The best fonts of 2021, as chosen by type designers

Serifs, scripts, revivals, experiments, and a DIY typeface.

Learnings from 30 months of building a community

What to keep in mind when running a community.

CRUX 4th edition

This issue of the UX magazine focuses on communication and teamwork.

Pico.css

Minimal CSS Framework for semantic HTML.

Oh spanning tree

Christmas tree, made with network devices.

Santa was here

Seasonal illustration, made with CSS.

Smolr tree lake

Winter landscape, made with JavaScript.

Smoothly reverting CSS animations

A couple of solutions to revert an animation on hover.

Cloudflare Radar’s 2021 Year In Review

What changed on the internet throughout this past year.

W

A micro WebGL2 framework.

The case for building more dynamic landing pages

“Mini-product experiences” can be a game-changer.

“Becoming a good engineer is about collecting experience. Each project, even small ones, is a chance to add new techniques and tools to your toolbox.”

Text Balancer

A fast text wrap balancer for multi-line headlines on the web.

CSS in 2022

What we can expect from CSS and browsers in 2022.

Design system FAQ: adoption and implementation

Too much talking on which tool, too little on who’s using it.

The UX Research Field Guide

User research doesn’t have to be that hard.

Loominous

An online tool for weaving pattern making.

“The number one rule for those creating anything worthwhile: it will take significantly longer than you think.”

hwb(): a color notation for humans?

What the upcoming CSS color notation is all about.

:has() has landed in Safari

“It’s great to see Safari leading the way on new CSS features.”

My approach to optimization

A high level philosophy on how to build optimal software.

Predictions for the Jamstack in 2022

What to expect from Jamstack development next year.

The year in type

A look back at some of the highlights of 2021.

Review of UI design trends for web and mobile in 2021

Tubik’s annual review of design trends.

Top 10 UX articles of 2021

The most read UX articles 2021 from the Nielsen Norman Group.

5 internet technology predictions for 2022

Outlook from a developer perspective.

My SEO and growth predictions for 2022

What trends shape organic growth and customer acquisition next year?

“Data is just the past pretending to know the future.”

“If you’re a maker of the web, consider your New Year’s resolution to be making usable, accessible, performant sites/applications.”

“If you’re making New Year resolutions, let ‘Publish my content on my own site’ be one of them? And ‘Provide an RSS feed for my blog/content’ be another?”

Happy New Year!

Let’s render anything as HTML checkboxes.

Nicole He’s internet realm

The creative technologist’s anything but ordinary personal website.

A tribute to the useless web

A hand-drawn Rube Goldberg machine, animated with JavaScript.

Snowflake Generator

It cycles snowflakes from seeds to their final state, thanks to WebGL.

Fluid Type Scale Calculator

Generate CSS font size variables for a fluid type scale.

The Colors of Motion

Visualization of popular movies as color timelines.

“If there’s one rule to live and die by in copywriting, it’s to always center what matters to the customer, not you.”

Manrope

A lightweight and modern sans-serif font for everyone.

Consider SQLite

What if SQLite would do just fine for your next web project?

UI is just micro UX

Learn to value both as a complete UX experience.

WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool

Make your web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities.

Vanta.js

Animated 3D backgrounds for your website.

The good, the bad and the toggle

A dissection of the toggle, checkbox, radio button, and related components.

My favorite design articles of 2021

Short reviews of a bunch of articles covering product design.

“API design is product design.”

2021 JavaScript Rising Stars

Say hello to the era of the meta frameworks.

The web doesn’t have version numbers

Terms like ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘web3’ are just for marketing.

Be plainspoken

The power of communicating in an unadorned manner.

Codrops 2021

Last year’s highlights from the inspirational blog for front-end developers.

web3 is centralized

“web3 is actually more centralized than the web it seeks to replace.”

Hook, line, and sinker

A model for crafting successful, viral content.

MenubarX

A Mac browser with which you can pin webpages to the menu bar.

Pastel

A command-line tool to generate, analyze, convert and manipulate colors.

Pounx

A browser-based 3D design tool with real-time collaboration.

Unlock

A platform for developers to sell, license and distribute their software.

Accessible heading structure

What is good for your reader is also good for your SEO.

Positive friction

How you can use it to create better user experiences.

Why might you run your own DNS server?

There are many reasons to run a DNS server or resolver.

Creating great content is a process, not a project

The pressure to “get it right” doesn’t have to be so rough.

Bad ideas in visualization

Thought-provoking analysis of some data visualization practices.

The many methods for using SVG icons

Techniques for particular situations and use-cases.

Tauri

A toolkit to build desktop applications with a web frontend.

COLRv1 color gradient vector fonts in Chrome 98

Chrome now helps to make color fonts widespread.

Washed up

Are technologies marketed under "web3" an evolution of the web?

Crypto: the good, the bad and the ugly

What to expect from cryptocurrencies in the world wide web?

My first impressions of web3

The 2021 Web Almanac

HTTP Archive’s latest web report is now available as Google Book.

Your CSS reset needs text-size-adjust (probably)

How to prevent an odd rendering issue in Mobile Safari.

Non Boring Gradients

Generate beautiful gradients with different interpolation spaces.

The future of color in CSS

New ways to create designs with brighter and more vibrant colors.

“Empathy as an engineer is a superpower. Caring about those you work with will do more for your career than writing beautiful defect-free code.”

Learn to implement SEO in your CMS

Guides, resources, and tips for popular content management systems.

AngularJS reaches end of life

Users can move forward with the TypeScript-based Angular framework.

“The most effective presentation skill is backchanneling, which is where you shop your idea to each stakeholder well ahead of time and get verbal buy-in. Presenting then becomes a cake walk because it’ll essentially be a formality.”

Shapefest

A comprehensive library of high resolution 3D shapes.

Web Accessibility Cheat Sheet

Guidelines to make your website more usable.

New on the web: programmatically open a native date picker

Say hello to elem.showPicker().

Gradient Generator

A tool to create vivid gradients with different color modes.

What I learnt from analyzing 7 million log file events

SEO insights from a ten months project.

Lottie Animations

A huge collection of ready to use interactive animations.

This is WCAG

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines in plain language.

Video to GIF converter

Adobe’s online converter to transform your videos into GIFs.

Chrome will disable modifying ‘document.domain’ to relax the same-origin policy

If your website relies on it, your action is required.

How not to learn TypeScript

What to keep in mind when getting started with TypeScript.

“I’m concerned when I see someone’s title looking like UX Designer, Service Designer and Content Designer. Each one is already a full time job, how can someone do the three?”

Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue

The original blue was chosen with care and through testing.

Autonomy, relatedness, and competence in UX design

Design from the perspective of three basic psychological needs.

From TypeScript to ReScript

Advantages and drawbacks of the ReScript programming language.

Latest Remote Jobs Trends and Stats

Insights on remote jobs trends, updated daily.

PHP in 2022

Exciting times, let’s take a look at modern-day PHP.

Top pens of 2021

100 amazing design and front-end creations.

Announcing Parcel CSS

A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier written in Rust.

Figma to Framer

A plugin to copy and paste designs from Figma to Framer.

What is the future of UX?

Jesse James Garrett about the evolution of UX design.

Boolean attributes in HTML and ARIA: what’s the difference?

There are some important distinctions to keep in mind.

Convert SVG to Lottie

A tool to transform your SVG icons or illustrations to Lottie animations.

“Writing good release notes is one of the most important steps of a release: distilling everything down to save others time and giving proper credit and thanks.“

Add RSS feeds to your website to keep your core readers engaged

The power of a well established web technology.

Flow and Redacted

Google Fonts for your wireframes and other early-stage designs.

What even is a web browser?

The question seems silly at first but is surprisingly interesting.