Bookmarks
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J. Paul Getty Museum Collection
Explore the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center and the Getty Villa.
Apply the 'open content' filter for free images.
Imitative Photography
This guy shows how you can learn by imitating the good way.
Exploring photography through imitation!
Until you're mastering a craft, imitation is a totally okay way to practice it.
CSS for printing to paper
Every time I open an Adobe application I get confused about what year it is and why everything is like when I was a young student. If I ever have to typeset a book, I probably will try to do it with HTML and this guide.
DONOTREPLY.CARDS
DO NOT TELL ME WHY THE THING I LIKE IS BAD
404s — gallery of error 404 page designs
Arguably it's time we let go of calling it a 404, but I think it's kind of cute exactly this one is the most famous HTTP status code.
A place to find all those lost pages.
Web development for absolute beginners
This series takes the magic out of web development that many can find so intimidating.
Hello! I’m Denis.
I’m a software engineer based in Berlin, Germany. My pronouns are he/him. You might be interested in my weeknotes, or perhaps my perpetual interests. In the past, I’ve worked for SoundCloud, BCG Digital Ventures, Pitch, Shopify, and others.
Aftel
I made this countdown timer to run workshops, but it turns out to be popular among educators and students too.
If you regularly use Aftel, you’re gonna love that you can do everything with keyboard shortcuts!
feed generator
Somehow I always run into issues with other tools generating RSS feeds automatically, so I'm going to try this one to make my own template next time.
Fluid type scale calculator
This table lists font size values in px for your type scales at the min and max viewport widths entered above. Add a viewport width to show its corresponding font size values.
I've been using this page for a while now, but Proportio.app looks like a more complete and easier alternative.
Proportio.app
Tool for creating proportional scales for typography, iconography, spacing, and components in design systems.
Better Images of AI
What’s the problem with current tropes? Abstract, futuristic or science-fiction-inspired images of AI hinder the understanding of the technology’s already significant societal and environmental impacts.
VFD Displays
Posy makes beautiful and often nostalgic videos about things that he cares about, but very few others. And makes them interesting.
VFD or Vacuum Fluorescent Display valhalla...
Maximilian Torggler
Max is putting the personal back into personal website.
Poline
I don't understand how it works and I haven't found a way to make it useful, but it's pretty and fun to play with.
"poline" is an enigmatic color palette generator, that harnesses the mystical witchcraft of polar coordinates. Its methodology, defying conventional color science, is steeped in the esoteric knowledge of the early 20th century.
UXers and Product Managers Both Say Others Intrude on Their Work
Summary: A survey of 372 UX and PM professionals shows that duplicative work is frequent and generates confusion and inefficiency. The first four questions are discussed in this article. A companion article covers the last two.
Smooth Shadow
Make a smooth css shadow
100 ways to slightly improve your life without really trying
1 Exercise on a Monday night (nothing fun happens on a Monday night).2 On the fence about a purchase? Wait 72 hours before you buy it.3 Tip: the quickest supermarket queue is always behind the fullest trolley (greeting, paying and packing take longer than you think).4 Bring fruit to work.
Floor796
An ever-expanding animation scene depicting the everyday life of the 796th floor of the huge space station
Annual Performance Reviews Ruin Everything
There is hardly an area of work, psychological safety, growth, collaboration or equity that annual performance reviews don’t undermine. Think I’m exaggerating? Have I got a (long) post for you….
How to pick the least wrong colors
I do have a formal design education, but I can very much relate with Matthew's feeling incompetent and love how he managed to turn a ton of research into an algorithm.
I’m a self-taught designer.1 This has its upsides: I learn at my own pace (in my case, slowly over decades and counting), I design my own curriculum, and I don’t have to do any homework or pass any tests.
Godly
Astronomically good web design inspiration from all over the Internet, every day.
LOADMORE
loadmo.re is a mobile-websites showcase initiated by DVTK. The curation was initially based on our own selection and is now meant to grow through submissions from our online community. From its earliest days, digital design practice has been focused on creating interfaces for computers.
Life After Lifestyle
One of the best and most inspiring articles I read this year.
Now we know what culture is. So it is finally time to talk about the way that new cultures are being made, and how this has changed from the lifestyle era. The social order is reconfiguring once again, and we are all shaping it in some way.
Randoma11y
Get random, accessible color combinations and train the robots by voting.
CSS background patterns
I love how much we can do with CSS today, without loading a single picture.
Pure CSS Parallax Websites
This article demonstrates how to use CSS transforms, perspective and some scaling trickery to create a pure CSS parallax scrolling website. If you find this article useful and want to explore CSS Parallax further, you may find my follow-up article "Practical CSS Parallax" an interesting read.
SVG Turbulance Effect for Text
This approach allows for some next level design options!
Holograms, light-leaks and how to build CSS-only shaders.
With mix-blend-mode finally gaining wide browser-support, we now have access to many of most common shading techniques in CSS. With some choice images and a bit of careful layering it's possible to build some surprisingly high-quality effects without the need for introducing any JS dependencies.
Paper Prototype CSS
Introducing Paper Prototype CSS. When I first started designing the OpenBenches website, I wanted to make it look deliberately crappy. I didn't want the people testing it getting too hung up on what it looked like.
Tired of creating color palettes? Get Atmos
Generate brand and complementary status colors. Can’t find the right color? Narrow down the search by choosing an emotion, industry, or color family.
Knots 3D
Feel free to explore our knot catalog and learn how to tie over 150 knots!
Quarantrain — Jim Merullo Dot Com
Childhood memories, pop culture references, fantasy scenes, images from my warped imagination.
The Climate Game
Can you reach net zero?
I lost my position as global minister for future generations because I spent my effort points to fast to reach net zero.
Tabler Icons
Open source icons by Paweł Kuna
Heroicons
Open source icons by the makers of Tailwind CSS
Remix Icon - Open source icon library
Remix Icon is a set of open source neutral style system symbols elaborately crafted for designers and developers. All of the icons are free to use for both personal and commercial.
The terminal for the 21st century
Warp is a blazingly fast, rust-based terminal reimagined from the ground up to work like a modern app.
List of countries for Fake address generator
Unravelling the surprisingly epic story of the world’s oldest pair of trousers
Trousers: they’re the leg-engulfing garments that, today, most cold to temperate weather societies take for granted as the most practical way to cover your lower body. Given their modern ubiquity, one might assume that, as long as there have been people, there have been pants.
Phone is Still the Best Way to Order Pizza
When ordering pizza for pickup, there is no easier way to do it than using a phone. On average, it takes no more than 20 seconds: There are many, many websites and apps that partner with local pizza shops. Often these apps require you to sign up or add excess information.
Build internal tools with YAML
YAML is terrible, because a wrong indentation (was it spaces or tabs?) can break your application. That aside, this looks very useful for many projects.
Create web apps, internal tools, admin consoles, BI dashboards, and more.
GPS
The Global Positioning System explained with clear interactive animations.
Josh W Comeau
Friendly tutorials for developers. Focus on React, CSS, Animation, and more!
Sara Souedian
Web UI and design systems engineer
Tatiana Mac
American designer who builds inclusive, accessible, and ethical products with thoughtful practices.
Brian Lovin
Internet things, saved for later.
Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young
Wear sunscreen.
I like the part that's not included in Baz Luhrmann's version too.
Gradient Generator
Beautiful gradients without muddy centers!
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
Just as relevant to designers as to programmers.
Erika Hall Knows How to Fix Your Design Process (But You’re Probably Not Going to Like It)
Despite the title, I found a lot of design wisdom condensed in quotable pieces here.
Biased by Design
A resource for cultivating awareness of when and how cognitive bias can be introduced into the design process
Discover Forgotten Trends in Web Design
Web Design Museum exhibits over 2,000 carefully selected and sorted web sites that show web design trends between the years 1991 and 2006.
Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper.
If you thought Roblox was a benign environment where kids can play and learn to make their own games, watch this video on YouTube.
The Third Web
I've been putting of writing a post like this myself, because I felt that maybe I just didn't understand blockchain technology well enough. That maybe I should read yet another whitepaper, join another Discord. Buy some ether.
I am a studied computer scientist with a nontrivial amount of experience. One main issue I have with Web3 from that perspective is that it’s just bad engineering.
My current hypothesis is that everything blockchain is like a combination of a pyramid scheme, scientology, Tamagotchi, a lottery and a lot of words trying to obfuscate that. It definitely doesn't deserve the name Web3, because it has little to do with the actual World Wide Web.
Languages don’t all have the same number of terms for colors – scientists have a new theory why
People with standard vision can see millions of distinct colors. But human language categorizes these into a small set of words. In an industrialized culture, most people get by with 11 color words: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple and gray.
Histography
I've had this idea for visualizing history on nested timelines, to get a better sense of the scale of history. This site does it in a much more clever, interesting and ambitious way than I would have done it.
Welcome to Histography, where every dot is a historic event from Wikipedia
Protopia Futures Framework
Monika Bielskyte summarizes her and her collaborator's views on how to shape our futures.
By now, Dystopias have become so obvious and banal that they are memes rather than cautionary tales [...]. But also, and possibly even worse: they serve as product roadmaps for entities such as Peter Thiel’s Palantir, the deeply racialized predictive surveillance tech inspired by Minority Report.
Websites that spark joy.
A curated list of sites with an extra bit of fun.
Leading with Craft
A series about hands-on career paths in the design industry.
Staff Design
An interview series about hands-on career tracks in design
How does Dialup work?
Dialup is a voice-chat app that connects you to people in surprising ways. Get recurring calls with people you want to meet.
Mutsuacen
Not entirely sure what to use this tool for animated vector drawings for. But it's fun to play with!
Why Cars Rarely Crash into Buildings in the Netherlands
I've lived in the Netherlands for a year and a half and I realized that I haven't seen a car crash into a building yet. You would think that cars regularly crashing into buildings would signal a problem to most people, but a lot of Americans and Canadians just accept it as normal.
Huetone • Make colors accessible
It takes some getting to know this tool, but it's one of the very few that really helps create full, coherent and usable color palettes.
Shh! Don’t Tell Them There’s No Magic in Design Thinking
When the term Design Thinking first emerged on the scene, I found it completely puzzling. People were treating it as if it was a revolutionary new methodology to produce better products and services.
Disrespectful Design, Part II
With dishonest cookie banners ('We respect your privacy') disrespectful design has become common. Which is odd, because traditionally design was about showing off how much a client could spend on making their visitors or customers feel comfortable.
What can you do, as a builder, if your job seems to require to employ disrespectful design patterns? First, it’s worth rehashing what Disrespectful Design is.
The Nine States of Design
Interfaces are merely the thoughtful composition of components. This leaves an often glaring hole for users on “the unhappy path” — The places where users may, intentionally or not, stray from your idealized flow.
Not really about states of a design, but a useful checklist for making sure all important component states are covered.
Five reasons why moral philosophy is distracting and harmful
I disagree with several parts of the article, but it's nice to see a different take on moral philosophy that's not nihilism. Or is it?
Grumpy Website+
I can stop tweeting—this is the definitive collection of bad design!
The Ministry for the Future, or Do Authors Dream of Electric Jeeps?
I agree with a lot of the criticism of the book. Still, we need more books like this: serious, ambitious explorations of what it means to be on collision course with nature. To me, the badly outlined solutions that the book explores only make it more obvious what a great challenge we're facing.
Europe's Software Problem
Europe’s communication needs are currently almost exclusively delivered by Chinese hardware that connects us to US-based platforms. For a variety of reasons, this is not a good idea.
Tokimeki Unfollow
If you're like me, you've followed a bajillion accounts over your years on Twitter dot com.
It takes a bit of time, but it's a fun way to improve your Twitter feed.
Making Disabled Buttons More Inclusive
Let’s get into why we use them and how we can do better than the traditional disabled attribute in HTML (e.g. `<button disabled>` ) to mark a button as disabled.
In almost every project I argue against adding disabled states to buttons, but end up including them nonetheless. This is a helpful guide for doing that the right way.
Precognition
It’s almost impossible to predict the future. But it’s also unnecessary, because most people are living in the past. All you have to do is see the present before everyone else does.
The perfect link
Not everyone knows that there’s more to a link than just a clickable word or image.
Marxian Alienation And Web Development
Burnout is not just overwork, or the ensuing exhaustion. Some of you will already know this.
How to survive a design career and avoid burnout
Then it was shut down, for no discernible reason other than a global partnership that went awry. [...] I asked Stanley what on earth had happened there. I might have imagined a flicker of pain on his face, but his answer was that you have to make peace that you will leave a trail of destruction as you make change happen in a large organisation.
Worry is an unhelpful friend and a shoddy fortune-teller
It all started with Goofy blowing lewd kisses at my mom. I was a five-year-old at Disney World, happily exploring with my parents. Happily, that is, until I entered what seemed like an adulterous nightmare.
Worrying is stupid and can you can stop doing it.
Photopea: advanced photo editor
Free online photo editor supporting PSD, XCF, Sketch, XD and CDR formats.
A Simple and Definitive Icons Library
Add a Goat to your next video call. Only £5!
Spice up your virtual meetings by inviting along a Goat!
Was pretty surreal to have a goat in the meeting, unannounced.
JENKEM - Matt Tomasello in "Rodney Mullen on Bath Salts: Round Three"
A weird skateboarding video.
Left-Side Vertical Navigation on Desktop: Scalable, Responsive, and Easy to Scan
Vertical navigation is a good fit for broad or growing IAs, but takes up more space than horizontal navigation. Ensure that it is left-aligned, keyword front-loaded, and visible. Many teams will try to shoehorn a broad navigation hierarchy into a horizontal navigation bar on desktop sites.
Avatar generator playground - Boring Avatars
Boring avatars generates custom, SVG-based avatars from any username and color palette.
A better segmented control
A few years ago, we built a segmented control component for the Lyft Product Language (LPL) design system. You may have read our guide to designing and using selection controls.
Career Development: What It Really Means to be a Manager, Director, or VP
It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of big-company HR practices. I’m more of the First Break all the Rules type. Despite my general skepticism of many standard practices, we still do annual performance reviews at my company, though I’m thinking seriously of dropping them.
Adding is favoured over subtracting in problem solving
A few days after reading about this alternative way of thinking, I managed to apply it felt like a genius!
In Praise of the Unambiguous Click Menu
I still remember my excitement when I learned how to build a hover-triggered submenu with just CSS. (It was probably after reading this 2003 article from A List Apart.) At the time, it was a true CSS trick. Seriously. Wild times.
Since touch screens, I avoid using mouse hover and right click to disclose essential UI elements.
Against Performative Positivity
I am considered a pessimist—the ‘Daria’ of design—whose standards are too high and too critical. Designers, I would argue, are afraid to embrace dissent because it disrupts the positivity bubble.
The Best Landing Page Design Inspiration
Lapa Ninja is a gallery featuring the best 2949 landing page design from around the web. Buy Lapa Ninja a Coffee ☕️
A Strong Personal Brand Will Enhance Your Life
I tend to agree with the article. But instead of 'personal branding' can we say 'ethics and professional presence' or something?
No more boring apps
How did our apps get so boring? It's time we put play, aesthetics, and quality-of-life over efficiencies.
I don't care for his styling. Still I find Andy's venture interesting, because it's the first time I see a designer sell digital products directly to consumers using an influencer type of marketing and a subscription model where one pays for supporting the creator rather than products updates.
Citibank just got a $500 million lesson in the importance of UI design
I expect this case to show up in thousands of slide decks of UX teams showing IT departments why they're underfunded and understaffed.
A federal judge has ruled that Citibank isn't entitled to the return of $500 million it sent to various creditors last August. Kludgey software and a poorly designed user interface contributed to the massive screwup.
Uniwidth typefaces for interface design
Uniwidth ≠ monospaced!
As a web/interface/visual designer I work a lot with label states. Selected, unselected, active, inactive, available, out of stock. Considering that you should never use color as the only visual cue (always remember accessibility dear designer), text weight is often my go-to solution.
The Building Blocks of CDR Systems
Carbon dioxide removal is what we need to avoid climate disasters. There's a lot more possible than planting trees. It's not a light read, but I find it very uplifting!
Pika
Pika is an easy to use, open-source, native colour picker for macOS.
Why I'm losing faith in UX
Important points about the relevance and ethics of design.
We're headed into a dangerous time, when our society is run on digital platforms, and UX isn't leading the way to ensure that those tools are usable.