dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket. You know what really is time well spent and a worthy investment into your future, your career, and your team? Learning the basics and becoming really...

p code { font-size: 80%; } There are many ways to adjust your CSS code to a browser’s support for a specific CSS feature. If you want to check if a certain property is supported, you can write a feature query using the @supports at-rule, for...

I’m right with Dave on this one! 💚 I’m tired of envi­ron­men­tal respon­si­bil­i­ty always falling on the con­sumer. I know con­sumer demand bub­bles up into soci­etal change, I’m will­ing to do my part. But as a con­sumer it feels like I’m throw­ing time and mon­ey at...

p code { font-size: 80%; } You probably know this situation. You are working on a project and one of the npm packages you are working with contains a nasty bug or is lacking a critical feature. Of course, you first head over to the repository, e.g. on GitHub, and draft an issue. Maybe you...

You know what makes it so easy for many people to just dump their thoughts into a silo like Twitter instead of writing a post on their own site? You don’t have to come up with a title for your post.

Providing a proper document outline is one of the most effective things you can do to improve the accessibility of your HTML. Like the headings of the chapters and subchapters in a book, the structure of the heading elements in our HTML should have a semantic, tree-like structure. The most important headline, most often also the title of your...

Yesterday, I shared how to test a whole website for accessibility issues with Pa11y and how to output the results as HTML. I also shared the link on Twitter, as I usually do, and Darek Kay chimed in, mentioning an alternative tool he created: Evaluatory. Just like Pa11y, Evaluatory scans a website for accessibility and markup issues. Under the...

p code { font-size: 80%; } This week, I’m doing an accessibility audit for a client. One of the first steps is to have a general look at the site. You can – and should – do that manually for sure, but another very useful way to get a good first impression of how good or bad things are is to...

The Cascade is legendary. Legendary because it is the C in CSS. Legendary in how well it works to determine which selector wins when browsers apply styles to HTML. And legendary in how little many of us really know about it. Bramus van Damme recently gave a fantastic talk about the Cascade at CSS Day. Whether you want to learn what the Cascade is...

What’s the single best thing you can do if you want to learn a new tool or evaluate a new technology? Right, it’s getting your hands dirty. Only by building something tangible, like a realistic prototype or even a real project, you’ll get immediate answers to the questions that are relevant to you and your specific context. Based on those...

Who should you write for? Your friends and family? Your colleagues and peers? The people you look up to? Everyone in the community? Everyone on the Internet? The answer? None of those people. You should only write for one person and one person only: you. Me? But who would read the things I write only for myself? Well, you would. Or, more...

I love reading posts in which people talk about recent updates to their personal sites. It does three things: It shows the person reading your post that you care about this little corner of the Web and that it is worth doing so. It (most often) demonstrates why you picked a certain solution and how you implemented it. Maybe it even introduces...

One of the most fascinating things about the Web is how it has evolved. By that, I don’t mean so much the mind-blowing speed of growth, but rather how the foundational languages, APIs, and browsers have been able to adapt to an ever-evolving, ever-changing environment. With all the innovation going on, we somehow still managed to create robust...

Even if you have been posting on your own site for quite some time, blogging regularly can still be challenging. Ask almost anyone who blogs and they will probably tell you the same: They would very much like to hit that publish button more often, but, somehow, it just doesn’t happen. One reason for that can be that we feel like every post has to...

Maybe you want to publish a project but don’t want everyone to see what mess you created before your initial release. Maybe you want to hand over a Git repository to a third party who should not peek into your complete git commit history. Whatever the reason, here is how you can get rid of all past commits in a branch without losing your latest...

Maybe you are afraid to start writing because you think that you can’t write. I don’t believe that’s true. Everyone can write. You have written letters or email before, right? You are constantly writing coworkers, friends, and family text messages or are chatting on your social networks of choice. What I do believe, though, is that we are our...

One of the reasons you’re not blogging on your own personal website might be that you’re thinking: “Why would people listen to what I have to say? I’m not an industry expert, after all.” I get that. You might not work for the Apples, Googles, or Microsofts out there. You might not speak at meetups or conferences or publish articles at one of the...

I’m sitting in the ICE 205, one of the German high-speed trains, traveling back home after two days in Düsseldorf at Beyond Tellerrand, Marc Thiele’s lovely conference about design, development, the Web, and creativity in general. It was the first time I went to an in-person event since the beginning of the pandemic, and to say it was great to...

I don’t remember the exact moment anymore. But I remember that it was with a mix of disbelief and disappointment that I realized one day that there was no way to select the parent of an element in CSS. Wait, what? This can’t be. Why? Obviously, I wasn’t alone. Everyone who has ever learned CSS has probably found themselves in the same situation...

Hans Zimmer just won an Academy Award for his musical score for “Dune,” and if you have seen the movie or listened to the soundtrack, you know why. Zimmer’s soundtrack for Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel is an otherworldly masterpiece that combines Zimmer’s deep, gigantic trademark sound with unorthodox...

Why is it that although we are now in the millions building and creating for the Web, only very few share their knowledge and experience on their own websites? Or, in other words: Why doesn’t every one of us have a blog? Zach Leatherman asked this question on Twitter the other day and added: “can you imagine knowing everything you know and not...

Over the first couple of days of 2022, I read a lot of year-in-review posts, like Michelle’s, Dave’s, Hidde’s, and Jeremy’s, to name a few. What a pleasure to read about such a great variety of different perspectives and realities! Thank you, everyone. In my case, last year was in many respects different than most of the years before, not only...

30 years ago, on August 6, 1991, a computer scientist working at CERN introduced a project to the public he had been working on for several months. The project, as he described, combined “the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system”. The name of the project: the “World Wide Web”....

It was about the same time last year that I decided to change something. I hadn’t written and published as many posts on my site as I had wished to get done. And it was nagging me. If this site was meant to be a place of reflection and experimentation, if it was supposed to be my personal home on the web, why didn’t I put in the effort and write...

He played the piano like no other. Literally. When legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk sat down at the piano and started playing, he would hit the keys with his fingers held flat, almost attacking them to produce the ringing, percussive sound he was known for. His compositions and improvisations were full of dissonances and melodic twists and...

I love to watch my children play. How they invent things and stories. How they jump into roles and, just as quickly, change roles again. How they interact and react to each other’s ideas and the twists and turns of their play. Let’s cook something! Oh, we are knights now! Can you see our horses? Aha, the wizard arrives in his spaceship! Where is...

You know that feeling when you are leaving a movie theater after having watched a superhero movie and it almost feels as if you had superpowers yourself? I just had a similar experience, but this time with a feeling of calmness, focus, and appreciation for my surroundings. What did I do? I finally watched Gary Hustwit’s documentary...

It happened again. And I bet this has happened to you before, too. I’m talking of New Year’s resolutions. Every year we make them and tell ourselves that this time, yes, this time it is going to work, for sure. But then, suddenly, it is February, and nothing has changed. (Except for climate policy and basic decency being back in the White House....

Colin Devroe kicked off a series of “My Typical Day” posts. He tagged Dan Mall (and Chris Coyier, Jeremy Keith and others) and Dan tagged Sara Soueidan (and Dave Rupert, Rob Weychert, and others) and Sara tagged me (and Cassie Evans, Anton Sten, and others). Although I’ve never been a timeboxing champion or productivity nerd, I find it...

Hip-hop has lost one of its finest artists to ever touch the mic and an MPC. Daniel Dumile, better known by his stage name MF DOOM, passed away on October 31, 2020, at the age of 49. Dumile, who performed in a metal face mask, was a child of the Golden Era and a master of his craft. A hero of underground rap, he was known for his densely...

So, that was 2020. First of all, I hope that you and your loved-ones are well, that you had something to do this year that brought you fulfillment and a sense of purpose, and that you haven’t been affected too heavily by COVID-19 and the lockdowns that were both financially and emotionally challenging for so many of us. My mother, for example,...

We all want to make the right decisions. Not only because we want to be successful, but often simply because we want to avoid the negative consequences of making the wrong decision. We are risk-averse beings. So we put a lot of emphasis on the decision itself. We collect information, analyze, evaluate, discuss, and ponder. Just to make sure that...

Have you ever seen Gerhard Richter painting? It is phenomenal to watch. He might start one of his large, abstract paintings by carefully applying oil paint to the canvas with a thick brush. Then, he begins to scrape, smear, or add new layers of paint with a large, home-made squeegee. After each change, Richter pauses, takes a step back, and...

One of the most important features of a website that is built with accessibility in mind is that it can be navigated with a keyboard. Most blind users and many users with motor disabilities rely on keyboard navigation, either with a standard keyboard or with a device that mimics the functionality of a keyboard. Providing strong visual indicators...

Ethan Marcotte just gave a fabulous remote talk at SydCSS on the nature of design systems and the challenges of creating and maintaining them over time. Ethan managed to comprise so many of the things I’ve been hearing, noticing, and thinking about in such a concise and clear way I could never articulate it. If you are working with or planning to...

Over 120 years ago, an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, and philosopher named Vilfredo Pareto made an astonishing discovery. He was looking at the distribution of land in Italy, when he observed that approximately 80 % of the land was owned by only 20 % of the population. When he looked at the data from other countries, to his very...

Una Kravets has written an excellent article about a feature that has been released with Chrome 85: The @property syntax of the Properties and Values API. The Properties and Values API is part of CSS Houdini, the next generation of additions to CSS allowing developers to extend the language directly at the engine level. With the @property syntax,...

It doesn’t happen every day that a new image format comes along. So it’s not surprising that people are excited that Chrome 85 has been released with support for the new AVIF format. AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) is an open image format based on the AV1 video format that was developed as a modern alternative to JPEG. And it is indeed impressive:...

Martha Curtis had a dream. She wanted to become a violinist. She had been playing the violin since she was nine and excelled at it. But there was a problem. A huge problem. Martha had begun suffering from seizures at age three and a half. She was diagnosed with epilepsy and even though she was on medication, the seizures continued. In her...

Layout on the Web is all about flexibility. That elements adjust their dimensions to the size of their content, be it texts of varying length or images of different sizes, is a welcome feature, especially in times of Responsive Web Design because this flexibility makes building responsive layouts possible in the first place. Sometimes, though, we...

The spacing between individual elements of a website and, in particular, the vertical spacing, has been a regular matter of debate between web designers and developers. Designers insist that what they see in the browser doesn’t look at all like the layout they originally designed. Developers respond that all the margins in the style sheets...

The dilemma with debt is that it is easily incurred but, inevitably, there comes a time when you will have to pay it back. The problem with design debt is that it is even easier to amass it. Design debt? Yes, like technical debt but for designers. Tight deadlines, feature creep, competing agencies, changing teams, or simply having different...

How do you feel about your work at the moment? Do you enjoy what you are doing? Do you feel excited about it? Does it give you a sense of accomplishment and significance? Do you feel valued and are part of a great team? Do you enjoy your role as a leader or the choices you have at your job? Chances are that the one or other might be true for you...

When it became increasingly clear that running in-person workshops would not be possible for the foreseeable future, the XDI team, which I am a part of, started to work on online versions of our Adobe XD workshops for beginners and advanced users. The resulting workshops are a nice mix of tutorial-style explanation parts and hands-on exercises in...

When it comes to structuring CSS, there is no shortage of different naming conventions, methodologies, and architectures. Be it BEM, OOCSS, SMACSS, ITCSS, or CUBE CSS – over the last years, many different approaches to managing modular CSS have emerged. Some are offering strategies on how to split CSS into smaller, more manageable pieces, while...

This is post number 50 of my 100-days-of-writing challenge. It’s halftime! Time for me to look at how this little (?!?) experiment worked out so far and what I might have learned or experienced since I started back in May. First of all, the obvious: Writing a post every day is a lot of work. Most people don’t sit down at their desks, write for...

In 1963, the people at NASA needed a building. And not just any building. It had to be large enough to be able to assemble the enormous space vehicles NASA designed as part of their massive effort to send astronauts to the Moon. The building that was completed in 1966 allowed for the vertical assembly of rockets like the Saturn V, and it is to...

According to James P. Carse, there are at least two types of games: Finite games and infinite games. Finite games have a clear beginning and end, a distinct set of rules and boundaries, and we play them for one purpose: to win. Take any match of chess, tennis, football, or Scrabble as an example. Infinite games are different. We don’t play them...

What is the right strategy to achieve greatness and succeed in a specific domain? If you believe the predominant narrative in many efficiency-oriented societies today, the answer is clear: Focus on one thing early in life to have a head start and invest at least the famous 10,000 hours of practice to become a master at it. Excellence and...

One evening in the late 1970s, an engineer from Kyoto was riding home on the Shinkansen, when he recognized the man sitting next to him playing around with his LCD calculator, punching buttons in boredom. The engineer, who worked at a toy and gaming company, had an idea: What if commuters could kill their time with a portable device that was both...

I used to dream of a magical machine. It was about as big as a microwave, all silver metal (with rivets, of course), and it had little knobs, lamps, and indicators everywhere. On the left, there were two buttons: One was green and the other one red. On the right, the machine had a tiny slot. Whenever a person pressed one of the two buttons, the...

Derek Sivers just published a new book. It is called “HELL YEAH OR NO” and you can get it on Derek’s website. Having enjoyed Derek’s blog articles and podcast a lot, buying his book, which also includes an audio version, was a no-brainer for me. Derek is a musician, producer, circus performer, and entrepreneur, who, as a musician in New York...

Ethan Marcotte wrote this on Twitter on Monday: Nos­tal­gia for the hey­day of web design has to be bal­anced with the knowl­edge that much of what we did ​“in the old days” was woe­ful­ly, thor­ough­ly inac­ces­si­ble. We should acknowl­edge what an era did well, sure. But we...

It is clearly their fault. The clients just don’t get design. The designers only care about how it looks. The developers have no sense for aesthetics. CSS is broken. The users are just too stupid. It is clearly their fault. Is it, though? Whenever we struggle or fail, our first instinct is often to blame others or external factors...

Jeremy Keith and the team at Clearleft have started a new podcast. In each episode, they are looking at a different theme related to design, development, and beyond. The first episode covered design systems and was already very worthwhile. But I especially enjoyed the latest episode about a topic that has become a bit of a hyped buzzword over the...

Problems come in two flavors. There are the problems we know how to solve, or at least know that there is a solution to them. Like mathematical equations, for example, or beating another chess player in five moves. For those problems, the mission is clear. And then, there are “wicked” problems. Wicked problems are problems that don’t have an...

Although you should not mess with scrolling unless it is really necessary, scrolling an element into view is something that is needed from time to time. In my case, I recently wanted to scroll to the top of a table after a user clicked on the pagination underneath the table. One way to scroll to an element is to use the good old anchor link....

Much like every other weekend, I spent several hours cleaning the apartment this Sunday. Although I enjoyed the result of it, I had always looked at cleaning as a tedious task. Yet, I have come to enjoy it over the last few years. This is because I have started to listen to talks, podcasts, and audiobooks while I’m emptying the dishwasher,...

I knew it would happen again. The fear. The tunnel vision. The blackout. Only a few seconds left. I don’t want to be here. “Next is Matthias, who will play the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 for us.” Applause! I can’t think straight. The tunnel vision is here now. What if it happens again? It will happen again, for sure. But I...

The COVID-19 crisis has temporarily shifted our attention away from the most pressing and life-threatening of all challenges: Climate change. But while we – at least in Europe and other parts of the world with responsible leadership – are on a flattening curve, the issue of the rapidly accelerating climate crisis is surfacing again. The CO2 in...

As we gain more and more experience in building digital products, we tend to think ever so often that we already know what a good solution looks like and how people will use our design. But that’s not true. Far too often, we are assuming that things work in a certain way or that users will understand our intentions – but we’re wrong. A classic...

Remember that thing you wanted to learn? You know what I mean. That thing that keeps on nagging in the back of your head. That thing that comes to mind now and then and reminds you that there are so many things that you could explore. You know it would be interesting and, almost certainly, fun to learn it. But somehow, you never started. Learning...

Ethan Marcotte just wrote a great piece about design systems and how the promise that design systems would hugely improve collaboration between designers and developers never really materialized. Many teams are still working in silos, which means there is a clear separation between design and development teams. And, as Ethan points out, while our...

The kids wanted pancakes. But there was only one egg left. Usually, I use four eggs to make pancakes. But the kids wanted pancakes. So I made pancakes. With only one egg. They turned out delicious. Sometimes, one egg is enough. Sometimes, you should just try although the conditions seem less than ideal. - This is the 32nd post of my 100 days of...

For me, 2020 started with a few posts about writing. I had read and listened to a lot of material on writing and wanted to share some of the things I had learned about how other writers approach writing as a craft, a process, and a passion. So I wrote posts about shitty first drafts, about not caring too much about what others say, and about the...

As a child, teenager, and student, I used to play a lot of football (or soccer, for my American friends). I only played in a club for about two years and had to quit the team because of an injured knee, but I always loved playing with my friends during my leisure time. Spending a whole afternoon running up and down a badly mowed pitch was pure...

Sarah Drasner just published a fabulous article, In Defense of a Fussy Website, in which she makes the case that we should all design and build websites again that are a joy to visit. Sites with those little details that make you smile, with small delights and touches that really make users...

Milton Glaser, one of the greatest graphic designers of our time, passed away this Friday on his 91st birthday in New York City. Well known for his 1977 “I ❤️ NY” logo and his Bob Dylan poster with psychedelic hair, Glaser changed the visual culture in the 1960s and 70s with his brightly colored, expressive designs and “brought wit, whimsy,...

If you have kids, you think a lot about how the world might look like when they grow up. At the moment, the world is being transformed on so many levels and so rapidly that, as Seth Godin argues, we might be in the middle of a change that is as big as the change that marked the end of modernity. This new era we are heading into is, for one,...

Do you know the feeling when you know an album so well that you always anticipate the next bar of a song and when the song ends, you can already hear the first beats of the next song playing in your head? The best albums are the ones, where it might take quite a while to get to know the music that well, but even when you seem to know every line...

Tim Ferriss just released the audiobook of his book “Tribe of Mentors”. The book contains the answers to 11 questions he sent out to hundreds of the world’s “top performers” from across all possible fields of expertise. In the introduction, which you can also listen to in Tim’s latest podcast episode, he talks about how the book came into being...

Writing HTML is hard. At least writing semantically sound, valid HTML is. This might come as a surprise to those who only scratch the surface of what HTML really can do. What can be so hard about a few elements, right? At least it isn’t an object-oriented, multi-paradigm programming language. But as soon as you start to dig deeper you realize...

It is one of the most emotional and finest moments in “The Last Dance”, Netflix’s documentary series about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls of the Nineties: The interviewer asks Michael Jordan if he thinks that the intensity at which he played the game has come at the expense of being perceived as a nice guy. Jordan looks a bit surprised and...

One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is how to know when something is ready. A website, an article, a song, a painting – whatever it is, how do you know that it is ripe for publication? There are many answers to that question and maybe everyone of us has their own answer. When it is complete. When there nothing more to add. When there...

How many connections are there in a team of two? One, of course. In a team of three? Three, of course. A team of four? Six. A team of five? Ten, already. What about a team of ten people? A team of ten has 66 connections. Yes, sixty-six. This basic concept of network theory – that the number of connections between nodes in a network increases...

There are books that you read once and never open again. There are even more books that you start to read and somehow never finish. I have a lot of them. And there are book with a lot of images in them, so there is not so much to read. I have a lot of them, too. But then, there are a few books which tend to pay you a visit from time to time....

Back in design school, I spent days – weeks even – trying to crack the secret code of a given topic. Typography? Once I know all the rules and all the typefaces, I’ll be a well-versed typographer. Logo design? Once I have looked at enough logos to understand what the essence of logo design is, I’ll be able to design great logos myself. Flash?...

There was this strange sound. Clack, clack, clack! Was it coming from the tires? Clack, clack, clack! Just a few minutes after we hit the Autobahn to drive back home all the way across Germany. Clack, clack, clack! Maybe I’ll better have a look. I pulled over and stopped at the filling station. I was lucky: There was a mechanic from the ADAC, the...

My father likes to say: “Man gewöhnt sich an jeden Scheiß,“ which translates to something along the lines of “eventually, any shit grows on you.“ He often uses it jokingly and with a wink, yet there is much truth to it. As human beings, we are extremely good at growing accustomed to our current situation and the things that are happening around...

Today I learned! Jeremy Keith wrote about an interesting detail about CSS custom properties, also known as CSS variables, that he learned from Lea Verou: They don’t support the Cascade when a value is invalid. Or, as Lea writes in her article Hybrid positioning with CSS variables and...

It’s been over a year now that, after reading an article by Ethan Marcotte, I wrote about why we all need to do better to make the Web truly inclusive. Ethan had shared the results of WebAIM’s 2019 study covering the state of accessibility on the Web and the results were devastating: 97.8 % of the sites had detectable WCAG 2 failures. The study...

“Just be authentic!” I’m sure you’ve heard that advice before. Maybe you also know some people, who proudly proclaim that they always like to be authentic and always openly tell people what they are thinking. There is only one problem with being authentic: It can be highly disrespectful, overly selfish, hurtful even, and, in the end,...

My late grandmother was born in 1913. When she was my age, she had already lived through the Great Depression, the Spanish flu pandemic, hyperinflation, the fall of the Weimar Republic, two world wars, and, with the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, the darkest chapter in German history. She had also witnessed the birth of radio, television,...

Life is full of risks. The risk to make a wrong decision. The risk to lose. The risk to fail. The risk to mention too many risks in the first paragraph of a blog post. There are some risks that most of us understandably want to reduce as much as possible. The risk to die, for example. Then, there are also risks worth taking. Why are they “worth”...

Joschi Kuphal shared an amazing video on Twitter this morning. It is a documentary about an exercise that the school teacher, lecturer, and diversity trainer Jane Elliot devised in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The exercise is called “Blue Eyes–Brown Eyes” and in it, Elliot uses the eye color of students to...

One of the reasons for Apple’s success in the years when they invented breakthrough products like the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, was the way they created their products. At the heart of the design process was the design studio where lots of models and prototypes of everything the team had in the works would always be on display. As Walter...

I love shortcuts. Not only keyboard shortcuts but also those in real life: When there is the opportunity to solve a problem quicker and more easily by taking a different path. Such a shortcut might be a new technique that you discovered or a new tool that makes your life easier. Such a shortcut might be possible through automation or a clever...

Run the Jewels released “RTJ4” today, two days ahead of schedule because of recent events in the US. It is available on the streaming services, but also as a free download again. You can combine the download with a donation that will go to the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Fund, a network of lawyers, legal workers, and law students...

Color on the Web has seen many iterations. When I started to fall in love with the Web in the late nineties, every self-respecting web designer was using web-safe colors. Although it can be argued that they never really worked, because colors still looked different on different screens, web-safe colors were at least the attempt to achieve...

Let’s talk about web fonts. More specifically, about a mistake I have seen developers make in several projects for different agencies: Embedding a web font in the wrong way. In each of the cases, the service they were using was Fonts.com, and given the service’s popularity, this quick tip might come in handy for some people. So what’s the...

Nature changes. Culture changes. Technologies change. Societies change. Markets change. We change. Change is everywhere around us. All the time. Inevitably. Change is a constant. The only problem with this is that human beings generally don’t like change that much. We are even afraid of it. So once something seems to work well for...

It is 1995. A 13-year old boy in Germany is playing basketball in his room. The walls are plastered with posters. Michael Jordan (life-sized), Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Shaq, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Sean Kemp, David Robinson, and many more are all watching him play. He dreams of moving to the US one day, this great country full of...

Ask any business owner or manager what could be improved about the operations of their company and they will very likely tell you that they are working on “improving efficiency”. They are switching from waterfall to agile to improve efficiency. They are tracking tasks and measuring progress to improve efficiency. They are trying to establish...

Type specimens are as old as printed typography. They were originally designed by printers and type foundries as documents that would show typefaces in use across different applications and with all available weights and styles, so that potential customers could evaluate a typeface’s inherent qualities and stylistic capabilities. Type specimens...

A few weeks ago, my son came up to me and asked if I wanted to guess which song he was about to clap. I agreed, sure that it couldn’t be so hard to guess. But as soon as he started, I didn’t have the slightest idea which song he was clapping. He became a bit frustrated and insisted that I should try harder. I tried again, but I was as clueless as...

So, I haven’t written in a while. Or, to be more precise: I haven’t finished a written piece in a while. That is not because I didn’t write at all, but in the current situation, I simply decided to prioritize family and work over writing, which is still kind of a hobby for me. I started a few posts from time to time but then didn’t take the time...

And then, the display of my MacBook Pro broke. So after five years, it was time to get a new machine, after all. Every time this had happened in the past, I took the opportunity to start from scratch and do a fresh install of all the software I in fact use and need. Consequently, I spent the past couple of days setting up my new Mac. As part of...

They say that writers come in two flavors: Diamond polishers and vomit drafters. Let me explain. Have you ever been sitting at your desk, trying to write one single paragraph, but then found yourself meticulously fiddling with every single shred of a word and each and every sentence until you finally got rid of the feeling that something just...

You might have heard of this quote from Marty Neumeier, author of The Brand Gap: A brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is. What he means by that is that no matter how much you want your product...

Yesterday, Chris Coyier asked a question on Twitter: “Who’s gonna read your personal blog because it has an RSS feed? I’m gonna read your personal blog because it has an RSS feed.” Chris then attached a screen recording of him scrolling down his massive list of RSS feeds of personal...

Now that a lot of people are publishing their year in review posts, I decided to write my first one, too, this time. And if only to be able to look back later on what I did and thought about in 2019. Writing a full “decade in review” post seemed a bit too excessive to me, though. So much has happened in the last ten years! Here is the TL;DR: I...

I don’t know about you but many people seem to think that accomplished writers are able to sit down at their desks and immediately start writing in beautiful, fully formed sentences and paragraphs. In reality, though, nothing could be farther from the truth. As Anne Lamott points out in her seminal book on writing, Bird by Bird, almost all...

Since I started writing on this site about three years ago, I have been thinking a lot about writing as a craft. What are the qualities of good writing? Are there any recipes or best practices to become a better writer? What are the tricks and habits of great writers? And so, although I knew that there are no magic recipes that guarantee a...

In a recent conversation with Tim Ferriss, Ben Horowitz, a co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, shared a line he likes to use in management: Sharp­en the contradictions.” What he means by this...

For those of us who work on and with the Web, the idea that the Web has its very own inherent qualities is not new. Whether you read John Allsopp’s seminal article “A Dao of Web Design” or watch Frank Chimero’s elaborate talk “The Web’s Grain”, the fundamental concept is the same: Instead of approaching building for the Web as if it was one of...

How often should you publish work on your site? Once a month? Once a week? Daily even? When you ask other creators or look on the Web for advice, you will get the most diverse answers to this question. People who post daily will tell you that, of course, you should post daily to stimulate your brain and train your writing skills or other creative...

What would happen if we really accepted the fact that control is an illusion? How would this change the way we approach projects? Making plans would always imply the possibility of failure and the willingness to adapt to new insights and shifting contexts. Leading a team would mean providing a safe space to curiously explore, imagine, and build...

With every project we start and every problem we are trying to solve, we are embarking on a journey. And although we might have a goal, this journey is still a journey into the unknown. Even with the most proper planning we won’t be able to predict and factor in all the obstacles that might lie in front of us. There are simply too many unknowns...

The best books are the ones that change your perspective, your view on the world, in such a profound way that you don’t look at it the same way ever again. To illustrate this fundamental switch, Jeremy Keith likes to give the example of ducks and dog masks. All ducks look perfectly normal at first, until you are told that all ducks are actually...

Ernest Hemingway did it. Successful entrepreneurs like Richard Branson do it. And I’m quite sure, even most of the former US presidents did it: Taking notes. As I wrote earlier this week, note-taking is not only important because you get stuff out of your head and make sure to remember it later. But you will also somehow enable your mind to think...

Whenever you have an idea, write it down. Immediately. It doesn’t matter how big or small you think the idea is. Just write it down. It doesn’t matter if you have other things to do, like changing diapers, fixing that horrible JengaScript bug, or debating on Twitter whether everyone’s a designer. There is always something that seems more...

Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. I enjoy the new perspectives they provide, especially interviews. Debbie Millman’s legendary design matters podcast, for example, is only one of many great shows where the host manages to stimulate a conversation that yields the most amazing stories and opinions. Another such conversation is the...

Social media in 2019 is a garbage fire. What started out as the most promising development in the history of the Web – the participation of users in the creation of content and online dialogue at scale – has turned into a swamp of sensation, lies, hate speech, harassment, and noise. Your Unfriendly Neighborhood Craving for attention and...

Rep­e­ti­tio est mater studiorum. Repetition is the mother of learning. You might have heard this old Latin proverb before, and it’s true: Repetition is key to memorizing something because with each iteration your brain builds up stronger connections in the neuronal networks which...

Vulnerability is still highly stigmatized in our society, particularly in business. If you want to be successful in life you better be brave and don’t show any signs of weakness. And vulnerability is such a weakness. At least that’s what many of us are being taught from a very young age. Brené Brown, a Research Professor at the University of...

It’s hard to decide what’s right and what’s wrong these days. There are so many people and so many organizations with so many different interests that it’s easy to get overwhelmed and to be fooled into believing the wrong things. And so it seems to be an option to give up and not have an opinion at all about many of the topics that seem to be...

Although some designers dislike them, because, at a first glance, they seem to be too overwhelming and too densely packed with information: If you design them carefully, mega menus work really well for site navigation. They convey site structure, present your users all available options at a glance, and thus provide a convenient and fast way of...

When I was in school our art teacher used to say: Kopieren heißt kapieren. Which translates to something along the lines of “copying something means understanding it.” What he meant is that if you want to...

A few days ago, John Maeda, Head of Computational Design and Inclusion at Automattic, shared this tweet: Good design is about clarity over style, and accountability over ego.— John Maeda (@johnmaeda) March 14, 2019 He is right. We are...

Yesterday, the Web turned 30. Thirty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a document called “Information Management, A Proposal,” his formulation of an information network for sharing and exchanging information at CERN, marking the birth of the World Wide Web. Three decades later, the Web has permeated every pore of our societies and daily lives...

People like to stick to their habits. Why? Because it is safer where they are now. Following a routine, a trusted pattern, reduces uncertainty about the future and thus alleviates fear. Everything is plannable and manageable. Tomorrow is safe. The problem is: The future is unstable and change is inevitable. So each plan you make can only be a...

If you’re riding through the suburbs in a train, you might recognize that houses usually come in two flavors. For one, there are the townhouses: Tightly packed, not too large, repeatable, convenient. And then there are the individual single-family homes which come in all forms and sizes, small or large, each one unique. Both types of houses have...

When you are developing a statement about something, this advice can be useful: If you can turn the statement into the opposite and it sounds like the most ridiculous thing on earth, chances are that your original statement isn’t that distinctive. For example, if you were to say about your service that it provides “a great user experience”, the...

I spent the last days of 2018 listening to an amazing podcast: Stephen Fry’s Great Leap Years brilliantly tells the story of the evolution of information technology throughout human history – from Johannes Gutenberg inventing the printing press to Alexander Graham Bell and his Bell Labs changing the course of history to Google’s AI DeepMind...

We all know that we should backup our data regularly and ideally with some sort of backup strategy but let’s be honest: Many of us don’t. Over the years, I got a bit better, but after listening to one of the highly recommended episodes of the (mainly German) Working Draft podcast, it became obvious to me that there was still a lot of room for...

I have a confession to make. I’ve become utterly terrible at finishing books, especially non-fiction. I once even published a list of books I will definitely maybe read one day. The reasons why I don't finish them are manifold: For one, there is always some work to do that seems more important than to sit down and read a book. Then, I have a...

I recently listened to an interesting episode of the podcast “The Design of Business | The Business of Design”, in which Jessica Helfand and Michael Bierut talked with Mariana Amatullo, who teaches strategic design and management at Parsons School of Design at The New School in New York. One of Mariana’s fields of research is how and when design...

This morning, I read a tweet by Dave Rupert that made me smile: Hey, Internet. My son loves drawing. This is great. My house is filled with 1000s of pieces of paper tho. This is not so great. Has anyone converted a ~5yo to an iPad or Surface Go for drawing? Does it work? Is there another...

Yesterday, I shared some advice by Seth Godin from an interview with Chase Jarvis. Today, I’ll do the same again, but not because I’m lazy (at least not this time) but because I think it’s a great follow up and just as actionable and useful advice. It goes like this: Whenever you need to communicate, write, build, or create something, always ask...

Last weekend, I listened to a highly interesting episode of the Chase Jarvis Live Show, a podcast featuring interviews with creators, innovators, and entrepreneurs. The episode’s guest was Seth Godin and as you might expect, he dropped a lot of knowledge and good advice. And while there was a whole lot more to take away from the interview, I...

I spent two weeks in August visiting my sister in New York. It was the first time for me in New York and one of the things that impressed me the most, was the perpetual movement of the city. This city really never sleeps. Everything seems to constantly evolve and change. Even such an evolved and established system as the Subway, which is now 114...

Recently, I read two posts within a few days that both resonated a lot with me. The topic of both pieces was the same: Writing. Or more specifically, writing on your own site. The first piece, “Just write.”, is by Sara Soueidan and if you haven’t read the article, I highly encourage you to do so. Besides the general advice that you should just...

Prototyping has been captivating me for quite some time now. Since 2012, I teach Interface Prototyping at the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel, Germany and especially over the last few years, I could watch prototyping slowly attracting more and more attention in the Web community. And at the moment, the topic is gathering even...

Prototyping.news: For a monthly update on the latest articles, tools, and other resources about prototyping for the Web, sign up for my new newsletter prototyping.news. The Illusion of Control We have a problem. And I fear that many of us still don't see it. And those who do see it are still...

Edit on 09-04-2022: This article is quite old and I have since realized that the conclusion I draw in the article was wrong. The upsides of using EMs as the unit in your media queries, especially in terms of accessibility, far outweigh the one downside I described in the post. So please use relative units for all media queries going...

In all of the posts I published on my site so far, I’ve never shared a single line of code. But since this is going to change with the next article on pattern libraries, I spent a little time over the weekend implementing syntax highlighting for my posts. I settled on Lea Verou’s Prism, a lightweight, extensible syntax highlighter for the Web. It...

CSS Grid is here and I bet you also heard that it's a game changer that could once more completely change the way we approach web layout. A New Kid on the Block The new layout module is a great achievement for all people involved in the process and also the fast implementation by browser makers is worth mentioning: It is the first time that such...

Once more, net neutrality is under attack. This founding principle of the open web guarantees that all data packages are treated equally – regardless of content or the amount of money you pay your service provider. Net neutrality keeps the internet open and uncensored and by that fosters freedom of speech and an exchange of ideas. Today, 12 July,...

When we design and build things for the web, it’s tempting to fall into the trap of doing things the We-have-always-done-it-that-way™. And this doesn't necessarily have to be our fault alone. We are all part of project teams and work environments that shape our perception of what viable solutions are and which achievements we are satisfied with....

Despite the proclaimed death of RSS I know a lot of people who still love to read their feeds on a daily basis. So feeds are definitely here to stay and providing your readers with different ways of consuming your content is also an important part of a website, especially if you consider yourself (and your site) part of the open web. Recently,...

This is the second article of a two-part series on digital citizenship. Part one was all about online privacy and how to protect it, this second part focuses on how we can build and promote tools that enable an open, independent, and resilient web. “I need your clothes, your boots and your [data].” If you're being pessimistic (some even would...

This is the first article of a two-part series on digital citizenship. Part one is about online privacy and how to protect it, the second part focuses on how we can build and promote tools that enable an open, independent, and resilient web. Invasion of the Data Snatchers Global surveillance is real and it’s not going anywhere. On January 20th,...

As we are moving from pages to patterns when creating and documenting websites and other digital design systems, pattern libraries are becoming increasingly popular. Ethan Marcotte, who famously coined the term responsive web design, recently published a nice little piece about pattern libraries on his website, in which he...

Today, I added a basic weighted search to this site. You can find it here and in the footer below. Providing a search functionality is one of the pillars of an IndieWeb site, mainly because it offers improved access to the content you create and own on your site. But: Search on personal and corporate sites is a somewhat difficult topic. On the...

Tantek Çelik wrote a post in 2015 called “js;dr = JavaScript required; Didn’t Read.”. It was about a fundamental problem regarding sites that depend on JavaScript for rendering content: Indexability. Although search engines got much much better at indexing JS, it still remains a major problem, which I learned the hard way a few weeks ago. On...

It’s that time of year when most people publish their „books I have read“ articles. Tim for example, and also Jeremy. I for myself am what you could call a book taster. There are a lot of books on my shelves that I started reading but somehow never finished. But this year this is going to change. Maybe. So here’s my list of books I want to finish...

In May 2016, I flipped the switch for the redesign of this site. My last site was never updated once it was online, so I wanted to do things differently this time. Inspired by numerous people who use their web presence to share and promote their thoughts and ideas, I decided to start writing on my own site. To explore things, to share with others...

Once again, beyond tellerrand, a great conference about design, development, and all things web, took place in the cold November air of Berlin. After walking over from Bahnhof Friedrichstraße to the Admiralspalast, an historical theater opened in 1910, where the spirit of the Golden Twenties is still present, the exited visitor is welcomed by a...

Do you remember when you wrote your first line of HTML? Watching my students sweat blood while I introduce them to the basics of HTML and CSS always reminds me of my teenage self, learning the ropes of HTML back in the 1990s. Although I loved to fiddle around with my computer (which included tinkering with config.sys and autoexec.bat) my real...

Lately, I travelled to Düsseldorf and attended the IndieWebCamp and also beyond tellerrand, a conference about design, development, and all things web. I’ll say it plain: If you never have been at a conference, you should go. If you never have been at beyond tellerrand, you should definitely go as soon as possible. Because it's an event that is...

Far too long, we have thought of web projects like rocket launches: You plan, design, and build the thing, maybe you train people how to steer it, and most of all you sweat blood only to be prepared on that magical date: launch day. That one decisive moment when your rocket takes off – flawless, perfect – with all eyes on the final product and...