Naming is hard. The language we use shapes the way we think about things, but also the conversation we have about it. That’s why we have so much confusion about colors, icons, UI components, features — and that’s why we struggle to name design tokens, HTML classes, and variables. Sometimes, the names we choose are too generic , so it’s difficult to understand what exactly is meant. And sometimes t

October is just around the corner, which means it’s time for some new desktop wallpapers! Designed by the community for the community, they’re here to brighten your screens, and maybe spark some creativity along the way. Misty mornings, leaves shining in bright red, yellow, and orange hues , and spooky creatures making an appearance — October has a very special charm. So, how about some new deskto

To be completely honest with you, I missed the news when CSS Container Queries first shipped. And when I finally heard about it, my very first thought was, “Why exactly do I need this when media queries already exist?” I’m not proud of that reaction, knowing what I know now, but it was comforting to know that I wasn’t alone. In fact, there are legions of us out there. What baffles me is that conta

Strong UX ideas do not secure investment on their own. Through a worked example, Alex Williams breaks down how to define business value, calculate costs, test causality, and build a credible case for the return on a design initiative. - UX - Design - Business Sooner or later, a CFO looks at your wireframes and asks what any of it actually does for the bottom line. Storyboards don’t answer that que

TThe web is evolving beyond menus, forms, and endless clicks toward experiences shaped around human intent. For UX designers, understanding this shift means re-evaluating their role, moving from designing visible interfaces to guiding transparent, intent-driven AI experiences. Ever since the commercialisation of the Graphical User Interface pioneered by systems like the Xerox Star and popularised

Could there be a better way to welcome the new month than with a new collection of desktop wallpapers? Whether you’re holding tightly onto summer or eagerly awaiting autumn, we’ve got some eye-catching designs to make your September just a bit more colorful. Enjoy! For more than 15 years already, our monthly wallpapers series has been the perfect opportunity for creatives of all backgrounds to put

In organisations today, data has never been more available. Dashboards and performance decks exist for almost every function — sales, product, marketing, operations — and the tools to build them have never been more accessible. And yet, in weekly standups and quarterly reviews, the same thing happens constantly: someone shares the numbers, the room nods, and the meeting ends without a decision or

This article is a sponsored by Fimo Every website is at its best the day it ships. The final branch merges, the site goes live exactly as designed, and it is briefly perfect. It will never be this good again. Not because anything breaks. The site keeps working. But the market moves, the messaging shifts, a competitor launches something, and the careful thing you built slowly stops matching the com

We know that everything on the web is a box by default, but you’ll find many animated <div> s pretending to be circles. But if you’ve ever met a real <circle> , you’ll know that they’ve got a lot more going for them. Dressed in SVG, they fit into a wider range of crowds than a humble <div> wearing HTML/CSS can. <img> has a strict no .html policy. The <img> tag is not as static as its name suggests

New EU guidelines, why AI sparkles aren’t enough, when AI labels are required, and what the rules mean for AI-powered features and products. There’s been a lot of confusion and panic this week about “huge fines”, “drastic measures” and “sweeping new AI rules” in the EU . In reality, it’s a lot more narrow — and a lot more sensible. And mostly it’s about making AI more obvious when it actually need

This article is a sponsored by Isadora Agency When front-end developers and UX engineers are tasked with building a web interface that feels tactile, bouncy, or destructive, the industry instinct is almost always the same: reach for a physics engine. Frameworks like Matter.js, Cannon.js, or custom WebGL solutions have become the gold standard for creating immersive, gamified websites. When our tea

The gap between “you need a library for this” and “the browser does this” keeps closing. A practical guide to auditing your dependencies and finding what the web platform can now handle for you. Most of us install a dependency once and never look at it again. It does its job, the tests pass, and we move on. But the web platform keeps moving too, and a surprising number of the libraries sitting in

Whether you’re enjoying some well-earned time off this August or are jumping headfirst into a new project, how about some new desktop wallpapers to accompany you on all those big and small adventures the month might bring? Well, we’ve got you covered! Everybody loves a beautiful wallpaper to freshen up their desktops and home screens, right? To provide you with inspiring designs on a regular basis

As AI reshapes product design, it could give designers greater autonomy or expose the gaps that autonomy makes harder to hide. Exploring both the bull and bear cases, Andy Budd examines what happens when designers need less permission to act. Designers have spent years saying they would do better work if the organisation got out of the way. Not always in those exact words, obviously. It usually co

Many of the AI tools we interact with take the form of text boxes. But what if there was a different way to interact with AI? Oleksii Hrzhehorzhevskyi explores a different approach to creating a new AI assistant and how designers can navigate the field as AI continues to change it. This article is a sponsored by MacPaw The phrase “artificial intelligence” has many excited, especially those in tech

React Server Components don’t send HTML to your browser. They don’t send JSON either. When a server component renders, what actually travels over the wire is a custom streaming protocol called Flight . It’s a line-delimited format with its own type system, its own reference resolution, and its own rules for reconstructing executable behavior on the client. Most React developers have never opened t

We’ve all heard of the sacred rule in modern web development, the rule never to be broken. The rule of “Never block the main thread.” You almost can’t miss it as a web developer; it’s in almost every performance guide, and to be fair, it is good advice. We all know the browser’s main thread is single-threaded , meaning it can only do one thing at a time. Plus, as we know, the main thread isn’t our

Many companies silently assume that everybody wants more AI in their lives. That people are craving new AI features , new AI products, new AI workflows — that would all magically replace all existing outdated practices and broken ways of working. But in reality, it seems like people don’t want more AI at all — at least not in the way most AI leaders envision it. Unsurprisingly, many AI features ha

When a branding project fails, it usually happens long before the logo stage: in the strategy phase, when words like “modern,” “trustworthy,” “premium,” “friendly,” and “disruptive” are left undefined. The result is a gap between what the brand is supposed to communicate and what the designer is expected to create. This is the space I like to call the “pre-concept” phase . At the beginning of a pr

Mental health applications keep facing a continuing, measurable crisis: many people stop using them quickly. The data is stark: almost 95% of users who open the app on day 1 abandon the app by day 30 , with a median 30-day retention of only 3.3%. Even the recognised mental health giants lose around 50% of their users within the first ten days. This severe engagement loss and retention collapse are