Years ago, when I read Sarah Drasner’s article on creating a VS Code theme, I silently thought to myself, That’s a lot of work… I’m never going to make a theme… But lo and behold, I went ahead and made one — and it took less than six hours to get most of the theme […]
No-Hassle Visual Studio Code Theming: Building an Extension Read More »
Modern brands are so obsessed with being “on brand” that they’ve forgotten how to be interesting. In chasing consistency, they’ve killed creativity, spontaneity, and the human spark that makes design memorable.
Stop Asking ‘Is This on Brand?’ — It’s Killing Your Creativity Read More »
Sometimes, the best inspiration lies right in front of us. With that in mind, we embarked on our wallpapers adventure more than 14 years ago. The idea: to provide you with a new collection of unique and inspiring desktop wallpapers every month. This February is no exception, of course. For this post, artists and designers
Short Month, Big Ideas (February 2026 Wallpapers Edition) Read More »
Neither Chrome, Safari, nor Firefox have shipped new features in the last couple of weeks, but fear not because leading this issue of What’s !important is some of the web development industry’s best educators with, frankly, some killer content. Maintaining video state across different pages using view transitions Chris Coyier demonstrates how to maintain a
Over the last two years, my team at Work & Co and I have been testing out and gradually integrating AI coding tools like Copilot, Cursor, Claude, and ChatGPT to help us ship web experiences that are used by the masses. Admittedly, after some initial skepticism and a few aha moments, various AI tools have
Practical Use Of AI Coding Tools For The Responsible Developer Read More »
Every interface you use is built on a quiet but crucial choice: vertical or horizontal cards. This hidden decision shapes how we see, scroll, and interact with content every day.
Vertical vs. Horizontal Cards: The UX Tradeoffs That Shape Modern Interfaces Read More »
Chrome 144 recently shipped ::search-text, which is now one of several highlight-related pseudo-elements. This one selects find-in-page text, which is the text that gets highlighted when you do a Ctrl/Command + F-type search for something on a page and matches are found. By default, ::search-text matches are yellow while the current target (::search-text:current) is orange,
How to Style the New ::search-text and Other Highlight-y Pseudo-Elements Read More »
We all have a few skeletons in our CSS closets. There’s probably that one-off !important where you can now manage that more effectively with cascade layers. Or maybe a dated Checkbox Hack that :has() has solved. Perhaps it’s been a long while since your last site redesign and it’s chock-full of vendor-prefixed properties from 2012.
Have you ever set z-index: 99999 on an element in your CSS, and it doesn’t come out on top of other elements? A value that large should easily place that element visually on top of anything else, assuming all the different elements are set at either a lower value or not set at all. A
Unstacking CSS Stacking Contexts Read More »
I was building a Modal component that uses the <dialog> element’s showModal method. While testing the component, I discovered I could tab out of the <dialog> (in modal mode) and onto the address bar. And I was surprised — accessibility advice around modals have commonly taught us to trap focus within the modal. So this
There is No Need to Trap Focus on a Dialog Element Read More »
