The state of typography in design systems

How 94 designers handle their type in practice.

CSS-Tricks has a new owner

“CSS-Tricks is an independent site once again!”

Fast is a design decision

Building is cheap now, but waiting never was.

Easy is taken

Why AI fundamentally can’t make work easy.

The Lethal Trifecta

Protecting agents from a common prompt injection attack.

Best free fonts of 2026

From crowd favorites to hidden gems.

User Experience Salaries & Calculator 2026

Salaries of UX professionals from around the world.

Come back to Firefox

“The Internet you loved is still here.”

The PHP panic has not turned to patching

93.6% of systems remain exposed to PHP2Shell.

The state of AI in design systems

What design teams do to stop AI drifting.

Getting good at AI takes time and practice

“It’s like working with a really weird person.”

Cloaking is dead, long live cloaking

“Unfortunately, cloaking is fashionable again.”

The AI cost of JavaScript frameworks

Which frameworks are better for agents?

Website migration costs are going to zero

When leaving a CMS is easy, staying must be earned.

Useful @custom-media presets

I can’t wait to use custom media queries.”

Tuning your AI instrument

Why “make this beautiful” works on my machine and not on yours.

The web can’t afford a JS runtime monoculture

What took over browsers is now consolidating the server.

Headless content marketing

A new (old) strategy for search.

Frankenstein‘s pattern

When design system components get stitched together.

“Design isn’t what happens after you understand the problem. Design is how you understand the problem.”

A practical AI search visibility check

Compare your Google and AI Mode visibility.

SEO + AEO = OAO (Organic Answers Optimization)

“It’s time for a new acronym to enter the marketing lexicon.”

Who the f*ck is admin?

Why bylines matter more now AI can fake expertise.

Make your creative process repeatable

Figma Weave turns AI generation into reusable team workflows.

Experience Design

Dropping the “User” from “User Experience”.

Only now will we begin to see how much vibe-coded technical debt non-programmers have been accumulating over the past two years when their apps start falling apart.”

Vibe Coding

“Maybe I shouldn’t have vibe-coded my costume.”

Bouuuuuh Villain

Lift Type’s spooky Halloween font for 2026.

“The more we focus on a particular technology, the more we lose sight of what normal people actually care about.”

NameThatUI

A visual dictionary of user interfaces.

Hallmark

“The design skill that ends AI slop.“

Snitch

An application firewall and real-time network monitor.

The iPhone Duo and web development

Building web layouts that respect the fold.

Time to rethink software security?

AI makes attacks easier and defense harder.

Context is the new interface

“The future of design lies in what happens between products.”

Dark patterns in online shopping

21 unethical practices spotted in over a decade.

New to the web platform (October 2026)

Baseline scroll-driven animations, wider JPEG XL support, and more.

Affinity finally comes to iPad

Illustrators get a free all-in-one app.

A select should tell you something

Customizable HTML ‘select’ options make choices easier.

CSS math dance

Dancing through CSS math function curves.

Chat is the future

Plain language for direction, controls to refine.

Death comes for XSLT

A beloved web technology awaits its execution.

Everyone’s a builder

But who decides what should ship?

Introducing adaptive dark mode

Safari brings a dark look to light pages on request.

robots.txt for AI crawlers

You can allow AI search, but disallow AI training.

Agents struggle with bad UX too

Why they’re unusually honest usability testers.

The next dependency problem

Your AI agents rely on dependencies too.

They have no more patience

“Build the simple webpage you mentioned a year ago.”

Why review AI-generated code?

“Better to use AI to create better tooling.”

Cloudflare Radar’s Zero Wire

Briefings on urgent vulnerabilities and threats.

AI can generate the interface

Not every moment wants confetti.

Site Seeing

Test your responsive design in real-world contexts.

Modern CSS might make frontends harder

What replacing JavaScript with CSS really costs.

Taming typography

Building a modern CSS reset.

The card skimmer inside your jQuery

SuperPixel replaces your payment form with a fake.

Chips and liquid information architecture

Navigation that flows with time, context, and person.

Groundbreaking SVG upgrade is approaching

CSS variables will soon reach inside your SVGs.

AI lets you pick three

Good, fast, cheap, coherent.

How to use AI without using AI

Getting the right balance of man and machine.

Just put some HTML on the web

“It’s a good idea to have less stuff that can be hacked.”

Theme switching made easy

A full-featured theme picker web component.

If you love a website, back it up

A hands-on guide to saving your favorite websites.

The small web is huge

“It’s larger than you can comfortably fit in your head.”

playgrnd

Tiny tools for making weird, beautiful things.

Interface Cheat Sheet

Practical rules that make interfaces feel finished.

Is software solved?

Measuring AI’s progress toward autonomous software engineering.

Tokenizer Mono

A font to visualize AI tokens as you type them.

Otherwise you’re just a machine

“AI is getting better at design. Designers should too.”

Ship it!

Use new CSS without breaking anything.

You already don’t understand your code

The layers kept changing, but your code didn’t.

What replaces shrinking organic search?

Email and paid search grow as organic fades.

CSS-Tricks, version 20

“We just pushed a site redesign.”

“Our bottleneck today is our attention. So we need to optimize our systems around our attention, not around agents producing more stuff.”

Storybook 11 beta

Agent-ready components for modern frontends.

Introduction to usability

Jakob Nielsen’s classic primer, freshly updated.

“x is dead” is dead

Design tools didn’t die, the shared stack did.

Open web traffic fell 24% in 5 years

25% more web users, yet zero traffic growth.

The future of SEO

Where search is heading in 2027.

Paperwall

A graphics design kit that runs offline in your browser.

How to dismiss a popover or dialog

Closing overlays the way users already expect.

.eat, .fly, and .here

The web just got three new top-level domains.

“A few years ago, if you told someone you were a software developer, they said something like ‘oh, that must be complicated, I have no idea how that works.’ Now they say ‘oh, you do software? I do too, I made a tool yesterday while watching TV.’”

Design engineering skills

Practical skills for your AI agents and Figma.

Introducing the Cross-Origin Storage API

Sharing big files across websites by hash.

FaceTypes

Hundreds of handpicked open fonts worth using.

Google releases Modern Web Guidance 1.0

The setup that avoids unwanted code.

WebMCP explained with a to-do app

When agents stop guessing what a webpage does.

Building an AI-ready design system library

“Code is the source of truth. Figma mirrors it.”

MCP is dead simple

“And that’s exactly the problem.”

Designing layouts with personality

Distinctive grids begin with a company’s story.

Every click has a price now

Cost is the new design material.

Interfaces that understand what we want

How AI decision models turn user intent into actions.

Getting much traffic from aocr.org?

That’s ByteDance crawling your website.

Responsible for code you don’t understand?

“AI’s primary purpose is to deskill its operators.”

Link text

“Accessible link text benefits everyone.”

“If you want to build a product that people will use, find something that people already do and make it less painful.”

Move fast and make things

What we owe the people using AI-built things.

Making a website in 2026

How six AI tools created one small website.

Let AI do what AI does best

How AI improved every app during a camping weekend.

Compound naming conventions

From camelCase to SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE in one sketch.