Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice

A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (3rd Edition)

37signals' 2006 manifesto for building a web application by building less — fixed time and budget, flexible scope, the interface before the code, and the words as design. Ninety-one short chapters, free online.

10 ways to stay creative in good times and bad

Jon Yablonski's field guide to the psychology behind good interfaces — thirty named laws and effects (Fitts's, Hick's, Jakob's, Tesler's, Postel's, the peak-end rule, cognitive load) each with the research, an example and a design takeaway. A free site first, then an O'Reilly book, now in its second edition.

Creating reusable components for user experience design and documentation

Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger's design book for developers — hierarchy, spacing, typography, color, depth, images and finishing touches as tactics you can apply without a designer's eye, from the two people who then built Tailwind CSS around the same instincts. A 218-page PDF, three screencasts, and a component gallery; DRM-free.

Martin Fowler's catalog of named, small, behavior-preserving changes — the second edition, rewritten in JavaScript so the refactorings apply to functions as well as classes. The book behind the third step of red–green–refactor.

Jeremy Keith's short history of the web's ideas — progressive enhancement, the layers of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and why building to the standard outlasts building to the browser. Free to read online.

Sarah Drasner's guide to animating SVG — CSS transitions and keyframes on paths, SMIL where it still helps, GreenSock for sequencing, responsive and accessible motion — from the loading spinner to a full illustrated scene, with the performance and browser trade-offs of each technique.

Ryan Singer's account of how Basecamp plans and builds — six-week cycles, an appetite instead of an estimate, work shaped before it is bet on, and hill charts to show what is still unknown. Fixed time, variable scope. Free online.

10 ways to share your creativity and get discovered

How Everybody Can Make Extraordinary Presentations

A groundbreaking tour of the mind and the two systems that drive the way we think

Interactive UX and product-design training in five-minute lessons — sixty-plus courses and career paths, skill assessments, certifications, and project briefs for a portfolio. Free assessments; Pro is a subscription. Has an affiliate program.

Stephanie Eckles' series — thirty-odd articles, each taking a problem front-end developers have solved with hacks for a decade (centering, custom checkboxes, aspect ratios, sticky footers, responsive type) and solving it with what CSS can do now — with SmolCSS, her companion site of copy-and-paste modern layouts, and Style Stage, a community showcase of one HTML file styled a hundred ways. Free.

Completes `var(--…)` from the custom properties declared in the workspace, with the value shown beside each.

Runs the workspace’s ESLint in the editor — problems inline, fix-on-save — so the pre-commit hook rarely has anything left to say.

Previews Iconify icons inline where their names appear — `i-tabler-rss`, `logos:figma` — and completes them from the installed collections.

A slide outline beside the deck’s Markdown, a preview pane, and slide-level navigation, for the decks in the slides repository.

Class-name completion, hover previews of the generated CSS, and lint for conflicting utilities, reading the project’s own Tailwind config and theme.

Runs and debugs Vitest from the Test Explorer — one test, one file, or the project — with inline results and watch mode, against this repository’s `unit` and `nuxt` projects.

The Vue language server — template type-checking, completion for props and events, go-to-definition across `<script setup>` — the same engine `vue-tsc` runs in the typecheck gate.

The macOS screen-capture app behind every screenshot in this garden’s issues and handoffs — area, window and scrolling captures, annotations, and a quick-access overlay.

DNS, the edge, the certificate and the email routing for this site’s names — the public address arrives through it, and the domain redirects are a record plus a rule.

Privacy-first analytics — no cookies, no personal data, one script — with named events and an API that this site’s charts read through a cached route.

The collaborative design tool — components, variants, variables, Dev Mode — and, through Code Connect and its MCP server, the design source a component contract points back at.

The container runtime on the laptop — the image gate (`pnpm run gate:image`) builds this site’s production image with it before any PR that touches the build lands.

Samantha Warren's deliverable for the gap between a moodboard and a comp — one sheet of fonts, colors and interface elements that says what a site will feel like before a single page is designed — with the free template and the four-step process (listen, interpret, define, iterate) that goes with it.