Archive
MeritWEB named 47 subjects and indexed its own scope
Nineteen pieces, five sections. This is the dense version; the front page is the edit.
TYPE
- Inter and Söhne share a single-storey g, not a purposeInter, drawn by Rasmus Andersson and given away, and Söhne, drawn by Kris Sowersby at Klim and sold, answer the same question — how a grotesque behaves at fourteen pixels — and answer it differently. Set the same paragraph in both and the difference is not decoration.
- Variable fonts shipped in 2016, four-weight habit survivedA variable font is one file with an axis in it. OpenType 1.8 landed the format in 2016 and most production builds still ship four static weights out of habit.
- Georgia was drawn for 14px, Times ported from metalHinting, subpixel rendering and generous x-heights are screen problems. The faces that solve them were drawn after the problem existed, which is why they do not look like adapted book types.
- Rasmus Andersson self-funded Inter and answers to nobodyA retail licence, a foundry commission and a giveaway produce different faces: what gets drawn depends on who is footing the drawing.
THE BROWSER
- CSS Grid landed in nineteen days across two browsersChrome 57 and Firefox 52, a fortnight apart. It was the first layout system designed for the job rather than borrowed from print or from tables, and it retired a decade of workarounds in a year.
- Container queries shipped in 2023 and ended viewport guessingContainer queries reached every major engine in 2023 and undid the assumption that a component knows how wide the viewport is. It never did.
- :has() let CSS style upward after twenty years:has() removed a whole category of JavaScript by letting a selector look downward and style upward. It landed across engines in December 2023.
- prefers-color-scheme landed in 2019 asking for palettesprefers-color-scheme made the preference readable in 2019. Treating it as an inversion is what makes a dark build look wrong.
TOOLS
- Figma kept shipping through fifteen months of acquisition shadowAdobe announced the acquisition in September 2022 and abandoned it in December 2023, and everyone kept working in Figma anyway. What changed was not the tool but where designers and engineers disagree.
- Style Dictionary turned brand colours into build failuresDesign tokens turned taste into named values, which is the only form of taste a pipeline can check.
- Webflow and Framer emit the site and the debtWebflow and Framer collapse the handoff by making the design file the build. What that costs is a separate question from whether it works.
- Tailwind CSS reopened where styles belongWhether styles belong in a stylesheet or beside the markup was settled by convention, not by argument. Utility classes unsettled it.
PAGES
- Stripe set tables as design, copycats took gradientsStripe's marketing pages made careful typography and well-set tables into a house style that half an industry copied without understanding which part was doing the work.
- Linear's dark page became half the industry's templateThe dark product page is now a genre with conventions. Naming them is more useful than admiring them.
- Scroll-driven animation ran in JavaScript for a decadeApple's product pages did with JavaScript what browsers now do natively, which is the usual order of events.
- CSS Grid made bento layouts cheap enough to overuseThe arrangement is not new. What changed is that it stopped costing anything to build, and cheap arrangements spread.
IN PRINT
- Marcotte's 2010 A List Apart article became industry methodResponsive web design is a specific idea with a date: fluid grids, flexible images and media queries, named together. It is not a synonym for working on a phone.
- CSS-Tricks and A List Apart archived the field arguingA List Apart, Smashing Magazine and CSS-Tricks are where the conventions were settled. The posts are dated and still readable, which is more than most industries manage.
- MeritWEB named 47 subjects and indexed its own scopeLaid out properly on one page.