Design

Smart-home notifications should be timely, relevant, specific, and personalized to avoid overwhelming users and causing distrust or disengagement.

Prefer SVG over PNG, trust browsers to downscale, drop obscure formats—the ultimate, exhaustive guide to favicons for modern web. Includes steps for static HTML and Webpack.

This unique piece of furniture, called Bookmarker, is by Japanese design firm StudioYO. Made from a minimum of materials, it's meant to be both a functional piece and a love letter to books. This is a "bookmark." It may sound like an exaggeration, but this piece of furniture

This delightfully bizarre Penguin Donkey was designed in 1939 by Viennese architect Egon Riss. It was commissioned by the then-new Penguin Books, a British publishing house that had been founded just four years earlier, and would be produced by British furniture company Isokon. The idea was that the piece

This handsome Plinth is by Swedish industrial designer Martina Claesson. Inspired by a gymnast's vault, her aim was to make a simple, elegant stool and storage piece. They're made of solid oak, and they stack. Claesson is a freelance designer, most

As all parents know, children rapidly outgrow both clothing and furniture. In the 1970s, Luigi Colani designed this plywood Tobifant furniture set, which could grow in height along with the child. Colani designed it to not only be flatpacked, but to be utterly easy

Radio buttons are built into web browsers. Why are we using a UI library that wraps another UI library that rebuilds radio buttons from scratch? Why does rendering a radio button require multiple dependencies and several kilobytes of JavaScript? How did we make a built-in browser control so complicated?

I hadn’t heard of James Moylan until I read a story about him in the Wall Street Journal after he passed away in December, but it turns out my gaze had fallen on one his designs almost every …

Create beautiful animations of your code by simply entering a series of code snippets. Export your code creations to 4k, ProRes, and other HD formats for sharing or usage in other media.

Graef's Manuale H 1920 is all-metal and ready to crank

Looking at the first principles of icon design—and how Apple failed to apply all of them in macOS Tahoe

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Why Japan’s internet looks weird — unless you live here. “Japanese customers are used to seeing a lot of information packed into tiny spaces — consider how much text you can find on the label of an onigiri…”

archived 16 Dec 2025 12:27:09 UTC

A closer look at Japan’s maximalist web design shows how cultural values and practical needs create an online world richer than it appears.

There’s an interesting cultural observation to be made as a writer based in Europe, that we like our sans-serif fonts, while our American friends seem to prefer a font with a serif. It’…

When 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler, who spent years editing Ernie Smith’s writing for Motherboard, reached out about doing a zine, Ernie was absolutely in. The goal of the zine—to shine …

A new typeface from Shantell Martin

Perhaps inspired by All Streets, Ben Fry’s map of all the streets in the US, Nelson Minar built a US map out of all the rivers in the country. Minar put all the data and files he used up on Github so you can make your own version.

Finding inspiration in everything from market boards to danfo buses, experimenting with indigenous scripts, and working hard to shed lingering Western influence, these type designers are building a uniquely African visual language.

Porte Neue Font is an elegant font family in 6 styles, released by Groteskly Yours Studio. Originally released as Porte in 2019, this updated 2025 version refines its classic outlines while expanding the family to six styles plus a variable font. Inspired by Eastern European stone-carved plaques, Porte Neue blends sharp contrast, sans serif font…

Porte Neue is an elegant high-contrast display sans serif by Groteskly Yours Studio. Porte Neue comes in 6 styles, and is perfect for logos, social media, packaging, and luxury branding. Free font trials and commercial licenses available.

Learn how to use the new range syntax for CSS style queries and the if() function.

Ffrom AI skeptic to optimist—exploring how intelligent tools augment human creativity without replacing judgment

The home of alternative design, code and content on the world wide web.

A friendly guide to front-end date pickers!

What makes a color "masculine"? Our guide explores the history, meaning, and versatility of 13 classic colors, from navy blue to salmon pink.

In the 1960s, Toyota's designers tackled a challenge that they hadn't yet: Design a vehicle with a lot of interior space, enough to carry up to eight passengers. Japanese law strictly regulated the length of vehicles, which presented the designers with a problem. They concluded that having the engine in

The Community Geography Lab in Ohio organized a mapping project for Kent residents to map historical Census data: This map was created working closely with South End residents, including three mapp…