It’s been 10 years since I published Building Successful Communities of practice…. To celebrate I’ve published a second edition. Currently at a special price to pre-order (UK only) hellotacit.com/building-suc...
Macromedia Fireworks 1.0 in 1998
In April 1998, Macromedia released the Macromedia Fireworks 1.0 graphics program. The program was able to work with both vector and bitmap graphics and was designed specially for web designers.
#WebDesignHistory
Excellent read. Sad having to smuggle accessibility in through stealthy means but aligning to a business goal makes it easier to get permission:
piccalil.li/blog/applyin... #a11y
winamp green head music player
If the future of layout is not CSS, it better be this
Some people have told me they wish they could go to CSS Day or Smashing Conf where I'll be talking this year, but the price is prohibitive, which I totally get.
But the CMD school of design is hosting a completely free conf around both of them, with great lineups.
the-web-you-want.org
📝 New CSS Article!
If you have seen my graph theory demo and wondered how it works, then the article is finally live!
frontendmasters.com/blog/two-cir...
I was playing with two circles and anchor positioning, and ended up creating a shortest path algorithm.
Modern CSS is fun!
That is a gem!
A green book that says Bad Services: How to fix services that don't work
Good Services came out 6 years ago and I am SO excited to finally announce that the Sequel - Bad Services - will be out in late May!
that is some tasty reporting!
The 5th edition of the Design Systems Report is here 📔
Design systems are now critical infrastructure—but they’re getting harder to sustain.
Buy-in is dropping. Teams are stretched. Adoption is still the biggest challenge.
Explore the report → hubs.li/Q04774jK0
“AI prototyping lets you quickly build in depth prototypes.”
Once again, we return to designing with ketchup.
Instead ask, what is the purpose of your prototype?
You could build prototypes in ketchup for all I care, so long as it serves the purpose you need it to.
uxdesign.cc/designing-wi...
How do you best communicate to patients on NHS waiting lists what the average wait time is? 🤔⏱️
The NHS App team have done some design and research on this, and have written up a great (detailed!) design history post: design-history.nhsapp.service.nhs.uk/secondary-ca...
The accompanying blog post shows that Dan and colleagues followed responsible disclosure process before publishing.
Saw the "OMG why are 40 & 50 year old people even ON social media?" post & my first thought was, "What do you think *should* happen, kid? Should we all just do a Logan's Run?" & then I realized this child has never once in their life heard of Logan's Run & I turned to dust & my ghost is typing this.
I also need a "make documentation" badge
Move slowly and maintain things - white text on green round badge
Badge rediscovered
Early weeknotes from me. How the sausage is made (and documented):
frankieroberto.github.io/nhsnotes/pos...
The best thing I’ve read today:
”Accessibility isn’t a spell you cast at the end of a sprint.”
- @annaecook.com
AI agents will join up government before government joins up government. This may be a mixed blessing.
Blog post. with some reflections about my recent agentic adventures:
loosemore.com/2026/02/25/a...
The “Average Accessibility Defects” number goes down with some guidance, but right back up with expert guidance.
Wondering if experts try to coach it (versus hand-wavy requests) and LLM’s corpus of stolen data doesn’t have the material to make what’s asked of it.
mastodon.social/@SteveFaulkn...
Little reminder that axe-con, organised by @deque.com is this week!!
It's a free online, two days (February 24 25) event, with a very nice line up of talks about accessibility and inclusive design.
Want to learn about accessibility? Register, check them live, or catch the replays!
#Accessibility
[blogpost] A decade later - 10 year anniversary of launching the 'new' ONS website
digitalbydefault.com/2026/02/21/a...
I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point.
I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion
People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it
Heck yeah!
Announcing The CSS Selection!
📰 www.projectwallace.com/the-css-sele...
📚 100,000 websites
⏱️ 100+ metrics
🔖 7 chapters
The biggest deep-dive ever into real-world use of CSS across the globe. Dive in and find out some hidden gems. Also, see how much of 'the new CSS' is actually used!
The designer’s happy path is only a fraction of the real experience. On zeroheight’s blog, I share a practical checklist to design components that survive loading, error, empty and offline states, real content, and diverse users.
Less Figma fantasy. More reality!
So I know a lot is going on right now, but I do want to share this:
I’m excited to share the launch of the new Microsoft Inclusive Design website 💙
This project is my love letter to the community and practice that’s shaped my work for nearly a decade.
inclusive.microsoft.design
1/
So much work is doomed from the start because of the assumption you can successfully chop up it up into discrete parts in advance, then try and create coherence through governance retrospectively. ‘Workstreams’. ‘Pillars’, all that nonsense, is, more often than not, based on a flawed assumption.
