Adding delight everywhere backfires. This post compares how anime handles a tonal shift against the Marvel background-gag habit, then covers Don Norman’s three levels and the microinteractions that hold a flow together.
Chromium made the native select element styleable. This walks through appearance: base-select, the ::picker pseudo-element, sibling-index() for per-option maths, and the anchor positioning that makes a radial picker possible, without giving up keyboard support.
Core bundles its own AI client in WordPress 7.0, so older AI Experiments builds fatal the moment you activate them. What is graduating out of experiment status, the LLM kill switch in Trac 64706, and how to load your own AI code without crashing.
A pass through the CSS landing in browsers now: random() and random-item(), clip-path folded corners, the containing-block catch in anchor positioning, and tabular-nums for WooCommerce dashboards that refuse to sit still.
SmashingConf Amsterdam runs in April 2026 at the Pathé Tuschinski. What pulled me in is the live-work format: speakers working through CSS and accessibility problems on stage instead of walking an audience through finished slides.
A live panel on March 31, 2026 with Amber Hinds, Mary Hubbard and Raquel Manriquez, on finding collaborators instead of solving everything alone. Plus a small transient wrapper so an upcoming events widget stops hitting an API on every page load.
Monikka Spruyt left corporate training to start Connect Holistic Health, and handed the site build to WordPress design experts instead of learning the stack herself. Why that trade usually pays off.
Core was tagging hidden Gutenberg images as high priority and hurting LCP. Ticket #64823 fixes that, and Performance Lab is dropping Web Worker Offloading after 6,000 updates with no feedback.
Magic numbers like z-index: 99999 are guesses. How I set up z-index tokens in CSS variables, pair a modal with its backdrop using calc(), and use isolation to keep a component’s layering inside the component.
AI raised the floor on production, and that changed what designers are actually paid for. Here is where human strategy still decides the outcome, and why judgment now carries the accountability.