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Gears
Interactive article explaining how mechanical gears work.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 99 posts.
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Cameras and Lenses
Interactive article explaining how cameras and lenses work.
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Old CSS, New CSS
I first got into web design/development in the late 90s, and only as I type this sentence do I realize how long ago that was. And boy, it was horrendous. I mean, being able to make stuff and put it online where other people could see it was pretty slick, but we did not have very much to work with. I’ve been taking for…
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The Decline of Usability
If you find this text interesting, please consider also reading The Decline of Usability: Revisited or some of my other many ramblings on modern user interfaces.
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1:60 scale Boeing 777 made from manila folders
The homepage of the work for which I'm best known — a model Boeing 777, made entirely from manila folders!
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Full-Bleed Layout Using CSS Grid
Certain layouts are surprisingly dastardly. On the modern web, one of the most common layouts is also one of the trickiest. In this tutorial, I break down how to build the "full-bleed" layout using CSS Grid.
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Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font
A s*** font that f***ing censors swearing automatically
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Creating a Pencil Effect in SVG
Dragons Abound produces maps in SVG, which is a vector graphics format. Vector graphics have a lot of features (such as lossless zoom) tha...
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The Al Jaffee / Mad Magazine Fold-In Effect in CSS
After 65 years at Mad Magazine, comic artist Al Jaffee announced his retirement. Jaffee was best known for his Mad Fold-Ins, where folding the page would reveal a hidden message in the artwork. Plenty of examples can be found on the web. The problem is, they all show the before and after statically, side by
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Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?
I've decided to stop using dark mode across all of my devices, because research suggests that going to the dark side ain't all that.
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Stop Asking Me to “Sign Up” (2014)
The fate of many startups depends almost entirely on one conversion point: When a visitor becomes a user. All too often, this pivotal role falls on the shoulders of a pitifully generic “sign up” button that’s lucky to get even a minute of consideration during development. If you take
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How Stripe Designs Websites (2017)
Developer and writer.
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The UX of Lego Interface Panels
LEGO interface panels are beautiful, iconic, and great for learning interface design basics. I bought 52 of them from BrickLink to explore the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.
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Disrespectful Design – Users aren’t stupid or lazy
This post made it to the top of Hacker News, sparking some great debate. See the discussion here. It’s a common narrative in tech to design products with the assumption that users are stupid …
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Don’t require a user to be interested twice: lessons on reducing signup friction
I learned the hard way how important a carefully designed sign-up process is. I saw a large percentage of interested people fail to sign up because of easily preventable flaws in the flow.
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Lights and Shadows
Interactive article explaining how lights and shadows behave.
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Why Figma Wins
Companies are a sequencing of loops. While it’s possible to stumble into an initial core loop that works, the companies that are successful in the long term are the ones that can repeatedly find the next loop. However, this evolution is poorly understood relative to its existential impact on a company’s trajectory…
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GitHub Dark Mode is too Dark
If you hate it too this is why. Using color theory to show why GitHub dark mode is disappointing
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Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
In the mind’s eye of many people, Japan is a land of tranquil Zen gardens, serene temples, and exquisite tea ceremonies. Both traditional and contemporary Japanese architecture, books and mag…
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Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs
This image has three components: On the left is an OCR’ed PDF from my ScanSnap iX500. I have selected most of the text, and on the right side you can see two copy&paste results. In the upper half is the result directly after scanning, right after the bundled ABBYY FineReader that comes with the iX500 did its magic. In…
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Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays
✪ Update 2021-06-11 For WWDC 2021, Apple has posted an excellent video on EDR.
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Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)
An experiment that proves that automatic accessibility testing is only a first step and that manual testing is vital.
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On the bonkers color palette of Garfield comics
He’s too young to really follow the narratives — after every strip he pauses, asks what happened, and then says, slowly and calmly, “Why” — but he’s already very fond of the drawings and characters.
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Showing a sunrise/sunset realtime 24/7 with the use of unsecured CCTV cameras
“24h Sunrise/Sunset” is an installation that displays a realtime sunset and sunrise somewhere happening in the world with the use of CCTV. Hardware: Raspberry Pi 3B+, Arduino Nano Every , custom PCB, power supply’s, VFD displays, lasercut metal and LEDs. Software: Python 3 & Firebase realtime databases Changelog of…
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Autodesk criticised by architects
Architectural unrest about Autodesk and its support for the industry's design businesses is growing. Discontent has been simmering for a decade or more, and has led to calls for EU action.The rece