Showing all posts about design
CSS is hard because it solves hard problems
18 May 2026
Julie Evans recently re-wrote her website’s Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and took the fight to the stylesheet language as it were:
So I decided years ago that I wanted to react to “CSS is hard” by getting better at CSS and taking it seriously as a technology, instead of devaluing it. Doing that changed everything for me: I learned that so many of my frustrations (“centering is impossible”) had been addressed in CSS a long time ago, and that also what “centering” means is not always straightforward and it makes sense that there are many ways to do it. CSS is hard because it’s solving a hard problem!
Oh, the fun, and untold lost hours, trying to centre something, without breaking the page layout.
But I would like to delve more deeply into CSS, because the language has become many hundreds of times more vast than when I starting working with it in the late 1990’s.
The last time I came close to doing any heavy lifting was four years ago, when I completely rewrote the HTML and CSS here. As ever though, I was working to do the job as quickly as possible, so I could get back to writing content here, day job, everything else there is to do, etc.
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design, technology, web history
Converting old London Underground train door buttons into light switches
7 May 2026
Specifically, a Hue light switch, using an old door opening button from a Jubilee line train.
I lived in London for a few years awhile back, and the District line also had door buttons you’d press to open or close the train doors. As I recall it, the doors on all other lines were controlled by the guard. These passenger operated door buttons could be something of a double-edge sword though.
I was travelling to Richmond one afternoon, and a passenger — possibly still on the way from home from the night before — and wanting to alight at a station, was getting the action all wrong in constantly pressing the door button.
He was — unawares, I was pretty sure — cancelling out the efforts of someone on the platform trying to open the door to board the train. There was confusion on one side of the door, frustration on the other, as the door went through a cycle of partly opening, then partly closing.
Maybe these door open and close actions are better controlled centrally, and the door buttons should be used as light switches instead.
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design, London, technology, travel
Hacker News: built on more than good software
10 April 2026
Every developer who sees HN thinks, “I could build that in a weekend.” And they’re right; they absolutely could. In fact, I’d assume they’re pretty shite at their jobs if they couldn’t. What they couldn’t build in a weekend // month // year // probably ever, is the thing that makes Hacker News actually work. And that ~thing is not the software.
There’s this concept called googlyness. Legend has it, if you want to work at Google, you need a certain set of traits, apparently referred to as googlyness.
To build the next Hacker News, and make a success of it, you’re going to need hackernewsness, something possibly far more elusive than googlyness.
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Bad design trends: hotel rooms without bathroom doors
2 December 2025
Bring Back Doors. A hopefully growing list of hotels where there are doors to the room’s bathroom.
I’ve emailed hundreds of hotels and I asked them two things: do your doors close all the way, and are they made of glass? Everyone that says yes to their doors closing, and no to being made of glass has been sorted by price range and city for you to easily find places to stay that are guaranteed to have a bathroom door.
I’m trying to think how this — hotel rooms without bathroom doors — became a thing.
Did an architect stay at the once sole establishment in the world that did not have bathroom doors in the room, and thought: now there’s an idea, I must incorporate it into my future hotel room designs.
One thing led to another, and suddenly bathrooms sans doors were a trend. A terrible trend.
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Sam Altman, Jony Ive, tease arrival of their AI device
27 November 2025
Stevie Bonifield, writing for The Verge:
In an interview with Laurene Powell Jobs at Emerson Collective’s 2025 Demo Day, they [Altman and Ive] said they are currently prototyping the device, and when asked about a timeframe, Ive said it could arrive in “less than” two years.
We only have to wait another two years to see what this is all about. From what I can gather though — albeit as an armchair expert — we might see an AI powered powered device, possibly similar in appearance to a smartphone, but without a screen, that responds only to voice commands.
As to what actually eventuates, only time will tell.
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artificial intelligence, design, Jony Ive, Sam Altman, technology
A four-hundred year, one way, trip to Proxima Centauri? Is this sci-fi?
13 August 2025
A proposal to build a multi-generational spaceship — named Chrysalis — that’s nearly sixty-kilometres in length, and would spend four-hundred years travelling to the star presently closest to the Sun, Proxima Centuri, recently won first prize in the Project Hyperion Design Competition.
The vessel, which would be fitted out with tropical forests, schools, workplaces, libraries, and manufacturing facilities, among other things, could house over two-thousand people. Obviously some travellers on Chrysalis, would live their entire lives only on the gigantic ship.
So far, so good. Aside from the ethical matter of consigning your descendants to a life lived on a sixty-kilometre long tin-can, whether they like it or not. But the proposal becomes a little murkier when we learn the vessel’s precise destination:
Chrysalis is designed to house several generations of people until it enters the star system, where it could shuttle them to the surface of the planet Proxima Centuri b — an Earth-size exoplanet that is thought to be potentially habitable.
Proxima Centuri b is thought to be habitable? So to recap: someone wants to spend untold trillions of dollars building a massive spaceship, that will carry some two-thousand people, on a four-hundred year long, one way voyage, to a planet thought to be habitable?
Am I the only one who sees a problem with this?
Wouldn’t we first want to be one-hundred percent certain the planet in question, Proxima Centuri b, was in fact habitable, in Earth-analog fashion, before even drawing up blueprints for the vessel? Apparently not. Chrysalis‘ designers appear to be so confident Proxima Centuri b is fit for human habitation, they’re laying on shuttles to get people on the ground.
Doubtless passengers are relieved they’re not required to parachute to the surface.
Proxima Centuri b was discovered in 2016. The body is a super-Earth, meaning it is larger than our home planet, but still smaller than the likes of Uranus or Neptune. In addition, the planet is located in what is considered to be Proxima Centuri’s habitable zone. Planets within a star’s habitable, or Goldilocks zone, as Earth is in the Sun’s, are generally deemed to be conducive to life. Temperatures are neither too hot, nor too cold, and water can exist in liquid form.
But talk of Goldilocks zones usually applies more to G-type main-sequence stars, or yellow dwarfs, such as the Sun. Proxima Centuri is a red dwarf star, a rather different kettle of fish. I’m not even sure the term habitable zone should be uttered in the same sentence as red dwarfs.
I’ve written about these stars before. They fascinate me. As mentioned, one is the star nearest to us. They also live for trillions of years (compared to billions for many other stars, including the Sun). Red dwarfs will probably be the last stars shining in the universe.
But, as I’ve said previously, they’re not all that life-friendly, particularly for human life. As I’ve written this before, I’ll be succinct. Planets in the supposed habitable zones of red dwarfs, would be — on account of their relative closeness to the star — tidally locked. One side of the planet forever faces the star, and bakes, while the other, cloaked in perpetual darkness, freezes. Most hospitable.
Red dwarfs also emit powerful flares. The outlook would not be good for the inhabitants of a planet in the path of one of these stellar outbursts. Proxima Centuri b may be possessed of some sort of atmosphere, and water might be present, but the planet is no Earth.
What if, on reaching the distant planet, those aboard Chrysalis find it to be completely uninhabitable? Would they be able to return to Earth? No, because the journey is one way. Passengers would be on a multi-century trip to their deaths.
Of course, the Chrysalis project is hypothetical, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t merit in the idea. If the vessel is ever to be constructed, a more suitable destination planet, not just one thought to be habitable, needs to be chosen.
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astronomy, design, red dwarf, science
Tiny Awards 2025 finalists announced, voting for winner open
8 August 2025
The nominees for the 2025 Tiny Awards have been announced.
Entry for the annual prize is open to personal or non-commercial websites that were no more than a year old in July, with their own unique URL (sorry, TikToks are ineligible).
Voting closes on Monday 1 September 2025, with the winner being named later in September.
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awards, design, IndieWeb, technology
Classic Web, a Mastodon page that explores the web of old
16 July 2025
Specifically, the time frame encompassing the dot-com boom (late 1990’s), Web 2.0 (early twenty-first century), and the 2010’s. The 2010’s don’t seem that long ago, but then again it’s been nearly six years since. Six years is close to thirty internet years (LinkedIn page), if you subscribe to the idea.
Classic Web features screenshots of websites from this period, and is curated by Richard MacManus, creator of Cybercultural, which documents the history and cultural impact of the internet, and founder of defunct tech blog, ReadWriteWeb.
I feels a certain ambivalence looking back at some of these old websites, particularly those of the dot-com and Web 2.0 eras. The web had a bit more character back then — certainly from a visual perspective — but there were downsides. Lack of accessibility, and even a sense of aesthetics, among them. But while we might have more accessibility today, visually the web appears more generic.
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Tables, nested tables, tables to the centre of the Earth, website interface design before CSS
8 July 2025
United Kingdom based web frontend architect Den Odell:
HTML tables gave us something no other element did at the time: control. You could create rows and columns. You could define cell widths and heights. You could nest tables inside tables to carve up the page into zones. That control was intoxicating. It wasn’t elegant. It definitely wasn’t semantic. But it worked.
It worked, but you could spend hours, days even, building a table structure, then slicing up an interface mockup, so the often numerous components would fit together perfectly.
The process was tedious, to say the least. It required placing sometimes minuscule images, both GIFs and JPEGs — being two of the main web image compression formats of the time — side by side, depending on the best optimisation method for each part of the interface.
See here an image of a page constructed thusly from disassociated circa 2001, when this was more website, and less blog. It felt wrong working this way — both on personal and commercial projects — but in the early years of the twenty-first century browser support for CSS was woeful.
Eventually, reasonable support for CSS arrived, but then the next challenge emerged: encouraging tables-layout-accustomed web designers to work with CSS for layout instead of HTML. But that’s a story for another day.
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design, history, technology, web design
IndieWeb is Punk, you have the blog, now here is the t-shirt
25 June 2025
Jamie Thingelstad recently suggested IndieWeb is to the web of today, what punk rock was to music of the 1970’s. IndieWeb is Punk, he said.
In a comment on Thingelstad’s post, Robert Birming said the slogan would look good on a t-shirt.
Not long after, Jim Mitchell unveiled a line — one black, one white — of t-shirts emblazoned with the words IndieWeb is Punk, which are available for purchase.
Never mind the bollocks, here’s the bloggers…
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